He set the photo into a drawer, reached a trembling hand out toward the telephone—but his secretary buzzed his intercom before he could lift the receiver from its cradle.

Senateur Moubouyi was on the line with a matter of pressing urgency, she informed him.

Were his mood less oppressively bleak, Assele-Ndaki might have smiled.

He had, it seemed, been beaten on the draw.

Nimec had arranged for them to meet the cable ship’s captain and project manager at ten P.M. in a dinner club called Scintillements. His name was Pierre Gunville, and for some reason Vince Scull was having a hard time with that. Scull also had a problem with the name of the club and the fact that their meeting was not taking place in an office building during normal work hours. Nimec could not say these complaints surprised him. Aggravation was Scull’s emotional springboard. If the day ever came when he wasn’t simmering with annoyance, you had to figure it might be worth consulting Nostradamus to see whether it was an omen of something or other being seriously amiss with the world.

Scull had begun his grumbling the second he met Nimec in the corridor outside their guest suites at the Rio de Gabao Hotel. Stepping into the elevator now, he jabbed a thick finger at the LOBBY button and continued to bitch and moan without respite as the doors slid closed.

“So why the hell doesn’t any of this crap bother you?” he said.

“Which crap do you mean?” Nimec said. “Just so I’m straight about it.”

“This guy with the fucked-up name, this fucked-up place where he made our appointment to meet him, this fucked-up time for it when I’m just off the plane from Paris,” Scull said, recapitulating his whole bilious list of complaints. He rubbed a hand over his scalp to smooth down a strand of his nearly extinct hair. “That’s what crap, Pete.”

The car started on its way down. Nimec tried without luck to think of a convenient blanket response, decided to tackle things in reverse order.

“You could have flown Air France with the rest of us, gotten here a couple days ago,” Nimec said. “Nobody twisted your arm into waiting around for a private jet charter.”

“Is that goddamn right?”

“Right.”

“Well, I’m not going to get into how much I paid for my membership on that service,” Scull said. “An expense the boss might’ve offered to shoulder, incidentally. At least halfway shoulder.”

Nimec gave him a look. “That’s asinine. If you have a fear of flying . . .”

“How many million times we been through this? I’m not afraid—”

“Okay, we’ll say you’ve got issues with commercial airlines,” Nimec said, loath to step into that sucking bog of dispute. “It’s your problem, you pay.”

Scull sneered.

“My problem, you want to call it that, is with how they run their security,” he said. “You’re the expert. Tell me you feel safe flying the terrorist-friendly skies.”