The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 15

Under a sky heaving with grey clouds, Victor Bronski stepped off the plane at N’Djili Airport, Kinshasa, and surveyed the scene with an air of jaded disapproval. Having travelled to virtually every Third World country in the course of his career, his opinion of the Congo was that someone should invent a Fourth World and plonk the damn place into it, in a class of its own where it belonged. And then toss a nuke in after it. He threw an even more disgusted look upwards, thinking that if the threatening rainclouds did let go, it would only become more unbearably humid. My Christ, what a shitpit.

Bronski was travelling light. His work here should require him to endure no more than a few days, at most. He would get the job done as slickly and efficiently as his reputation promised, deliver the goods and go home with a very fat pay cheque. At fifty-eight, with a quarter century under his belt as a private investigator and another fourteen years before that spent in law enforcement and criminal intelligence, he wasn’t someone who left much to chance. All this professionalism, experience, and attention to detail came at an extortionate price, but when your employer was one of America’s richest shipping magnates, Eugene Svalgaard, money was bottom of the worry list.

Bronski had no issues with travelling openly to the country in which he intended to conduct criminal business, because he was using false documents in the name of Henry R. Barrington, one of his favourite aliases and one that he felt lent him an air of sophistication. Mr Barrington was smart but casual in nicely pressed chinos, a lightweight blazer, and a white shirt open at the neck with a silk cravat. With a Panama hat on his grizzled, balding head, he looked very much the part of the slightly adventurous American tourist.

Bronski’s travelling companion, equipped with an equally convincing and expensively forged passport in the name Josh McKenzie, was a former Navy SEAL called Aaron Hockridge, now working occasional private military contractor jobs from his base in Tucson, Arizona. Aboard the same flight were four more of Hockridge’s hand-picked guys, their real identities all disguised. They’d booked individual seats scattered about the plane and made no sign of recognising one another on boarding. They disembarked in the same manner, ignoring one another and passing separately through customs. On the other side, each took a taxicab to the mid-priced hotel in Avenue Rép. du Tchad that was to be their base.

Once Hockridge and the others were checked into their rooms, Bronski phoned Eugene Svalgaard from his own. ‘What’s the weather there in Knoxville?’ he asked, poking a finger through the lopsided blinds to peer down at the chaotic street below.

Pacing the floor of his luxury hotel suite in Mombasa, Kenya, with white beaches and the Indian Ocean in view, almost naked with a dressing gown loose around his short, chubby little body and the air conditioning blasting at full pelt, Eugene Svalgaard replied, ‘I’m freezing my ass off while looking forward to a white Christmas. How are you finding Smolensk?’

‘This is a real classy joint you booked us into, boss. There are hookers in the hotel lobby and the bed sheets, you don’t wanna know. What did I do to deserve this kind of treatment?’

‘I’m sure you’ve had worse. Just cope. Right now I’m really more interested in knowing what progress you’re making with our project.’

‘I just got here, boss. I’m on it, okay? I’ll keep you posted.’

‘Every hour. On the hour. I’ll be waiting.’

‘Take it easy, will you? What happened to trust?’

‘Trust my ass. You get this done fast before we miss our chance. No screw-ups.’

‘You’re hurting my feelings, boss. When did I ever screw up?’

‘There’s always a first time. Call me the moment you got something to report. And it better be good news.’

‘Fat fuck,’ Bronski muttered, putting away the phone.

Sixteen hundred miles way on the east coast of Kenya, Eugene Svalgaard slumped on the king-size bed in his luxury suite and stared out of the balcony window at the swath of empty beach, the palm trees and the turquoise ocean beyond. He was a veteran connoisseur of luxury suites all over the world, and he wouldn’t have kept a dog in this one. He’d almost exploded when he’d discovered that it didn’t come with a private kitchen, chef and other essential staff. But if he had to be in Africa, this was as good a place as any to hole up in, keep his head down and twiddle his thumbs while waiting for Bronski to deliver the goods. The champagne was acceptably chilled, the bathroom roach-free so far, and the ocean view relaxing. Relaxation was what he needed to ease the nagging self-blame over his stupid mistake.

His mistake had a name, one that wouldn’t ever be forgotten: Pender, the double-crossing sonofabitch of a shady lowlife ex-mercenary and jewel thief whom Eugene had hired to obtain the Star of Africa diamond for him by whatever means necessary. If Eugene hadn’t been so blinded by the power of his lust for that beautiful rock, none of this mess would have happened.

Thank Christ for Victor Bronski. It was only due to Bronski’s top-dollar detective skills that they’d been able to trace the diamond’s path after it vanished into thin air halfway between Salalah and Mombasa. Following Pender’s slimy, disreputable trail to Kenya, Bronski had managed to deduce that the scumbag had been out to screw his boss from the start. To aid him — or at least, that had been the intention — Pender had struck a deal with a man whose reputation was even more gruesome than African luminaries such as General Butt Naked and Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Given what he knew about the Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Khosa, Bronski was quite confident that Pender was now very much dead; and there were no prizes for guessing who had got their mitts on the hot rock itself.

Now, all Eugene had to do was get it back. Which was a fairly straightforward matter, as he saw it. Knowing what Bronski had told him about this Khosa, the idea of stealing it back was out of the question. Eugene accepted that if he ever wanted to lay his hands on the Star of Africa, he was going to have to pay. He was perfectly willing to write off the trivial $5,000,000 sum he’d wasted on Pender, if he could convince its new owner to part with it for a few dollars more.

That was where Bronski came in. His job was to make contact with Khosa’s people and lay an offer on the table that (in Eugene’s words) an illiterate drum-banging savage from the Congo jungle couldn’t possibly refuse, sealing the deal quickly before anybody else jumped in with a bigger number.

As to exactly how much of an offer he should make, Eugene had spent a while rolling numbers around his head. The figure shouldn’t be too high — after all, this was a strictly black market item now, with every cop in Oman and half of Interpol raising hell to find the thing. But the figure shouldn’t be too low, either. The deal had to appear dazzling enough that this shit-kicking jungle bunny (again, Eugene’s words) would trip over himself in his haste to snap up the cash before the anonymous bidder changed their mind. It had to positively blitzkrieg the negotiating table, eclipsing any chance of another player — of whom Eugene knew there would be many — putting up a bigger number. Eugene needed to show some muscle, seize control of the situation and leave Khosa in no doubt as to who was boss.

To that end, fifty sounded about right. Fifty million bucks was a fair chunk of change, even for the owner of the Svalgaard Line, but given that it represented less than 7.5 per cent of the behemoth $700,000,000 price that the Swiss brokerage agency of Fiedelholz & Goldstein had previously been grasping for on behalf of its original owner, the recently deceased Hussein Al Bu Said in Oman, Eugene was prepared to suck up the cost. The forthcoming insurance payout for his storm-wrecked cargo ship Svalgaard Andromeda would go quite a way towards recouping the loss, in any case.

The more Eugene had considered it, the more golden the deal seemed. Okay, so maybe he wouldn’t be able to buy that golf course in Scotland. He might have to hold off renewing his Rolls Royce this year. So what? He hated golf anyway, and cars held little appeal for him. His one true passion in this world, even more than money, was diamonds. For a mere $50,000,000, the Great Star of Africa, the holy grail of the diamond world, lost for so long that it had passed into the realms of myth and legend, would at last be his to treasure forever, to adore and fondle every day for the rest of his life and take with him to his grave. He couldn’t possess it soon enough. Eugene was dizzy with expectation.

He foresaw little difficulty in executing his plan. If that piece of trash Pender could make contact with Khosa, Bronski could do it twice as easily. The man was a magician. (Damn it all, why hadn’t he hired him first time round?) And who wouldn’t jump at the chance to become fifty million bucks richer at the click of a mouse? With that kind of cash in the bank, Khosa could do anything he wanted. Declare himself king of the jungle, for all Eugene gave a damn.

For security, it had been agreed to take on extra men, experienced operatives who would watch Bronski’s back while the deal was being done. Then, when the funds had been wired to the account of Khosa’s choosing, the diamond was safely in Bronski’s hands and everyone was happy, Eugene would hop on his Learjet to somewhere reasonably safe like Nairobi or Kampala to take delivery of it personally before flying his beloved trophy home to New York. Nice and easy. What a marvellous, insurmountable moment that would be, the crowning glory of his diamond-collecting career.

Eugene took another gulp of champagne and drifted deeper into his happy daydream.