The Golden Chair

by A J Fontenot

  This is where McGillis was when Erin called. It buzzed from under the Wexford story’s stack. He fished it out, and, without looking at it, answered, “Huh.”

  “Conall, it’s Erin.”

  “Erin, article’s already locked. You know. It’s already scheduled to be in print tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, no — it’s not that.”

  “You got something new?”

  “Maybe… I don’t know yet. Have you ever heard of a Jonah Lennox? East Africa.”

  “Jonah…Lennox…” McGillis put down the paper he’d been working on and rubbed his forehead. “Nothing right away. What’s the connection?”

  “He runs a research facility in Ghana.”

  As she was talking, he put the phone between his shoulder and cheek and started typing, looking him up online.

  “They do a lot with humanitarian aid and health data,” she said. “They haven’t been in West Africa too long, though.”

  “I don’t see anything online. No ‘Jonah Lennox’s’ that matches that description.”

  “Conall, I was talking with Paul Dannon — you know Paul?”

  “Paul… oh yes, your Paul. Right.”

  “Right, he’s been in Ghana recently. And,” she said, “this is strictly off the record at this point—”

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Well, there’s a potential outbreak. A newly uncovered bacterium. It’s killed a few people. And you know how R4 is. That’s the exact stuff we’re looking for. But Carl is trying to bury it.

  “Bury it?”

  “It’s not just that, the data I’m getting from Lennox’s lab in Ghana is inconsistent.”

  “And so…”

  “And so when I asked Paul about it, he got all serious and told me to keep my distance.”

  “Did he actually give you anything other than that?”

  “Well, no. But I think there’s something going on here.

  “Erin.”

  “No, hear me out. Things weren’t adding up today when I talked to Carl about it. But when I mentioned it to Paul, he got weird about it and told me he didn’t want me to end up like Gillian.”

  McGillis stopped. That was it. This was why she was calling.

  “How many times…,” he started.

  “It’s not that,” she said.

  “Erin,” he cut her off again. “You’re a good reporter.” And he meant it. Erin Reed was a good reporter. Some people just had it in them. Gillian did. And Erin did, too. Except for this. She was stuck on the conspiracy. “You’re looking for something that’s not here.”

  “Conall, you’re the only one who has a bigger file than I do on Somalia ’93.”

  “And that’s what I’m telling you,” he said.

  “It fits,” she said. “Mom was looking into NGOs being used as fronts for corruption, right?” He could almost see her holding up fingers to count off her points as she made her case. “The pattern in each of the cases was controlling some outbreak.”

  “That was over 25 years ago.”

  Clearly not listening, she barreled forward. “She was briefing you daily from Mogadishu. If we go back through those dailies, I’m sure we’ll…”

  The dailies… he thought. No. He’d been through those files too many times. Whatever happened to Gillian, it wasn’t in that file. But it wasn’t just Erin. Gillian was his friend, too. And what happened over there, how she died, and how quickly everyone seemed to forget — which was understandable, as the entire Somali infrastructure was crashing down in 1993. But something was… No. It was over, there’s nothing else there.

  “No,” he said. “The answer’s no. You know I cared about your mother. I worked with her for almost twelve years. If you’ve got a new story, let me know. But don’t make it personal, okay. Erin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t make it personal,” he repeated.

  “I’ll keep you posted,” she said, “Gotta go now.”

  She ended the call.

  McGillis put the phone down. He propped his elbows on his desk and started chewing on one of his fingernails. A habit he only did when he was thinking about something he didn’t want to. Despite himself, he was thinking about what Erin had said. There are a lot of theories in the world. But journalists deal in facts. It was a speech he’d given her before. And now, in his head, he was now giving it to himself.

  He looked down at his watch. Just after ten. It was going to be a long night. He could feel it.

  10

  Associated Press

  ACCRA, GHANA (AP) — Twelve men are dead at Lake Volta at an underwater logging company.

  A new strand of Staphylococcus (a bacterium commonly called Staph infection) was uncovered in the Lake Volta region of Ghana last week.

  Some local health professionals are now concerned that many in the region who do not have access to antibiotics may be at risk.

  Jonah Lennox, director of a research center in Ghana studying the new strand, believes there to be no cause for alarm.

  “There is absolutely no chance,” said Lennox, “that this is anything other than an isolated case.”

  Lake Volta is the home to the thousands of underwater trees, preserved since the Akosombo dam was built in 1965, which flooded the entire region and created the largest, by surface area, manmade lake in the world.

  The new strand of bacteria was recently uncovered by Discovery Logging Ltd, an underwater logging company harvesting the fifty-year-old trees. The hardwood is still in good condition and highly sought in furniture manufacturing. The Ghanaian government takes a 20% cut of all harvested prior to exporting.

  The Lake Volta region, in the south of Ghana, is largely a rural area, surrounded by farmers and small village-cities.

  The Ghanaian Ministry of Health was unavailable for comment.

  11

  The Van

  Paul left the restroom and made his way back through the bar, putting on his jacket as he walked.

  He opened the door, feeling the bar-room stuffiness give way to the cold night air. He saw Erin, standing against a light post, facing away from him as she finished a call.

  As he walked up to her, she turned to him, putting both hands in her jacket and shuttering as a whip of wind passed through them.

  “I’m this way,” she said, pointing with her elbow.

  “I’ll walk with you,” he said.

  The two of them walked in silence. There was a myriad of thoughts in Paul’s mind as they walked. One of them was his gauge of the board. He was pretty sure none of them were in on what was about to happen. What was about to happen… He turned those words over in his head. Paul had been around long enough to recognize the scent of when something wasn’t right. And he smelled it now. But it was still too early to know anything.

  Officially, the ITG board had asked him to come, paying for his trip. But unofficially, his own assignment as it were, was to get ahead of whatever was going on. Paul was leaving in the morning, and he wasn’t any closer to figuring out what Lennox was doing.

  Lennox…, he thought.

  And Ibsen… Why was Ibsen talking to Lennox, he wondered. Paul and Ibsen had their own rough history. And perhaps that’s to be expected. They were cut from the same cloth. And, in a weird way, they both do the same kind of work — only from drastically different angles. Ibsen has always lived deep in the pockets of the well-connected, the well-funded. While Paul, he preferred the—

  A big light jerked in front of him, ripping him out of his thoughts. His own shadow, and Erin’s too, flashed onto the building next to them.

  In the same moment, he heard the uneven whirling sound of an engine whose car has just taken a heavy bump. Like when a vehicle mounts a curb at speed.

  He turned, over his shoulder the wild flash of two, square halogen headlines, rocked up and down dangerously as the panel van mounted the curb. It sliced down a no-parking sign as it did.

  The van engine pushed harder, and without fully turning around, Paul push
ed Erin, bodily.

  Her body flung against a parked car, and she rolled onto its hood, falling over.

  Paul slammed himself flat against the wall of the building, hitting it hard. He made himself as flat as he could, not closing his eyes as he did.

  The van passed inches from him, and the air around it pulled him like a suction.

  As the van rushed pass, Paul turned, marking it.

  White.

  Chevy.

  Small tail lights…late nineties.

  No windows.

  No license plate.

  The van’s red lights bounced back onto the street and, tires squealing, as it clipped a parked car. The scrape of the bumper seemed to echo around them. It rounded the nearest corner. And, as quickly as it had come, it was gone.

  He stood looking after it. Stuck on that last bit… No license plate.

  He jerked his mind back to the present. Erin. She’d already gotten up and was standing beside him, looking too at where the red taillights disappeared a second ago.

  Both of them where heaving lungfuls of cold night air.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She looked at him, not speaking, and then back behind them as if expecting another. And then she blurted out, “What the hell was that?”

  He looked to her and then back to the spot where the van had disappeared.

  “That,” he said, steadying his breath, “was a warning.”

  She looked again in the direction the van had gone.

  “Paul—” she started.

  “Erin,” he said, shaking his head, “I’m serious. Keep your distance on this one.”

  They both stood there for a moment. She pulled her jacket closer around her. He unzipped his halfway.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  They walked the rest of the way to the Metro in silence.

  Erin swiped her card. Paul started to buy a ticket, then hesitated.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I don’t think they let vans on the Metro.”

  He looked at her.

  “It was a joke,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “right.”

  She looked at him for a moment longer. There was a controlled calm about her. It was shock. People in shock were optimistic, dismissive. She was… It really was like looking at Gillian again after all these years, he thought.

  “I’m, er, heading back in the morning,” he said. “Sure you’re going to be okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then, I’ll see you in…”

  “A year or two?” she offered with a little smile.

  Paul smiled, too. But it wasn’t a real smile.

  “Yeah,” he said, “a year or two.”

  12

  Ben

  Ben Okello swore.

  “So…” Gavin said, letting the question linger.

  Ben looked at him and then back at the aging Land Rover. It was mid-afternoon, and the Ghanaian sun was still hot. Steam hissed out from between the metal in the front grill. The Land Rover sat pressed into a mess of trees and mud.

  Ben put his hand behind his pink-dyed hair, resting it against his neck, thinking.

  Paul has always been a reasonable man. He understands things happen. Especially out here. Then again, ‘reasonable’ is a relative term. Everyone has their limits. And so far, this week is shaping up to be one that might be testing those limits. And then… there was that thing in Belize a few years back. That was unfortunate. And really, to Ben’s own defense, none of those vehicles were actually Ben’s fault. It was more of a wrong-place wrong-time sort of thing. Ben pushed all of that out of his mind.

  “Do you know how to use a winch?” he asked Gavin.

  “A winch? Is that, like, a British thing?”

  Sometimes Ben couldn’t tell if Gavin was making a joke or asking a real question.

  “It’s the silver cable on the front of the car.”

  “Oh, er, no.”

  Ben looked at him.

  “I analyze data for a living,” he said defensively. “And,” he added, “I didn’t technically need to be here at all.”

  “I know, I know,” Ben said, looking around. “See the tree over there, the big one?” Ben pointed to a mango tree about twenty feet away.

  “Yeah.”

  Ben reached down and pulled the cord out of its tight coil.

  “Take this,” he said, handing the hook to Gavin. “Pull the cable with you, take it over there and wrap it around that tree. When you get it around, use the hook to clip it together.”

  “What are you going to do?” Gavin asked.

  “I’m…,” he trailed off, thinking.

  The truth was, Ben was just doing what he did best. Make it up as you go along. To some, that was irresponsible. But not to Ben. For Ben, it was a skill. A survival mechanism.

  Ben grew up black in Britain. That wasn’t the same as growing up black in America… but there still weren’t a lot of black people in Britain. Especially not in Wales, which is where Ben’s parents moved in his formative years. They were doctors, and they opened a practice in an underserved area.

  And, the son of two doctors, Ben was on the same track. Good grades, good school, and then, getting into the right med school. And if he hadn’t pushed eject, that’s exactly where he’d be right now.

  Instead, for the better part of the last decade, Ben made his living traveling to difficult places, taking pictures, and then selling those pictures to concerned parties, like NGOs, or the occasional corporate client. The skill here was in the timing. These kinds of pictures have a shelf life. Getting there first, making all the right local contacts, that was everything.

  And that’s how he met Paul.

  They’d started working together on a contract basis at first. But soon Paul brought him on, full-time. And over the last few years, Ben’s work with Paul had expanded to more than photography. Mostly, he took over Paul’s work when Paul had to travel.

  Gavin slipped as he worked his way around the tree. He said something indistinct as he struggled to get his footing again. After he’d wrapped the cord around the tree, he clipped it. “Okay,” he called out to Ben, “it’s clipped.”

  Ben gave a quick tug on it from his end, and then sat behind the wheel of the Land Rover and pushed a button on the dash.

  The winch began to hum, and the cable between the truck and tree tightened. Ben watched the cable.

  The truck jerked and slowly started to move, sideways at first, and then it straightened up. Steadily it moved out of the muddy-tree mess they’d landed in a few minutes ago.

  Once the Land Rover was sufficiently out of the mud, Ben hit the button on the dash again, and the truck stopped moving. He leaned out of the window and yelled, “unhook it.”

  Gavin unhooked the cord and walked back over. They both stared at the dirty, truck, letting the next, obvious question float silently between them.

  “Do you…think it still works?” Gavin said.

  Ben pulled the hood release and lifted the hood. As he stood looking over the dirt-colored engine, his fingers traced down until he pulled back and looked down at the front of the truck. A small but solid branch stuck out of the grill, a green leaf still attached to it.

  “Reservoir,” Ben said.

  “Reservoir…” Gavin repeated, standing back, and looking down into the engine.

  “It’s the water tank that the radiator uses,” Ben said.

  Ben bent down and looked at the stick and then leaned into the engine and shook the radiator.

  “Everything still seems solid. Except for that,” he said, pointing to the branch sticking out from the grill. Ben reached down and pulled it out.

  “So that’s it?” Gavin said.

  “Maybe,” Ben said.

  “We still need to fix the reservoir. And fill it back up with water. At least until we can get back to camp and fix it properly.”

  Ben turned to Gavin.

  “Bring the spare water around, would you.”


  “The spare drinking water?”

  “We’ll need it for this more.”

  Gavin walked to the back of the Land Rover and pulled off a brown rectangular tank with a large X imprinted on it. He lugged it around to the front.

  Ben leaned into the cab through the open passenger side window. Reaching down, he found a roll of duct tape.

  Gavin made it to the front, lugging the heavy water tank.

  “Wait, you’re going to tape it?”

  “You have a better idea?”

  “I…,” he started and then stopped. “Will that really work?”

  “We only need it to work for just a little bit more,” he said as he ripped a piece off with his teeth.

  Ben leaned in and put the tape across the cracked plastic reservoir container. He ripped a few more pieces. But the time he was done, it looked like a duct-tape Christmas present.

  “Give me the water,” he said.

  Gavin heaved it up to him.

  Ben slowly poured it in.

  “Hold this,” he said, pushing the water container back to Gavin, as he dropped to the ground, looking under the engine.

  “Okay,” Ben said, standing back up, “I think this might work.”

  “Wait, might?”

  “Definitely, it’ll work.”

  Gavin looked like he wanted to say something else, but Ben was already behind the driver’s seat starting the engine.

  “Come on, you wanker,” he said under his breath.

  The engine revved to life.

  Ben let his hand hover just over the steering wheel, watching the temperature gauge.

  “All right, love,” he said. “I knew you’d do it.”

  He leaned his head out his window, “drop it, we’re good.”

  After a moment, Gavin dropped the hood and then walked around and got in the passenger side. “And just so that we’re clear,” Gavin said, pulling his door shut, “when Paul finds out about this,” he motioned to the front, “I wasn’t here.”