The Templar Legion t-5 Read online

  There were three uniformed men in a small, windowless room with a gray tiled floor. The uniform was the same as those of the men lounging around in front of the armored car outside. One of the men sat behind a scarred wooden office desk, while a second man stood beside him and the third man stood in front of the exit door leading out of the room. There was a wooden examination table to the right of the desk. The two standing men wore mirrored aviator sunglasses, while the man behind the desk did not. The two guards carried what looked like Tokarev TT-30 automatic pistols in cheap belt holsters. A framed photograph of Solomon Kolingba hung on the wall behind the man at the desk. There was a wooden bench running along the wall opposite the desk.

  Lanz stepped up to the desk and waited silently. The man behind the desk stared up at him. He was in his forties, the first gray showing at his temples. He wore round, stainless-steel-framed glasses. The name strip on his fatigues read, SAINT-SYLVESTRE; not surprising, since the Central African Republic had once been part of French Equatorial Africa.

  “Passport.”

  Lanz reached into the inner pocket of his cream-colored linen jacket and took out a passport. It was dark blue with CANADA stamped in gold above the Canadian coat of arms. He handed it over.

  Behind the desk Saint-Sylvestre leafed through the blank pages. “Canadian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your name is Konrad Lanz?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not a Canadian name.”

  “My parents were Austrian. I immigrated as a child.”

  “You don’t travel a great deal, I see.”

  “On the contrary,” said Lanz. “I travel a great deal. You will notice the day of issue was only two months ago.”

  “A brand-new passport.”

  “The previous one was full.” In fact, Lanz had a number of passports but Canadian ones were easiest to get and he preferred to use brand-new documents when traveling to a country he had never visited before. God only knew which countries a madman like Kolingba disliked or had been offended by in his addled psyche.

  Lanz had spent a week researching Kukuanaland and its leader, and from what he had gathered there was no doubt that Freud would have had a field day deconstructing the self-made general’s life and lunacies. According to various reports, his mother had been a prostitute who may or may not have been functionally retarded. His father had apparently been one of her clients. Kolingba had two sisters and three brothers, all of whom died violently and under mysterious circumstances.

  Kolingba’s moods and behavior were notoriously unpredictable and violent; the citizens of Kukuanaland lived in perpetual fear. On the other hand, the general’s second in command, Oliver Gash, was an enigma, appearing on the eve of the so-called “revolution” to offer his support. Lanz’s sources indicated that Gash had some sort of vague criminal past in the United States; Lanz wasn’t sure which of the two men was the more dangerous.

  “Why have you come here?” Saint-Sylvestre asked.

  “Business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “None of yours,” answered Lanz, wondering how far the man behind the desk could be pushed.

  “The Department of the Interior is concerned with everyone’s business, Mr. Lanz.” Saint-Sylvestre smiled.

  “I thought you were immigration, not the secret police.”

  “In Kukuanaland they are one and the same,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “And there is nothing at all secret about our police.” The man’s smile hardened into something else. “We are a very open country, you see.”

  “Commendable,” said Lanz.

  “So, I ask again, what is your business here?”

  “Guns,” said Lanz.

  Saint-Sylvestre blinked behind the steel-framed glasses. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m an arms dealer…. Mr. Saint-Sylvestre, I specialize in small arms of all types up to and including man-portable antitank systems like the American LAWs or the Russian RPG-7.”

  “Actually, it’s Captain Saint-Sylvestre, Mr. Lanz.” He paused. “What makes you think your services would be of interest to us?”

  “Because the pistols your two guards are wearing were designed in the nineteen thirties. So were those submachine guns the guards outside were carrying.”

  Saint-Sylvestre glanced down at the passport in his hands and changed the subject. “You were in Mali.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you do any business there?”

  “None to speak of. I made a few contacts.”

  “And one of them suggested you visit us? Anyone in particular?”

  “A man named Ives,” said Lanz, throwing his line into the water. “Archibald Ives.” There was no reaction from Saint-Sylvestre other than a brief note he jotted on a pad close to his right hand. The ballpoint he used was a Montblanc-his own, or booty from an unwary foreigner who’d passed through the bleak little room that was Saint-Sylvestre’s fiefdom?

  “And are you bringing any of these weapons into the country?” Saint-Sylvestre asked, nodding toward the single suitcase Lanz carried.

  “Just the catalogs,” Lanz answered.

  “The suitcase,” said Saint-Sylvestre, indicating the examination table. Lanz lifted the case and spun it around. The guard standing beside Saint-Sylvestre ran the zipper around the edges of the case and threw back the top. Saint-Sylvestre glanced inside. Toiletries, neatly packed summer-weight clothing and a half dozen thick catalogs: Armament Technology Incorporated of Canada, Browning, Bushmaster, the Czech Republic’s eska Zbrojovka Uhersky Brod, China’s Norinco, Russia’s Rosvoorouzhenie.

  Captain Saint-Sylvestre picked up a catalog at random and leafed through it, then dropped it onto the table. Using the Montblanc, he turned over the clothes in the suitcase. He found only a library-edition copy of Carl Hiaasen’s most recent novel. He picked it up. “What is this?”

  “A very funny book about the cult of celebrity in the United States.”

  “You don’t have this cult in Canada?”

  “It’s hard to tell.” Lanz shrugged. “There are no celebrities in Canada. They all go to the U.S.”

  “The book is funny?”

  “Very.”

  “The author is a celebrity?”

  “I suppose,” said Lanz.

  “Then he ridicules himself?”

  “I don’t really care.” Lanz sighed. He was getting bored with the man’s convoluted interrogation. “I bought it to read on the plane.”

  Saint-Sylvestre dropped the book back into the suitcase and changed gears again. “Empty your pockets, please.”

  Lanz did so. Saint-Sylvestre picked up his wallet. He examined all the credit cards and counted the cash. There was four thousand dollars in U.S. hundred-dollar bills.

  “A great deal of money.”

  “I’m a great believer in cash.”

  “So am I,” said Saint-Sylvestre. He counted out ten hundred-dollar bills, folded them and slipped the money into the breast pocket of his uniform. He looked up at Lanz and smiled.

  “Tax,” he explained.

  “That’s what I thought.” Lanz nodded.

  “No cell phone?”

  Lanz shrugged. “Would I get a signal?”

  “No camera?”

  “I didn’t come here to take pictures.”

  “It is a very beautiful country,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “There are many attractions for the visitor. Many colorful birds and exotic animals.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Although the jungle can be very dangerous. Sometimes fatal,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “I strongly advise you to stay in Fourandao. For your own safety.”

  “Of course,” said Lanz. Now, what was that all about?

  “You may go,” said Saint-Sylvestre. Lanz nodded, repacked his suitcase and put everything back in his pockets, including his wallet.

  “Perhaps you could recommend a hotel,” said Lanz.

  “There is only one. The Trianon.”

  Lanz nodde
d. The guard at the exit door stepped aside. Lanz picked up his suitcase and left. Saint-Sylvestre watched him go. Finally he spoke to the guard beside him in rapid-fire Sango.

  “Tondo ni wande,” he instructed. Keep watch over the foreigner.

  “En, Kapita,” said the guard. He followed Lanz out the door.

  11

  Michael Pierce Harris sat in his room at the Khartoum Hilton and listened to the distant satellite-echoing voice of his boss.

  “What’s the present situation?” Major Allen Faulkener asked from his London office.

  “They’re getting ready for some sort of expedition, that’s for sure,” answered Harris. “They’ve been picking up everything from bug spray and hammocks to machetes and malaria pills.”

  “The pilot, Osman?”

  “Stripping down the engines on the Catalina.”

  “Do you have any idea about their ETD?”

  “Tomorrow, maybe the day after. Osman’s filed a flight plan for Umm Rawq.”

  There was a brief silence. Finally Faulkener spoke. “There’s a Matheson twin Otter at the civilian airport in Khartoum. Take it down to Wau, on the border, in the morning. I’ll have a half dozen men on standby. That should be enough.”

  “Enough for what?” Harris asked.

  “They’re following in Ives’s footsteps,” said Faulkener, his voice rising and falling spectrally on the carrier wave. “Make sure they stumble and fall. Fatally.”

  Returning from his regular afternoon stroll through town, Konrad Lanz stepped into the Bar Marie-Antoinette at the Trianon Palace Hotel and let his eyes adjust to the gloom. The long, narrow space off the lobby was empty except for Marcel Boganda, the bartender. Late sunlight leaked weakly through the partially opened louvers on the window that looked out onto the Trianon’s colonial-style veranda.

  The room was straight out of Rudyard Kipling, complete with a gently rotating wooden fan whickering overhead, a few old, cracked brown leather banquettes and club chairs scattered randomly. The centerpiece, the bar itself, was forty feet of art deco, deep red burled bubinga hardwood, the slab surface of the bar top as dense as marble. The bar was Marcel’s pride and joy; every drink was served with a coaster and every condensation ring was wiped up almost before it had a chance to form.

  Marcel was in his fifties, round faced and short haired. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and dressed in evening clothes from the time the bar opened at noon to closing time at midnight. He was a formal, distant man and rarely spoke unless he was spoken to. It was only by accident that Lanz had discovered from a waiter in the dining room on the far side of the lobby that Marcel actually owned the Trianon.

  Crossing the room Lanz took a seat on one of the tall, high-backed leather-covered bar stools at the veranda end of the room. He put his Carl Hiaasen book down on the bar and waited. It took a moment or two but eventually Marcel wandered down and took Lanz’s order: a chilled green-and-yellow bottle of Congolese Ngok beer with its lurid crocodile logo. Marcel poured the pale, corn-colored lager into a tall glass, letting the short head rise, just so. Lanz took a sip and sighed happily.

  “Hot out there,” said Lanz.

  “Most usually is, sir,” said Marcel. “It is a hot country.”

  “Lived here all your life?” Lanz asked.

  “I went away to school, sir. To France. The Sorbonne.”

  “And you came back here?” Lanz asked, surprised.

  “This is my home,” said the bartender simply, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Kukuanaland?”

  “Fourandao, sir.”

  “What do you think about Kolingba?”

  “I try not to,” answered Marcel. Lanz wasn’t entirely sure but he thought he caught a tinge of irony in the man’s voice.

  “Does he ever come here?”

  “No, sir. Our president is not a drinker.”

  “How about his second in command, this Gash fellow?”

  “Chocolate bourbon on the rocks from time to time,” said Marcel. “Why do you ask me so many questions, sir?”

  “I’ll be honest with you, Marcel. I need an in to the president.”

  “In my experience, sir, people who preface a conversation with ‘let me be honest’ are anything but, and what precisely do you mean by an ‘in’?”

  “I’m an arms dealer, Marcel. I sell guns and ammunition, mostly to small African countries like this one, usually to their rebel factions, sometimes to warring religious and ethnic groups.”

  “We have no rebel factions, sir, nor do we have warring religious or ethic groups.”

  “What about this Limbani character?” Lanz said.

  “Dr. Limbani has been dead for quite some time,” said Marcel. But there was a faint flicker of apprehension and a little twitch of the eyes that went with the statement. Lanz decided to leave it for the moment.

  “Where does Kolingba get his weapons?”

  “I couldn’t say,” said Marcel.

  The bartender was looking very uneasy now, and Lanz decided to back off completely. “Well, if you think of a way I could get in to see the man, let me know,” he said.

  “Of course, sir.” There was a pause. “Will that be all?”

  “Another beer, Marcel.”

  After Lanz finished the second beer, he picked up his book and left the bar. In the lobby he spotted a lone man sitting in one of the fan-backed wicker armchairs, smoking a cigarette and reading a copy of Centrafriquepresse. He was the same man who’d followed him on his afternoon walkabout. Lanz smiled. Saint-Sylvestre’s surveillance was nothing if not obvious.

  Lanz went up the broad, sweeping staircase to the mezzanine, then walked up three more flights to his small room under the eaves. It was simply furnished with an iron bedstead, a mattress that had seen better days and a simple spindle-legged desk with an old-fashioned brass swan-neck lamp. Lanz dropped the book onto the desk and stepped across to the window, which gave him a view over the square and into the compound directly opposite the hotel.

  The compound ran a hundred and fifty feet on a side, the walls quarried cut stone, the large gate wood-strapped and hinged with iron. Guard towers, tin roofed and constructed from plywood, had been added at each corner. The so-called “presidential residence” was up against the east wall, and there was a rudimentary barracks building kitty-corner to it. A smaller brick building that sat directly across from the residence was almost certainly a guardhouse. The barracks looked as though it could hold between a hundred and a hundred and fifty men.

  A tin-roofed shed had been built against the wall next to the guardhouse-obviously the motor pool. Lanz counted two bumblebee-striped Land Rovers with tinted windows, three armored personnel carriers and an even dozen “Mengshi” Chinese Humvee knockoffs painted in jungle camouflage, 50-caliber machine guns mounted just forward of the sunroof hatch. Considering all the other Chinese equipment he had seen, the machine guns were probably W-85s. Fourandao had a population of less than five thousand; the compound’s ordnance was easily enough to protect the town from direct assault as long as there was no air element.

  Lanz went back to the desk and sat down. Taking up the book, he carefully stripped off the celluloid library cover and the original jacket. He set the book aside and laid the dust jacket illustration-side down on the desk.

  Lanz had been a soldier since his compulsory military service in the late seventies. He’d worked with every sort of intelligence tool, from satellite imagery and phone taps to photo intelligence and drugged “persuasion” of the enemy. Of all these techniques he’d never found anything more useful and more accurate than the evidence of his own eyes.

  On the inside of the dust jacket was an accurate scale map of central Fourandao, the information gathered during his afternoon strolls during the past few days. The map was drawn lightly in pencil directly from memory after each of his daily constitutionals.

  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.