Rogue's March (16 page)

Lowenthal leaned forward. “We suspect it may be a taped transcription. We've recorded the broadcasts and replayed them. The same appeal is being made over and over—identical, even down to the surface irregularities.”

“What does that mean?” Bondurant asked.

“They may have the voice, but it's not entirely clear they have the man.”

Selvey turned to Lowenthal, annoyed. “When did you birds find this out?”

“Are you saying the President may be a prisoner?” Becker put in.

“I'm saying that the voice is transcribed,” Lowenthal replied. “Drawing no conclusions, not yet. It may be simple prudence on his part. The presidential palace is some distance from the radio transmitter. With guns in the streets—”

“I thought he had a private hookup at his office,” Becker remembered.

“Whether someone has the voice, the body, or the man, it's a plea for civil order,” Bondurant interrupted, his patience wearing thin. “Let's return to our problem. Reddish says Malunga is under control, but he doesn't know about the rest of the city. Neither do the rest of you. A breakdown in order is still very much a possibility. What if the rebels grow in strength and the President asks us for additional military aid, as the rebels seem to be doing over this clandestine radio? What do we say if he asks for military help, immediate help—helicopters, armored cars, even tanks?”

“He's got all he can use now,” Selvey answered. “What he ain't got is command and control, the smarts to use what he's got. What he could use is military advisers, but ain't no one gonna go that route these days,” he concluded, falling back on his Tennessee vernacular, a kind of irony which didn't endear him to Bondurant.

Ignoring him, Becker asked, “What if elements from across the river infiltrate during the night to reinforce the rebels? What if they link up with the workers party in Malunga and proclaim the peoples republic they've been talking about on this clandestine radio?”

“What clandestine radio?” Reddish said.

“We've had a report that a clandestine radio is operating from the workers party headquarters in Malunga,” Lowenthal explained, dropping his voice. “The French think they've picked up the transmissions.”

Bondurant gazed at Reddish curiously. “You doubt that?”

“I'd be skeptical. The party compound is demolished, the buildings burning.”

“This was at five o'clock,” Lowenthal added.

“The French don't have that kind of capability,” Reddish said. “They couldn't pinpoint a transmitter in Malunga with that kind of accuracy. Their commo people can't even stay in their own operating frequencies.”

“Then you do doubt the report,” Bondurant said.

“Yes.”

“But we still have to contend with the probability of foreign support for the rebels, maybe from the African radicals, from Brazza, possibly even the Cubans. Whether they have a transmitter or not, they may claim themselves a provisional government, like the old rebel government at Stanleyville. The question is, Do we move now or wait until it's too late,” Becker asked, “thereby risking Dr. Kissinger's ire, as well as everyone else's?”

“Move against what?” Reddish said, annoyed. “How? The only thing you've got out there are a lot of scattered kids with Soviet weapons. The paras will be potting off singles all night.”

“I don't think we need hypothesize about an imaginary scenario when the real one is ambiguous enough,” Bondurant commented. “Reddish may well be right, but that remains to be seen. The fact is we seem to be blundering about in the dark without the faintest idea of where these guns came from, what the intention was, or where this bloodshed is leading us. I spoke to the présidence over two hours ago and told the President's aide that we'd do nothing that would imply a loss of faith in this government. If we were to begin evacuating our staff, at least five other embassies would follow suit, and that, I'm convinced, would simply play into the hands of those who are responsible for that mischief out there. At the time, I had no idea that the situation was as confused as you now describe it.

“Meanwhile, here we sit. You can't tell me whether it's a coup, a revolution, or a street brawl. You don't know where the guns came from or what they're doing with them. Someone is in the streets attempting, for all we know, to bring down a regime we've invested years in—money, military equipment, time, prestige, political capital—and you can't even give me a coherent assessment of the situation. Something like this takes people, it takes planning, it takes time! Yet you sit there squabbling among yourselves and tell me it has no paternity, that it just happened! Virgin birth, is that it!”

The room was silent. Bondurant had lifted himself from his chair and moved to the bar cart near the bookcase. He noisily filled his glass from the ice bucket and poured out a double whiskey.

“I assume that if the ministry of finance had pocketed some of the port improvement funds, I'd be told,” he resumed sourly, turning back across the room. “Or if the minister of defense had been surprised
en flagrant delit
atop the privy council table, as Major What's-his-name told us at last month's country team meeting, we'd all know of that too. Yet a bloodbath is taking place, people are being shot down in the streets, guns infiltrated into the communes to be used by the hungry, the sick, and the frightened, and you know nothing about it. We've failed, each of us, myself as well as you. It's as simple as that.”

He sank down slowly in the chair in front of his desk, his anger gone, one hand held across his eyes, his gaze hidden. “My mind's stuck,” he muttered.

“Sorry?” Becker leaned forward, startled, as if Bondurant had suffered a seizure.

“My mind's stuck,” he repeated, removing his hand. His face was calm but distant. “I couldn't remember the word for virgin birth. Dr. Merton at Lawrenceville once used it constantly to remind us of our ignorance.”

“Parthenogenesis,” Lowenthal volunteered quickly, like a nurse bringing smelling salts.

“That's it—yes, thank you. Ignorance was virgin-born, he used to say. ‘Parthenogenetic nincompoops,' he once called us. Intimidating too. I've always had difficulty remembering the word, probably for that reason. Freudian, would you say?” He sat up, as if he'd wakened in another room, looking about calmly. “Help yourself, please. Everyone get a drink. Why don't you lead the way,” he suggested to Becker. “Then the three of you can get your heads together in the next room. I'd like to talk to Reddish alone for a few minutes.”

They sat alone in the study, Bondurant nursing his whiskey, Reddish not drinking at all.

“I take it that it hasn't been a very good day for you,” Bondurant commenced sympathetically.

“Not very good, no.”

“When is Haversham coming back?”

“Next week, probably.”

“Ill-timed, wasn't it, his vacation?”

Haversham had taken a holiday in the Kenyan bush after the African Division meeting in Nairobi.

“It usually happens that way.”

Bondurant nodded, putting his glass down. “If we know so little at present and have claimed so much in the past, I can only conclude we're not telling all we know. That's reasonable, isn't it?” He studied Reddish in disapproval, massive head cocked forward, eyes peering over the reading glasses. “What are you concealing?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

Reddish's eyes were a clear gray-green under the sandy brows, but his cheeks were flushed. “Nothing at all, no sir.”

“I find that incredible,” Bondurant said in disbelief, sitting back. “I find it impossible to believe that you of all people could be so ignorant of what's happening out there. Where are the ministers you're said to control still, the ones whose pockets you've been lining all these years, the ones with the Geneva bank accounts and the Cote d'Azur real estate, the men whose loyalty you're said to own, lock, stock, and barrel?”

“Shot. Bought off, scattered. They wiped me out.”

“Who wiped you out?”

“I don't know yet.”

“But they're dead. As dead as those in the streets? How much did it cost you and the Agency? How much? How many millions?”

“I've stayed with the Soviets since you came,” Reddish said. “Those were my instructions, my OD. I bailed out of internal politics a year ago when you took over.” He didn't want a showdown with Bondurant. If Langley and State got wind of it, he'd be finished. Not an embassy or a station chief would touch him.

“You still had your ministers, like Yvon Kadima,” Bondurant said harshly. “You can't deny that, never!”

“Because of their jobs. Because they were helpful. Because they cooperated in tracking the Soviets and East Germans.”

“You weren't buying intelligence!” Bondurant shouted, losing his temper. “That's a myth, your operational fig leaf! Don't sit there and tell me that. You were buying influence, the same today as it was three years ago, trying to control policy within the cabinet and presidency as you once controlled the embassy! Maybe you can fool Haversham, but you can't fool me.”

“I'm not trying to fool anyone.”

“Those days are over, finished! You're finished. When I came here, that's what I insisted upon! The DCI himself assured me of that, right there in his office at Langley—that the old ways of dealing with the President were over, that there would be no more midnight visits to the palace, either by you or anyone else. You might have had a free hand in the old days, when everything was so confused that no one knew what you were doing, when there wasn't a government here worth dignifying with the name, but times have changed. You haven't. You haven't faced up to it.”

“I've stuck with the Soviets and the bloc,” Reddish said woodenly. “I haven't talked to the President in over a year, since you came—”

“You went to Kindu a few months ago! For whom? For the President!”

“For Kadima. To look at an arms cache the army claimed was Chinese weapons.”

“How did the President get the M-16 rifles? How did he manage that after State and Defense turned him down? Do you think I don't know? You got him those guns! You did it, Reddish—through your old friends in Euroarm! Don't sit there and deny it.”

Reddish said nothing. Bondurant sat back in disgust.

Haversham was an open book for him, socially nimble but secretly sly, a Yale man who exuded fellowship with the other embassy undergraduates—his State, DOD, and AID colleagues—but a Skull and Bones man at heart. The secret society ethos and the condescension it bred had been apparent to Bondurant in an entire generation of Ivy League cold warriors at the Agency, many of them his close friends, but Reddish was an enigma to him. He fitted no niche Bondurant could recognize. He knew a little of his problems. He'd been an Arabist until the Soviets had wrecked his career in the Middle East; he'd bounced about the Asian and African backwaters ever since, never obtaining a post of his own. Bondurant supposed that he had a few old scores to settle with the Russians, inflaming the President's suspicions of Federov and his staff at every opportunity. He knew nothing about Reddish's divorce. Haversham had told him there was an errant daughter somewhere in a private school in New England, sent there after she'd twice run away from a Rome boarding school, once with two German youths on their way to the Middle East. Reddish had had to take leave to find her, retrieving her from a Volkswagen minibus on the beach in southern Turkey.

Bondurant had been uneasy from the first, but had tried to be sympathetic. In the old days it had been Reddish, not the previous ambassador, who'd been summoned nightly by a hapless President to discuss his problems—cabinet assignments, army nominations, tactics for dealing with the Soviets and the African radical states. The President's dependence had dated from the days of the rebellions when improvisation had been the style, Reddish had been the most adept at it, and the Agency had given him full rein. “He practically ran this country for over a year, just himself, no one else,” Haversham had told him once, as if he were a rehabilitation counselor for Alcoholics Anonymous, “so what do you do with a man like that?” Langley's problem too, Haversham had implied, and Bondurant, not a cruel man, had understood. The mood in Washington had changed, the Agency was vulnerable everywhere, and he'd tried to be patient.

“All right,” he said finally, aware that he'd already said too much, “I don't have time to pursue this now. We can discuss it later. But I want to see everything you send out, do you understand? Every word.”

“I understand.”

“Let's talk about the Soviets for a minute. Selvey told me they were Russian guns. How are the Russians involved in this bloody mess?”

“I don't know. I will in time.”

“Let's hope so.” Quite suddenly, Bondurant felt very tired. They'd talked for twenty minutes and nothing had been clarified.

“What was it?” Selvey asked Reddish from the front seat. “A pissing contest?”

“No, not a pissing contest.”

They drove along the river toward the embassy.

“I would have told him if it had been me,” Selvey vowed irritably. “We put this goddamn country together for them, got rid of the Marxists, the Soviet stooges, then the Simbas and mercenaries, and they were on the road back. Then the President gets cold feet about not having a representative government and brings the old politicians back. National reconciliation! It's a fucking circus, that's what it is! We sold out—sold out the army that had whipped the rebels and mercs, gave it back to the politicians, and let the goddamn monkeys run the zoo!”

“The ambassador can't change the President's mind every time he feels like it,” Lowenthal said from the rear.

Selvey turned angrily from the front seat. “The shit he can't! This isn't Paris, perfessor! It's Africa—the dead-end boonies! He could make policy inside the President's head anytime he fucking felt like it, just like the old days, right, Andy?”