“Look,” Asya remarked. “Is dragon lady, come to visit us. I knew there was reason I did not like you.”
Favreau stood on the other side of the mesh barrier and regarded her with a bemused expression for a moment. When she turned her attention to King, her look changed to something like… hunger.
“Who are you?” It wasn’t a demand so much as a statement of awe, delivered with all the sultriness and intensity that made most American men weak in the knees.
Asya hoped her brother would answer with something defiant or sarcastic—‘No one you want to mess with’ or ‘Your worst nightmare’—but that was more Rook’s way of doing things. King said nothing at all.
“No? Nothing? Perhaps I need to ask the question differently. Or perhaps…” Favreau’s lips curled in a predatory smile as she shifted her scrutiny to Asya. “Ah, I see it now. Brother and sister. Perhaps she will tell me what I want to know. Or, perhaps you will tell me to spare her unnecessary discomfort.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Asya said.
“Later,” Favreau replied without missing a beat. “For the moment, I think I will—”
“You’ve already lost.” King spoke quietly, forcing Favreau to stop and focus her attention on him again.
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
“Mulamba’s proposed African federation would mean the nationalization of the oil and natural gas industry across the entire continent,” King continued. “Your Big Oil bosses couldn’t stand for that, so they had you arrange his abduction in London. But it wasn’t enough to just get him out of the picture. You want chaos. Chaos makes the people who live here desperate, willing to give away their natural resources for the promise of stability and a quick buck.”
Favreau rolled her eyes and then moved over to the table where their phones and glasses lay. She tried to activate one of the q-phones but gave up when nothing happened. Asya knew that there was no way for her to overcome the phone’s biometric security, but she suspected that the phone actually was on, and transmitting every word that was said back to Deep Blue. King’s long accusatory statement had been his way of telling Deep Blue what he thought was actually going on in the Congo.
Asya wasn’t sure how that was going to help them get out of this mess, but she trusted that King knew what he was doing.
“Are you going to tell me who you are?” Favreau asked, setting the phone down. “You aren’t CIA. Senator Marrs believes you are, but we both know that isn’t true.”
“Let’s talk about Senator Marrs. Are you working for him, or is he working for you?”
Favreau laughed. “Neither. We have coincidental… sympathies.” She rolled the word around in her mouth like a sip of wine.
“Give him a message for me. Tell him he’s wasting time. President Mulamba is free. He’s on his way back here. This little revolution is finished.”
She made a brushing gesture with her hand. “Let him come back. It’s too late for him to make a difference.”
“He’ll have a very compelling story to tell his people — to tell the whole world — about how you are responsible for all of this, about how you were willing to tear the entire continent apart just so you could take their oil.”
“This is Africa,” Favreau said. “That’s how things are done here. Read a history book.”
“Oh, I know history, believe me. And I know that sometimes, things change.”
“You’re very sure of yourself. I like that in a man.” Favreau looked at him again for a long moment, breathing quickly as if aroused. Then she turned to one of her associates. “Take them out into the jungle and shoot them.”
19
Favreau watched as the two prisoners were herded out of the cell and taken away. She had considered shooting them herself, right then and there, but there was something about the man, something compelling.
She marveled at how quickly he had dissected the particulars of what she was doing on behalf of Consolidated Energy. He hadn’t gotten everything quite right, and he’d mistakenly attributed their motives to her. In fact, she didn’t care at all whether CE got their oil and natural gas leases, or for that matter, whether the inhabitants of the region got rich or got hacked apart with long knives. Her desires were for nothing so banal as wealth and power.
The wealthy and powerful believed that life was a game where the goal was to achieve an ever increasing amount of wealth and power, not realizing that, in so doing, they were consigning themselves to the same endless hamster wheel existence as everyone else. Favreau believed life was a different sort of game, where the true goal was to test oneself — win or die.
When she was young, joining the DSGE had once seemed like the ultimate challenge, but she had mastered the spy game and eventually grown tired of it. She had been drawn to the private sector, not because of the lucrative promise of material reward, but because it was the same game she had excelled at, but with fewer rules and much higher stakes.
The best games always had high stakes.
Favreau was fascinated with games. She had organized the men in her ESI strike team according to a playing card system: ten men, each designated by a corresponding card value, two through ten, with ace reserved for the unit leader. The suit — spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs — was used as the unit identifier, though rare was the situation that called for the deployment of all four units at any given time. Presently, Spades and Diamonds were in the UK, where they had carried out — and if the American had not been lying, subsequently botched — Mulamba’s abduction, while Hearts and Clubs were deployed throughout the Congo region.
The three positions corresponding to the face cards in each suit, she reserved for special roles — consultants or, when the contract called for it, the clients themselves — and as such, it was rare to have a king, queen or jack ‘in hand.’ For her own part, Favreau, had chosen the designation ‘Red Queen.’
One of the younger ‘cards’ had once asked if she’d taken her name from the supercomputer in a video game about zombies, and although she had no idea what he had been talking about, she rather liked the idea of both the computer and the fact that it was from a game. Her inspiration had been the character from the Lewis Carroll story Through the Looking Glass. Unlike the mercurial Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Red Queen from Carroll’s earlier tale was a cold, calculating chess piece that embodied the simple truth that Favreau lived by: to stay alive, you have to keep moving forward. In her case, that meant running toward the fight, not away from it. Retreat was weakness, and weakness was death.
That summarized her philosophy of life.
Her hand dropped to the remote trigger device in her pocket. With less pressure than it would take to pull the trigger on her pistol, she could detonate the RA-115, which lay in a corner of that very room. The explosion would erase the palace and kill hundreds, perhaps thousands in the blink of an eye.
She had no intention of doing so, but the mere fact that she could was as potent a stimulant as any illicit drug. That was true power.
She had learned about the bomb through her personal network of intelligence contacts. A disgruntled Russian official had told her of the sale to Hadir. An informant in the terrorist group, a man who would not have dreamed of selling his information to the West, but owed her a personal favor that he was eager to settle, had told her of the plot to destroy the Suez Canal. Her employers, both her superiors at ESI and the oil barons of Consolidated Energy, had given her carte blanche when it came to carrying out their schemes, so she saw no conflict in stopping Hadir personally or acquiring the bomb for her own, as yet undetermined, purposes. It had already proven quite handy at keeping General Velle in line, but merely using it as a threat — as a tool for extortion — wasn’t very satisfying.