The Red Die

by Alex MacBeth

  Felisberto looked out at the courtyard and the new resident chicken. Why did he have to deal with these minor distractions when the Stokes case demanded his attention?

  “Who is in charge of the park?” asked Felisberto, forcing himself to remain interested in the young man’s drama.

  “I met the director only once. His name is João Abdurramane,” said Tomlinson.

  The expression on the Comandante’s face changed. Tomlinson registered the evident change in the Comandante’s expression and realised this might be his card. Felisberto had crossed paths with a man by that name in the past and he resolved to check with the young foreigner to make sure it wasn’t the same person.

  “Describe this João Abdurramane to me,” demanded Felisberto.

  “Small, quite fat, in his late forties.”

  “Bald?” interrupted Felisberto.

  “Yes.”

  Felisberto confirmed his fears. João Abdurramane, one of the many aliases of ‘The Fixer’, one of the most dangerous men in the country. Felisberto had crossed paths with him in the past. The Fixer had a reputation for being as at ease with the nation’s politicians as he was with the capital’s worst street thugs and was equally apt at using charm or ruthless violence to solve any issue. It was rumoured he could arrange the assassination of anyone in the country within forty-eight hours. What could The Fixer be doing in these sleepy parts? The zoologist’s case had just become a lot more interesting and Felisberto decided he would detain Tomlinson in Mossuril, until he could find a use for him. Suddenly he thought there could be a link to Stokes’ death. Money and debt appeared stronger motives than ever, thought Felisberto. Was The Fixer responsible for Stokes’ murder?

  “Tomorrow I’m due to meet my embassy. I filed a report,” said Tomlinson.

  “Where?”

  “The meeting is fixed for noon, I know the place.”

  “Don’t play hardball,” the Comandante belted back, “tell me the meeting place or you’re not leaving that cell until your bones rot and rats carry away your limbs bite by bite.”

  “The Hotel Girassol,” said Tomlinson tamely and prompted by the convincing warning, citing the only prominent place in Nampula that he knew apart from the actual meeting place.

  “You better not be lying,” Felisberto warned him. The Comandante stood up and escorted Tomlinson to a small room reserved for guards to rest between spells of duty. It had been almost undamaged by the explosion. The room was clean and had a bed with a mattress and a reasonably fresh sheet on it, a small table and a chair. A framed poster of the current president hung on the wall. An old lady dressed in a beautiful wrap-around all-in-one capulana dress brought a bowl of rice, some chima, spicy beans, tea and a bread roll.

  Felisberto closed the door to the cell without saying anything and Tomlinson ate. Within minutes he was asleep, knowing that it was only hours before the British Embassy staff would save him. While Tomlinson slept, Felisberto caught up with new details’ in the Stokes case. Why had Frangopelo’s convoy now come under fire twice in two months? The Comandante decided he had to find more about The Fixer if he was going to join up the dots.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The next morning Felisberto and Samora were on the road to Nampula. Tomlinson sat in the back of the car.

  “So who exactly are we meeting?” asked Samora, lifting his head from a new phone he had bought the day before.

  “Representatives from the British Consulate in Maputo,” said Tomlinson. There was a pride in his voice as he said it.

  Samora was evidently unsatisfied with the answer, his face twitching in disbelief.

  “So they are flying from Maputo because you sent them an email? They don’t even come up when we file emergency reports of starvation or drought,” said Samora deadpan.

  Tomlinson realised the only reason his report was receiving any attention was because he was a British citizen and more importantly, the report described major problems in a project with a plethora of international stakeholders and financiers. Still, he felt prepared to wield the power he carried as a European to shine light on the crimes at the reserve. He resolved in the car to fight tooth and nail to enlist the embassy to launch its own investigation of activities in Section 3. If animals were being killed or sold to smugglers instead of being nurtured to repopulate the region it was a crime against humanity as far as Tomlinson was concerned. The major international stakeholders would want to hear of the strange happenings at the park, he reasoned. After that he would leave it to the relevant authorities to make their investigations.

  They arrived in Nampula around 10am and had tea out of view at a small roadside shack. They rehearsed the routine they had practised that morning. Tomlinson would be allowed to meet with the embassy representatives alone but he would keep his phone on all the time so the two policemen could hear what was happening.

  “You’ll translate, Samora,” said the Comandante.

  “Yes, tenk u vere mach,” said Samora in broken English. He pulled out a second phone and found an app that would translate the audio with a thirty second delay.

  Tomlinson was increasingly twitchy. He had lied about the meeting place and didn’t know how to address it. They parked two hundred metres from the Girassol below the church. Tomlinson looked around and shook his head. “I don’t think this is the place,” he said.

  Felisberto’s face tightened. “Where is the place, then?” The Comandante had become increasingly irritated by the young whippersnapper’s attitude. He had no time for a local version of Julian Assange. He’d already found one dead body in his bay weeks before. One dead white whistle-blower had already stretched his resources, more would surely send him crashing. Better his embassy take care of him until such a time as he could give evidence. Felisberto didn’t have time to babysit.

  “We drove past the place before,” said Tomlinson. “New Hotel.”

  The Comandante turned around and looked Tomlinson in the eye. “If you are bullshitting us, we will stop being so friendly,” said Felisberto, eyeballing Tomlinson for a good ten seconds. He then sped down Avenida Eduardo Mondlane towards the New Hotel and parked in the car park. Samora unlocked Tomlinson’s cuffs and gave him a few seconds to compose himself before they set off. Tomlinson walked in first followed by Samora and then the Comandante, as planned.

  The embassy reps were waiting in the restaurant. Tomlinson walked straight over and introduced himself. Samora and the Comandante each took seats in the lobby where they could watch proceedings from behind newspapers, with headphones to listen to the conversation.

  “Anything to drink?” a pale but pretty young girl wearing a long navy dress asked Tomlinson with a warm smile.

  Tomlinson asked for a coffee, shook hands with everyone in the delegation and took a seat. He was surprised that the consulate even had four people to respond to such a report, let alone that they had come to meet him at their own expense to investigate it. He took pride in knowing that his country would always stand up for what mattered in the world. The three men were all well-built, probably former rugby players, thought Tomlinson, public school types, polite but quiet.

  “So tell us about what you saw at the Nampula Wildlife Reserve,” said the girl, after a quick round of introductions. Tomlinson recounted what happened with Abdalla; his first days in the park, the diary, and his own suspicions of Section 3.

  “Do you have the diary?” asked the girl, sipping from her own ginger tea. She had introduced herself as Valerie Clemence, Second Secretary, and one could see why she had been chosen. Behind her pretty features and articulate manner, she was tough. Her eyes never left Tomlinson’s when she asked him something, demanding every detail available for each answer.

  “Yes, I have it,” said Tomlinson.

  “Do you have a copy?” asked Valerie Clemence.

  Tomlinson had of course made a copy but decided he would seek some guarantees first.

  “I’m having some difficulties with local…” Tomlinson trailed off almost
having forgotten Samora and Felisberto were listening him to. He had no idea if they understood English but he didn’t want to risk using any obvious words. “…forces, guardian forces,” continued Tomlinson diplomatically.

  “Can you help me return to Blighty?” Tomlinson asked.

  The girl and the three men look confused.

  “It’s a case of needing to get to Blighty quite urgently in order to avoid the old bill” persevered Tomlinson. He gave a small head shake to try and indicate he was being wired.

  The girl smiled, gave a faux military salute to show she had understood and lent in with the three men to discuss the request.

  “Whatever charges you face, the embassy will support you to repatriate so that you can be judged within the British legal system,” said Clemence.

  “I can write down some of the problems,” said Tomlinson cryptically, knowing that he had to confuse Samora and the Comandante enough to communicate to the embassy staff that he was being taped. He sketched out a note and passed it to Clemence

  WE ARE BEING WATCHED AND BUGGED BY LOCAL COPS IN THE LOBBY

  “This is very useful information, thank you Chris,” said Clemence. She leaned back in towards the men and whispered briefly before standing up and walking arm-in-arm with Tomlinson towards the bar counter, where she ordered a drink. Out in the lobby Felisberto couldn’t believe what he was hearing and he was forced to break his cover to approach Samora for an explanation.

  “What are these acuna talking about?” asked Felisberto. “Your talking computer is spitting complete rubbish. It said Tomlinson is troubled by local spirits. Later he was asking to go to a place for the blind. And what’s all this about an old bill he hasn’t paid? Sort this out, Samora, this isn’t an arcade, it’s… you know what it is!” said Felisberto steaming. Samora had to admit his voice translation tool hadn’t worked and he himself hadn’t paid much attention in English classes at school, thinking a time would never come when he would actually be called upon to understand the language. He listened to the recording again but to him it all sounded like people smiling in between chewing gum.

  “So? What are they on about?” said Felisberto, pointing towards the restaurant. As he did so, both he and Samora realised that the three tall men in suits standing in their eye line had obscured their view of Tomlinson and the girl at the bar. Felisberto moved across the lobby to get a better view but the only clear angle was where Samora was sitting and all they could see from there was the men’s backs. Felisberto contemplated walking into the restaurant to check everything was okay but decided he would wait a little longer before breaking cover. He had suspected that Tomlinson might try and escape under the protection of his embassy.

  One of the men in suits walked to the door at the far end of the restaurant and left. Felisberto saw him re-emerge in the car park seconds later and enter a black 4x4 with tinted windows. The Comandante entered the restaurant to check on Tomlinson as the two men, both over six feet, entered the lobby. Tomlinson was gone. So was the girl. The two men walked straight past Samora and outside.

  “We need to follow them,” said the Comandante grabbing Samora. Felisberto had recognised one of the ‘delegation’; another of The Fixer’s henchmen, a nasty piece of work known as ‘Puto Puto’. The men in suits jumped in the car and drove off. Felisberto and Samora tailed them from a distance through Nampula, east towards Mossuril. These weren’t embassy staff, they’d been had. Which meant somebody had found out about Tomlinson’s meeting with the British Embassy and got there first. How? Surely the embassy couldn’t be hiring The Fixer’s killers. Could there be a leak at the comando? Were their phones or computers bugged like in the James Bond films he had enjoyed as a teenager?

  They’d been taken down by cartoon tactics. How had they not seen Tomlinson and the girl disappear? Samora drove in silence as the Comandante kept his eyes firmly on the car in front. After about forty-five minutes the car stopped and all three men, including the driver and Puto Puto walked out of the car to the other side of the road and disappeared down an alleyway. Was this a trap? Samora stepped out of the car and onto the busy side road. He bought some bananas from an old woman. He took out his phone and started pacing backwards and forwards near the parked black Landcruiser, talking animatedly. Through a small shade in the window he could see there was no one in the car.

  “What do you mean there’s no one in the car?” asked the Comandante “Where’s the Englishman?”

  It dawned on them at the same time. Neither Tomlinson nor the girl had ever left the New Hotel. Neither he nor Samora had seen them leave. The men leaving was a decoy. They had been set-up like schoolboys in a game of hide and seek. They drove back to the New Hotel but neither the girl nor Tomlinson was there. Nobody at the hotel had seen them leave. The officers returned to Mossuril. They had lost Tomlinson, no less to a gang of thugs, but more importantly they were now one step behind whatever was swirling above them. Felisberto would inform the British Embassy of what had happened. Going through official channels would take forever. Tomlinson had left a ‘mailbox thing’ on the printout of his report and Samora would use the ‘Internet thing’ to let them know what happened later.

  First the Comandante wanted to find a way to get to The Fixer. Their paths had first crossed more than twenty years earlier. At the time The Fixer went by the name Bizu. People said he was a refugee from Rwanda. Like with many of his compatriots there were vicious rumours that Bizu had committed horrendous crimes during the Rwandan Genocide and had fled to avoid being held accountable. These suspicions only grew when he started putting together a hit squad for the elite in Maputo. Then one day he changed his name. After a few years Bizu intimidated everyone into calling him João Abdurramane, but his Central African accent still shone through when he spoke. If the Fixer was in town, something big was going down.

  PART THREE

  Chapter Seventeen

  Podolski was grabbing lunch when he got the text.

  Urgent meeting required. It was The Source. Fifteen minutes later they were sitting in their usual meeting place bathed in oak and leather furniture. Something was different about The Source. He sat cross-legged fidgeting and looked distinctly uncomfortable.

  “Rough night?” said Podolski, sipping on his Guinness. “You look like shit.”

  “There have been some developments regarding our inconvenience in Mozambique,” began The Source.

  “I thought we’d met with him.”

  “We did meet but things took a rather unexpected turn.” The Source braced himself as to how to break the next bit of news. “He’s now in our custody.”

  “What?”

  “Well,” continued The Source, “I told you about the diary he says he has in his possession. Naturally we were keen to recover it, but things took an unforeseen, but perhaps even positive turn,” ventured The Source. “It turns out he had been in trouble with the local police and so he claimed asylum with our people on the ground. We played along of course and we now have him in a safe house about eighty kilometres outside of Nampula.”

  Podolski’s cheek muscles tightened.

  “I didn’t tell you to fucking kidnap the kid,” said Podolski, grabbing The Source briefly before regaining his composure.

  “Do you realise what we stand to lose here? What you stand to lose here?” said Podolski straightening himself. “Think hard about what you are doing. It isn’t only your job at stake.”

  Both men sat staring at the wall in silence until finally Podolski spoke again.

  “We need a plan. How much does this zoologist know?”

  “Not much but he wants the embassy to open an investigation. If we can make him believe that he is actually in the hands of embassy personnel and that we are going to open an enquiry, perhaps he will let it go.”

  “Perhaps?” echoed Podolski.

  “What do you suggest?” retorted The Source.

  “I suggest you sort this shit out, you punk,” said Podolski, fuming. “We have too much rolling
on Mozambique to have a zoologist screw up our plans. Neutralise him.”

  The Source jolted back. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “What about the local cops?”

  “Two African crime fighters with bicycles and batons? Please!” said Podolski, bursting into uncontrollable laughter. “Continue telling him he’s in safe hands. Take him to get the diary. If need be kill the local cops then. When you have the diary and the computer, deal with the tree hugger.”

  “Another thing,” continued Podolski, “I may need you to go to Mozambique and put things back on track. We are having one too many setbacks.”

  “The Fixer said there is a policeman who has been sniffing around our business but not to worry, he has plans to neutralise the issue,” said The Source.

  “Take his lead,” said Podolski. “If I don’t get you the Fixer will, if you screw this up. The first shipments are being prepared. The supply chains are ready, the buyers are in place.”

  Podolski laughed heartily. Mozambique was a heart that never stopped beating as far as Mason and Stock were concerned. Their operations, far from the scrutiny of watchful eyes yet right under the nose of the international community, were set to make them billions; money which would be easy to filter through the company’s network of offshore accounts.

  Podolski proposed a toast to his muse: “To Eldorado!” All that stood between him and his billions was a zoologist and a local cop. Podolski knew that if need be these were hurdles that could be overcome in one way or another. Every project has its opportunity cost, its collateral damage and its innocent victims. The Source reluctantly toasted to the devil’s intent.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Samora had finally found rooms for the new cadets and Felisberto was happy to have some quiet reign again at the comando. He sat in his temporary office with nothing but a flickering candle for company, enjoying the unfiltered sound of evening bugs. The electricians had installed pirate wiring, switch boxes and sockets that had caught fire only a few days after the state-owned provider had linked the installation to the grid, but the power-cut and subsequent shadows offered comfort, not doubt, to the Comandante.