‘My father was a man called General Ritchie Sharratt, and I reckon you boys would have liked him because he was one of the finest soldiers who ever put on a uniform. He owned a big farm about a hundred miles north of a city that is now called Ibera, and grew mostly tobacco, which was where I learned about commodity prices. But he was a man who believed in his nation and didn’t mind fighting for it if he had to. That was why he became a soldier, and he was bloody good at it, rising to become a General in the Batotean Army.
‘Nearly thirty years ago, the country I grew up in was turned upside down. Like a lot of guys my age, I got out of there, I went to university in Britain, then found myself a job in the City. But Mum and Dad stayed behind, working their farmland and doing what they could for the nation. Dad had fought against the man who took over, the guerrilla leader Benjamin Kapembwa, but he was a soldier just like you and he wasn’t going to hold a grudge. He decided he’d do everything he could to make the new country as good as the old one.’
He paused, his eyes scanning the men in front of him. ‘And now I want to show you something.’
He walked briskly through the hallway towards the left wing of the house. Steve put his drink down and followed him. A pair of double doors led into a private cinema. There were eight rows of ten seats. The lights were dimmed, and Sharratt was standing right next to the screen as the men took their places. ‘This is where I grew up,’ he said.
A film flickered up on the screen. The first shots were black and white followed by colour sections shot on one of the Super 8 cameras that were popular in the 1970s. The house was made from red brick and white clapperboard, with flowers all around it. The gardens were lush and green, as were the fields. Some of the shots showed a couple of kids playing on a trampoline, followed by newsreel pictures of General Sharratt leading his troops from the Batotean Army into battle. Next, there were shots of Archie’s father grown old, a distinguished-looking man in his seventies, still strong and proud, inspecting the work on his farm from the back of his favourite horse.
‘And then this happened,’ said Archie, his voice turning solemn.
The screen went dark, then sprang back to life. There was no sound, just a series of still pictures. There was blood on the finely polished oak floorboards of the hallway. And then in the next picture you could clearly see the bodies of an old man and woman. Their clothes had been torn from them, and there were cuts across their bodies where it looked as if they’d been whipped. The hands had been hacked off the old man. From the expression of agony on his face, it looked as if he’d still been alive when they’d amputated the limbs: it might well have been the shock that killed him.
But through the blood, their faces were still clearly recognisable.
‘Mum and Dad,’ said Archie, the emotion clearly audible in his voice. ‘In 2000, the so-called war veterans came to the farm. That’s what they called themselves anyway, but they were really just Kapembwa’s thugs. All the white farmers were being driven off the land. My parents had always been excellent employers, providing homes and schools for all the families that worked the fields, and helping to pay for a doctor in the local town. That didn’t make any difference to the thugs that Kapembwa sent up from Ibera. My parents were brutally murdered.’
There was a rasp in his voice, and his fists were grinding together.
‘And now it’s time for some payback.’
‘You’re talking about a coup?’ asked Ollie.
Archie shook his head. ‘An assassination,’ he replied flatly. ‘Kapembwa must die.’
Seven
STEVE ALLOWED A MOMENT FOR the words to sink in.
An assassination.
That wasn’t what he’d expected.
‘There’s a group of ten of us boys - men who were born and grew up in Batota but went out into the world and did well for themselves. Most of them want to stay in the background, which is why it’s me standing before you guys today. But there is plenty of money in the kitty so you don’t need to worry about that.
‘Here’s the deal. You boys put together the unit you need to get the job done. I’ll arrange for five million dollars to be paid into a bank account in Cyprus controlled by an independent law firm. When Reuters carries the story that Kapembwa has died, the money is yours. There will be a hundred thousand for each man to be getting on with. If you aren’t successful, you can keep the cash. I don’t care how you do it. All I ask is that Kapembwa dies . . . and that it happens in the next month.’
The image of his dead parents was still flickering on the screen, but Archie wasn’t looking at that. He was looking straight at the men in front of him.