The American Mission Read online

  Some days, Alex thought, the job wasn’t all bad.

  The glow didn’t last for long. Alex had nearly finished his final interview when the Consul General shouted for him from the comfort of his leather “executive model” desk chair.

  “Alex, I want to see you in my office right now.”

  Ronald R. Ronaldson was both Alex’s boss and the embodiment of his deepest professional fears. R Cubed had once been a rising star in the Foreign Service. Somewhere along the way, however, he had fallen from grace—alcohol, it was widely assumed—and found himself at fifty commanding a small consulate in a West African shithole. He was angry about his fate and took it out on his subordinates through the infliction of petty indignities.

  “Sure thing,” Alex replied in as upbeat a tone as he could muster. “Let me finish with this last case, and I’ll be right there.”

  “No, Alex. Right now.”

  Alex made his apologies to the last applicant, a seventeen-year-old kid with good grades at the local convent school and a scholarship offer from Wake Forest, and made his way back to the CG’s office. French doors connecting his private office to the suite provided the Consul General with a commanding view of the entire section, or would have if Ron Ronaldson hadn’t kept the heavy curtains on the inside drawn tight to facilitate the occasional midafternoon nap.

  “What can I do for you, Ron?” Alex tried hard to keep any edge of impatience or irritation out of his voice, but he was not quite successful.

  “I’ve been going over the statistics on visa issuance,” Ron began. From the vaguely glassy look in the CG’s eyes, Alex suspected that R Cubed had been conferring with either Johnnie Walker or Jack Daniel, his two most reliable confidants. “Frankly, Alex, your issuance rate is simply too high. You’re nearly fifteen points higher than Ham and well ahead of the average for the region. I need you to bring that number down before it’s time to send in the quarterly report.”

  “Why does the issuance rate matter? The real problem should be the overstay rate. There my numbers are pretty good. I may issue more visas than Ham, but in percentage terms, I don’t have any more of my visa cases picked up on immigration violations than he does. Less than two percent, actually.”

  “I don’t give a good goddamn about that. The issuance rate is the number Consular Affairs sees, and I don’t want them flagging my consulate as the weak link in West Africa. We’d be seen as a terrorism risk. I’m simply telling you to get your numbers down.”

  “Ron, are you telling me that I need to start rejecting qualified people who traveled two days and forked over a hundred and forty dollars for three minutes of my time just to bring our numbers in line with the bell curve?” Alex knew that this approach was not going to produce the desired result, but he couldn’t help himself.

  Anger flared briefly in Ron’s eyes before they returned to their glassy norm. “If you want to put it that way, Alex, then yes. That’s exactly what I’m telling you to do. You can start with this gentleman.” Ron pulled a passport and visa application out of his in-tray. Alex could see from the piles of applications and passports that the CG had been reviewing the morning’s issuances. “You approved a visa earlier for a man named Rafiou Alfa Ismael Pascal Gushein.” Ron mangled the pronunciation of the unfamiliar name. “The man is an obvious bad risk. When he comes back this afternoon, you tell him your decision has been overturned by a more experienced officer and that he does not qualify for a visa.” Ron made no effort to hide the satisfaction he took in issuing this humiliating instruction, and Alex felt his ears begin to burn.

  “I know you feel that consular work is a terrible comedown for you, Baines. And, frankly, you’re not particularly good at it. You’re too soft and too slow. Ham is in a different class. He’s just passing through the consular universe. But you’re in this for the long haul. Get used to it. Stop thinking you’re better than this. Better than us.”

  Alex had no reply. Ron was wrong about Gushein, but not about Alex. He left the CG’s office without saying a word.

  That afternoon, Mr. Gushein and his nephew came back for the visa Alex had promised them. R Cubed had pulled open the curtains in his office and opened the French doors to provide a good view of Alex’s humiliation.

  “Listen,” Alex said to Gushein’s nephew. “We have a problem. The big man back there doesn’t want me to give your uncle a visa. He doesn’t think Mr. Gushein will come back to Guinea after visiting his son. I don’t agree. I’m giving your uncle the visa, but you need to make it look like I’ve turned you down.” Alex spoke in rapid-fire French mixed with a heavy dose of Guinean slang that he knew Ron wouldn’t understand. The CG’s French had never progressed much past “Frère Jacques.”

  “Please tell your uncle that he needs to convince the fat man back there that I’ve just ripped his heart out of his chest. Do you think he can do that?”

  “No problem.” The nephew spoke softly but rapidly to Gushein, whose face almost seemed to cave in with sadness. Alex wondered for a moment if his nephew had told him that he would not be getting a visa. No matter. He would learn the truth soon enough. Alex had printed the visa himself and placed it in the passport rather than allowing one of the local staff to do it. There was a record of the decision in the computer and Ron, of course, had access to the system, but he was generally pretty lax about administrative controls. Alex doubted very much that he would ever check.

  Alex heard R Cubed slam the French doors, which was followed by the sharp hiss of the curtains being drawn. Time to celebrate his triumph with a Jack and Coke, easy on the Coke.

  Gushein left the consulate leaning on his nephew for support. When he reached the door, he turned to look back at Alex and gave him an almost imperceptible nod. So he knew. The old man would have made a hell of an actor.

  Alex realized that he had just made two important decisions. The first was that Mr. Gushein was getting on a plane for Chicago if Alex had to buy the ticket himself. The second was which letter he was going to send off to the Centrex people.

  2

  MAY 31, 2009

  KISANGANI

  Marie Tsiolo was nervous. It was not an emotion with which the proud daughter of a Luba principal chief was especially familiar. She had been working for this moment for nearly a year, five years if you counted her time studying in South Africa and even longer if you counted the years she had spent learning every rock and trail in the hills near her home village.

  The unfamiliar surroundings heightened her anxiety. Kisangani, the third-largest city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was located along the last navigable stretch of the mighty Congo River. When the Belgians still ran the Congo, cotton, coffee, and rubber had made Kisangani and its colonial masters rich. Now it was a shadow of its former glories.

  A few businesses still thrived in the city, and one of them was the purpose of Marie’s visit. Kisangani was home to the exploration-and-engineering arm of her employer, Consolidated Mining Inc. Headquartered in New York, Consolidated was an enormous, sprawling multinational. The main office for the mineral-rich Congo was in the capital, Kinshasa, but it was out here in the wild eastern half of the country that Consolidated made most of its profits. This is where the company mined the copper and cobalt and gold that made the Congo concession so valuable.

  The ultimate business of Consolidated wasn’t mining; it was money. And Marie hoped that she had persuaded the company to make just a little bit less of it. Now it was time to close the deal. The future of her people hung in the balance.

  The Consolidated Mining office was a far cry from the modernist glass cube the company had built in Kinshasa. The multibillion-dollar company operated out of a third-floor walk-up in a crumbling concrete building next to the Soviet-style post office. A row of small plaques announced the names of the six businesses that shared the building. Three were trading companies. One was a dentist’s office. One was a brothel. Marie hit the butt
on next to the Consolidated logo. A moment later the front door buzzed open.

  There was a cracked mirror on the wall in the lobby, and Marie took a quick look at herself before climbing the stairs. She was not particularly vain, but Marie knew that her looks were an asset in negotiations. Like most of her tribe, Marie was tall, nearly six feet. Her high cheekbones and piercing dark eyes were a gift from her mother. She wore her hair in neat braids pulled back and tied off with a black ribbon. The Kisangani office was relatively informal, so Marie had dressed simply in khaki slacks and sandals with a cream-colored V-necked blouse. Her only jewelry was a single-strand necklace of polished coral beads that she had bought in Cape Town. Under one arm, she carried a black leather document case.

  The door to the Consolidated Mining office was open. There was a small waiting area with a few chairs and an empty reception desk. There were three separate offices in the suite. Jack Karic, the head of the Kisangani office, was at his desk in the largest of the three, looking over the material in a thick binder open in front of him. A cigarette smoldered in a glass ashtray next to a coffee cup emblazoned with the company logo.

  “Hi, Jack,” Marie said, with a polite knock on the open door. The windows in Karic’s office were propped open. The air-conditioning was out again.

  Karic looked up from his files and glanced briefly at his watch.

  “You’re late.”

  They spoke in English. Karic’s French was execrable while Marie, like many Congolese, was multilingual. In addition to French and English, she spoke Luba, Swahili, and Lingala, a trade language that served as a kind of lingua franca in the ethnically and linguistically diverse Congo. Marie took the seat directly across the desk from Karic.

  “Sorry. There was trouble with the plane.” In fact, all flights in and out of the city of Goma in the Congo’s far east had been grounded for the better part of the day by a thick cloud of volcanic ash spewing from Mount Nyiragongo.

  “No great surprise there,” Karic scoffed. “They probably ran short of duct tape.”

  In Marie’s experience, Westerners in central Africa came in two distinct flavors. Some embraced the rich cultures and accepted the hardships as inseparable from the beauties and joys of life in the region. Others, like Karic, resisted the experience, resented the hardships, and over time grew increasingly small-minded and embittered. Karic expressed his resentment over his assignment to Kisangani with a contempt for the Congo and the Congolese people that he did little to disguise.

  Right now, however, Marie needed him. She let the gratuitous dig slide.

  There was an air of dishevelment about Karic that mirrored that of the decaying city around him. He was taller than Marie and thin, with a pronounced Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down when he spoke. Although he had been in the Congo for nearly three years, he had never adapted to the tropical climate and his face was perpetually flushed. A halfhearted comb-over could not conceal a sizable bald spot. His oxford shirt and seersucker suit were badly wrinkled, and the sweat stains under his arms offered evidence that the office air-conditioning had been out of commission for some time.

  Grudgingly, Karic offered Marie a plastic bottle of room temperature water.

  “Is that my report you’re reading?” she asked.

  “It is.”

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s a good report.”

  “Thanks. You have the geology studies in there, and I brought you a proposal on the way forward for your approval. We need some heavy equipment, generators, and lots of safety gear, but nothing that the company doesn’t have in excess. It’s been six months since I was back in Busu-Mouli. I left plans and blueprints with my father and my uncle so that they could get a start on both the digging and refining operations. That way, we’ll be able to integrate the equipment slowly as it becomes available. The initial product will be pretty crude. I’m confident that with the company’s help we’ll be self-financing within a year and turning an operational profit a few months after that. Ultimately, I’d like to be able to produce industrial-quality ingots on site. That’s a few years down the road.”

  Marie’s enthusiasm was unfeigned. The deal she had been negotiating with the mining company promised to transform life in her village.

  Karic closed the binder. “It’s a good report,” he repeated. “Too good, I’m afraid. Henri tells me that he’s had second thoughts about the arrangements you discussed.”

  Marie’s heart sank. She understood immediately what Karic meant. Henri Saillard, the mining company’s country representative for the Congo, was based in Kinshasa. Like Karic’s, his background was on the business end rather than the production side of Consolidated’s operations. While Karic was an accountant by both training and temperament, Saillard’s area of expertise was government relations. In a country as corrupt as the Congo, this particular skill was considered vital to the company’s success.

  “What does he want?” she asked flatly.

  Karic looked at her with all the sympathy of a vulture watching a wounded animal it had marked as its next meal.

  “This is a potentially big find, Marie. The company wants an open pit.” He didn’t need to say any more.

  Returning to her village after studying at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Marie had recognized the honey yellow cliffs along the trails she had walked as a girl as being almost pure chalcopyrite, a mineral rich in copper and cobalt. She was determined that this potential source of wealth would go to benefit the people of her village and not the kleptocratic government in Kinshasa. The villagers were farmers and fishermen, however, not miners. Moreover, mining was a capital-intensive industry and the equipment was prohibitively expensive. Marie knew that she needed help if it was going to be done right.

  With that in mind, she had approached her employer with a proposal: If Consolidated would provide surplus gear that she could use to mine and refine the chalcopyrite ore, the village would share the profits with the company, and Consolidated Mining could burnish its global image by promoting sustainable development. Marie’s one condition was that the digging and the smelting needed to be conducted in an environmentally responsible way. That meant using less-efficient and therefore more-expensive techniques such as slope or shaft mining. She had no intention of allowing the lush valley where her village was located to be turned into a lifeless wasteland through strip mining.

  Henri Saillard had accepted her terms, and this meeting with Karic was supposed to be a technical discussion about what equipment and material Marie needed for the project.

  In that moment, Marie hated Jack Karic, Henri Saillard, and the mining company that employed them all. She tried to mask her anger with a cool and unreadable expression, but there was some undisguised heat in her response.

  “It can’t be open-pit, Jack. The company is not going to strip-mine my home.”

  “Have you looked at the price of copper? It’s up over forty-five hundred dollars a ton. That’s double what it was just eighteen months ago.”

  “This copper belongs to my people, not the company.”

  “You don’t understand. That copper belongs to the People’s Republic of China. They just haven’t paid for it yet, and the only real question is who is going to collect from Beijing. If your father agrees to cooperate and relocate the village, the company can help. They’ll pay a fair royalty and find a new piece of land for the village. Better land.”

  “And if we refuse?”

  “Then Henri and I will get the government’s permission to dig there anyway and you get nothing. Seems like a pretty easy call to me.”

  Marie was silent as she weighed what Karic had told her. He was right. It was an easy call.

  “Go to hell, Jack. Busu-Mouli is our home. You can’t have it. It is not for sale.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Marie. The company will take that copper. The find is simply too
rich to ignore. We’re offering you a fair share, but if you fight us on this, you will lose.”

  “I don’t think so.” Marie spoke with considerably more confidence than she felt.

  Karic leaned back in his chair and studied Marie intently. She could almost see the gears spinning in his brain.

  “There may be a way,” he suggested, “to buy yourself some time.”

  “How?” Marie’s hostility was evident in her curt response.

  “Feed the beast. Give it something else to chew on, and it might leave your village alone. At least for a while.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Coltan.”

  Marie was not surprised by the answer. Coltan was industry slang for columbo-tantalite, a dull black metallic ore that could be refined into tantalum. Although most people had never heard of it, tantalum was exceptionally valuable. In its refined form, it had heat-resistant properties and was capable of holding an electrical charge for an extended period. This made it the ideal material for capacitors in cell phones, laptops, and high-end stereos. The pure metal retailed for more than five hundred dollars a kilogram. The raw ore could be found in commercially exploitable quantities in very few places. Eastern Congo was one.

  The oil industry recognized, but could never explain, that some petroleum geologists had a nose for oil. They could somehow “feel” the presence of big oil and could look at a data set and predict with high confidence where the company should drill. Marie had the same talent for coltan.

  “It doesn’t work like that. You can’t find something like that just by wishing hard enough.”

  “I understand that. We aren’t going in blind. There are site surveys in the Aruwimi Valley region that offer promising indications of a big find.” His voice was oily. “The company is putting together a team to do the fieldwork. I want you to be the second geologist on that team.”