Mission Liberty (13 page)

“A week at best,” he said. “I’ll be in and out, but we’re headquartering here. My associates are arranging for a car right
now.”

“You have security?”

“We have travel papers,” DeLuca said.

“I hope they have pictures of Benjamin Franklin on the front,” Mohl said. “What sort of work will you be doing?”

“Land conservancy research,” DeLuca said. “Deforestation. With Conservation International.”

“Who’ve you got, handling your payouts inside the government?”

DeLuca shrugged.

“I’m sure the World Bank has people, but I might be able to recommend somebody if you’d like. I know a man who’ll know who
to grease and won’t take anything off the top beyond what you pay him. That’s about all you can really hope for.”

“Are you really a spy?” DeLuca asked him. He wasn’t sure yet whether to tell Mohl that David Letterman went to his high school.

Mohl straightened up and gave a mock salute.

“Serving your espionage needs since the National Security Act of 1947.” He slouched again, leaning heavily against the bar.
“Don’t listen to them. I’m just a lowly Boeing executive trying to sell a few planes. I sold Burkina Faso the only two airplanes
they owned, and then they hit each other. Just remember—in Liger, there’s no such thing as an NGO—nothing is nongovernment.
Bo has a hand, or at least a finger, in everything. No banky, no panky.”

Mohl sipped his beer, staring thoughtfully for a moment at the candle burning on the bar.

“Too bad about the power shortage,” he said. “The air-conditioning doesn’t do a damn thing, but I miss the ceiling fans.”

“Were they teasing about your wife?” DeLuca asked.

“No, no they weren’t,” Mohl said with a weak smile. “But don’t worry—that’s been over for years. Are you married, Mr. Brown?”

DeLuca nodded.

“Happily?”

DeLuca nodded.

“You know what the secret to a happy marriage is?”

DeLuca shook his head. Robert Mohl leaned in, lowering his voice conspiratorially to a near-whisper.

“Don’t get drunk every night and don’t have affairs. And if she hits you, don’t hit her back. You follow those rules and you’ll
be just fine.”

“NEW DEVELOPMENT,” THE VOICE ON DELUCA’S SATphone said. “Sorry to wake you. You’re not busy, are you?”

“How could I be busy at 5:00
A.M.
?” DeLuca said. “I was having a helluva dream, though.”

“Mefloquine?” Phil LeDoux said.

“No doubt,” DeLuca said. “Sometimes I think I’d rather have the malaria.”

“No, you don’t,” LeDoux said, and DeLuca knew his friend was speaking from experience. “Anyway, back to real-life nightmares.
Last night a chartered C-130J landed at Liger International containing seventy-two mercenaries, all of them white, about half
South African and a quarter Russian and the rest a mix. The leadership is British. The top guy is Major Simon Bell, ex-SAS.”

“Is this Artemis Corp. or something different?”

“Something different,” LeDoux said.

“Okay,” DeLuca said. “What’s it to me?”

“It’s this,” LeDoux said. “Bo knew. He had his Presidential Guard meet the plane. The mercenaries are sitting in a hangar
at the airfield, under heavy guard. Bell is being interrogated, but he’s not going to give anything up. I suspect he’s the
only one who really knows what the mission was. Him and us.”

“We know?” DeLuca said.

“MI-6 surveillance,” LeDoux said.

“They briefed us?”

“Not exactly,” LeDoux said. “The mission was to take out Dari. Not that we’re necessarily opposed. The sponsor is WAOC. The
broker is a guy named Hugh Lloyd. He chartered the Hercules. MI-6 has their panties in a twist. Guess why?”

“I’ll take a stab and say Hugh Lloyd is related to somebody,” DeLuca said.

“Good instincts,” LeDoux said. “His father is Alistair Lloyd, former MP and the current PM’s chief advisor.”

“Again, what’s it to me?” DeLuca said. “Or to us, I should say.”

“Nothing, a week from now,” LeDoux said. “Until then, everything. Liberty barely has the appearance of a coalition. We have
the British, the Poles, and Spain, for now, and only the British are sending ground troops. Hugh Lloyd apparently hasn’t spoken
to his father in twenty years, but the blood connection still pairs English interests with big oil, since the old man is so
close to Blair. If this breaks in the media, we could lose British support. We don’t want that, any more than we want MI-6
to know we’ve been hacking their SIGINT. The problem is, we don’t have a lot of assets in country right now to keep their
ears open. We don’t expect you to be able to keep this down, but we’d like to know it’s going to explode, a few minutes before
it explodes, if that’s possible.”

DeLuca considered a moment.

“Maybe I’m being completely dense,” he said, “but I’m still not quite sure why you’re telling me. Why not tell CIA? Wait a
minute. I get it. MI-6 is hacking Langley.”

“We could go there,” LeDoux said, “but we have better things to do, don’t we? If we’re lucky, our seventy-two mercenary friends
sit in their hangar playing Twister, Simon Bell is released, or somebody pays Daniel Bo a few million pounds to let them go,
they get back on the plane, and nobody’s ever the wiser. If we’re not lucky, it blows up, the Brits pull out, and John Dari
and his friends have even more reasons to kill white people. I’ve got a meeting with Hans Berger in twenty minutes and I’m
going to ask him what’s going on. He may or may not tell me.”

“You could always dangle him from a helicopter,” DeLuca suggested.

“It didn’t stop you, did it?” LeDoux said. “There’s one other reason to let you know. You knew that Evelyn Warner, your old
friend, is working in Liger?”

“I’d heard that,” DeLuca said. “I wasn’t making any plans to see her.”

“Well, if you do, you should know that Hugh Lloyd, Lord Lloyd, was her first husband. First and only. That might be something
you could use. Obviously, she’s media, so if she has any contact with her ex—did they have children, do you know?”

“She never mentioned any. I doubt it. Thanks for the heads-up,” DeLuca said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, if I’m lucky, I still
have enough mefloquine in my system for one last bad dream before my real day starts.”

He closed his eyes, but when sleep wouldn’t come, he turned on his CIM and used his satellite uplink to log onto the Internet,
where he found an e-mail from Walter Ford waiting for him.

David,

Greetings and salutations. The boys at Doyles were asking about you. Sami says hello as well and to call him when you get
back, but not before then.

A couple things. I Googled “Stephen Ackroyd” (also “Steven Ackroyd”) and got nothing. There’s a guy by that name in Alaska
studying waterfowl, but I don’t think that’s who you mean. If this guy’s a writer, I can’t find anything he’s published, but
maybe he means literary quarterlies and that sort of thing. Not everything is online. Sorry.

Also, see attached or go to
www.transparency.org
(or
www.globalsecurity.org
) for the latest on corruption in Liger. I know
you don’t have time to download, so in brief (forgive repetitions from previous e-mail), it started before the current President
Bo and before his father (British colonial), but kicked into high gear in the late sixties when oil was discovered—the linkage
between WAOC members and various ministries is profound/historical. WAOC was basically founded to coordinate the bribes the
oil companies had to pay to everybody from the oil minister to Education to Transportation to commissioner of national parks
fees/ licenses/inspectors/special taxes, etc. Liger, Norway, and UK were the only countries that stood by U.S. during the
first oil crisis in the early seventies and Liger essentially helped break OPEC’s back. In return, gratitude, etc., we sold
them weapons—nothing new about that, long history there of countries trading guns for whatever Africa has to offer. Estimates
say $3-4 per barrel goes into Bo’s pockets or trickles down from there, and maybe 100,000 barrels a day goes missing entirely.
Transparency International estimates Bo has a personal fortune of maybe $65 billion in Swiss accounts. That’s not a typo—billion
with a “B.”

Some thought he was cooking the goose that laid the golden eggs before they hatched, so to speak, when he talked about nationalizing
the oil industry. Two schools of thought on that—one, he’s bluffing to extort higher kickbacks, after a huge new find of oil
in the northeast, Kum territory (estimated 12 mil. bpd
¥
50 yr. once exploited or 219 billion barrels). The find is officially just a rumor, but the people at TI say it’s for real.
The bluff is that Liger doesn’t have the infrastructure or the human knowhow to run their own oil industry, and the U.S. can’t
afford the dip in production that would occur while they got up to speed, were they to attempt it. The second thought, however,
and the big fear, is that Liger might not have the know-how but IPAB does—Arabs know plenty about oil. Would Bo bring in IPAB?
Right now, they’re coming whether he wants them or not, and he’s a survivor who is likely to cut a deal. Either way, it’s
something up with which WAOC cannot put.

Thought you’d be interested. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.

Walter

When Dan Sykes knocked on the door to the penthouse suite at the Port Ivory Hilton, he expected to be met by a large entourage.
A contingent of soldiers had been waiting downstairs and in the lobby, and he’d assumed they were there to escort the actress,
but he’d supposed there would be others, stylists and hairdressers and such. He was surprised when she answered the door herself.

“Who are you?” she asked him.

“Dan Sykes,” he said. “Blackwood Security. I think you’ve been expecting me.”

She stared at him. She was easily the most beautiful person he’d ever seen in his life.

“I’m with Blackwood Security,” he repeated, reaching for his ID. “They sent me.”

She scrutinized his identification.

“Who’s ‘they’?” she asked.

“The people insuring your next picture, I believe,” he said. “Apparently they’re going to feel better if I’m here.”

“No one told me anything,” she said. “I have thirty government soldiers traveling with me. Why do I need more security?”

“Because thirty-one is better than thirty,” Sykes said. “Plus I speak English.”

“I would prefer to have a black head of security,” she said. “Don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Sykes. My father was white. I’m
thinking only of the political climate in this country. I’m simply trying to do everything possible to make certain that I
accomplish what I came here for.”

“I understand,” he said. “And I am here to help you. You’re free, of course, to hire somebody else, but I don’t know who you’re
going to get, given, as you put it, the political climate. I have a sixth-degree black belt in karate and I’m certified on
anything from a pocketknife to an M-4.”

He was still standing in the hallway. The actress was dressed in khaki shorts and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up,
a tan bandana around her neck, white socks, and hiking boots.

She remained suspicious.

“Just tell me one thing,” she said. “What do you think of me?”

“As an actress?” he said.

“No,” she said. “What do you think of me being here?”

“You’re a special UN ambassador,” he said. “That’s good.”

“I want you to tell me what you really think,” she said. “I read a story before I left comparing me to Jane Fonda, visiting
North Vietnam.”

“You came anyway,” Sykes said. “That means you believe in what you’re doing.”

“Do you think I should be here?” she asked.

“I think this country is a very dark place,” Sykes said. “Dark places need light. And bright lights follow you wherever you
go.”

“Good answer,” she said. “Come in, please. I’m almost ready.” She began sorting through stacks of documents spread out on
her bedspread. “Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Sykes—for reasons that still sometimes baffle me, I do understand that I have a hugely
disproportionate amount of attention on me. I don’t claim to deserve it, but since I have it anyway, I goddamn well intend
to use it properly. I’m here to make sure that for as many nights as possible, the nightly news and the
New York Post
and
Inside Edition
and whoever else runs pictures of what’s going on here, even though I’m sure to get hammered in the press by writers who’ll
say I’m just some idiot actress, in over her head, talking about things she doesn’t understand.”

“You know that President Bo isn’t going to let you see anything he doesn’t want you to see, don’t you?” Sykes said. He saw
a framed photograph of a smiling black child on the bedstand. “It that your son?”

“Jonathan,” she nodded. “So you’re ex-military—is that correct, Mr. Sykes?”

“Call me Dan,” Sykes said. “And yes, I am. Counterintelligence.”

“Call me Gabby. And what is that?” she asked, taking an orange juice from the minibar and offering him one. He declined. She
shook her drink. “That sounds like the opposite of intelligence, which would be stupidity.”

“That’s only true of the leadership positions,” Sykes said. “Counterintelligence is to the military police what the FBI or
the CIA is to your local police. That’s the best way to describe it.”

“Have you ever killed anybody, Dan?” she asked.

“Yes,” he told her. “In combat, I have. That’s what soldiers do.”

She looked at him again, hesitating.

“I suppose it means you understand something that I don’t. Okay, you can stay,” she said.

“What would you like me to do?”

She glanced about the room, her eyes falling on a metal suitcase with formidable-looking clasps on it, the case the size of
a large overhead bag, and then on her purse, which she picked up and opened.

“You can do two things,” she told him. “The silver Zero case is your responsibility. If I said, ‘Guard it with your life,’
would you take that literally?”