The Templar Legion

15

Captain Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre sat in his bedroom and stared through the viewfinder of the Canon EOS 5D at the hotel across from him. The Ali Pasha Hotel was on Clapham Street, just off the Brixton Road in south London.

The policeman could imagine the interior: six floors of tiny rooms and toilets the size of cupboards. Narrow stairways, peeling wallpaper and groaning pipes. Bedbugs, roaches and mice. Ten thousand places in London just like it. Anonymity defined.

The whole area was unofficially known as the capital of Afro-Caribbean England and it was easy enough for Saint-Sylvestre to fit in as long as he kept a check on his university-educated accent.

As well as being the densest part of black London, Brixton was also the crime capital of the city. Behind the colorful facade of the fresh fruit and vegetable stands and the street-long markets for African and Caribbean clothes, you could trade in just about any vice the human mind could think of, from heroin to hookers, smuggled cigarettes to smuggled women, blood diamonds to body parts, machine guns, stolen goods, counterfeit handbags, wristwatches and haute couture.

From your heart’s desire and passions to your soul’s blackest cravings-all were the stock-in-trade of Brixton. All of which made Brixton a logical end for Saint-Sylvestre’s pursuit of the still enigmatic Konrad Lanz.

During Lanz’s six-day stay in Kukuanaland he had made four official attempts to see Kolingba and gone for five afternoon walks. He had remained in the Trianon hotel during the evenings, sometimes eating in his room and sometimes in the Marie Antoinette Bar.

During these evenings he spoke only to Marcel Boganda, the bartender, a longtime paid informant of Saint-Sylvestre’s. According to Boganda their conversation had never gotten onto subjects of any more interest than the weather. Although Saint-Sylvestre had heard or seen nothing to dispute Oliver Gash’s presumption that Lanz was in Fourandao to reconnoiter a coup d’etat, neither had he heard or seen anything to support it.

Saint-Sylvestre had been a policeman in the Central African Republic a great deal longer than Gash had been a resident there, and something about the Rwandan/ American refugee triggered the policeman’s distrust.

If there had ever been a man more of an opportunist than President Kolingba, it was his newly minted second in command Oliver Gash, and if Gash wanted to know about an upcoming coup it was only to decide which side he should take or whether he should flee to his secret accounts in a number of Switzerland-, Panama- and Liechtenstein-based banks, all of which Saint-Sylvestre knew about.

Saint-Sylvestre also knew about Kolingba’s secret accounts, and was well aware that one of his own people at the Department of Internal Affairs had similar documentation regarding the African leader. On more than one occasion during Saint-Sylvestre’s long career it had occurred to the policeman that the government of the Central African Republic in general, and Kukuanaland in particular, was no more nor less corrupt and corruptible than any other nation; it was simply smaller and more overt. Like an expectation of personal privacy, in Kukuanaland there wasn’t the slightest expectation of a government that was incorruptible.

Corruption had been expected on the African continent with the first delivery of foreign-aid powdered milk and penicillin. There were three thousand tribes and two thousand languages all fighting for their existence and no moral code whether Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist or otherwise had ever made more than the most superficial inroads into that wretched, poor and terrible place. Joseph Conrad knew what he was talking about when he reached the end of that river in the Congo and found nothing but “The horror! The horror!”

And now it seemed there was more to come. In the four days since Konrad Lanz’s arrival at Heathrow he had met five people at his somewhat sordid headquarters at the Ali Pasha. Of the five, four had been cast from the same mold: hard, tough-looking men with an animal sense about them, even in the bowels of a megacity like London.

One of them had even been recognizable from the photo files Saint-Sylvestre kept at the airport. His name was Stefan Whartski, a Pole who’d started his mercenary career as a transport pilot during the Eritrean civil wars of 1980 and 1981. With men like Whartski talking to Lanz, it looked more and more as though his intuitions had been correct-he was watching a coup d’etat in the making.

The fifth Saint-Sylvestre called Mr. X. It was this man who was now meeting with Lanz for the second time, and he was something else altogether. Tall, distinguished, wearing his Bond Street suit like a uniform and with a military bearing that would have looked better on the parade ground than crawling through the jungle swamps outside Fourandao. This was the money man at ground level, not the principal perhaps but a conduit leading to him.

Lanz and the mystery man suddenly came out of the hotel and stood talking for a moment, bathed in the security light over the main door of the grimy six-story building. Saint-Sylvestre twisted the big telephoto lens. After a thousand surveillances like this one, reading lips was second nature to him.

Mr. X: “You’ve checked the money, then?”

Lanz: “Yes. Quite correct.”

Mr. X: “You’ll be there tomorrow?”

Lanz: “You said seven thirty.”

Mr. X: “Yes. Wear a tie, please.”

Lanz: “Anything you like.”

Mr. X: “All right, then.”

Lanz: “Sure you won’t come for a bite? They do a very nice butter chicken.”

Mr. X: “That sort of thing never agrees with me. Indian food, I mean.” He paused. “Must get home to the wife and kiddies.”

Lanz: “Of course.”

The two men parted without shaking hands. Mr. X climbed into a black Jaguar XJ sedan while Lanz headed for the High Street. Saint-Sylvestre took out his cell phone and hit the speed dial. A tentative voice answered on the second ring. “Selam, ’alo?” Tahib Akurgal said.

“It’s me,” the policeman said without identifying himself. God only knew what sort of lists the night clerk at the Ali Pasha Hotel was on.

“Yes?”

“What did you hear?” Saint-Sylvestre said. The first question he’d posed to Tahib, the hardworking medical student who worked nights at his uncle’s hotel, was, “How much did the gray-haired man with the German accent pay you to report anyone asking questions about him?” Tahib had balked. Saint-Sylvestre said he’d double the amount and if he found out that Tahib was playing both ends against the middle he’d slit the throats of every single member of Tahib’s family, young or old, saving Tahib for last. Tahib was now on Saint-Sylvestre’s payroll at a hundred pounds a day.

“They are going to meet his lordship at seven thirty tomorrow evening.”

“His lordship?” Was Mr. X spoofing his boss or was something else going on?

“That is what the other man said, effendi.”

“Did the other one say where this meeting was to take place?”

“Yes, he even made sure that Lanz-bey wrote the address down.”

“What is it?”

“Number nine Grantham Place, flat six, London W-one.”

Westminster. Mr. Lanz and Mr. X were playing for high stakes. Grantham Place was to the Ali Pasha like heaven was to hell.

“I’m coming across the street, Tahib. I’ll need the key.”

“No, sir, please, Lanz-bey will kill me if he finds out!”

“Lanz-bey is eating butter chicken at a curry house up the road, probably the same Curry Capital he’s had dinner at for the past three nights.”

“Please, sir,” Tahib groveled. “I cannot.”

Saint-Sylvestre smiled. “Yes, sir,” he said. “You can, and you will. Another hundred pounds.”

“This would be in addition to the regular hundred pounds?” The groveling was gone. The policeman had done a little scratching into the night clerk’s background and discovered that Tahib’s father was a major dealer on the Istanbul gold market in the Kapali carsi, the Grand Bazaar, which by definition meant he was a criminal. Like father, like son. A doctor perhaps, but a doctor with a criminal mind.

“Yes, in addition to the regular hundred pounds.”

“Perhaps you would like a key to the adjoining room in case of an emergency, effendi.”

“You’re wasting my time, Tahib. Don’t do that.”

“No, sir, of course not. I shall await your arrival, effendi.”

Saint-Sylvestre took the tiny Chobi miniature camera out of his backpack and slipped the half-inch square device into his shirt pocket. Three minutes later he was letting himself into Konrad Lanz’s hotel room with the key provided by Tahib Akurgal.

The room was on the top floor of the hotel, facing an alley lined with industrial-sized rubbish bins and the back sides of buildings facing the next street. There was a zigzagging, rusting and ancient fire escape with a landing outside of Lanz’s window that appeared to be painted shut.

The room contained a narrow bed, a writing desk that had been moved from against the wall to stand alone under the only overhead light, and two chairs-a Victorian-style captain’s chair with scrolled arms and legs and a plump upholstered club chair with a chenille throw covering the worn, pale burgundy velvet upholstery.

The only other furniture was an IKEA-style side table for the swaybacked bed and a pressboard chest of drawers. Lanz’s suitcase was sitting open on the chest, an expensive-looking Mulholland Brothers shaving kit in plain view.

Saint-Sylvestre crossed to the desk. There was a yellow lined pad of neatly made notes, a fine-tip felt pen and the cover of the Carl Hiaasen book Lanz had brought to Fourandao.

Saint-Sylvestre was impressed by Lanz’s ingenuity; working from memory every day, Lanz had put together an exceptionally detailed map of the center of the town, including the location of electrical transformers and telephone lines along with their switching stations. Particular attention had been paid to the presidential compound, noting the number of guard towers and the number of shifts at each tower. The offices of the Department of the Interior were correctly located on the plaza, as were the three blocks of flats directly behind the plaza, most of which were occupied by favored friends of Kolingba who occupied most of the government bureaucratic offices for Kukuanaland. The map also noted army patrol routes and times and noted manpower for each.

The notes on the yellow pad reflected the maps, and Lanz’s simple shorthand for various terms was easy enough to decipher. The mercenary had correctly judged that the compound held around two hundred men, with a hundred on duty at any one time.

The rare comings and goings of the president and Gash were also noted. There was a page of notes devoted to nothing but ordnance, armor and airpower, all of it accurate. Lanz hadn’t missed a trick.

On another page there was a list of names and ranks as well as figures that were most likely pay scales. And lists of equipment. Each of the separate pages had an estimated figure totaled in euros at the bottom. The last page had a simple formula that Saint-Sylvestre recognized without any trouble:

2 comp X 200 (2 Maj.) PSF

8 plat X20 (8 Lieut)

40 sq. X 10 (20 sgt.)

Two majors for two companies of two hundred troops provided by an unnamed private security force, divided into eight platoons of twenty headed by eight lieutenants, further divided into forty separate squads of ten, each with its own sergeant: Lanz’s prescription for taking over Fourandao with four hundred highly trained and well-armed soldiers. The final grand total for men, equipment and transportation was slightly in excess of one million euros. A country taken for one million, three hundred thousand American dollars.

Saint-Sylvestre began to photograph the documents with the tiny Chobi camera.

Who would pay that much money for a backward, corrupt and hostile piece of jungle territory surrounded by plague, genocide, mass rape and murder in the middle of Africa? And even more important, why?