Elizabeth Lowell - Innocent as Sin

“Back up,” Faroe said to him. “Kayla isn’t stupid. She knows she’s at risk.” He handed her the papers he’d just pulled out of the fax. “The ambassador agrees. If you want to work for St. Kilda Consulting, we’re yours.”

“Can you bring Bertone down?” Kayla asked.

“With you, I’m betting yes. Without you…” Faroe shrugged again.

Kayla looked at Rand.

He shoved his hands into his pockets and waited.

“So this was a recruitment from the instant I saw you at the party,” she said to Rand. “You were told to hook me and reel me in so St. Kilda could look me over, decide if they trusted me.”

“I never lied to you,” Rand said.

“And if I don’t sign up?”

“We’ll give you a safe house while we go after Bertone,” Faroe said.

“But without me, you won’t have as good a chance of getting him.”

Faroe nodded.

Oh, well, I guess I never really was cut out to be a banker anyway, Kayla thought. She read the fax pages quickly, then more slowly. With a rather grim smile, she took the pen Faroe offered her.

Move over, Alice. I’m coming down the rabbit hole.

She signed and handed the pen back to him.

“You can keep the silver dollar,” Faroe said to her.

“I was planning to.”

Royal Palms

Saturday

9:50 P.M. MST

Faroe shoved an unlabeled DVD into the TV player, handed the controller to Kayla, pointed to the pause button, and said, “Grace and I have to go wrestle with the Krebs cycle. Knock on the door if you have any questions Rand can’t answer.”

As Faroe and Grace left the room, a Scots-accented voice came from the TV speakers.

“My name is John Neto. I am an intelligence official employed by the government of Camgeria. My small country is in the heart of the conflict zone of equatorial West Africa.”

The screen showed a montage of beautiful seacoast, vivid green jungles, wild scrubland, and slender, very dark people who looked into the camera with indifference or hostility.

“I’ve been there,” Kayla said. “I spent a week trying to get a bus to Niger.”

“There aren’t any roads from there to Niger,” Rand said.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t speak the language. It took me a week to give up and take a Russian-made passenger plane flown by the most drunken pilot who ever got off the ground. Landing in Niger was…an experience.”

“What did you think of Camgeria?”

“Amazing. Appalling. Yet so vivid in spite of the poverty. Smiles everywhere. Kids laughing.”

“Have you seen it lately?”

“I read the papers and surf the Net,” Kayla said.

And even if she hadn’t, the images on the TV in front of her would have told her all she needed to know. Photos, headlines, web site content from Camgeria and other West African nations.

Armed insurrections, genocides, and refugee camps, all played against a backdrop of green and blue. And red.

Blood.

Agony.

Death.

Whoever had put the DVD together was a master of the PowerPoint presentation. Kayla felt herself drawn back to her youth, to a time when her world was wide open, when optimism was the rule rather than the exception, when all possibilities were equal. Camgeria had been a kind of paradise then. Now it was a kind of hell.

Maimed children.

Starving babies.

Mothers with empty eyes and breasts.

“God, such misery,” Kayla said. “What happened?”

“Andre Bertone.”

The TV showed a still color photo of a white man standing in the middle of a group of black men. Behind them was a dirt landing strip.

“East Camgeria?” she asked.

“You have a good eye.”

“I spent a lot of time trying to get out of there,” she said dryly.

A large twin-engine transport plane whose tail numbers had been painted over crouched on the dirt strip, props turning, dirt and grit flying. Shirtless black men carried off armloads of assault rifles from the cargo hold of the aircraft. In the foreground, another group of laborers stacked heavy, lumpy burlap bags.

“Coltan,” Rand said before Kayla could ask. “It’s vital for modern electronics. There’s been a worldwide shortage of coltan for the last decade. Each of those bags holds fifty kilos. That would make them worth about five thousand dollars apiece.”

Kayla stopped counting bags on the screen when she passed a quarter million dollars.

The camera zoomed in on the white man.

“That’s Bertone!” Kayla said.

“Aka the Siberian,” Rand agreed.

Bertone was wearing a white expedition suit he’d sweated through at the arms and back. Red dust clung to the wet places. He was smiling.

“Like a vulture at a carcass,” Rand said.

“When I was backpacking, we called Bertone’s costume a ‘bwana suit.’ He looks like he was born for it.”

“A gunrunner in a bwana suit. As far as I know, this is the only photo that shows the Siberian in action.”

“Why do you call him the Siberian?”

“A few years ago Bertone, aka Victor Krout, aka a lot of other names, was one of the most successful arms merchants in the world. He imported a quarter million small arms, twenty million rounds of ammunition, at least a million antipersonnel land mines, fifty thousand heavy machine guns, give or take, and numerous military vehicles, including at least a hundred armored personnel carriers and twenty decommissioned Soviet assault helicopters. All of it was used to attack native villages in four separate African countries.”

“That’s how he made his money? Running guns?” Kayla asked. “According to what he told the bank, he’s an oil broker.”

“He is, now. Before that he was the gasoline that turned centuries of smoldering ethnic and tribal conflict into a hellfire that killed thousands of innocent people. They’re dead because Bertone poured a flood of modern military weapons into primitive tribal politics.”

Rand started to say something more, then let John Neto’s voice talk over the savage images.

“My people have been killing one another for a long time, yes, but Bertone and his ilk made it possible to murder with ruthless modern efficiency. The losses were horrifying. We were a primitive people delivered into the hands of modern warfare, warfare driven by gunrunning opportunists like Andre Bertone.”

Kayla hit the pause button. “I thought diamonds were the bloody item of barter.”

“Bertone took whatever was offered-exotic hardwoods, illegal ivory, minerals. His favorite was bargeloads of oil siphoned from government pipelines by rebel thieves.” Rand smiled thinly. “He is one smart son of a bitch. When other arms runners demanded cash, he pioneered the barter economy. Really widened the killing field.”

Before yesterday, Kayla wouldn’t have believed it. Arms dealing in the upper crust of Phoenix? No way. That sort of thing was reserved for third-world outlaws.

She hit a button on the controller and continued her unhappy education.

“Bertone has a genius for turning a profit on a transaction with one group of combatants, then reinvesting that profit in more arms, which are then sold to the first customer’s enemies.”

The picture on the screen changed. No longer a voice-over, the camera pulled back to reveal Brent Thomas and John Neto.

“Yet today,” Thomas said, “Andre Bertone has UN diplomatic credentials and is a respected international oil dealer.”

“Yes. Enough money buys respectability. As we speak, Bertone is an intermediary for shiploads of Eastern European weapons that will be paid for with long-term oil concessions the Camgerian rebels will grant to oil companies owned by Brazil and France. Even your own government deals with Bertone for oil.” Neto smiled thinly. “Like gold or diamonds or dollars, oil can be laundered to hide its source. Andre Bertone is brilliant at just that. Oil-hungry governments, or governments wishing to arm the enemy of their enemy, are willing to overlook Camgerian deaths. We are a pawn in the larger global game.

“And we are being sacrificed.”

More images of butchery, starvation, disease; vultures thick on the ground.

Kayla didn’t want to believe it, didn’t want to think she lived in a world where war was a commodity like any other.

And worse, that she’d handled blood money for the bloodiest butcher of all.

Rand grabbed the controller just before it dropped to the floor. He paused the DVD. “You okay?”

“No,” she said. “I feel sick. Dirty.”

“Bertone will do that to anyone with any decency in them.”

She thought of the glitz and glamour of the Fast Draw, canapés paid for in children’s blood, politicians paid for the same way, everyone lining up like cattle to be serviced by the merchant of death. It had happened only hours ago, hours that felt like days, months.

Another life she had lived in another time.

And now she had hit the bottom of the rabbit hole hard enough to break her soul.

Rand saw the tears streaming down Kayla’s face and wanted to swear. Only the decent felt another’s pain. Only the decent could be corrupted. Only the decent could be made to feel dirty.

He didn’t think about smart or stupid, should or shouldn’t. He just gathered her into his arms, tucked her face against his shoulder, and held her. The hot silence of her tears reached him as nothing had since Reed’s death.

“It’s not your fault,” he said, stroking her hair, kissing her eyelids gently, tasting her tears. “None of this is your fault.”

“I helped him.” Her voice was as bleak as her tears.

“You didn’t know.”

“I do now.”

“I’m sorry,” Rand said.

“It’s not your fault.”

“Isn’t it?” he asked against her hair. “I brought you to St. Kilda.”

“It’s not St. Kilda’s fault. They’re just the messenger.”

“Yeah, well, we all know what happens to messengers.”

She smiled sadly at him, sighed, and took the controller back. But when she moved to separate from him, he held her close.

“I’m okay now,” she said.

“I’m not.”

She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry some more. So she leaned against him and started the DVD again.

“How can you stop it?” Thomas asked seriously. “You’re a very small nation whose supposed allies are very close to Andre Bertone.”

“Camgeria and some of the other small African nations victimized by Bertone have come together to establish the West African Regional Tribunal.”

“How will that help?”

“The tribunal is an investigatory body that is accumulating evidence against Bertone and his ilk. We will prove that the peoples of West Africa have been victimized by some of the most unscrupulous men on the face of the earth. Then world opinion will force that money to be returned to the people from whose blood and bone it was squeezed.”

“That sounds like a huge job.”

“It is. Interviews like this are just the beginning. We need help. We need friends. We need people who haven’t been purchased by Andre Bertone.”

The DVD ended with the stylized logo of the channel.

Kayla let out a long sigh, relieved that no more images of suffering would be burned into her conscience. “How did I miss this show? I’m a fan of The World in One Hour.”

“This segment is still in production,” Rand said, tossing the controller aside. “It won’t air at all unless we get more evidence against Andre Bertone.”

“More? What I saw was devastating. Bwana-suited gunrunner becomes Phoenix socialite and benefactor to state, national, and international politicians.”

“You and the guy who took that picture are the only ones on earth who can link Bertone to the bwana suit.”

“You’re kidding.”

Rand looked at her.

“You’re not,” she said quickly. “I knew that. I just didn’t want to know it.”

She swiped the back of her hand against her eyelashes, taking the last of her tears, wondering if she’d really felt Rand’s lips moving so gently over her skin.

“Pictures are powerful, but they can be Photoshopped,” he said. “Anybody who saw President Bush supposedly giving the world the Roman salute knows all about digitizing photos.”

She started to object, then sighed. “And the first thing Bertone’s lawyers would scream is Photoshop.”

“Yeah.”