The Golden Chair

by A J Fontenot

  “Just opening the door,” she said, making eye contact now.

  As the door latch released, the man yanked it open, using his gun to motion her out. She stepped out. The other soldier has already moved Ben away from the Land Rover, searching him for weapons. Erin’s soldier looked at her, a few times, but did not touch her.

  He flicked his hand, “go there,” he said, pointing to where Ben was standing.

  She walked over to Ben. A third soldier walked out from the single-story nondescript building next to them. He escorted them inside.

  They were put into a windowless room. It had a single, bare fluorescent tube, tied loosely to the ceiling with a metal wire. It filled the room with harsh light. In the center was a table and three chairs. Neither of them sat. The soldier left, shutting the door behind him.

  Ben walked to the door and lightly turned the handle.

  “Locked…,” he said.

  Erin sat at the table, leaning her head in her hand. Ben stood next to the door with his back again the wall.

  “This kind of stuff happen to you often?” she said, not looking up at him.

  “Only on Thursdays,” he said.

  She looked at him. Making a joke right now… she thought. She felt her head beginning to throb.

  “What do they want?” she asked.

  “No telling,” he said. “They’ll probably search the truck, pop the bonnet, do it properly, to see if there’s anything good in there. See if they can find any reason to keep up, or fine us, or whatever.”

  She let out a sigh.

  “Do you think this has anything to do with Lennox?”

  Ben seemed to consider it for a moment. “How could it?” he said.

  That was what she couldn’t figure either. It was thin. Conspiracy-theory stuff. And he’s a crook, yes. But he’s not God, how would he… Then again… what would a roadblock like this be doing here in the middle of nowhere? It’s like they were waiting for them.

  Ben seemed to read her mind.

  “Look,” he said, “these kinds of things happen out here. We don’t actually have anything they can hold us on. They’ll soon realize that. And if they hold us too long, they’ll be getting a call from our Embassies, which is the very last thing they want. It’s just a game. And we have to play it out.”

  It felt like they’d been in this room for hours when Erin looked down at her watch. Twenty minutes. No windows. No visits. Erin stood up and sat back down. Ben was sitting on the floor now, his knees pulled up and his arms resting on them.

  The time crept by slowly like this, until, after a couple of hours more, the same soldier opened the door and walked in.

  At the sound, Erin pulled her head up and looked at him. Ben, still sitting in the same spot, didn’t turn.

  “You’re free to go,” the soldier said, “your paperwork checks out.”

  “Right…,” Ben said in a lazy voice. He stood, and they both followed the man out.

  Outside it was dark now. Yellow light from the inside of the building spilled out. And an outdoor light, high on a pole, lit a concrete area off to the side. The Land Rover was there, the keys still in it.

  Ben got in, flipped on the dome light and took a brief survey of the inside. As Erin climbed in, she saw where the men had looked through the truck, looked through her bag, too. Everything seemed to be there still.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Ben said, “before they change their mind. …it wouldn’t be the first time,” he said, backing the Land Rover out and making the tires chirp as he turned hard, bumping back down onto the dirt road.

  As they drove, the road was completely dark now. Other than the bumps, the only way they knew they were making progress was from the dirt road zooming under the headlights in front of them.

  “Do you know how to get there in the dark?” Erin said.

  “Nope…,” he said.

  “So then…what…”

  “We’ll have to camp, but,” she saw him glance at her in the dark, “probably not a good idea to do it too close to our friends back there.”

  The Land Rover bounced for some minutes more.

  “There,” he said, pointing. “That’ll work.” He pulled the truck off the road, up a small hill, and down the other side, into a clearing and away from the road.

  Best she could tell, they were hidden from the road now, though she still couldn’t see much of anything around them.

  “We’ve got some sleeping rolls in the back,” he said.

  51

  Next to the Stars

  “You never really notice how many stars there are…,” Ben said, “until you find yourself in the middle of nowhere sleeping on top of a Land Rover.”

  Erin, below him, didn’t respond. For a moment, he thought she’d already fallen asleep. The seats in the back of the Land Rover had long since been removed. And that’s where Erin lay, on a sleeping roll, with the tailgate down, next to a small stash of food rations. Ben lay his roll on the roof. It had a small rail around the edge but was otherwise flat. Not, strangely, the first time he’d slept there.

  “Do your parents like what you’re doing?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This work…with Paul…”

  Ben was silent a moment before answering.

  “I’m not really sure,” he said.

  Both of Ben’s parents are doctors. And they do a lot of lower-income pro bono work. But they’re the kind of people who are building something. Either of them could easily switch to a hospital or a more profitable practice if they wanted. On the other hand, Ben had, at best, a freelancer’s resume. On paper it looked like he’d bounced around from job to job. It was the nature of the kind of work he did. But, honestly, he wasn’t really sure if parents did approve.

  “I haven’t seen them in almost five years,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “I dunno, just…life, I guess.”

  “You should go see them.”

  Ben laid still, his hands behind his head.

  “What about your parents,” he said, “are they proud of you?”

  “I don’t know…,” she said, almost to herself. “I never met my dad. I was a baby when he left. I’m honestly not sure if he’s still alive. And my mom, she died, when I was younger. But I remember her, though. She was always calm. And in control. I liked that.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t…”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s been a long time. I don’t mind talking about it.”

  “So that’s the connection with Paul, then?”

  “Yeah. He was my mom’s cousin. I met him a few times when I was younger. But he was always off somewhere else. And, so was my mom, for that matter. She was a journalist.”

  “How did she die?”

  Erin was quiet for a moment.

  “Someone killed her.”

  Ben turned on his side, not looking at the stars anymore.

  “She was on assignment, in Somalia,” Erin said, “in the early nineties, just before Mogadishu fell. She was doing a story on nonprofit corruption. The ‘official report’ says she was caught in crossfire.”

  “Official report? But…you believe there’s something else there?”

  “My mother was a veteran conflict journalist. She was smart. She’d been in a lot of places like that before. I didn’t know all that at the time. I was only nine. But later, I started looking into it. And eventually, I became a journalist too. My mom’s partner at the time, he thought the same thing.”

  “Which was?”

  “That there was something else there. That she found something…something somebody wanted to stay hidden.”

  “Do you have any idea who it was?”

  “For a long time, I didn’t. I only had the case files, her reports. But I knew that she wasn’t ‘caught in the crossfire.’ I knew there had to be something else. And a few years ago, I caught a break. Or I almost did. I found someone who was there at the time, who was working my mother in M
ogadishu. And he was going to talk. But he was pretty scared. So we arranged to meet outside of the U.S., down in Trinidad.”

  “What happened?”

  She was silent again. Ben began to think she might not have heard him.

  “He…,” she said, “never showed.”

  “Think he was lying, or…?”

  “I think someone got to him,” she said. “Anyway, after that, I stepped away from it all for a while. That’s when I joined Carl.”

  “Carl?”

  “He’s my boss, at R4. I think I was just…afraid, really. I didn’t want to go that way.”

  “Like your mum?”

  “Yeah. And then this stuff with the loggers and the pending outbreak started happening. At first, it just seemed like bad reporting. But something was missing, I could feel it. So I started looking into it.”

  “Over the years,” she said, “I kept in touch with my journalism contacts. Mainly, my editor over at The Post. He was also my mom’s partner years ago. And I still write some for them. Anyway, I reached out to him, I told him what I thought was going on here.”

  And then…then he found something. He found Jonah Lennox’s name in my mom’s notes.”

  “She knew him?” Ben said.

  “Apparently. He might have been a source or something. There weren’t any details about him in her notes. Just his name. But something about it seemed more than coincidental to me.”

  “So you came here, because of him.”

  “In a manner of speaking. I really didn’t have anything more than a hunch…until I saw the data from Gavin. There were other little things along the way. And then…Mofi.”

  “Do you really think Lennox had something to do with your mum’s death?”

  She was quiet for a long moment.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I don’t know what I know anymore… All I know is that he was there. That, and whatever my mother was working on, got her killed. I…don’t know how it all fits together yet.”

  He heard her shift below him.

  “Well,” he said, “if there’s anything dodgy at the logging site, anything we can link to him, then we’ll find it.”

  52

  The Site

  The night passed quietly. The morning sun was clipping the rim of the windows, passing through and bouncing around inside the back of the Land Rover. Erin sat up, yawned, and slid to the end, sitting on the tailgate, letting her legs hang down.

  She saw Ben, already awake and packing his stuff from last night. Moving at full speed already.

  She tried to remember what time she’d fallen asleep. Gave a quick attempt at adding up the hours and just as quickly gave it up.

  “Here,” he tossed her a cellophane-wrapped bar, “breakfast.”

  She caught it, or rather, her lap did. Her reflexes would be awake later.

  Without getting up, she leaned to the other side of the truck, reached her bag and pulled it closer, dropping the bar inside. When she did, she noticed a small red blinking light on her sat phone. She pulled it out and held it to her ear.

  “Ben,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said from somewhere out of sight.

  “Have you heard from Kwami recently?”

  “Umm, not since he left yesterday, why?”

  “He called and left me a message,” she said, as she listened to it.

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “He says Paul’s in jail,” she said, putting the phone down.

  “Paul’s what?” he said, coming around to look at her.

  “He left me a message. Yesterday. Must have been when we were held up at the checkpoint. I just tried calling him back…no answer.”

  “Let me listen to it,” he said.

  She handed him the phone. He stared down at the ground as he listened. He handed the phone back to her without saying anything.

  “I was thinking about something,” Erin said. “When I first got here, Paul told me he thought there might be a mole in the camp.”

  “A mole? Like a spy?”

  “Yeah. Maybe. Before, in D.C., the night before we left, someone almost ran us over. And it didn’t seem like an accident. So I’m thinking he was just telling me to play my cards close.”

  “Did he say who he thought it was?”

  “No. I don’t think he knew.”

  Ben seemed to be thinking about this. He began walking, nodding his head and talking to himself.

  “No,” he said, stopping. He looked up at her. “No, I’d stake my life on it. We can’t have a mole.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” he said firmly. “Yes, I’m sure.” He started walking again. “If he said that, he had to be referring to the Lennox-Keeler situation. That would make sense… He must have been referring to the data tampering,” he talked through it.

  “Is it weird,” she said, “that he wouldn’t have mentioned anything like that to you? You, being his right hand-guy and all.”

  “No,” he let out a little laugh, “not really. Paul doesn’t work like that. We work together, yes, and, I think, we make a good team. But we’re not together like that. He’s still very…separate. Nobody ever really knows what’s going on in Paul’s head.”

  “So what do we do?” Erin said.

  “What, about Paul?”

  She nodded.

  “Nothing we can do,” he said. “If Paul was arrested, it wasn’t for something small, he’s too careful for that. Which means, even if we could do something, it would take time, days probably. Besides, Paul’s got…other measures in place…”

  “What do—”

  “No,” he said, “we keep going. Besides, Kwami’s there. Nothing we can do for Paul right now.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they were back on the road. The drive was easy. It was another hour before Ben started to slow and turned off the road. The road they turned onto was just as large, if not larger. Erin could see in the dirt, wide tracks from large trucks.

  They drove slower now, cautiously.

  But as they approached, they were surprised to find the site completely abandoned. There was a line of plastic yellow barricade tape covering the entrance. But it had been knocked down and driven over.

  They could see the two-story facility, with what looked like a cutting facility below and an office above. Off, on either side, were large stacks of logs and a few large pieces of logging machinery. And then, framing it all was the serene water of Lake Volta, with its low mountains along its edges.

  They pulled up to the facility.

  “I don’t think anyone’s here,” Ben said.

  They parked the truck off to the side, out of sight — just in case — and Ben grabbed his camera. Erin and Ben got out and began walking toward the facility.

  “So, this is the place…?” Erin started.

  “Where the loggers were killed. Yeah.” Ben said.

  53

  Traitor

  Keeler sat in a twenty-four-hour spot in Accra, a place that saw a mixture of tourists, ex-pats, and locals. Mostly, it was a place he could wait and not be disturbed. And it was public.

  That last part, he’d learned over the years, was important.

  First-meetings, like this, were precarious. No one really trusted anyone else yet. And so they often had a good chance of falling apart. Public places helped. They were safe.

  Or, at least, that’s what people thought.

  They weren’t really safer.

  If anything, they were more dangerous. Easier to blend. Easier to get lost. And easier to make diversions.

  But today Keeler wouldn’t need any of that. It’s been said that great empires rise and fall on the strength of their network. Keeler didn’t have an empire. But he worked for one. And his job was to—the list of euphemisms was long — ‘grease the wheels,’ ‘encourage under-performing partners,’ and, his personal favorite, ‘depopulate the threat.’

  At the end of the day, most people looked at him as the muscle. But that was w
rong. The muscle was simple. Force was only one of the tools in that belt. No, Keeler was a squeezer. Force only got you so far. But to really make things happen, you needed leverage. And sometimes, the best kind of leverage is the kind that kicks them in the balls and then pummels them while they’re still down writhing.

  In other words, sometimes it’s got to be personal.

  That’s what Keeler was doing here today.

  He motioned to the man behind the counter to bring another drink. As he did, a spunky, attractive girl sat down next to him. He let the first few seconds pass without acknowledging her. Then he swiveled on his barstool, leaned back and looked at her. She didn’t immediately return the look.

  Despite himself, there was something about her he liked.

  He, of course, knew who she was. But this side of Marisol was…new…and interesting.

  “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a traitor,” he said.

  She didn’t respond. Or look at him.

  “No, really,” he said, reaching to slide the bit of her short hair blocking her eyes.

  She grabbed his hand with a force that he enjoyed.

  “I guess,” she said, looking at him directly now, “we’re all full of surprises.”

  “Speaking of which,” he said, pulling his own hand free, “from now on, your job is to make sure there are no surprises coming this way.”

  She looked away.

  “Clear?” he said, going back to his drink.

  “Keep up your end, and we’ll be fine,” she said.

  Keeler took another deep drink and put his glass down hard. He slapped both hands down on the counter, got up, and, without another look at Marisol, walked out.

  54

  Control

  If it weren’t for the stacks of logs surrounding the place, the facility could pass for a remote lodge. Most of the first floor was open air, like a large carport, extending about fifteen feet high. It had a floor-mounted saw with a small conveyor belt and chipper attached. Everything around the machine was coated in the two-toned tan and red sawdust. The second floor was a series of windowed rooms. And, as is not uncommon in this part of Africa, was a low stone perimeter wall with a large opening in the front and back.