The man laughed, the sound abrasive in the crisp late-afternoon air. “Oh, you’ll soon have one. Don’t you worry. Be careful what you wish for.”
The hard-looking mercenary type grabbed her arm and she tried to twist away. His fingers were like a vise, and his grip tightened. “This way,” he growled, and half dragged her toward the building, where two uniformed guards stood by the entrance. She took in the bars on the few windows and the five-meter-high wall circling the grounds, a tower in each of the four corners housing guards with rifles she could make out even from a distance. Where, exactly, in relation to Moscow she was, she had no idea; her knowledge of the metropolis’s outlying areas was limited, and the name of the incarceration center meant nothing to her.
But wherever it was, the expressions on the guards’ faces as she stumbled on numb feet toward them told her that her stay wouldn’t be a pleasant one.
Chapter 20
Bangui, Central African Republic
Leo and Levi waited in the hotel lobby for the Range Rover to reappear. The hotel was larger than they’d anticipated and nicer, albeit still far below the standards they would have expected anywhere else. But on balance, the air-conditioning worked, the food they’d ordered in the restaurant had been edible, and the rooms clean, so they considered themselves lucky.
Hassan had called Leo’s room to alert him that he was coming by in ten minutes. That had been almost half an hour ago, and Leo and his Israeli diamond expert stood impatiently near the glass doors as the hotel staff went about their business in a discreet hum of French. The marble lobby was about as far removed from the shanties they’d passed on the way there as imaginable, and the desperation and poverty that hung over the city like a pall of pollution seemed a world away.
“Filthy place,” Levi remarked, as though reading Leo’s thoughts.
“One of the poorest countries in the world. The irony being that it’s actually rather wealthy in terms of natural resources – gold, diamonds, copper. But every ruler steals anything he can get his hands on, leaving the nation bankrupt, and it’s been that way since it got independence in 1960.”
“The French weren’t much better.”
“True. As with Russia, it doesn’t matter who’s running the country for the majority of the population. Life’s tough no matter what for them. Just as things are comfortable for the elite. It’s the same everywhere – the only difference is how well the bottom lives, not the top.”
Levi laughed softly. “Another reason to never be on the bottom.”
“True enough.”
Headlights bobbed up the drive and the Range Rover appeared. The doorman, clad in a starched white uniform that would have made an admiral blush, swung the glittering glass wide and held it for them. Even as the sun was sinking into the jungle like a molten ball, the heat was intolerable, a wall of swelter that slammed into them with the intensity of a furnace once out of the building. A flash of lightning lit the sky, and a moment later the heavens let forth a deafening roar, signaling that the anticipated storm’s arrival was imminent.
Hassan stepped out of the Range Rover, unruffled and unapologetic for his tardiness, and held the rear door open. Levi slid in, followed by Leo. They strapped in and soon were swaying down a mud road that ran north from the town.
“What’s beyond the outlying areas?” Leo asked as the driver shifted gears.
“Not much. Rebels, mostly. Villages, but nothing to them. Not someplace you want to visit,” Hassan said.
“And where are we headed?”
“We’ll be there soon enough.”
They turned off the road onto what appeared to Leo to be little more than a track leading through the trees, and his trepidation grew as the lights seemed inadequate to illuminate the way. Just as he was about to protest, the jungle gave way to a clearing, and they approached a gate, where a half dozen men brandishing AK-47s watched them near.
The driver waved at them and one of the men pushed the gate open. The truck continued for a hundred meters, and a colonial-style mansion rose out of the gloom. Hassan looked over his shoulder at Leo and smiled as the driver braked.
“We’re here. One of Abel’s cottages,” he said, referring to the warlord with whom Leo was brokering the deal.
“Some cottage,” Levi muttered in Russian. If Hassan registered it, he gave no indication.
More armed guards lounged on the veranda, their rifles held close, their eyes distrustful as Hassan escorted Leo and Levi up the steps and into the house. The interior was as opulent as the exterior, but with the same air of dilapidation. The furnishings were overly ornate, remnants of a colonial time long past.
“This way,” Hassan said, and led them up a polished wooden stairway to the second floor. Oil paintings of African dignitaries lined the corridor through which they proceeded to the rear of the house, where yet two more gunmen sat outside an oversized hardwood door.