Busted Flush

“That isn’t what worries me, Excellency,” she said. “With Tom Weathers gone”—to her surprise and annoyance, the name caught briefly in her throat—“the war of liberation has slowed.”

“We feel the loss of Mokèlé-mbèmbé most keenly,” Nshombo said.

He could have fooled Hei-lian. The president was renowned for never showing visible emotion. But his utter nonresponse to the loss of his revolutionary comrade, the man whose crazy genius and unmatched powers had put him in this palace, struck even her as cold.

“Now that the UN has joined us,” he said, “I think they and my Simba Brigades, along with help from our LAND brothers, should suffice. Don’t you?”

She wondered. She didn’t care to say so aloud. Her job required selfless courage, not folly. She searched for words to frame her true concern. The PRC had backed Weathers’s guerrilla-style strategy for liberating the Oil Rivers. With him . . . gone, the campaign had shifted to conventional warfare. And the Simba Brigades were largely trained and subsidized by India: China’s bitter geopolitical foe and, more specifically, rival for Nigerian oil.

Shrill, excited barking broke out ahead. They walked from among the high rose-jeweled hedges, across white gravel that crunched beneath their shoes, toward a wire-mesh fence. A white-clad attendant opened the gates to admit the president and his companion.

A horde of mop-headed white Dandie Dinmont terriers yapped ecstatically as they jumped up Nshombo’s trouser legs. The president chuckled and clucked to them in the dialect of his and his sister’s tribe, which apparently had about a dozen living speakers. They didn’t include Hei-lian.

“I know what your interests are, Colonel Sun,” Nshombo said. “You look after them ably. And you have served me well. As Tom did.” He knelt and let the tiny dogs lick his face. He actually smiled, in a manner that reminded her, remarkably, of Sprout in better times. “But I know that in all the world, only Alicia and these dear little creatures truly care for me. Remember that well, Colonel.”

“Thanks,” Tom Diedrich said. “I feel better already.” Which, John Fortune thought, was total macho bullshit. Not even Our Lady of Pain’s super-accelerated healing could take perceptible effect that fast.

“You still look like twenty miles of bad road,” Buford said helpfully.

“We all serve the Revolution as best we can,” the young woman said. Her English was just shy of too thickly accented for John Fortune to follow. She smiled through bloody gashes and the glaring red burn that now covered half her face.

She was already moving slowly when she’d entered the cheery, brightly lit room in the presidential palace. John couldn’t imagine what weight of hurt she carried from wounds she had taken to herself. He didn’t want to try.

Simone Duplaix sat in a chair beside the bed, almost hidden by bursts of roses, red and pink and yellow, Alicia Nshombo had sent from her brother’s garden.

“You sound just like Tom Weathers,” she said. Out of consideration for her fellow Committee members she spoke English, too.

“Do I? He . . . left his mark on me. On all of us.”

“Yet he was a warrior,” the Lama said. He sat in a chair like a normal person, sipping bottled orange Fanta through a straw. “You are a healer. Is it not strange you are being disciple of one such?”

“What I saw in the Delta made me accept that the Revolution won’t be won by good intentions.”

Which, John knew, was another of the Radical’s damned bumper-sticker homilies. He’d seen it on enough Prius bumpers. I guess she spent enough time with Weathers in the few days before he got whacked, he thought. That Chinese TV chick didn’t look too thrilled about it, either. Ah, well. He wasn’t here to sort out the PPA’s domestic affairs.

<You should court this girl,> Isra told him. <Even though she is black. She is strong, and has good hips. She could bear you strong sons.>

Please, he thought. I’m in love with Kate. And this girl has got a self-mutilation thing going that makes the most razor-happy emo girl look a wimp. Plus I get enough from you without putting up with hearing revolutionary slogans twenty-four/seven.

Dolores Michel bent to stroke an uninjured part of Diedrich’s forehead with gentle fingertips. “You will be well soon, well-named Brave Hawk.”

“Thanks, ma’am,” he said.

She left. “Well,” John said, “she seems to be taking the Radical’s demise pretty calmly.”

“Don’t be a dick, John,” Simone said. “She’s trying to hold in so much pain, she can’t give in to sorrow.”