“Fuck that,” Wilson said. “What’s he talking about? How did they insult him?”

“He’s supposed to guard your room,” the soldier replied.

“So?”

“Your friends wouldn’t let him.”

“It’s our job,” Khalid insisted. “We sit outside – in a chair – with the H.K.’s. We take turns, you know?”

“So what’s the problem?” Wilson asked.

“He wants the chair. So he pulls a knife.”

The pygmy started to say something, but Wilson waved him off. “Tell him we’re sorry,” Wilson told the soldier. “Tell him he can guard my room.” As the soldier translated, Wilson turned to Khalid. “Why don’t you just get another chair?”

Khalid shrugged. “We could do that.”

“There’s one downstairs,” the soldier said.

Wilson nodded. “I’ll go with you.”

As they walked down the corridor, the soldier laughed. “Your boys are pretty good!” he said. “Or pretty dumb.”

“Why do you say that?” Wilson asked.

The soldier laughed again. “This pygmy, he’ll kill you in a heartbeat. Everybody knows that. So your boys took a big chance for you!”

As they went down the stairs to the main offices, a wave of laughter and shouting rolled toward them. The source of the noise turned out to be a clutch of boys, none of them more than thirteen years old, hovering over a laptop computer in an empty office. At first, Wilson thought they were playing a video game, but then he saw they were online and at a porn site.

The soldier screamed “Out! Get out!” and threw a head-fake at them. They ran.

Wilson turned to the soldier, who was laughing. “You have a satellite connection out here?”

The soldier nodded.

“All right if I use it?”

The soldier shrugged. “Sure,” he said, and went off in search of a chair.

Wilson sat down before the monitor, cracked his knuckles, and typed: www.yahoo.com.

He was hoping for news of Hakim.

Clicked on Check Mail. Clicked on Draft. The page appeared. And to his surprise, he found not one message, but two. I can’t find Hakim had yet to be deleted – which pissed him off. It was a small thing, but an irritating one. Now was not the time to get sloppy about security. God knows, the protocols were simple enough. Wilson checked the deletion box, and went on to the more recent message which, like its predecessor, was addressed to no one and had a Subject line that read “None.”

Found Hakim. No problem.

He was meeting with friends.

Wants you to get in touch.

Wilson stared at the message. He felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. “Found Hakim”? The words – or more accurately, the number of words in the first sentence – pushed him back in his chair.

He tried to rationalize it. Maybe Bo had forgotten… But no. How do you forget a protocol as simple as theirs? You don’t. Which meant that Bobojon hadn’t written the message. Someone else had. Someone who knew enough about Bobojon’s e-mail to know that he was using Draft mode to communicate. But how could that be?

Wilson flashed back to the Marmara Queen, when the ship had been at anchor off Istanbul, waiting for the dock strike to end. Zero and Khalid had been watching television – some Arab channel – and someone was getting busted on camera. There was a man with a hood over his head. Men with guns. Wilson said: What’s this? And Khalid said: Malaysia. Not Berlin. Malaysia.

Wilson’s ass tightened. He thought hard. I can’t find Hakim. That was Bobojon, no question. Four words. And then this phony message about getting in touch. Who was that? Wilson thought about it for all of about fifteen seconds, and began to put it together. There weren’t a lot of possibilities. I can’t find Hakim. Obviously, Hakim had gone missing, and Bobojon had worried about it. Now, Bobojon was missing, or if not missing, no longer in control of his own communications. So Hakim must have given him up. And now the police were looking for Wilson.

Or someone.

Did they know who he was? Did they know his name – where he was – what he was doing? Maybe.

Or maybe not. If Bobojon talked (and everyone talked if you tortured them enough), they would know everything. And that would be the end of it.

But they didn’t know everything. For example, they didn’t know about the protocol he and Bobojon had used, so maybe Bo had gotten away. Or maybe he’d been killed.

Hakim was a different story. To Hakim, Wilson was a sideshow – a guy named “Frank d’Anconia,” one of Bobojon’s projects. An American with crazy ideas. How much could Hakim actually tell them? How much did he actually know?

Well, Wilson thought, he knows everything about the hash, the guns, and the diamonds. He can tell them where I am and what I’m doing, and he can tell them where I’m going. He can tell them what I look like, but he can’t tell them who I am – not exactly. The most he could say was that I’d been in prison with Bobojon. But that could be a lot of guys. Bo had done a lot of time.

So he was safe for now. The CIA, or whoever they were, might be waiting for him in Antwerp. But they wouldn’t come after him in the Congo. Not in a war zone, not with the government five hundred miles away.

Of course, if Ibrahim found out about Hakim, all bets were off. The diamonds would disappear. And so, in all likelihood, would Wilson. He’d end up at the bottom of the mine, or on a spit.

Found Hakim… get in touch.

I don’t think so.

He went to the mine in the afternoon. It was nothing like he’d imagined.

If he’d thought about it at all, he’d have expected to find a tunnel with narrow-gauge tracks leading into the earth – a sort of coal mine. Or else a mountain stripped into tiers, with massive machines clawing at the ground. Instead, he found something stranger. A landscape with the pox.

The mine was a gigantic pit, maybe two hundred yards across, dug to a depth of about thirty-five feet. This enormous hole was crisscrossed with berms of yellow earth that framed a score of smaller pits in which teams of emaciated miners stood up to their knees in stagnant groundwater, sweating under the watchful eyes of armed foremen.

In each pit was a wooden trough with a wire mesh at the bottom. Gasoline engines pumped a steady stream of water into the troughs, while diggers fed them with shovel after shovel of excavated stones, pebbles, and soil. The rushing water washed and tumbled the rocks, making the smaller stones fall through the mesh at the bottom. At the end of each trough, a boy shoveled the finer gravel into piles.

Stripped to their shorts and slaked with mud, the “shake-shake men” scooped this finer gravel into the circular wooden sieves that gave them their name. Stooping to the surface of the water, they whirled the sieves in such a way that the muck and clay sluiced to the edges, while the much heavier, diamondiferous gravel coagulated in the middle.

Somehow the shake-shake men could spot a quarter-carat diamond in the rough without fail. And when they did, they froze in place, and whistled to the foreman, who’d come running.

“How much do you pay them?” Wilson asked.

His guide laughed. He was the same man who’d driven them from the airstrip in the Mercedes. “Well,” he said, “the ones we pay get sixty cents a day, American. And food. The others just get food.”

“The others?” Wilson asked.

The driver grinned. “There are some we don’t pay.”

“Why not?”

A shrug. “Bad boys. Lugbara people. Prisoners of war.”

“But you feed them.”

The driver nodded. “Of course. They have to eat. So, two cups of rice a day. Cassava, sometimes. I’m telling you, man, that’s Easy Street you’re looking at.”

An hour later, Commander Ibrahim was seated at a card table outside a concrete hut in a compound at the mine. It was here that the diggers and shake-shake men received their pay and rations, and it was here that punishments and rewards were meted out.