Maverick

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Claire threaded her arm through Dan’s. He had picked up on Aba’s hostility and was stiff and disapproving. He clearly didn’t like Aba’s attitude to Claire. Surreptitiously, Claire patted his hand.

  It’s okay.

  It wasn’t, really. This past year had taken so much away from Claire, including, apparently, Aba’s friendship. Tight bands of emotion wrapped around her chest.

  “What are you doing here in Laka?” Aba checked her wrist watch, which she wore with the dial on the inside of her wrist. The message was clear. What are you doing wasting my time?

  “Aba—" Claire began, then looked around at the busy lobby. It was also the A & E entrance, and it was filled with men and women patiently waiting to be seen by a doctor.

  Everyone was talking at once. A number of men were sitting on the floor playing what looked like a variation on jacks, only with bones. It was more like a village fair than a waiting room. Several babies were wailing and every couple of minutes the loudspeakers came on to make service announcements. The noise level was as loud as a rock concert.

  “Can we go somewhere to talk?”

  Aba’s beautiful mouth tightened. She was clearly struggling with ‘no’.

  “Please?” Claire asked quietly.

  The doctor turned on her heel and, Claire followed her, Dan right behind her. Dan was in warrior mode. Unsmiling, grim, alert.

  The hospital was a shocker. Claire had, thank God, never had occasion to enter the old Charitè hospital, but the Embassy had called it The Roach Motel—you checked in but you never checked out. It had been a dank, unwelcoming building along the banks of the Makongo River and Claire had often thought, driving by it, that Dante’s warning Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here should have been chiselled on the stone portico.

  The old building had been torn down and in its place was this one—light, airy, scrupulously clean, gleaming even.

  The staff, doctors and nurses, bustled by just like in any urban hospital, looking busy and competent.

  Aba led them down several corridors and finally opened a lacquered white door with a key. Inside was a modern office, neat and tidy. One wall was filled with medical textbooks, another with Aba’s various diplomas and certificates.

  And on another wall…

  Claire walked over, mesmerized. It was a wall of framed photographs, mostly of Aba—in lycée, in medical school, graduating, with a white coat and stethoscope in a small clinic in the jungle, arms over the shoulders of her colleagues.

  And then Aba with her parents, with her husband and… oh God. Claire’s heart gave a huge thump in her chest. She touched the largest photograph of Marie. It must have been taken several years ago—her hair had been long then. Claire traced the outlines of Marie’s face, and it was as if she had somehow sprung back to life and was right here in the room with them.

  Marie was smiling in the photograph, and that was as it should be because Marie was always smiling. It was her default expression. Sometimes the smile was ironic, because she’d been an intelligent woman and there was much in life that didn’t bear thinking of. She’d been so funny, so incredibly cutting and smart in her take on things, at times devastatingly witty. Claire remembered her imitations of Crock-of-shit and Danielle Crocker that had had her in stitches. And God, when she walked like Bowen, with that stiff, pompous gait of his. Claire had laughed until she was gasping.

  Marie. The best friend she’d ever had. Devastatingly funny. Fiercely loyal. Always there.

  “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her,” Claire whispered. “I miss her… so… much.”

  A long, slender black hand rested on her shoulder and Claire turned into Aba’s arms, clutching her desperately. They were both crying, and that felt so right because Marie not being in the world left this aching black hole that nothing could ever fill.

  They cried their loss and their sorrow and their outrage, until no tears were left and Claire’s arms dropped from Aba’s waist.

  A strong male fist clutching a bloom of tissues appeared, and they both accepted them gratefully.

  Claire glanced at Dan, wavering through the prism of her tears as if he were a mirage in a hot desert. For a moment, she’d completely forgotten about him. What did he think of this, two women weeping their hearts out?

  But he didn’t look embarrassed or disdainful or exasperated. He simply stood, handing out tissues to the two women, face sober and sad.

  He was a soldier. He understood loss.

  Something in Aba had broken, certainly her anger at Claire. Before, anger had swirled in the room, so intense Claire thought she could see it. Now there was an ease, an acknowledgement of their shared loss.

  “Sit down.” Aba pulled two chairs out in front of her desk and sat behind it in a swivel chair. She looked at them both once they’d been seated. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “No, thank you.” Claire leaned forward, wanting to dive in right away and talk about Marie’s actions that day. But there had been a tentative peace made with Aba and she didn’t want to break it. So she looked around and sketched a smile. “La Charitè has certainly changed in this past year. It seems completely new.”

  Something flickered in Aba’s face, gone before Claire could decipher it. “Yes, it is completely new. The old building was razed to the ground a month after the bombing, and this new building was erected in record time. We have the New Hope Foundation to thank for it. Another hospital is being built two hundred miles upriver, where it will provide health care to over a million people who have no health care at all at the moment.”

  Claire nodded. “So… maybe something good came of that day?”

  Again, that look. A flash, then gone. Anger. No, rage.

  “Are you writing an article?” Aba asked.

  “Good God, no!”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  Good question. Claire was finding it a hard one to answer. Maybe it was the crying jag, maybe the long trip was finally catching up with her. All of a sudden she was seized with a deep weariness. The words simply wouldn’t come.

  Dan took over, leaning forward a little, looking Aba straight in the eye. “Claire doesn’t remember anything about that day. She suffers from amnesia, which is not surprising given the level of damage she sustained. But I was there and I remember. The two of us were the only ones in the Embassy on the 25th. We were in Post One, which is a secure area behind bulletproof glass, while the Red Army flooded the streets.” He held his hand up when Aba opened her mouth. “Now, your mother told us that in her belief, it wasn’t the Red Army at all that invaded Laka. Is that correct, in your opinion?”

  Aba nodded. “Absolutely. Marie and I recognized a number of officers of Mbutu’s army, all dressed up in red rags. We didn’t understand what was going on, but one thing was clear. The Red Army wasn’t involved. I’m not saying they aren’t crazy, because they are. But my information from colleagues working in the bush was that they were at least five hundred miles away, intent on trying to take back control of the diamond mines in the hinterland, and certainly weren’t planning on taking over the central government. They simply didn’t have the strength.”

  “And why do you think Mbutu’s men pretended to be members of the Red Army?”

  Aba gave a cynical smile. “I went to a Catholic school, Gunnery Sergeant.”

  “Dan will do, Doctor.”

  “Dan.” She bowed her head, eyes never leaving his. “Well, Dan, in this Catholic school we were taught Latin and Roman history. The Latins had a saying when something unusual happened and no one could figure out why. Cui bono? Who gains? Who benefits? And, well, who gained in the end from the bombing?”

  “Mbutu,” Dan answered. “Mbutu gained. The US poured money into Makongo, buckets of it. The Red Army was destroyed. The central government became the new flavour of the month.” He waved his hand around the new hospital room. “New hospitals, new schools.”

  There it was again. That cloud crossing Aba’s face.


  “Aba,” Claire said, reaching across the desk to hold her hand. “What did Marie tell you? Why did she go back to the Embassy for me?”

  Aba looked away, but her hand tightened on Claire’s. “She’d understood, too, that it wasn’t the Red Army. And she’d seen something. Someone. Someone she didn’t trust. It wasn’t clear to me why she felt it was important, but for her, you were in terrible danger. She went back for you.” Aba swivelled her head back to Claire. “She loved you,” Aba said simply. “She went back to save you. And she lost her own life.”

  “Oh, God.” Tears swam in Claire’s eyes. Her heart was simply breaking. “Why? Whom did she see?”

  Aba shrugged and pulled her hand from Claire’s. She stood, the interview at an end. “If you’ll excuse me—"

  A bolt of electricity ran through Claire. Marie had given her life to make sure Claire lived. And now she had a duty to find out why.

  “There’s something wrong, isn’t there? Here. At the hospital.”

  Aba’s voice dripped sarcasm. “Here? This hospital? So shiny and new? What could be wrong?”

  Claire looked at her steadily. “And yet there is.”

  Aba was still for a long time, then nodded jerkily. Her voice was bitter. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? Okay. Let me show you something.” She sat back down, reached in a drawer under her desk and brought out two packages. She threw them on the desk.

  Claire picked them up and examined them carefully. Inside each package were two blisters with ten capsules each. Twenty capsules. The two packages were identical. Medicine by a famous international pharmaceutical company, but she had no idea what kind of medicine.

  “Do you know what that is?” Aba asked.

  Claire shook her head.

  Aba picked up one. “This is a latest-generation antiretroviral drug, to combat AIDS. The very latest drug, proprietary, not generic, and cutting edge. The very best modern medicine has to offer. Taken properly, it extends the lifespan of an AIDS sufferer by at least twenty years. Makongo currently has an AIDS epidemic. One in five adults is infected, one in six children. This is literally a miracle drug, which will keep children alive until we finally find a cure. This kind of medicine doesn’t come cheap. Look at the price on the box.”

  Claire turned it around in her hand until she saw the price printed in the back lower left-hand corner. Her eyes widened.

  “Indeed,” Ava said dryly. “This costs €800 a dose. That’s about a thousand dollars. And it’s not being doled out sparingly, either. Our pharmacopoeia has plenty and there’s a warehouse full of this drug and other very expensive miracle drugs out at the airport, ready to be airlifted into the hinterland. No expense has been spared.”

  She stopped. There was silence in her study, broken only by a distant loudspeaker calling for a doctor to come to the emergency ward.

  Aba picked up the other box of medicine between thumb and forefinger and wagged it. “And this?” She threw it back down on the desk. “This is about a dollar’s worth of paper and talcum powder pressed into capsules and put into blisters.” She laid them side-by-side on the desktop and looked at Claire and Dan.

  “So. Which is which?”

  “I can’t tell,” Claire whispered.

  “Neither can I,” Ava said. “And I live with that, daily. I’ve had ten boxes of this drug, ten boxes of our most powerful antibiotics, and ten doses of chemotherapy secretly tested in a lab in Paris. I paid for it myself. About two thirds are fakes. And so every time I have a child dying of cancer or a mother dying of AIDS and I administer medicine to them, I’m either saving their lives or condemning them to death, and I don’t know which.” She slapped the desktop with her open hand, her voice suddenly harsh. “I don’t know which!”

  “Can you have them all tested?” Dan asked.

  She shook her head angrily. “Absolutely not. It’s out of the question. The tests cost about a thousand dollars. I paid for them myself because I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I was getting incredibly erratic results from the drugs. Testing all our medicine would cost millions of dollars. And if I were crazy enough to come out into the open about this, you can rest assured that only the real drugs would be tested. I would immediately lose my job and I would be arrested for slander. Not to mention earning the enmity of my countrymen. Doubting the New Hope Foundation, which gave us all this.” She waved her hand at her modern office, encompassing the efficient hospital outside. “It doesn’t bear thinking about. I would be put in an insane asylum. Or, considering the way Mbutu is going, taken out to the river and shot, my body left for the crocodiles.” Her lips pressed together and a lone tear ran down an ebony cheekbone. “My husband was almost ready to write an article about it when he disappeared. They found his body ten days later. I identified it only by his wedding band.”

  “These are perfectly identical.” Claire held the two packages side by side and could detect no difference at all, not even a minute one.

  “Yes, they are. The Foundation shipped about a hundred million dollars’ worth of medicine last year. If two thirds are fakes, that’s almost seventy million dollars in profit. Tax free. I’m sure some of it goes to Mbutu, but you can bet a good chunk would go to the man who is the great benefactor of Makongo.” She leaned forward to Claire and Dan. “To the man Marie went back to the Embassy to warn you about. And the man who probably killed her.”

  “Bowen McKenzie,” Claire breathed and Aba nodded grimly.

  CHAPTER 20

  It was time to tell him.

  “Marie was killed,” she said quietly as they walked out of the hospital. “They never even found her body, but she was killed before she was blown up.”

  Dan checked their surroundings, then honed in on her face. “How do you know that, honey?”

  She took a deep breath and watched his eyes. “When I came out of the coma, I couldn’t move very well. It took me another month to sit up, and another few weeks to start walking down the hospital corridor. And at first, I was really confused. I had trouble—" Here she mimicked Dr. Fallows, her neurologist, “‘orienting myself in space and time’. I’d lose track of the time completely. Sometimes I forgot whether it was day or night. And I forgot I was in the hospital… I thought I was back in Laka. A few times I thought I was in Durban, and a couple of times I thought I was a student again, in Georgetown.” She huffed out a breath. “Did any of that happen to you?”

  “No,” he answered. “But I didn’t sustain any head injuries at all. I lost my spleen and my knee and blew an eardrum, that’s it. But I’ve seen plenty of cases of head injuries and PTSD, and they’re not fun.”

  “No, they’re not,” she agreed. She looked down at the ground, at the weeds growing out of a crack in the pavement and tried to flatten them with her toe.

  “Claire?”

  She drew in a deep breath, blew it back out again in a controlled stream.

  “I had nightmares. Like the one you saw. Every night. Sometimes several times a night. It got so bad I was terrified to fall asleep. I think I was half crazy for a while there. The only thing that would work was sedation so strong I lost my REM sleep and that was even worse.”

  “Jesus,” Dan breathed. “That must have been hell.”

  She nodded jerkily. “Oh yeah.” Hell was almost a mild term for it. “And though I didn’t remember during the day what had happened, I think there was information in my subconscious that just kept geysering up, horribly. It’s as if the images simply wouldn’t let me alone. The nightmares varied but a lot was the same. In the most frequent one, I am crouching in some bushes and things are going on. Things I don’t understand. There are flashlights, men—Africans—moving around, shifting things. And then a big truck drives out and another big truck, looking exactly the same, drives in. And then—" Her throat went dry and she licked her lips.

  “And then a woman beckons to me. And in doing that, she has to stand up a little and a man sees her. A white man. And this is when it gets truly horrible. The sky is always red
and the men are more devils than men. Red-skinned, scampering, like some scene out of Hieronymus Bosch. And the white man is the head devil. I can’t see his face, but somehow I know him. I know I know him, but I don’t know how. He points to the woman and turns to one of the other devils, who grins and brings a rifle to his shoulder and fires. There’s like this red mist around the woman’s head and she crumbles. Then the white man turns to me and opens his mouth. It’s blood-red inside and he cocks his finger at me and… I wake up.” She couldn’t suppress a shudder and Dan put his arm around her shoulders. “That’s the one I had nightly, for months.”

  That terrible chill had come over her again, though the temperature was in the mid-eighties, hot and humid. The cold penetrated to her core.

  “There was a shrink in the neurology ward. We had a lot of sessions, while he was assessing my neurological responses. He’d listen to me, then ask me totally unrelated questions. I told him about the dream and that I had it over and over again. That had never happened to me before, either with dreams or nightmares, not that I’d had that many nightmares before the bombing. The doctor said it was an anxiety dream and a guilt dream. I felt guilty that I had survived and Marie hadn’t. And that I was anxious that I was never going to recover fully. The white man represented weakness, loss.” She shook her head. “He never really convinced me, but in those days, I didn’t have the energy to argue.”

  Claire looked at Dan. His face was tight, eyes hard.

  “Dan, I think I witnessed a murder,” she whispered. “I think that’s what it’s about.”

  His jaw muscles clenched. “I think you did, too. And maybe someone isn’t too hot on you getting your memory back. Where are your medical records?”

  “My what?”

  “Your medical records. Do you know what they say?”

  “I guess. Traumatic amnesia, functional loss, hallucinations. Or at least the Latinate terms for those. I hacked into my records one afternoon. It wasn’t in any way hard to do. There were reams of documents and a lot of assessments, but the bottom line was that I was crazy from the trauma. That scared me. And I think I understood that day that I was never going to get my job back. DIA could never afford to have an analyst who’d had that kind of psych evaluation.”