“Did you enjoy the seafood?”
“Enormously.”
“Do no secrets ever pass your lips?”
Janson got off the kitchen stool, stood to his full height, and kissed her on the mouth. “Not today.”
“You kiss like a man in love with another woman.”
“I kiss like a man in a rush. Mimi, I need help. You can give it to me. And you can help me even more if no one knows we’ve spoken.”
Mimi smiled. “My lips will be sealed the instant you leave. What do you want?”
“Could we start with the Nigeria–Isle de Foree connection?”
“The military connection or the oil connection?”
“I thought they were the same.”
Mimi smiled again. “I am testing your depth of knowledge.”
She picked up a telephone, carried it out the door into the garden, and spoke rapidly. When she came back indoors she said, “I invited a couple of boys to come straight over to brunch. Do you still cook omelets?”
Janson started warming a pan on her huge AGA range and broke a dozen eggs into a bowl.
“What else?” she asked.
“Iboga. Is he possibly hiding in Nigeria?”
“Impossible. He would be brought to book. No one would protect him.”
“Not even the army?”
“Iboga is toxic. Nigeria has got enough image problems on the continent without sheltering bloodthirsty dictators. We’ve not yet recovered from our own. And may never.”
“Do people you know talk about where he might be?”
“Just talk. Sightings here and there. He’s not exactly nondescript.”
Janson smiled and gave her a story she would like to repeat. “An MI5 chap once told me that back when Idi Amin fled Uganda he was spotted in Saudi Arabia by a satellite.”
“Iboga is fatter than Amin. And satellites are more technologically advanced today.”
“What sightings have you heard about?”
“France. Romania. Bulgaria. Croatia. Russia.”
“Where in Russia?”
Mimi shrugged. Her dressing gown slipped off a round shoulder.
“How about Corsica?” Janson asked.
Mimi nodded. “I heard Corsica.”
“Really?”
“Just the other day, from a fellow down there on holiday. He didn’t actually see him, but he heard mention.”
“Where?”
Mimi shrugged again. “He was yachting. So I suppose by the sea.”
“Do you know about Securité Referral?”
“No. What is it?”
“Sort of a freelance union of rogue covert agents.”
“Drug smuggling?”
“Anything that makes money, I gather.”
Mimi warmed oil in a pan and began sautéing whole tomatoes. Janson grated cheese and sliced bread for toast. The guests arrived, Everest Orhii, a thin, middle-aged Nigerian in a worn blue suit and open shirt, and Pedro Menezes, a former oil minister of Isle de Foree, who was better dressed and looked extremely prosperous. Janson nodded his thanks to Mimi and murmured, “Pretty impressive on short notice.”
“You already knew I was impressive,” said Mimi. “Or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Minister Menezes gazed hungrily at the omelet Janson was dividing. Everest Orhii, the Nigerian, tore gratefully into the portion Mimi passed across the kitchen table. Both men, it turned out, were in exile, the Nigerian scraping by to spend money for lawyers in hopes of someday returning to Lagos. The Isle de Foreen was hoping to bribe his way back to Porto Clarence. Orhii had worked in the Nigerian oil ministry, though at a lower level than Menezes was at in Isle de Foree.
They each had cell phones, which were constantly ringing. Each would jump from the table, shout, “ Olá!” or, “Orhii here!” and rush out to the garden for a private conversation.
“Before the civil war,” Menezes told Janson, “Isle de Foree resisted jointly exploring deepwater blocks with Nigeria.”
“Even though Nigeria was supporting Iboga?” asked Janson.
“The policy was initiated well before Iboga. The Nigerians had taken advantage years earlier when we were desperate. The shallow-water agreements were not fair.”
“No,” said Orhii, returning from the garden and redraping his napkin across his flat belly. “It was not that the agreements were not fair.”
“Then what?” demanded Menezes.
Orhii swallowed a slab of toast in two bites. “Isle de Foreens dislike Nigerians. They accuse us of being overbearing. It is reflexively typical of small nations to dislike big nations. As many nations hate America, so many hate Nigeria.”
“To have Nigeria as a neighbor is to sleep with a hippopotamus.”
“My nation and your island are separated by two hundred miles of open gulf.”
“Hippos can swim.”
“They all say we are pushy!” Everest Orhii shouted. “They say that we push ahead of the line and take all we want.”
Pedro Menezes’s phone rang and he rushed out to the garden.
Orhii motioned Janson closer. “If you want to know about petroleum exploration in the deepwater blocks, ask Everest about the bribes he took from GRA.”
“What is GRA?”
Orhii shrugged. “I don’t know. Sadly, they never visited my office. I suspect they dealt directly with my superiors, however.”
“Mimi?”
Mimi shook her head. “Not on my radar. Ask Pedro. He’s happy to talk. He’s so bored in London. He wants to go home and be oil minister again, but that will never happen. Ferdinand Poe will allow only the war veterans in his cabinet.”
Mimi carried her phone out to the garden, passing Pedro Menezes on his way in.
“What is GRA?” Janson asked when Isle de Foree’s ex–oil minister took his chair and addressed the remains of his omelet.
“Oh, them.” Menezes smiled. “Haven’t heard from them in years. Though why would I, stuck in London?”
“What are they?”
“Very generous.”
“What do you mean?”
“What he means,” interrupted Everest Orhii, “is that GRA paid him plenty to allow them secret access to explore deep waters south of the fields Isle de Foree was supposed to share with Nigeria.”
“There was no connection,” Menezes retorted disdainfully. “No Nigerian rights.”
“The geology is incontrovertible. It’s the same patch.”
“The geology is as clear as the history and our sovereignty. They are our waters and our sea bottom. Not Nigeria’s!”
“It would never stand up in court.”
“It doesn’t have to, now.”
“You ripped us off.”
Janson laid a big hand on each man’s arm and said, “Gentlemen, what do the initials ‘GRA’ stand for?”
“Ground Resource Access,” answered Menezes. “I believe.”
“Believe?” snorted Everest Orhii. “You must know who gave you all that money.”
“Their business cards read: ‘Ground Resource Access.’ I never found it listed on any exchange, however, or in any professional society.”
“Ground Resource Access?” Days earlier Janson had listened to Kingsman Helms say, “The problem with the supply side of oil is a problem of accessing the resources in the ground.” Coincidence? But, as Janson had told Helms, he had heard it from other oilmen. Common nomenclature.
“Was it an American company?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Were the people you dealt with American?” he asked patiently.
“The man who called on me appeared to be American.”
“What did he look like?”
“Rather like you. Fit, like a former soldier.”
“Could he have been a soldier?” asked Janson, thinking perhaps GRA was a front company for a U.S. covert service.
Menezes shrugged.
“Do you recall whether his card read ‘Limited’ or ‘Incorporated’?”
“ ‘Inc.’ He was American. No doubt about that.”
“And when was this?”
“Four years ago.”
Someone was taking the long view of Kingsman Helms’s assertion that “a purely logistic problem becomes a political problem when governments claim access.”
Mimi returned. Janson gave her a shadow of a nod. Time to move along. He had learned all he could here. CatsPaw’s freelancers could research the name.