Cutting Edge pp-6 Read online

He’d been prepared to see neither as he arrived at Senateur Moubouyi’s colonial mansion and was ushered into the salon by his houseman.

  Assele-Ndaki stood in the doorway now, looking into the room with frozen features. President Cangele. Here. How was this possible? It was everything he could do not to physically jump when the paneled oak door shut behind him.

  “Assemblyman, hello.” The president sat at the head of a long table, two of his closest aides to his right, the rest of the chairs filled with more than twelve of Assele-Ndaki’s legislative colleagues. “We’ve been waiting for you with unanimous anticipation. And unanimity among politicians is too rare and short-lived to neglect for any period.”

  Assele-Ndaki did not move. He felt staggered and weak kneed, as if struck by a hard concussion.

  “Mr. President…”

  “Please, come in,” Adrian Cangele nodded toward a single empty chair on his left side. The snapshot of Macie lay in front of him, its lower border pressed flat against the table by the thick fingers of his hand. “Now that you’ve arrived, there is no reason for you to stand apart. Is there?”

  Recognizing the clear edge of sarcasm and double-entendre in the president’s remarks, Assele-Ndaki struggled to gain possession of himself. He had expected a huddle of government officials gathered to challenge the power and authority of the very man who was at the table with them and to determine how the UpLink license might be suspended or revoked. Expected representatives of both parliamentary chambers linked by their participation in a conspiracy, and a common warning — which had come to each of them in the form of an anonymously mailed photograph.

  Instead…

  Assele-Ndaki surveyed the room. Only Cangele and his aides were looking at him. All the rest of the men were focused everywhere but in his direction… some of them on the two-hundred-year-old rapiers and poniards against one wall, some on the cased set of eighteenth-century French pistols mounted opposite the sword collection, some examining the Chinese porcelain vases and expensive trinkets that filled various cabinet shelves. Others were merely staring at their hands or at vacant points in the air.

  Assele-Ndaki turned his attention onto the senator whose invitation he had accepted. Seated at the president’s left with his eyes on the table, Moubouyi appeared to sense his gaze. He met it with his own for the briefest of moments, then looked back down.

  Cangele’s deep-set eyes, meanwhile, continued to scrutinize Assele-Ndaki from his broad ebony face. The smile on his full mouth was quick, and often charming, but also unspontaneous and rarely invested with humor. It had a demanding severity even at the most casual and relaxed moments… and the mood in the room was worlds from either.

  Assele-Ndaki pushed forward across the floor to the table. The president wore an orange and white patterned kente batik shirt, collarless with wide bell sleeves. It was unusual attire for him. Cangele typically favored Western dress, custom suits from the renowned European boutiques.

  The assemblyman sat.

  “I trust,” Cangele said to him, “no one present requires an introduction.”

  Assele-Ndaki gave a silent nod. How could the president have learned about the meeting? About the photograph? Could someone in this room have told him, committed an act of duplicity seeking to curry favor in the belief things would sooner or later come to light? Or perhaps he had found out through his secret eyes and ears throughout the government? But in the end these questions were unanswerable. Nor did his informant’s identity and reasons matter. Cangele knew. He knew. One way or another, they would each of them who had planned to obstruct his goals bear the consequences.

  “I mean no disrespect, but there are places I would much rather be,” Cangele said. His eyes held steady on Assele-Ndaki’s face. “Other ways I would have chosen to spend my Sunday afternoon.” He triggered his smile again and gestured expansively with his left hand. His right continued to rest on the picture of Macie Nze, its touch flat and heavy. “Instead, I’ve been pressed into this working visit to Port-Gentil… into slipping out of the capital like a thief.”

  Assele-Ndaki said nothing. His tension was hard to separate from that of his fellow parliamentarians. It was a kind of flux in the room that seemed to radiate from each and accrete into something greater than the sum of its parts. He could feel it prickling his skin like current. When he breathed, it left the taste of steel nails at the back of his tongue.

  “Mr. Assemblyman,” Cangele said to him, “I know you and Macie Nze had close personal ties, and I wish to express my regrets and condolences over his death. My own direct dealings with him were infrequent, but I remember him as a committed and estimable public servant worthy of respect.”

  Assele-Ndaki nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “There are many who will miss him.”

  “His savage abduction and murder was a waste. An intolerable act. You may take it as a given that the crime will not go unsolved… and that its perpetrators will not elude justice.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President.”

  Cangele took a deep breath, then released it through his nose and mouth. He was a large man with a bulging middle and his girth somehow gave the exhalation a tidal quality.

  “Although they lack solid proof, my sources have cause to suspect Macie Nze’s murder was connected to his falling awry of a mysterious political-influence peddler,” he said. “An unidentified foreigner who has sought to hinder my telecommunications initiatives through means varying from financial incentives of questionable legality, to overt criminal bribes. And it pains me to say that some in our government might have been receptive to them.”

  The president’s dark eyes remained clamped on Assele-Ndaki, who looked back at him in silence, not knowing how to answer, afraid to turn away.

  “Jean Jacques,” Senateur Moubouyi said at last. “Before you joined us, the president was asking our opinions—”

  “Off the record, we must underscore,” Ali Nagor said from farther down the table. He was an assemblyman from Mounga Province, to the east.

  “Of course, I should have mentioned that,” Moubouyi said. “President Cangele polled us, informally, about a proposition of amnesty for anyone who may have been lured into accepting the foreigner’s inducements. As I understand it, explicit admissions of impropriety would not be required, but rather a simple and confidential pledge among all parliamentarians that none will occur in the future… with particular regard to the telecom issue.”

  Silence again. Then Nagor said, “The president is gratified by the National Assembly’s approval of his UpLink licensing policies despite the shadowy lobbies that would have hindered them. And while he welcomes honest and open political debate, he likewise wishes to see the licenses ratified without further sabotage.”

  Assele-Ndaki did not react. He was trying to plainly understand the meaning of what he’d heard. President Cangele’s dark eyes, still fixed on the assemblyman, made it difficult for him to think straight.

  “So,” Cangele said, then. “What have you to comment?”

  Assele-Ndaki hesitated another moment.

  “Loyal and good men may make mistakes they regret, Mr. President,” he said. “As one who believes in the possibility of atonement, I would prefer such individuals be granted a chance to rectify their mistakes, rather than have their shame compounded by scandal and punishment. And I am convinced most would of them look on it with humble appreciation.”

  “And yet there is a hesitant note in your voice.”

  Assele-Ndaki’s throat was dry and tight. He drank from the glass of water on the table beside him.

  “Only because I would respectfully suggest that some might shy away from the opportunity to make amends out of self preservation,” he said, and glanced at the photograph under Cangele’s fingertips. “My dear friend Macie Nze was surely innocent of wrongdoing. But it could be that he was under strong persuasion to compromise his integrity, commit an indiscretion that would have weighed on his conscience… and was tortured and killed for his refusa
l. It gives me fear that the same could happen to the guilty who wish to redeem themselves. Or worse yet, to the people they love. These are men with families.”

  President Cangele was quiet, his smooth features thoughtful. He kept his gaze on Assele-Ndaki a while longer, and then let his eyes slowly move over the faces of the conclaved parliamentarians.

  “No one in this room today has seen me. No one in this room has heard me,” he said. “None of you… are we agreed?”

  Heads were nodding around the table. Assele-Ndaki’s was no exception.

  Cangele smiled his ready, hard smile.

  “I know what it is to be a family man. A husband. A father. And to my own bemusement, a recent grandfather,” he said. “It is with my growing brood in mind that the commitment I’ve made toward a democratic future for our nation is constantly renewed. It is for them I wish to see Gabon become a model of social and governmental reform on our continent… and in doing so, someday make dinosaurs of autocrats like myself and insatiable bought-out scoundrels such as you gentlemen.” He paused, the smile gradually dwindling from the corners inward. The fingers of his right hand tapped the photograph of Macie Nze, his left fist thumping his chest over the wax cloth shirt. “Still, I am African. My blood and heritage is African. I am therefore, by nature, an unromantic dreamer. The reality is that my plans for our republic have come under attack from forces of subversion and terror. And the attack must be repulsed. My pledge here is this: Stand with me now, as one, and you will have my fullest protection. Any past weaknesses you have shown will be excused. But let a single man in this room stand against me, continue his faithlessness, and you will see the offer pulled back from over you, leaving your heads open to whatever may fall on them — again as one. All of you will be reminded that I, too, know how to be terrible and threatening. Remember who I am, good sirs. Remember my African blood.”

  A hush fell over the parlor. Though he’d continued to address the entire group as he concluded, the president’s eyes had momentarily snapped back to Assele-Ndaki. Now he shifted them to the death photograph of Macie Nze, slid it away from himself, calmly leaned back in his chair, and folded his hands over the great mound of his stomach.

  The silence stretched out a while longer. His face mild, Cangele studied the section of tabletop he had cleared of the photograph.

  Assele-Ndaki drank from his glass, a long swallow. He knew the question had been left for him to ask.

  “How will our unity be announced?” Despite the water moistening his throat, his voice seemed to be issuing from the smallest pinhole.

  Cangele smiled, as much to himself as to the others in the room. Quiet and impassive since Assele-Ndaki’s arrival, one of the presidential aides turned toward the assemblyman and regarded him with sudden interest, as if having become aware of his presence for the first time.

  “We have arranged for an article to appear in the morning paper,” he said.

  * * *

  Pete Nimec and Vince Scull waited under the hot yellow sun in the market of Le Grand Village, holding pain beurre they had bought on their way into the plaza, the pan fried, heavily buttered breads greasy in their wax-paper wraps. There were throngs of people around them. Hawkers, shoppers, beggars. Many of the latter were children with the filmy stares of oncho—a parasitic river blindness — who squatted at the periphery of the square. In a wildlife dealer’s stall some yards to the right, a bright green parrot fluttered on its perch in a crude screen cage atop a display table fashioned of two wooden barrels that had been bound together with a thick hemp rope. Fluffs of emerald down clung to the cage’s rusty metal bars like dandelion seeds. The newspapers lining the bottom of the cage were covered with a thick dry encrustation of droppings and cracked nut shells. A second parrot lay unmoving in the layer of waste, dead or close to dead. In a bloody canvas sack hanging from a post above the cage, an unseen creature released a shrill animal cry as it thrashed repeatedly against the cloth in a vain struggle to free itself.

  Nimec turned from the stall, swallowing a bite of his fry bread without appetite. It was like he’d hurled the food down into a ditch. The happy traveler.

  He desperately missed Annie and the kids.

  He looked over Scull’s shoulder toward the north end of the outdoor market and spotted Steve DeMarco and Andy Wade approaching through a crowded aisle. They were a conspicuous pair. Both men had on pastel short-sleeved shirts, while the Gabonese strongly preferred colorful prints… or simple undyed kaftans in the case of the population’s devout Muslims. DeMarco’s whiteness and Wade’s blackness made them even easier standouts. Whites in this country were almost always foreigners — expats or short-term visitors — and lived in a sort of proximate separation with the nationals. Stranger that he was here, Nimec’s study of his mission briefs, and his first-hand impressions of the place, pointed toward very little true social mingling between people of different races. They shared the same streets, stayed at the same hotels, and ate at the same restaurants in self-segregated clusters. What interactions they had seemed driven mainly by commerce and politics.

  The relaxed companionability of the two Sword ops as they walked together would leave observers with scant doubt they were of another place and culture.

  Scull had noticed Nimec looking past him.

  “See anybody?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Nimec said. “DeMarco and Wade.”

  Scull grunted and bit into his fry bread. He was sweating profusely, his sparse hair pasted to his head, dark rings of moisture staining the underarms of his shirt.

  “Ackerman’s on his way in, too,” he said. “Coming from behind you.”

  Nimec gave him a nod. That accounted for everybody except Conners, who was decoying.

  He and Scull waited in the pressing afternoon heat and humidity. After a few moments the men reached them.

  They exchanged nods.

  “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” Scull said.

  DeMarco looked briefly at him, then turned to Nimec.

  “You think we ought to take a walk?” he said.

  Nimec jerked his head slightly to indicate the surrounding crush of market buyers.

  “I like it where we are,” he said. “Best place to be right now.”

  DeMarco nodded his understanding. A congested area offered its own type of cover — the people in circulation around them would present a constant and changing impediment to an observer’s line of sight.

  “Okay, let’s compare notes,” Nimec said to him.

  “We were tailed.”

  “Wheels or heels?”

  “Wheels,” DeMarco said. “A-B.”

  Meaning he and Wade had been subjects of a two-car vehicular surveillance.

  “The lead driver was a cabbie outside the hotel,” Wade said, looking down as he spoke to partially mask his lips from view. “He wasn’t interested in fares, ignored a whole bunch of people at the stand. Pulls out behind us, follows slow and tight. Then he turns off, and somebody else in a regular car picks up the tail.”

  “The hack show himself again?” Nimec said.

  “Cruises by about five blocks farther on, disappears,” DeMarco said. “I think he might’ve been worried he got burned.”

  Nimec stood in thoughtful silence.

  “Heels for Scull and me,” he said after a moment. “A-B-C.”

  Meaning the surveillance placed on them had consisted of a three-man foot team. And it hadn’t been half bad. There had been a man in an embroidered kufi hat and dashiki talking into a cell phone as he stepped from an apartment building near the hotel. Another two men in casual Western clothes, strolling together on the opposite side of the avenue, moving almost abreast of them. The men across the street had seemed to be conversing with each other, but then Nimec, noticing one of them wore an earbud headset, realized he was also on a cellular. Just as Dashiki had passed Nimec and Scull and turned into a store, Earbud crossed to their side of the avenue, dropping back, taking Dashiki’s position at the rear. A few
blocks later they pulled another switch. Earbud quickening his pace, then passing. Dashiki reappearing behind them, trailing them again, a quick shopper that one. Meanwhile, lo and behold, Earbud’s friend had kept pace across the avenue. The leapfrogging had continued almost the entire way to the market.

  Nimec glanced at Ackerman.

  “How about you?” he said.

  “A pair of gendarmes in a patrol car,” Ackerman said. He was shaking his head in the negative, a ploy to confuse hidden eyes. “Right up until I got into the market.”

  Nimec kept looking at him. “You sure?”

  “Positive. Black uniforms. They split off after Conners.”

  Nimec was quiet again. When DeMarco had told him about being caught on camera at the Rio, the first thing to enter his mind was the possibility of corporate espionage. Several Asian and European telecom carriers had been competing to become the African fiber ring’s savior when Planétaire went belly up, and it was conceivable one or more of them could have gotten upset enough to go over the top when UpLink won its contract with the Gabonese government, figuring they could still gum up the deal. There were also various national lobbying groups that had joined in opposition to yet another dominant foreign company moving in its assets and tried to block UpLink’s entry with a passel of legislative maneuvers once they happily bade adieu to Planétaire. A few were still making moves despite the ruling party’s obvious support. Any of these interests, or combination of interests, could have decided to do some peeping.

  Except Nimec had nothing but questions about what their game might be. Add them to the questions he’d been left with after talking to Pierre Gunville, and there were more than he could count… though bundling them all together in his head was almost certainly a bad idea. He had a vague mistrust of Gunville, but at this stage, it was merely that. Nimec didn’t know whether it meant Gunville was connected to anything he needed to be concerned about, let alone to whoever was messing with UpLink. The truth was he didn’t know what was going on. But the involvement of the gendarmerie was heavy, and he would need to start producing some answers fast.