president.”
“In my experience, sir, people who preface a conversation with ‘let me be honest’ are anything but, and what precisely do you mean by an ‘in’?”
“I’m an arms dealer, Marcel. I sell guns and ammunition, mostly to small African countries like this one, usually to their rebel factions, sometimes to warring religious and ethnic groups.”
“We have no rebel factions, sir, nor do we have warring religious or ethic groups.”
“What about this Limbani character?” Lanz said.
“Dr. Limbani has been dead for quite some time,” said Marcel. But there was a faint flicker of apprehension and a little twitch of the eyes that went with the statement. Lanz decided to leave it for the moment.
“Where does Kolingba get his weapons?”
“I couldn’t say,” said Marcel.
The bartender was looking very uneasy now, and Lanz decided to back off completely. “Well, if you think of a way I could get in to see the man, let me know,” he said.
“Of course, sir.” There was a pause. “Will that be all?”
“Another beer, Marcel.”
After Lanz finished the second beer, he picked up his book and left the bar. In the lobby he spotted a lone man sitting in one of the fan-backed wicker armchairs, smoking a cigarette and reading a copy of Centrafriquepresse . He was the same man who’d followed him on his afternoon walkabout. Lanz smiled. Saint-Sylvestre’s surveillance was nothing if not obvious.
Lanz went up the broad, sweeping staircase to the mezzanine, then walked up three more flights to his small room under the eaves. It was simply furnished with an iron bedstead, a mattress that had seen better days and a simple spindle-legged desk with an old-fashioned brass swan-neck lamp. Lanz dropped the book onto the desk and stepped across to the window, which gave him a view over the square and into the compound directly opposite the hotel.
The compound ran a hundred and fifty feet on a side, the walls quarried cut stone, the large gate wood-strapped and hinged with iron. Guard towers, tin roofed and constructed from plywood, had been added at each corner. The so-called “presidential residence” was up against the east wall, and there was a rudimentary barracks building kitty-corner to it. A smaller brick building that sat directly across from the residence was almost certainly a guardhouse. The barracks looked as though it could hold between a hundred and a hundred and fifty men.
A tin-roofed shed had been built against the wall next to the guardhouse—obviously the motor pool. Lanz counted two bumblebee-striped Land Rovers with tinted windows, three armored personnel carriers and an even dozen “Mengshi” Chinese Humvee knockoffs painted in jungle camouflage, .50-caliber machine guns mounted just forward of the sunroof hatch. Considering all the other Chinese equipment he had seen, the machine guns were probably W-85s. Fourandao had a population of less than five thousand; the compound’s ordnance was easily enough to protect the town from direct assault as long as there was no air element.
Lanz went back to the desk and sat down. Taking up the book, he carefully stripped off the celluloid library cover and the original jacket. He set the book aside and laid the dust jacket illustration-side down on the desk.
Lanz had been a soldier since his compulsory military service in the late seventies. He’d worked with every sort of intelligence tool, from satellite imagery and phone taps to photo intelligence and drugged “persuasion” of the enemy. Of all these techniques he’d never found anything more useful and more accurate than the evidence of his own eyes.
On the inside of the dust jacket was an accurate scale map of central Fourandao, the information gathered during his afternoon strolls during the past few days. The map was drawn lightly in pencil directly from memory after each of his daily constitutionals.
Fourandao was laid out in an elongated grid centered on Plaza de Revolution
“In my experience, sir, people who preface a conversation with ‘let me be honest’ are anything but, and what precisely do you mean by an ‘in’?”
“I’m an arms dealer, Marcel. I sell guns and ammunition, mostly to small African countries like this one, usually to their rebel factions, sometimes to warring religious and ethnic groups.”
“We have no rebel factions, sir, nor do we have warring religious or ethic groups.”
“What about this Limbani character?” Lanz said.
“Dr. Limbani has been dead for quite some time,” said Marcel. But there was a faint flicker of apprehension and a little twitch of the eyes that went with the statement. Lanz decided to leave it for the moment.
“Where does Kolingba get his weapons?”
“I couldn’t say,” said Marcel.
The bartender was looking very uneasy now, and Lanz decided to back off completely. “Well, if you think of a way I could get in to see the man, let me know,” he said.
“Of course, sir.” There was a pause. “Will that be all?”
“Another beer, Marcel.”
After Lanz finished the second beer, he picked up his book and left the bar. In the lobby he spotted a lone man sitting in one of the fan-backed wicker armchairs, smoking a cigarette and reading a copy of Centrafriquepresse . He was the same man who’d followed him on his afternoon walkabout. Lanz smiled. Saint-Sylvestre’s surveillance was nothing if not obvious.
Lanz went up the broad, sweeping staircase to the mezzanine, then walked up three more flights to his small room under the eaves. It was simply furnished with an iron bedstead, a mattress that had seen better days and a simple spindle-legged desk with an old-fashioned brass swan-neck lamp. Lanz dropped the book onto the desk and stepped across to the window, which gave him a view over the square and into the compound directly opposite the hotel.
The compound ran a hundred and fifty feet on a side, the walls quarried cut stone, the large gate wood-strapped and hinged with iron. Guard towers, tin roofed and constructed from plywood, had been added at each corner. The so-called “presidential residence” was up against the east wall, and there was a rudimentary barracks building kitty-corner to it. A smaller brick building that sat directly across from the residence was almost certainly a guardhouse. The barracks looked as though it could hold between a hundred and a hundred and fifty men.
A tin-roofed shed had been built against the wall next to the guardhouse—obviously the motor pool. Lanz counted two bumblebee-striped Land Rovers with tinted windows, three armored personnel carriers and an even dozen “Mengshi” Chinese Humvee knockoffs painted in jungle camouflage, .50-caliber machine guns mounted just forward of the sunroof hatch. Considering all the other Chinese equipment he had seen, the machine guns were probably W-85s. Fourandao had a population of less than five thousand; the compound’s ordnance was easily enough to protect the town from direct assault as long as there was no air element.
Lanz went back to the desk and sat down. Taking up the book, he carefully stripped off the celluloid library cover and the original jacket. He set the book aside and laid the dust jacket illustration-side down on the desk.
Lanz had been a soldier since his compulsory military service in the late seventies. He’d worked with every sort of intelligence tool, from satellite imagery and phone taps to photo intelligence and drugged “persuasion” of the enemy. Of all these techniques he’d never found anything more useful and more accurate than the evidence of his own eyes.
On the inside of the dust jacket was an accurate scale map of central Fourandao, the information gathered during his afternoon strolls during the past few days. The map was drawn lightly in pencil directly from memory after each of his daily constitutionals.
Fourandao was laid out in an elongated grid centered on Plaza de Revolution
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