The airport train raced past highway rush-hour traffic into Paddington Station.
Janson checked again that he had no one in his wake and took a taxi across Hyde Park. He hopped out at Exhibition Road and walked circuitously to a cobblestone mews in Ennismore Gardens where he rapped a bronze griffin-shaped knocker on a sturdy black door. While he waited for sounds of stirring inside the house, he heard the echo of ironshod hooves of horses of the Household Cavalry clattering from Knightsbridge Barracks.
A tall, full-bodied woman in a sky-blue silk dressing gown threw open the door. She had shiny black skin, a regal stance, and enormous bright eyes. Her hair had been hastily stuffed under a turban that matched her dressing gown. Her full lips twitched in a smile.
“Have you any bloody idea what time it is?”
“Hoping I’m not too early for coffee.”
“Breakfast, too, I suppose?”
“I’ll cook the breakfast.”
“Anything else?”
“Information.”
“Janson, there was a time you would have jumped at ‘anything else’ before you asked for information.”
“You’re too exquisite to be rushed,” said Janson, “and I am in a major rush. May I come in?”
“Princess” Mimi was the daughter of a piratical Lagos property developer who made millions erecting international hotels and luxury condos on prime public land deeded over to him by his cronies in Nigeria’s government. Mimi herself was not a crook. But Mimi lived very comfortably in the house in Ennismore Gardens that would be her father’s place of exile the inevitable day he had to flee prosecutors or, far more likely, the chaos of Nigeria imploding in corruption and civil war.
Among the lovers she chose to bless briefly were top men in Nigeria’s army and oil ministry. She had a great gift for friendship; men she dropped still squired her around London’s best restaurants and still boasted of their accomplishments, hoping to win her back, which made her a font of the sort of gossip and rumor that usually turned out to be fact. Ironically, she maintained in her larcenous father’s future safe house a salon for Nigeria expatriates of every persuasion. Out-of-favor politicians, banished journalists, and revolutionaries with prices on their heads argued politics in her drawing room, vastly expanding Mimi’s knowledge of West African schemes and machinations. From Lagos to Cape Town, if it happened in Africa, Princess Mimi knew it first.
“I heard you were in Angola,” she remarked as she poured coffee in her immaculate tiled kitchen, which overlooked the communal gardens behind the house.
“Passing through.”
“Did you enjoy the seafood?”
“Enormously.”
“Do no secrets ever pass your lips?”
Janson got off the kitchen stool, stood to his full height, and kissed her on the mouth. “Not today.”
“You kiss like a man in love with another woman.”
“I kiss like a man in a rush. Mimi, I need help. You can give it to me. And you can help me even more if no one knows we’ve spoken.”
Mimi smiled. “My lips will be sealed the instant you leave. What do you want?”
“Could we start with the Nigeria–Isle de Foree connection?”
“The military connection or the oil connection?”
“I thought they were the same.”
Mimi smiled again. “I am testing your depth of knowledge.”
She picked up a telephone, carried it out the door into the garden, and spoke rapidly. When she came back indoors she said, “I invited a couple of boys to come straight over to brunch. Do you still cook omelets?”
Janson started warming a pan on her huge AGA range and broke a dozen eggs into a bowl.
“What else?” she asked.
“Iboga. Is he possibly hiding in Nigeria?”
“Impossible. He would be brought to book. No one would protect him.”
“Not even the army?”
“Iboga is toxic. Nigeria has got enough image problems on the continent without sheltering bloodthirsty dictators. We’ve not yet recovered from our own. And may never.”
“Do people you know talk about where he might be?”
“Just talk. Sightings here and there. He’s not exactly nondescript.”
Janson smiled and gave her a story she would like to repeat. “An MI5 chap once told me that back when Idi Amin fled Uganda he was spotted in Saudi Arabia by a satellite.”
“Iboga is fatter than Amin. And satellites are more technologically advanced today.”
“What sightings have you heard about?”
“France. Romania. Bulgaria. Croatia. Russia.”
“Where in Russia?”
Mimi shrugged. Her dressing gown slipped off a round shoulder.
“How about Corsica?” Janson asked.
Mimi nodded. “I heard Corsica.”
“Really?”
“Just the other day, from a fellow down there on holiday. He didn’t actually see him, but he heard mention.”
“Where?”
Mimi shrugged again. “He was yachting. So I suppose by the sea.”
“Do you know about Securité Referral?”
“No. What is it?”
“Sort of a freelance union of rogue covert agents.”
“Drug smuggling?”
“Anything that makes money, I gather.”
Mimi warmed oil in a pan and began sautéing whole tomatoes. Janson grated cheese and sliced bread for toast. The guests arrived, Everest Orhii, a thin, middle-aged Nigerian in a worn blue suit and open shirt, and Pedro Menezes, a former oil minister of Isle de Foree, who was better dressed and looked extremely prosperous. Janson nodded his thanks to Mimi and murmured, “Pretty impressive on short notice.”
“You already knew I was impressive,” said Mimi. “Or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Minister Menezes gazed hungrily at the omelet Janson was dividing. Everest Orhii, the Nigerian, tore gratefully into the portion Mimi passed across the kitchen table. Both men, it turned out, were in exile, the Nigerian scraping by to spend money for lawyers in hopes of someday returning to Lagos. The Isle de Foreen was hoping to bribe his way back to Porto Clarence. Orhii had worked in the Nigerian oil ministry, though at a lower level than Menezes was at in Isle de Foree.
They each had cell phones, which were constantly ringing. Each would jump from the table, shout, “ Olá!” or, “Orhii here!” and rush out to the garden for a private conversation.
“Before the civil war,” Menezes told Janson, “Isle de Foree resisted jointly exploring deepwater blocks with Nigeria.”
“Even though Nigeria was supporting Iboga?” asked Janson.
“The policy was initiated well before Iboga. The Nigerians had taken advantage years earlier when we were desperate. The shallow-water agreements were not fair.”
“No,” said Orhii, returning from the garden and redraping his napkin across his flat belly. “It was not that the agreements were not fair.”
“Then what?” demanded Menezes.
Orhii swallowed a slab of toast in two bites. “Isle de Foreens dislike Nigerians. They accuse us of being overbearing. It is reflexively typical of small nations to dislike big nations. As many nations hate America, so many hate Nigeria.”
“To have Nigeria as a neighbor is to sleep with a hippopotamus.”
“My nation and your island are separated by two hundred miles of open gulf.”
“Hippos can swim.”
“They all say we are pushy!” Everest Orhii shouted. “They say that we push ahead of the line and take all we want.”
Pedro Menezes’s phone rang and he rushed out to the garden.
Orhii motioned Janson closer. “If you want to know about petroleum exploration in the deepwater blocks, ask Everest about the bribes he took from GRA.”
“What is GRA?”
Orhii shrugged. “I don’t know. Sadly, they never visited my office. I suspect they dealt directly with my superiors, however.”
“Mimi?”
Mimi shook her head. “Not on my radar. Ask Pedro. He’s happy to talk. He’s so bored in London. He wants to go home and be oil minister again, but that will never happen. Ferdinand Poe will allow only the war veterans in his cabinet.”