“Why don’t you get them out?”
“Because if we did we might well not get back in again for a very long time. Striker has a major investment here. So, at the moment, that option is not realistic.”
“Well, that’s your business, not mine.” Marten’s eyes left White and went to Anne Tidrow. “If you don’t mind, I’ve had a long couple of days. I want to join my friends at the table so that we’re all together when the soldiers come to escort us to the airport. Maybe you haven’t heard, but the army kicked us out of the country. We’re leaving on the ten-o’clock flight to Paris, assuming it gets off. One way or another we’ve still got a lot of night ahead of us.”
Suddenly the thunderous beat of a bass drum rocked the room. Instantly everything went silent. Even the storm seemed to quiet down. Anne looked to Conor White.
“Here we go again.”
In the next second an honor guard made up of a dozen black African soldiers in gold-and-blue dress uniforms and wearing white gloves appeared in the main doorway. Each carried a gold-plated AK-47.
Again came the thundering boom of the drum. Immediately eight more soldiers in the same uniforms marched smartly into the room and stopped in unison. One had a large bass drum harnessed in front of him. The others carried gold-plated trumpets. In unison they raised them to their lips and blasted out what sounded like some kind of fanfare.
“President Tiombe is coming,” Conor White said quietly. “He does this at whim, whenever it is his pleasure.”
Marten looked toward the doorway as the drummer and trumpet soldiers stepped to the side and a lone black African in an elegantly tailored full-dress military uniform entered. He was tall and wide at the same time and visibly soft, giving more the appearance of a buffoon than of the warrior-king of a merciless army. For an instant he surveyed the room, then without further hesitation started forward, accompanied left and right by the gold-plated-AK-47-carrying guards.
“What’s going on?” Marten asked.
“He’s making himself known to the foreign guests,” White said. “He wants to be recognized as Equatorial Guinea’s great host and benefactor.”
Marten watched as president/dictator Francisco Ngozi Tiombe worked the room like a politician, choosing this person and that at random, shaking hands, chatting briefly, and sometimes touching them warmly on the shoulder as he moved on to the next. Thirty seconds and a dozen handshakes later he stopped in front of them.
“Good evening, Ms. Tidrow, Mr. White,” he said in a low rumbling voice and in impeccable English. “I trust you are enjoying your stay.”
“Yes, of course, Excellency, thank you,” Conor White said, bowing slightly at the waist as he did. President Tiombe smiled, and then his eyes shifted to Marten.
“This is Mr. Marten, Excellency,” White offered. “Unfortunately circumstances are such that he has to leave your most hospitable country this evening.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Marten.” Tiombe smiled. “Please say good things about my nation and my people when you reach your home. I look forward to welcoming you personally the next time you visit Malabo.”
“That is most generous, Mr. President.” Marten nodded but did not bow. “Thank you.”
Tiombe fixed Marten with a stare that could only be called chilling and then abruptly moved on.
“Now you can say you’ve met the president of Equatorial Guinea,” Conor White said with a smile.
“All the more reason to be leaving.” Marten finished his drink and set the glass on the bar. “I hope I’ve been some help to you.”
“It was kind of you to take the time to talk with us,” Anne Tidrow smiled.
“The pleasure was mine,” Marten said and, with a nod to Conor White, walked off.
White waited until Marten was out of earshot, then turned to Anne. “What do you think?”
“He knows more than he’s telling.”
“I agree.” White picked up his drink. “The question is what to do about it.”
7:52 P.M.
14
HEADQUARTERS, AG STRIKER OIL & ENERGY COMPANY,
HOUSTON, TEXAS. STILL THURSDAY, JUNE 3. NOON.
A deeply troubled forty-seven-year-old Josiah “Sy” Wirth, chairman of AG Striker, stared out at the glare of the city from the window of his sixty-fourth-floor office. Tall and lanky, his face creased by time, the Texas sun, and the lifelong strain of intense ambition, he wore faded jeans, a weathered, pearl- studded western shirt, and ostrich-skin boots. He looked more like a cowboy just in from the range than like the top executive of a booming oil company.
“By all accounts, Mr. Loyal Truex landed his Gulfstream an hour ago,” he said coldly. “Theoretically, he’s on his way here now.” Abruptly he turned from the window to look at Striker’s general counsel, Arnold Moss, a sixty-two-year-old widower and long-ago-transplanted New Yorker, sitting in a chair across from him. “It doesn’t take that long to get from Ellington Field to here. So where the hell is he? Lost? Or did he stop to get laid along the way?” Wirth sat down at his desk and picked up a large unlit cigar from a red, white, and blue ashtray shaped like the state of Texas.
Like his personality, like Texas itself, Wirth’s office was huge, if coldly austere, all chrome and glass with pockets of overstuffed cowhide furniture arranged here and there in tidy groups for simultaneous separate conversations. A long side table held bottles of water, a stack of cheap Styrofoam cups, and a large thermos of coffee; a well-worn mesquite-topped bar stood in a far corner. In front of the window was the room’s centerpiece, Wirth’s enormous desk, ten feet long by four feet wide, its glass top an inch thick. On it were his essentials: an open laptop computer, a hand-tooled leather cigar box, a twelve-inch-high cigar lighter in the form of an oil derrick, the Texas-shaped ashtray, a slate gray telephone console, two lined yellow legal pads, an electric pencil sharpener, and four freshly sharpened number 2 Ticonderoga 1388 pencils lined up perpendicular to each other exactly two inches apart. Other than his executive desk chair and a mesquite credenza behind the desk itself, there was very little else. No photographs of wife and children. No bound volumes of corporate handbooks lining ornate bookshelves. No portraits of company founders on the walls, which, except for a large AG STRIKER company logo stenciled in raised gold leaf across from his polished-steel office door, were wholly bare.
A buzzer sounded on Wirth’s console.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Truex,” a female voice responded.
“Send him in.” Wirth said, then looked at Moss, “He’s here.”
“So I gather,” Moss said as the door opened and Loyal Truex, founder and chief executive of the private security contractor Hadrian Protective Services, entered.
“Finally, the man himself,” Wirth snapped. “Where the fuck have you been?”
“Traffic accident. Luckily not mine,” Truex said in a quiet kind of southern drawl.
“Ever think to pick up the phone and call? Or don’t you think this meeting’s
