Commander Ibrahim turned his attention to the boy with the Firestone necklace. “I’ve decided,” he said. Then he paused, savoring the moment as everyone’s eyes turned to him. “He’s just a boy… from a poor family… and it was a small diamond.”

The family was nodding in agreement. The boy, too.

“But…” Ibrahim paused for a second time.

Wilson could see it coming.

“I have a mine to run,” Ibrahim said. “So here’s what we’re going to do.” Ibrahim reached into his pocket, and pulled out a lighter. Moving around the table, he went to the family clustered on the ground, and gave the lighter to the mother. “Light him up, Mother…”

She wailed.

Seeing what was happening, her son scrambled to his feet. But with the tire around his neck, and his hands behind his back, it was impossible to get anywhere. One of the soldiers grabbed him by the tire, spun him around, and shoved him back the way he’d come.

The mother was hysterical.

“Well, if you won’t do as I ask,” Ibrahim said, “we have an even bigger problem.” Still looking at the mother, he raised his hand and snapped his fingers. On cue, three soldiers came out of the little pink building, carrying five tires and a can of gas. The family gasped, and one of the younger boys swooned dead away.

But Ibrahim was having a grand old time, and so were his men. Some of them were laughing, and all of them were bright with excitement. “Light him up, and that’s the end of it! I promise you, Mother, once the boy toasts up, you can go home!” He waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. She was shaking her head so hard, it seemed almost as if it might fly off. “You understand, don’t you? You’re as responsible as the boy is! More! You brought him into the world. So now, I think, it’s up to you to take him out. If you don’t want to do that, if you can’t do that, I’ll quite understand. But then, I’m afraid, there’s a tire for each of you!”

Ibrahim sank to his haunches, a few feet in front of the mother, and looked her in the eye. “What’s it to be, then? You’re in charge, Mother! You decide! The boy – or the family? C’mon!” He spun the lighter’s little wheel, and a flame flickered.

“Let her alone,” Wilson said.

Commander Ibrahim turned, and stared.

Wilson stepped forward with his hand out, palm up. “Let me do it.”

CHAPTER 17

It was a test.

If, like Nietzsche’s superman, Wilson was (as he believed) “beyond good and evil,” then any remnants of “conscience” he might have were artifacts – the detritus of his own evolution. Static.

If he thought about it, he could probably work out an equation for it. A formula for the moral equivalent of the signal-to-noise ratio.

The idea, of course, was to shed his conscience as if it were a snakeskin. Just walk right out of it and keep on going. If anyone came after him, they’d see it in the grass, a ribbon of scales – and they’d wonder: Was Wilson nearby? Was he hunting?

It was important to Wilson – essential, really – that he should be comfortable with the violence inside him. And so, the boy…

His eyes rolled back as Wilson approached, cigarette lighter in hand. He stood in front of the kid for what seemed like a long time, waiting for him to look up from the ground. That was a part of it – having the strength to look his victim in the eye, embracing his fear, while accepting the injustice that was about to take place.

The boy must have sensed this as well, because he kept his eyes on the ground for what seemed like a long time. When, finally, he shook himself from what seemed like a waking swoon, and looked up, Wilson met his gaze for an instant, then spun the lighter’s little wheel and lit him up.

The kid came alive in a rush, darting this way and that, engulfed in flames and trailing a veil of acrid black smoke. Militiamen leaped out of his way, laughing, as if they were playing a game of blind-man’s bluff. Every so often one of the soldiers would spin him around with a kick in the ass or a tug on the tire. But the game didn’t last long. It was over in thirty seconds. Though Wilson couldn’t be sure, it seemed to him that the boy had a heart attack. One minute he was running around, making noises, and the next…

There was a sort of clumsy pirouette that ended with the boy sinking to his knees, clawing at the tread. Then he stiffened, and that was that. Like a tree, he toppled sideways, and lay in the dirt, smoking.

By then, Wilson himself was breathing hard, as if he were the one who’d been running around. Which was funny, because he hadn’t actually done anything. Just spun a little wheel, and pressed it to the boy’s chest.

He searched his heart for what he felt and, to his surprise, found that there was nothing there. The kid was dead, that’s all.

Shit happens.

But that was yesterday, and now Wilson had his own problems.

Commander Ibrahim had arranged for a technical to take him to the Ugandan border, near Fort Portal. There, an armored car would be waiting to drive him to Kampala. From the Ugandan capital, he could catch a plane to London, and before he knew it, he’d be in Antwerp.

Wilson declined the offer. Entering Uganda from the Congo in an armored car would attract too much attention, he said. He told the militiaman that he and Hakim had discussed it in Baalbek. And they’d decided that he should go to Bunia. Hakim’s friends would arrange for a boat. He’d cross Lake Albert at night, avoiding the Customs’ police and soldiers. In Uganda, Wilson and his party would travel by motorcycle along bush roads to the main highway, and from there to Kampala. Zero and Khalid would be with him all the way, providing a measure of security.

Ibrahim was skeptical, but in the end, it wasn’t his problem. He had his guns. Wilson could do what he pleased.

“Is there a bank in Bunia?” Wilson asked.

“Of course,” Ibrahim replied.

Wilson thanked him. “I’ll need a safe-deposit box until the boat leaves.”

“No problem.”

In reality, of course, there was no boat, nor were there any “friends.” Bunia was simply Plan B, a way for Wilson to rid himself of Ibrahim while finding a buyer for the diamonds he could no longer sell in Antwerp.

Because whoever was sending messages from Bobojon’s computer was undoubtedly holding Hakim as well. If Wilson showed up at De Witte Lelie Hotel, he’d probably be “renditioned.” The moment he walked in, the CIA, FBI – whoever it was – would take him down. They’d stab him with a needle and that would be that. He’d wake up with a hood on his head, chained to a seat in Terrorist Class on his way to a prison that didn’t exist.

Thus, Plan B.

The capital of the Congo’s most dangerous province, Bunia was the African equivalent of Deadwood. A swarming dystopia, ripe with garbage, sewage, and disease, the city was a crumbling slum of three hundred thousand people – many of whom were starving, sick, and desperate. Not far from Lake Albert, it was a little piece of hell in an otherwise heavenly setting.

The diamonds Commander Ibrahim had turned over in exchange for the arms – more than three pounds of preselected “rough,” ranging in size from three to five carats – were concealed in a beautifully carved ironwood head, hollowed out for the purpose. There were 7,263 carats, and every one of them was of gemstone quality. Commander Ibrahim guaranteed it, and Wilson took the militiaman at his word. And why not? Ibrahim and Hakim were in business together, while Belov and Wilson were merely their agents. The business was as bloody as it was lucrative, and it was built on trust. If you asked either man why he trusted the other, he would talk about Allah, and the cause they shared. He would invoke the Umma of Muslim solidarity, and allude to a decade of secret operations in which the two of them had been engaged. But in the end, both men knew that their trust was held together by something even stronger than Islam. It was held together by one man’s gun and the other man’s knife, and by each man’s certain knowledge that the other could reach out and touch him, wherever he might be.