There was a brief, rattling sigh, like raindrops on a metal roof, followed by a perfectly ordered series of thumps as the blowgun darts found their targets. Holliday stared, impressed. The students had fired in distinct, even sequence, blindfolded, and each of them had hit the stark white bull’s-eye of his target dead center.
“Everyone, male or female, in this valley can do what you’ve just seen, some better and faster in the daylight or in the dark. There are four thousand people here, Colonel. They are the last of their kind and each one of them is willing to die for their freedom. How does that stand up to an AK-47?”
“I wouldn’t like to give odds,” said Holliday. “Too close to call.”
“Will you stand with us, Colonel? We could use the help and advice of a real soldier.”
Holliday didn’t hesitate. It had been a long time since he’d had something worth fighting for.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll stand with you. We all will.”
27
Matheson chose room nine at the old Tate Gallery-Art and the Sublime-for his meeting with Lanz. The mercenary met him standing in front of John Martin’s
“Do you know anything about John Martin?” Matheson asked.
“Never heard of him,” said Lanz. For the mercenary, art was for chocolate boxes. He stared up at the six-by- ten-foot canvas. The horizon burned with orange hellfire, whole mountains slid into the abyss, while thousands of screaming, naked bodies came tumbling after. A single intense bolt of light ricocheted up the valley. Lanz supposed it was meant to illustrate the wages of sin, but it left him cold. He had as much use for religion as he did for art.
“He was quite mad, of course,” murmured the industrialist. “Came from a mad family. Father was a fencing master. Martin was apprenticed to a painter of heraldic devices on coach doors. His older brother, also named John, was once known as England’s greatest arsonist. Martin painted almost as a hobby-his real passion was designing a new sewer system for London. Quite mad.”
“Your point being, Sir James?” Lanz asked.
“Sometimes great men are seen to be mad because so few people can appreciate the extent of their genius.”
“Sir?”
“Am I mad, do you think, Lanz?”
“That’s not for me to say.” Lanz shrugged.
“Allen Faulkener is dead,” said Matheson. “He was murdered in a hotel room in Vancouver, Canada. The same day the two little old ladies he was dealing with were killed in a fire. Although it later turned out they were actually killed by Faulkener’s own weapon.”
“Presumably this had something to do with the situation in Africa?” said Lanz.
“Yes.”
“Do you wish to delay?” Lanz said.
“I haven’t decided,” answered Matheson. He moved along to the next painting on the wall of the gallery. This one was small in relation to the John Martin, not quite three feet on a side.
“I’ve given guarantees,” said Lanz. “Most of these men won’t wait, and if we lose the dark of the moon we’ll have to set back the clock by almost a month. It will be expensive.”
“How expensive?”
“At least a million, maybe more. The men will all have to be paid for their wait time. If you want to be sure of your transportation, that will also be a premium.”
The Brocklebank sisters were dead, their proxy held by someone as amorphous as Turner’s figure of death. He already owned most of the outstanding shares, but if he risked using the shell company the mysterious forces responsible for the murders of Faulkener and the Brocklebanks would simply exercise the option and take over the huge find in the tiny African country.
If he simply ate the shares he’d purchased and did a separate deal with Nagoupande, he could salvage the situation with a relatively small loss, but who knew how far Nagoupande’s bought-and-paid-for loyalty would last?
He didn’t have any choice. What was that ridiculous motto Faulkener was always quoting-
On the other hand, if there was ever a time for daring it was now. He’d tell Lanz to keep a gun to Nagoupande’s head until the mining concessions were turned over and loyalty ceased to be a factor. He turned away from the deathly vision on the wall. It had to be now.
“We continue as planned,” he said. “No delays. At the dark of the moon.”
Lanz nodded, his spine automatically straightening. “At the dark of the moon.”
General Solomon Bokassa Sesesse Kolingba awoke abruptly and painfully, a blazing flare of sunlight spearing through a small space between the heavy velvet curtains that were usually drawn tightly together to avoid just such an event. He was not a man who met the day well, preferring instead to rise slowly, first slaking his thirst with several bottles of Mongozo banana beer and then spending at least half an hour in the bathroom voiding his bowels.
Following this he generally ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage, black pudding, bacon, mushrooms, baked beans, hash browns, grilled kidneys, a pair of Scotch kippers, three slices of fried bread and half a tomato for color, followed by several carafes of either hot chocolate or sweet black coffee, depending on his mood.
This meal was generally eaten in his living room while sitting in his favorite reclining chair in front of an extremely large flat-screen TV while he watched CNN and the BBC on his satellite receiver. Sometimes if the news was boring he’d watch an old movie.
At eleven he would get dressed in a set of camo fatigues and shoot skeet on the roof for an hour before lunch. Any variation on this routine was fraught with danger, and interrupting it without an extremely good reason could prove seriously harmful.
On the twenty-sixth day of that month, two days before the dark of the moon, Oliver Gash entered General Kolingba’s private quarters at four fifty-one a.m., one minute before official sunrise. He stayed in the shadows close to the door and well away from the big, curtained four-poster bed that stood in a far corner of the room. The worst of it was that Kolingba never snored; he slept almost silently, an immense, immobile pile in bright yellow silk pajamas and a black silk mask.
“General,” said Gash quietly from the other side of the room. There was no response, but Gash heard a faint clicking sound from behind the curtains surrounding the bed. The sound of one of the silver-plated presentation Colt.45s being cocked. He squeezed his own hand a little harder around the butt of the cocked Glock 17P in the pocket of his jacket.
“General?”
There was a long pause.
“Have you come to murder me in my bed, Gash?”
“No, sir.”
“I can see in the dark like a cat. I would kill you first.”
“Yes, sir, I know that.” From Rwanda to Banqui to Baltimore to here; it really was a long and winding road.
“I am
“I know this, too, General, and I would never have disturbed your sleep without the most important of
