“I disagreed all along,” Rand said. “I knew the Siberian-Bertone. No one like you would have willingly gotten in bed with him.”
“What you’ve told us meshes perfectly with what we already knew,” Grace said.
“And your mental attitude is solid,” said Faroe. “There aren’t many young women-or men, for that matter-who could keep level with what’s happened in the last forty-eight hours.”
Kayla lifted her eyebrows.
And waited.
Grace smiled.
Faroe said something under his breath. Then he met Kayla’s cool eyes. “We need you to get inside this mess and shut Bertone down.”
Kayla flipped the silver dollar. “I thought this covered it.”
“That’s a bikini. You need a Mustang survival suit.”
“What does a survival suit cost?”
“Sign on with St. Kilda Consulting.”
“Told you,” Rand said.
Faroe ignored him. “We’ll give you cover, employment, and pay that equals the risk. It’s the same agreement we sign with all our operators.”
“If you sign on with St. Kilda,” Grace said, “I doubt that American Southwest Bank would ever employ you again.”
Kayla laughed abruptly. “Ya think?”
“But part of the deal is that St. Kilda would make sure you had legal coverage for any trouble the bank might want to make,” Grace finished. “Your choice, Kayla.”
“The bank is the least of my worries,” Kayla said. “Andre Bertone isn’t. What about him?”
Faroe gave an odd, elegant, exaggerated shrug, the kind Kayla had seen Mexican businessmen make in the middle of negotiations. It was sign language for Que sera, sera.
What will be, will be.
“We’ll do everything we can to ensure your safety,” Grace said.
“As long as it doesn’t interfere with the assignment,” Rand pointed out coldly.
“Back up,” Faroe said to him. “Kayla isn’t stupid. She knows she’s at risk.” He handed her the papers he’d just pulled out of the fax. “The ambassador agrees. If you want to work for St. Kilda Consulting, we’re yours.”
“Can you bring Bertone down?” Kayla asked.
“With you, I’m betting yes. Without you…” Faroe shrugged again.
Kayla looked at Rand.
He shoved his hands into his pockets and waited.
“So this was a recruitment from the instant I saw you at the party,” she said to Rand. “You were told to hook me and reel me in so St. Kilda could look me over, decide if they trusted me.”
“I never lied to you,” Rand said.
“And if I don’t sign up?”
“We’ll give you a safe house while we go after Bertone,” Faroe said.
“But without me, you won’t have as good a chance of getting him.”
Faroe nodded.
Oh, well, I guess I never really was cut out to be a banker anyway, Kayla thought. She read the fax pages quickly, then more slowly. With a rather grim smile, she took the pen Faroe offered her.
Move over, Alice. I’m coming down the rabbit hole.
She signed and handed the pen back to him.
“You can keep the silver dollar,” Faroe said to her.
“I was planning to.”
Royal Palms
Saturday
Faroe shoved an unlabeled DVD into the TV player, handed the controller to Kayla, pointed to the pause button, and said, “Grace and I have to go wrestle with the Krebs cycle. Knock on the door if you have any questions Rand can’t answer.”
As Faroe and Grace left the room, a Scots-accented voice came from the TV speakers.
“My name is John Neto. I am an intelligence official employed by the government of Camgeria. My small country is in the heart of the conflict zone of equatorial West Africa.”
The screen showed a montage of beautiful seacoast, vivid green jungles, wild scrubland, and slender, very dark people who looked into the camera with indifference or hostility.
“I’ve been there,” Kayla said. “I spent a week trying to get a bus to Niger.”
“There aren’t any roads from there to Niger,” Rand said.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t speak the language. It took me a week to give up and take a Russian-made passenger plane flown by the most drunken pilot who ever got off the ground. Landing in Niger was…an experience.”
“What did you think of Camgeria?”
“Amazing. Appalling. Yet so vivid in spite of the poverty. Smiles everywhere. Kids laughing.”
“Have you seen it lately?”
“I read the papers and surf the Net,” Kayla said.
And even if she hadn’t, the images on the TV in front of her would have told her all she needed to know. Photos, headlines, web site content from Camgeria and other West African nations.
Armed insurrections, genocides, and refugee camps, all played against a backdrop of green and blue. And red.
Blood.
Agony.
Death.
Whoever had put the DVD together was a master of the PowerPoint presentation. Kayla felt herself drawn back to her youth, to a time when her world was wide open, when optimism was the rule rather than the exception, when all possibilities were equal. Camgeria had been a kind of paradise then. Now it was a kind of hell.
Maimed children.
Starving babies.
Mothers with empty eyes and breasts.
“God, such misery,” Kayla said. “What happened?”
“Andre Bertone.”
The TV showed a still color photo of a white man standing in the middle of a group of black men. Behind them was a dirt landing strip.
“East Camgeria?” she asked.
“You have a good eye.”
“I spent a lot of time trying to get out of there,” she said dryly.
A large twin-engine transport plane whose tail numbers had been painted over crouched on the dirt strip, props turning, dirt and grit flying. Shirtless black men carried off armloads of assault rifles from the cargo hold of the aircraft. In the foreground, another group of laborers stacked heavy, lumpy burlap bags.
“Coltan,” Rand said before Kayla could ask. “It’s vital for modern electronics. There’s been a worldwide shortage of coltan for the last decade. Each of those bags holds fifty kilos. That would make them worth about five thousand dollars apiece.”
Kayla stopped counting bags on the screen when she passed a quarter million dollars.
The camera zoomed in on the white man.
“That’s Bertone!” Kayla said.
“Aka the Siberian,” Rand agreed.
Bertone was wearing a white expedition suit he’d sweated through at the arms and back. Red dust clung to the wet places. He was smiling.
“Like a vulture at a carcass,” Rand said.
“When I was backpacking, we called Bertone’s costume a ‘bwana suit.’ He looks like he was born for it.”
“A gunrunner in a bwana suit. As far as I know, this is the only photo that shows the Siberian in action.”
“Why do you call him the Siberian?”
“A few years ago Bertone, aka Victor Krout, aka a lot of other names, was one of the most successful arms merchants in the world. He imported a quarter million small arms, twenty million rounds of ammunition, at least a million antipersonnel land mines, fifty thousand heavy machine guns, give or take, and numerous military vehicles, including at least a hundred armored personnel carriers and twenty decommissioned Soviet assault helicopters. All of it was used to attack native villages in four separate African countries.”
“That’s how he made his money? Running guns?” Kayla asked. “According to what he told the bank, he’s an oil broker.”
“He is, now. Before that he was the gasoline that turned centuries of smoldering ethnic and tribal conflict into a hellfire that killed thousands of innocent people. They’re dead because Bertone poured a flood of modern military weapons into primitive tribal politics.”