Read The Templar Legion Online
Authors: Paul Christopher
The Templar Legion (31 page)
On the other hand, if there was ever a time for daring it was now. He’d tell Lanz to keep a gun to Nagoupandé’s head until the mining concessions were turned over and loyalty ceased to be a factor. He turned away from the deathly vision on the wall. It had to be now.
“We continue as planned,” he said. “No delays. At the dark of the moon.”
Lanz nodded, his spine automatically straightening. “At the dark of the moon.”
General Solomon Bokassa Sesesse Kolingba awoke abruptly and painfully, a blazing flare of sunlight spearing through a small space between the heavy velvet curtains that were usually drawn tightly together to avoid just such an event. He was not a man who met the day well, preferring instead to rise slowly, first slaking his thirst with several bottles of Mongozo banana beer and then spending at least half an hour in the bathroom voiding his bowels.
Following this he generally ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage, black pudding, bacon, mushrooms, baked beans, hash browns, grilled kidneys, a pair of Scotch kippers, three slices of fried bread and half a tomato for color, followed by several carafes of either hot chocolate or sweet black coffee, depending on his mood.
This meal was generally eaten in his living room while sitting in his favorite reclining chair in front of an extremely large flat-screen TV while he watched CNN and the BBC on his satellite receiver. Sometimes if the news was boring he’d watch an old movie.
At eleven he would get dressed in a set of camo fatigues and shoot skeet on the roof for an hour before lunch. Any variation on this routine was fraught with danger, and interrupting it without an extremely good reason could prove seriously harmful.
On the twenty-sixth day of that month, two days before the dark of the moon, Oliver Gash entered General Kolingba’s private quarters at four fifty-one a.m., one minute before official sunrise. He stayed in the shadows close to the door and well away from the big, curtained four-poster bed that stood in a far corner of the room. The worst of it was that Kolingba never snored; he slept almost silently, an immense, immobile pile in bright yellow silk pajamas and a black silk mask.
“General,” said Gash quietly from the other side of the room. There was no response, but Gash heard a faint clicking sound from behind the curtains surrounding the bed. The sound of one of the silver-plated presentation Colt .45s being cocked. He squeezed his own hand a little harder around the butt of the cocked Glock 17P in the pocket of his jacket.
“General?”
There was a long pause.
“Have you come to murder me in my bed, Gash?”
“No, sir.”
“I can see in the dark like a cat. I would kill you first.”
“Yes, sir, I know that.” From Rwanda to Banqui to Baltimore to here; it really was a long and winding road.
“I am
uSathane-umufo
, a devil man. I know your thoughts,” said Kolingba out of the darkness.
uSathane-umufo
, a devil man. I know your thoughts,” said Kolingba out of the darkness.
“I know this, too, General, and I would never have disturbed your sleep without the most important of reasons.”
The heavy curtains on the side of the bed facing Gash were thrust aside and Kolingba appeared out of the gloom, throwing back the black satin sheet that covered his huge body. He swung his legs over the bed, planting them wide apart like a Sumo wrestler. In his right hand the silver-plated pistol glinted. Kolingba lifted one giant buttock and broke wind explosively.
“Speak,” said the dictator, yawning.
“There are several things, Your Highness. Together they point to a single conclusion.”
“What things?”
“Saint-Sylvestre has disappeared.”
“The policeman?”
“Yes.”
“Why should I care about a policeman disappearing? This is not enough to wake me from my dreams, Gash. My dreams are prophecies. They guide me as I guide my country.”
Oh, jeez.
“He disappeared while he was following a man he believed was a mercenary, Your Highness.”
“What sort of mercenary?”
“He was traveling on a Canadian passport, but Saint-Sylvestre was sure he was German.”
“Why would a mercenary come here?”
“Saint-Sylvestre thought there was a good chance that he was reconnoitering Fourandao.”
“Reconnoitering? Why would anyone want to do that, Gash?”
“For a coup-d’état, Your Majesty.” Gash waited for the reaction. There was none except for Kolingba’s fingers tightening a little around the big automatic in his hand.
“That is impossible,” said Kolingba. “My enemies are gone. My people love me.”
“Perhaps, Your Majesty, but there have been reports of a mining engineer who showed an interest in the area around the Kazaba Falls.”
“There is nothing there. Only swamp and jungle.”
Gash summoned up his courage and spoke. “Limbani has been seen.”
“Don’t be foolish,” scoffed Kolingba. “Limbani is
isipokwe
, a ghost.”
isipokwe
, a ghost.”
“I’m afraid Limbani is no ghost, Your Highness. He has been seen at the first cataract talking to a group of white men. He is very much alive.”
Kolingba bolted up out of the bed, eyes bulging in the semidarkness, a yellow mountain of flesh waving an automatic pistol, screaming. “Then find him! Find him! I will have him, Gash! Do you understand me!? You must kill him! I must kill him! He is a scourge! An infestation! Kill him!”
Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the anger vanished. Kolingba threw the pistol on his night table. “What are you going to do?” Kolingba asked.
“I thought we could take one of the helicopters and look for any signs of him upriver. It is clear that any attempt on Fourandao will come from the east—we would have heard about it long ago if it was coming from Banqui.”
“My dreams tell me that the danger comes from the west. Perhaps from Banqui, or even farther.”
“You could go yourself and see,” replied Gash, knowing what the reply would be.
“You know I will not fly in one of those things, Gash,” said the general petulantly. “Go for me.”
“Of course, Your Majesty. I have your full authority in this, I presume?”
“Of course, of course!”
“In writing?” Gash asked. If there was to be a coup Gash would have to be the one who prepared against it.
“Yes! Yes!” Kolingba said, waving Gash from the room, his face twisted angrily. Gash had to stop himself from laughing as he suddenly understood Kolingba’s urgency—he was desperate to get to the chamber pot beneath the bed.
Gash backed toward the door; the pistol was only a foot or two away from Kolingba’s hand. “And have my breakfast sent here today, would you. I must think about all of this,” the general added.
“Right away.” Gash nodded. He found the door at his back and slipped quickly from the room. As he headed to the kitchens he found himself thinking about the cash hidden behind the wall in Kolingba’s office and how it could be accessed quickly if it became necessary. As he made his way down the stairs he began to whistle the theme music from the old
A-Team
series, his favorite back in Baltimore. He smiled broadly as he reached the ground floor of the main compound building. He really did love it when a plan came together.
A-Team
series, his favorite back in Baltimore. He smiled broadly as he reached the ground floor of the main compound building. He really did love it when a plan came together.
28
Sir James Matheson, Ninth Earl of Emsworth, maintained two official residences in England. One was Huntington Hall, the enormous seventeenth-century ancestral estate in Derbyshire. The other was a magnificent seven-bedroom apartment in Albert Hall Mansions located between Albert Hall and the Royal Geographical Society on Kensington Gore overlooking the Albert Memorial and Kensington Gardens.
The earl and his wife, the Countess Edwina, formerly Lady Edwina Talbot, had a long-standing marital agreement that neither party would arrive at the other’s residence without an invitation and at least twenty-four hours’ notice. The twins, Justin and Jonathan, had been packed away to Barlborough Hall School since their fifth birthday and still had another six years to go before being packed away once more to Oxford or Cambridge, and thus presented no particular problem to either parent.
Neither Sir James nor Countess Edwina professed the slightest interest in what the other was doing and each left the other alone, except for formal occasions such as Royal Garden Parties, the Grand National and Royal Ascot. For the most part, Huntington Hall was the countess’s fiefdom and London belonged to Sir James.
Like most titled people in England with reputations to sustain, both the countess and Sir James had their various appropriate charities, and those charities required fund-raising. On the advice of his accountants, Sir James Matheson’s cultural charity was the Royal College of Music—even though he was known to have a tin ear that had difficulty getting the tune for even “God Save the Queen” right. He sponsored several dinners, concerts and cocktail parties for the college each year to raise money.
Unfortunately the date for one of those parties fell just forty-eight hours before the dark of the moon in Fourandao, Kukuanaland, and the launch of Matheson’s private invasion of that country. Even more unfortunate was the fact that these cocktail parties invariably took place at his apartment in Albert Hall Mansions.
Matheson’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a five-and-a-half-story building, and dwarfed both the Royal Geographical Society and Albert Hall itself. Matheson’s father, the eighth earl, either through great good fortune or liberal applications of money, had managed to purchase one of the center apartments, which had an arched, recessed balcony that stretched the width of the entire apartment and could be used in inclement weather.
A large black-and-white-tiled entrance hall led to a thirty-by-forty-foot reception room on the right. Kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms and a sitting room were on the left. The first reception room led to a second reception room, which led out to the arched balcony; beside the reception room was a master bedroom that Matheson had renovated into a study-library, also leading out to the arched balcony. At the last tax evaluation, the apartment had been valued at eight million, two hundred thousand pounds.
At the present moment it was crammed with well over a hundred people grazing on several thousand pounds’ worth of mini Parmesan baskets filled with cauliflower puree, wild-strawberry-and-cucumber jam on toast, wild mushroom palmiers with creamed goat cheese, dragachelio baby quail egg Florentine with pink pepper hollandaise and, last but not least, the eight-pounds-a-mouthful seared miso-infused tuna. On top of that were forty strategically placed crystal vases of cut flowers spread through the entrance hall, the two reception halls and the three bathrooms designated for guest use that evening, not to mention the endless spigot of expensive French, German and Italian wines and the full bar, all of it serviced by more than two dozen waitstaff, bartenders, presenters and a ten-person cleanup crew for after the party.
In the smaller of the two reception rooms a tuxedo-wearing deejay had hooked into Matheson’s own apartment-wide Bose system, providing selections of classical music interspersed with jazz that nobody was paying the slightest attention to. There was a six-man armed security team, all dressed in tuxedos—provided by Kate Sinclair’s Blackhawk Security—to make sure that no one stole the family silver or got into violent arguments about the respective merits of Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov and Carl Heinrich Carsten Reinecke. All of it was giving Sir James Matheson a violent headache. He really did have much more important things on his mind.
By ten he was saying good-bye to his last few guests, all of whom promised to send large donations to the Royal Academy. By eleven thirty the caterers were on the way out the door, and by midnight the apartment was his own again. He unlocked the door to his study, which had been off-limits for the evening, and stepped inside.
The room was comfortingly dark, as it usually was, the only light coming from a small green lamp on the bar. He poured himself a glass of thirty-two-year-old Auchentoshan single-malt and went over to his desk to look for an old bottle of Rofecoxib. He flipped on the desk lamp and saw that there was already someone seated in his chair, blood leaking down the starched bib front of his evening clothes from the eight-inch gaping slash across his throat. The man’s head was so thrown back by the wound that Matheson could see the cocaine frosted around his nostrils. There were several more lines of cocaine on the desk in front of the dead man, along with a rolled-up five-pound note. Matheson put down the heavy glass of whiskey. He recognized the slaughtered body: it was Simon Wells, a puff-piece writer who made the circuit putting society names into his column in boldface. A completely harmless individual with a not-uncommon taste for drugs. For a moment Matheson thought about doing the dead man’s lines on the desk to calm his nerves a little, but thought better of it.
A pole light came on in the far corner of the room. It illuminated a tall, thin black man holding an automatic pistol loosely in his hand. The man was dressed in an expensive-looking set of evening clothes and there was a glass of something that looked like gin and lemon on the table beside him. He reached for it with his free hand and took a moderate sip, the ice cubes tinkling pleasantly against the expensive Czech crystal.
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