Fourandao was laid out in an elongated grid centered on Plaza de Revolution de Generale Kolingba, the old city square directly in front of Lanz’s hotel. There was one main street running north and south, intersected by the road from Bangui that followed the west-east course of the Kotto River. On the outskirts of town the road from Bangui became Rue de Santo Antonio, and the north-south street was Rue de Liberdad. Two banks sat on the Rue de Liberdad-Banque Internationale pour le Centrafrique and Banque Populaire Maroco-Centrafricaine-and one on the square, the Bank of Central African States. Of the three, two were known to have been heavily involved in money laundering and financing for blood commodities. The Bank of Central African States occupied the only building of over four stories in Fourandao, the upper floors containing the People’s Republic of China consular offices, the Kukuanaland Department of Customs and Excise and the Department of the Interior.
The two main streets were the only ones that were paved; the interconnecting grid of residential streets were dirt tracks. Lanz could detect no sewer system of any kind, which meant that the interconnecting streets flooded during the rainy season. Except for the buildings on the square Fourandao relied heavily on tin-roof and concrete-block construction. In most cases the quality of the concrete blocks had been poor, and without any foundations or drainage the majority of the buildings were crumbling at their bases. The only exception to this was a walled and guarded group of three modern blocks of flats that appeared to be built out of concrete. From what he could gather from eavesdropping in the bar of the hotel these flats were occupied by government bureaucrats in favor with Kolingba.
On his walks Lanz had noted evidence of malnutrition and rickets among the population, and on several occasions he’d seen huge rats nesting in the garbagechoked ditches. Dense foliage encroached on the edges of the town, and he’d seen several native women carrying bundles of firewood out of the jungle. Fourandao was as close to the edge of civilization as it was possible to get. There was no police force, since that function was operated out of Saint-Sylvestre’s euphemistically named Department of the Interior, no fire department, no city hall or any other civil authority. Kukuanaland was a country in name only; in reality it was nothing more than a criminal fiefdom that probably didn’t stretch much beyond the town limits.
Smiling to himself, Lanz began neatly filling in the street names he’d gathered that day. Every battleground had its weaknesses and he was reasonably sure he’d discovered Fourandao’s.
Oliver Gash sat in Captain Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre’s office overlooking the Plaza de Revolution de Generale Kolingba and studied the huge aerial photograph of Fourandao that took up the entire wall behind the policeman’s massive African mahogany desk, rumored to have once belonged to Mobutu Sese Seko, the long-dead dictator of Zaire, who had in turn purchased it from the estate of the late General Gnassingbe Eyadema, the long-standing “president” of Togo. Both Gash and Captain Saint-Sylvestre were smoking Marlboros, the cigarette of choice among those in Kukuanaland who could afford them. Gash had once joked to General Kolingba that they should advertise in tourism magazines abroad, touting Kukuanaland as a vacation destination for smokers. Kolingba had taken him seriously and Gash had to spend weeks talking him out of it.
“So what exactly does he do on these little walks?” Gash asked.
“He walks.” Saint-Sylvestre shrugged.
“No camera?”
“None that we can see.”
“Anything in his room?” Gash asked.
“Nothing incriminating. He has a number of weapons catalogs.”
“Did you run a background check?”
“Of course. He could be what he says he is-at first glance he appears to be an experienced mercenary who knows Africa well.”
“But you have doubts,” said Gash. It was a statement, not a question.
“I always have doubts, Dr. Gash. It is my business to have doubts. Our friend Lanz doesn’t ring quite true. Why does a mercenary soldier suddenly switch to being an arms dealer? Why would a supposed arms dealer travel here knowing perfectly well that we are supplied by the Chinese and have been since the beginning? There are no fools in the arms business and if a man is an arms dealer he is a fool. Ergo, I don’t believe it.”
“All right,” said Gash, stubbing out his cigarette in a huge ceramic ashtray on the desk in front of him. “What is he doing here?”
Saint-Sylvestre smiled. “At a guess I would say he’s on a reconnaissance mission.”
“To do what?”
“To facilitate a coup d’etat,” said the policeman mildly.
“Dangerous words, Captain,” responded Gash. “Talk like that could get you into serious trouble.”
“I’m not promoting the idea, Dr. Gash; I am merely giving my opinion.” Saint-Sylvestre was well aware that he had to take a very circumspect path with Gash. The man was an uneducated savage, but he had what the Americans called “street sense” and a certain animal shrewdness that was sometimes mistaken for intelligence. Worst of all Gash had the killer instinct of a sociopath, which would have been Saint-Sylvestre’s diagnosis had he been a doctor. In some ways Gash was even crazier than Kolingba.
Gash lit another cigarette, smirking as he did so. “All right, then, Captain, in your opinion, who is he working for?” In Baltimore it would have been easy to figure out which of your rivals was strong enough to make a play for your turf; here the same rules didn’t apply.
“I’m not sure. Originally I thought it might be one of our neighbors-Chad, the Congo, Cameroon-but I don’t think that’s the case.”
“Why not?”
“He’s white, for one thing. I seriously doubt that the government of Chad would hire a white mercenary, not to mention the fact that they’ve got too much to lose internationally. The same is true of the Congo-to be seen as an aggressor now would be all the excuse the U.N. would need to send in troops. Cameroon doesn’t have the money to launch a serious invasion and they’d have to go through the rest of the country to get to us. It doesn’t make sense.”
“What does?”
“He came here from Mali, but he wasn’t hired there. He also mentioned a man named Archibald Ives. I asked a few questions. Ives was a geologist.”
“Was?”
“He’s dead. Murdered in the Sudan.”
“There’s no oil in the CAR is there?” Gash asked.
Saint-Sylvestre shook his head. “Not a drop. They gave up looking for it years ago.”
“What, then?”
“He was a primarily a mineral geologist, a prospector. If he was in Kukuanaland there’s no record of it, so that means he came in illegally, probably through the Sudan.”
“Looking for what?”
“I spent some time thinking about that,” said Saint-Sylvestre, leaning back in his chair. “Any geologist in his right mind wouldn’t come into Kukuanaland on a whim. He must have known what he was looking for. The only way he could have known that would be through remote sensing, probably from a satellite.”
“The Americans? The CIA?”
“No, they wouldn’t risk the political blowback if they were found out, and we don’t have anything they want anyway. Kukuanaland is hardly strategic.”
“They’d like to wipe us off the map; I know that much,” said Gash. “That creepy secretary of state keeps on making all these war-criminal claims about the general.”
“You don’t need a geologist for that,” said Saint-Sylvestre. He shook his head. “No, somebody was looking for something and they found it. This Ives fellow was sent in to corroborate whatever their remote sensing told them. Lanz is here because the only way these people can get what they want is by getting rid of General Kolingba.”
“A mining company?” Gash said.
“A big one.” Saint-Sylvestre nodded. “Big enough to have access to a remote sensing satellite. Big enough to finance a small war.”
“So we bring Lanz in and you interrogate him.”