the slightest attention to. There was a six-man armed security team, all dressed in tuxedos-provided by Kate Sinclair’s Blackhawk Security-to make sure that no one stole the family silver or got into violent arguments about the respective merits of Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov and Carl Heinrich Carsten Reinecke. All of it was giving Sir James Matheson a violent headache. He really did have much more important things on his mind.
By ten he was saying good-bye to his last few guests, all of whom promised to send large donations to the Royal Academy. By eleven thirty the caterers were on the way out the door, and by midnight the apartment was his own again. He unlocked the door to his study, which had been off-limits for the evening, and stepped inside.
The room was comfortingly dark, as it usually was, the only light coming from a small green lamp on the bar. He poured himself a glass of thirty-two-year-old Auchentoshan single-malt and went over to his desk to look for an old bottle of Rofecoxib. He flipped on the desk lamp and saw that there was already someone seated in his chair, blood leaking down the starched bib front of his evening clothes from the eight-inch gaping slash across his throat. The man’s head was so thrown back by the wound that Matheson could see the cocaine frosted around his nostrils. There were several more lines of cocaine on the desk in front of the dead man, along with a rolled-up five-pound note. Matheson put down the heavy glass of whiskey. He recognized the slaughtered body: it was Simon Wells, a puff-piece writer who made the circuit putting society names into his column in boldface. A completely harmless individual with a not-uncommon taste for drugs. For a moment Matheson thought about doing the dead man’s lines on the desk to calm his nerves a little, but thought better of it.
A pole light came on in the far corner of the room. It illuminated a tall, thin black man holding an automatic pistol loosely in his hand. The man was dressed in an expensive-looking set of evening clothes and there was a glass of something that looked like gin and lemon on the table beside him. He reached for it with his free hand and took a moderate sip, the ice cubes tinkling pleasantly against the expensive Czech crystal.
“My name is Captain Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre of DGASEK, the Direction Generale d Action et de la Securite Exterieure de Kukuanaland, or to put it more simply, the secret police of that country.”
Matheson was smart enough and sober enough not to try to bluff and bluster. If the man in the chair had wanted to kill him he would be dead by now; if Saint-Sylvestre was from Kukuanaland he knew about the huge neodymium and tantalum strikes discovered by Ives, a discovery of rare earths in such concentrations that he could single-handedly break China’s monopoly overnight.
“May I ask why you killed poor Simon here?”
“Sadly for him he was in here doing his drugs when I came into the room. His death was necessary to keep my presence secret.”
“The door was locked,” said Matheson, trying to think as he kept up the stream of macabre chatter.
“The French doors on the balcony weren’t,” said the black man. “They were either open or your dead
“May I sit down?” Matheson asked.
“No,” said the black man. “Remain where you are.”
“How did you get into the apartment? The party was by invitation only.”
“I pickpocketed Elton John coming up in the elevator, or at least it looked like Elton John. Nobody gave me a second look. I could just as easily have come in with the caterers and gone around poisoning all your guests.”
“What do you want?”
“A great deal of money and a share in whatever it was Archibald Ives found below Kazaba Falls. Say one million pounds in cash and one full percent of any mineral concessions granted to Matheson Resource Industries, payable in preferred shares of MRI, since you can no longer use Silver Brand Mining as your shell company.”
“One percent isn’t very much,” said Matheson. How the hell did he know about Silver Brand but not what Ives had discovered? Was there any value in that? Matheson’s brain tried to cut through the patchy fog of his headache and alcohol. Was there an advantage?
“I’m not a greedy man,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “One percent and a million pounds isn’t enough for you to risk my divulging what I know before the fact, and after the fact I’ll be able to hold it over your head for the rest of your life. You know as well as I do that this is the sort of thing that brings down governments, let alone industrial concerns like yours.”
“I deal in minerals, Mr. . ”
“Captain,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “And you’re about to deal in potential genocide.”
“What is it you think you know that I would value so much?” Matheson asked.
“In thirty-six hours you intend to launch a coup d’etat against Solomon Kolingba that will promote Francois Nagoupande as his successor. The coup is to be led by a mercenary named Konrad Lanz who has been recruiting officers and noncoms from the Ali Pasha Hotel on Clapham Street. The private soldiers will be hired by agents in Sierra Leone, ex-members of the Revolutionary Front Army of Liberia and butchers each and every one. ”
“If you win the coup and install Nagoupande he will immediately set about to kill as many Baya as he can- Kolingba’s people. When he’s done that, he’ll murder the Yakima. You think Kolingba is dangerous because he is mad, but your good friend Nagoupande in the silly uniform you bought him is even more dangerous simply because he is sane. He is a pragmatist, Lord Emsworth. A new broom sweeping clean, and in Africa that means killing your enemies. You are about to turn Kukuanaland into a killing field.”
“You think you know a great deal,” said Matheson.
“I’m not one for verbal jousting, Lord Emsworth,” Saint-Sylvestre said quietly. “I killed your banker, Leonhard Euhler from the Gesler Bank in Aarau. I killed the Brocklebank sisters in Vancouver, negating the value of your Silver Brand short-sell plan, and I killed Allen Faulkener because he got in my way. You will pay me what I ask because you
“I will murder your wife in her bed at Huntington Hall, which would not unduly concern you, but I shall murder her in your bed along with Jeremy Congreve, the twenty-year-old son of your estate manager, Tom Congreve, which you would find mortifyingly embarrassing, since there already are rumors extant of your impotence. I would kill your twin sons, Justin and Jonathan, at Barlborough Hall School, gutting them like fish and leaving them floating in Butchertown Pond in the copse behind the main building. And if that didn’t convince you I’d kill your eighty-three- year-old mother at her assisted-living apartment in Oxfordshire. I’d take my time with her, Lord Emsworth; I can guarantee you that.”
“Why are you doing this?” Matheson asked. His legs felt rubbery and acid was creeping up his throat.
“The same reason you are,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “Money. And you’d better make it quick; you’re running out of time.”
29
Konrad Lanz stood in the baking heat of Mopti Airport in northeastern Mali and watched as a dozen workers crawled like busy ants over the rickety wooden scaffolding surrounding the old Vanguard cargo aircraft. They were painting over the green cedar on the tail, as well as the striping that was the usual livery of Lebanon Air Transport, covering it with a flat black spray paint that would render the place virtually invisible from the ground at night.
Reflective chrome strips were being painted over around the windscreen, and the windscreen itself was being covered on the inside with polarizing film. Even the wheels on the landing gear, the bare aluminum tips of the propellers and the open engine nacelles were being given the flat black paint job. Not that stealth was a real concern for Lanz.
Mali had few jet fighters, Nigeria had only fifteen Chinese fighters with five pilots fully trained on them and Cameroon had four light attack aircraft, three of which were out of service and the fourth having been grounded since the death of the Cameroon Air Force’s only instructor the year previous.
It was doubtful that they would have any trouble in the air from any military source. Nigeria had twenty ancient Russian antiaircraft guns, most of them placed around the capital city, Mali had no air defense system at all and Cameroon had twelve of the same antiaircraft guns as the Nigerians, also placed around their capital. With no moon Lanz considered it very unlikely that there would be anything else in the sky when the time came.
He watched the men working for a few moments more, satisfied that they’d make their deadline of ten p.m. tomorrow. As well as the painting, the Vanguard had to be fitted with extra webbing for cargo, and jump seats for
