Tom Cain - Dictator

She gave his hands a little squeeze, as if she knew just what he was thinking, and leaned forward to kiss him, very delicately, on the cheek.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course you will.’

She’d asked one question, but she’d answered another one altogether.

‘Good,’ said Carver. ‘I’m glad we’re agreed on that.’

A silence fell on the room, eventually broken by a harsh, guttural cough. Zalika spun round, saw Klerk with his fist to his mouth and frowning as if in deep discomfort. She burst out laughing. ‘God, Wendell, I’ve never seen you looking embarrassed before!’

‘Not at all,’ growled Klerk, clearing his throat. ‘I just wondered if you could stop flirting for five seconds and demonstrate to Mr Carver here that you really do know as much about President Gushungo as I just said you did.’

‘Of course,’ said Zalika. ‘I’d be delighted.’

She picked up the remote control and turned back to the TV, clicking her way through a series of menus until she came to a PowerPoint file titled HG-HK. ppt. She clicked it open and a picture of Henderson Gushungo appeared on the screen.

‘Just in case we’d forgotten who we were dealing with,’ Zalika said.

Now she was all business.

‘Before we go any further,’ she continued, ‘I just want to explain how we – well, I actually – arrived at the location that was chosen for this operation. The obvious place to attack Gushungo, of course, is Malemba itself. But it is also the least suitable. The President has the nation’s entire armed forces to call on as personal protection. His secret police are everywhere. He still has a lot of allies, men who know that their only hope of staying in power is to keep the old man alive as long as possible. We also have reliable information suggesting that Gushungo has at least four doubles. Their basic role in life is to take a bullet that’s meant for him, so it would be depressingly easy to take out the wrong man and kill some innocent lookalike instead of the real thing. And if that were not bad enough, the total collapse of the country’s infrastructure would make it a hard place to leave in a hurry. Of course we could organize a fast extraction if we had to. But the state Malemba is in makes everything much more complicated and much less reliable than you’d want it to be. So if Malemba’s no good, when does Gushungo go abroad?’

She clicked the remote control and a new picture appeared of the President standing in front of a giant Bedouin tent, shaking hands with a man wearing vivid purple silk robes, a matching pillbox hat and impenetrable black shades.

‘There are still some states willing to welcome Gushungo. This is him meeting Gaddafi in Libya last year. He also had the brass nerve to attend an EU summit on relations with Africa in Lisbon. Officially, the European nations are opposed to his regime. All his bank accounts within the EU and even Switzerland have been frozen. But it’s very difficult for them to prevent a head of state entering a European nation, particularly if he’s been invited to attend a multinational meeting, or an event held by an international organization like the United Nations. So here he is in Rome, for example.’

Now the picture on the screen showed Gushungo, surrounded by a scrum of bodyguards and photographers, standing in front of the Colosseum.

‘He went to a UN conference there and talked about the need to preserve global food supplies and meet the threat of climate change,’ said Zalika. ‘This from a man who has reduced his country to a desert! When I think of how our farms used to be when I was a girl: the land looked after so beautifully; wonderful crops every year; plenty of work for everyone… and now it’s all gone. It makes me so angry.’

‘You are not alone, my dear,’ said Tshonga. ‘We all feel the same way.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ she said. ‘Anyway, there are opportunities when the President makes these visits. But the host countries give him the same protection they provide for any head of state. These days all the western nations have excellent special forces, the Middle Eastern and Asian ones, too. I’m sure you could find a way past them if you had to, Sam. But again, it adds to the risk. Which left me with one final option.’

Another picture appeared on the screen. It was blurry, taken at long distance with an extreme telephoto lens. It showed a close-up of Gushungo wearing a dressing gown, leaning on a balcony.

Click.

Now the picture expanded and revealed that the balcony was on the top floor of a slender four-storey building perched on a hillside, with similar constructions on either side.

‘This is dear old Henderson, beloved Father of our Nation, sunning himself at his new holiday home,’ said Zalika. ‘It’s in Hong Kong. And that’s where we’re going to get him.’

Before Carver could respond to what Zalika Stratten had said there was a tentative, barely audible knock on the door.

‘Come!’ barked Klerk.

The door opened to reveal a woman in a short strapless red cocktail dress. She was very blonde, very tanned and very thin. As she walked across to Klerk, she smiled in a way that was simultaneously dazzling yet also somewhat tentative, as if she were not quite sure of how she would be received. She stepped up to Klerk and lightly placed her right hand on his chest then kept moving round him as if marking out an invisible boundary to ward off any competitors. She left her hand where it was as she stepped behind him so that her fingers ended up draped over his right shoulder, revealing long, perfectly manicured nails painted in the same scarlet shade as her dress. The diamond and ruby ring on the fourth finger was a mugger’s wet dream.

She gave Klerk a proprietorial peck on the left cheek and said, ‘When do you think you’ll be ready for dinner, sweetie? Jean-Pierre is totally stressing out. He’s making us individual cheese and black truffle souffles and he says they have to be served straight from the oven.’

‘Ten minutes,’ said Klerk. ‘Let this be a warning to you, Sam: when I have made you very, very rich, you too will have to deal with temperamental chefs and beautiful, highly strung women.’

Klerk turned back to the blonde. ‘My dear, this is Mr Samuel Carver, who is about to do me a very great personal favour by sorting out a problem with our African operations. Sam, meet Brianna Latrelle, my fiancee, who hopes that I’ll do her an even bigger favour by setting the date for our wedding before I die of old age.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Brianna,’ said Carver, shaking her hand.

Up close, he could see that there were fine lines beneath the make-up on Brianna’s pretty face. No wonder she wanted to seal the deal with Klerk. She had to be in her late thirties at least. She needed to land her man soon, before someone younger and fresher stole him away.

‘Hello, Sam,’ Brianna replied, with another all-American cheerleader smile.

She looked at Zalika, as if noticing her for the first time. ‘Zalika, honey,’ she said, kissing her on either cheek. ‘You make the cutest little secretary. But aren’t you changing for dinner?’

‘I’m so sorry, Bree,’ said Zalika. ‘I’ve been working so hard I just haven’t had time. And anyway, your dress is so stunning, I’m sure I couldn’t compete.’

The compliment was sweetly made. But Carver detected something much more hostile beneath the surface: each word was like a dagger covered in candyfloss. These two women were anything but friends.

‘Right then, that’s enough chit-chat,’ said Klerk. ‘Brianna, my dear, go and tell Jean-Pierre he can start cooking his precious souffles.’

‘Of course, my love,’ Brianna said, giving Klerk another little kiss before she left.