startled, anguished, dazed. On the man’s upper right torso, a small oval of red
bloomed, like a boutonniere.
Now the other members of the Caliph’s detail followed suit, loosing a brief
fusillade of well-aimed bullets. Marionettes released from their strings, the
seven officers collapsed, tumbled, sprawled.
Despite himself, the Caliph laughed. These deaths had no dignity; they were as
absurd as the tyranny they served. A tyranny that would now find itself on the
defensive.
By sunrise, any free-floating representatives of the Anuran government that
remained in the province would be well advised to shred their uniforms or else
face dismemberment by hostile mobs.
Kenna would no longer be part of the illegitimate Republic of Anura. Kenna would
belong to him.
It had begun.
The Caliph felt a surge of righteousness, and the clear piercing truth filled
him like a light. The only solution to violence was more violence.
Many would die in the next several minutes, and they would be the fortunate
ones. But there was one person in the Stone Palace who would not be killed—not
yet. He was a special man, a man who had come to the island in an attempt to
broker a peace. He was a powerful man, revered by millions, but an agent of
neocolonialism nevertheless. So he had to be treated with care. This one—the
great man, the “peacemaker,” the man of all peoples, as the Western media
insisted—would not be a casualty of a military skirmish. He would not be shot.
For him, the proper niceties would be observed.
And then he would be beheaded as the criminal he was.
The revolution would be nourished on his blood!
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
The worldwide headquarters of the Harnett Corporation occupied the top two
floors of a sleek black-glass tower on Dearborn Street, in Chicago’s Loop.
Harnett was an international construction firm, but not the kind that put up
skyscrapers in American metropolises. Most of its projects were outside the
United States; along with larger corporations such as Bechtel, Vivendi, and Suez
Lyonnaise des Eaux, it contracted for projects like dams, wastewater treatment
plants, and gas turbine power stations—unglamorous but necessary infrastructure.
Such projects posed civil-engineering challenges rather than aesthetic ones, but
they also required an ability to work the ever shifting zone between public and
private sectors. Third World countries, pressured by the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund to sell off publicly owned assets, routinely sought
bidders for telephone systems, water and power utilities, railways, and mines.
As ownership changed hands, new construction work was required, and narrowly
focused firms like the Harnett Corporation had come into their own.
“To see Ross Harnett,” the man told the receptionist. “The name’s Paul Janson.”
The receptionist, a young man with freckles and red hair, nodded, and notified
the chairman’s office. He glanced at the visitor without interest. Another
middle-aged white guy with a yellow tie. What was there to see?
For Janson, it was a point of pride that he seldom got a second look. Though he
was athletic and solidly built, his appearance was unremarkable, utterly
nondescript. With his creased forehead and short-cropped steel-gray hair, he
looked his five decades. Whether on Wall Street or the Bourse, he knew how to
make himself all but invisible. Even his expensively tailored suit, of gray
nailhead worsted, was perfect camouflage, as appropriate to the corporate jungle
as the green and black face paint he once wore in Vietnam was to the real
jungle. One would have to be a trained observer to detect that it was the man’s
shoulders, not the customary shoulder pads, that filled out the suit. And one
would have to have spent some time with him to notice the way his slate eyes
took everything in, or his quietly ironic air.
“It’s going to be just a couple of minutes,” the receptionist told him blandly,
and Janson drifted off to look at the gallery of photographs in the reception
area. They showed that the Harnett Corporation was currently working on water
and wastewater networks in Bolivia, dams in Venezuela, bridges in Saskatchewan,
power stations in Egypt. These were the images of a prosperous construction
company. And it was indeed prospering—or had been until recently.
The company’s vice president of operations, Steven Burt, believed it ought to be
doing much better. There were aspects of the recent downturn that aroused his
suspicions, and he had prevailed upon Paul Janson to meet with Ross Harnett, the
firm’s chairman and CEO. Janson had reservations about taking on another client:
though he had been a corporate-security consultant for only the past five years,
he had immediately established a reputation for being unusually effective and
discreet, which meant that the demand for his services exceeded both his time
and his interest. He would not have considered this job if Steven Burt had not
been a friend from way back. Like him, Burt had had another life, one that he’d
left far behind once he entered the civilian world. Janson was reluctant to
disappoint him. He would, at least, take the meeting.
Harnett’s executive assistant, a cordial thirtyish woman, strode through the
reception area and escorted him to Harnett’s office. The space was modern and
spare, with floor-to-ceiling windows facing south and east. Filtered through the
building’s polarized glass skin, the afternoon sunlight was reduced to a cool
glow. Harnett was sitting behind his desk, talking on the telephone, and the
woman paused in the doorway with a questioning look. Harnett gestured for Janson
to have a seat, with a hand movement that looked almost summoning. “Then we’re
just going to have to renegotiate all the contracts with Ingersoll-Rand,”
Harnett was saying. He was wearing a pale blue monogrammed shirt with a white
collar; the sleeves were rolled up around thick forearms. “If they’re not going
to match the price points they promised, our position has to be that we’re free
to go elsewhere for the parts. Screw ’em. Contract’s void.”
Janson sat down on the black leather chair opposite, which was a couple of
inches lower than Harnett’s chair—a crude bit of stagecraft that, to Janson,
signaled insecurity rather than authority. Janson glanced at his watch openly,
swallowed a gorge of annoyance, and looked around. Twenty-seven stories up,
Harnett’s corner office had a sweeping view of Lake Michigan and downtown
Chicago. A high chair, a high floor: Harnett wanted there to be no mistaking
that he had scaled the heights.
Harnett himself was a fireplug of a man, short and powerfully built, who spoke
with a gravelly voice. Janson had heard that Harnett prided himself on making
regular tours of the company’s active projects, during which he would talk with
the foremen as if he had been one himself. Certainly he had the swagger of
somebody who had started out working on construction sites and rose to the
corner office by the sweat of his brow. But that was not exactly how it
happened. Janson knew that Harnett held an MBA from the Kellogg School of
Management at Northwestern and that his expertise lay in financial engineering
rather than in construction engineering. He had put together the Harnett
Corporation by acquiring its subsidiaries at a time when they were strapped for
cash and seriously underpriced. Because construction was a deeply cyclical
business, Harnett had recognized, well-timed equity swaps made it possible to
build a cash-rich corporation at bargain-basement prices.
Finally, Harnett hung up the phone and silently regarded Janson for a few
moments. “Stevie tells me you’ve got a real high-class reputation,” he said in a
bored tone. “Maybe I know some of your other clients. Who have you worked with?”
Janson gave him a quizzical look. Was he being interviewed? “Most of the clients
that I accept,” he said, pausing after the word, “come recommended to me by
other clients.” It seemed crass to spell it out: Janson was not the one to
supply references or recommendations; it was the prospective clients who had to
come recommended. “My clients can, in some circumstances, discuss my work with
others. My own policy has always been across-the-board nondisclosure.”
“You’re like a wooden Indian, aren’t you?” Harnett sounded annoyed.
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m sorry, too, because I have a pretty good notion that we’re just wasting
each other’s time. You’re a busy guy, I’m a busy guy, we don’t either of us have
time to sit here jerking each other off. I know Stevie’s got it in his head that
we’re a leaky boat and taking on water. That’s not how it is. Fact is, it’s the
nature of the business that it has a lot of ups and downs. Stevie’s still too
green to understand. I built this company, I know what happens in every office
and every construction yard in twenty-four countries. To me, it’s a real
question whether we need a security consultant in the first place. And the one
thing I have heard about you is that your services don’t come cheap. I’m a great