Margaret Truman's Allied in Danger

by Margaret Truman

  “I don’t know what to say,” Brixton said.

  It was Annabel who said, “What do you want Robert to do with this?”

  “I want my husband’s murder avenged,” Abiola said sternly, steel in her small voice. “I want his children to know that he didn’t die in vain. I want—”

  For the first time since they’d arrived Abiola Dimka broke down in a torrent of tears. Annabel went to her, knelt, and wrapped her arms about her. Brixton watched, speechless, moved, and angry at whoever had so brutally destroyed the dreams of this family. Once Abiola had pulled herself together, he said, “I’ll do everything I can to accomplish what you want, Mrs. Dimka.”

  “Thank you,” she said softly. “Ammon trusted you.” She paused. “I do, too.”

  “Have funeral plans been made?” Annabel asked after disengaging from Abiola.

  “In Nigeria. His family and mine would want that.”

  Annabel asked whether the Dimka family was safe in Nigeria considering the reason for his murder.

  “We aren’t afraid,” she answered.

  “What about the investigation into your husband’s murder and the arson?” Brixton asked. “Have the local police interviewed you?”

  Abiola nodded. “They’ve been very nice, very considerate.”

  “That’s good to hear,” said Brixton.

  He sensed they were outwearing their welcome and suggested that they leave.

  “Thank you for coming,” Abiola said.

  “When will you be leaving for Nigeria?” he asked.

  “There is much to be arranged. Hopefully in a few days.”

  “Travel safe,” Annabel said, and gave Abiola another hug.

  Abiola came to Brixton and embraced him. “Do right by my husband,” she said.

  “I’ll do everything I can,” he said.

  Once in the car Brixton vented his rage.

  “What’s with these Nigerians?” he asked. “What are they, made of steel? She’s just lost her husband and she takes the time to go to the bank, call me, asks me to come to where she’s living temporarily, her kids parceled out to friends, and thinks about how to honor her husband’s death.”

  “A remarkable woman. What will you do with what she gave you?” Annabel asked, indicating the envelope she held on her lap.

  “For now? Let’s go back and wait for Mac to return. I’d like for you and him to see what this evidence amounts to.”

  Brixton and Annabel had settled in Mac’s office and started to peruse what was in the envelope when he arrived.

  “What are you two conjuring up?” he asked through a laugh. “The overthrow of the government?”

  “The Nigerian government maybe,” Brixton said. He went on to recount their trip to Virginia and their meeting with Ammon Dimka’s widow.

  When Brixton and Annabel had finished, Mac said, “She must be quite a woman.”

  “She certainly is gutsy,” said Annabel.

  Brixton handed Mac a page he’d been reading. “Look at this, Mac.”

  Smith took the sheet and quickly perused it. “He’s laid out in this document how oil bunkering works in Nigeria,” he said. “I thought Dimka’s interest was in the Nigerian financial scams.”

  “It was,” Brixton said. “There’s a lot of documentation on that subject in what he left in this envelope. But he also had been accumulating the goods on how Nigerian crooks siphon off oil from the major refineries and sell it on the black market.” Brixton read further. “He also alludes to how some in Bright Horizons use muscle to keep people in check. Damn!” He brought his fist down on the arm of his chair. “How about this?”

  He handed the papers to Smith, his finger pointing to a name.

  “‘Agu Gwantam,’” Smith read aloud.

  “The infamous Agu Gwantam,” Brixton said, “the so-called warlord who Dimka told me about. He seems to be involved in everything.”

  The three of them continued rifling through the contents of the envelope Dimka had left behind. A few of the papers contained statistical information about the extent of oil bunkering in the Niger Delta and its impact on the Nigerian economy. Brixton cited one statistic. “The oil companies lose up to two hundred thousand barrels of crude oil every day through theft.”

  “Here’s one,” said Annabel. “It’s estimated that thirty thousand people in the delta are involved in stealing oil from the big oil companies. According to Mr. Dimka, most of it is sold by natives to foreign cartels, but some of it stays in the delta and is sold locally.”

  “How the hell do you steal that much oil every day?” Brixton asked.

  “I’ll have to do some boning up on the process,” Smith said.

  “Mr. Dimka certainly didn’t pull any punches in these pages,” Annabel said. “According to him, politicians, and even executives of the major oil companies, are involved in oil theft, taking bribes to look the other way. In some cases they even help the thieves.”

  “Total corruption,” Smith commented.

  “And I thought D.C. politicians were bad,” Brixton added.

  Smith sat back and exhaled. “The question is, Robert, what do you intend to do with all this information that his wife decided to share with you?”

  “I’m not sure,” Brixton said. “I’d like to take this stuff with me and read it carefully. There’s plenty to digest.”

  “By all means,” Smith said. “Let me know what conclusions you come to.”

  As Brixton started to go to his adjacent office for an hour of serious reading, Annabel asked him how Flo and her shop were doing.

  “Doing fine, Annabel. She’s about to head for L.A. for some fashion week celebration there. She’s excited about it. It’ll do her good to get away for a few days.”

  “Looks like we’ll be having a dinner guest for a few nights,” Annabel said lightly.

  “Count on it,” said Brixton.

  He secluded himself in his office to digest the copious material left by Dimka, and made notes. As he prepared to leave, Mac Smith looked in on him.

  “Making sense out of it?” Smith asked.

  “Yeah, I think so,” Brixton replied.

  “And?”

  “I think I owe something to Ammon Dimka’s wife, Mac. I want to do right by her.”

  Smith wished him a good night and left for an appointment, leaving Brixton with his thoughts about Abiola Dimka. He was deep into them when the phone rang. It was Flo calling from her clothing shop in Georgetown. She sounded upset.

  “Something wrong?” Brixton asked.

  “Yes, there is. I just received a threatening call.”

  “Somebody threatened you? Who?”

  “I don’t know. It was a man, He didn’t give his name. He had a deep voice.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that if I cared about my life I’d better get you to stop sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

  “‘Sticking my nose?’ Where am I sticking my nose?”

  “He wasn’t specific, Robert, but he mentioned Africa.”

  “What about Africa?”

  “He said—wait, I wrote it down—he said that you should butt out of African affairs.”

  Brixton sighed. “Mrs. Dimka,” he said flatly. “I just left her.”

  He explained how he had responded to Abiola Dimka’s call, and that Annabel Smith had accompanied him to their meeting. “Whoever these people are, they know about my connection with David Portland and the Dimka family. Obviously, they also know that you and I are a couple.”

  “That’s easy enough for anyone to find out.”

  “Why don’t you lock up shop and head home?”

  “I can’t. I have customers.”

  “It’s not worth selling a couple of dresses, Flo. These guys mean business. Look what they did to Dimka.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “Good.”

  “You be careful, too, Robert.”

  He assured her that he would be and the call was ended. He wan
ted to wave away the call she’d received as nothing but an empty threat.

  But he couldn’t. He knew better.

  He spent an additional hour in his office before deciding to call it a day and head for home. Mrs. Warden had already left, her desk spotless, pens and pencils lined up like well-trained soldiers, her flowered coffee cup immaculately washed and ready for the next day’s combination of organic tea, honey, and lemon juice. Brixton had to smile; while he would never feel close to his receptionist, he’d grown to admire her.

  He locked up the office and went downstairs to the underground parking garage where his Subaru was parked in a reserved spot. He unlocked the door, slid in behind the wheel, inserted the key into the ignition, and turned it. Nothing happened. It was dead. That was when he noticed that the hood was popped slightly open. Strange, he thought. That had never happened before.

  He got out, went to the front of the car, and felt through the opening for the latch that would allow him to fully raise the hood. He found it and used the metal rod to prop it open. Although he knew little about the mechanical workings of an automobile, he knew enough to note that the battery cables had been disconnected from the battery and flopped loosely into the engine compartment.

  He straightened and looked around the garage in search of someone, anyone, who might have removed the cables from the battery. He was alone. Whoever had done it was long gone.

  He mumbled four-letter words as he reconnected the cables, hoping that he’d attached the right ones to the proper terminals. Still cursing, and with greasy hands, he reentered the car and turned the key. It started with a roar, a welcome sound.

  He drove home, where he washed his hands and poured himself a drink, thinking all the while about the call that Flo had received. Her caller had told her to warn him to butt out of anything having to do with Africa, and his battery cables had obviously been disconnected to reinforce that message. Although it had been a minor inconvenience, he had every reason to believe that the next warning would be issued to him personally, perhaps the way it had been so brutally delivered to Ammon Dimka.

  CHAPTER

  37

  PORT HARCOURT, NIGERIA

  Sir Manford Penny, XCAL’s British chairman, settled in his first-class seat on an early morning British Airways flight from London to Lagos, Nigeria.

  He was not happy.

  He’d recently learned that the British High Commission in Lagos had requested that a team of auditors from London’s Serious Fraud Office of the Attorney General’s Office be dispatched to Nigeria to look into allegations of financial misconduct by XCAL in the Niger Delta. He’d pressed to learn more about what had prompted the audit but had come up against a bureaucratic stone wall. All he was told was that it involved the theft of oil from the company’s exploration and refining operations.

  This wouldn’t be the first British government inquiry into oil bunkering. Those probes had been limited to the loss of revenue suffered by British oil interests and finding ways to mitigate it; no allegation of fraud had been leveled against any individual. It was an accepted fact that millions of pounds each year were lost as a result of MEND and other groups’ cutting into the pipes, siphoning off what spouted from them, and selling the crude on the international black market, or refining it in makeshift facilities for local sale as diesel or kerosene.

  But this governmental intrusion sounded different to Penny, and potentially more troublesome. The auditors evidently wanted to examine whether some employees of the oil company might have financially benefited from it.

  Like Sir Manford Penny.

  He had quietly enjoyed a steady flow of money from Nigeria over the years in addition to his salary as the company’s UK chairman. This income was, of course, off the books, laundered through banks in the UK. Penny had been careful when setting up those accounts; they were labeled as income from land deals that his family had entered into many years ago. As far as the meticulous Manford Penny was concerned, no one could ever make the case that the funds in those accounts had come from his share of illegal oil bunkering, theft from the very company in which he held a leadership role.

  Penny viewed Nigeria as a cauldron of violence and disease; his lifestyle in London and trips to other European nations and to XCAL’s U.S. headquarters better reflected his genteel, civilized lifestyle, and he used any excuse to avoid travel to Nigeria. But after a troubling phone conversation with Max Soderman, XCAL’s chief operating officer in the Niger Delta, Penny decided that the trip was necessary.

  Soderman had been running XCAL’s Nigerian operations for nine years. He was a big, burly man with a loud voice, and a tendency to disparage Nigeria and Nigerians whenever he was in the company of equally prejudiced executives. German by birth, his parents had immigrated to the United States when he was an infant, settling in Oklahoma, where his father was employed by a local oil company. The young man earned a degree in geology from Oklahoma State University, and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Texas. His intelligence and outgoing personality propelled him through a succession of managerial jobs until being hired by XCAL to manage its stateside extracting operations. He would have happily stayed in that job had a nasty divorce not impacted his financial status, as well as souring his views of the American legal system. When the job of COO for XCAL in Nigeria opened, he applied and soon found himself in Port Harcourt in charge of the company’s sprawling, trouble-plagued extracting and refining efforts. The job came with a sizable salary and numerous perks, including a handsome home in the upscale town of Ikoyi.

  Penny’s phone conversation began with the two men’s contrasting styles—Soderman blustery and matter-of-fact, Penny falling back on his familiar strained pleasantness—“Cheerio, old chap, not to worry.” But Soderman didn’t sugarcoat his concern for what was happening. He said, “I think you’d better get here to Port Harcourt, Manford, and get here fast. Our private business arrangement might be in trouble, big trouble.”

  “Why don’t you come here to London, Max? I’m sure that you would enjoy a respite from Nigeria’s heat and humidity.”

  Soderman’s reply was a curt, “No! You’re the one with the most to lose, Manford. You get on a plane.”

  “All right,” Penny said, “but it will be a short visit. I’m overwhelmed with things back here in London.”

  Had the reason for the trip been official company business, Soderman would have been reluctant to make such demands of XCAL’s UK chairman. But this wasn’t company business. It was personal, pure and simple, and involved a business arrangement the men had entered into four years earlier.

  Penny’s flight to Lagos was uneventful. He took a liking to a British Airways flight attendant and tried to chat her up, but she would have none of it. Disgruntled, he deplaned and connected with an Arik Air flight to Port Harcourt International Airport, recently branded by an international passenger organization as “the world’s dirtiest and most corrupt.” He and other arriving passengers were herded into a tent lacking air-conditioning that had been erected next to the airport’s single terminal building. Penny had traveled with one oversized carry-on bag, which allowed him to skirt the chaotic baggage claim area. Once outside he spotted the company car that Soderman had dispatched for him, the driver a Niger Delta native with a pleasant, chatty demeanor. But Penny wasn’t looking for idle conversation. His mood matched the heat and humidity he faced when departing the airport. Among many things that Sir Manford Penny found unpleasant was sweating.

  “Thank God your air-conditioning is working,” he told Soderman when he arrived at the COO’s house and had been ushered in.

  “It doesn’t always,” Soderman said. “The Nigerians don’t know how to do anything right, including providing electricity. I had a gas generator installed right after I arrived in this hellhole, had to use it plenty of times. Nothing works in this goddamn place.”

  Penny was used to Soderman’s grousing about conditions in Nigeria and chalked it up to the sour
disposition of a perpetual malcontent, although he certainly understood. He wasn’t any fonder of the Niger Delta than his host.

  They deferred serious conversation during pre-dinner drinks and dinner, served by members of the household staff. As much as Penny disliked being there, he was grateful that they weren’t served typical Nigerian food. The last time he’d visited XCAL’s Nigerian operations he’d been served what he was told was called Nkwobi, cooked cow legs smothered in a thick sauce of chili peppers and peanut powder. It had taken him days for his delicate stomach to recover. Instead, Soderman had ordered that dinner consist of filet mignon, mashed potatoes, salads, fresh bread, and French merlot that he stocked in a basement wine cellar.

  They retired after dinner to the privacy of Soderman’s study.

  Dressed in his usual double-breasted blazer and gray slacks with a razor crease, Penny had at least surrendered to the sticky weather by removing his tie after dinner. Soderman had exchanged the suit he’d worn that day for meetings with Nigerian government officials for loose-fitting crinkled tan pants secured around his stomach with a drawstring, and a flowing Hawaiian shirt he’d bought while on holiday in Maui. Leather sandals flopped from large, calloused bare feet. His head was shaved; the stubble looked like a gray helmet.

  After hearing more complaints from Soderman about conditions in the Niger Delta, Penny said, “Perhaps we had better discuss what brings me here, Max. It’s obviously important or I wouldn’t have elected to leave the creature comforts of London for Port Harcourt.”

  “Creature comforts, huh, Manford? Don’t talk about creature comforts to me, pal.”

  Penny made a show of looking around the spacious, well-furnished room. “It appears to me,” he said, “that you aren’t lacking in creature comforts.”

  “As long as I stay inside this house. The minute I go outside I know I’m in a Third World country run by whores and savages. That’s assuming the AC even works. Let’s get down to business. What the hell is this fraud division of your Attorney General’s Office?”