Since he was not officially supposed to be here, it would hardly do to have too high a profile–like a shoot-out with some half-baked crazed spy.
Fortunately, the U.s. ambassador in this backwater owed Hughes several large favors, and if the man wasn’t exactly in Hughes’s pocket, he was circumspect in the extreme. You didn’t get to be a full ambassador without learning which way the wind blew, then setting your sails accordingly.
Hughes turned his attention to the palace compound.
The main building was big, ostentatious, three stories tall, and made of some slightly pink native stone, with glazed blue tiles on the roof.
The architectural style looked to be a bad blend of Mediterranean and Spanish-style villas. The compound was maybe ten acres and a dozen buildings, and surrounded by a fifteen-foot-high matching stone wall topped with what looked like broken glass.
Hughes shook his head. This kind of spending fit a pattern he’d seen all over the world. The less wealth a country had, the larger the extravagances the top dogs lavished upon themselves.
The rich got richer and the poor got poorer.
What a surprise.
The limo arrived in front of a big electrically operated metal gate in the pink stone wall. A pair of guards with assault rifles outside the gate drifted over and bent to look inside the limo.
The Brit nodded at them, and it was obvious they knew him, but he offered his ID anyway. The guards checked the ID, then waved at a third armed guard inside the gate at a small kiosk.
The gate swung outward to admit the limo.
The driveway was circuitous, and wound around several sharp-angled turns bounded by ponds or dirt mounds covered with grass. Platt had explained that to Hughes. If you managed to get a car full of explosives through the gate, you weren’t going to be able to build up enough speed to ram the palace hard enough to put your vehicle inside before you set it off.
The President was largely beloved–but apparently not universally so.
Eventually, the limo arrived at the entrance to the main building.
Standing in front of a set of tall, carved wooden doors was President Pemandes Domingos, along with a pair of bodyguards and a large-busted but otherwise willowy blond woman in a white blouse, a short black skirt, and three-inch heels.
Very attractive, the woman. Domingos’s mistress, perhaps?
Hughes alighted from the limo as the driver held the door.
He smiled at Domingos, who flashed a set of perfect teeth in return.
“Ah, Thomas! How good to see you again!” Domingos spoke good English with an accent from South Africa, the country to which he had been sent for his university education.
A university at which, apparently, Domingos had majored in sex, gambling, and drinking.
The two men shook hands. The President was short and heavyset, with a web work of spidery veins across his nose and cheeks, visible despite his dark complexion. The broken vessels were probably due to incipient alcoholism. At fifty, he had a dissipated look, an aging rake who needed a magic picture in the attic, but unfortunately didn’t have one.
His namesake ancestors had been Portuguese, and somewhere along the way they had obviously taken a dip or two into the native pools, for he was darker than most Europeans, and what was left of his thinning, dyed-black hair was very curly. But Domingos’s features were otherwise not Negroid, despite Platt’s racist slurs.
“Mr. President. I am honored.” Domingos waved that away.
“No, no, none of that, we are friends! Please, come into my humble home. And I would like you to meet Miss Monique Louis, who has just recently returned from Paris. I am sure you two will get along famously!” Hughes eyed the blonde, who smiled lazily at him, a hint of come-hither in her expression.
“Bonjour,” she said.
“So nice to make your acquaintance.” Ah… Unless he was terribly mistaken, the good President had apparently provided him with a … companion. Well. She was attractive enough.
And Domingos certainly had enough practice in such matters to have selected an expert trull.
Why not?
Negotiations could sometimes be arduous, and Hughes might as well relax after they were done–but only afterward.
The tall doors were carved in bas-relief, images of native people, proud faces and young bodies, most of them nude, a kind of gallery of tribal Africa. Platt must have loved that when he’d seen it. Hughes could almost see the cracker shaking his head in disgust. Except for the naked black women, of course.
The doors swung silently open, each operated by a black man dressed entirely in white– shoes, pants, shirt, coat. Monique moved over, took Hughes’s arm in hers, and smiled at him, and they followed the President into the palace.
The bodyguards swung into position behind them.
This, Hughes decided, should be inter esting.
Chapter 27 Friday, January 14th, 6:00 a.m. New York City, New York
At Mac’s, one of the last old-style hard-core gyms in Manhattan, Platt grunted through a set of heavy squats. Wasn’t no ferns or New Age music playing here, no chrome and red leatherette magnomachines or yuppie VR slant walkers, just racks and racks of iron–dumbbells, barbells–and benches and racks and a concrete floor with a few rubber pads on it.
Mirrors on the walls and good lighting, the place had those, but that was it. You didn’t come here to get a nice glow, you came here to sweat–and to know pain.
He was in the safety rack, so the weight wasn’t gonna fall and crush his ass, but that didn’t help his thighs. They burned as though he was standing hip-deep in molten lava. Four hundred pounds on the bar across his shoulders, and after the first set, each rep was a war. He hated squats, hated “em, and after a couple of heavy sets, he could barely move. He’d puked more than a few times after squats, in such pain he couldn’t even stand up without help, but that was how it went. You wanted to be strong, you had to move big weight, that was the name of that tune. Those little pansies who did leg extensions with fifty pounds and thought they were working out made Platt want to laugh. You didn’t see those guys here. Mac would laugh their asses right out of the building.
Excuse me, sir, but where are the cardio walkers?
Why, just go out the front door and a couple of miles that way, hoss.
Look for a spa full of sissies, you’ll fit right in.
Down Platt went, legs coo king in their own juices. Below horizontal, butt almost on his heels.
Up he came, vibrating, shaking, quivering, fire flowing through his veins and arteries, burning his muscles, hot right to the bone.
Man!
Three more, and he was able–barely, finally!– to rack the weight. He grabbed a towel, wiped the sweat off his face and neck, and moved to the water fountain. Around him, the clang of steel echoed as men grunted and strained against the big plates. There were a couple of women here, body builders on the juice, so they looked like men. That kind of woman didn’t appeal to him at all. He liked to see a woman in shape, but not a male shape caused by mojo steroids that did everything but grow a dick on her.
Well. Enough of this. Time to shower and head for the place in Queens where he had his throwaway computer set up. The feds were about to get another surprise, courtesy of the Fried Sex gang. A big surprise this time.
Platt laughed aloud. He didn’t see how life could get much better than this.
Friday, January 14th, 8:00 a.m.
Ambarcik, Siberia Jay Gridley leaned into the fierce wind coming off the East Siberian Sea, a wind so strong and cold that it would blast an unprotected man to death in a matter of seconds. Enough wind so that the rocks along the shore were bare of snow, despite more than ten feet of it having fallen in the last two months.
The snow had been blown away like so much dry talcum powder.
The locals here liked to joke about how cold it got. There were people in Alaska or Canada who bragged about throwing a pot of boiling water into the air and watching it freeze on the way down. In Siberia, they liked to say, the water would freeze while still in the pot. Sometimes while the pot was still on the fire, da?
It was an unlikely place to be hunting for clues to a Danish terrorist organization, maybe more so than any other, but there was a blowhole in the ice up ahead where seals came up to breathe, and one of those “seals” was the packet of information he wanted to find. Jay was armored against the cold-electrically heated underwear, including socks, hat, and gloves–with four layers of material over that–poly prop, silk, wool, and fur–a face mask, and heavy boots. Even so, he felt the cold prying at the mask he wore, digging at the smallest seams in his clothing. This was as close a VR scenario as he could build to what the locals actually faced, and he wondered how they could stand it. The houses here were all heavily insulated, with triple doors and windows, dead spaces in the insulated walls, and even so, you could store your food in an unheated back room and it would keep all winter long.