Chapter 8
Frank: Now
Gone! What the hell do you mean she’s gone?”
“Keep your voice down.” Hank Henson had pulled him aside the moment that the President had entered his first conference with the U.N. Secretary-General. They stood fifteen feet from the Sec-Gen’s door, thirty-eight stories up in the Secretariat Tower.
“We don’t know much yet. You know where she was stationed?”
“Sure,” and Frank felt sick. Beat had pulled escort duty on the ambassador to Senegal right at the westernmost bulge of Africa. The U.S. ambassador had been receiving death threats and the Secret Service had sent her to investigate the degree of danger. She was an expert on both West Africa and personal security, so the Secret Service had loaned her to the Office of Foreign Missions for a couple of weeks. That in itself was pretty normal, but—
“Agent Belfour…” Henson kept his hands up as if to fend off Frank’s anger. Not a bad idea. Right at this moment Frank could understand the desire to kill the messenger.
“… was accompanying Ambassador Sam Green and three assistants, left Dakar yesterday, July first, at seven a.m. local time. They were headed to a series of meetings at Bissau in Guinea-Bissau. There’s no ambassador there because we have no permanent diplomatic mission there.”
“Because the place is such a goddamn hellhole they can’t keep a government in place.”
“Granted.” Hank rolled right on with his whispered report that several of the closer secretaries were trying desperately to overhear. “It’s only a one-hour flight. The locally-staffed liaison office called at five p.m. to ask if they’d left Dakar yet, they were eight hours overdue at that time. Then the locals went home because it was the end of the work day. When the Senegalese operator tried to confirm with Guinea-Bissau this morning, July second, they couldn’t get a response at all, so they finally reported them late. The G-B liaison office is still not answering.”
Frank needed to hit something and hit it hard.
The fine wood paneling smelled faintly of a recent lemon-oiling. The Sec-Gen’s secretaries sat in a row of neatly aligned desks. Several elegant comfortable chairs were clustered in front of the thirty-eighth floor window, with its spectacular view of the Manhattan shoreline, to accommodate waiting dignitaries. Not a single Senegalese or Guinea-Bissau office worker to punch anywhere. Not even a padded wall in a sparring gym to pound on.
“Twenty-four hours?” was all he could grind out of his tight throat. They’d been missing for twenty-four hours before word had gotten back.
“No, Guinea-Bissau is ahead of us. In local time they are thirty hours overdue now.”
“Someone just kill me now.”
“You wouldn’t like it.” Hank’s sense of humor never lurked far beneath the surface and gave Frank a tempting new target. “If I killed you, you wouldn’t have a chance to pummel whoever screwed this up.”
“Great. You’re a big help.” He paced to the Sec-Gen’s office door and back. He allowed himself up to a max of twenty feet away before he considered himself off post. Typically a nation’s guards waited in the comfortable chairs over fifty feet away, and watched the view of the Manhattan skyline. He was the United States Secret Service, Frank stayed close and watched the area around the door.
“We’re having a hard time getting any communication in or out. We think they may be having another coup. It has been over a year since the last one, and we did just capture that rear admiral of theirs in the d**g-and-arms-trafficking ring.”
Frank couldn’t shake the need to do something, anything, and he had only one option on that score.
“Keep me posted.” Then he turned until he once again stood two steps to the right of the office door, behind which the President of the United States was in a meeting, and shifted into parade rest.
He scanned the room, everything and everyone where it had been two minutes before. Everything in place.
Except his world, which had now been turned upside down.