The Templar Legion

“I couldn’t say,” said Marcel.

The bartender was looking very uneasy now, and Lanz decided to back off completely. “Well, if you think of a way I could get in to see the man, let me know,” he said.

“Of course, sir.” There was a pause. “Will that be all?”

“Another beer, Marcel.”

After Lanz finished the second beer, he picked up his book and left the bar. In the lobby he spotted a lone man sitting in one of the fan-backed wicker armchairs, smoking a cigarette and reading a copy of Centrafriquepresse. He was the same man who’d followed him on his afternoon walkabout. Lanz smiled. Saint-Sylvestre’s surveillance was nothing if not obvious.

Lanz went up the broad, sweeping staircase to the mezzanine, then walked up three more flights to his small room under the eaves. It was simply furnished with an iron bedstead, a mattress that had seen better days and a simple spindle-legged desk with an old-fashioned brass swan-neck lamp. Lanz dropped the book onto the desk and stepped across to the window, which gave him a view over the square and into the compound directly opposite the hotel.

The compound ran a hundred and fifty feet on a side, the walls quarried cut stone, the large gate wood- strapped and hinged with iron. Guard towers, tin roofed and constructed from plywood, had been added at each corner. The so-called “presidential residence” was up against the east wall, and there was a rudimentary barracks building kitty-corner to it. A smaller brick building that sat directly across from the residence was almost certainly a guardhouse. The barracks looked as though it could hold between a hundred and a hundred and fifty men.

A tin-roofed shed had been built against the wall next to the guardhouse-obviously the motor pool. Lanz counted two bumblebee-striped Land Rovers with tinted windows, three armored personnel carriers and an even dozen “Mengshi” Chinese Humvee knockoffs painted in jungle camouflage, 50-caliber machine guns mounted just forward of the sunroof hatch. Considering all the other Chinese equipment he had seen, the machine guns were probably W-85s. Fourandao had a population of less than five thousand; the compound’s ordnance was easily enough to protect the town from direct assault as long as there was no air element.

Lanz went back to the desk and sat down. Taking up the book, he carefully stripped off the celluloid library cover and the original jacket. He set the book aside and laid the dust jacket illustration-side down on the desk.

Lanz had been a soldier since his compulsory military service in the late seventies. He’d worked with every sort of intelligence tool, from satellite imagery and phone taps to photo intelligence and drugged “persuasion” of the enemy. Of all these techniques he’d never found anything more useful and more accurate than the evidence of his own eyes.

On the inside of the dust jacket was an accurate scale map of central Fourandao, the information gathered during his afternoon strolls during the past few days. The map was drawn lightly in pencil directly from memory after each of his daily constitutionals.

Fourandao was laid out in an elongated grid centered on Plaza de Revolution de Generale Kolingba, the old city square directly in front of Lanz’s hotel. There was one main street running north and south, intersected by the road from Bangui that followed the west-east course of the Kotto River. On the outskirts of town the road from Bangui became Rue de Santo Antonio, and the north-south street was Rue de Liberdad. Two banks sat on the Rue de Liberdad-Banque Internationale pour le Centrafrique and Banque Populaire Maroco-Centrafricaine-and one on the square, the Bank of Central African States. Of the three, two were known to have been heavily involved in money laundering and financing for blood commodities. The Bank of Central African States occupied the only building of over four stories in Fourandao, the upper floors containing the People’s Republic of China consular offices, the Kukuanaland Department of Customs and Excise and the Department of the Interior.

The two main streets were the only ones that were paved; the interconnecting grid of residential streets were dirt tracks. Lanz could detect no sewer system of any kind, which meant that the interconnecting streets flooded during the rainy season. Except for the buildings on the square Fourandao relied heavily on tin-roof and concrete-block construction. In most cases the quality of the concrete blocks had been poor, and without any foundations or drainage the majority of the buildings were crumbling at their bases. The only exception to this was a walled and guarded group of three modern blocks of flats that appeared to be built out of concrete. From what he could gather from eavesdropping in the bar of the hotel these flats were occupied by government bureaucrats in favor with Kolingba.

On his walks Lanz had noted evidence of malnutrition and rickets among the population, and on several occasions he’d seen huge rats nesting in the garbagechoked ditches. Dense foliage encroached on the edges of the town, and he’d seen several native women carrying bundles of firewood out of the jungle. Fourandao was as close to the edge of civilization as it was possible to get. There was no police force, since that function was operated out of Saint-Sylvestre’s euphemistically named Department of the Interior, no fire department, no city hall or any other civil authority. Kukuanaland was a country in name only; in reality it was nothing more than a criminal fiefdom that probably didn’t stretch much beyond the town limits.

Smiling to himself, Lanz began neatly filling in the street names he’d gathered that day. Every battleground had its weaknesses and he was reasonably sure he’d discovered Fourandao’s.

Oliver Gash sat in Captain Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre’s office overlooking the Plaza de Revolution de Generale Kolingba and studied the huge aerial photograph of Fourandao that took up the entire wall behind the policeman’s massive African mahogany desk, rumored to have once belonged to Mobutu Sese Seko, the long-dead dictator of Zaire, who had in turn purchased it from the estate of the late General Gnassingbe Eyadema, the long-standing “president” of Togo. Both Gash and Captain Saint-Sylvestre were smoking Marlboros, the cigarette of choice among those in Kukuanaland who could afford them. Gash had once joked to General Kolingba that they should advertise in tourism magazines abroad, touting Kukuanaland as a vacation destination for smokers. Kolingba had taken him seriously and Gash had to spend weeks talking him out of it.

“So what exactly does he do on these little walks?” Gash asked.

“He walks.” Saint-Sylvestre shrugged.

“No camera?”

“None that we can see.”

“Anything in his room?” Gash asked.

“Nothing incriminating. He has a number of weapons catalogs.”

“Did you run a background check?”

“Of course. He could be what he says he is-at first glance he appears to be an experienced mercenary who knows Africa well.”

“But you have doubts,” said Gash. It was a statement, not a question.

“I always have doubts, Dr. Gash. It is my business to have doubts. Our friend Lanz doesn’t ring quite true. Why does a mercenary soldier suddenly switch to being an arms dealer? Why would a supposed arms dealer travel here knowing perfectly well that we are supplied by the Chinese and have been since the beginning? There are no fools in the arms business and if a man is an arms dealer he is a fool. Ergo, I don’t believe it.”

“All right,” said Gash, stubbing out his cigarette in a huge ceramic ashtray on the desk in front of him. “What is he doing here?”

Saint-Sylvestre smiled. “At a guess I would say he’s on a reconnaissance mission.”

“To do what?”

“To facilitate a coup d’etat,” said the policeman mildly.

“Dangerous words, Captain,” responded Gash. “Talk like that could get you into serious trouble.”

“I’m not promoting the idea, Dr. Gash; I am merely giving my opinion.” Saint-Sylvestre was well aware that he had to take a very circumspect path with Gash. The man was an uneducated savage, but he had what the Americans called “street sense” and a certain animal shrewdness that was sometimes mistaken for intelligence. Worst of all Gash had the killer instinct of a sociopath, which would have been Saint-Sylvestre’s diagnosis had he been a doctor. In some ways Gash was even crazier than Kolingba.

Gash lit another cigarette, smirking as he did so. “All right, then, Captain, in your opinion, who is he working for?” In Baltimore it would have been easy to figure out which of your rivals was strong enough to make a play for your turf; here the same rules didn’t apply.

“I’m not sure. Originally I thought it might be one of our neighbors-Chad, the Congo, Cameroon-but I don’t think that’s the case.”