St Kilda Consulting 02 - Innocent as Sin

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 moreslowly. 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.”

33
    Royal Palms
Saturday
9:50 P.M. MST
    F aroe 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 themost 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,