The Secret Chamber (13 page)

Jeffrey’s jaw clenched, accentuating the sunburn at the corners of his mouth.

‘Bloody … hell …’ he managed before there was a loud burst of clapping from behind. They both turned to see an African man dressed in an immaculate white suit, with Gucci sunglasses carefully balanced on his nose. He rocked forward as he clapped, grinning so widely that each one of his white teeth were on display.

‘Damn, Jeffrey, you are just a sucker for a beating,’ he said, reaching forward to slap the journalist on the back. Beer swilled over the top of the journalist’s glass, welling out over the front of Jeffrey’s shirt. ‘You’re like some kind of fucked-up pitbull. Tenacious, but dumber than hell.’

He then stared down at Bear and, raising his fists like a prizefighter, gave her a huge wink.

‘And you! Wow, you gonna make a boy fall hard. I love that whole vest, grease-stained shit you got going on there. Ain’t nothing sexier than a girl that knows her way round an engine.’

Fabrice smacked his lips together as he pulled back the chair Jeffrey had been pawing. He sat down, adjusting his sunglasses a little, and allowed the full wattage of his smile to shine on Bear.

Jeffrey coughed quietly. ‘If you don’t mind, Fabrice, I was …’

‘… boring her to death. Why don’t you try one of girls at the bar? I’m sure they’d love to hear all about that little article of yours. Just make sure you pay them their hourly rate.’

As Jeffrey slowly retreated to his own table, Fabrice shook his head.

‘Gotta love journos like that. Barely left the city in nearly a year and wants to write about the
real
Africa. Damn’
muzungos
never get it. You want to get anything out here, you got to get out there and take it for yourself.’ He paused, squeezing his fists together. ‘You gotta have balls.’

‘The trick is to have them. Not think with them,’ Bear countered, folding her arms across her chest and pushing her cleavage up a little. Fabrice smiled again, trying to stop his eyes from flicking downwards. Taking one of the chips left over on Bear’s plate in front, he pointed it at her.

‘And while we’re on the subject, that’s exactly what I got
you
by. I am the only one around here that can get you the fuel you need to get into the Ituri. Guess that makes me your new best friend.’

He chewed on the chip thoughtfully. ‘And, girl, trust me when I say this: I ain’t cheap.’

Bear’s expression stayed fixed. Her eyes were drawn to the side of Fabrice’s cheek, where burn marks rose up to his hairline. She knew that guys like this were a dime a dozen in the Congo; maybe not as slick or successful, but underneath they were always the same. They had seen too much war and horror to respond to threats, and universally seemed to follow only three passions in life: money, women, and a pathological hatred of MONUC.

Bear leaned across the table, releasing her hair with a sideways toss of her head.

‘You know you’ll get your money, so why don’t you relax about that? But this isn’t just about me getting what I want. You help me get that fuel and it’d be like sticking a finger up to MONUC. Screw everything else, wouldn’t it just be fun to bust my plane out of the compound, right from under their damn’ noses?’

Fabrice’s eyes were masked behind the mirrored sheen of his sunglasses.

‘Sounds like you’re the kind of girl that likes to mix business with pleasure.’

‘When it suits me.’

He slowly shook his head.

‘Why do I get the feeling this is going to hurt?’ He signalled to the waiter for a beer. ‘I tell you what, you give me a
thousand
US a gallon and I’ll get you all the fuel you need.’ He paused, sniffing the air. ‘That way you can use it for the plane instead of washing yourself in it.’

‘Don’t play me for a tourist, Fabrice. Two hundred a gallon, or I get it from someone else.’

‘Where do you think are – JFK? There’s only one airport round here and the manager’s my boy.’

‘Three hundred a gallon and I’ll give the MONUC base the finger while I buzz the tower.’

Fabrice gave a deep laugh, clutching hold of his stomach as if it might crack. He banged the table a couple of times, making the bottles clank together, before finally offering her his hand.

‘Five hundred and you take some cargo for me. And that’s the last offer you’re gonna hear.’

Bear held back, her eyebrows arching suspiciously.

‘Cargo?’

‘Yeah. A couple of
muzungos
are on some screwed-up mission to find a friend of theirs. They need to get into the Ituri and one of them’s hell-bent on the idea. Damn’ nearly started a riot in my bar when I told him it wasn’t going to happen. Should have dumped the kid in the lake, but there was something about him …’ Fabrice paused, his expression clouding over as he remembered the same irreconcilable anger that he had carried for years after his parents had died. There was something about the Westerner that had reminded him so clearly of himself back then.

Bear waved her finger slowly in front of Fabrice’s nose.

‘Tell the tourists to take a hike. From what Pieter said,
we
need to get to a small village called Epulu just over the river. Anything north of that point is LRA country and your boys aren’t going to last five minutes on the ground.’

Fabrice took a sip of his beer.

‘What makes you so sure you will?’

Bear’s expression darkened. ‘Just get me that fuel. The rest is my problem.’

‘Look, Pieter told me you’ve done some impressive shit, but it’s different here.’

‘Spare me. This ain’t my first time.’

Fabrice slowly took off his sunglasses, folding them carefully on the table. He stared at Bear with wide brown eyes tinged at the bottom with a rim of grey-blue. They looked somehow damaged, the irises textured with fine brown lines which laced out across the whites. Despite the smile still playing at his lips, there was not an ounce of levity in them.

‘You look like the kind of person used to giving advice, not taking it. But let me tell you something from one Hema to another. We both know what it was like during the wars – neighbours, friends, everyone hunting us down until the roads were stained red with our blood. We’ve seen it all, right? But this …’ Fabrice’s expression stayed absolutely fixed. ‘This is like nothing the Congo has ever seen before. Something’s shifted and no one, and I mean no one, who goes north comes back.’

He reached across the table, the palm of his hand open.

‘I’ll get you your fuel. Just be damn’ sure you know what you’re wishing for.’

Bear stared at him for a moment longer. What could
Fabrice
hope to gain from such scaremongering? He was trying to push her out of the deal, not into it. Her eyes searched his before she reached forward and took his hand.

‘OK. It’s a deal. But I want the fuel and the Westerners at the plane by 4.30 a.m. sharp. We take off before dawn hits.’

Fabrice replaced his sunglasses and whistled softly between his teeth.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Standing up with her hands resting on the table, Bear stared down at him. His eyes ran up the length of her body before eventually meeting hers.

‘And the money?’ he asked. ‘Or were you thinking of working it off another way?’

‘The money will be waiting for you on the tarmac once we get our fuel. Until then, why don’t you and Jeffrey cool off in the lake together? He looks like he could do with some company.’

THE CO-PILOT OF
the Gulfstream 550 private jet undid his safety belt and squeezed his way past the pretty air stewardess into the main part of the cabin.

‘My apologies for disturbing your lunch, gentlemen,’ he said in English to the two men sitting facing each over an immaculate white tablecloth. ‘A call has been diverted to the plane for a General Jian.’

The pilot’s eyes moved from one man to the other, unsure to whom he should be speaking. Jian slowly dabbed the corners of his mouth with the napkin and looked down at the finely crafted hands of his Patek Philippe watch. The call was a few minutes later than he’d been expecting.

Moving round the seating area to the bureau at the back of the plane, he picked up the satellite phone. A few seconds later, he was shouting in Mandarin into the mouthpiece.

‘This is an outrage!’ he boomed. ‘You will personally see to it that I get a full enquiry within two hours. You hear me, lieutenant? Two hours! I want to know how the
satellite
exploded and why.’ There was a pause as he waited for the inevitable string of apologies. ‘And when I get back, there are going to be some major shake ups. We are the PLA, lieutenant. We do not make this kind of mistake.’

Jian rang off, then paused before getting up from his seat. He closed his eyes, systematically going over each detail in his head. He had deliberately used an unsecured line, certain that the Guild would be monitoring all communications from his office. The display of outrage had been for their benefit. Leaning back in the padded chair, he massaged his temples, rather pleased with his performance. But now they knew, and from this one single event, everything else would follow.

He already had a man in place to ensure the investigation team wouldn’t find any evidence of the explosives they had used. By now, the wreckage would be strewn over a couple of miles and it would take them days to sift through it all. One thing, however, was vital – they had to believe the explosion had been caused by a technical fault and not the result of deliberate sabotage.

The truth was, there was no actual satellite in the launch. The rockets, fuel and guidance systems had been carrying little more than an empty shell into space before Jian’s explosion had brought them all crashing back down again. Instead, they had manufactured a dummy satellite from low-grade aluminium which, when blown into a thousand pieces, should be more than enough to fool the investigating team.

He was taking a serious risk. It was too public and exposed for his taste, but it had been the only way he could hide the
fact
that only twenty satellites had been built, when the Guild had actually financed twenty-one. Thirty-six million dollars had remained unspent from the budget, which, after some careful reallocation, was more than enough to get him started.

From the very beginning, Jian had known that any joint venture between the PLA and the Guild would lead to a host of complications and, more importantly, miscommunications. Everything had to pass through circuitous chains of command and got bogged down in endless amounts of red tape. In the end, it had been a relatively simple task to feed in two conflicting orders to the construction company in Guangdong. With all the different prototypes and redesigns being built, they were soon unsure as to exactly how many satellites were in the final order.

General Jian had offered to intervene personally to clear up the confusion … and had succeeded in muddying the waters even further.

However, it had not been as easy to hide the accounting discrepancies nor to load the empty casing of the dummy satellite without any of the technicians realising that something was amiss. But, as with all high-level security matters, everything was compartmentalised, with each technician seeing only one small part of the jigsaw at any one time. Such protocols had left Jian just enough room for manoeuvre.

After eight months, he had finally succeeded in getting the money out of China. Using three separate export companies based in two different provinces, he had diverted small chunks of money every few weeks, eventually amassing
the
entire balance in a Lebanese account. The bankers out there were well accustomed to acting as intermediaries for the Saudis and were renowned for maintaining their clients’ anonymity. The Lebanese were also natural-born traders. They couldn’t care less where the money came from or how. Only their cut was important to them. As the saying went in downtown Beirut : morality was for the philosophers at Byblos.

Jian inhaled deeply, then slowly moved back to his seat. Settling himself against the tan leather upholstery, he stared at the man opposite, flashing him a brief smile that was meant to be pleasant.

‘Everything all right, General?’ his dining companion asked.

Jian nodded, faintly amused that Hao addressed him as ‘General’ despite their having known each other since university days, eighteen years earlier. Since then, Hao had pursued an unspectacular career in electronics, despite the industry’s meteoric growth over the last decade. That mediocrity showed in his whole demeanour: in his sunken eyes, ringed with bags of tired skin; in his nose, reddened from drink.

They hadn’t seen each other in over twelve years and ostensibly were still friends, but when Hao first clambered on board the plane in Beijing, Jian had been forced to mask his contempt. Hao’s suit jacket had threadbare elbows and a greasy stain running up one sleeve. Here they were, flying on a $50 million jet, and the idiot hadn’t even been able to find a decent suit to wear.

Jian soon discovered that Hao’s drink problem was as
bad
as his research had suggested. Hao had gulped down a vodka and tonic shortly after take off and, although clearly desperate for another, had been too timid to ask. Instead, his right knee bounced up and down in nervous spasm and he shuffled continually in his seat, trying not to stare at the empty glass. Jian found almost every facet of the man utterly revolting.