“How do you know about the skeleton crew?” someone asked.
“I have the assurances of one of the top men in the government.”
“Who is it?”
“I cannot say.”
“Then how are we supposed to trust him, to trust you?”
“He will make it easy for us to gain control of the palace, and therefore the government.”
“Why?”
“Yes, why is he doing this?”
“He favors our cause,” she said with as much sincerity as she could summon.
Otherwise she would have to explain that Claude DuMarier was being paid by a very rich American to betray his country, having been promised a life of luxury in exile, and she didn’t want them to believe, to know, that they were risking their lives on the word of a man whose only motivation was greed.
“Hah, no one in the government favors our cause,” someone said.
A chorus of agreement filled the room. It was time to retake control.
“If you don’t believe in this, leave now,” she shouted over the din, which quickly subsided. “I have worked for the past year to make this day happen. I have traveled long distances to make this day happen. I have smuggled arms across the border into Kamalia, risking everything I have, including my life. And I am telling you now, here, in this room, that on Saturday the south gate at the palace will be unguarded, the entire government will be in the Chambre d’Etat, waiting for us. If you do not believe this, leave now.”
The room went silent, and for a few moments she was back in New York again, lights trained on her face, hair and makeup assistants scurrying around her, a camera clicking away, and all because of her, because she had the power to draw these people with their powerful lamps and huge reflectors and long-lensed cameras, the magnetic center of the universe—that’s how she’d felt when the hot lights had made her skin glow like something radioactive, something fearsome. It had lasted only briefly, that feeling of power, fading with the bright lights, but it had felt wonderful. And she felt it in Rémy’s living room, the power to move people. Only now it wasn’t her almond eyes and sharp cheekbones; it was her words, her conviction.
“Saturday, then,” said someone.
“Saturday,” someone else repeated, and soon the room was chanting, throwing their fists in the air: “Samedi! Samedi! Samedi!”
But Sophie’s fists remained at her side as she watched. In her mind’s eye her right hand clutched a knife and held it above the heart of Laurent Boymond, a moment frozen in time, the moment she’d been working toward ever since thugs had burst into her home, their home, and taken Matthew from her.
Chapter 57
Zach arrived in Washington, DC, by Amtrak on Tuesday morning. He walked quickly through Union Station, content to be jostled by crowds of ambling tourists admiring the magnificent building and by commuters ignoring it as they hurried to their offices. He never wanted to be alone again. The cab ride to the State Department building on C Street took him past several DC landmarks and a dozen or more marble buildings housing government offices, all designed to project solidity and timelessness. They struck him as vain and preening. Real power wasn’t contained by marble tombs in Washington but sheathed in gleaming glass and steel 250 miles to the north—in particular, on the sixtieth floor of 14 West 57th Street.
A Google search at the Upper West Side hotel he’d been holing up in had yielded the name he needed, which he gave to the guard on the first floor of the enormous Harry S. Truman Building on C Street, headquarters of the State Department. He’d called from New York to make an appointment, claiming to be a representative of Julian Mellow, a name that opened doors everywhere, even in the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, which focused on sub-Saharan Africa.
Jackie Yonkus greeted him at a second-floor reception area. She struck him as incongruously glamorous for a policy wonk: thirty-five, he guessed, tall and model-slim, with long, silky blonde hair and pale, delicate features that were in sharp contrast to the drab quarters in which she worked. She wore a pale lavender sweater, black slacks and heeled shoes that brought her up to almost six feet. Zach felt a bit underdressed in her presence, even in the khakis trousers and white oxford shirt he (or rather, Arthur Sandler) had bought that morning at a Gap on the West Side.
She led him down a series of corridors before showing him into a dark, windowless office. Books filled every available surface, and her small desk was covered with neat piles of papers and reports, but otherwise Jackie Yonkus’s office offered few clues to her life outside the office: no family photos, no revealing knickknacks, not even a coffee mug or takeout cup.
“I would have thought Kamalia was the last place Julian Mellow would want to be involved,” she said from behind her desk. Zach sat in the single visitor’s chair across from her. “After you called I sent emails to our Deputy Chief of Mission in Villeneuve, as well as to our public affairs officer, our political officer, and our economic officer. No one has had any contact with Julian Mellow since his cobalt operations were nationalized. I’m sure you know his son was killed there following the coup.”
“Matthew was a reformer. I think his father wants to carry on his work.”
Her pale blue eyes flashed skepticism. “Julian Mellow, a reformer?”
“Where Matthew is concerned, Julian’s not the same man he is in business.”
She considered this for a few moments. “Perhaps. West Africa is something of a backwater here at State. And Kamalia is the backwater of the backwater. We get very little attention. Other than cobalt there’s nothing much to interest anyone in the place.” She lifted a slim manila folder. “This is a file of every article published in the United States about Kamalia so far this year. You see, nobody cares.”
“Harry Lightstone cares.”
“It’s a bit of a surprise, a huge surprise, actually, that Lightstone keeps mentioning Kamalia. In the past month I’ve had a dozen reporters sitting right where you are, asking about Kamalia. But even they don’t end up writing articles. There’s not much to say, I suppose.”
“What got you into it, then?”
“Why Kamalia?” Her pale skin reddened very slightly. “When I started here there wasn’t even a Kamalia specialist. I began on the West Africa desk. I’d joined the Peace Corps after college, went to Ghana, and fallen in love.” Her color deepened. “With the country, the region. Everything there is so much more vivid, I thought, at least compared to Greenwich, Connecticut, where I grew up. Everything in Greenwich is tastefully muted, monochromatic—the green lawns, the pastel sweaters, the white skin. In West Africa the colors seemed brighter to me, more varied, the sounds louder and crisper, the issues so much more vital. Here, we argue every four years about paying for healthcare. In much of West Africa, there is no such argument because there is no healthcare to speak of.”
She was completely flushed, though it wasn’t embarrassment but rather conviction. And whatever delicacy he’d read into her face was gone, replaced by a formidable passion.
“Of course, it was never really that simple,” she said. “Especially once I got to State, where it’s all about nuance. Here it’s all about how a 1 percent increase in the export duty in Ghana will result in a 6 percent increase in the cost of cocoa in the US, which will result in a point-zero-three percent rise in the price of candy bars, which will result in a point-zero-zero-three rise in inflation, which is unacceptable, completely unacceptable, never mind that that 1 percent increase in the Ghana export tax will finance a new hospital and three schools. What’s a hospital and schools compared to affordable candy?”
“But why Kamalia?”
“It was offered to me two years ago. I was one of the youngest people to be assigned to a country desk, so I took it. It was after the coup, which caught us by surprise, and State hates surprises. They felt they needed a specialist in case the place got hot again. At first I couldn’t wait to move on. There isn’t much prestige in Kamalia, as you can see.” She looked around the
small, cluttered office. “Ghana and Ivory Coast get windows. Not Kamalia.” They both smiled. “Have you been there? It’s not much of a country, really, Villeneuve doesn’t have a speck of colonial charm. Everything is half finished—the roads, government buildings, power plants. Everything stopped when Laurent Boymond took over, so there’s a Brigadoon quality to the place, as if any progress at all was just a dream. But when you leave the city and travel up into the mountains, it’s the most beautiful place on earth, something about the air fills you with energy, and the sky seems so close, you feel like you’re in some sort of magical biodome where nothing bad can happen. The Kamalians feel it, too, even after all they’ve been through. There’s no despair there, just resignation.”
“Why is Lightstone talking about Kamalia? Is there really a threat there?”
“Nothing is happening in Kamalia. Le Père Boymond has everything under tight control.”
“Lightstone talks about human rights violations.”
“Our sources indicate that, compared to other countries in the region, Kamalia is not a human rights concern. Human Rights Watch puts it at number forty-three. For Africa, that’s practically nirvana.”
And yet Lightstone had made Kamalia a centerpiece of his campaign, devoting precious sound bites to it when he could be talking about issues that really resonated with the public. Would Julian Mellow go to such lengths just to hear Le Père’s regime denounced in speeches by a candidate who was sure to lose? Would that be enough for him?
“What about civil unrest, danger to the Americans there?”
“We have intelligence that suggests that there is a small band of insurgents who are dedicated to overthrowing Boymond’s regime. They are well armed, but small in number…perhaps a hundred people, mostly in their twenties. They’re led by a woman named Sophie DuVal.”
“Matthew Mellow’s girlfriend,” Zach said. He’d met her once or twice, and recalled occasional newspaper profiles of the glamorous couple who inexplicably deserted New York for third-world Africa, where they dedicated themselves to improving the lives of the people.
“We think she’s planning some sort of coup. It will fail.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Le Père’s army is loyal to him, his palace is more secure than the Pentagon, and I don’t think the people will rise up in support of them even if they do make headway. As I said, this is not a country of activists.”
“But you said they are armed.”
“AK-47s, mostly. State-of-the-art assault rifles.”
“Well…”
“The government has ten times as many AK-47s, and grenade launchers and tanks. Everything short of nukes. If they had nukes, I’d have a window.”
“If the government has such tight control, where did the insurgents get the weapons?”
“They must have smuggled them into the country somehow. And someone’s financing their activities. Sophie DuVal occasionally travels to Paris, as recently as four months ago. We think she meets her backer there, but we have no proof. Is it Julian Mellow?”
“I don’t know,” he said, though he was quite sure it was. Still, the question nagged at him: why would Julian back a doomed coup? It seemed as uncharacteristic as backing a losing presidential candidate.
“He has the motive. Le Père nationalized his company and then killed his son.”
“So there’s no hope for Sophie and her comrades?”
“If they do go ahead with the coup attempt, it will be suicide for them.”
“But Le Père was successful three years ago.”
“We assume he had some sort of ally within the former government. If the insurgents have someone inside the Boymond government helping them, they may have a chance. But our intelligence says there is no such person.”
Or perhaps there was. Julian might have arranged for an “ally” within the Kamalian government. He’d recently shown the lengths he would go—the lengths he could go—to manipulate events and people.
“And if the coup fails, the US’s position on that will be…”
“No position. An internal affair in a sovereign nation.”
“But if Lightstone should win?”
“Perhaps he’ll deliver another speech on the subject of human rights at a fundraiser. But I doubt anyone will cover it. My message to Julian Mellow would be, ‘Stop your support of the insurgents; you’re sending them to certain death by encouraging them with money and perhaps a sense that the greater world cares about them.’ I don’t want to see any more bloodshed in Kamalia. They don’t deserve it. Will you send him that message?”
Julian never backed losers. Yet Sophie DuVal and her comrades were doomed to defeat in Kamalia. Why was he supporting them, even if financing a few hundred weapons was, for him, a tiny investment? A sentimental attachment to the woman his son had loved? But Julian had no sentimental attachments. And sending her to her death was hardly a way to honor his son’s memory. No, if Sophie was going to lose, then losing, for Julian, was winning. Her defeat would help him in some way, help his cause, which was electing Harry Lightstone to the White House. Sophie would lose—in fact, she was being set up to lose. Of course, her defeat—inevitably bloody—would validate the seemingly out-of-left-field ranting of Harry Lightstone, make him look prescient and perceptive. Presidential.
“Will you tell Mr. Mellow that his support of the Kamalian insurgents will only lead to more bloodshed?” Jackie asked.
“I’ll do my best,” was the only honest answer he had.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28
Chapter 58
Julian read the Times coverage of Victor Carron’s death as his Gulfstream G650 banked over northern New Jersey and headed west. He could just make out Newark Airport to the left, commercial jets lined up on the runway, waiting their turn. He’d be halfway to Chicago before the last one left the ground.
The flight attendant brought him black coffee as soon as the pilot turned off the seatbelt sign. He drank it while reading the paper. Apparently Carron had been asphyxiated in his own garage, according the Westchester coroner’s office. He’d slipped and split his head open on a concrete step leading from the garage to the house. One theory was that he’d been headed somewhere, after a drunken morning, turned on the car, realized he’d forgotten something inside the house, and left the engine running when he went in to retrieve it. The vodka-induced fall had not killed him, but it had knocked him unconscious and the carbon monoxide had done the rest. Another theory held that he’d turned on his Lexus to attempt suicide, decided to go back inside the house to get something, perhaps more vodka, or paper and pen to write a note, and, lightheaded from the carbon monoxide, had slipped and fallen.
The death was front-page news. Proponents of the suicide theory, including several Wall Street colleagues, were quoted in one of several Times articles on the affair speculating that, after a life of nothing but success, Carron slipped up just once, in agreeing to manipulate the vice president’s portfolio, and simply couldn’t forgive himself—nor face the prospect of a trial and, potentially, jail. He was a man who allowed himself no flaws, said one associate. With Victor, it was perfection or nothing, said another; faced with a major shortcoming, he’d chosen nothing. That he was guilty of colluding with the vice president was unspoken but understood; his suicide was as good as an admission. Of course, others quoted in the articles, mostly family members and close friends, held to the accidental death theory. But his blood alcohol level seemed to point to a guilty conscience in any case.
Julian put down the Times and devoted a few moments’ thought to Victor Carron. He tried to have as little involvement as possible with the men who ran his companies. He’d set up a pyramid structure that enabled him to oversee his empire with only five people reporting to him. Victor Carron had not been one of those people. But Victor’s boss, who oversaw all of Mellow Partners’ financial services investments, had reported to him, and so Julian had not been able to completely avoid meeting him. He recalled that Carro
n had tried to interest him in joining a board, a disease charity, something to do with children. More than likely he had a child afflicted with that disease, since it didn’t sound like the sort of charity you’d join to build business contacts; museums and hospitals were better suited for that. Well, the sick child and the rest of the family would be well provided for. Carron had been paid several million dollars a year and had a generous, company-paid insurance policy.
As had become his custom, Julian searched inside himself for a trace of remorse and failed to find one. Victor Carron was no longer available to refute allegations that he’d manipulated the vice president’s investment trust at the veep’s request. And his suicide, if that’s what it was, seemed to confirm the public’s worst suppositions. Julian waved for the flight attendant and asked for his breakfast.
• • •
In Chicago, he was met by a car and driver and taken to the Ritz-Carlton, where a Secret Serviceman escorted him from the lobby to a suite on the top floor, then through a large living room to a smaller sitting room with a view through a large picture window that was all sky and lake, a flat, uninterrupted expanse of pale blue.
“Gentlemen,” he said on entering the room.
Four men, huddled around a coffee table covered with documents and newspapers, looked up at him, but only Harry Lightstone showed recognition.
“Julian, good morning,” he said wearily. “We were just talking about the suicide, if that’s what it was. It’s simply unbelievable. Terrible tragedy.”
He seemed genuinely saddened, which was almost sweet in a pathetic way, given that Harry had never met Victor Carron and that the election, which would be significantly impacted, in his favor, by the suicide, was less than a week away. It seemed highly unlikely that the vice president would resign, but he had been transformed from a political asset into a serious liability, sucking attention away from Nessin himself.
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