Cutting Edge pp-6 Page 15

  In each case, the photo was enclosed in a plain manila envelope and neatly taped between two rectangular pieces of cardboard to protect it from damage in shipping. Adhesive labels on the envelope’s lower left- and right-hand corners read “Personnelle et Confidentiele”— Personal and Confidential — so it would be opened only by its intended recipient. Their typeface, and the type on the separate address label, was a common boldface Times Roman font produced by an equally common make and model of computer printer. Even the ink-jet cartridge used was of an ordinary, commonplace variety. None of the envelopes bore a return address. And none included a worded message.

  The ghastly picture of Macie Nze was a clear enough communication without one.

  Although an inspection of their coded postmarks would reveal they were deposited at Libreville’s main postal center on Boulevard de la Mer sometime after the last batch of mail was sorted and processed on the evening of September 26, and before the first batch was loaded onto delivery trucks early on September 27, not even the most sophisticated forensic tests would have shown evidence of handling on either the photographs or their packaging. There were no latent fingerprints, biological samples, trace fibers, or minute particulate materials from which useful information could be extracted. It was as if the mailings had been prepared under aseptic laboratory conditions.

  Of course, few, if any, of the public officials to receive the envelope would have considered informing the authorities about it for a moment. They had far too much to lose from any sort of police investigation into their surreptitious contacts and affairs.

  Because Assele-Ndaki’s office headquarters was located near the start of the mail route in the Quartier Louis, his deliveries would generally reach it before he arrived for the day. This pleased the assemblyman, whose bent was to read through his morning correspondence over a cup of strong mocha-flavored coffee and a crème tart bought on his way in, at a patisserie on a side street off Boulevard Omar Bongo.

  The contents of the manila envelope, however, had left Assele-Ndaki wishing he had never opened it. Not today, nor ever.

  While Assele-Ndaki’s terror on discovering the photograph was characteristic of all those who laid eyes on it, the horror that descended on him went many shades deeper, and his grievous sorrow was something entirely of its own. He and Nze had known a close fraternal relationship that went back to childhood. Born into political families, they had grown up neighbors in Port-Gentil, where their elders had often socialized. As boys they had attended the same primary and secondary schools, played soccer on the same youth league. They had shared a dormitory room at the Sorbonne in Paris, graduated that esteemed historic university with advanced economic degrees, and after returning to Gabon held executive positions with the nation’s largest energy and ore mining firms. Some years afterward they had found their lives again intertwined, as both gained National Assembly seats in the same constitutional election.

  And together they had attended a string of secret meetings with Etienne Begela and other principal government figures, gatherings at which they were persuaded to accept handsome financial inducements from the blanc, Gerard Fáton… grafted to thwart UpLink International’s overhaul of their country’s telecommunications system. Begela had drawn Assele-Ndaki and his longtime friend into the conspiracy, just as he had doubtless courted the rest of its participants. But Assele-Ndaki would blame no one except himself for his decisions. They had not resulted from any form of pressure or coercion. Rather, he had been enticed by the easy money… and, to be truthful, succumbed to the excitement of slipping across lines of ethics and legality, a visceral delight in probing his untapped capacity for craftiness.

  Now that thrill had been replaced by the sickening realization of how mad his actions had been. Their actions — his and Macie’s, perhaps the actions of the rest as well. It had almost seemed a game until their chamber of parliament convened in Libreville for its vote. The amendment they had drawn up to stall legislation that would ensure the extension of UpLink’s temporary operating licenses for at least the next quarter century contained what they had fancied to be marvelously clever revisionist language. But when the president had gotten wind of their intentions through his cadre of appointed loyalists — Gabon’s constitution, drafted under his sharp authoritarian eye, allowed him to handpick nine assemblymen to chair key law-making committees — the authors and supporters of the proposed amendment had been cautioned to desist in far blunter terms than their artful bill flaunted. The choice presented them was stark. They could move forward with their obstructionist plans and invite the scrutiny of the ministry of justice. Find their government and business dealings, financial records, even their sexual activities open to rigorous investigation. Their every affair delved into without deference to social position or regard for privacy.

  Or they could instead go with the existing bill. And also go about their lives unburdened by inconvenient, embarrassing disruptions.

  The amendment had been scrapped, and UpLink’s regulatory approvals given easy passage through the Assembly.

  What Assele-Ndaki and his friend had failed to grasp — what none of the amendment’s sponsors had understood at the time — was that they were in greater jeopardy of being rolled over by the inexorable force that had driven them on until that point. The blanc would tolerate nothing but their moving forward once they had committed to his agenda, would simply plow them down in their tracks if they dared halt or turn back.

  Now Assele-Ndaki felt his skin prickle. Beads of sweat slicked his forehead, gleamed on the broad slopes of his cheekbones. Macie. Poor Macie…

  He had been murdered. Made a gruesome example. Inquiry and scandal were the tools of politicians. And the blanc was not that.

  Assele-Ndaki shuddered, staring at the photo of Macie on his knees with the blazing necklace around his shoulders. Macie burning like a human candle, his face contorted in dying agony behind licks of gasoline-charged flame. Macie burning with his hands cut off at the wrists, dropped on the ground where he could see them as the fire rose around him and the life broiled from his flesh.

  An example, Assele-Ndaki thought again.

  Though numb with shock, he retained full command of his instincts for self-preservation. Examples were by very definition meant to serve as warnings, and he would not have been sent the photograph if it was too late for him to avoid sharing Macie’s fate. There was still a chance the telecommunications legislation could be defeated, or become so deeply mired in the parliamentary process that the net result was the same. While it had cleared the National Assembly, its ratification would require Senát passage, normally a rubber stamp vote to satisfy the president’s will. But Assele-Ndaki had many confederates, some of them quietly aware of the blanc’s maneuvers. If the venerable senateurs ruled to overturn the bill after their chamber deliberations—if enough of them could be persuaded to vote against it — it would be kicked back down to the lower parliamentary house and resubmitted to committee for changes. Then the amendments could be reintroduced, the process for all practical intents and purposes started from the beginning.

  Assele-Ndaki’s heart was racing. It was a plan of abject fear and desperation, he knew. All those who undercut the president would pay the consequences. They would be probed, censured — their personal reputations impugned, their careers in government run into the dirt. Some stood to lose everything. Were Assele-Ndaki’s wife to learn of his own extramarital proclivities—

  Everything, yes, the amendment’s proponents would lose everything.

  Except their lives.

  Assele-Ndaki gazed at the photo of Macie in his smoking ruff of flame and felt a fresh bout of horror and grief.

  Better to walk in disgrace than suffer death. Especially that kind of death.

  He set the photo into a drawer, reached a trembling hand out toward the telephone — but his secretary buzzed his intercom before he could lift the receiver from its cradle.

  Senateur Moubouyi was on the line with a matter of
pressing urgency, she informed him.

  Were his mood less oppressively bleak, Assele-Ndaki might have smiled.

  He had, it seemed, been beaten on the draw.

  * * *

  Nimec had arranged for them to meet the cable ship’s captain and project manager at ten P.M. in a dinner club called Scintillements. His name was Pierre Gunville, and for some reason Vince Scull was having a hard time with that. Scull also had a problem with the name of the club and the fact that their meeting was not taking place in an office building during normal work hours. Nimec could not say these complaints surprised him. Aggravation was Scull’s emotional springboard. If the day ever came when he wasn’t simmering with annoyance, you had to figure it might be worth consulting Nostradamus to see whether it was an omen of something or other being seriously amiss with the world.

  Scull had begun his grumbling the second he met Nimec in the corridor outside their guest suites at the Rio de Gabao Hotel. Stepping into the elevator now, he jabbed a thick finger at the LOBBY button and continued to bitch and moan without respite as the doors slid closed.

  “So why the hell doesn’t any of this crap bother you?” he said.

  “Which crap do you mean?” Nimec said. “Just so I’m straight about it.”

  “This guy with the fucked-up name, this fucked-up place where he made our appointment to meet him, this fucked-up time for it when I’m just off the plane from Paris,” Scull said, recapitulating his whole bilious list of complaints. He rubbed a hand over his scalp to smooth down a strand of his nearly extinct hair. “That’s what crap, Pete.”

  The car started on its way down. Nimec tried without luck to think of a convenient blanket response, decided to tackle things in reverse order.

  “You could have flown Air France with the rest of us, gotten here a couple days ago,” Nimec said. “Nobody twisted your arm into waiting around for a private jet charter.”

  “Is that goddamn right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I’m not going to get into how much I paid for my membership on that service,” Scull said. “An expense the boss might’ve offered to shoulder, incidentally. At least halfway shoulder.”

  Nimec gave him a look. “That’s asinine. If you have a fear of flying…”

  “How many million times we been through this? I’m not afraid—”

  “Okay, we’ll say you’ve got issues with commercial airlines,” Nimec said, loath to step into that sucking bog of dispute. “It’s your problem, you pay.”

  Scull sneered.

  “My problem, you want to call it that, is with how they run their security,” he said. “You’re the expert. Tell me you feel safe flying the terrorist-friendly skies.”

  Nimec leaned against the handrail on the back wall of the car, glancing up at its floor indicator panel. The number twenty-four flicked by. Eleven down, twenty-three to go.

  “I don’t waste energy worrying about what I can’t control,” he said. “DeMarco’s got the right take on it, you want to know what I think. If terrorist incidents in the air were the norm, they wouldn’t make headlines. The only reason they’re on the six o’clock news is because they don’t happen every day.”

  “Like floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, huh? A guy walking aboard with a Semtex bomb in the heel of his shoe’s just another act of God.”

  “Do us both a favor and let it go, Vince.”

  “Let what go? It was me who was at those negotiations in Paris all last week, while you were still cooling your heels at the home office,” he said. “If somebody hadn’t sewn things up with the Nautel’s cable-maintenance fleet, we wouldn’t be going to see Captain Gunslinger tonight.”

  “The boss had other negotiators there taking care of things,” Nimec said. “You enlisted.”

  “That’s where you’re dead wrong, Petey,” Scull said. “I’m the company point runner. The forward scout who’s supposed to go conning for buried mines. The risk assessment man. Which means—”

  “It’s your job to assess risks,” Nimec said, completing the familiar mantra. He checked his Annie-Meter. Too long to go. Then he glanced at the floor-indicator panel again. Ten, nine. Almost at the lobby. He would have to settle. “Fact is, Vince, you’re earning the salary that pays for your executive jet plan tonight. We’d need to talk with Gunville even if his outfit wasn’t contracted. Right now our teams just mean to use Nautel for support ops. But two divers from the Africana got killed while making repairs on the same fiber line we’re planning to send our men down to survey. I know the company line about what happened to them. I read the press accounts. And I still want to sound him out. Hear the story straight from his mouth. Because it’s my job to keep our people as safe as can be when they might have to put themselves at risk.”

  “Did you hear me say I had a problem with that?” Scull thumbed his chest with indignation. “How about we get back to what I asked in the first place, you don’t fucking mind.”

  Nimec shrugged mildly.

  “The Gabonese are late eaters,” he said. “Nine, ten o’clock at night’s their usual dinner time. It’s also the custom to invite foreign business guests out for a meal. Entertain them. And the place we’re meeting Gunville is supposed to be pretty decent.” He paused. “You ought to enjoy yourself while you can. Be glad it’s not two days from now, when we have to head into the bush to check out the new ground-station facilities.”

  “I’ll be gladder if we could stick to the point.” Scull rolled his eyes. “Scintillements, you know what it means? Sparkles. Probably has those laser lights flying around over the walls and ceiling, make you feel like some nut-case with a big crayon covering them with colored squiggles—”

  “I’m not sure that’s how it’ll be. I picked up a tourist brochure in my room, and there was an ad—”

  “Come on. Since when are you so gullible? Must be the settled life affecting you.”

  Nimec looked confused. “Settled life?”

  “I just asked you not to stray off the topic. You want my advice on this love thing you got going in Texas, we can do it later,” Scull said. “The club, Petey. Focus on the club. Think about its name a minute, then tell me you expect good eats. They can be pretentious as they want dressing it up in French, I still say it belongs on the marquee of some poky Brooklyn disco like the one that used to be run by the Russian mob punk you took down… what the hell was it called, by the way?”

  “The Platinum Club.”

  “Yeah, that’s it…”

  “Vince,” he said. “French is the official language here.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe it’s you who should use your head.” He shrugged again. “Nobody’s dressing anything up. Nothing fancy or pretentious about it to their ears.”

  “Still worse,” Scull said. “If the owners of the joint know the customers know what the name means, how good can it be? And speaking of bullshit handles, what’s with this Captain Guns-at-the-hips? If you think you’re gonna find that one on his birth certificate, guess again.” Scull made a rumbling sound. “Reminds me of a guy I met at a party once, introduced himself as John Wildlife. No shit. Right away, I peg him as some dilettante rich kid whose moneybags parents stuffed a fortune into his mountaineering knapsack, or maybe into his kayak when he was about to paddle off down the Snake River. Had to be a fortune. Startup capital to help him found one of those tree-hugger nonprofits in D.C… Georgetown, no less. Guy’s got a whole floor of offices on Sixteenth Street for this foundation — you know what rents are like over there. And the reason? Just so he can take a vacation from his recreational activities every now and then, pull himself out of the white-water rapids long enough to dry off his ass. John Wildlife, will somebody please fucking spare me—”

  Their elevator stopped at the lobby with a soft ding. As its doors swished open, Nimec saw the concierge flash a hospitable smile from his desk and expelled a sigh of relief. Scull had ceased his tirade.

  “Come on, Vince.” He exited the car
. “Let’s find ourselves a taxi.”

  Scull followed a step behind him, frowned.

  “I’ll be happy if we get a driver who doesn’t take us for a couple of greenhorn suckers,” he said.

  * * *

  The concierge took pains to be helpful as the two Americans came across the lobby from the elevator. Did they need their currency exchanged? he enquired in studied English. Would they like particular directions somewhere? Were there any special room-service orders they might wish to place with the staff in advance of their return?

  The first man to pass his desk — Monsieur Nimec, executive suite 9—declined with a polite thank-you. The new arrival — Monsieur Scull, who had insisted on an immediate room change from suite 8 to suite 12 on check-in, stating the former was incommodious and noisy — merely shook his head in the negative and followed the other toward the entrance.

  The concierge did not let the second guest’s scowl leach any of the obliging geniality from his expression. He was skilled at his job and knew how to keep his poise.

  The concierge’s eyes tracked them as they strode to the hotel entrance and a doorman in a braided, epauletted uniform held open its large glass doors. Then he reached for his telephone, tapped in a number, left a brief message with the person who answered, and hung up.

  With their backs to him, the smile he offered the men had fled his face.

  Out front, the doorman hastened from beneath the hotel’s regal red-and-gold awning, hailed one of several waiting curbside taxis, and opened its rear door for the UpLink representatives. Then he asked their destination — again in their own tongue — was given it by the tall, narrow-jawed man who had led the way through the entrance, and helpfully communicated where they were going to the driver in his native French.

  The taller of the men tipped him and climbed into the taxi. His stocky companion packed himself into the backseat next, slamming the door shut before the doorman could close it for him, albeit in what would have been a much gentler manner.