The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel (2 page)

Autumn 2008

René E. Eriksen had never
been a cautious man. It was perhaps why he had gone from success to failure and back again in an endless chain of unpredictable events, which in the greater perspective nonetheless gave rise to a certain degree of satisfaction with his life. At the end of the day he put it all down to some kind of innate luck.

Yet in spite of this, René was by nature a pensive soul. When faced by the big questions and confrontations of childhood, he had often sought refuge behind his mother’s skirts. Accordingly, in adult life he instinctively made sure always to have a reasonably foolproof exit strategy on hand when casting himself into uncharted depths.

For that reason he had taken time to think things through when his good friend and former schoolmate Teis Snap, now managing director of Karrebæk Bank, had called him up that afternoon at his office in the ministry and put forward a proposal a man in René’s elevated public position under normal circumstances would have considered highly inappropriate.

The bank crises had yet to begin wreaking havoc, but these were days in which the greed of speculators and the irresponsibility of government financial policy were becoming plain to anyone who earned a living lending money.

That was why Teis Snap called.

“I’m afraid to say that Karrebæk Bank will go bust within two months unless we can get our hands on extra capital,” he’d said.

“What about my shares?” René blurted out with a frown, his heart already pounding at the thought of the first-class retirement under
Mediterranean palms he had been promised now collapsing like a house of cards.

“What can I say? If we don’t come up with something drastic right away, we’re going to lose everything we own. That’s the reality of the matter, I’m afraid,” Snap replied.

The silence that ensued was a pause between friends. The kind of interlude that left no room for protest or more abstract comment.

René allowed his head to drop for a moment and inhaled so deeply it hurt. So this was the situation, and swift action was imperative. He felt his stomach knot, perspiration cold on his brow, but as head of office in the Evaluation Department for Development Assistance he was used to forcing his mind to think clearly under duress.

He exhaled. “Extra capital, you say? And what would that involve, more exactly?”

“Two hundred, perhaps two hundred and fifty million kroner over four to five years.”

Sweat trickled down under René’s collar. “For Christ’s sake, Teis! That’s fifty million a year!”

“I’m aware of that, and I find it most regrettable indeed. We’ve done everything in our power to draw up contingency plans these past four weeks, but our customer base just isn’t stable enough. The last two years we’ve been far too eager to lend out money without sufficient security. We know that now, with the property market collapsing.”

“Dammit! We need to do something quick. Haven’t we got time to withdraw our personal assets?”

“I’m afraid it’s already too late, René. The shares have plummeted this morning, and all trading’s temporarily suspended.”

“I see.” René noted how cold his voice suddenly sounded. “And what do you expect me to do about it? I’m assuming you’re not just calling to tell me you’ve squandered my savings, are you? I know you, Teis. How much did you salvage for yourself?”

His old friend sounded offended, but his voice was clear: “Nothing, René, not a penny, I swear. The accountants intervened. Not all accountancy firms are prepared to step in with creative solutions in a situation
like this. The reason I’m calling is because I think I may have found a way out, one that might also be quite lucrative for you.”

And thus the swindle was initiated. It had been running for several months now, and things had gone smoothly indeed until a minute ago when the department’s most experienced staff member, William Stark, suddenly appeared, waving a sheet of paper in front of him.

“OK, Stark,” said René. “So you’ve received some contorted text message from Louis Fon and haven’t been able to get in touch with him since. But you know as well as I do that Cameroon is a long way from here and connections aren’t reliable, even at the best of times, so don’t you suppose that might be where the problem lies?”

Unfortunately Stark appeared less than convinced, and at that moment a warning of potential chaos in René’s future seemed to materialize.

Stark pressed his already thin lips into a pencil line. “But how can we be sure?” He gazed pensively at the floor, his unruly red bangs drooping down in front of his eyes. “All I know is that this text message came in when you were on your way back from Cameroon. And nobody’s seen Louis Fon since. No one.”

“Hmm. But if he’s still in the Dja region, mobile phone coverage is practically nonexistent.” René reached across the desk. “Let me see that message, Stark.”

René tried to keep his hand steady as Stark handed him the sheet of paper.

He read the message:

Cfqquptiondae(s+l)la(i+l)ddddddvdlogdmdntdja

He wiped the treacherous perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand. Thank God. It was gibberish.

“Well, it does seem rather odd, Stark, I’ll grant you that. The question is, does it warrant further attention? It looks to me like the phone just went haywire in Louis Fon’s pocket,” he said, putting the paper down on the desk. “I’ll have someone follow up on it, but I can tell you that Mbomo Ziem and I were in contact with Louis Fon the same day we drove to Yaoundé and we saw nothing out of the ordinary. He was packing for his next expedition. With some Germans, as far as I remember.”

William Stark peered at him darkly and shook his head.

“You say it probably doesn’t warrant further attention, but have a look at the message again. Do you think it’s coincidental that it ends on the word “Dja”? I don’t. I think Louis Fon was trying to tell me something and that something serious may have happened to him.”

René pursed his lips. In all ministerial posts it was a question of never appearing dismissive of even the most ridiculous hypothesis. That much he had learned over the years.

Which is why he replied with, “Yes, it is a bit strange, isn’t it?”

René reached for his Sony Ericsson that was lying on the windowsill behind him. “‘Dja,’ you say.” He studied the phone’s keypad and nodded. “Yes, it
could
be accidental. Look, D, J, and A are the first letters on their respective keys. Press three, five, and two and you’ve got ‘dja.’” Not impossible while it’s just lying in a person’s pocket, though the odds would certainly seem slender. So, yes, it definitely is strange. I just reckon we should wait a few days and see if Louis turns up. In the meantime I’ll get in touch with Mbomo.”

He watched William Stark as he left the office, following his every movement until the door was shut. Again he wiped his brow. So it
was
Louis Fon’s mobile Mbomo had been playing around with in the Land Rover on their way back to the capital.

Idiot!

He clenched his fists and shook his head. Mbomo being infantile enough to steal the mobile from Fon’s body was one thing, quite another was that he had not come clean when René asked him about it. And how the hell could the big dope have been stupid enough not to check for unsent messages? If he’d stolen the phone from the body, why hadn’t he removed the battery as a matter of course, or at least reset its memory? What kind of imbecile would steal a phone from the man he had just killed, anyway?

He shook his head again. Mbomo was a clown, but right now the problem wasn’t Mbomo, it was William Stark. In fact, Stark had been a danger all along. Hadn’t he said that from the start? Hadn’t he told Teis Snap the same thing?

Bugger it! No one possessed an overview of the department’s
agreements and budget frameworks comparable to Stark’s. No one was anywhere near as meticulous as he in the evaluation of the ministry’s projects. So if anyone could uncover René’s misuse of development funds, it was William Stark.

René took a deep breath and considered his next move. The options weren’t exactly multiple.

“If ever you should run into problems in this matter,” Teis Snap had said, “then call us immediately.”

That was what he now intended to do.

Autumn 2008

There weren’t many people
to whom William Stark could turn for a piece of professional advice.

In the gray world of the civil service, he was in charge of but a small island to which few wished to sail. If he felt unable to approach his head of office, the only other person available to him seemed to be the head of the department, but who would go to the head of the department with a suspicion of this nature—and, more particularly, of this magnitude—without first having secured tangible evidence? Not him, that was for sure.

To any superior in the upper echelons of the government services who happened to be reasonably kindly disposed, an underling who sounded the alarm on suspicion of abuse of office or other irregularities in the execution of government business was called a whistle-blower. Ostensibly this was laudable, like a siren warning of impending ambush, but if one were to press the point with these civil service officers, one would invariably find that such a person was considered to be a snitch, and snitches seldom fared well. In modern-day Denmark there were examples aplenty. One recent instance was that of an agent of the Danish military’s intelligence service who was handed a prison sentence for having demonstrated that the country’s prime minister had withheld vital information from parliament in order to lead his country into war in Iraq. Not exactly the kind of attitude that encourages candor.

Besides, William was not one hundred percent certain. Though the thought had played on his mind for some time, it was all still little more than an inkling.

After having briefed his head of office, René E. Eriksen, about Louis Fon’s text message he had made at least ten calls to various individuals in Cameroon, people he knew the loyal Bantu activist was in regular contact with, and in each case he had encountered bewilderment at the fact that this untiring spirit should have been silent even for a few days.

Thus it was that just this morning William had finally gotten through to Fon’s home in Sarki Mata and spoken to his wife, whom Fon had always made a point of keeping updated as to his whereabouts and how long he was planning to be away.

It was obvious his wife was anxious. The woman kept bursting into tears and was convinced her husband had fallen foul of poachers. What they might have done to him was something she could not yet bring herself to think about. The jungle was so vast and contained so many secrets. Louis had told her so on countless occasions. Things happened there, as she said. William, too, knew this to be true.

Of course, there could be any number of reasons for Fon not having been in touch. Temptations abounded in Cameroon and who could guess as to what a handsome man in the prime of his life might succumb to? The girls in that part of Africa were not exactly known to be timid or lacking in initiative, so the possibility that Fon was simply shagging his brains out in a grass hut and allowing the world to revolve as it saw fit was certainly not to be discounted. William almost found himself smiling at the idea.

But then he thought about what had happened before this situation arose, about how the first phase of the Baka project had proceeded. That fifty million kroner had been rushed through the ministry to ensure the continued existence of the pygmy population in such a far-flung corner as the Dja jungle was odd enough in itself. And why specifically the Baka, as opposed to any other people? Why such a generous sum?

Yes, William had wondered right from the start.

Two hundred and fifty million kroner over five years wasn’t much in a total development budget of some fifteen billion a year, but still, when was the last time such a limited project had received such massive funding? Had they targeted the entire pygmy population of the Congo jungle, the second-largest primeval forest in the world, he might have been able to understand. But they hadn’t.

And when the funding was approved, even an idiot with half an eye could have seen that normal procedure had been ignored on several issues. It was at this point that William’s instincts had been activated. In essence, development aid in this case merely meant the transfer of funds to government officials in Yaoundé, leaving it up to the locals to take things from there. And this in a country generally considered to be one of the world’s most corrupt.

For William Stark, a public servant in every sense of the word—and yet not without his own history of error—this was a worrisome situation. Therefore, in light of the turns the case had taken during the last few days, he now looked upon the role of his superior in these proceedings with new eyes.

When had René E. Eriksen ever taken such a personal interest before? When had he last flown out to oversee the commencement of a project? It had been years, surely.

Granted, that fact in itself might conceivably serve to guarantee that everything about the project was aboveboard and subject to the appropriate controls, but it
could
also indicate the opposite was true. God forbid. Eriksen of all people could foresee the consequences: years of the department’s work being upended and scrutinized. It simply mustn’t happen.

“Ruminating, eh, Stark?” came a voice, sneaking up from behind.

It had been months since he had heard that voice in his own office, and William looked up with surprise at his superior’s unpleasant smile. The man’s face looked all wrong beneath his chalk-white hair.

“I’ve just spoken to our contacts in Yaoundé and they feel the same as you,” said Eriksen. “There
is
something wrong, they say, so your assumptions are probably right. According to them, Louis Fon may have done a bunk with some of the funding and now they want someone from the ministry to get down there and audit their payouts to the project from day one. Most likely they reckon it’ll cover their asses in the event of anyone pointing a finger at them in the case of irregularities. If you should find any, that is.”

“Me?” Was Eriksen intending to send
him
down there? William was confused. This was a development he hadn’t seen coming and certainly
one he didn’t care for. “Do they know how much he might have ripped them off for?” he added.

Eriksen shook his head. “No one seems to have a clear idea as yet, but Fon has about two million euros at his disposal for the period. Maybe he’s just out making purchases and is clean. Maybe he found out that the seeds and plants are cheaper or better quality somewhere other than where he usually buys. At any rate we need to pursue the matter. After all, it’s what we’re here for.”

“True . . . ,” said William. “But I’m afraid I’ll have to pass on this one.”

Eriksen’s smile vanished. “I see. And on what grounds, if I might ask?”

“My partner’s child is in the hospital at the moment.”

“I see. Again? And what bearing does that have?”

“Well, I support them both as best I can. They live with me.”

Eriksen nodded. “It’s highly commendable of you to put them first, Stark, but we’re talking two or three days at most. I’m sure you’ll be able to work it out. We’ve already booked you on a flight to Brussels and onward. After all, it’s part of your job, you know. There were no seats left to Yaoundé, I’m afraid, so you’ll be flying to Douala instead. Mbomo will pick you up at the airport and drive you to the capital from there. It only takes about two hours.”

William pictured his stepdaughter lying in her hospital bed. He wasn’t pleased at this new prospect.

“Are you sending me because I was the one who received Louis Fon’s text?” he asked.

“No, Stark. I’m sending you because you’re our best man.”

—

The word on Mbomo Ziem was that he was a man of action. This he demonstrated outside Douala International Airport, where half a dozen aggressive men squabbled over the rights to carry William’s luggage.

“Your taxi is waiting, sir! This way, come on!” they implored, yanking at the suitcase wherever they could get a grip.

But Mbomo shoved them away, indicating with a brutal glare that he was not afraid to take on the whole pack of bearers to save his boss a couple of thousand francs.

He was a big man, this Mbomo. William had seen photos of him, but he had been standing next to diminutive Bakas, who made any non-pygmy look like a giant. Here in real life he realized that not only the Baka appeared small in Mbomo’s presence, for the man towered like a cliff above the human landscape, and for that reason it seemed only natural that the word “security” should be applied to him amid this mad spectacle of frenzied men, each fighting for the privilege of lugging his suitcase and thereby perhaps earning the chance of a small meal.

“You’ll be staying at the Aurelia Palace,” Mbomo informed him as their taxi finally pulled away from the bearers and a couple of men hawking cheap jewelry who ran on behind, hopeful until the last second. “Your meeting at the ministry is tomorrow morning. I’ll come by personally and pick you up. Unlike Douala here, Yaoundé is a fairly safe place, but you never know.” He laughed, his whole upper body quaking, though no sound passed his lips.

William’s gaze turned to the glowing sun as it sank beneath the treetops and to clusters of laborers idling along by the side of the road, machetes hanging limply from tired hands.

Apart from the packed minicabs, the speedy 4x4s, and the clattering pickups constantly passing them and putting everyone’s lives at risk in the process, only battered, heavily laden trucks with broken headlights were on the road. It was no wonder that much of the wreckage that lined the dusty highway had a close resemblance to the vehicles upon it.

William was a long way from home.

—

Having carefully chosen his menu, William sat down in a corner of the lounge where there was a chair; a sofa with thick, patterned covers reminiscent of the seventies; and a timeworn coffee table on which a pair of dewy glasses of beer had already been placed.

“I always get two in at a time whenever I’m down here,” said the corpulent man seated next to him, speaking in English. “The beer’s so thin it trickles out of the pores again as quickly as you can get it inside you.” He chuckled.

He pointed at the necklace that William was wearing, with the small
masks hanging from it. “I can tell you’ve just arrived in Africa. You must have run into some of those jewelry bandits out at the airport.”

“Yes and no.” William fingered the necklace. “I’ve just got here, yes, but I’ve had this for a number of years. It
is
African, though. I found it once when I was inspecting a project in Kampala.”

“Ah, Kampala. One of Uganda’s more interesting cities.” He raised his glass to William. Judging by the diplomatic-looking bag, he too was a civil servant.

William produced his portfolio from his leather briefcase and placed it on the table. To begin with there was the specific issue of fifty million kroner and how to channel it on to the Baka project. Then there were a number of documents to be skimmed and a series of questions to be prepared. He opened the manila folder and arranged its entire contents in three piles in front of him. One containing spreadsheets, a second comprising project descriptions, and a third of memos, e-mails, and other correspondence. Even the yellow Post-it note was there, with Louis Fon’s text message jotted down on it.

“Do you mind if I sit and do some work here? There seems to be no desk in my room.”

The man replied with a friendly nod.

“Danish?” the man asked, indicating the logo of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the head of the documents.

“Yes, and you?”

“Stockholm.” The man extended his hand and switched to Swedish. “First time in Cameroon?”

William nodded.

“In that case, welcome,” the man said, shoving his extra glass of beer across the table toward him. “Cameroon isn’t a place a person ever gets completely used to, you know.
Skål
.”

They raised their glasses, the Swede downing his in one gulp and then gesturing toward the waiter for a refill, all in one seamless movement. Alcoholic public officials like him were a regular feature in equatorial regions, as William well knew. He had seen a number of their own people return home firing on less than all cylinders after a stationing abroad.

“You might think I’m given to drink, but you’d be wrong,” said the
Swede, as though having read William’s thoughts. “Truth is, I just pretend to be.”

He pointed discreetly toward a sofa arrangement at which were seated two black men in light-colored suits.

“They’re from the company I’m negotiating with tomorrow. At the moment they’re checking me out and in an hour or so they’ll report back to their boss on what they’ve seen.” He smiled. “No skin off my nose if they think I’ll be turning up the worse for wear.”

“You’re in business, then?”

“You could say. I close contracts for Sweden. I’m a controller, and a good one at that.” He nodded to the waiter who appeared with his next two beers and raised one to William. “
Skål
, then!”

William tried in vain to keep up with the Swede’s liquid intake. A good thing he wasn’t playing the same game. His stomach wasn’t geared to it.

“I see you’ve got a coded message.” The Swede indicated the yellow Post-it note in front of William.

“Well, I’m not sure, to be honest. It’s a text message that came in from a partner of ours who disappeared down here a week ago.”

“A text message?” The man laughed. “A beer says I can decode it in less than ten.”

William frowned. Decode it? What did he mean?

The Swede took the note, placed a blank sheet of paper in front of him, pulled out his Nokia mobile from his pocket and put it down on the table.

“It’s not likely to be a code, if that’s what you think,” William said. “That wouldn’t really be how we operate in the ministry. Frankly, though, we’ve no idea what it’s all about, or why it should look like that.”

“OK. Written under difficult circumstances, perhaps?”

“Perhaps. We can’t ask the man. Like I said, he’s disappeared.”

The Swede put pen to paper and began to write:

Cfqquptiondae(s+l)la(i+l)ddddddvdlogdmdntdja
.

Beneath each letter he wrote another, all the while glancing at his mobile.