And so the drive stretched on. Nze believed daybreak was fast approaching—for whatever it was worth, the coarse, heavy fabric over his face had not completely blocked his perception of light and darkness. Much earlier, before the 4×4 slipped out of the city, he’d distinguished the glow of traffic signals, streetlights, even the occasional glancing headlamp beams of other motor vehicles. Now he had discerned a faint lifting of the black outside the windows, coupled with the sounds of an awakened jungle. He could hear the discord of overlapping birdsong, and had thought he’d recognized a mangabey’s shrieky primate cry behind him on the forest road.

Part of Nze’s mind yearned for an end to the torturous ride. Another part of him, however, understood how insane a desire that was, what its fulfillment would likely mean for him. He had tried to ignore these emphatic inner warnings, banish them from contemplation, but they had persisted anyway.

Assistant Minister Macie Nze was a man of some fair reason, a trait that would not allow reality to be denied.

If only his capacity for logic and common sense had guided his recent actions, Nze supposed he would never have gotten into this wretched spot. But greed was an imbecilic spoiler that could overcome a person’s best instincts. In his case, it had happened once too often.

As the car rolled on over the dirt roads, Nze’s thoughts suddenly backtracked to when he’d been taken outside his home all those hours ago . . . and then reversed themselves a little further, to the very moment he was lured into the trap.

The call came shortly after eleven o’clock on what was now the previous night. Seventeen minutes past eleven, to be exact. There was a Berthoud clock on his living-room bureau, and Nze recalled having looked at the antique timepiece as he had reached for the phone, setting down his late-evening glass of wine.

“Bonsoir, Macie.” The voice in his handset had belonged to Etienne Begela. “Ça va?”

“Bien, merci.”

Nze had waited. Begela’s cordial tone had thrown him off guard, as it had at the hotel earlier that night. His superior in the Office des Postes et Telecommunications, and a Beti Fang of maternal family linkage, Begela had not spoken a word to Nze for weeks before the reception . . . not, in fact, since their tense conversation aboard the Avirex flight out of Libreville after the National Assembly voted its approval of the UpLink licenses. Begela alternately accused Nze of being a bungler and double-crosser for having withdrawn his opposition. Nze countered that political exigency had left him with no choice except to launch a strategic retreat. The Americans’ support among the PDG’s most formidable and senior members was overwhelming, he’d insisted. Continued challenges would merely label both of them obstructionists to their future sorrow.

“Don’t speak to me of sorrow,” Begela said once their plane left the Gamba airport runway. “It isn’t you who must face our backer.”