Anne was staring at Kovalenko. “Who else is following us?”
“Two of his fighters.” Kovalenko reached out a finger and pushed aside the photos until he found the one he wanted, the one showing Patrice and Irish Jack in a helicopter doorway. “These.”
Anne exchanged glances with Marten, then looked back to Kovalenko. He wasn’t telling her everything. “You said ‘others.’ Who are they? Your people? Who and how many?”
“As far as I know, only one, Ms. Tidrow. The head of your own company.”
“Sy Wirth?”
Kovalenko nodded. “He is, or at least was, traveling separately and feeding information about your position to White and his men. Where any of them are now I don’t know.”
“Where did Wirth get this timely information he was passing on?” Marten said, then deliberately looked at Anne.
“Don’t even think it,” she snapped. “I haven’t talked to him since we were in Malabo.” She nodded at Kovalenko. “Why don’t you ask him how he knows all this.”
Kovalenko smiled easily. “Moscow.”
There was no smile from Marten. “I should be surprised, but I’m not. I suppose Moscow knew about Jacob Cadiz, too.”
“It took a little time, but yes.”
“Why would Father Willy send the photographs to him and not his brother? Was he that close a friend?”
Kovalenko cocked his head and grinned. “You honestly don’t know.”
“Know what?”
Kovalenko’s free hand swept around, indicating the house. “This is the place Theo Haas came to work and get out of the Berlin cold and the public spotlight of a Nobel laureate. He didn’t want people coming around bothering him, so he used the name Jacob Cadiz. He spoke Portuguese well; few people knew.” Abruptly his expression changed. He put the photos aside and picked up the folded white envelope with the camera’s digital memory card inside. “What is this?”
Marten didn’t answer.
Kovalenko unfolded it and slid out the card. “Ah,” he said, smiling, “the cake’s frosting.” Suddenly his eyes found Marten’s. “You’ve looked at its contents.”
“Some, not all.”
“Where is the computer you were using to view it?”
“In the other room,” Marten said quietly, still trying to understand what Kovalenko was doing here and why Moscow was involved.
“I was assigned before I knew you were in the middle of it,” Kovalenko said as if he had read Marten’s thoughts. “Moscow has been watching the developments in Equatorial Guinea closely. She is always intrigued when a Western oil company shows undue interest in an area and begins building up its operation there, especially in West Africa, where there are potentially large untapped reserves. If something should prove of value it would be strategically unfortunate if other countries, especially the Chinese, got to bid on it first. I’m sure you can appreciate that kind of thinking. It’s merely good business.”
“So one would think.”
73
12:54 P.M.
Marten glanced at Kovalenko, then powered up Jacob Cadiz’s computer and slid the memory card into its port. Anne was in a chair to his right. Kovalenko sat on a stool to one side and behind them, the Glock in his hand, Franck’s Heckler & Koch machine gun still dangling from his shoulder.
“Let’s see what we have, tovarich,” he said as the screen came to life. Marten touched the mouse, and a photograph popped up on the monitor. It had been taken with a long lens and apparently from a hidden vantage point in the brush. It was a portrait of a bizarre picnic in the jungle. Six white wicker chairs were pulled up to a long table covered with a white linen cloth, two on either side, one at either end. Fine china, silverware, and expensive wineglasses sat atop the table. White-gloved soldiers in the dress uniform of the Army of Equatorial Guinea stood by as waiters. Another of them carved a huge roast on a serving table nearby. Two more, in full dress and seemingly of high rank, were seated along one side of the linen-covered table. Opposite them were Conor White’s lieutenants, Patrice and Irish Jack, dressed in their trademark tight black T- shirts and camouflage pants. Several more SimCo mercenaries stood in the background, their muscular arms crossed over their chests. All had buzz cuts and wore wraparound sunglasses and had automatic pistols strapped to their thighs.
Conor White himself wore a tailored white suit with an open-collared starched white shirt and sat at one end of the table. Another man sat at the far end, his back to the camera.
“Go to the next,” Kovalenko said.
Marten touched the mouse, and the next photo came up. In it the other man was revealed. He was older, had jet black eyes, and wore the dress uniform of an Equatorial Guinean army general.
“Mariano,” Marten said, surprised.
“Generalissimo Mariano Vargas Fuente. You know him?” Kovalenko marveled.
“I had the pleasure of being interrogated by a unit of the Equatorial Guinean army. He sat in on the party.”
“You were lucky not to be butchered on the spot. He’s Chilean. Was once an officer in the Directorate of National Intelligence under Augusto Pinochet. He was personally responsible for the death squads and the unspeakable horrors they committed. Thousands of people vanished under his watch, and then he suddenly-”
“Disappeared into the jungles of Central America,” Marten finished for him. “Or so I was told. How did he get to Equatorial Guinea and when?”
“He was living under an assumed name in southern Spain. That was until your friend Conor White recruited him for the Equatorial Guinean army.”
“White?”
“Yes, but secretly. President Tiombe thinks he did it alone. Sought out Mariano and paid him a fortune to run the E.G. counterinsurgency.”
“Why?” Marten was mystified.
“For Mr. Tiombe to demonstrate to the people that this is how he handles troublemakers.”
“He doesn’t know White set it up?”
“Probably not.”
Marten looked sharply to Anne. “Did Striker Oil order White to arrange the Mariano contract?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was Sy Wirth’s doing with Loyal Truex pulling strings. Maybe White did it for his own reasons. However it happened, I had no knowledge of it.”
“There seems to be a lot you don’t know about your own company.”
“That’s why I’m here with you, darling, to find out.” Anne’s stare could have split Marten down the middle.
“Tovarich,” Kovalenko said, mildly amused at their spat. “It makes no difference who ordered it. The thinking behind it was tactical. Fire up the insurgency through the army’s brutal repression of it. Slaughter or terrify anything that moves, and do it theatrically. Men, women, children, the elderly, even animals.
