here. Kinshasa anyways, the capital, not that it's really the same country, that's a thousand miles west, there aren't even any roads there from here. But we moved to New York when I was eleven."
"What brought you back?"
Prester sighs. "I used to deal on the Lower East Side. Had to do it to pay my way through Columbia. Just little stuff at first. Then more and bigger. Then one day I had to get out, and all America was too fucking small. Came back here, never even got my degree. That's me in a nutshell. I'll spend my whole life two credits short of the Ivy League. Ain't life a joke?"
"Hilarious," Jacob says curtly. "Why are we here?"
Prester favours him with a dark look. "You got somewhere else to be?"
"I'm just wondering if you have a point."
"I'll get there when I get there. I'm doing you a fucking favour, man. I shouldn't be talking to you at all."
Jacob looks unconvinced.
"Prester," Veronica says the name slowly, remembering something. "Prester John was a king, wasn't he?"
Prester blows a smoke ring. "That he was. The legendary king of a fabulous Christian nation hidden deep in the dark continent. A kingdom of peace and love where the roads were paved with ivory and gold. Never existed, of course. But a whole shitload of crazy motherfuckers came here to look for him. And just look what they found instead." He waves his arm to take in all of the country around them. "Found and founded. Genocide and civil war. About four million dead untimely in the last twelve years, between Congo and Rwanda."
For a little while he and Veronica smoke in silence.
Jacob asks, "And now you work for the US government?"
"No no no. Bite your tongue, wash out your mouth. Not for. With. Independent contractor. Professional go-between. Protocol man. Human bridge between the Congo and America, providing that invaluable extra edge of local knowledge, cultural understanding, and most important of all, connections to everyone who's anyone. Least that's what it says on my business cards. Azania was a two-man shop. Me the protocol guy, Derek the security expert." Prester hesitates, and his voice drops. "We had real clients. Mining companies. But mostly, in practice, for real? Me and Derek were a deniable front for the CIA."
The three letters seem to echo.
"You wouldn't believe all the shit going down out here nowadays," Prester says. "The new race for Africa is on. America, Britain, France, China, Russia, the Saudis, the South Africans, there's a whole new twenty-first century Great Game going on, and everybody wants to win. That's the thirty-thousand foot view. Sounds romantic, don't it? But zoom in close enough and what you see on the ground is a whole lot of people getting very fucking dirty." He smiles sardonically. "The funny thing is, Strick thinks I'm one of them. He will be so pissed that I'm talking to you in camera. But Derek said you were his best friend." He turns from Jacob to Veronica. "And if you were faking it when they put that panga to your neck, then you deserve all the Academy Awards ever made. So what the hell. Let's spread a little home truth around for once."
"What truth?" Veronica asks.
"Ay, well, there's the fucking rub." Prester drops his cigarette and grinds it out beneath his heel. "Derek was set up. You know that. He knew too much. But what did he know? Not that terrorists were working with interahamwe. They went out of their way to make that very public themselves, didn't they? Told the whole fucking Internet. No, what Derek knew was that one of our bosses, one of our real bosses, in Charlie Indigo Alpha, was covering up a small mountain of smuggling money. Just imagine. An American intelligence officer raking in profits from illegal cross-border trading by genocidaires. Working hand in hand with Athanase Ntingizawa, Captain Interahamwe himself. Definite first-ballot member of the all-time bad-guy hall of fame, even before he jumped into bed with Al-Qaeda. Bit of a resume stain if that comes out, you know? The kind of thing that might drive the officer in question to some seriously extreme extremes, in order to sweep all the blood back under the carpet. Like cutting a deal with Athanase to murder the guy investigating the smuggling."
Veronica opens her mouth and shuts it again. She can't believe she's hearing this, especially not here in this surreal place. She feels like she's in a movie, like some director is