“Marie Margai,” she said, simply. There was a silence. And then she continued. “Marie Margai is the volunteer your colleague told you about.”
“I see,” I said, though I didn’t. “That’s great. Do you have a number for her? It would be great to talk to her.”
“Well, Dr. . . . McLean, wasn’t it?” I assured her it was. “I don’t think you will have much luck on the telephone.”
“Wow, is the cell phone reception that bad up there?”
“No, Dr. McLean, I mean because she is dead.” My back straightened, and my smile faded, too. “Marie died in February. Was killed in February,” she corrected herself, “on her way back from opening our school in Kabala.”
“I’m so sorry, ma’am. I didn’t . . .” I switched from compassionate face to concerned face. “But how—I mean, why? I thought it was safe up there now.”
“That’s the saddest thing, Doctor. It is. It’s so unusual. She was robbed. Maybe her attacker panicked—who knows?—but she was stabbed, and brutally. For what? That little camera of hers. They wouldn’t get twenty dollars in the market for it. She was such a happy, lovely girl. It’s so sad.”
It was pitch-black now. I left Florence bathed in the green hue of the neon-lit reception. The flush of mourning that passed over her had made her forget that she hadn’t quite trusted me. I stood outside in the street. I wanted to turn around and tell her that her friend hadn’t been robbed. She’d been liquidated. Instead I cleared my throat and spat into the gutter and lit a cigarette. The air was heady with frying palm oil and gasoline fumes. I could feel the jagged edge of a benzo comedown cutting in and walked back to the hotel. Roberts was sitting awkwardly in the bar next to a punter wearing a shabby suit and sporting an uncombed Afro. They were being teased by two hookers. So I took dinner alone in my room. Fried chicken, fufu and two bottles of Guinness Export.
I ate slowly. The vague unease that I had felt about Roberts from the outset crystallized into a hard, gleaming fear. This was a black operation: dead drops, unknown assets, classified sources, fake identities and me, an unbadged assassin—all working entirely independently of one another, each player able plausibly to repudiate all the others. It looked like the loose ends were being tied up: first Sonny Boy, then Marie Margai. Who next, Roberts and Juliet? They linked everyone to everything.
If this operation was being swept up as it went along, they were already as good as dead.
* * *
• • •
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
Where was she? Where was Ana María?
Thump. Thump. Thump.
My right hand found the SIG; I was on my feet, feeling my way to the bathroom. No running water. I pulled the cord to the light above the sink. I looked into the shaving mirror, but it was empty. There was no one there. Ana María wasn’t there. I wasn’t there. Where my face should have been, I saw only the reflection of the tiles on the wall behind me. I put the muzzle of the SIG against the silvered glass and squeezed the trigger.
The mirror dissolved into a shower of diamond-white shards blown back past my head. I saw myself then, standing in the void behind the mirror. The screeching stopped, and I could hear—what? My own heart beating?
Thump. Thump. Thump.
But where was she? Where was Ana María?
And then a bright white burst of light.
My hand on the bedside light switch.
Makeni. Still in Makeni.
* * *
• • •
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. “Hey, mister.”
Empty bed, sweat-soaked, twisted sheets. Alone. Again.
One o’clock in the morning. I stood to one side and put the muzzle of the little black SIG against the peephole.
“Hey, mister,” the voice hissed. “I keep you company.”
Before I opened the door, I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and put the pistol under the mattress. It was one of the working girls from downstairs. Five-five, shoulder-length wet-look extensions, sheer green blouse, black push-up bra.
“Where’s your friend?” I asked.
“With your friend,” she replied. She looked quickly both ways down the corridor, lifted the hem of her skirt and tilted her pelvis. She was naked underneath and exposed herself for a second or two. “Good company. Good massage. No disease.”
She stepped into the room, and I closed the door.
11
We hit the first roadblock at eleven o’clock.
After a slow start it had been plain sailing for the first hour or so. The Kabala Highway was metaled and well maintained. A steady flow of poda-podas ran north—minibus taxis carrying people and bundles of goods deeper into the interior. Trucks and cars like ours snaked around them and the cargoes of people and goods they discharged onto the road every few miles.
We both smoked. Roberts hardly spoke. His pursed lips and half frown hung somewhere between fear and remorse. Distress, I supposed, at the unknown quality of my discretion; shame, most likely, at the sober recollection of how much he loved—and needed—Juliet.
I felt none of those things. Just an emptiness inside.
By the time he’d wound down the window to hand the Sierra Leone Army squaddie his identity card, it was like sitting in a smoke-filled pressure cooker. I was glad of the change of atmosphere. Roberts and the soldier spoke in Krio. I smiled, nodded my head and tuned the radio to Bintumani 93.7.
The trooper grinned and waved us on.
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth.”
“Remind me again, Roberts—what’s the truth today?” That made him smile.
“You only been here two days and already you’re talking like a Limba.”
“You know what they say, mate—inside every Irishman is a Limba trying to get out.” Roberts half choked and spat out the still-open window.
“Fuck me, bruv. You got that right. I told him you were a doctor visiting my sister in Kabala, and I was hoping to marry you off and get rich.”
It was unseasonably hot for March. Ninety degrees and climbing, and it wasn’t yet midday. Five minutes down the road, we passed two SLA armored personnel carriers mounted with .50- caliber machine guns. The drivers leaned out their windows, shouting at each other in conversation in what sounded like Krio. A dozen soldiers milled around in British Army surplus uniforms, fiddling with their old British self-loading rifles.
“Is this normal?” I asked.
“Remind me again, Max,” Roberts replied, half-serious. “What’s ‘normal’ today?” That made me smile.
“We’ve only been on the road for a day, and you’re already talking like an Irishman.”
“Well, you know what they say, mate.”
The farther north we went, the fewer vehicles met us coming south. Heat haze blurred the road. The radio crackled and died. Try as he might to retune it, Radio Bintumani was dead.
“It happens,” Roberts said, clicking off the radio. “It’s the mountains. They kill the FM signal.”
We carried on in resigned, sweaty silence. A palpable whiff of cheap perfume rose off Roberts’s sodden shirt. His frown came back. And then, twenty-five miles outside Kabala, we ground to a halt. All traffic north had stopped. Nothing moved south. The driver of the poda-poda immediately in front of us switched his engine off. The battered white shell of a Mazda taxi disgorged a throng of hot, angry passengers. One by one they grasped the futility of frustration like divine revelation and squatted in the shade of a giant mango tree that overhung the tarmacadam.
I looked at Roberts. We both climbed out.
“This is where the highway ends, bruv,” he explained as we straightened up in the pall of heat rising off the sticky blacktop. He turned to me and waved vaguely in the direction of the highway/car park. “Here on it’s just a dirt road to Kabala. There’s usually a jam.”
“And it’s always like this?” I had a bad feeling. Roberts did, too. He sniffed the air and ground out his cigarette in the dust by the side of the road. “Nah, not always. I bet you a truck has snapped an axle or something. It’s a single track. No way round it. I’ll go have a look-see.”
We’d stopped in the shade of the tree. Green mangoes crushed by truck tires filled the air with a sweet smell of decay and fermentation. I sat on the boot of the car, feet still on the ground. Another poda-poda pulled up behind me. The driver grinned and gave me a wave. Emblazoned across his hood ran the words “Prayer Is the Key.”
My lips worked their way around the Hail Mary, stumbling over syllables unspoken after years of unbelief. Once I’d asked Sonny Boy why he prayed to the Virgin just before we inserted into a hot landing site. “The priest says it works even if you don’t believe in it.” He’d grinned. And then the night sky lit up with tracer as our bootheels sank into the Afghan moondust under the chopper. His body armor stopped three AK rounds that night. I didn’t know whether that proved or debunked his priest’s counsel.
* * *
• • •
“WELL, IT AIN’T good.” Roberts sighed. Fine red dirt from the unpaved road had collected in his braids. Beads of sweat broke out across his brow. “Army. Lots of army. Like, more army than I’ve seen for ages. They’ve cut the road, and they’re out in the bush. You can see them for miles between the trees. Some shit is going down. Serious shit.” I didn’t say anything. Roberts reached into the car and took out a bottle of tepid water. He drank deeply. “No one in our army is going to piss about in this heat unless it’s serious.” He wiped the sweat out of his eyes. “It’s fucking March. It’s supposed to be nice in the mountains. It must be nearly thirty-five.”
“OK, let’s go and talk to them. Turn the car around and get one of these taxi drivers to mind it.” I passed him a folded wad of local notes. Roberts swung the old Nissan out from between the two big taxis parked up on the other side of the road, facing back toward Makeni. Then he recruited a lad with biceps like my thighs to stand shotgun over our ride. I shouldered my day bag with the small medical kit and the SIG inside. Roberts carried the rifle bag.
The queue of traffic was rapidly lengthening behind us. Up ahead, it was a mile to the front of the line. Roberts had covered the ground fast. It was no wonder he’d come back sweating. A Sierra Leone Army major was holding court, pacifying irate truck drivers while overseeing what appeared to be the establishment of a cordon of troops that spread out on either side of the road. Roberts had been right. The soldiers spread out for several hundred meters at least in either direction. I could see clusters of camouflage fatigues standing out against the ochre dust in the spaces where the trees thinned out. The major saw me and waved me over. I was the only white person there, and, I guessed, a perfect excuse to cut short his exposure to dozens of disgruntled motorists.
“Hello, sir,” I said. “I’m Dr. McLean. Heading to Musala. How d’y’do?” I offered him my hand. He took it with a firm, curt shake.
“Well, as you can see, Doctor, we are doing only so-so.” He looked at Roberts, at our bags. “Musala?” I nodded. “That, Doctor, will be very difficult today. Maybe tomorrow.”
“I see. What about Kabala?”
“That will also be difficult.” He frowned at me from under heavy eyelids. “May I see your papers, please, Doctor?” I handed him my passport and circled around him. He was a good six inches shorter than me, and I didn’t want him to have to squint into the sun. He thumbed through the Canadian passport, looked at the entry stamp and handed it back to me almost absentmindedly. He had a kind face, polished boots and wore a Browning Hi-Power on his hip.
“You are a team, you two?” He nodded toward Roberts. I told him we were.
“Only a mad dog or an Englishman would want to drive himself around Salone, sir.”
His frown relaxed, and he took my arm.
“Come.”
A beleaguered lieutenant took his place at the front of the queue of complainants, and the three of us—Roberts, the major and I—walked twenty paces to a British Army surplus Land Rover Defender. We stood in the meager shade it threw on the dust.
“I am sorry to say that there has been—how shall we say?—an outbreak in Musala. It has already spread to Kabala. We are trying to contain it here, Dr. McLean.”
“Before it reaches Makeni?”
“Exactly, Dr. McLean. Exactly. Before it reaches Makeni. You have broken the code.”
I could feel Roberts recoil behind me and heard his sneakers grub in the dirt. I knew what he wanted to ask, so I posed the question for him.
“Ebola?”
The major’s drooping eyes refocused on mine. Sliced into the jet-black skin of his right cheek was a thin line of scar tissue that ran from his right ear to the corner of his mouth. Clean and deep, it bore the unmistakable signature of a straight razor.
“No. It is not that devil.” He’d stopped smiling. “But the government is afraid people will think so and panic.”
“What,” I asked, “has ‘broken out,’ then?” The major pulled the lobe of his right ear and looked down.
“Uh, cholera. The government says it’s cholera. Bad cholera.” He spoke softly, although no one else was in earshot. For a moment I thought I actually heard Roberts cough the word “bullshit,” but he was just clearing his throat.
“Well, that is extraordinary,” I said, lowering my voice, too. “Cholera is my area of expertise, sir.” I patted the side of my day bag with an open palm. “And I have just the thing to deal with, oh, a couple of dozen cases right here.” The major looked at me again, carefully, weighing up what exactly, I wasn’t sure. I produced a stethoscope from the kit with an unnecessary flourish, just in case there was any doubt in his mind about our credentials.
“Good,” he said finally. “Good. There is something I would like to show you, Doctor. I would be interested in your, uh, medical opinion.” And with that, he ushered us into the Land Rover. Roberts and I sat in the back. The major rode up front. A vacant-looking corporal took the wheel, and we were on the road again.
For ten kilometers or so, we drove along the main, unsurfaced road to Kabala. The beginnings of the town were reaching out to us—a general store, some low-slung houses and even a dilapidated children’s playground set back into the trees: A GIFT FROM THE PEOPLE OF GERMANY, announced a rusted sign above the unused swings and merry-go-round. I was expecting to see no one, but some people were still on the road. A corn-on-the-cob seller was fanning the coals under a dozen or more leaf-wrapped ears in expectation of a lunchtime rush. There were soldiers, too—spread out, but deployed in numbers along the verges, clinging to whatever shade they could find. If they saw the major’s Land Rover in time, they saluted, but mostly they were oblivious to us until we’d passed them—my white face at the window causing more than a couple of them to call out “Sah!” with a smile as we sped along.
The terrain became increasingly hilly, and then we turned off the road, heading west and then northwest around the town toward, the major said, the smaller town of Yakala. He checked his pistol and reholstered it. He looked professional, wary.
“Bandit country,” he said, half-turned to me. Roberts caught my eye and shook his head very slightly with a look that said, No, it isn’t.
One track gave way to another. The soldiers thinned out, and then, as we entered the outskirts of a larger village nestled between two steep hills, there was a throng of them, standing out in their dark green fatigues against the dull browns of the village’s mud walls and raffia thatch. I could feel Roberts shifting about beside me as we drew to a halt. The major climbed out and opened my door. The driver did the same for Roberts.
The first thing I noticed was the smell of dead bodies. Roberts swore heavily under his breath.
“Wait here, please,” the major ordered, and walked away fro
m us toward a low, gray concrete building. It contrasted sharply with the houses in the village, and was ringed by sandbags. A flagpole rose up above it, flying the sun-bleached green, white and blue flag of the Republic of Sierra Leone. He spoke briefly to a sergeant standing by the door and then went inside, covering his face with a spotless white handkerchief as he did so.
“Police station?” I murmured to Roberts, trying my best to smile at the soldiers while not looking like an idiot.
“No. Army post,” he replied, gazing at his feet. “The north’s covered with them, since the war.”
I looked again, more carefully. The roof was peppered with bullet holes: small black apertures that fanned outward at their edges to make jagged metal splashes reaching skyward. The bullets that had made the holes had been fired from inside the building. I looked around on the ground. There was no spent brass to be seen. All about us the rising smell of decaying meat grew stronger. On the top of one of the hills that flanked us, I could make out a wood-and-corrugated-metal observation post. There were half a dozen soldiers standing there, too, looking out across the hills, toward the northern forests. All of them wore bandannas across their mouths and noses. There were no civilians to be seen anywhere. No smoke rising from the huts. No sound of children whooping or crying. No sound at all except the interminable buzzing of flies and the scraping of the soldiers’ boots in the dust.
Roberts waved away a bluebottle, took a packet of cigarettes out of his jeans pocket, lit one and offered me the packet. I took it and fumbled, letting the last stick drop out of the soft pack. I bent down to pick it up off the ground and saw another butt on the ground next to it. The letters on the paper above the filter caught my eye: they were in the Cyrillic Russian alphabet. I picked it up along with my own dropped cigarette and slipped it into my pocket.
The Break Line Page 9
