Buch lesen: «Seducing the Mercenary»

Chapter 1

Nine hours earlier. 06:02 Zulu. Friday, November 8. Ubasi airport. West Coast of Africa

Perspiration dampened Dr. Emily Carlin’s blouse as she neared one of two customs checkpoints.

There was no electricity in the cramped Ubasi arrivals room this morning. Fans hung motionless from the ceiling, the only light in the terminal coming from doors flung open to white-hot sunlight. Even at this early hour everyone was already dulled into slow motion by the rising temperatures and humidity.

The line of passengers shuffled slowly forward and Emily moved with it, people jostling her on all sides. She’d been informed Ubasi possessed no X-ray equipment and the additional lack of power made it even less likely they’d find the knife strapped to her ankle under her jeans.

It was small protection, but she didn’t expect much trouble. Her mission was simply to get into the beleaguered war-torn country wedged between Nigeria and Cameroon and assess the sociological situation. Most importantly, she was to compile a psychological profile of notorious mercenary Jean-Charles Laroque, known on this continent as Le Diable, a fierce and deadly guerrilla war expert, master military strategist, and now, a dictator.

She had exactly one week to do her job. Laroque’s life depended on her assessment.

Just over twelve months ago the Parisian-born Laroque had sailed into Ubasi on a Spanish boat with a scruffy black Alsatian at his side, a rough band of mercenaries under his command, and a cache of black market weapons in his hold. After putting up a weak fight, the beleaguered Ubasi army had surrendered to Laroque.

Xavier Souleyman—the despot who had overthrown Ubasi’s King Douala eight years previously and ruled the country with a bloody hand ever since—had escaped Laroque’s capture and fled the country with the aid of a small band of loyalists.

Laroque had wasted no time moving into the royal palace, installing himself as de facto leader, and after negotiating with the rebels who had seized control of the northern jungles of Ubasi during Souleyman’s reign, Laroque had assumed personal ownership of massive tracts of land where his geologists had proceeded to strike oil—enough to potentially rival production in both Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea combined.

That fact alone had catapulted the once-forgotten country and renegade warlord instantly onto the world stage.

In less than a year Laroque had managed to broker unheard-of treaties with disparate rebel factions over the border in Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea—radical militants who opposed their own corrupt governments’ financial ties with Western corporate interests in the Gulf of Guinea.

This placed Laroque in an exceedingly powerful anti-status-quo position. He now had the power to spark a major civil war in the region that could cut off oil supply to the rest of the world for decades to come—oil that had recently become critical to U.S. foreign policy, given the current tensions in the Gulf of Arabia.

On top of this, four deep cover CIA agents in Ubasi had just been slaughtered, their bodies displayed using the same gruesome signature technique once employed by Laroque’s mercenary father as he’d cut an increasingly bloody swath across the continent before meeting his own violent end two years ago.

Laroque seemed to be sending a message to the U.S.: Get out. Stay out. Or else.

And here Emily was going in.

She mopped her brow with a damp and tattered tissue as the queue inched forward again and heat pressed down.

Emily was a Manhattan-based expert in tyrannical pathology with a military background of her own. The minds of dictators, organized crime bosses, renegade warlords and murderous despots were both her passion and her professional specialty. Alpha Dogs, she called them.

She’d been contracted by the Force du Sable, a private military company based off the West Coast of Angola, to profile this particular Alpha Dog. The FDS in turn had been retained by a CIA-Pentagon task force in a clandestine bid to control the Laroque “situation.” His threat in the region was becoming too great for corporate and political comfort.

The U.S., however, could in no way be overtly involved in a bid to oust the new Ubasi tyrant. Nor could the CIA trust its own at the moment—the source of the intelligence leak that had resulted in the deaths of the four CIA agents represented a grave internal security breach, which was why the FDS had been brought in.

Emily’s assessment of Le Diable would be used by the FDS to formulate strategy. She needed to identify where the tyrant’s psychological weaknesses lay—and in her experience, they always lay somewhere—and she had to pinpoint what fired him. While much was known about Laroque’s military exploits in Africa, virtually nothing was known about the man himself.

No one knew what made him tick.

Emily’s job was to figure out what did.

She also needed to ascertain whether taking him captive would exacerbate an already volatile situation in the Gulf. To do this, she’d have to determine how his subjects viewed him—as evil despot, or charismatic leader. Tyrants wore both stripes, and the last thing the U.S. wanted was to make the man a martyr.

If taking Laroque prisoner was not an option in Emily’s opinion, the result would be death by assassination before midnight on Thursday, November 14.

Meanwhile, a team of FDS operatives was infiltrating Ubasi from the north. They would gauge the power of the exiled Souleyman faction, and start negotiations to back Souleyman in another coup to overthrow Ubasi. The FDS team on the ground would also get Emily out of Ubasi if she ran into trouble.

Emily didn’t like the idea of swapping one murderous tyrant for another, but the U.S. did. Souleyman was easy to control. Laroque wasn’t.

The oil business made strange bedfellows, she thought as she removed her water bottle from her bag, but politics was not her concern. Her sole interest was the Alpha Dog.

But while Alpha Dogs like Laroque were her intellectual thrill, they were also highly unstable—and dangerous. And she hadn’t been on a mission for a while.

A combination of anticipation and anxiety shimmered through her stomach as the queue inched closer to the customs checkpoint. She uncapped her water bottle and took a swig of the warm contents.

She could not afford to screw this one up.

She couldn’t afford to screw anything up. She’d left enough of a personal mess in Manhattan as it was. She needed this job. And she needed to do it right—for both professional and personal reasons.

Her nerves tightened as she glanced at the line of passengers on her left, the one with the rest of the Geographic International science crew—her cover. It was moving much faster.

She’d been separated from them by a soldier who called himself the “document man” and roughly shunted to the line on the right. Emily wondered if she’d have been assigned to the faster queue if she’d given the “document man” cash. But she was saving her two hundred dollars in bribe money for the big important-looking guy manning the customs booth ahead. She had another two hundred dollars U.S. stashed in her Australian-style bush boots as backup.

Perhaps she should have brought more.

She was uncharacteristically hot and edgy this morning, and it was not a sensation she enjoyed. Emily liked to stay cool and in control—always. She tried to shrug off her uneasiness, putting it down to the pathetic mess she’d left in New York. She was tired, emotionally drained, still reeling from her recent relationship fiasco.

The angry heat of humiliation once again flushed her cheeks. She’d been lured over the boundary between professional and personal, made to look like a fool. It had been a damn stupid mistake, and it would never, ever happen again.

She irritably swiped the sweat off her lip with the base of her thumb. This FDS contract could not have come at a better time. She wanted to put as much physical distance between herself and her ex—if she could even call him that—as humanly possible.

She needed to focus on someone else’s pathology, not her own.

Emily was almost at the customs booth now, and her pulse quickened. She shot a look at the other line, saw the last of the science team leaving the terminal, and cursed silently.

While FDS leader, Jacques Sauvage, had hastily cobbled together a deal with their sponsors that allowed her to tag on to the Geographic International team, the scientists themselves had no idea why Emily was actually here, and they were under no obligation to coddle her. In fact, they’d been instructed by their sponsor to ask no questions at all. She cursed herself again. She should have forked over the damn bribe.

The customs official motioned for her to approach.

“Passeport?” he commanded in heavy African bass.

She handed it over along with her currency declaration form.

He flipped open her passport, glanced at her photo, looked up and met her eyes.

Her mouth went dry.

He smiled, teeth bright against gleaming ebony skin. “And what have you got for me today, Dr. Sanford?” he asked in deeply accented English, using her alias.

She slid a hundred dollar bill across the counter, watching his face. He stared at the money, his smile fading.

She pushed another note slowly across the counter. “It’s all I have,” she said in English.

“Vous êtes Américaine?”

Her heart beat faster. It was patently obvious from her passport what her nationality was, and now he was refusing to speak English. “Oui, je suis Américaine.”

“Raison de visite?”

A ball of insecurity swelled suddenly in her throat. “I’m here with the Geographic International science team,” she said firmly, in English, wishing to hell the crew hadn’t left without her. She unfolded and handed him another piece of paper that had the Ubasi palace stamp on it. “See?” She pointed to the signature. “We have permission from the Laroque government.”

The official didn’t even pretend to look at the piece of paper. His eyes continued to hold hers. “Currency declaration form?”

“I gave it to you, with the passport.”

“Non—”

“I did! Look, it’s right there,” Emily said, pointing.

The man shook his head, raised his hand high above his head and clicked his fingers sharply. Two armed guards left their station at the exit doors and started making their way toward his booth. Emily’s heart pounded wildly against her rib cage. “What’s going on?” she demanded.

“There is a problem with your currency declaration,” the customs official said in French, before turning to the next person in line. “Passeport, s’il vous plaît?”

“No, there isn’t. Wait! You haven’t even looked at my form. You—”

The guards took her arms roughly. “Venez avec nous.”

Emily jerked back. “Why? Why must I go with you? Where to?”

But the guards hauled her briskly away.

“What about my luggage?” she snapped, dangerously close to losing her temper. “I haven’t collected my bags yet.”

But they remained mute as they forced her through a crushing crowd of people, all of whom studiously averted their eyes. The reaction of the crowd wasn’t lost on Emily. She saw it as a blatant sign of fear of government authority. These people were terrified of Laroque’s goons, she thought as the guards forced her into an interrogation room. She whirled round as they shut the door and locked it.

Stay calm. Breathe.

But no matter how Emily tried, she couldn’t. The room was airless. The temperature had to be more than 100 degrees, humidity making it worse. Her jeans clung to her legs, her hair stuck to her back, and rivulets of sweat trickled between her breasts. Emily shoved the damp strands of hair back off her face. She refused to let this man or his country get the better of her!

She refused to let any autocratic male make a fool of her.

The heat of humiliation burned into her cheeks again. Damn, she was displacing her anger and she knew it. She needed to focus on this tyrant, not her ex. That’s why she was here. She was a profiler for God’s sake. She could do this.

She clenched her jaw, forcing herself to take stock. She still had her knife, her traveler’s checks, her satellite phone, camera and, most important—her computer.

Anything she typed or downloaded into her laptop would be relayed via satellite to a monitor on the FDS base on São Diogo Island. It was state-of-the-art military communications technology, and it was how she would file her daily briefs, along with her final report on Laroque.

Just as she was thinking she’d be okay, the door banged open against the wall. Emily jerked in fright, heart pounding right back up into her throat.

The customs official loomed into the room. “I will see your checks and francs.” He held out his hand, palm up.

“I…beg your pardon?”

He didn’t budge.

Emily reluctantly opened the pouch strapped to her waist and forked over the wad of traveler’s checks and francs she’d had to declare on the form.

The man thumbed through the wad slowly, mouthing the amounts as he did. He looked up sharply. “There is a discrepancy. The amount here is not the same as you declared on the form.”

“It is. I—”

“This is illegal. You are smuggling currency. You will pay a fine of fifty thousand francs.”

“What! That’s ridiculous. That’s…almost ten thousand dollars. I don’t have that kind of money on me!”

“But you can get it, yes? You will have your passeport confiscated until you return to the aéroport with the francs for me personally, ça va?”

Emily looked at him, stunned. Without her passport she was a prisoner in Ubasi. And illegal. She wouldn’t be able to obtain the visa all tourists had to buy in Basaroutou within twenty-four hours of landing. This was pure corruption. She cursed viciously under her breath. These men had targeted her because she was American, female, separated from her crew, and because she possessed expensive equipment. She was, in their eyes, a perfect candidate for extortion. And who the hell could she complain to? Their dictator, Jean-Charles Laroque?

She cursed again as the customs official abruptly departed, leaving the door swinging open. A guard waited outside with her bags, which no doubt had been searched.

Emily grabbed them from him as the guard took her arm, marshaled her toward the exit doors, and dumped her and her belongings unceremoniously onto the dusty streets of Basaroutou.

A riot of colors and sounds slammed into her, and for a second she just stood blinking at the chaos. People jostled her on all sides, dressed in everything from swaths of brightly colored fabric to tattered western dress and stark white tunics. Women carrying baskets on their heads hawked the contents, and on crumbling sidewalks vendors peddled everything from exotic fruits and strangely shaped vegetables to mysterious oils in brown bottles and weird-looking shriveled animals.

Poverty was clearly evident, as was a mélange of cultures. But the faces Emily saw were not ones of milling discontent. Her first impression was an air of industry and purpose.

She hadn’t expected this, but then virtually nothing was known about Ubasi under Laroque’s rule.

She shaded her eyes, sun burning down hot on her dark hair. Most of the buildings were dun-colored and flanked by impossibly tall, dull-green palms that rustled in the hot wind. Cerise bougainvillea clambered up walls pockmarked by years of war and roads were dusty and cratered with disrepair.

Emily squinted into the light as she searched for something that vaguely resembled a roadworthy cab.

Thankfully she still had what was left of her bribe cash in her boots. Passport or not, she had a job to do. She’d contact the FDS from the hotel and see what she could do about getting her papers back.

But as soon as she tried to elbow her way through the people thronging the sidewalks, she sensed a shift in energy that made fine hairs at the base of her scalp stand on end. She stilled, suddenly acutely cognizant.

There was a strange tension in the air. The mass of humanity around her was growing tighter, quieter. A dark anticipation began to throb tangibly through the crowd.

Emily’s pulse quickened.

Soldiers were beginning to clear the street and line the road, holding people back with automatic weapons.

The air literally began to crackle with a mounting expectancy. Then the crowds grew suddenly hushed, and now she could hear only the rattle of palm fronds in the wind. Something was coming.

Emily’s heart beat faster.

She began to look for exit routes. She knew from experience situations like this had a way of rapidly flaring into extreme violence. But anything vaguely resembling a cab was a good hundred yards off, and the crowds were closing her in even as her brain raced to comprehend what was going on. She was trapped, being wedged and jostled down toward the curb that edged the main street. She gripped her bags tight against her body and peered down the road, trying to see what was happening.

A burst of automatic gunfire suddenly peppered the air, and she jerked back as a convoy of military Jeeps rounded the corner at the bottom of the road. Soldiers triumphantly brandished AK-47s high above their heads, firing with abandon, the sound ricocheting between buildings as the convoy roared up the street.

Emily ducked as the vehicles neared her vantage point, but to her surprise, instead of fleeing in terror, the crowds around her surged forward, singing, ululating, chanting in such a strangely harmonious and resonant chorus it chased shivers over her skin.

Emily slowly stood, awestruck by the elemental effect of the primal sounds on her body.

The first set of Jeeps raced past in a cloud of fine dust. Then the haunting hush returned, silent anticipation thrumming in the humid air. Emily’s heart began to pound like a drum as she leaned forward, trying to see all the way down the road.

A large open-topped military vehicle flanked by smaller Jeeps rounded the corner and crept slowly up the street. The crowd was so deathly silent that the only sound above the growl of engines was of the government flags snapping on the hood. As the big Jeep drew closer, Emily saw what they’d been waiting for.

Their leader.

Adrenaline dumped into her blood. She was seeing Le Diable in the flesh for the first time.

Jean-Charles Laroque sat high in the back of the vehicle, regal, utterly confident. Everything about him telegraphed power.

The sleeves of his camouflage shirt had been rolled back to reveal gleaming biceps. His shoulder-length black hair was drawn back into a ponytail of dreadlocks that accentuated the aggressive angle of his exotic cheekbones. He wore pitch-black shades under an army beret cocked at a rakish angle over his brow.

At his side sat his faithful Alsatian, Shaka. The dog’s fur glistened in the sunlight, its teeth starkly white against a pink tongue as it panted in the heat.

A hot thrill slid sharp and fast through Emily’s stomach.

The Jeep drew close, coming right up alongside her, and a strange primal awareness prickled over her skin. Emily could not have looked away if she tried.

Laroque turned his head, slowly scanning the crowd, then his gaze collided with hers. His body tensed visibly. He raised his dark glasses slowly, looked right at her, into her, isolating her from the crowd, cutting her from the herd like prey. He was close enough for Emily to see that his eyes were ice-green against burnished mahogany skin, and just as cold, devoid of any humor or glimmer of kindness.

She could barely breathe. Her own eyes watered as she met his gaze, unable to blink. Not wanting to. The crowds around her faded into a distant blur, the silence becoming a deafening buzz as her world narrowed to focus solely on him.

Laroque shifted around in his seat, watching her as his convoy crawled up the road…then he was gone.

Emily stood rooted to the spot, dust settling around her as the crowd erupted in a riot of sound. She tried to catch her breath.

What in hell had just happened here?

This man clearly had the adulation of his people. She hadn’t expected that. Nor had she expected the effect he would have on her.

She swallowed, suddenly gravely uneasy with what she was about to do, with the very real impact her profile would have on this country, these people and that powerful man.

Because Emily wielded a power of her own.

Her professional judgment could kill him.

In less than one week.