As they entered the palace grounds, King heard Deep Blue’s voice. “King, I have bad news. There’s no way to sugar coat this. I’ve lost contact with Bishop and Knight.”
The words hit King like a plunge into an icy lake. He heard Asya give a little gasp, but like him, she kept moving, putting one foot in front of the next. “Lost contact?” King asked through clenched teeth. “What’s that mean? Are they dead?”
“It means their q-phones aren’t working anymore. They were alive when I lost the signal, but the rebels were firing mortars on their position. We built those phones to take a beating. The fact that we lost both signals at the same time…” Deep Blue didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. “It gets worse. Queen and Rook found Mulamba in a farmhouse outside London. He’s alive, but they’re pinned down. I thought you should know.”
“Understood. Keep me posted. King, out.”
Damn it!
14
The shit had hit the fan, and there wasn’t a thing King could do to help any of them. The instantaneous connectivity afforded by the q-phones made him feel all the more helpless. The Chess Team were the best soldiers on Earth. If anyone could get out of a tough scrape, he knew they could, but that didn’t make dealing with it any easier.
He flashed back to the conference call just a few hours earlier. It had not been as difficult to convince Deep Blue to commit to the operation as King had initially feared. Like the others, the former president felt the same compulsion to defend the innocent and the helpless — the ones who would almost certainly die first if the situation in the Congo continued to deteriorate. Because he was no longer constrained by political realities, the former president was actually eager to do something, anything, even if it seemed like a desperate long shot. His restraint stemmed, not from an ambivalence toward the plight of the Congo’s people, but from a very real concern about putting his people in harm’s way for a goal that was, at best, unclear.
King understood that kind of thinking better than Tom Duncan ever could. He had spent nearly three thousand years focused on one objective — saving his friends and family. It had become a sort of mania, almost impossible to let go of. Like an overprotective parent, he had become so used to the idea of saving them that now he couldn’t bear to see them at risk. But risk was what they did. They were, one and all, willing to sacrifice anything, their lives if necessary, for a greater good, just as he was.
Easy to say, but a lot harder to accept, especially after centuries focused on the single goal of keeping them alive.
And for what? So they could die senseless deaths just a year later?
He choked down his helplessness and anger, and he followed Mabuki into the presidential palace. The general led them to a large conference room where several people were already gathered around a table. Given the awkward silence that followed their arrival, King guessed they had probably been arguing.
As he moved his gaze about the room, his glasses began supplying him with biographical data. The photosensitive lenses were now barely tinted, and would hopefully be passed off as ordinary spectacles. None of those present could see the information being beamed onto King’s and Asya’s retinas — the names of Congolese assemblymen and military officers, tribal leaders and of course, acting President Gerard Okoa. Not everyone in the room was African, however. A group of Caucasians sat near the president, two men with the sort of muscular physiques that could be achieved only through the use of illegal chemical substances — King dubbed them ‘the steroid twins’—and another older man with doughy features and slicked back hair. King’s attention, however, was drawn to the fourth person in their group, a stunningly beautiful woman with dark hair, who focused her laser-like stare in their direction.
Asya narrowed her eyes and stared back. “We don’t like her,” she muttered in Russia.
King knew his sister wasn’t merely being catty. There was something dangerous about this woman, and she made no effort to hide it.
A name appeared before his eyes, seemingly superimposed over the woman’s face. Monique Favreau. Former officer of the DGSE. Presently field director of Executive Solutions International.
King knew that name very well. ESI was a notorious private security company. Not just mercenaries, but an army of mercenaries. Only the wealthiest corporations could afford ESI — the diamond cartel and petroleum multinationals — and certainly not a poor developing nation in Africa. If ESI was involved, it meant that someone with a lot of money and power had taken an interest in the Congo situation.
Mabuki introduced King and Asya simply as ‘advisors from the United States’ and no one questioned it. King got the sense that there was a lot of advising going on. As they took seats, the acting president addressed them.
“More Americans.” Okoa was a blunt man in both word and appearance. He was not exactly overweight, but thick, like an unfinished clay statue. “Why are you here?”
King studied him, wondering how much he could say about what they hoped to accomplish, and whether he could promise the man anything at all. Okoa claimed to be a strong supporter of Joseph Mulamba, but politicians could rarely be trusted to say anything that wasn’t self-serving, and now that Okoa had a taste of power, King wondered if he would he still be faithful to Mulamba’s vision of a unified Africa.
There seemed no point in lying to the man. “If I may speak frankly, Mr. President, my country is reluctant when it comes to interfering in the politics of a sovereign nation.” Someone laughed aloud, a staccato sound, like the crack of a whip. It was the woman, Monique Favreau. King didn’t stop. “But some of us are not willing to stand by and allow another genocide to take place.”
Genocide was a powerful word. Even those who openly advocated the extermination of their hated enemies shied away from it.
Okoa was unmoved, though. “And since we have oil and natural gas, our genocide is much more interesting to you.”
The not-so-thinly veiled accusation shocked King. “I don’t know anything about that, sir.”
“Is that so?” Okoa glanced toward Favreau and the other men. King did, too, and as he did, he heard Deep Blue mutter a rare curse. An instant later, the facial recognition software displayed the name of the older Caucasian man. Lance Marrs, United States Senator, Utah.
Two years earlier, Marrs had taken advantage of an unfolding global crisis to target his number one political enemy, President Tom Duncan — Deep Blue. While Duncan and Domenick Boucher had ultimately turned Marrs’s attack to their advantage, it had come at great expense. Duncan had been forced to resign from office in disgrace, providing endless fodder for late-night talk show comedians, and his accomplishments, the public ones at least, had been relegated to a footnote in history.
King realized that Marrs was staring back at him. “I’m not sure who you are, fella,” the Senator said, oozing contempt. “I can only assume that President Chambers sent you here without the approval of the United States Congress.”
“You can assume whatever you like,” King said. “That’s your standard operating procedure, isn’t it?”
Marrs bristled, but King kept talking. “Speaking of assumptions, am I to assume that you have the approval of Congress?”