Bangui, Central African Republic
The strident ringing of a telephone echoed through the manor house, shattering the stillness. Moments after it fell silent, a knock sounded at the master bedroom and the muffled voice of one of the servants jarred Abel to full wakefulness.
“Sir? I’m sorry, but it’s Captain Roberge. He says it’s urgent.”
Abel blinked and stared at the time. Three in the morning. As he pushed the covers aside, the girl next to him stirred, her skin gleaming like onyx in the faint light from the clock. She made a sound like a baby kitten and rolled over, covering her face with one arm as the warlord pushed himself to the end of the bed and stood.
He pulled on a silk kimono and cinched it around his considerable waist, and then made his way to the door, where the servant waited outside with a portable telephone. Abel took it from him and stepped into the hall. The servant scurried down the stairs, leaving the warlord to his call. Abel padded to his office and switched on the lights, and then settled into his chair.
“Well? Is it done?” he boomed into the phone.
“Sir, I…everyone’s dead. Lucien too. The weapons were destroyed and the diamonds are gone.” The captain of the cargo ship gave a panicked report of the events at the wharf, his voice shaky. When he finished, Abel’s words were dangerously measured.
“So we have nothing for our trouble and have lost a small fortune,” he hissed.
“I’m afraid so, sir.”
“But the Russian miraculously walked away from it,” he said.
“It would appear so. We saw him taken aboard his boat, and then the police and fire brigade arrived and things got crazy.”
Abel’s voice was so quiet it was almost a whisper. “Was he carrying anything?”
“I…I can’t be sure. It was dark…” The captain drew in a sharp breath. “You think this might have been deliberate?”
“I don’t know what to think, other than it is fortuitous for the Russian that everyone involved in the transaction is dead, leaving no witnesses.” Abel paused. “What do you think happened?”
“I assumed they were attacked.”
“By whom? And why?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“Exactly. This was the Russian’s home turf, using his security, yet some mysterious attacker discovered when the transaction was occurring and, for unknown reasons, destroyed everything? How likely does that sound to you?”
“Put that way…”
“I have a call I need to make,” Abel growled.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Nose around, see what you can learn. Other than that, there isn’t much you can accomplish, is there?”
Abel hung up and searched for a number on his computer. He quickly did the math in his head on the time difference as he dialed. An American voice answered.
“This is Red Hawk. Have your boss call me. Now,” Abel snapped, and terminated the call.
Three minutes later the phone rang.
“That was fast,” Abel said.
“You heard about the disaster at the dock?”
“Yes. Very disappointing.”
“We’re still trying to understand what happened.”
“I can tell you what happened,” Abel growled. “I delivered fifty million dollars’ worth of stones to you, as agreed, and they’re gone. I’m out the arms and the diamonds, and nobody knows how it happened.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“Yes, well, there’s not much for me to figure out. You owe me fifty million. This was your man. You vouched for him. It’s on you.”
“I understand how you feel…”
“Not how I feel. I still require the weapons. You need to either get them for me, as of yesterday, or arrange for the return of my fifty million. There is no third choice.”
The American was silent for several moments. When he spoke, his tone was guarded. “I’ll speak to my superiors.”
“Yes. Do that.”
~ ~ ~
A team of analysts was gathered in a conference room at CIA headquarters, reviewing the reports they’d received on the explosion at the wharf. Lou Demond, the case officer who’d been handling the exchange of diamonds for arms, was pacing in front of a whiteboard, his face set in a frown and sweat staining the armpits of his dress shirt.
“Our man says that there was no sign of an attack from where he was watching,” one of the analysts said, reading from a report. “No vehicles came down the street, so if an attack occurred at all, it had to have been either from the sea, or…was preplanned and staged from inside the warehouse.”
“The African’s livid. He holds us responsible,” Demond said. “I can sympathize with his position.”
“We don’t have enough information to form a determination, sir.”
“Right. But we do know a few things: the diamonds and the arms are history. The Russian survived and is being airlifted out, or has been already, for treatment in Moscow. His security chief reported that a fuel truck was used in an attack on the meeting, but he doesn’t know why or who or even how they learned about the transaction. There are no other witnesses to corroborate or contradict his story, but to my nose, a lot of it stinks – starting with that if this is a setup, the Russians just screwed us out of fifty million, as well as the arms, for all we know. We have no proof that the Russian even acquired them. See the credibility problem?”
“He was injured.”
“No, he claims he was injured. We have no independent confirmation of that,” Demond corrected.
“Why would he do it, though? What’s his motivation?”
Demond laughed harshly. “Are you kidding? Money. He pocketed fifty mil worth of our skag, and he just took the Africans for fifty. That’s a lot of glass beads, even in Moscow.”
A thin analyst with a wispy goatee tapped his pencil on the conference table as he leaned forward. “We need to hold the Russian accountable. Put it back on him. The man’s rich. He’s got to make good on his botched op – that’s all there is to it.”
“I agree. But he’s incommunicado for now. And frankly, that decision has to be made at a level considerably above our pay grade. Our job is to prepare a report that doesn’t read like a fairy tale so I can brief the brass first thing in the morning. No guesses, no best hypotheses. Just the facts.” Demond paused. “If the Russian’s trying to play poker, he’s out of his league on this one. It’s not the Africans he’s trying to take to the woodshed, it’s us.”
“If he’s behind it, sir. We don’t know that’s the case.”
“Right. But we can use Occam’s razor in the meantime, and the shortest distance between two points is that he’s been playing us all along, and we fell for it. That’s my operating assumption until proven otherwise.”
The first analyst scowled. “We have other entanglements with him.”
“As of now, consider them aborted.”