The American Mission (33 page)

“
Allo
. Monsieur Saillard's office,” she announced.

“Good morning. My name is Benoit Juneau. I am the new Commercial Counselor at the Swiss Embassy. There is an urgent matter that I need to bring to Mr. Saillard's attention. I know that this is very last-minute, but I wonder if he might be able to see me today. It's important and I will only need a few minutes.”

“Mr. Saillard's schedule is quite full today.”

“I'm sure that it is.” In fact, Alex was holding Saillard's schedule in his hand and knew exactly what the mining company's representative in the Congo was doing with his day. Interspersed with several genuine business meetings were such diversions as breakfast at the Grand Hotel Kinshasa, a tennis match with an executive from British Petroleum, and a massage with “Serena.” There was no indication as to whether this came with a happy ending.

“Perhaps if you could let me know the nature of the issue,” the cheery scheduler offered.

“It's a communication from my government and I'm afraid it's rather sensitive. I would need to discuss this personally with Mr. Saillard.”

There was a pause that lasted long enough that Alex feared they might have been cut off. “I think I can squeeze you in for perhaps twenty minutes right after lunch,” she said finally. “Shall we say three?”

“That would be perfect, thank you.”

•   •   •

A
t two-fifteen, Alex stepped out of a rented BMW in front of Consolidated Mining's headquarters on Avenue Kasavubu. He was wearing a blue pin-striped suit from a high-end Kinshasa boutique and tortoiseshell zero-prescription glasses. The tie—red with thin blue stripes—was Zegna. His hair was slicked back with copious amounts of styling gel, and he had trimmed his beard into a designer stubble. In his right hand, he was carrying an oversize black leather briefcase with the monogrammed initials BWJ. It was a self-consciously flashy look.
Certainly, he bore little obvious resemblance to the blurry ID photo on the “wanted” posters. And the posters themselves were growing increasingly scarce as Ilunga's supporters were quietly ripping them down as they were plastering the walls of the city with their own campaign material. Still, his thin disguise would not withstand even a casual encounter with someone he knew.

Consolidated Mining's headquarters was a modernist cube of steel and black glass that seemed out of place on a block dominated by crumbling, Soviet-style concrete structures. The building also seemed somewhat less than proud of its identity. The only reference to the company was on an understated brass plaque to one side of the revolving door that led into the cool, dark lobby decorated in black leather and chrome. The receptionist, a stunning young Congolese woman in a pastel European-designed suit, was clearly also part of the décor. So were the armed guards in dark blue uniforms standing post in front of the glass door that led to the office area.

The receptionist's unobtrusive name tag identified her as Yvonne. Alex told her that he was there for a meeting with Henri Saillard. Discreetly, she checked that the name Benoit Juneau appeared on her list of expected visitors. Mr. Saillard's office, she told him, was on the fifth floor. She did not ask to see any ID. Alex had the right look, the easy arrogance of a first-world diplomat in a third-world country that is surprisingly hard to fake.

The elevator, like the rest of the building, was functional and spare. It opened directly into the waiting area for Saillard's office. The room featured Scandinavian modern furniture and high-quality abstract prints. An attractive woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties sat behind a desk of blond wood in front of the door that Alex presumed led to Saillard's private office.

“May I help you?” she asked. Alex recognized her voice from their conversation on the phone.

“Benoit Juneau to see Henri Saillard.”

“You are early, Monsieur Juneau,” she said, with just a hint of reproof in her voice. “I'm afraid Monsieur Saillard has not yet returned.”

“Am I early? I thought we said two-thirty.”

“It was three o'clock, monsieur.”

“How foolish of me. Serves me right for making the appointment myself. My scheduler is away this week, I'm afraid. I'm sorry to inconvenience you like this.”

“It's no trouble. I hope that you don't mind waiting.”

“Not at all. Would you mind if I used the WC?”

“Of course not. It's through that door and down the hall on the right.”

Alex knew that. It was on the plans that Giles had acquired for him off the server at Van Der Rhone & Samuelson, the architecture firm in Amsterdam that had designed the unsightly edifice. He also knew that at the end of that same corridor was the entrance to the stairwell that led to the roof. Saillard's office was on the top floor, so Alex had to climb only a short flight of stairs to reach the door to the outside. To his relief, the door was unlocked. He had tools in his bag that might have allowed him to get it open, but probably not without damaging the door in some way. He did not want Consolidated Mining to know that anyone had been up here. Alex pulled a roll of duct tape out of his briefcase and taped the latch inside the strike plate.

The roof was painted white, but it was still hotter than Hades under the midday sun. Immediately, Alex saw something that had not been in the plans. An elevated landing pad had been added to the roof. A red and white helicopter sat parked in the middle of the landing circle. It was a Bell 222, standard-issue transport for self-important executives the world over. This one had Henri Saillard's name stenciled on the door in fancy script.

Alex stripped off his jacket and draped it over a pipe. The satellite dish was right where it was supposed to be. Phone service in Kinshasa
was both incredibly expensive and unreliable. It made economic sense for the mining company to use satellite service rather than the state-run telecom. He did not have much time. If Saillard returned to the office before he was finished, Alex could find himself trapped on the roof with no way down. The schematics had given him only a rough idea of the layout. Now he needed to find and access the junction box that controlled the dish. A thick green cable led from the base of the dish along the top of a low wall and terminated in a nondescript gray box protected by a padlock. This is what he was after. But there was a problem. Installing the helicopter pad had forced the company's technicians to move some things around. The junction box was now in the wrong place.

He pulled a map out of the briefcase and laid it on the ground to line it up with the orientation of the building. His target was a half-finished shopping mall a little more than a kilometer from the Consolidated Mining building. The developer had built most of the mall's concrete shell before running out of money and skipping the country one step ahead of the gangsters hired by the bank to collect on the loan. The abandoned property had been hanging in legal limbo ever since. Giles had helped him find it. For what Alex needed, the mall was practically perfect. It was isolated, elevated, and had a direct line of sight to the Consolidated Mining building on Kasavubu. Unfortunately, the junction box had been relocated to the back side of a retaining wall that would block the signals that Alex was hoping to pirate. He could fix it . . . he hoped . . . but it would take time.

A pair of shortened bolt cutters made quick work of the lock. There was nothing special about the system inside. The controls and the wiring were plain vanilla. Alex removed a small metal dish about six inches in diameter from his briefcase. A black plastic box was attached to the back of the dish. A second box, this one gray and metallic, had red and blue wires extruding from the sides with copper alligator clips attached at the ends. It looked ugly and slapdash, and it was. But Alex was reasonably confident that the gear would work as intended if he could line
it up with the target. As the minutes ticked off, he could feel himself sweating from both the sun and the pressure. His watch read two-forty. He had hoped to be done by now.

Because he was not sure what he would find, Alex had brought an assortment of tools and parts that he thought might be useful. Linking the gray metal box to the guts of Consolidated Mining's communication system was pretty straightforward. The alligator clips kept the circuits intact, but they allowed a secondary signal to run through a connection at the top of the box. A third wire connected to the power cord drew enough electricity to keep the machinery active. Alex attached a three-foot cable to the connection at the top of the box and looped it over the wall. From the other side, the dish should have line-of-sight access to the abandoned shopping mall. He put the lid back down on the junction box and slipped over the wall to fix the dish in place. The construction site was clearly visible about five blocks away. After securing the cable to the back of the dish, Alex lined it up with the mall as best he could and used the duct tape to tie it securely to one of the pipes running from the rooftop solar water heater. He checked his watch again. Two-fifty-one. Alex hoped that Saillard shared his countrymen's penchant for lingering over lunch.

There was still one more stop to make. He did not want Saillard's assistant to call the Swiss Embassy to see what had happened to Monsieur Juneau who had mysteriously disappeared on his way back from the men's room. After removing the duct tape from the door, Alex returned to Saillard's office. He offered profuse apologies to the personal assistant, but it seemed that he was not yet over the stomach bug that had laid him up for the better part of a week. Unfortunately, he would have to return to his office immediately to see the Embassy doctor and he would be in touch to reschedule the meeting. The secretary was solicitous, understanding, and sympathetic. She could see from Monsieur Juneau's flushed appearance and sweat-stained shirt that he was indeed unwell.

Alex departed in haste. It was two-fifty-seven. The elevator door opened on the lobby level just as Henri Saillard was walking into the building. Alex saw him through the glass door and turned to drink out of a water fountain as Saillard walked through the door and into the open elevator no more than five feet away. Alex kept his face turned away, but he was certain that everyone in the area could hear the jackhammering of his heart. Saillard paid him no attention, however, and as soon as the elevator doors had closed, Alex straightened up and walked out onto the street.

•   •   •

L
ater that day Alex invited Giles and Jean-Pierre to join him on an early evening errand. They stowed several boxes of electronics in the trunk of Giles's car and Alex directed the computer hacker to the construction site he had targeted from the roof of the Consolidated Mining building.

Giles drove a beat-up old Citroën that might once have been white. They parked in a deserted lot on the backside of the unfinished shopping mall. The red-dirt lot was dry and cracked. An abandoned panel van stood on blocks in one corner. Everything of value had long ago been stripped from the vehicle. The rusting hulk looked like the bleached bones of an animal that had died on the savannah and then been picked clean by scavengers. They carried the boxes of gear up a concrete stairway. The stairs, like the rest of the building, were only partly finished. They were open to the outside and pieces of rusty rebar jutted out of the landings. When they reached the third floor, Alex noticed a peculiar pungent odor. It reminded him of ammonia.

“What is that smell?” he asked Giles.

“Take a look.” The hacker pointed to the next landing and Alex saw a large colony of bats clinging to the wall. They were restlessly stretching their wings in anticipation of the falling darkness. The stairs above were slick with nearly half an inch of guano. There was something
unsettling about the way the bats moved on the walls. These were small common brown bats. Some of their fruit-eating cousins had three-foot wingspans. Alex shuddered slightly at the thought. Jean-Pierre was utterly unfazed by the bats and carried his small box of gear past the colony without breaking stride.

They exited the stairwell on the fifth floor. They set the boxes down while Alex looked for the best place to set up. This floor was probably intended for office space rather than retail. It lacked any kind of broad central corridor. A corner office that Alex suspected had been earmarked for one of the project's muckety-mucks offered the best line of sight to the Consolidated Mining building.

There was still some material left on-site from when the developers had called a halt to construction. Alex and Giles built a table from abandoned scaffolding and scrounged a couple of empty crates to sit on.

“What are we doing here?” Jean-Pierre asked, as he helped unload the boxes of electronics.

“We're going to do a little spying,” Alex answered.

“That's cool.” Jean-Pierre did not have a problem with that. There were no moral absolutes in his world, only friends and enemies.

Alex explained each step to Jean-Pierre as he and Giles set up the gear.

“This is a satellite telephone.” Alex handed the phone to Jean-Pierre. “It works a little bit like the TV dish that you and I worked on at the church. But instead of cartoons, this picks up conversations. We're going to listen in on the phone calls of our friends at Consolidated Mining and see what we can learn.”

“Show me how it works,” Jean-Pierre replied.

It took nearly two hours to build the system that Alex and Giles had designed. It was a Rube Goldberg device that included a broken-off car radio antenna on radial legs made of wire coat hangers, a commercial satellite tuner, and Giles's backup laptop, a clunky but serviceable Hewlett-Packard. Linking up the hardware and software had taken
longer than they had anticipated and the system had more steps to it than Alex was comfortable with. None of the steps were especially complicated, however. There was no reason it should not work as promised. Just in case, Alex asked Jean-Pierre to push the power button on the laptop. This was for luck. Given all that the boy had been through and somehow survived, someone somewhere was looking out for him. The system booted up normally. For the next ten minutes, however, nothing happened. Alex was about to reboot and try again when the electronic sound of numbers being dialed came over the sat phone's speaker. The computer identified the number being dialed as Consolidated Mining's corporate headquarters in New York. After three rings, someone picked up on the other end.