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President talk to your ambassador recently?”
    â€œHe saw him last week.”
    De Vaux got up and closed the shade. “He wants to know everything these days. That’s why N’Sika and I were ready to get out of GHQ. Who can keep up with all the rumors? You have to be half mad and a charlatan to keep up with them—Rasputin himself. Palestinians, you say?” He laughed bitterly and sat down again. “We were dealing with all of them—Palestinians, Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Belgian royalists, Maoists, anarchists, and God knows what else. Everywhere he looked, he saw a conspiracy. Everyone trying to get his knife in. Don’t let your ambassador catch the same disease, all right?
    â€œLet’s put it all out on the table now, just the two of us. It was a Chinaman’s nightmare up there at GHQ. Every morning. N’Sika got an ulcer. At six o’clock in the morning we’d meet to put together the daily foreign intelligence brief, N’Sika and I. Six o’clock in the bloody morning! At eight, the old man would be waiting for us at the présidence . It was our neck in the noose. We never knew when he’d spring the trap. ‘What did the Russian Ambassador do last night?’ he’d want to know. ‘Who did the East German meet with at the finance ministry?’ That wasn’t our brief. Internal security had the Soviet and East German watch, but he was checking on them. Sometimes we’d wing it, but that was risky. Half the time he was testing us. Then there were the rumors those little bastards in the présidence put into his head, and we’d have to chase those down too.
    â€œWe finally worked out a system. We watched his daily appointment schedule. If he’d met with the Belgians, we’d dig up all we could about what the French were doing and have it for him the next morning. If the Israeli Ambassador had been in, we’d cram the morning brief with what the Arabs were up to. For a time after the sixty-seven Israeli war all he cared about were UN and OAU questions. He could never make up his mind about the Sinai, whether it was in Africa or the Middle East. ‘How many Bantus are there in the Sinai?’ he asked N’Sika one day, and we knew the Israelis had gotten their teeth into him again. The sixty-seven war was a royal mess. Israelis in French Mirages and American Phantoms, Jordanians in American Pattons and British Centurians, Egyptians in MIG’s, Jordanians in British Hawkers—who could make sense of it? Not him. Senility was getting to him, and that made it worse. He began to forget things, but that just made him slyer. Today is all he knows, and he’s just hanging on.”
    He lifted his glass and drank, Reddish watching him silently from across the table.
    â€œIt was a regular Comédie Française,” de Vaux resumed. “‘Worry about the Portuguese in Angola,’ N’Sika muttered one day while the old man was lecturing us about the Chinese in Burundi, and the old man must have heard him. ‘Your stomach growls,’ he told N’Sika the following day. ‘Get out.’ It was the ulcer. He saw a MIG-17 over Brazzaville one afternoon as he was returning from the OAU meeting in Addis Ababa, and that worried him. It was after that that he began looking for someone to give him ground-to-air missiles. He asked the Israelis. He knew the Americans wouldn’t supply them. N’Sika had told him that. After the coup attempt in Brazza last year, he asked for M-16 rifles for the para brigade and the palace guard, remember? You chaps came through in the end, and for a month or so he was his old self again.”
    The State Department had denied the M-16 request for policy reasons, a breach of the embargo on sophisticated weaponry for Africa. At Haversham’s insistence, Reddish had contacted a former Agency colleague who worked for Euroarm, a Luxembourg-based arms broker, and the