The American Mission (32 page)

From behind them, a new voice asked, “Can I get a glass of water?” This voice was immediately familiar to Alex, even though he had heard it speak no more than a dozen sentences. He turned to find Jean-Pierre standing at the threshold to the kitchen wearing a pair of pajamas at least three sizes too large with a pattern of blue and red elephants.

The former child soldier squealed with joy when he saw Alex, and ran to hug him.

“I have been working to find homes for Antoine's former charges,” Ilunga explained. Some are staying here with me, including young Jean-Pierre. He speaks quite well these days, you know.”

“Is everything okay now?” the boy asked.

“Not yet, Jean-Pierre,” Alex replied. “But it will be.”

A
UGUST
6, 2009

K
INSHASA

T
he morning sun woke Marie before the alarm sounded. She stretched languidly and propped herself up on one elbow to look at Alex still sleeping soundly next to her. They had been sharing a small room on the second floor of Ilunga's house. There was barely enough room for a double bed and a nightstand. Still, the time she had there with Alex was a wonderful luxury. He was a patient and tender lover, but Marie was wary of the strong feelings she was developing for him. He was the first white man she had slept with. Color was not an issue for either of them, but neither was blind to the obstacles to a long-term commitment.

She ran her hand across his chest. He stirred. Reaching up to take hold of her hand, he pulled it to his mouth and kissed her palm lightly. A little electric thrill shot through Marie's spine. She did not know how long they had together, but they had today.

As she thought ahead to what they had to do that day, Marie
frowned slightly. This would be the first serious test of Ilunga's political strength and Marie was nervous that it would fall flat.

Alex must have sensed her anxiety. “Don't worry,” he said, pulling himself up into a sitting position on the bed. “It's going to go great today. I'm just sorry that I won't be there to see it.”

Although Marie had many of the campaign's foot soldiers distributing pro-Ilunga literature pull double duty by also taking down the “wanted” posters with Alex's picture on them, it was still not safe for him to be near a large crowd in broad daylight. This left Marie in charge of organizing Ilunga's campaign and she had risen to the challenge. She had cut her teeth on byzantine tribal politics. Still, she was nervous about the day and grateful for Alex's support. She forced herself to smile.

“It's going to be fine,” Alex repeated.

“God, I hope so.”

The campaign to unseat President Silwamba had started online. Some of the more advanced computer programmers in the Freedom Coalition had already been working on a website promoting Ilunga as the real winner of the last election and the best hope for political reform in the Congo. The message was clear: Silwamba was illegitimate. Albert Ilunga was the duly elected President of the Congo.

At first Ilunga had been skeptical of this approach. He had wanted to march to the presidential palace and plant his flag. What good was the Internet, he asked, when less than five percent of the population outside of the capital had access to a computer? Marie and Alex had persuaded him that this was not a normal political campaign. They were targeting the Kinshasa elite and international public opinion. Their goal was to get Silwamba's own supporters to turn against him. If an election was like a boxing match with two heavyweights slugging it out in the center of the ring, Ilunga's political movement had to be more like jujitsu. They had to get Silwamba off balance and let the weight of his position ultimately drag him down.

It had been nearly a week since Ilunga had agreed to challenge Silwamba. Encouragingly, there were already some signs that their campaign was gaining traction. The initial trickle of visitors to the website had not grown to a torrent, but at least it was a steady stream. Marie had reached out to a number of women's groups, including the Wives of Wounded Veterans. Ilunga, meanwhile, had put the word out through the Brotherhood of the Circle that the time for change had come. The secret society was not large, but many of its members were in positions of influence and nearly all were eager to see the back of Silwamba.

They had not yet had any public events, however. Today Ilunga would lead a march from the villa to the ironically named Freedom Square in front of the presidential palace. The turnout would be a key test of his political strength. The website and flyers called on Ilunga's supporters to gather in front of the villa at ten in the morning for the march. Marie had told Albert that they were hoping for five hundred people to show up. Privately, she thought they would be lucky to get half that.

Silwamba's naked power grab in the aftermath of the election had sucked much of the energy out of the Congo's nascent democracy movement. Marie was less than certain that they would be able to revive the coalition that had come so close to propelling a man she considered honest and decent into the presidency.

That is why she found herself holding her breath when she and Ilunga stepped out the front door of the center at ten-fifteen. The bullhorn in her hand was heavy and it would make her feel ridiculous if there were only a handful of people waiting for them on the street. Standing in the small garden between the house and the front gate, Ilunga took hold of Marie's upper arm and turned her to face him.

“No matter what happens today, Marie, know that you have done well. This is just one piece of a larger effort. It is important. But if our supporters are not yet ready, it is not the end. I assure you.”

Marie nodded. “Thank you, Mr. President.”

Ilunga opened the gate and they stepped out onto the street. The crowd of supporters waiting for him to appear roared its approval. Blinking back tears, Marie surveyed the scene in front of her. There were at least two thousand people in the street, many waving light blue and gold Congolese flags or handmade placards in various languages that read
ILUNGA
IS
PRESIDENT
. Ilunga took the bullhorn from Marie and held it up to his mouth.

He made it only a few syllables into “My fellow citizens,” however, before the roar of a fired-up and adulatory crowd drowned him out. There would be a time for speeches, they seemed to say, but this was a time for rejoicing.

When they had quieted some, Ilunga spoke for ten minutes. Few in the audience could hear what he said, but no one seemed to care.

•   •   •

W
hile Marie had been working on building up Ilunga, Alex had focused his energies on finding a way to take down Consolidated Mining. He needed two things: information and evidence. So while Marie was leading a march to the front door of the presidential palace, Alex sat down with Ilunga's in-house computer guru, Giles Mbaka, to plot a more circumspect trip through the back door at Consolidated Mining.

Giles was the senior computer instructor at the Coalition. He was also a hacker of considerable skill, who did his work on a beautiful, high-end PowerBook that had “fallen off the back of a truck.” Giles did not look the part. His nose had been broken and badly set at least once, and his build was more like that of a professional wrestler than a computer geek. He had big, beefy hands that moved with surprising grace across the keyboard. Most unsettling, however, was that Giles had only one ear. The left side of his head was a mass of scar tissue where the ear
should have been. Giles kept his hair cut short, as if to draw attention to his disfigurement. All of Ilunga's inner circle had complicated and often violent pasts. Giles was evidently no exception. For whatever reason, Giles and Alex had clicked almost immediately, and the hacker had taken on the project of proving Alex's innocence as a personal charge.

When Alex walked into his classroom, Ilunga's webmaster was wearing a dark blue Hawaiian shirt opened halfway to his navel and his trademark orange-tinted sunglasses. The left earpiece balanced somewhat precariously on a nub of puckered scar tissue. The glasses, he insisted, helped ease the eyestrain from hours in front of a monitor. Alex was pretty certain, however, that Giles wore them because he thought they looked cool.

In the corner of the room, two TVs were on with the sound off. One was tuned to the DRC's state news channel and the other to CNN. Giles pulled the international programming off a pirated satellite feed distributed through some of the Internet's darker corridors.

“How's it looking, Giles?” Alex asked, taking the seat next to him. The image on the PowerBook monitor was a schematic diagram of Consolidated Mining's website, the back-end configuration accessible only to the company's IT people . . . and now to Giles.

“It's pretty tricky.” They were speaking in English, a language for which Giles had boundless enthusiasm but only reasonable proficiency. He was a huge fan of Hollywood movies and American TV, and he used his conversations with Alex as a chance to brush up on his skills. Alex was happy to oblige. He owed Giles. The hacker had spent the better part of two days exploring Consolidated's computer system.

“The firewalls are . . .” Giles paused, looking for the right word before settling on the almost nonsensical “hotter than they need to be.”

“Can you get over the walls?” Alex asked.

“Over? Maybe not. Under? Maybe yes. But if they are looking, they see me. No promise I find anything on the other side. Could be a red hand say, ‘I sorry I call Mr. Alex a spy. He is a really nice guy.' Maybe
nothing. Maybe report on how much money they make last year. It's hard to know.”

“What about Henri Saillard's e-mail account? Is that inside or outside the wall?”

“Inside.”

“What's on the outside?”

“His calendar. The secretary keeps and her account easy to read.”

“That's a start. Let's take a look at that. And if you wouldn't mind poking around a bit more to see if there's any way into the restricted areas that won't trip the alarms, I'd be grateful. At some point, though, if we can't find a quiet way in, we may just need to knock down the wall and see what we find.”

“No problem.”

Giles needed only seconds to open Saillard's calendar, and Alex spent the next fifteen minutes reviewing his schedule of appointments. The seeds of a plan were beginning to germinate. The sheer audacity of the idea was enough to make it almost plausible.

“Can you get into the maintenance records?” Alex asked.

“I think yes,” Giles said, clicking through a series of links and inputting commands with bursts of keystrokes. The records included such routine corporate data as the schedule for the janitors and the maintenance plan for the motor pool. That was not the kind of information that Alex was after.

“What about building schematics, blueprints, that sort of thing?”

“I not think there's no something like that at this system.” If anything, Giles's English seemed to get worse with practice.

“Where do you think we might find that kind of information?”

“Maybe they have paper copy somewhere inside. E-copy . . . maybe the . . .
c'est quoi le mot?
 . . .
l'architecte?
 . . . has on his server.”

Alex clapped the giant hacker on the shoulder. “Giles, you are a fucking genius. Do you think you can find out who designed that building and get a copy of the plans?”

“Maybe yes.”

“How soon?”

“Tomorrow.”

•   •   •

A
re you out of your mind?” Marie asked, when Alex explained to her what he was planning to do. She had come back from the march overjoyed and excited about their prospects for success. Even the police had seemed at times to be helping the demonstrators rather than hindering them. Bringing just a few members of the security services over to their side would be a real victory. At the same time, she recognized how fragile their gains were and how quickly joy could turn to bitterness.

“Do you have any idea what's likely to happen to you if you get caught?”

“Unpleasant things. But I can't simply sit on my ass and wait for my good karma to deliver justice. I have to take the fight to these guys. I need to know what they're doing and see if there isn't some way that I can shake them up a bit.”

Marie felt a brief flash of anger and there was heat in her response.

“And have you given any thought to what it means for Ilunga and what we're trying to do here if you are found out? They would use you to discredit him. We're working for change that could ultimately heal an entire country. Think about what you're putting at risk because you want to get your job back.”

As soon as she said this, Marie regretted the words, but it was too late to unsay them. Instead of getting angry, however, Alex reached out and took her hand.

“I have thought about it. What I want to do is essential to Ilunga's mission. Silwamba and Consolidated Mining aren't simply allies, they are a single organism. We need to know more about them, to find their
vulnerabilities. And as for me crawling back to the Embassy and pleading for my old job . . .”

Marie looked away, ashamed that she had even leveled that charge.

“I'm done with them,” Alex continued. “No matter what happens to Consolidated Mining or to me, I'm finished with the State Department . . . with government. It's over.”

“What will you do?” Marie asked.

“I don't know. I'll need to think about that. And I'll need to think about what's best for Anah. But I won't go back to making the kinds of compromises that the State Department has demanded of me. I need something simpler, more . . . pure. You know something? I've slept better since I became a fugitive than at any time since the Sudan.”

She kissed him hard on the mouth and he held her tightly against his body.

“Will you help me?” he asked, stroking her hair.

“You know I will. What can I do?”

He pulled back and looked her in the eye.

“Can you do some shopping for me this afternoon?” he said seriously.

“Of course. What do you need?”

“I'll make you a list.”

•   •   •

T
wo days later, Alex called the main number at Consolidated Mining and asked for Henri Saillard's office. He was using a prepaid mobile telephone that Marie had picked up for him on her shopping trip. Alex did not want the mining company to be able to trace the call back to either Ilunga or the sat phone he had liberated from the Embassy. The woman who answered Saillard's line had a cheery voice and a Flemish accent.