He had understood fairly quickly that there was going to be an opening at the executive level in Angola, and he had immediately learnt Portuguese. His career climb had been meteoric. His bosses had seen his potential, although there were others with more experience who had applied for the same post. He had been appointed to a desirable position with little or no discussion.
That was his first contact with Africa, with a poor and shattered country. He didn’t count his days in Vietnam. He had been an unwelcome intruder there. Here he was welcome. At first he spent his time listening, seeing, and learning. He had marveled at the joy and dignity that flourished among the hardships.
It had taken him almost two years to see that what the Bank was doing was completely wrong. Instead of helping the country to gain true independence and enable the rebuilding of the war-torn land, the Bank merely served to protect the very rich. He noted that the people around him treated him with deference because of his high rank. Behind the radical rhetoric there were only corruption, weakness, and greed. There were others — independent intellectuals and the odd politician — who saw what he saw. But they were not in positions of power. No one listened to them.
At last he could stand it no longer. He tried to explain to his superiors that the strategies of the Bank were misinformed. But he received no response, despite making transatlantic flights time and time again to persuade those at the top in the head office. He wrote countless memos but never received anything other than well-meaning indifference. At one of these meetings, he finally sensed he had become labeled as difficult. Someone who was beginning to fall outside the pale. One evening he spoke with his oldest mentor, a financial analyst named Whitfield who had followed his career since his undergraduate days and who had helped recruit him. They met for dinner at a small restaurant in Georgetown, and Carter had asked him straight out: Was he alienating everyone? Was there really no one who could see that he was right and that the Bank was wrong? Whitfield had answered just as candidly, and told him he was asking the wrong question. It didn’t matter if Carter was right or not. What mattered was Bank policy.
The following evening, Carter had flown back to Luanda. A dramatic decision was taking shape in his head, as he leaned back into his comfortable first-class seat.
It took several sleepless nights for him to see what it was that he actually wanted.
It was also at this time that he met the man who would play a decisive role in convincing him that he was doing the right thing. In hindsight, Carter had often marveled at the mixture of conscious decisions and random coincidences that made up a person’s life.
It had been an evening in March in the middle of the 1970s. He had been suffering a long period of sleeplessness as he searched for a way out of his dilemma. One evening he felt restless and decided to go to Metropol, one of the restaurants down in Luanda’s harbor. He liked going there because there was little chance he would run into anyone from the Bank. Or any of Angola’s elite, for that matter. At Metropol he was usually left in peace. At the next table, that night, had been a man who spoke very poor Portuguese, and since the waiter couldn’t speak English, Carter had stepped in to translate.
Then the two of them had started talking. It turned out that the man was Swedish and was in Luanda on a consulting project commissioned by the state-owned telecom sector, which was grossly neglected and underdeveloped. Carter could never say afterward exactly what it was that sparked his interest in this man. He usually maintained an element of reserve in his interactions with others, assuming that most of the people he met were his enemies. But there had been something about this man that lowered his guard, even though Carter was a suspicious person by nature.
It had not taken long for Carter to understand that the man, who soon joined him at his own table, was highly intelligent. He was not merely an able engineer and technician, but someone who seemed to have read up on and understood much of Angola’s colonial history and present political situation.
The man’s name was Tynnes Falk. Carter had only learned this when it was late and they had said good-bye. They had been the last to leave the establishment. A lone waiter was slumped half-asleep at the bar. Their chauffeurs were waiting outside. Falk was staying at the Hotel Luanda. They decided to meet the following evening.
Falk had only intended to stay in Luanda for the three months that the project was expected to take, but after it was over, Carter offered him a new consulting project. It was mainly an excuse to retain him, so that they could continue their conversations.
Falk therefore returned to Luanda two months later. That was when he told Carter he was unmarried. Carter had likewise remained unmarried, though he had lived with a succession of women and fathered three girls and one boy, whom he almost never saw. In Luanda he now had two black lovers. One was a professor at the local university, the other the ex-wife of a cabinet minister. He kept these liaisons secret, except from his staff. He had avoided forming relationships within the Bank. Since Falk seemed very lonely, Carter helped him into a suitable relationship with a woman named Rosa, who was the daughter of a Portuguese businessman and his Angolan housekeeper.
Falk had started to feel at home in Africa. Carter got him a nice house with a garden and a view of Luanda’s beautiful harbor. He also wrote a contract that rewarded Falk excessively for the minimal work he was expected to perform.
They continued their conversations. Whatever subject they discussed in those long tropical nights, they always found that their political and moral opinions coincided almost exactly. It was the first time Carter had met anyone whom he could confide in fully. Falk felt the same way.
It was during these long African nights that the plan began to take shape. Carter listened with fascination to the surprising things Falk told him about the electronic world where he lived and worked. Through Falk, he had come to understand that he who controlled electronic communication controlled everything. It was especially what Falk told him about how wars would be fought in the future that excited him. Bombs would be nothing more than computer viruses smuggled into the enemy’s storehouse of weapons. Electronic signals could eliminate the enemy’s stock markets and telecom networks. The time of nuclear submarines was over. Future threats would come barrelling down the miles of fiberoptic cables that were slowly entangling the world like a spiderweb.
They were in agreement about the need for patience, from the beginning. Never to rush. One day their time would come. And then they would strike.
They complemented each other. Carter had contacts. He knew how the Bank functioned. He understood the details of the financial world and how delicate the economic balance of the world really was. Falk was the technician who could translate ideas into practical reality.
They spent the evenings together for many months, refining their plans.
They had been in regular contact during the past twenty years. From the very beginning they had known the time was not quite at hand. One day it would be.
Carter was jerked out of his thoughts by a sudden noise and instinctively reached for the gun under his pillow. But it was only Celine, who was fumbling with the locks on the kitchen door. Irritated, he thought that he ought to fire her. She made too much noise getting his breakfast ready. The eggs were never cooked the way he liked them, and she was ugly, fat, and stupid besides. Celine could neither read nor write and had nine children. Her husband spent most of his time chatting in the shade of a tree. If he wasn’t drunk.