Holliday turned on his heel and watched as all four of the armed children guarding them were also struck, each one more than once, the bright white cones appearing in faces, backs, chests and bellies.
The effects of the darts were instantaneous: paralysis, choking, convulsions, a strychnine-like arching of the back, foaming at the mouth and then complete loss of sphincter control followed almost immediately by death.
Holliday, Peggy, Rafi and Eddie were the only people left untouched. Out on the river, the dugout drifted. The boy who had torched the sailboats was draped over the gunwale as two crocodiles fought to pull his corpse into the water.
The sailboats themselves were smoldering hulks, their occupants either burned to death or dragged down to the muddy bottom by the giant reptiles. The whole thing had been silent and from the first dart in Salamango’s eye to the last child’s death had taken only seconds. Not a word had been said; not a shot had been fired.
With her camera Peggy began taking photos of the bizarre killing ground all around them. Suddenly she stopped; her hands were shaking too hard. Holliday followed her stunned gaze. Men began to appear from the jungle, scores of them, all dressed in ornately folded linen loincloths that looked like pleated kilts and sandals, their thongs crisscrossed up to the knee in a familiar design. They carried five- or six-foot-long bamboo tubes in their hands and short quivers on their belts for the long, cone-ended darts.
Some of the men wore crested wooden helmets with leather cheek flaps, the crests made from some kind of stiffened animal-hair bristle, while others wore simple linen coifs to match the kiltlike loincloths. The strangest thing about them was their color-a tanned light brown like heavily creamed coffee. Their hair was dark and straight, their features definitely Caucasian rather than negroid. Most startling of all, Holliday could see that some of the oddly dressed men had blue eyes.
“Umufo omhloshana,” Eddie said quietly.
Holliday nodded. “The Pale Strangers.”
22
There was a knock on Sir James Matheson’s office door.
“Enter!”
Allen Faulkener stepped into the lavish office and stood in front of Matheson’s desk. “Leonhard Euhler is dead,” he said stiffly.
“Christ!” Matheson said. “How?”
“Some sort of homosexual tryst, as far as the Swiss police are concerned. Love letters, suicide note.”
Matheson sat rigidly behind his desk, palms spread on its smooth empty surface. He thought for a moment, then leaned down, pulled open the humidor drawer of the desk and took out a Romeo y Julieta Short Churchill Robusto.
He closed the drawer carefully, then took a gold Dunhill cutter-punch combination out of his waistcoat pocket and prepared the cigar for smoking. He sat back in his chair and lit the cigar with a matching Dunhill lighter, all the while trying to maintain his composure in front of Faulkener. It didn’t do to let the hired help see the master afraid, and for the first time in a long time that was exactly what Sir James Matheson was-afraid.
Matheson wasn’t much of a believer in luck or happenstance. Whatever evidence the Swiss police had in hand he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that Euhler would pick this particular moment to snuff out his lights for some idiotic love affair. He could sense the first small cracks in his plan, but if his intuition was right, who was responsible, and how did he stop the cracks from getting worse?
“No signs of foul play?”
“Apparently not. Pills, the love letters, as I mentioned. The man who wrote the letters died in a car accident.”
“Recently?”
“Six years ago.”
Why would a man, poof or not, kill himself over the death of a lover six years ago? It was making less and less sense. Everything was pointing to the Kolingba operation.
“I’ll want to see the autopsy report, the police file and any surveillance tapes that were made.”
“I’ve already checked, Sir James. There were no cameras at his residence but there are interior and exterior cameras at the bank.”
“Speak to Herr Gesler personally; tell him that since Euhler was handling some delicate business for us I would very much appreciate receiving copies of the tapes as soon as possible. If he balks, lean on him a little; remind him of the dossier on his personal affairs that is in our possession. Get the tapes for the day before the man’s death and for the day after.” Matheson paused. “He was supposed to get the proxies on the mining company you found; did he do so?”
“Not that I am aware of, Sir James.”
No, of course not; there’d be no point in killing him if the proxies had been exchanged. Someone else was trying to get them. But who? Nagoupande? He didn’t have the brains of a gnat, and Matheson seriously doubted that the man would be able to imagine such a conspiracy, let alone orchestrate it.
Kolingba was probably incapable as well, but his personal Rasputin, this Oliver Gash, might, although he doubted it somehow; Gash’s dossier portrayed him as a criminal with a criminal’s shrewdness and without the real sophistication to manage a massive short-selling stock fraud. It simply wasn’t his thing. He took another puff on the cigar, enjoying its rich, sweet flavor for a few brief seconds. Time to get down to brass tacks. The proxies.
“Find out the position of the proxies. If Euhler did not have them signed you will go to British Columbia yourself and obtain them. I have copies here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have we heard from Harris and Mrs. Sinclair’s hooligans in Africa?”
“No, sir. Not a word.”
“Then presume that he’s been wiped off the slate and that Holliday and his archaeologist friend are still at large. We’re looking at far too much media exposure if they’re allowed to survive. Find someone better than Harris to stop them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How much longer for our Austrian friend Lanz?”
“The new moon is next week.”
“His minders are keeping an eye on him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, get me those tapes and find out about the proxies. Without them I might as well be investing in a dustbin full of ashes.”
“Yes, sir.” Faulkener left the room.
Matheson sat back in his chair. He was breaking half the securities and exchange laws in this country and any others where he expected to trade Silver Brand Mining, and if he was caught at it they’d put him behind bars for the rest of his life. His financial crimes made Bernie Madoff look like an amateur. On top of that he could be charged with conspiring to commit murder both before and after the fact, not to mention toppling a foreign head of state and bribing his replacement. To make things worse it now looked like there was some mysterious competitor for Kukuanaland’s spoils.
His smile widened and he pulled heartily on the stubby little Churchill Robusto. He hadn’t been this sick with fear and this excited since he’d lost his virginity to his father’s mistress at the age of fourteen. He took the sweet-tasting cigar out of his mouth and blew a plume of aromatic smoke toward the ornate plaster ceiling of his office. These were the moments a man lived for!
A single figure stepped out of the jungle, his face covered by an ornate wooden mask, its edges trimmed with stiffened gold rattan like a lion’s mane, a round cockerel crest topped with rigid bristle, bloodred like that of a helmet worn by a Roman centurion.
The red wooden eyes of the face bulged and the mouth was a boxy square, wooden bars where the teeth should be, much like a gladiator’s protective head covering. He wore the same white cloth kilt as the others, complete with a short quiver full of darts, but this man’s skin was coal black. His feet were covered in heavy sandals, leather strips crisscrossed almost to his knees.
In one hand he carried one of the long blowgun tubes and in his right hand he carried something very much like the crook and flail of an Egyptian pharaoh: sacred signs of power, divinity and kingship. Like the scepters found in King Tutankhamen’s arms, these were also solid gold.
A heavy gold arm ring was set with enormous uncut diamonds and emeralds.
As he approached Holliday and the others the man in the ornate mask slipped the gold flail and crook into the waistband of his kilt and raised his hand to remove the mask. As he did so one of the lighter-skinned men stepped forward, head bowed, and took the mask from him almost reverentially. Like the flail and crook, the mask, too, was clearly some sign of high office.
The face of the man, now unmasked, was dark eyed and intelligent. He smiled, and as he did so Holliday could see an old-fashioned silver amalgam filling in his left bicuspid. Whoever he was, this man was no jungle savage.
He stopped in front of Holliday and extended his hand. “Good afternoon, Colonel Holliday, my name is Dr. Amobe Barthelemy Limbani. Perhaps you could introduce me to your friends.”
23
Captain Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre’s experience of the United States was limited to a fourteen-day package holiday to Miami he took out of simple curiosity one August. His experience of Canada and Vancouver amounted to even less: a few satellite TV interviews he’d seen shot on rainy city streets during the recent Winter Olympics.
Getting off the Air Canada 747 he was pleasantly surprised to find a modern, clean and reasonably efficient airport terminal. The customs agents, while obviously naive about the ways of the world, were at least polite, which was a step up from the uniformed gorillas he’d dealt with at Miami International.
He had purchased a Vancouver travel guide during the brief layover in Paris, and picked an appropriately lavish downtown Vancouver hotel in case his plan B required taking the elderly ladies out for tea. He booked a suite online using one of Euhler’s credit cards, so when he picked up a taxi outside the arrivals terminal he simply told driver, “Hotel Vancouver.”
As he left the airport it quickly became apparent that Vancouver was very much a city of water and bridges. The airport itself was on an island in a river delta, and on his left he could see the Pacific Ocean.
They traveled down Granville Street, a wide boulevard lined with pink-and-white blossoming cherry trees. There were mountains in the distance, cloaked in evergreens, and even more water as they passed over something called False Creek that seemed to be some sort of tourist shopping attraction.
Within fifteen minutes of leaving the airport the taxi arrived at the Hotel Vancouver. It was a city block-sized structure built like a French chateau, with a distinctive copper roof, long since gone green with age and the elements. He signed in using one of Euhler’s credit cards again. Unlike most European hotels, there was no requirement to hand over or even show a passport, and no one seemed to care that a black man who spoke English with a decidedly French accent would have such an obviously Germanic name as Euhler. Saint-Sylvestre smiled.
Back in the Cold War days, and even now, Canadian passports were the document of choice among intelligence agencies, since they offered visa-free entry into 157 countries and visa on arrival for most others. In the sixties it was said that there were more spies entering the United States on shuttle flights from Ottawa and Toronto than there were ordinary passengers, and even as late as 1997 the Mossad used Canadian passports in their botched assassination attempt on Khaled Mashal, the infamous Hamas leader. Very naive, these Canadians, Saint-Sylvestre thought for the second time that day.
An aging busboy took his suitcase up to the small suite he’d booked and he gave the man a five-dollar tip from the multicolored wad he’d changed his Swiss francs into before leaving the airport.
The suite was beige, conservative and came with all the bells and whistles, including big-screen TVs, Wi-Fi, a jet tub and bathrobes. Like advertisements in the Sunday New York Times for four-thousand-dollar A.P.O. Jeans and thirty-thousand-dollar purses from Marc Jacobs, this was the kind of luxury that provided the seeds of revolution to the masses, something that his esteemed superior, General Solomon Kolingba, with his bumblebee Range Rovers, his diamond-encrusted Rolex President and his three-thousand-dollar Dolce amp; Gabbana sunglasses, seemed to have forgotten.
And now, it seemed, his forgetfulness was catching up with him. Sadly, the fat, bullet-headed president of Kukuanaland was not the Robin Hood he’d pretended to be at first. The wealth he earned by the criminal enterprises he oversaw with Gash rarely went much farther than the garrison walls in Fourandao or beyond the front doors of the bank directly below Saint-Sylvestre’s offices. Certainly none of it reached the impoverished people of the country.
Unlike the policeman, General Kolingba was not a reader of history, nor a reader of anything at all, for that matter, and was unaware of a truism that most high school history teachers and every overthrown dictator in the world could tell you: he who lived by the coup d’etat had a very good chance of dying by it.
There were several restaurants within the hotel and an extensive room service menu, so, antirevolutionary or not, Saint-Sylvestre ordered himself a breakfast of freshly squeezed orange juice, cream cheese on a bagel with British Columbia smoked salmon, a breakfast steak frites with a perfectly fried egg on the top and a thermos of Viennese coffee. He had a quick shower, dressed himself in the fluffy white robe and was just settling in with a complimentary copy of the Globe and Mail, Canada’s newspaper of record, when the food arrived. He ate heartily and plotted out the day ahead.
By eleven he was ready to begin. A quick check of the local telephone directory revealed that the Brocklebank sisters lived on a street simply called the Crescent in a district of Vancouver known as Shaughnessy. He spent twenty minutes in the hotel’s business center Internet kiosk on the lower-lobby floor and discovered that the Brocklebanks were a respectable old Vancouver family with the requisite skeletons in the closet, including a huge silver mine that had gone bust in the 1920s after A. G. Brocklebank, the sisters’ grandfather, had overleveraged himself, the bust virtually cleaning him out.
P. T. Brocklebank, A.G.’s son and the sisters’ father, had married into a huge sugar fortune, but the marriage turned sour when his heiress wife discovered that he was not only having an affair with her sister’s husband but had also embezzled millions from the family business to squander on the Standard Stock and Mining Exchange in Toronto.
The scandal in Vancouver was enormous, but womanizer, embezzler and poor businessman he may have been, he did love his daughters and had made them the beneficiaries of an extremely large life insurance policy well before he “accidentally” drove his wife’s rather swank 1936 Packard V12 Convertible Coupe over the two-hundred-foot-high cliffs at what was now Wreck Beach near the Point Grey Campus of the University of British Columbia.
Since the insurance company could not prove suicide or inebriation, they had no choice but to pay off the claim, including the double-indemnity clause. The sisters, who were still living in the original Brocklebank mansion on the Crescent, were suddenly wealthy again.
Wisely consulting lawyers and bankers, the sisters had stayed wealthy ever since. Neither had married and there were no heirs or assigns. Upon their deaths the Brocklebank estate would become the property of the University Women’s Club of Vancouver, of which they had been active members after their graduation from McGill extension college in Victoria more than half a century ago.
Neither woman had ever worked, although both were longtime volunteers for various women’s causes. For no good reason in particular, Betty was prochoice and Margie was antiabortion; Betty was a theoretical Marxist while Margie was an enthusiastic supporter of monopoly capitalism.
Saint-Sylvestre dialed the phone number he had found in the directory and after seven rings a small, slightly distressed-sounding woman’s voice answered.
“Yes?”
The voice was thin, brittle and quavering: an elderly woman who received few calls and when she did get them they were usually bearing bad news. He could imagine a little old lady in a housedress, sitting in a hallway filled with dusty oil paintings of old family members and lit by low-wattage bulbs to save on the electricity bill.
“Miss
Brocklebank?” Saint-Sylvestre replied, trying to keep his voice as unthreatening as possible.
“This is Betty Brocklebank; who is speaking, please?”
Saint-Sylvestre was ready for the question. “My name is Wolfgang Gesler, Miss Brocklebank. I represent the Gesler Bank of Aarau, Switzerland. I am here in your beautiful city on behalf of my father, Herr. . Mr. Horst Gesler, the president of the bank. This is concerning the disposition of your stock in the Silver Brand Mining Company, of which you and your sister are the majority shareholders.”
“Now, isn’t that strange,” answered Betty Brocklebank. “We had a telephone call from a representative of your bank only yesterday.” Her voice brightened. “He’s picking us up in a limousine and taking us to the Sylvia for tea this afternoon to discuss the situation.”
Shit! Saint-Sylvestre thought. It hadn’t occurred to him that Matheson’s people would get to the sisters first.
“No, no, it’s not strange at all, Miss Brocklebank,” said Saint-Sylvestre, trying to put a laugh in his voice and only barely succeeding. “My father mentioned that the business of your shares was important enough to require two representatives from the bank. We seem to have gotten our wires crossed, yes?”
“Apparently,” said Betty Brocklebank.
“I wonder if you could tell me which of our people he sent along to help me out?”
“A Mr. Euhler,” said the Brocklebank sister. “If that’s how you pronounce it.”
“Your pronunciation is excellent, Miss Brocklebank,” soothed Saint-Sylvestre. “And Leonhard was an excellent choice, a very good man. Did he leave a telephone number, by any chance? I’d feel a bit of a fool if I had to phone my father and ask.”
“He’s staying at the Hotel Georgia, room eleven twenty-four. I think they call it the Rosewood Georgia or the Georgia Rosewood now. Margie and I rarely get out these days, you see. Frankly she’s gone a bit dotty, if you ask me. I’m afraid I spend most of my time picking up after her and reminding her that her precious Siamese cat died years ago. . if you know what I mean. Margie can be something of a trial.” She pronounced her sister’s name oddly, with a hard G so that it came out Mar-ghee.
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