The American Mission (26 page)

Alex steeled himself to make a dash for the door. Maybe if he took them by surprise, he could cover the twenty feet before they could target him. Maybe. Doubtful. The odds were not appealing, but it was still better than waiting to be trapped like a rat. Just as he was about to throw back the tapestry and make a run for it, the doors at the back of the church opened with a crash.

Father Antoine was standing in the doorway dressed in his full clerical garb. The tall priest made for an imposing figure silhouetted against the darkness outside. He had traded in his cane for a crosier, the shepherd's crook of a bishop. Antoine spread his arms wide, raising the crozier in his left hand.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” And, in fact, the priest seemed almost preternaturally calm.

“You will fear me, priest,” the largest of the militiamen snarled in his distinctive Rwandan French. “Tell me, where is the American?”

Alex slipped quietly out from behind John the Baptist's beheading. With the gunmen focused on the back of the church, he had a chance to make it to the door unseen.

“You have misplaced an American?” The priest laughed. “How careless of you. Do not worry. Americans are as common as fruit flies. There must be millions of them. Be patient. I'm sure another one will show up sooner or later.”

“Do not be a fool.”

“It's a bit late for that. I've been one most of my life. But in the end, it has been a life of purpose. What is your purpose in life, my Rwandan friend? And how do you expect to explain yourself when the time comes to meet your Maker?”

“Maybe you can help me with that, priest, for you will no doubt see him before I do.”

The militia leader drew a finger across his throat and the foot soldiers on either side fired two sustained bursts of automatic-weapons fire into the priest's midsection. Antoine's vestments disintegrated in a fountain of blood and the priest toppled over on his back. The crosier fell from his hand to clatter on the floor.

“No!” Alex screamed involuntarily, as he lunged toward his fallen friend. The Rwandans pivoted, their instincts honed by years of fighting in the jungle driving them to zero in on the new threat. The leader smiled when he saw Alex and slung his Kalashnikov off his shoulder. Alex dove for the exit and just made it outside when a hail of bullets from at least one of the AKs slammed into the door frame.

Outside, Alex scrambled to his feet and ran in the direction of the stables, not because it was safer but because it led away from the dormitory and the children. He had no shoes and was just as glad because his bare feet made little noise as they slapped against the flagstones. He did not have much of a head start. A moment later, the three gunmen were in the courtyard, shining powerful flashlights in a spiral search pattern. The flashlights in the hands of guerillas were now as dangerous as their automatic rifles. A spear of light passed briefly over Alex and swung quickly back to track him. For a moment, he was fully illuminated and he saw his own shadow projected onto the wall of the stables in front of him. He dodged violently to the left just before a burst of weapons fire cut through the night air, crashing into the wall where his shadow had stood only a half second before. He managed to avoid the questing beams of light long enough to reach one of the stable's shuttered windows. Noisily, he slipped the bolt that fixed the shutters together and left them dangling wide open. Then he hid behind a pile of lumber and copper pipes that he and Jean-Pierre had salvaged from the interior. As he had hoped, the gunmen found the open window and assumed that Alex had climbed inside. The militia leader bolted the window and led the two foot soldiers into the stable through the front door. Once they were inside, Alex ran as quietly as possible to the door and closed it. The
bolt was on the outside. The building had been designed to keep horses inside rather than to keep intruders out.

It would not take long for the guerillas to realize what had happened, and they would be able to force their way out without too much trouble. Even so, Alex reckoned that he had bought himself a little time. He was tempted to run for the side door in the compound wall and escape onto the city streets, but he could not be sure that the guerillas would not take out their frustration on the orphan boys. Jean-Pierre might have spread the alarm, but Alex needed to be sure. The heavy thump of rifle butts on the door of the stable signaled that the
genocidaires
had discovered that they had been duped. He needed to get to the boys before the guerillas escaped.

Alex ran in the direction of the blockhouses, where the boys slept. The trap did not hold the
genocidaires
for as long as he had hoped, and he could sense, more than hear, the guerillas following close behind him. He had nearly reached the dorm when a commanding voice boomed out of the night. “Mr. Alex, get down, now!”

Without thought, Alex threw himself forward on the ground, skinning both of his forearms on the flagstone courtyard. Rifle fire whizzed over his head, and for a moment Alex was afraid that the guerillas had opened fire on the orphans. In a moment, he realized that he had it backward. The boys, led by a sixteen-year-old veteran bush fighter named Luc, were shooting at the guerillas, using the
genocidaires'
own flashlights as aiming points. Many of the orphans Antoine had taken in over the years had spent time with the militias. They were boys, but they were no strangers to killing. It was over in less than twenty seconds. All three
genocidaires
were dead. None of the students were hurt. Jean-Pierre stood next to Luc, and Alex was grateful to see that he was not carrying a rifle. There had been enough violence in his life.

“Thank you, Luc,” Alex said, as he pulled himself up from the ground. His forearms stung something fierce, but he was otherwise unhurt.

“Antoine?” the boy asked.

“I'm sorry.”

The boys, veterans of the Congo's wars, some with years in the bush and dozens of notches on the stocks of their AKs, cried bitter tears over the loss of their surrogate father. Alex joined them without shame. The death of his friend was a debt that would be paid in full.

J
ULY
18, 2009

K
INSHASA

E
mbassies, U.S. embassies in particular, were fortresses. They were castles designed to protect secrets rather than kings, but the principles were not all that different. The American mission in Kinshasa was an imposing mass of stone, steel, and glass. And tonight Alex Baines was going to break in and steal its secrets. He was in desperate need of two things: money and information. And he thought he knew where he could find both of these. The Ambassador's personal safe.

If he made the mistake of thinking about the entirety of what he needed to do, it was a ridiculous proposition. Layer upon layer of security protected what he was after. When he broke it into smaller pieces, however, it was much less daunting. To someone from the inside, many of the layers were gossamer-thin, known codes, systems, and routines that depended on an opponent's ignorance of day-to-day operations and standard procedures. Alex reviewed what he had to accomplish. It was doable. Just.

The first hurdle was the outer wall. It was fifteen feet tall and topped with razor wire. A sophisticated active laser alarm system alerted Post One if anything larger than a chipmunk tried to make it over the top. The wall was impregnable, but it had a weakness. It had a gate and a guard post. More important, that post was manned twenty-four hours a day by a local contract guard. A human being. Soft, squishy, and unpredictable human beings were the weak links in any “impregnable” system.

Tonight the guard on duty was Farouk, a middle-aged man with a pronounced belly and a receding hairline. Farouk carried a 9mm pistol in a holster on his belt, but his most dangerous weapon was a simple green button on his desk that would alert the Marine guard at Post One to call the detachment to a REACT. Within minutes, half a dozen heavily armed Marines would be in the compound wearing ceramic body armor and ready for just about anything. The Marines worked for Rick Viggiano. Alex's challenge would be to keep Farouk from touching that button.

At one-thirty in the morning, the traffic on Avenue des Aviateurs was thin, and Alex kept his head turned away from the cameras on the corner of the compound walls as he dashed across the street to the Embassy.

The gatehouse looked like it had been grafted onto the wall. The outer door opened into a screening room complete with an airport-style metal detector through which the guards could process visitors before buzzing them through the door to the courtyard. The inner and outer doors could not be opened at the same time. Ordinarily, as many as three guards were on duty, but in the middle of the night there was only one guard covering the graveyard shift.

Alex looked through the narrow glass window on the outer door. Farouk was sitting with his feet up on the desk, thumbing through one of the local sports magazines. He tapped on the glass. The guard startled, glanced over at the door, and hit a button on his desk. The door's electronic lock disengaged with an audible click.

“Good evening, Farouk.”

The guard looked decidedly unhappy.

“Hello, Mr. Alex,” he said. “I wasn't expecting to see anyone at this hour.”

“I know. I hope I'm not disturbing you. I'm actually coming back from a dinner that went late and I wanted to stop by to pick something up from the office.”

“Just a minute, please,” the guard said, picking up the receiver of his switchboard-style phone.

“What is it, Farouk?”

“I need to call Mr. Viggiano. He left strict instructions that we were to call him immediately when you came to the Embassy. He was really quite insistent.”

Farouk's index finger was suspended over one of the speed-dial buttons. Although he could not see what was written next to it, Alex was confident that it read either
VIGGIANO
HOME
or
VIGGIANO CELL
. He leaned forward and pressed the kill switch. The dial tone went silent.

“You don't need to do that.”

“Oh, but Mr. Viggiano said it was very important.”

“Yes, I know. I lost my embassy ID and Rick found it. He was going to give it to me personally, but we spoke a couple of hours ago and he told me that he would leave it with the Marine at Post One. So it's all taken care of and there's no need to wake him.”

“But Mr. Viggiano said . . .”

“That was before he and I spoke. It's okay now. You really don't want to wake him unless it's something serious. You and I both know that he has something of a temper.”

Farouk looked confused, torn between his desire to follow the RSO's instructions and his desire not to become the object of the abusive ex-cop's wrath.

“Maybe you're right,” Farouk said, putting down the receiver. “No need to bother him at this hour if it's already fixed.”

“That's a good call.”

The gatehouse opened out onto the road that nearly circled the Embassy compound inside the massive outer walls. To the left, the road led to the big circular driveway of the Ambassador's residence. To the right, it curved around to the front of the Embassy chancery. Closed-circuit TV cameras monitored the courtyard. The Marine on duty at Post One monitored the feeds. Alex walked as close to the wall as possible to avoid the cameras' overlapping fields of view. Talking his way past the local guard at the gate had been one thing. Getting the Marine to let him into the chancery was quite another. The Marine Security Guards seemed to take great joy in their rigid and inflexible enforcement of the rules. There was no way the Marine was going to let Alex into the chancery without his embassy ID. It was more likely, in fact, that the MSGs had orders to detain Alex on sight.

He couldn't just walk inside. With the push of a button, the Marine on duty could lock the doors to the lobby and trap Alex inside. The door that actually led into the chancery was like the door to a bank vault. The heavy steel swung out on pneumatic arms. Three-inch-diameter titanium rods slid out from the frame to anchor the door to the reinforced concrete wall.

In contrast to the steel door to the chancery, the double doors that opened into the lobby had a glass-paned front. From the far side of the road across from the entrance, Alex could see into the lobby and he could just make out the form of the MSG on duty behind Post One's bulletproof glass. Fernando Gutierrez was a nineteen-year-old corporal from San Juan with two great loves, the United States Marine Corps and Guitar Hero. A surveillance camera mounted on the wall right behind Alex was pointed at the entrance. Alex studied the setup for a moment and then disconnected one of the leads that clipped into the
camera like a phone jack. He watched the Marine. The feed from the camera had gone dead and it took only a moment for the young MSG to realize that something was wrong. It was standard procedure when a camera went off-line for the MSG on duty to conduct a visual inspection of the equipment. Alex had seen Marines do it many times over the years.

The front door was typically left unlocked. The vault door on the inside, however, was part of the chancery's “hard line” and could be opened only from the inside or by a switch located at Post One. The MSGs could also open the door with a key they wore around their necks. The only other person in the Embassy with this key was Viggiano. From the booth, the Marine on duty could see everything in the lobby, and in the event of an attack he could secure all of the doors and windows with a single master switch. To get outside to check the camera, however, Gutierrez would have to leave the booth and walk around to the vault door. The moment Corporal Gutierrez turned and exited Post One by the back door, Alex ran for the entrance. For fifteen or twenty seconds, the Marine would be both blind and deaf to his surroundings.

Alex eased open the front door and slipped inside, taking an extra few seconds to close the door securely behind him. Crossing the lobby at a run, he threw himself flat against the wall next to the vault door. Moments later, the door clicked open. Alex was shielded from the corporal's view behind the open door. He caught the edge of the door with the tips of his fingers and held it open. Although it weighed at least a ton, the door was finely balanced on its hinges and it was not hard to keep it from swinging closed. When Gutierrez exited the lobby, Alex stepped around the vault door and into the chancery. The door closed behind him with a mechanical whirr as the titanium locking rods reengaged. He had successfully penetrated the Embassy's outer defenses. He was now inside the hard line.

Alex did not want to risk the elevator, which would have shown up
as active on Post One's instrument panel, so he took the stairs up to the executive suite. A six-digit cipher lock protected the door to the suite, but most of the senior officers in the mission knew the combination. The lock was intended to keep out intruders and overly curious local employees, not cleared Americans. The suite itself was alarmed, and Alex had thirty seconds to enter the code before it triggered a warning to Post One. A digital timer on the keypad counted down the seconds. He did not have this combination, but Spence was a creature of habit and Alex hoped that nothing had changed since his days as the Ambassador's staff assistant. As Ambassador, Spence was entitled to pick his own codes, and for as long as Alex could remember, he had used the same number for his alarm—100755—his wife's birthday. It was exactly the kind of thing that Diplomatic Security warned you not to do. The blinking red light switched over to solid green. The alarm code had been accepted.

Although it was unlikely that anyone would notice, Alex did not want to turn on the office lights. There was a chance that they could be seen from the street. He had brought a small flashlight from the tool kit that he had been using at Antoine's church and used that to navigate.

Spence's office was crowded with memorabilia from his diplomatic life: awards and honors, ethnic artwork, and various souvenirs. The inexorable accumulation of tchotchkes was one of the lesser hazards of a Foreign Service career. Pride of place was given to Spence's ambassadorial commission, a poster-size document in a heavy gold frame, signed by the President and emblazoned with the Great Seal. The commission began with the words: “The President of the United States, reposing particular confidence in your honesty, integrity, and ability . . .” Alex feared that what he had come to learn would confirm that the President's trust had been misplaced.

There was a collection of framed pictures on a shelf beneath the commission. Some were professional photos of Spence posing with presidents and secretaries of state. Others were family portraits. One
was of Anah. This was her school picture from last year. Alex remembered the care with which Anah had selected her wardrobe for that day, modeling half a dozen outfits for him before settling on a hot pink sweater and the cream blouse with the polka dots that matched the beads in her hair. He felt a sharp stab of loss at their separation.

Impulsively, he slipped the picture out of the frame and into his jacket pocket, stashing the empty frame in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. It was, he knew, a foolish thing to do. If Spence noticed the missing picture, he would know right away that Alex had been there. But he wanted the picture and—if he was honest with himself—he did not want Spence to have it. He had broken the bond of trust with Anah as well as with Alex. And he bore at least a share of the responsibility for Antoine's death. Alex could feel the anger and guilt over his friend's murder roiling inside him like a nest of snakes.

In contrast to the clutter elsewhere in the office, Spence's heavy oak desk was almost bare. Peggy gathered Spence's papers at the end of the day and locked them in the safe. The Ambassador had a separate safe that he used for his personal papers. It was the one he had used to lock up the file Viggiano had allegedly found in Alex's house. This was the one Alex wanted to get into. Here again, he was hoping that Spence had not changed his ways. On the desk were two phones, a regular switchboard phone and an encrypted STE, a leather blotter, and a silver paperweight in the shape of Africa. The paperweight was titanium, a gift from Consolidated Mining. Next to the paperweight was Spence's Rolodex.

The Ambassador was something of a Luddite and still kept paper records of his key contacts. He also habitually used it as a kind of cheat sheet. Alex flipped through the names until he found the one he was looking for: “Mr. Mosler.” Underneath were the numbers 456-179. Several digits seemed to be missing, but that was because it was not a telephone number. It was the combination to Spence's safe, which like all of the State Department's safes was manufactured by the Mosler Safe
Company. Spence liked to come into the office on weekends, but he was never very good at remembering all of the combinations.

The Mosler safe had an LCD dial that spun without tumblers as a further deterrent against safecrackers. It opened readily to the combination 45-61-79. In the top drawer, Alex found the leather bag of diamonds and the file folder of secrets that had so quickly unraveled his life. He pocketed the diamonds. They were easy enough to convert into hard currency, albeit at significantly less than fair market value, and the money they represented would help him keep running. Even innocent men needed to eat. There was also a handheld Iridium satellite phone and a 9mm pistol with a spare magazine. He pocketed those as well.

In the second drawer, Alex found what he had hoped not to find. A dark green folder labeled simply
OPERATIONS
contained aerial photographs of Busu-Mouli. He would likely have recognized the village from his own memories of flying over it in J. J. Sykes's Otter, but some faceless drone in the intelligence community had removed any guesswork by labeling key landmarks for easy identification. Small white boxes and arrows identified the mine and smelter, the wharf, the armory, and, most ominously, Chief Tsiolo's house.

Beneath the photographs was a memorandum of agreement on the letterhead of Executive Solutions, a South African mercenary outfit famous for both professional competence and obsessive secrecy. The memo committed the company to provide two Denel AH-2 Rooivalk helicopter gunships to support a raid on the Congolese village of Busu-Mouli on July 23 in exchange for a cash payment of $150,000. That was only five days from today. No matter how brave they were, Jean-Baptiste's village guard would be utterly helpless when faced with armored attack helicopters mounted with high-speed Gatling guns. If they fought, they would die. It was not hard to imagine who would be leading the raid: Innocent Ngoca and the
genocidaires
of the FDLR.