'A' for Argonaut (20 page)

Twenty-One

Kinshasa

B
oyko and Pajak were exhausted after surviving the attack at the Grand Tropico Aphrodiziax. The two men sat in SSI’s street floor office off the front lobby at Boyko’s Hotel Costa do Sol on Kinshasa’s Boulevard June 30th, the street name celebrating DRC’s independence from Belgium on June 30th, 1960. Loudspeakers could still be heard through the open window. The men could still smell the smoke from the gunfire and explosives coming from the street. Lights and loudspeakers blended with the excited commands of Boyko’s security force outside. Boyko laughed as he poured two fingers of vodka for Pajak into a delicate, rose-patterned Lalique china cup.

“Fuckin’ savages,” he roared. “They ruined the show!”

“Not to mention the girls who died,” Pajak observed.

“Merchandise.” Boyko said dismissively. “Infinitely replaceable.”

A Brahms lullaby played on a Dolby Home Theater surround-sound stereo system mounted in a huge, teak electronics center. Boyko handed the cup and saucer to Pajak who sat in a rocker-recliner chair. Behind his island-shaped desk, a 21-inch desktop computer screen flashed a series of pornographic lesbian scenes.

The centerpiece, however, sat on the desk: a sentimental amber-tinted print of Boyko’s hometown of Tbilisi’s fourth century Anchiskhati Basilica. It was framed with an encrustment of multi-colored diamonds, deep blues to bright yellows. They matched the large stones in the rings on Boyko’s fingers.

Boyko walked to his desk and picked up an object that sat to the right of the picture, a transparent brownish yellow Buddha carved from what appeared to be a huge diamond.

“One of ours. Sixty-five carats, indistinguishable from the centerpiece of a sixteenth century diamond pendant necklace stolen from the Louvre in Paris. We sold a thousand of them in the Jade Room at the Mid-Year Emporium in Yangon, Myanmar, for twenty thousand dollars apiece, twenty million dollars U.S. in total.”

His pricing strategy never ceased to amaze Pajak. He had no idea how he could do it.

Boyko opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out what appeared to be a cell phone. As Pajak watched, Boyko’s laughter turned to a cackle. He circled the office, held the instrument in the air; ran it over all the electrical outlets, lamps, and furniture in the room; waved it over and across the desk and sighed. It was in fact a sophisticated laser audio surveillance detector. A red light flashed and beeped on the pocket-sized calculator that sat on the desk, Boyko threw his head back; his laughter rose to a near-scream. The signal meant the device had been bugged.

“They think they can fuck with the Master? Amateurs.” He tipped his head back, roared, picked up the pocket-sized calculator from the desk.

Pajak reached in his pocket. “Here.” He passed his comrade a small pocketknife.

Boyko opened the calculator. Inside, he found a tiny audio microphone and transmitter.

“No one in this fuckin’, stink hole of a country can be trusted,” he snarled. The irony of his statement escaped him.

“It would, in any case, be an unusual organization if it didn’t self-generate its own spies,” Pajak retorted.

“We know that routine refractive-index testing will only give a shadowy, over-the-limits refractometer reading. Bright orange-red fluorescence to long and short-wave ultraviolet radiation won’t raise any suspicions.”

“What about the color? You think they’ve figured that out?”

“We’re using the cyclotron. It’s secure. They have no access,” Boyko said. He explained that cyclotron treatment hadn’t been used for years to color diamonds. Few remembered the surface treatment process, which made it perfect for his purpose.

An armored personnel carrier pulled up outside the hotel. Two armed guards stepped out and came into the office. Boyko reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He led the guards down the hallway to a locked steel door into a room that was empty save for one long table. In the middle sat large stacks of blue, apricot, and red notes, outdated, worthless: old Zairean currency bills in denominations of 50,000, 100,000, and 200,000 Zaires.

“Security payroll,” Boyko said with a grin as the men toted the money out the door into the armored car. “It just doesn’t get better than this. We still pay them in ‘New Zaires.’ Good in our stores. Nowhere else.”

“What are we going to do about Maran?” Pajak asked, changing the subject to a more critical issue. “We have to stop him.”

Twenty-Two

The Pentagon: Arlington, Virginia

B
ack from a special session of Treasury’s Financial Operations Group, Brigadier General Bull Luster stared out a window in his new Pentagon office over the Potomac. He watched the constant honor guard going through its vigilant routine at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The web belt around Luster’s waist tugged. He loosened it, careful to avoid smudging the embossed star on the brass clasp. The telephone rang. Embedded in the oak desk next to it, a special issue Glock field knife lent the proper intimidation to Luster’s office visitors. Exclusive to the SAWs, its handle gleamed with polished brass knuckles.

Luster let the telephone ring.

“Get that for me, Jake.”

Sergeant Major Jake Woodruff had just accepted the role as Brigadier General Hank Luster’s special assistant. He answered the phone for his boss.

It was Baltimore.

The door opened. Jake looked in.

“Maran is outside. Says he has an appointment. Nothing on your schedule.”

“Let him in; then leave us alone. Hold the calls.”

“You got a call from General Baltimore. Told him you’d call back.”

When Maran entered, Bull Luster rose. He pressed his hands over his thick chest, straightened the wrinkles in his tunic. He stuck out a hand. His eyes bulged like bulbs. The bushy silver eyebrows supported a series of wrinkles, terraces across his forehead. Though he had expected a visit eventually, he was shocked to see Maran so soon. He wasn’t happy about it.

“Maran!”

“We have to talk.” Maran’s voice rumbled. Tension crackled the air like a bundle of Chinese firecrackers. Luster felt the ricochet off his office walls.

He maneuvered around the large desk and took several steps to the bar behind it.

“Sure. Let’s have a drink. Rannymareade Ancient?”

Maran composed himself. He felt like murdering Luster after his betrayal at the trial.

Is he one of the conspirators that want me dead?

A glimmer of hope flickered that Luster was only following his conscience. Maran had to play his hand cutely if he were to find out.

“Remember Freetown?” Maran asked.

“Sierra Leone? Diamonds just there in the riverbeds?”

“Corpses. Dismembered. Discarded limbs‌—‌hands.”

Luster’s face puckered.

“You bailed me out of that attack in‌—‌what was the name of that joint?”

“Osama’s. Run by a Frenchman. His idea of a joke,” Maran said.

“We were all pretty hammered.”

“Right. My last drink.”

“Oh, hell. Ain’t I the ass? Heard you quit. The Program,” Luster said, apologetic for the oversight.

“Yeah. AA. Life’s good. I’m going to keep it that way‌—‌Day at a time. I need your help to clear my name.”

Luster bristled. Maran was crossing a line. An internal probe would not just cut into Luster’s budget; it would lend credence to Maran’s wild charge.

“Mack, Mack. There’s no way. If there were, my staff would have found it and brought it to my attention. You were in the wrong.” Luster was losing his patience.

“Someone torpedoed Taxi Home. And it had to be one of us.”

“You’re beginning to piss me off, trooper!”

“Second nature. As I’m sure you remember. I’m going to do more than piss off a lot of people before I’m finished.” Maran’s voice was rising.

“In fact, I plan on killing some, God willing.”

“Listen here, soldier!” Luster shouted back. “Don’t blame me for
your
stupidity. You are the one who disobeyed a direct order in the line of duty. You’re not the only maimed op who served under my command. We’re losing people every day and it’s not going to stop until we go after the Islamist fanatics with the kind of resolve that won us WWII and the Cold War. It’s not happening now. And God only knows if it will ever happen again. Those people who attacked you in Cabinda for all we know have a direct connection with the Middle Eastern maniacs. Arms for diamonds. That’s what it’s all about.
I
know it.
You
know it. Tell it to Congress. They say that’s not our war. African savages butcher one another? Not our turf. Complete idiots. There you are. The new American way. Fuckin’ heads in the sand. If not up their asses.”

“Until KoeffieBloehm gets hurt; then the big banks will be all over Treasury screaming for the military option.”

“That’s a fact!” Luster’s finger punctuated the air like a rapier.

“It keeps coming back. The Animal’s face. My guys, slaughtered. Those savages came out of the bush armed with top-shelf U.S. armament! Yet, one hour earlier, they were sitting around in their compound. No perimeter guards. All we had to do was close in…”

Maran paused.

“…but the Animal knew we were coming.”

General Bull Luster grimaced. When he opened his mouth, it was like a flamethrower.

“What do you think this has to do with me? Valentine moved me out of the action. You may think you’re one scapegoated trooper. Betrayed. No doubt, it’s what’s anchored you from beaching up on the dry land, the rocks. Now it’s time to lick your wounds and give it up!”

Maran’s breath came in short, heavy gasps. Vertigo hit like a rush. Doubt besieged him.

Is Luster right? Maybe my soul is fired by blood lust.

Luster stood, pulled out a sheaf of color photos, threw them on the desk. Mutilated faces. Dismembered bodies. Children rent in pieces. Piles of rubble where large buildings had been. The gore wasn’t new to either of them. You never get used to it.

“This is the gruesome truth of the story. In spite of this barbarism, half of America still believes we should be coating our foreign policy with honey. Diplomacy,” he scoffed. “They believe, somehow in their addled minds, that we’re swatting flies here when it’s so obvious that we’re under attack by a subterranean swarm of sewer rats.” The General’s face flushed like an inflated plum. “We’re in a civil war right here in America.”

“What has that got to do with Cabinda?”

“Everything’s connected. Today, anything’s possible. No truths anymore, only theories, guesses, and dreams. A president who wants to release Gitmo terrorists as though the enemy war criminals and serial killers we’ve got locked up there are the
victims.
Anti-Americans slithering out of the campuses. The fur-worshipers, tree-huggers, abortionists, gun-control nuts, porno-freaks, transvestite-lovers, atheists, One-Worlders, Communists, Trotskyites, Maoists, Castroists. Now radical Islamists. It’s the poison they’ve spread, the Leftists, that’s made you paranoid,” Luster growled.

“And we’re still pulling punches,” he added. “No one has the balls to face that fact. It sounds almost un-American to say it; we are fighting an ideology in Islamism, not a religion. The West better soon remember that Israel, derisively referred to by the Liberals as ‘the Zionists”, is the only democracy in the Middle East as we know democracy and the entire Arab world united to attack that country’s independence as soon as it was birthed in 1947.”

Maran’s mind flashed on his days at the Point. In a class with Colonel Jon Timber, he studied the Sociology of Ideology and got turned on by Friedrich A. Hayek’s little book “The Road to Serfdom.” He never forgot Hayek’s warning about the left’s obsession against free enterprise competition in favor of government central planning: “Planning leads to dictatorship.” Maran saw that happening all around him. However, this wasn’t the time he was going to get into that.

“I didn’t come for a political speech. I’ve heard enough of that bullshit to last me three lifetimes. I need concrete answers. How can you help me?”

“You had a chance to testify, to provide evidence. There was none. Get out before you get killed.”

Is that advice‌—‌or a threat?
Maran wondered.

“How did the Animal get hold of an Abrams tank?” he asked.

The question hung in the air like gun smoke.

When Maran left, Luster
picked up the telephone. Baltimore confirmed that the meeting was on. At the same time, in the privacy of his own office, Sergeant Jake Woodruff put in a call to Abner Dolitz.

The sun was still
out, shimmering like a mirage on the pavement ahead on the George Washington Parkway as Maran tooled the rented Town Car around the light midday traffic. It had taken him fifteen minutes to find a spot in the Pentagon parking lot and now the ride down the Interstate to Alexandria’s Old Town took no longer. This time his host expected him. He pulled off South Washington Street, a block down from the Lyceum. He parked at the rear of Cole Martin’s office.

Martin, a large man, fond of Stetson cowboy hats which hung from a rack behind his desk, had retired from his role as Inspector General at the National Security Agency months earlier. Before that, he had led NIMA, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency that collects and analyzes satellite images for DOD. A former professor of national security at MIT, Martin now taught nuclear non-proliferation policy law at Georgetown. He was also a Nelson McCracken Award-winning expert in ballistic missile and satellite technology. He had been Maran’s friend since his early days as a covert operator on TDY with the Army’s remote space intelligence programs.