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  For AMBER EDWARDS

  and

  LUCKY

  Our “Present Friend”

  PROLOGUE

  Exfiltration

  Last Year

  30°8' N, 9°30' E

  Tunisian Border near Ghadamis

  395 Miles South of Tripoli

  Checkpoint,” said Janson.

  Two Toyota pickups, angled nose to nose a mile ahead. The narrow oiled road, a service track for a string of high-tension power lines, was banked six or eight feet above the rolling desert. A tracked combat vehicle and a trained driver might get around it. A stolen taxi with an amateur at the wheel didn’t have a hope.

  “Government or rebel?” asked Kincaid. She sat in back with a dented Leica slung from her neck.

  Janson, sitting in front to calm the driver, scoped the pickups with an eight-power monocular lens. Civilians caught between loyalists and rebels clogged the roads to the border, so he had directed the taxi farther south through hot, windblown land edged by rock ridges and speckled with the pyramidal silhouettes of camels grazing on thin groundcover.

  He steadied the instrument with two hands. “Black mercenaries… bullpup assault rifles… truck on the left is towing a Type 63 rocket launcher.”

  Kincaid hid their rebel pass under the driver’s seat and handed Janson government-issued business visas sponsored by a Tripoli importer of irrigation pumps for the Great Man-Made River Proj­ect Authority. Young and fit, she wore a scarf over her short brown hair, loose cargo pants, and a baggy, sweat-stained long-sleeved shirt. Her papers said she worked for the publicity department of the Infrastructure and Minerals unit of KBR. She sat still as ice.

  Janson’s visa named him a hydraulic engineering manager with the same unit. He was older than Kincaid, a nondescript man with iron-gray, close-cropped hair. Faint lines of scar tissue on his hands and face and a hint of bulk under his loose shirt suggested a career ladder that had started at the bottom as an oil-patch roughneck slogging through night school. He was as calm as the woman in the backseat, almost serene.

  “We’ll get through this fine,” he told the driver. “Just take it easy.”

  It was clear to the driver that neither American understood the danger. African mercenaries were trigger-happy in the best of times. They’d be better off facing rebels who were anxious to look good on CNN. The government’s foreign soldiers did not care what the world thought; their backs were to the wall, and for them it was win or die.

  Worse, the officer commanding the checkpoint wore the insignia of the 32nd Brigade, the infamous Deterrent Battalion. He was not about to “join the people’s struggle.” Not only did he enjoy elite status, he knew that rich rewards awaited the officer who captured the dictator’s turncoat son. If the traitor was lucky enough to be caught by the rebels instead of the loyalists, they might preserve him as a hostage. The loyalists would kill him, and whoever delivered the traitor’s head to his father would receive a medal and a villa in the best neighborhood.

  The soldiers raised their rifles.

  “Slow down,” said Janson. “Keep both hands on the wheel.” He laid his own hands in full view on the dashboard, papers under his left. Kincaid gripped the back of the driver’s seat with hers.

  The driver, a bare-headed man in his thirties dressed in fake designer jeans and a shabby white shirt—the costume of North Africa’s disaffected hordes of overeducated underemployed—felt an overwhelming impulse to stomp on the accelerator and run down the soldiers. If he stopped, the best they could hope for was the mercenaries would rough them up and tear the car apart. God help the woman if the officer let them at her. Would it not be better to take a chance and put their fate in the hands of Allah?

  “Slow down,” Janson repeated. “Do not provoke them.”

  Everything he and Kincaid had encountered trying to cross the border—fear-crazed civilians, jumpy mercenaries, roving rebel units—indicated that the revolution had tumbled into chaos. No surprise after forty years of rule by a psychotic. But the fact that the loyalists were utterly distracted by a mad hunt to catch one foolish traitor took the cake.

  The psychotic dictator, the self-named “Lion of the Desert,” had spawned eight sons. Four of them—the playboy, the Army commander, the family’s oil-company director, and the transport minster—were national figures seen regularly on state TV and feted abroad in Rome and Paris. Another, who had become an obscure imam in a remote province, had disappeared behind a priestly beard; and the gay one who had fled to Milan hadn’t been seen in years. The same was true of the youngest son, Yousef—“The Cub”—who had studied computer science in the United States.

  The Cub’s face was not familiar, his photograph never published. The best intelligence confirmed that he had won trust from his father that his brothers never had because he had modernized internal security to control cell-phone communication and Internet access. Twitter and Facebook were indulged at the Lion’s pleasure. He could shut them down with a word.

  Hope that Yousef would steer the old despot in enlightened directions had been shattered in the first bloody days of the revolt when the Lion vowed to fight to the death. The Army was fragmenting, his cabinet resigning, and murderous civil war was certain. The political standoff and the threat of NATO bombing had even some loyalists whispering for the old man’s ouster.

  Yousef had panicked, fearing prosecution for war crimes. Then Italy offered an out. Trying to stop the slaughter, and positioning herself as a savior of the oil-state’s business elite, Italy promised asylum. Like everything else in the conflict, it had come too late. Before Yousef could surrender, the fighting turned chaotic. He was on the run, last seen in the oasis town of Ghadamis.

  “Slow down!” Janson repeated, hard as a round racked into a chamber. The driver took his foot off the gas, convinced that if he tried to run the checkpoint, Janson would kill him before the soldiers could fire their rifles.

  * * *

  THE SOLDIERS GESTURED them out of the car. The Deterrent Battalion officer glanced at their papers. “Open the trunk.”

  “No key,” said the driver.

  “Shoot the lock.” The mercenaries aimed casually in the general direction of the lock, fired a dozen rounds, then aimed carefully as one stood to the side and tipped the lid up with the barrel of his rifle.

  The trunk held a bullet-riddled spare tire and a bright green Libya national soccer bag. The officer opened it. His eyes widened. He plunged his hand inside and withdrew a banded stack of hundred-euro bills. “Is this yours?”

  Janson said, “No. I had no idea it was in there. Perhaps you could take charge of it.”

  The officer gestured, and a soldier sprayed the taxi’s hood with a crescent of green paint. “Go. If you run into any more checkpoints, that will get you through. Sorry for the inconvenience. Tell the world you were treated decently.”

  The officer cuffed the driver on the back of his head and kicked his leg, herding him back to the car. The driver stiffened at the insult. Janson shoved him behind the wheel. Kincaid called to the officer, “May I take your photograph, please?”

  An engaging smile warmed her
face. The officer squared his shoulders for her camera, wondering how he had missed at first glance that she was an unusually attractive woman.

  Janson walked unhurriedly around the front of the taxi, climbed in, and said, “Drive. Before they change their mind.”

  The driver stomped the accelerator and the old taxi rolled away.

  * * *

  THE GREEN SPRAY-PAINT pass and a hundred-euro bribe got them across the border.

  Tunisian authorities, overwhelmed with refugees desperate for food, water, and shelter, waved them on to the airport. A twin-engine Embraer Legacy 650 landed. The long-haul executive jet was owned by Catspaw Associates—Janson’s corporate-security consultant outfit of independent contractors linked 24/7 by Internet and secure phone into an ethereal amalgam of freelance researchers, IT specialists, and field agents.

  Janson and Kincaid helped their pilots unload tents, blankets, and bottled water. Fifteen minutes after the plane touched down, its big Rolls-Royce engines hurled it back into the sky carrying Paul Janson, Jessica Kincaid, and the dictator’s son Yousef dressed like an overeducated, underemployed North African taxi driver.

  PART ONE

  “Who Governs Here?”

  ONE

  Now, One Year Later

  5° S, 52°50' E

  Indian Ocean, 700 Miles off the East African Coast

  En Route: Mahé, Seychelles Islands, to Mombasa, Kenya

  The superyacht Tarantula was making eighteen knots between the Seychelles Islands and Mombasa. Built on a Kortenaer-class frigate’s hull, she had a warship’s profile—a high bow, a clean sweep to a low stern—and a strikingly graceful superstructure by Parisian designer Jacques Thomas, famous for resurrecting the fluid curves of the Art Nouveau in bent glass and carbon-fiber-reinforced epoxy. She was pointing west, burnished bright and shining by the sunset. Seen from a low-slung skiff racing flat out on a course to intercept, Tarantula appeared to skim the surface of the Indian Ocean like a fiery dragonfly.

  A crew of twenty men and women attended the fully automated ship, her middle-aged owner, Allen Adler, and Adler’s guests. She carried two helicopters—each painted gold with Adler’s initials emblazoned red on its tail boom—a ten-place Sikorsky S-76D on a pad amidships and a light-turbine five-place Bell Ranger on the foredeck. Two twenty-passenger high-speed tenders were cradled at the stern in a well deck, which was a bay that could be flooded in order to launch the boats. Also sharing the well deck was a fifty-three-foot blue-water sloop, an ocean-passage Nautor Swan that would make a millionaire proud.

  Night was falling quickly, as it did so near the equator. Five of Adler’s guests—a former fashion model, a retired United Nations diplomat and his wife, and a New York real estate agent and her husband—gathered for cocktails to watch the sun set from a forward lounge under the steering bridge.

  The sixth, Allegra Helms, a thirty-year-old Italian countess with pale blue eyes and long blond hair, joined their host on the bridge itself—a spacious, glass-enclosed aerie with views in four directions of the darkening sea. Adler was trying to impress her by driving the yacht. To demolish his expectations of a hookup, she had packed an outfit that her mother would have bought from Valentino’s resort collection—monastically simple high-waisted white linen yachting slacks with a boat-neck blouse—and an Hermès scarf, screen-printed with her family device in a pattern so minute that only a cousin or an ancient enemy would recognize it.

  A round German stewardess in a short, tight skirt brought a tray of marinated shrimp and sea scallops. She returned with a Champagne bucket, opened a bottle of Cristal with quiet efficiency, and poured two glasses.

  “That’s all,” Adler said patting her behind. “Outta here. You too, Captain Billy,” he told the officer watching the instrument cluster that surrounded the auto-helm.

  Allegra Helms was kicking herself for accepting a last-minute invitation from a man she had known only through a mutual acquaintance. Now she was trapped in the middle of the ocean on a boat full of boring strangers. She could dodge the other guests, but there was no escaping their host, who just would not shut up about his money and his fucking yacht.

  “Biggest in the world—460 feet, 3,550 tons—and I had her teched-up so I can drive her with a smart-phone app.” Adler swigged Champagne, indicating with a nod that Allegra should help herself, and resumed his monologue with a joke she had heard twice at dinner the night they sailed. “I don’t know what I’m paying the captain for.”

  An alarm sounded a staccato chirp. Allegra saw the captain’s eyes shoot to the radar monitor, and she noticed an orange dot flare briefly. Adler brushed past him and flipped a switch to mute the noise that was interrupting his delivery.

  “I can run this baby from the middle of Kansas. Captain Billy, what am I paying you for?”

  Allegra glanced at the captain, a sun-polished symphony of curly chestnut hair and Viking cheekbones—speaking of hookups, if she were considering one, which she was not. Not with her husband meeting her in Mombasa. And never, ever, when trapped on a boat.

  “You could run her from the middle of Kansas,” Billy Titus answered with an affable smile as he fiddled the radar’s controls. “You pay me so you don’t have to.”

  Allegra laughed.

  Adler glared. “Fact is I pay him a bonus to save on fuel, and I fine him when he wastes it. Isn’t that right, Captain Billy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Go grab a bite. The countess and I will run the ship.”

  “Keep an eye on the radar.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “I mean it, sir. If you see pirates before they get too close, we can cut in the turbines and get the heck away.”

  “I guarantee you that no pirates will bother me. Go get something to eat and leave us alone. I’ll call you back when I need you.”

  “The hunting season just started, Mr. Adler. The monsoon’s over, and the water is calm enough for small boats.”

  “Go, goddammit! Now!”

  Captain Titus took his time checking the radar once again, before he turned on his heel and left the bridge.

  Alone with Allegra, Adler said, “My captain is a regular comedian.”

  “Che buona figura.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means… He has a great image—handsome—and you could also count on him to do the right thing.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It would be hard for you to understand. It means he’s a gentleman.”

  Adler heard the challenge and threw it back at her. “You saw me grab that girl’s ass. You think there’s something wrong with that?”

  She turned her back on him and studied the radar screen, which showed an empty sea in every direction. Adler was more alert than she had thought, and she wondered idly whether he used his crudeness to confuse business rivals into underestimating him.

  Adler said, “She’d be disappointed if I didn’t grab her ass. She’d think I was mad at her.”

  When Allegra still remained silent, Adler demanded, “What do you think?”

  She was thinking about her husband, who was currently rooting around East Africa like a truffle pig on his incessant hunt for oil and gas concessions. It would be nice to have him around if Adler became any more of a pain.

  “I think you remind me of my father.”

  Adler’s face hardened. “I’m not old enough to be your father. I’m forty-eight.”

  He was fifty-eight, she knew for a fact—though remarkably fit and still handsome, with looks that would age well. She said, “My father gropes the servants too.”

  “Oh yeah? What does your mother think of that?”

  “We’ve never discussed it.”

  Adler blinked. Then he switched tactics, though not his manner. “How much money does your husband make running American Synergy?”

  “He doesn’t run all of ASC. He’s president of the Petroleum Division.”

  “The Petroleum Division is their number
-one profit center. What do they pay him to run it?”

  “I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

  That stopped him again, though only a moment. “You don’t care?”

  “I’d rather feel young than rich.”

  Adler winced, as she hoped he would. But it didn’t shut him up. “How long do you think that will last?” he shot back.

  “How can you guarantee that pirates won’t attack us?”

  “I cut a deal with Bashir Mohamed. Bashir’s ‘king’ of Somalia’s pirates. He gave me a pass for protection. No one will attack my yacht.”

  “How can he guarantee other pirates won’t attack?”

  “They’re afraid of him. He’s organized them. Anyone gets independent, he turns them over to the UN’s African Union Army, or the Combined Maritime Force. They include the Chinese and Russians, who play a lot rougher than the US and EU. Or he pays somebody to kill them. Piracy is the same as any business: you make money by controlling the market, and you control the market by clearing out independents.”

  “What did you offer Bashir Mohamed in return?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  At last, she thought, Adler was becoming interesting. Allegra smiled a smile that warmed her pale eyes. She ran her fingers through her hair. “You must tell me,” she said. A beguiling hint of an Italian accent lent music to her fluent English. “You’ve made an interesting story.”

  “Do you know anything about New York?”

  “I was sent to school there, as a girl.”

  “Where?”

  “Nightingale-Bamford.”

  “OK. That explains a few things.”

  “Like what?”

  “You act less like a countess than a New York rich kid.”

  “So what did you offer Bashir Mohamed?”

  “I sit on the boards of private schools like Nightingale. Not theirs, but others. In exchange for Tarantula’s safe passage, Bashir Mohamed’s firstborn son has a spot guaranteed in preschool. I swear that’s the truth. That’s all it took. He’s dreaming preschool to prep school to Harvard.”