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  “I assume you’ve guessed who I am,” the white said.

  Nze gave a slow nod.

  The tire, he thought.

  The gas can.

  The burn-stained ground around him.

  He felt himself trembling with fear.

  “Let’s hear you say my name,” the white said. “It’s been a grueling ride for everyone. But worn out as we are, we must strive to be polite.”

  Nze started to answer and his voice cracked. He wet his parched lips, tried again.

  “Gerard Fáton,” he rasped.

  The white continued regarding him steadily.

  “There you go,” he said. A trace of a smile on his lips. “Monsieur Nze, you should be honored that I’ve come down to say good-bye to you, and capture the moment so that it will be remembered and appreciated.”

  Nze’s trembling worsened. He couldn’t make it stop.

  “I’ve done nothing…”

  “And your doing nothing has cost me.”

  Nze shook his head.

  “What happened in Libreville… I did my best,” he said. “My arguments were defeated… but your desires weren’t made clear to me until very late. Too late. I had to rush to understand them… to prepare. If I’d had more time—”

  Fáton vented a sibilant breath through his teeth.

  “Lie to me once more, and I’ll have your hands separated from your wrists to make the burning worse.”

  Nze was shaking uncontrollably. There was no denying what was planned for him. He felt his bladder release and hardly cared that his abductors could see the moist stain spreading across the crotch of his pants. He could live with the shame, if he could somehow find a way to live at all.

  “You changed your vote to curry favor with some no-rate government connivers,” Fáton said. “Vulgar rustres. Rubes and yokels who play act at being Mandarins.”

  “I’ll try again,” Nze said. “I can do better. Much better. I never meant to give up, you must believe that—”

  “Stop. Now. You offend me.” Fáton shut his eyes, inhaled through his mouth, stood quietly holding his breath. After a long while he expelled the air from his nostrils, raised his eyelids with a kind of reptilian slowness, and went back to staring at Nze.

  “ ‘I don’t see any chance of making inroads’,” he said. “Does that statement ring familiar to you?”

  Nze’s face showed the anxious terror of a captured animal. Familiar? Of course it was. Of course. Here was another piece of the trap’s framework. Fáton was simply repeating words that the assistant minister himself had spoken to Etienne Begela over the telephone what seemed a hundred years ago.

  Fáton stared at Nze for a brief moment longer before turning to the small group of men beside him.

  “Let us necklace this faithless swine and be done here,” he said.

  Even as he spoke, one of Fáton’s armed guards went to the tire, crouched over it, and began filling it from the can, working the spout through a hole that had been gouged into the tire’s sidewall. He poured until the can was almost empty, took a handkerchief from his pocket, soaked it with whatever was left of its contents, and wadded it into the hole, leaving a small wick of cloth hanging out. Finally he tossed the can into the brush and was joined by another of the guards, who helped him lift the tire off the ground and carry it toward the patch of blackened sedge where Nze knelt helplessly and watched.

  Nze tried to move, knowing it was futile. The khat chewer from inside the Benz — or whichever of his captors was standing behind him — had taken fast hold of the electrical cord that bound his arms and legs. He could only squirm with impotent terror in that solid, unbreakable grip.

  The tire was lowered over Nze’s head to rest around his shoulders. Fuel sloshed inside it, the stench overwhelming him.

  He sobbed.

  “Very good,” Fáton told the pair of fatigue-clad men. Then, to Nze, in a tone of calm gratification: “You were warned about lying twice, little piglet.”

  Nze sobbed openly.

  Fáton was looking past his shoulder.

  “Omar,” he said, “Coupez ses mains, si’l vous plaît.”

  Omar, cut off his hands, please.

  Nze felt a sudden swish of air, glimpsed the bright sun-sparkle of the rising machete blade. He was already screaming when it came down on him with a quick sweeping motion, his cries loud enough to startle a drove of birds from their perches in the hemming brush. Cold pain sledged up from his wrists as the machete carved into them, penetrating deep, momentarily snagging on something, a resistant knot of muscle or bone. It was wobbled from side to side, and then pushed through with a sickening wet crunch. An instant later the coldness turned to pulsing heat.

  Nze howled at the top of his lungs, his blood soaking into the thirsty blackened ground. The shadow of the khat chewer, the machete wielder, the butcher who had maimed him, folded and unfolded as he crouched behind Nze, and rose again, and then dropped both severed hands in front of him, let them fall together inches from his knees, crimson streaming from them, tatters of meat flapping wetly around the stubs of his wrist bones, the second and third fingers of one hand twitching like the legs of a dying crab.

  Through a haze of suffering and weakness, Nze watched Fáton slide a fist from his right gusset pocket and hold it out before him like a sideshow magician engaged in an amusing bit of hocus pocus. Then he spread open his fingers to display the wooden matchbox in his palm.

  “Allumettes,” he said. Again with that even, satisfied calm. “Here is some humane advice, mon ami. As the diesel oil inside the tire bursts into flame, it might be desirable for you to take good, deep breaths of smoke. This goes against involuntary reflex, I know. The fumes will be quite hot, and are apt to sear your throat and lungs. But if you do manage to control yourself — deep breaths, I remind you — they will render you unconscious before the melted tire rubber and burning fuel start to run over your body. They cling to the flesh, you see. And I imagine it must be quite agonizing when flesh cooks.”

  Fáton’s left hand appeared from inside his jacket, produced a match from the box, and flicked it against the striker.

  Its head budded orange and he moved to within arm’s reach of Nze.

  Nze looked at him, tears streaming down his cheeks, his nose and throat clogged with mucus.

  “Please, I beg you—” he began.

  Fáton frowned with disapproval, touched his flickering match head to the wad of cloth.

  “Here, at least, my labor has not been in vain,” he said, and stepped backward as the makeshift fuse ignited with an audible whoosh.

  The fuel inside the tire caught almost at once, fire gushing out the large hole in its sidewall, then gnawing through in other places, rapidly tracing its way around the circumference.

  Moments later the whole tire went up with a combustive roar. Nze gasped for air and felt broiling heat fill his mouth. Choking on his own scream, he struggled grotesquely to tear free of his bonds with fingers he no longer had, the blaze ringing him in, raking him with its vicious talons. Blots of diesel fuel and gummy, liquified rubber dribbled over his skin, bonded with his skin, ate their way down and down and down into his skin. He could hear his blood sizzle in that blasting, torching heat as the fiery mix splashed the raw bloody stumps of his wrists.

  The lids burning away from his eyes, wilting off in curled, blackened strips, Nze endured several remaining instants of sight before the eyeballs themselves were cooked in their sockets — a brief staring agony of horror in which he could see Fáton through breaks in the sheet of flame, standing with his camera raised, his pale lips drawn into a leer beneath the wide, black circle of its lens.

  Then Nze’s throat finally unlocked to release the scream that had been trying to force its way out. His body its own raging pyre, he continued screaming for some time, bellows that went climbing high into the air with the flames and smoke. Fáton was cognizant of them long after he and his men had returned to the 4×4 and swung back around onto the snaking
jungle trail.

  Nze had not taken his advice about the deep breaths, it seemed… and, in Africa as perhaps nowhere else on earth, one’s mistakes bore the harshest of all possible consequences.

  FIVE

  VARIOUS LOCALES

  On his last evening in Madrid, Siegfried Kuhl sat facing his high terraced window above the Gran Vía and watched the sunset bathe his completed scale miniature of the Iglesia de San Ginés in deep burgundy light. Against the wall near the apartment door were his few articles of luggage. Beside his chair was a large paper shopping bag that contained a purchase he had made at an art-supply shop some blocks from La Casa Real.

  He had moved with haste to close out his affairs here, and it had now come down to his final act before leaving.

  As his eyes took in the miniature, Kuhl thought of the long effort it represented, the concentrated application of his learned skills. Its piece-by-piece construction had been painstakingly slow, but impatience rather than patience had held him to it, an irresistible drive to see the model take on finished shape from its raw makings. He thought of the hours he had spent sketching plans from the digital reference images stored in his laptop computer, of the careful fabrication of its segments with his saws, rasps, files, gouges, chisels, and wood knives. He summoned back to his very fingertips the tactile impressions of working his materials, methodically hand carving unformed balsa to replicate the church’s brick and tile facades; its crests, moldings, and traceries; its every architectural feature and texture — even cutting small pieces of glass to fit its windows.

  Inside his church, Kuhl had re-created San Ginés’s three arched naves and the figure of the Virgin Mother in her apparition as the Lady of Valvanera, patroness of remedies, whose grace was sought for healing and protection in war. There, it was said, a group of assassins had once stolen into the vestibule and murdered a young man as he knelt before the Lady in adoration, leaving his headless corpse to be discovered at her feet, and his spirit to haunt the aisles with ghostly elegies to a transgression unpunished… and, Kuhl imagined, a restless anger at reverence scorned and unrewarded.

  After detailing the model to his satisfaction, Kuhl had sanded and primed its subassemblies for the paints he had mixed to create the earth tones of its outer walls, the darker colors of rail and roof, dome and steeple, as well as the age-tarnished iron bell in the proud tower of San Ginés, and the crucifix raised high above all. He had applied his coats of paint with precise brushstrokes, done his staining and streaking with a sponge applicator to approximate the effects of age, sun, and soot. Then he had used clever dashes of color to hint at the rare artwork decorating the interior walls — canvases by El Greco, Salvatierra, Nicolás Fumo, and a reproduction of a work by the Venetian master Sebastiano Ricci that had been destroyed in an eighteenth-century fire. Ricci, whose devout paintings commissioned by the authorities in Rome contrasted strongly with his reputation for impiety and willful defiance of religious law.

  Kuhl stared at his miniature from his chair across the room, his eyes fixed on the bell tower he had epoxied to its rooftop just minutes before.

  Like flames, the westering sunlight boiled through its semicircular arches.

  With the dying of the day, Kuhl’s period of latency had also reached its end. Minutes from now he would depart for Barajas airport and exit the country using a fraudulent identity and supporting documents — one of many aliases he’d seeded around the world and kept in reserve for when he received his signal from DeVane. Thousands of miles away, Kuhl’s cell of sleeper agents in America had been activated and made rapid arrangements for his coming. On his specific instructions, they had secured a base that fit his cover and conformed nicely with his tactical imperatives. It would provide crucial seclusion, exploitable terrain, and at the same time place him within close reach of his potential target or targets.

  Find what Roger Gordian most loves, and we will know his greatest weakness. Strike at it, and we will have struck at his heart.

  Kuhl was confident of achieving those objectives. He had compiled a thorough mental dossier on Gordian, and knew Harlan DeVane’s intelligence was still more comprehensive. His American operatives had also supplied useful information. Much had been readily acquired, for despite his estimable regard for UpLink International’s corporate security, Roger Gordian had put limited emphasis on his individual secrecy. Kuhl had found this unsurprising. Gordian was a prominent businessman, someone who led a highly public life. Whose success depended in part on his accessibility, and a reputation that inspired widespread confidence. His background was common knowledge. His personal and professional linkages were to a considerable extent open, apparent, exposed. Some of them had already come under Kuhl’s pitiless lens, and he believed their order of importance in Gordian’s life to be a relatively simple determination. Once he was convinced beyond doubt of the link best broken, it would be no less simple to assess its vulnerabilities, and learn whatever remaining facts he needed to move with potent, decisive speed.

  He moved his glance to the clock on the table next to him, then returned it to the miniature of San Ginés.

  The hour and minute had come.

  There was only one thing left for him, one thing before he closed out.

  Kuhl slid his hand down to the shopping bag he’d leaned against the foot of his chair and took hold of its handle. Then he rose and went over to the worktable where the church of his diligent fashioning glowed bloodred in the ashes of nightfall.

  He stood there looking down at it, appraising its every feature, recalling the intensity of his labor with a sense of powerful and intimate connection. Feeling an investment of self that in some indescribable way connected him, in turn, to the old church on Calle del Arenal, after which his exacting replica had been crafted.

  Calle del Arenal, the Street of Sand, ancient cemetery of Jews, their dust and bones razed at the order of an inquisitor tribunal.

  Kuhl thought of the lustful dancers at Joy Eslava, gathering in the shadow of the cross like freed birds outside a cage that had held them from flight, as if that near reminder of confinement somehow added fervor to their kinetic mingling.

  After a moment, he reached into the shopping bag for the sculptor’s mallet he had purchased at the nearby art-supply shop. The iron head did not weigh much — one and a half pounds, to be precise — but it was quite sufficient to do the job intended for it.

  He leaned down, placed the shopping bag on the floor next to the table, and opened its mouth wide. Then he straightened, raised his sculptor’s mallet over the church, and with clenched teeth brought it down hard on the newly completed and attached bell tower.

  It took only a single blow of the mallet to drive it down through the model’s splintering roof to its inner core. Three additional blows reduced the entire miniature to crushed and unrecognizable scraps of colored wood.

  Kuhl did not pause to regard its shattered remnants, merely cleared them from sight with a broad swipe of his right arm that sent them spilling over the edge of the work table into his shopping bag.

  Brushing the last pieces of the obliterated church off the table, he lifted the bag again, carried it to the door of the apartment, gathered up his luggage, and vacated without a backward glance.

  Kuhl left the shopping bag in a waste receptacle in an alley behind the building, and could feel the tightness in his jaw starting to relent by the time he hailed a taxi to the airport. His existence in Madrid was indeed closed out; he had been released for a mission that he almost believed himself born to fulfill.

  Across the ocean, Big Sur awaited.

  * * *

  “I’m telling you, Gord, no qualifications, this is the juiciest steak I’ve ever eaten,” Dan Parker said, and swallowed a mouthful of his food. He had ordered the prime New York strip with a side of mashed potatoes. “I feel like we haven’t been here together in years.”

  “That’s because we haven’t,” Roger Gordian said. He had gotten the filet mignon with baked. “Three years, i
f you’re counting.”

  Parker looked up from his plate with mild wonder. “No kidding? That long?”

  Gordian nodded, pressing some sour cream into the potato’s flesh with his fork.

  “That long,” he repeated. It was a bit hard to believe. Lunch at the Washington Palm on Nineteenth Street was once a regular monthly appointment for them, but that was before Gordian’s illness. It was also before Dan had lost his congressional seat in Santa Clara County, having succumbed to the political fallout for helping Gordian lobby against indiscriminate dissemination of U.S. encryption tech abroad. This had proven a resoundingly unpopular stance among his constituents in Silicon Valley’s software industry, who, with the exception of UpLink International, had not seemed to care a whit whether the al Qaedas, Hamases, and Cali Cartels of the world had access to products that could thwart the best surveillance efforts of global law enforcement, their rationale having been that the terrorists and drug lords could get their hands on similar encoding programs from foreign countries, or bootlegged copies of U.S. programs regardless of legal obstacles. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em for a buck, Gordian thought, even if they’re planning to flood your borders with heroin or level the foundations of Western civilization.

  “A lot’s happened to keep us busy,” he said.

  “Truer words have never been voiced.” Parker tipped his head toward the good-humored caricature of Tiger Woods on the wall above their formerly usual corner table. “At least Tiger’s still here with us.”

  “That he is. And for my money the kid’s a permanent fixture.”

  Parker grinned. The sports and political cartoons mounted everywhere in sight were a tradition at the restaurant harkening back almost a century to the original Palm on Manhattan’s East Side. Before Woods rose to fame on the green, his current spot on the wall had for over a decade been occupied by the caricature of a retired star football player who’d been well-loved by fans young and old until he was accused of a grisly double homicide, one of the victims being his ex-wife and the mother of his children. Then the football player’s picture had come down and been replaced by a drawing of a television sportscaster who was soon to be booted from his job after allegations that he’d taken large bites out of his mistress while dressed in women’s clothing, or something of that nature. Woods had replaced the sportscaster on the wall around 1998, and remained there since, even though the sports commentator had eventually found sufficient sympathy among fans and network executives to be restored to his approximate slot on the airwaves.