Chapter 41At three o’clock sharp, they were sitting in Monsieur Hjamal’s anteroom waiting for him to get off the phone, his secretary told them. He had taken the whole of the first floor in an old, but nicely renovated, house in the business district of Dakar. The layout was basic and apparently effective. There were two offices on each side of the hall leading from the stairwell. From there and down the corridor, another two rooms had their door wide open. Talya, James and Hassan were waiting in one of them. A man and a woman, busily working away, occupied the other.
Monsieur Hjamal’s secretary was a mature woman, judging by the deep jaw lines on either side of her thick lips. She had the allure of someone resigned to her fate. The glasses, slipping down to the tip of her nose, made her
