"Where is the woman? Where is my woman? Where is the reader of the ancient tongue of the Hamidian traders?"
"She is with her bodyguards. All the snipers you saw here last week are no more. They are dead," said Lord Wissex.
Moombasa couldn't believe his ears. The man was calm. Wissex was talking without a tremor in his voice and the man was telling him he did not have what Moombasa had paid well for.
"You failed," screamed the generalissimo.
"Yes," said Wissex.
"That's it? Yes? Just yes? Ten million dollars and you are telling me yes?"
"Yes," said Lord Wissex.
"He is telling me yes," said Moombasa to an aide. The aide nodded and offered a suggestion.
"Shoot him."
"Let's find out first why he is not afraid," said Moombasa.
"Then we shoot him," said the aide.
"Sure," said Moombasa.
"Hey, you. Brit. Where is the woman who reads
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Hamidian? Where is the mountain of gold? Where the things I pay for?"
"In stronger hands than ours, your Excellency," said Wissex.
Moombasa liked the way the Briton said "your Excellency." It had class and made him feel kingly. It made him feel that perhaps he could go to Buckingham Palace, possibly even cop a feel there. If not the queen, perhaps a princess or two.
"What stronger hands?" he asked.
"Major nations against whom I would advise you not to compete," said Wissex blandly.
"Why you can't beat them? Those major nations, are they big shots?"
"We could beat them," Wissex said.
"Then why you not do it?"
"Because it would be a strain on your economy. We have to move technologically, sustain losses, advance despite those losses. I wanted to give you what a backward nation could afford."
"Hey, what you say?"
"Your Excellency?" asked Wissex.
"What you say there? That word?"
"What word?"
"Backward," said Moombasa.
"You have no industry. You have no road system or telephone system that works. No hospitals that aren't staffed by Europeans at the higher levels, no air force that works without European direction, and you produce absolutely nothing except more Hamidians."
"We produce oil and cobalt."
"Americans produce it," Wissex said. "You, I am afraid, just lay title to it because you were born
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here, Excellency. That is what you produce. And with the money from materials that Americans mine and drill for, you buy Americans, ambassadors, journalists, and of course the leftists whom you get for nothing. I have not forgotten your trying to pawn off Myra Waxelburg and Dudley Rawlingate III as some sort of Vanguard Revolutionary Suicide squad."
Moombasa looked at his aide. Such insults. No one called backward nations backward anymore. They emerging or developing or Third World. You didn't go to no ugly woman in the street and say you ugly. So you didn't call no Third World nations what they were either. And here was this man who took his money calling the People's Democratic Republic of Hamidia what it was.
Moombasa felt blood come up hot from his toes. He didn't want to shoot the Brit that moment because then he couldn't have the joy of killing him again. He thought of fire. Slow fire under the feet. Burn off his tbenails. Put out his eyes. Peel away his chest. And the generalissimo felt himself chuckling. His aides moved away in fear. Everyone left but Neville Lord Wissex.
"So, being a backward nation, I would advise against your spending another ten million on a technological phase assault that may produce absolutely nothing. That may not even gain for you that mountain of gold which belongs to you and is worth perhaps tens of trillions of dollars."
"How many zeroes that?" asked Moombasa.
"At least twelve in your counting," said Wissex.
"Spend, you British dog," Moombasa said.
"It's too much for you to handle."
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"I say spend," Moombasa said.
"Well. If you say so."
"I demand so," said Moombasa. "Demand. I will give it to you in cash. And there is more where that came from."
Moombasa was, of course, talking about his personal wealth. By now it exceeded the national treasury five-fold. But his honor had been insulted. He hardly listened to the Brit explain that the three were now in St. Maarten but would soon be in Bombay where a trap would be laid. The words about these assassins using the human body better than anyone ever had before meant nothing to him. Nothing.
"And so in ancient Bombay these ancient assassins will fall beneath the most modern of technology," Wissex said.
"And there's more where that came from," said Moombasa.
But later, when Wissex left, Moombasa reflected and decided that he would do a little work on his own. Just to protect his investment, which had now grown to $20 million.
"Bombay," said Terri Pomfret, returning from the beach on the western, the French side, of the island of St. Maarten. She noticed that Remo hadn't tanned even though he was lying out in the sun.