by J M Hemmings
2
ABOUBAKAR
2nd September 2020. Stallions Bar, Beirut
Aboubakar handed one of his many fake identity documents to the bouncer, with a cheerful if somewhat plastic grin smeared across his broad visage. The monstrously muscular young man – a steroid abuser, Abou surmised – glanced at the card and nodded, indicating with a dismissive wave that he was satisfied.
‘Wrist, stamp,’ the bouncer grunted, automaton-like.
Aboubakar rolled up the sleeve of his silk shirt to expose his wrist, which was adorned with numerous gold and silver bracelets and beaded West African flair. After he got his stamp, he headed down the stairs into the club, and was hit by a wall of deep house music that rumbled his insides and rattled his brain like the passing of a speeding locomotive. Glancing at his own reflection in the mirror-finish chrome that bordered the downstairs doors, he saw looking back at him a portly Cameroonian with a shining bald pate and a wide, fine-featured face. Pounding bass vibrated the floor in seismic ripples beneath his feet, which were disproportionately small and almost delicate in construct. He got caught up in staring at his reflection and tugged at the lapels of his leather jacket, grinning with muted glee at the sparkling glint of the many rings that adorned his fingers.
Inside the pulsating belly of the club, green lasers parted the acrid, smoky air with geometric precision as multicoloured lights spun frenetically, anarchic overseers of the churn of chaos on the dancefloor. Sweaty, barely clothed bodies, male and female, flailed and gyrated in a broil of seething flesh, like a scene transplanted from Hieronymus Bosch’s Final Judgment of Man. Abou pushed his way through the revellers, moving with a quiet grace that belied his large frame. Before he could get to the bar, though, a slender young Lebanese man dressed in form-fitting clothes sidled up to him and stroked a flirtatious hand across his forearm. Abou locked his eyes into the man’s for a few moments, and then slowly looked him up and down, his features a deadpan mask. Abruptly, however, the corners of his mouth curled up into a lascivious smile.
‘Well, well, look at you, you little cutie,’ Abou cooed with a salacious grin, speaking fluent Arabic.
After coyly mirroring Abou’s smile, the young man discreetly tucked a napkin into Abou’s pocket and then slipped away, melting back into the rolling sea of bodies.
‘Backstage, now,’ were the only words on the napkin, scrawled in a hasty hand.
Abou made his way around the periphery of the dancefloor and then, after making sure that he wasn’t being watched, he ducked inside the curtained-off backstage area.
‘Mira,’ he said, immediately recognising the figure waiting in the shadows.
‘Hello Aboubakar. I took the liberty of purchasing a rum and coke for you. Double, yes?’
A petite middle-aged Arab woman, her features angular almost to the point of gauntness, attired in a dark business suit, stood up from the ratty sofa, greeting Abou with a politely extended hand. He took it, noting with a subtle shudder the cold clamminess of her palm.
‘Thank you. Are you sure we’re safe here?’ he asked, almost having to shout at full volume to make his voice heard above the thunderous din of the club.
The woman swept her shoulder-length hair out of her eyes, darkened with kohl, before replying.
‘We’re safe. The Huntsmen have eyes and ears in this city, but not in here. It’s true that the Huntsmen have connections all over the Lebanese underworld … but this club isn’t owned by gangsters. It’s off the radar, so to speak.’
Aboubakar craned his neck and peered with suspicion into the corners of the claustrophobic space and its impenetrable shadows; his eyes could perceive things in the gloom that human eyes could not.
‘Are you absolutely sure?’
‘Do you think I’d be here if it wasn’t safe?’
This response seemed to satisfy Aboubakar.
‘How goes the war, Mira?’ he asked.
‘Which one?’ she asked in a neutral tone, stiff-faced, both her eyes and her voice glacial.
‘The one just across the border; Syria. Or Yemen, or any other war you lot are involved in, take your pick.’
‘Ah, so not the War. Well, I’m not sure how much I want to share with you on this topic, Aboubakar, suffice to say that I have close contacts in the upper leadership of ISIL, who are working with myself and three other board members … and that my arms company has been doing very, very well since the Syrian conflict began. Ditto with Yemen, and other wars. In other news, though, you may be interested to know that something that has been lost for a very, very long time, something immensely important, may have been found … but I’m afraid I cannot give you any more details on that just yet.’
‘One of the lost Temples? One of the Mothers, alive?’ he asked, leaning forward, his eyes widening with surprise.
‘I cannot comment further on that matter.’
‘Ah you Huntsmen and your secrets … but in the end, business trumps all other concerns, always, yes?’
Mira was quick to retort, rather snappily.
‘A sentiment you yourself are familiar with, are you not?’
‘Touché, although I wouldn’t say that I’m perhaps as focused as you Huntsmen are. Anyway, let’s not beat about the bush, Mira. We are here to talk business, so let’s talk. I’ll come right out and say it: my main concern is the West African situation.’
‘That’s understandable. Your financial interests are at stake.’
He exhaled a long, protracted sigh, gazing at the ground before abruptly challenging her with a piercing stare.
‘I could lose millions, no, tens of millions of dollars,’ he murmured.
Mira held his gaze in silence for a few seconds, not a single muscle in her face moving.
‘You already have.’
Abou dropped his glass. It shattered on the floor between his feet, but the sound of it smashing was muted by the raging typhoon of deep house.
‘You … you promised that—,’
Mira was quick to cut him off, but there was neither a trace of apology nor any hint of sympathy in her tone.
‘I promised nothing, Aboubakar. I said that I would try to protect your interests. I did try, but I am only one member on a board of thirteen.’
Abou slammed his fist on the table that sat between them, his teeth gritted and the muscles in his neck bulging, the whites of his eyes bright white in the gloom.
‘Couldn’t you have tried harder?!’ he roared hoarsely.
Mira remained unmoved; Aboubakar may as well have been talking to a cardboard cutout.
‘The Board is already suspicious of me, and relentlessly pushing an agenda that is contrary to our overarching plans will do nothing but out me as a dissenter. The consequences would be beyond disastrous. You know this.’
Abou massaged his temples with trembling fingers as he stared blankly at the floor. His stubby fingers, moving in firm, rhythmic motions, were a panacea of helplessness, a kinetic embodiment of paralysing despair.
‘Then it is all gone.’ The bitter words emerged from between his lips like fat, writhing maggots bursting from a rotting corpse. ‘Everything that I have worked for, for the last sixty years … all gone. My cocoa plantations—’
‘And the surrounding rainforest, approximately fifty thousand acres of it,’ interrupted Mira. ‘Yes, all of this is about to become the property of the Zhong Lai Mineral Resource Corporation, one of the Huntsmen’s many subsidiaries.’
‘But the legal objections I filed with the government,’ Abou stammered, his voice tremulous with shock, ‘the human rights groups petitioning for the indigenous pygmies, the wildlife and environmental impact studies that indicated—’
Mira interrupted again, speaking in a somewhat weary tone; an almost mechanised, automated response.
‘We own your government, Aboubakar. It really doesn’t matter what the NGOs say, or how much they try to protest. We both know what the ultimate bottom line is.’
‘But, but you said, you said
if, if I gave your personal mining company limited rights to a small portion of my land, that—’
‘You’re not listening,’ she hissed, cracks of emotion finally appearing on the porcelain death mask that was her countenance. ‘I said that I would try. Can you get that through your skull?! Try. And I did try, I did everything I conceivably could. But what you have to understand is that the full capacity of the mineral wealth buried beneath those rainforests and your cocoa plantations is crucial to meeting the Huntsmen’s economic and manufacturing expansion goals over the next decade. Our factories in China need those minerals, every last ounce of them, and there is simply no getting around that. To meet the required growth targets, to boost manufacturing capacity, to expand into new markets and—’
Abou’s eyes blazed in the dark, catching the light cast from a UV lamp and taking on a preternatural glow as he growled out his anger.
‘Do you understand what this means?!’
‘I’m sorry that you’ve lost your—’
‘Not only for me, you selfish bitch!’ he bellowed gutturally. ‘Thousands of innocent people are going to lose their livelihoods! Families will be run off their ancestral lands and made destitute, every last wild animal in the area will be slaughtered, the ancient rain forest obliterated, and my employees, who you know are treated and paid better than any other plantation workers throughout the whole of West Africa—’
‘Some of them will be employed by Zhong Lai.’
‘A handful, nothing but a fucking handful out of hundreds! Don’t try to patronise me, don’t! “Some of them will be employed”, that’s absolute fucking bullshit! You’ll throw them all out so you can ship in your own workers from China! I’ve seen it all over Africa, don’t even bother trying to deny it! That is how this works, is it not?! God, you’re a bunch of vipers, a bunch of soulless fucking vipers!’
The brief cracks that had appeared in Mira’s countenance closed up and her expression of cool neutrality returned; Abou’s rage broke against her unflappable calm like torrential rain battering an unmoving cliff face.
‘Yes, that’s how it works.’
Abou curled his fists into tight, quivering balls.
‘And the handful of my people who will be employed by you can look forward to toiling like slaves, and this for a mere fraction of what I pay them, and after you vampires have sucked the land dry of its minerals, you’ll turf them out on their arses, won’t you?’
‘Yes.’
Aboubakar paused to dribble a string of dry, humourless chuckles from between his full lips before continuing.
‘Leaving them nothing but a poisoned, ruined desert of a landscape in which they can’t drink the water, can’t grow food, can’t even till the earth … In fact the only thing they can look forward to is contracting all manner of cancers and dying early, agonising deaths! Unless starvation gets them first, that is.’
‘That’s not my problem.’
‘We had a deal!’
‘I couldn’t honour it, and I’m sorry about that. There really was nothing I could do.’
Abou reached up and squeezed his fingers against his temples as he spoke, his words almost slurred, his tone soft … and defeated.
‘Obviously, I cannot uphold my end of the deal now,’ he murmured.
‘Even if you had been able to, my personal mining company has now been dissolved and absorbed into Zhong Lai. Your end of the deal couldn’t have happened anyway.’
‘What?!’
‘Listen, these are all very recent developments that I was pressured into by the board. I’m being closely watched, and all of my activity is being monitored. What’s more, I think that someone has tipped off one of Ma’s loyalist board members about my dealings with you and other neutral beastwalkers. I’m under investigation, Abou. So far they haven’t been able to conclusively prove that I’ve been liaising independently with non-Alliance beastwalkers, but the suspicion—’
Abou cackled haughtily, cutting her off.
‘Because we are all targets for your organisation,’ he snarled after his humourless laughter had faded out. ‘The only good beastwalker is a dead beastwalker, isn’t that your policy?’
‘Yes, officially, but as you know—’
‘You’re different, right?!’ he sneered. ‘You can see the value in working with us, not against us!’ Aboubakar paused his tirade to spit with disgust onto the sticky floor before continuing. ‘Fucking right! Bah! Never, ever trust a Huntsman … or a Huntswoman!’
A shadow now crept across Mira’s features, spreading its darkness like squid ink billowing through water.
‘You don’t know, Aboubakar. No, you don’t know half of it, even. There are other forces at work here. More potent forces than you can possibly imagine. And I have started to understand the power of these new forces … a power that, if unleashed, could…’ She paused here, gazing into the distance, entirely absent for a few moments. ‘I’ll say no more,’ she eventually said.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘I’ve said too much already,’ she hissed. ‘You only get to know what I need you to know.’
Abou smiled sourly and shook his head.
‘Vipers. Vipers, the lot of you! How can I trust a single drop of poison that oozes from those lips of yours, Mira?! How?!’
‘You have to trust me, because I’m all you’ve got right now. The Alliance project is currently hanging by a thread. Myself and two other Board members are the only ones keeping it alive.’
‘Wonderful! You’re keeping it so that your friends will just exterminate some of us then. I should be kissing your feet with gratitude, shouldn’t I?’
‘Stop being so obtuse!’ Mira shouted, finally allowing a surge of unchecked emotion to crack through her granite-smooth façade of calm. ‘You know what position I’m in! Damn you, I’m trying to create at least a semblance of a win-win situation here! If you really were as magnanimous and upright as you’re pretending to be, you’d be fighting with the Rebels against us! But you’re not, are you? You’re looking out for your own interests, not fighting in a war that cannot possibly be won.’
Aboubakar glared at her, his wrath simmering in silence, but he realised that he could not counter what she was saying.
‘Now listen to me for a moment, Aboubakar, and I mean really listen. While I did unfortunately fail to save your land and cocoa company, I can offer you a deal that won’t leave you completely empty-handed. The Alliance is planning to offer you their protection, as well as limited shares in the Zhong Lai mining project that will take place on your former land … if you can help us.’
‘Protection? I haven’t been actively targeted by Huntsmen for decades. Why do I need protection now?’
‘Trust me, you’ll need it. Things are going to change very soon. Since the Huntsmen have been so successful in crushing the Rebels over the past century, to the point that they’re hardly even considered a major threat anymore, the board has decided to set its sights back on the remaining neutral beastwalkers. So, full-scale operations are going to be launched against any of you who are not Alliance members. Rebel and neutral alike, you’re all going to be actively targeted for extermination. As you said, the Huntsmen’s policy has always been one of zero tolerance for the existence of any beastwalker. However, those of us who supported the Alliance understand the value of making use of certain key beastwalkers in furthering our goals – goals which are sometimes entirely independent of the Huntsmen organisation – and we have decided that you will be a most useful ally.’
‘When were they planning on approaching me?’
‘Officially, next week. Now Abou, I must point out to you just how important this is. The whole point of the Alliance project was to both use beastwalkers’ abilities to combat the Rebels, and to diminish beastwalker power by dividing you all, and turning you against your own kind. At this point in time, the board is not convinced that the success of the project, or more precisely, the lack thereof in recent years, can justif
y keeping it afloat.’
Abou shook his head, looking perturbed.
‘The aid of the Alliance was what enabled you to finally crush the Eastern Council. That was possibly the greatest blow struck by you Huntsmen yet in the entire history of the War, your finest victory. That single blow almost ended the War there and then.’
‘A victory we will not forget … but nonetheless, what remains important was that it was not the end of the War. Remember, a handful of members of the Eastern Council survived the cleansing, while others remained unaccounted for and may still be alive. And we know at least that one carried with him the key to the Eastern Council’s powers. As long as that power remains accessible in the world, it is a threat to us.’
Abou nodded.
‘William Gisborne … the ever-present thorn in your side.’
‘The Alliance has reached the end of its usefulness to us—’
‘Because,’ Abou said, ‘it has failed to eliminate Gisborne, and thus the latent threat of the Eastern Council’s power still lives. And those long-lost temples, which might still contain living Mothers, with all of their power … he may know where they are.’
She nodded, clasping her hands together as she answered him.
‘Precisely. While that little ember of power survives, as insignificant as it is in Gisborne’s puny hands, the threat remains. Remember, an all-consuming fire needs but a single spark to ignite it, and Gisborne holds that spark in his fingertips … especially if, in addition to his knowledge of the Council’s secrets, he knows where the lost Mothers are, and how to awaken them. But there is not only that to consider, there is also the new power. A rising power that will sow seeds of chaos. A power that I wish to ally myself with, because I have seen its potential. And if I could take what remains of the Eastern Council’s power, add the combined strength of the Alliance members loyal to me, and meld it with this new, dark power…’