him for many years, but I hear that he wears gold rings on every finger and lightens his skin with a cream. What kind of an African does this? He is jealous of me because as children I was the one with the courage to receive these marks of a warrior.’ Khosa touched the mutilated ridges on his face. ‘Louis was a coward then, and he is a coward now. I will kill him one day soon.’
Khosa finished his glass and poured another. His posture was beginning to slump and the slur in his voice had thickened a little more.
‘I think I will try a taste of that stuff, after all,’ Ben said, pointing at the bottle.
‘Be my guest, soldier. If you like it, I will give you a bottle to take back to your quarters.’
‘That’s very generous of you, General.’ Ben got up and fetched a glass from the drinks cabinet. Settling back in his armchair he poured a half-measure and took a small sip. It wasn’t Laphroaig, that was for sure. The palm wine seemed about twice as strong as Ben’s favourite single malt scotch. He put the glass down. With any luck, Khosa would just drink himself into a fatal alcoholic coma right there in front of him.
‘So that’s your plan?’ Ben asked. ‘To dethrone your brother and become governor of Luhaka Province in his place?’
‘No, no. My plans are much greater. It is not just Luhaka Province that is the problem. The Congo is like a rotten fruit. The government is bankrupt and in pieces, with no direction and no love for its unhappy people. In some places, the illiteracy rate among them is total. The biggest employer in the country is the civil service, but the workers must rely on bribery and embezzlement just to make a living.’
It sounded to Ben a lot like modern-day Britain, but he wasn’t in the mood to get into a wider discussion.
Khosa went on, ‘The poverty is terrible everywhere. Have you ever been poor? I do not think so. You are from Europe, where there is no poverty.’
‘None whatsoever,’ Ben said.
‘You cannot understand,’ Khosa insisted, emphasising his point by waving his glass at Ben. ‘Do you know what it is to live with nothing in your belly and no clothes on your back? When we were young we lived like animals in the jungle, for years. It was only through war that Louis and I were able to pull ourselves from the dirt.’
The slurring in Khosa’s voice was growing more and more noticeable. You go on like that, Ben thought. Just carry right on.
Khosa held up the diamond again, brandishing it as though it were a talisman. ‘Thanks to the fortune I will make from this stone, now we will have a chance to build a real country. Luhaka will be only the beginning. After I become governor, all the people of the Congo will come to me. They will give me their strong young men. If I had a hundred thousand fighters, I would be ready to march on Kinshasa and take my place in the Palais de la Nation. Have you ever seen the palace, soldier?’
‘I can’t say that I have,’ Ben replied.
‘The president says he has a hundred and twenty thousand soldiers, but this is a lie, like everything else he says. There are more like fifty thousand. It will be easy for me to defeat them. Of course, many of my men will die and we will have much destruction to repair afterwards. But we have a saying in my country: “Where elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.”’
At that point in his monologue, Khosa began making strange noises. Ben realised that he was singing. ‘One country, one father, one ruler: Khosa! Khosa! Khosa! That is what they will sing about me, soldier. I can already hear them.’
Another big slurp of Kotiko. ‘A strong nation I will make of this country. Like General Amin did for Uganda. How I loved that man. Under my rule, nothing will stop us from becoming a true world power. All my people will benefit from the riches under the soil. They will be happy and united once again. I will build the biggest army Africa has ever seen, and I will pay all my soldiers a hundred dollars a month. The United States president will come to me whenever I summon him. Then with the help of all Africa I will eradicate the Tutsi scum from the land and annex Rwanda as a new province of my republic.’
‘You have something personally against the Tutsi, or do you just enjoy killing people?’
‘They are treacherous cockroaches and cannot be trusted. Every true African knows this. After the civil war in Rwanda, my country was invaded by a million Tutsi who called themselves refugees when in reality they only wanted to take over all of Zaire. Louis and I, we hunted them. Our death squad killed many, many, many. We called it Operation Insecticide. Sometimes we killed a hundred in a day. We used guns, knives, or ropes to strangle them. Women, children, all cockroaches just the same. But however many we killed, more kept coming.’
Khosa lapsed into a long silence, as if he were replaying the memory of those times inside his head. He guzzled another glassful of Kotiko, refilled it twice more, and knocked it back each time. The second bottle was almost empty now. He closed his eyes, swayed a little, and for a moment Ben thought he would keel over sideways. Khosa slowly opened his eyes, pupils unfocused and his vision clearly swimming. His gaze searched for Ben, found him, and fixed him with a baleful expression.
He whispered, ‘When I close my eyes, soldier, I see terrible things. I see bone and rotting flesh and worms. I see a million skulls of people I have killed, looking at me. I hear their voices inside my mind.’
Then Khosa sank back into the sofa and the glass slipped from his fingers.
Ben stood up. He stepped around the edge of the coffee table, bent down and snapped his fingers three times an inch from the African’s nose. No reaction. He reached out, grasped the thick muscle of Khosa’s shoulder and gave it a shake. He was heavy and hard to move. Ben shook him harder. No response. Khosa was out cold.
Ben’s mind began to whirl. Here was this man, this cruel and ruthless and almost certainly insane murderer, Jude’s kidnapper, the worst person Ben had ever known in his life, completely helpless and at his mercy. This was an opportunity that wouldn’t come again.
But what to do with that opportunity?
The room was full of objects that Ben could have killed Khosa with. He’d been discreetly eyeing them during the conversation. The bottle. The ebony ashtray. Any of the heavy antique lamps would double as a useful club to beat his brains out with. Or else Ben could have used his bare hands, the way he’d been trained, the way he’d last done only a few days earlier when he’d broken Scagnetti’s neck. But Scagnetti had been a small, wiry guy, easy to get a grip on. Khosa was a far larger and more powerful man, and nothing about him was predictable. He might not die immediately. He might wake up, and if he did there would be a struggle, possibly a messy one. Ben was certain that the guards who’d escorted him up here to the eighth floor were lurking just outside with their ears to the suite door, ready to burst in and come charging to their general’s aid at any sign of trouble.
Once committed, there could be no failure. If Ben was going to kill Khosa, right here, right now, the job had to be done instantly, decisively, and with authority.
There was only one item in the room definitively capable of all three.
Ben thought fuck it and reached down Khosa’s body to the gunbelt. He unsnapped the retaining strap of the holster and drew out the big Colt Anaconda. Chambered in .44 Remington Magnum, custom-engraved, fitted with a grip made of mammoth ivory. One of a matched pair, much prized by their owner. The other one, Ben had tossed into the Indian Ocean during the battle to regain control of the Svalgaard Andromeda.
The
