Savage (Jack Sigler / Chess Team)

by Jeremy Robinson

  He was groping for the right word, when a paunchy but well-dressed middle-aged man seemed to materialize beside the reception desk. “Did I hear correctly? Are you Mr. Joseph Mulamba?” The man did not wait for a reply, but reached out and began vigorously pumping Mulamba’s hand. “Jonathan Grigsby, sir. Assistant Director of the RGS. This is a rare and unexpected honor, sir. I wish that you would have phoned ahead so that we could arrange a more fitting reception.”

  “Mr. Woodhouse advised me not to publish my itinerary.”

  “Mr. Wood—ah, your bodyguard, of course. Well, it’s no matter.” He made a shooing gesture to the receptionist, who quickly surrendered his desk. “The full resources of the Society are at your disposal, sir.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Grigsby. I wish to see the papers of Henry Morton Stanley.”

  “Of course,” beamed Grigsby. “We have a full collection of all his published writings in our digital archive. You are welcome to use one of the computers in the reading room, or if you like, I will arrange for you to have full access to the archive off-site so that you can peruse the information at you leisure.”

  “Forgive me, Mr. Grigsby, but I am not speaking of the published works. I would like to see Stanley’s original diaries.”

  Grigsby’s enthusiasm slipped a notch. “Ah, well let me see what we have. You do know that most of Sir Henry’s journals are housed at the Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa?”

  “I was not aware of that.” Mulamba frowned. “The portion I wish to read relates to the search for Dr. David Livingstone. Would that be in your collection?”

  “The original?” A crease appeared in Grigsby’s forehead. He seated himself at the terminal and began tapping on the keyboard. Minutes passed in an uncomfortable silence, and at one point, Woodhouse caught Mulamba’s eye and tapped his watch meaningfully. We’ve been here too long.

  Woodhouse was not merely being paranoid. While the newly elected president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was popular with most of his countrymen, his bold vision for the future of his nation—and for all of Central Africa—was not embraced by all. He had enemies, a small but highly motivated minority of his countrymen, who feared that his promised reforms would somehow undermine their wealth and power.

  Ironically, he felt much safer here, abroad with just two personal protection agents, than he did in the Palais de la Nation, his office in Kinshasa, where he would be surrounded by soldiers and bodyguards, any one of whom might secretly be plotting his assassination.

  “Ah,” announced Grigsby. “The original diaries containing his record of the search for Livingstone are in the collection in Belgium, but we do have scans of the document in our archives.”

  “What about the missing pages?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Stanley removed several pages from his diary,” Mulamba explained. “Including the entries where he described the actual meeting with Livingstone. Do you have those pages?”

  “Well, no. As you’ve said, those are…well…rather missing.”

  Mulamba sagged in defeat. “I had hoped that perhaps those pages would have found their way into your collection.”

  “Sadly, no. If they still exist, they might be in the museum in Belgium. They aren’t on record, but perhaps they were catalogued incorrectly.”

  “Oui. Yes, that is a possibility worth exploring. Thank you, Mr. Grigsby.” Mulamba extended a hand, which Grigsby shook, and then Woodhouse was guiding the president back toward the exit. The bodyguard ducked his head out to check with his counterpart, and then held the door open for Mulamba.

  The two bodyguards bracketed him for the short walk back to the SUV. Even though the vehicle had not been out of his sight the entire time, Clarke did a quick walk around the exterior, checking to verify that no one had tampered with it. When he finally gave the all clear, Woodhouse opened the rear door and gestured for Mulamba to get in.

  “Thank you, Ian. I apologize for wasting your time.”

  The bodyguard smiled. “As long as your checks cash, my time is yours to—”

  Woodhouse’s head suddenly split open like a ripe melon, splattering blood, bone chips and brain matter all over the interior of the SUV.

  Mulamba was too stunned to even move. He was no stranger to violence of this sort. He had witnessed countless atrocities during his childhood. Yet this was different. This wasn’t a border village or a back alley in Kisangani. It was London. This was the civilized world. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen here.

  Woodhouse fell onto the floorboard and then slid back onto the sidewalk, as if his bones had turned to liquid. From the corner of his eye, Mulamba saw Clarke drop, similarly stricken. It occurred to Mulamba that he ought to pull the door shut and engage the locks. That would be enough. He would be safe inside the armored vehicle, safe from whoever had killed his bodyguard, but before he could move, a figure in a red hooded sweatshirt thrust his head and shoulders into the vehicle and brandished a pistol.

  “Don’t move,” the hooded man warned. “Just be cool and you’ll live.”

  Mulamba managed a weak nod. The man got in and pulled the door shut. Another similarly attired man opened the front door and slid into the driver’s seat, and without saying a word started the engine.

  As the SUV pulled away, continuing down Kensington Gore, Mulamba barely noticed the scenery passing by.

  5

  The George Bush Center for Intelligence, Langley, Virginia

  Domenick Boucher sat back in his chair and let his gaze sweep around his office. The room had a comfortable familiarity to it. Even though much of his working day was spent on the move—visiting various directorate heads and their personnel, leading briefings in the conference rooms and the crisis center, shuttling back and forth between the White House, the Capitol, the Pentagon and other destinations throughout Washington—this space was his. It was, in every sense save the literal, home.

  Boucher had occupied this office, and held the title of Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, for nine years, which meant he had been leading the organization longer than anyone in its sixty-six years of operation. That was longer even than the legendary Allan Dulles, who had overseen some of the most dramatic and controversial intelligence operations in the nation’s history, culminating in the disastrous Bay of Pigs incident. Boucher would not have quite such a notorious legacy.

  He had been thinking a lot about his legacy lately, ever since announcing his plans to retire.

  Although he would not formally leave his post until the end of the month, most of the day-to-day operations were already being overseen by his interim successor, Danielle Rudin, the woman who would hold the job of acting D/CIA until the Senate approved President Chambers’s pick for the job. Given the way Washington was functioning lately, that might be a long process. But politics were no longer Boucher’s concern. He was merely a figurehead now, a placeholder.

  It was a rare thing indeed for someone to hold an appointed post for so many years. Most agency directors lasted a year or two at most. Some were brought down by scandal. A few had chosen to fall on their swords—figuratively speaking—taking the blame for bad decisions made higher up the food chain. Most, however, came and went as administrations changed. Boucher had been appointed by Tom Duncan shortly after his election. When Duncan had been forced to resign from office late in his second term, Boucher had been one of the few appointees from the previous administration to keep his job, owing in no small part to his perceived role as the whistle-blower who had brought Duncan down.

  No one knew, no one could ever know, that the president’s fall from grace had been carefully orchestrated by Duncan himself, along with Boucher’s help, to save the country, and indeed the entire planet, from a much greater threat.

  When the scandal had finally slipped from the headlines, Boucher had been prepared to leave office as well, but the newly sworn President Chambers had implored him to stay, at least through the next election cycle. Oddly enou
gh, it had not been Chambers’s pleas that had prompted Boucher to stay, but rather the debt he owed Tom Duncan. For although Duncan had resigned from office in disgrace and slipped out of the public eye, he had not for one second forsaken his oath to protect and defend America from all enemies. Duncan needed a friend in the administration, and Boucher was that man.

  Now, more than two years into Chambers’s first full term in office, Boucher felt the time was right to shuffle off the stage, but it was going to be a big change. It was as if there was a countdown clock running in the corner of his vision wherever he looked, ticking down the time remaining before he wouldn’t ride in the elevator, sit in his chair or visit with his secretary. He felt like a bright orange leaf on a tree branch in autumn, afraid to let go, but eager to see where the wind would take him.

  The hum of an incoming phone call stirred him out of his musings. A picture of the person calling was displayed on the screen of his smart phone. It was a very familiar picture, as it was identical to the framed portrait hanging on the office wall. Boucher answered before it could ring a second time.

  “Good morning, Mr. President.”

  “Domenick, hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.” Chambers’s voice sounded weary, but that was a chronic condition for men who sat behind the Resolute Desk.

  “Mr. President, for the rest of the month, there are no bad times for you to call me. Next month? Well now, that’s a different story.” Boucher tried to keep his tone light, though in fact the call had him worried. The president wasn’t the sort of person to call out of the blue and shoot the breeze. If he was calling the Director of the CIA, then it was because he needed something from the agency—needed it urgently. Also, Chambers knew that Boucher had handed over most of his duties to Rudin. That meant the president wanted something that the designated interim director could not provide.

  “Glad to hear it.” It wasn’t a platitude. The president actually sounded reassured by the promise. “Do you think you could come by the office? Say, in an hour?”

  It wasn’t really a question. “I’ll be there, sir.”

  The president had left instructions with Stewart Hulce, his Chief of Staff, to have Boucher brought to his informal office in the study adjoining the Oval Office. Because he controlled access to the president, the White House Chief of Staff was one of the most powerful positions in the government, and Hulce took both his responsibilities and his privileges as gatekeeper very seriously. His expression indicated that he wasn’t at all pleased by this unscheduled meeting between his boss and the outgoing head of the CIA. He was even unhappier when Chambers asked him to leave them alone, but he slunk from the room without protest.

  The president sank into his chair, gesturing for Boucher to sit as well. Then he skipped the customary exchange of pleasantries and got right to the point. “Have you been following this business in Africa?”

  Despite having voluntarily side-lined himself, Boucher had not completely disengaged from day-to-day operations. He read and annotated the daily intelligence brief before it was forwarded to the White House, so he knew exactly what the president meant.

  Approximately twenty-one hours earlier, Joseph Mulamba, the newly elected president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo—not to be confused, Boucher had pointed out in the margins of the paper, with the neighboring Republic of Congo—had been abducted off a London street while on a state visit. The police had no leads and no knowledge of whether Mulamba was even still alive. Within a few hours of the incident, General Patrice Velle, the chief of the Congolese Army, had marshaled his troops in the eastern city of Kisangani and declared himself the acting president. The cities of the DRC were on a knife’s edge and poised to slip into chaos. This was actually a better state of affairs than what was happening in the eastern provinces, where the smoldering coals of ancient tribal feuds were being fanned into a fresh wave of ethnic violence. Further complicating matters, several of the stateless guerilla armies that roamed the Congo rain forest—really nothing more than well-armed criminal gangs made up of legions of indoctrinated child soldiers—were swarming out of the jungle, attacking rural villages and outposts.

  Boucher let out a soft sigh. This was the kind of stuff he wouldn’t miss at all. “I am, sir. I believe I added a footnote or two to the brief.”

  “Is there anything we can do about it?”

  The question caught Boucher off guard. “Sir?”

  Chambers drew in a breath. “You were there, at CIA, during the Clinton administration, weren’t you Domenick?”

  “Yes sir.” Back then, he’d been a senior operations officer. It was hard to believe he’d come so far in such a short time.

  “Do you know what Clinton said was the biggest regret of his presidency? I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t that business with the intern and the cigar.”

  Even if he hadn’t known the answer, Boucher would have been able to guess from the context. “Rwanda.”

  “We sat on our hands and kicked our heels, and a million people were slaughtered.”

  Boucher didn’t respond. He understood, better than most, the sort of horrors that were loose in the world. He also understood how political realities could get in the way of the most honorable intentions.

  Just six months before the events in Rwanda, an attempt by the US government to intervene in a similar humanitarian crisis in Somalia had led to a two-day long battle, in which two Blackhawk helicopters were shot down, eighteen American soldiers were killed and one was taken prisoner. The bodies of the slain were desecrated and dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. The images of these atrocities were dutifully recorded and broadcast by the news media, and many Americans began to publicly question why their sons were getting killed trying to save a bunch of ungrateful savages. With the bitter taste of that disaster still in its mouth, the administration had all but ignored the unfolding genocide in Rwanda, and innocent people had died.

  Unfortunately, twenty years and two wars later, the attitude of the American public remained largely the same, especially with respect to Africa. Their antipathy was understandable. Despite numerous humanitarian missions and billions of dollars in foreign aid packages, nothing ever seemed to change.

  Chambers regarded Boucher from across the desk for several long seconds. Finally, it was he that broke the uncomfortable silence. “You know something, Domenick? You’re the first person I’ve talked to who didn’t have a ready excuse for our failure.”

  Boucher spread his hands. “I’m sure you’ve already heard all the reasons why we didn’t do more, and why we probably shouldn’t get involved the next time it happens. From a pragmatic viewpoint, they are perfectly correct reasons.”

  “Pragmatically speaking,” said the president. “It always comes back to that. My opponents in Congress say that until we can put our own house in order, we’ve got no business trying to help the Third World.”

  Boucher winced at the dated term. ‘Third World’ was a holdover of the Cold War era, when nations were divided into ‘worlds’ based on how they fit into the global chess game between the superpowers. The Western nations were the First World, the Communist powers were the Second and the developing nations of Asia, Africa and Central America, who were pawns in the struggle, were the Third World. Despite the largely political definitions, ‘Third World’ had become synonymous with poverty, squalor and corruption.

  “Pragmatism is cold comfort when millions of lives are in the balance,” conceded Boucher. “It’s a little like saying, ‘Sorry, I can’t rescue you from drowning until I finish waxing my car.’”

  The president chuckled softly at the apt metaphor. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

  “It’s easy for me to say it. I’ve already packed my office. You have to worry about a re-election campaign.”

  “And if I lose that campaign, I’ll lose whatever ability I have to make a difference in the world.”

  Boucher almost laughed aloud at that. Chambers’s predecessor was proof positive that y
ou didn’t have to be president to save the world.

  “Not very many people know what I’m about to tell you,” the president went on. “And for now, it’s best to keep it that way. You know that Joseph Mulamba was kidnapped in London. What you might not know is the underlying reason for his state visit.”

  “I just assumed he was looking for foreign aid.”

  “In a manner of speaking.” The president drummed his fingers on the table for a moment, as if trying to decide how to reveal his secret. “What do you know about the African Union?”

  “It’s sort of like the United Nations. A treaty organization designed to promote peace and security among the African nations. They’ve done a lot to advance human rights and combat the spread of AIDS, but they’re sort of a paper tiger, if you’ll forgive the pun.”

  “What if I were to tell you that Joseph Mulamba wants to give it some real teeth?”

  Boucher narrowed his gaze. “Just what exactly is that supposed to mean?”

  “President Mulamba intends to transform the African Union into a legitimate federal authority.”

  Boucher leaned forward in his chair. “Let me make sure I understand what you’re saying. He wants to create an African federation?”

  “The United States of Africa,” the president said, almost reverently.

  Boucher shook his head. “It won’t work. It will never work.”

  “I believe differently. Mulamba was in London to meet with the Prime Minister to get the Brits on board. His next stop was to be here, and I was going to pledge the support of the United States of America.”

  “Sir, with respect, the nations of Africa would never agree to this. There are so many reasons why this would never work.”

  “Mulamba presented a very persuasive argument to suggest otherwise. Look, I didn’t ask you here to debate this or to explain myself.”

  “Then respectfully sir, why did you ask me here?”

  “Because I want this to succeed.” Chambers took another deep breath. “With Mulamba missing and probably dead, the odds of this happening are shrinking with each passing second. His legal successor, Gerard Okoa supports the plan, but the army is divided. If this General Velle takes power, that will be the end of it. I’ve drafted a resolution asking Congress to send American forces to supplement UN peacekeepers in the Congo. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to fight to make it happen, and that will take some time, which is something we don’t have.”