The Kinshasa Conga

Let’s talk about 1993. The Soviet Union had just spectacularly shat the bed, and all its little spy-bastards were scurrying around trying to sell the family silver before Boris Yeltsin drank it all. Enter GRU Major Grigori “The Groin” Volkov—a man whose ambitions were matched only by his spectacular incompetence and a forehead you could use to project movies onto. Passed over for promotion for the seventeenth time (rumor has it he once classified a grocery list as “Cosmic Top Secret”), Grigori decided to go into business for himself. He broke into a forgotten sub-basement laboratory at the Biopreparat facility, snagged what he *thought* was a doomsday plague called “Red Death-9,” and buggered off to the world’s premier flea market for freelance evil: Kinshasa.

The ’93 Kinshasa arms bazaar wasn’t your slick, James Bond, Monte Carlo affair. It was held in the back of a sweltering, half-abandoned brewery that smelled overpoweringly of stale beer, monkey sweat, and desperation. The guest list was a who’s-who of geopolitical assholery: a couple of perpetually furious Libyan colonels, a North Korean general who hadn’t blinked since 1978, some shady IRA quartermasters, and a CIA liaison in a Hawaiian shirt who was fooling absolutely no one. Into this den of vipers waltzes Grigori, sweating through his polyester suit, carrying a glorified thermos containing—he believed—enough apocalyptic goo to make the Black Death look like a mild case of the sniffles.

“Behold, gentlemen!” Grigori announced, his voice cracking. “The ultimate weapon of asymmetrical warfare! Guaranteed to collapse any decadent Western society in… uh… hours!” He fumbled with the clasps on his briefcase, his sausage fingers slick with flop sweat. One of the Libyan colonels, bored, started cleaning his gold-plated pistol. The distraction was fatal. Grigori dropped the briefcase. The thermal carafe inside shattered. A faint, slightly floral-scented aerosol hissed into the humid air. Everyone froze, expecting their skin to melt off. Instead, something far, *far* stranger happened. The perpetually furious Libyan colonel suddenly looked at his gold-plated pistol with what could only be described as unadulterated lust. The North Korean general began passionately slow-dancing with a crate of RPGs. The CIA man was seen trying to insert American dollars into the IRA guy’s cargo pockets as if he were a go-go dancer.

The agent wasn’t Red Death-9. Grigori, the absolute tit, had stolen the *wrong fucking vial*. He’d grabbed a canister of “Agent Bacchus,” a failed 1970s KGB experiment designed to “sow hedonistic chaos” at a NATO summit. It was a hyper-potent aphrodisiac, a weaponized orgy bomb. The ensuing fiasco, delicately referred to in Langley debriefs as the “Kinshasa Conga,” was less of an arms deal and more of a pansexual free-for-all that apparently lasted for six hours. According to the apocryphal diary of a Mobutu-loyalist-turned-erotic-novelist, “the only transaction successfully completed that day involved three Serbian paramilitaries, a Mossad observer, and an unnerving quantity of mayonnaise.” Grigori reportedly escaped in the confusion by crawling out under a pile of writhing arms dealers and made his way to Antwerp, a broken, baffled man.