“Is it in euros?”
“Francs,” Bagdasarian corrected.
Kabila nodded and one of the gendarmes at the table reached over and picked up the attaché case. He had a sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve.
Bagdasarian saw there were two very young girls pressed up against the back wall of the shack. Their eyes were hard as diamonds and glittered as they took him in.
The gendarme sergeant pulled the case over and opened it. The sudden light of avarice flared in his eyes, impossible to disguise. Bagdasarian shrugged it off.
While the sergeant counted the stacks of French currency, Colonel Kabila reseated himself.
He snapped his fingers at one of the girls and she jumped to pick a fresh glass off a shelf beside her. She brought it over to the table and poured the colonel a fresh drink from an already open bottle. Bagdasarian could feel the intensity of her gaze.
Kabila regarded the Armenian through squinty, bloodshot eyes. He picked up a smoldering cigar off the table and dragged heavily from it. His men made no move to return to their seats. Kabila pulled his cigar out of his mouth and gestured with it.
“Sit down.”
Bagdasarian pulled out the chair from the end of the table opposite Kabila and eased himself into it. The two men regarded each other with coolly assessing gazes while the sergeant beside Kabila continued counting the money. Kabila lifted his new glass and splashed its contents back without changing expression.
“Shouldn’t a man like you be out selling drugs in the nightclubs?” Kabila asked.
“Shouldn’t you be out in the delta or back east, fighting?”
Kabila shrugged. “That’s what the army is for. I fight crime.”
“How’s it pay?”
“Not as well as you do, I hope.” Kabila smiled. He wasn’t smiling when he added, “For your sake.”
The gendarme sergeant looked up from counting the money secured inside the attaché case. Kabila’s eyes never left Bagdasarian. “Is it all there?” he asked.
“More.”
“More?” Kabila asked Bagdasarian.
“There’s a bonus in there. You’re going to have to travel outside the city.”
“Up river?” The colonel sounded incredulous.
“Yes.”
“I am a policeman.” Colonel Kabila smirked.
Bagdasarian followed the line of Kabila’s sight across the room to where the gendarme he had scuffled with stood glowering.
“Any way you want it, Colonel.”
“Yes. Yes, it usually is.”
Kabila leaned back from the table and stretched out his arm.
The girl who had poured his drink slid into his lap. She regarded Bagdasarian from beneath hooded lids. Bagdasarian guessed she could have been no older than fourteen. She was beautiful, her eyes so darkly brown they were almost black, but still nearly luminescent. The effect was disquieting. In America she would be a freshman in high school. In Congo-Brazzaville she was the paramour of a corrupt warlord four times her age.
Bagdasarian forced himself to look away.
The sergeant on Kabila’s right shut the briefcase and placed it on the floor of the shack underneath the table and at his colonel’s feet. Bagdasarian looked around the room. An expensive-looking portable stereo played hip-hop music featuring a French rapper. A bar stood against one wall and a motley collection of bottles sat on it, devoid of import tax stamps. Cigar smoke was thick in the room, and Bagdasarian was surprised to see several of the gendarme officers chewing khat, a narcotic root he had always associated with the Horn of Africa, as well as the more common draggar.
The Armenian placed his hands palm down on the table and pushed himself up. He rose slowly and nodded to the colonel, who didn’t bother to return the favor. Bagdasarian looked over at the gendarme who had opened the door. The man’s eyes were slits of hate.
Rafik Bagdasarian crossed the room, keenly aware of how many guns were at his back. He placed his hand on the door handle and slowly turned the knob. Coolly he swung it open and stepped out into the falling rain.
Nigeria
THE QUONSET HUTS HAD BEEN dropped into the clearing by a Sikorsky helicopter. The cover story had to do with oil exploration for Chevron, which was a prolific presence in the Niger Delta region.
The electronic intelligence for the program hadn’t been so lucky.
The four-man team had traveled upriver through snake-, crocodile-and pirate-infested waterways first by motor launch and then for four miles of bush breaking overland.
The satellite relay station was jointly funded through the NSA and the DEA for counterterror and antinarcotics trafficking operations throughout western sub-Saharan Africa. For the most part the marriage between law enforcement and raw intelligence gathering had proved successful.
The most glaring hole in the plan was the lack of a security element. The NSA, unlike its intelligence-gathering counterparts in the Central Intelligence Agency or the Pentagon, preferred a “below the radar” profile to one more centered on firepower.
Calvin Sloke, a six-year electronic-intelligence specialist, swatted a mosquito.
The flying bug was particularly big and had got that way, Sloke suspected, by helping its vampric self to liberal portions of the American’s blood.
“Got you, you son of a bitch!” Sloke shouted in triumph.
The bug was smeared like fruit pulp along his forearm just above his Timex Ironman wristwatch.
“Congratulations,” Selene Hoffman replied from behind him.
Her voice was thick with sarcasm. She didn’t much like Sloke after six weeks in the cramped quarters and had pretty much given up pretending otherwise.
“Screw you,” Sloke replied, voice artificially pleasant.
“In your dreams, dork.”
“Quitting smoking sure has done a lot for your personality.”
“Sorry my not dying is inconveniencing you.”
“Boy, has it.”
“Stow the bullshit,” Mark Ensign said as he entered the tech center.
The ex-Marine was the only one of the crew who’d been to Africa before, having served time in both Liberia and Somalia as a counterintelligence officer. He still kept in shape with daily routines of calisthenics that made the other techs nauseous just watching him.
“We get our signal today?” he continued.
“Coming up now,” Sloke said.
Overhead, in geosynchronous near-earth orbit, a Dong Fang Hong satellite of the People’s Republic of China made its daily pass. Like clockwork the Nigeria station would begin signals intercepts, or SIGINT, operations.
This operation, along with digital wiretaps of the satellite and cellular communications networks used by the criminal pipeline that moved cocaine and heroin from Mexico and South America through Africa, up to Armenia and into the European Union, was the primary responsibility of the Nigeria station.
“Where’s Dex?” Hoffman asked.
“Getting some rack time,” Ensign replied.
Jason Dexter was the hardware and systems engineer assigned to keep all the various highly classified components at the site working and working with each other. After six years with the U.S. Navy and then two more doing the same job with the Department of Defense’s Defense