and wailing and drooling with terror.
With the heel of his combat boot Ramsey pushed the door closed behind her and studied the figure that lay on the bed.
'Negus Negusti, King of Kings,' he said with a dry irony, and the old man stirred and looked up at him.
He was dressed in a spotless white robe, but his head was bare. He was thin, impossibly thin. Ramsey knew that he suffered from the ailments of great age, his prostate and digestion were diseased, but his mind was clear. His feet and hands protruding from the folds of the white robe were childlike and emaciated. Each tiny bone showed clearly through the waxen amber skin. His beard and hair were untrimmed and entirely bleached to the lustre of platinum. The flesh had melted from his face, so the nose was thin and aquiline. His lips had shrunk and drawn back. His teeth were yellow and too large for the delicate bones of his cheeks and brow. His eyes were enormous, black as pools of tar, bright as those of a biblical prophet.
'I recognize you,' he said softly.
'We have never met,' Ramsey corrected him.
'Still, I know you well. I recognize the smell of you. I know every line of your face and the inflection and timbre of your voice.' 'Who am I, then;' Ramsey challenged him softly.
'You are the first of a legion - and your name is Death.' 'You are wise and perceptive, old man,' Ramsey told him, and advanced to the bed.
'I forgive you for what you do to me,' said Haile Selassie, Negus Negusti, Emperor of Ethiopia. 'But I cannot forgive you for what you have done to my people.' 'Commend yourself to your God, old man,' said Ramsey as he picked up the pillow from the bed. 'This world is no longer for you.' He pressed the pillow down over the old man's face and leant his weight upon it.
Haile Selassie's struggles were like those of a trapped bird. His thin fingers clutched lightly at Ramsey's wrists and plucked softly at his sleeves. He kicked and danced, and the robe rode up above his knees. His legs were thin and dark as sticks of dried tobacco, and the knees were enlarged knots out of all proportion to the skinny shanks.
Gradually his struggles grew weaker, and there was a soft spluttering under his robes as his sphincter relaxed and his bowels voided. Ramsey leant on the pillow for five minutes after the old man was completely still. He felt an almost religious ecstasy come over him. Nothing he had done before had ever given him this sense of gratification. It was physical and emotional, it was spiritual and at the same time deeply sexual.
He had killed a king.
He straightened up and removed the pillow. He plumped it up and then lifted the old man's head and set the pillow beneath it. He pulled the hem of the robe down to Haile Selassie's ankles, and folded the little childlike hands upon his breast. Then with thumb and forefinger he drew down his eyelids.
He -stood for a long time studying the emperor's deathface. He wanted to fix the image in his mind for ever. He was unaware of the heat and the stench in the closed room. He sensed that this was one of the high points in his life. The frail body epitomized all that he had pledged to destroy in this world.
He wanted the memory of that destruction to be strong and vivid enough to last a lifetime.
All possible opposition had been eliminated. The voice of dissent was silenced. The sons of Brutus were all of them dead, and the revolution was secure.
There were many other important issues needing Ramsey's attention elsewhere in Africa. With a clear conscience he could hand over his position as security adviser to the People's Democratic Government of Ethiopia. His successor in office was a general in the security police of the German Democratic Republic. He was almost as skilled as Rarnen Machado in the enforcement of pragmatic democracy on a recalcitrant population.
Ramsey embraced Abebe and boarded one of the Ilyushin transports that now flew regularly in and out of Addis. It was a most convenient port of entry to the entire continent.
They refuelled in Brazzaville and then flew south and west to land on the new airstrip at Tercio base on the Chicamba river just as the sun set into the blue Atlantic Ocean.
Raleigh Tabaka met him. During the drive from the airstrip to Ramsey's new headquarters compound in the palm grove above the white coral beach, Raleigh brought him fully up to date with developments during his absence.
Ramsey's private quarters were austere. A thatched roof and large unglazed windows with roll-up blinds of split bamboo; bare uncarpeted floors and chunky but comfortable furniture made by a local carpenter from hand-sawn indigenous timber. Only the electronic communications equipment was modem. He had direct satellite links to Moscow and Luanda and Havana and Lisbon.
As Ramsey entered this simple dwelling he was reminded forcefully of the cottage at Buenaventura in Cuba. He felt immediately at home here, with the trade winds in the palms and the ocean breathing heavily on the white beach below his window.
He was exhausted. This deep bone-weariness had accumulated over the weeks and months. As soon as Raleigh Tabaka left him, he dropped his combat uniform in a heap on the mud floor and crawled under the mosquito-net. The gentle warm gusts of the trades through the open window billowed the mosquito-net and caressed his naked body.
He felt replete. He had performed a difficult but infinitely worthwhile task with skill and success. He knew that he had earned new honours and rewards, but none would be as satisfying as this deep sense of achievement that buoyed his weary spirit.
His creation surpassed that of a Mozart or a Michelangelo. He had used as his raw materials a land and a people, mountains and valleys and lakes and rivers and plains and millions of human beings. He had mixed them on his palette and then, in blood and flames and gunfire, he had fashioned and worked them into a masterpiece. His creation surpassed that of any artist who had lived before him. He knew that there was no God - at least, not as the bishops and imams whom he had so recently disciplined and humiliated imagined God to be. The god that Ramsey knew was of this world. He was the twin god of power and political mastery - and Ramsey was his prophet. The work had only just begun. First a single nation, he thought, and then another and another, until finally an entire continent. His elation staved off sleep for a few minutes longer, but as he succumbed his mind took another turn.
Maybe it was the hut and the wind and the sound of the sea - whatever the association of ideas, he thought of Nicholas. In the night he dreamt of his son. He saw again his shy reluctant smile, and heard his voice and his laughter in his head, and felt the small warm hand curled in his hand like the timorous body of a tiny creature.
When he awoke the longing was even more intense. While he worked at his desk the image of his son's face receded and he could concentrate on the coded messages from Havana and Moscow that flashed down from the orbiting satellite. However, when he stood up from his desk and looked down through the open window to the beach, he imagined he saw a slim tanned little body splashing in the green surf and heard the sweet treble cries of the child.
Perhaps it was merely a reaction from the slaughter in the streets of Addis Ababa, or the memory of the corpses of the sons of the abuna with their eyeballs hanging on their cheeks and their inunature genitals stuffed into their mouths, but over the next few days the desire to see his son became an obsession.
He could not leave Tercio base now, not with so much in play, so many prizes at stake on the great gaming-board of Africa. Instead he sent a satellite message to Havana and within an hour had his reply.
After Ethiopia they would deny him nothing. Nicholas and Adra were on the next transport flight from Cuba. Ramsey was waiting at the airstrip when the Ilyushin landed at Tercio base.
He watched his son come down the ramp. He walked ahead of Adra, no longer clinging to her hand like a baby. There was alertness in the way he carried his head, a spring to his step, and a sparkle of curiosity and intelligence in his eyes as he paused at the bottom of the ramp and looked about him keenly.
Ramsey felt an extraordinary emotion, an intensification of the longing and pride with which he had anticipated the boy's arrival. No other human being had ever moved him in this way. For long aching moments he watched his son in secret, concealed in the throng of disembarking troops and swarming porters, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. He was reluctant to give a name to this emotion he felt.
He would never have entertained the word 'love'.
Then Nicholas picked him out. He saw the boy's entire attitude change. He started forward at a run, but within a dozen paces he took control of himself. The look of extreme pleasure on his lovely face was swiftly masked. He was expressionless as he walked calmly to the side of the jeep in which Ramsey sat and held out his hand.
'Good day, Padre,' he said softly. 'How does it go with you?' Ramsey felt an almost irresistible compulsion to embrace him. He sat very still while he overcame it, then he took Nicholas's hand and returned his formal greeting.
Nicholas rode in the front of the jeep beside his father. Adra sat in the back. They skirted the guerrilla camp on the way from the airstrip to the beach compound, and Nicholas could not contain his curiosity. He asked the first question hesitantly, in a subdued voice.
'Why are all these men here? Are they sons of the revolution like we are, Padre?' When Ramsey replied without any sign of irritability, the next question was bolder. When the
