The Night Ranger jw-7

by Alex Berenson

  “Where’s the Land Cruiser?”

  “They towed it to their headquarters in Garissa. I doubt there was any forensic evidence to find, but if there was, I can guarantee it’s gone. They’ve talked to everybody here, I wouldn’t call them interviews, more like, tell us what you know or we’ll take you out back, give you a working-over. Truncheon in hand.”

  Truncheon. A good Irish word. “Anyone give them anything? Here or in the camps?”

  “Not that I know of. They’re not good at sharing, the GSU.”

  “Any Americans been here?”

  “Four nice men with short haircuts showed up three days ago. Two had business cards saying they were from the embassy. The other two didn’t tell me their names. They wanted to take the laptops that the kids used. I said no, but I did let them do what they wanted to them here.”

  So the agency and NSA were doing what they did best, chasing electronic intel. No doubt they had mirrored the hard drives. “What about phones?” Wells said.

  “They asked about mobiles too, but I told them the truth, those kids couldn’t be separated from their handsets.”

  “They look at anyone else’s computers?”

  “Like mine or Jimmy’s? Now, why would they do a thing like that?” She pulled two water bottles from the minifridge beside the couch. “My one luxury. Have to have cold water.”

  She passed him one. He drank gratefully. His thirst had come up quietly. The sun here baked out moisture in a way that was almost pleasant. Until it wasn’t.

  “So, just to be clear. They didn’t look at your computer, or Jimmy’s.”

  “No. Anyway, it wouldn’t have mattered. Jimmy practically chains his laptop to his wrist. Very concerned about computer security, my boss.”

  “Any reason in particular?”

  “Not that I’d know of.” Moss showed him her crooked teeth again. “I’m trying to stick to the facts here, you see. What I know firsthand.”

  “That’s admirable. How about this, then? What did you think of the volunteers? Were they in the way?”

  “The truth is that on a daily basis this isn’t rocket science. We provide food, water, basic medical care. The Kenyans police the camps. The refugees govern themselves. We’re not supposed to get involved with their politics. We can advocate for them, but our power is limited. That’s not just WorldCares, by the way. It’s everybody, even the big groups. What I’m saying is reading to the kids like Gwen did, working at the hospital like Hailey, it’s as useful as anything anybody here is doing once you get past the basic provision of services.”

  A long not-quite-answer. Wells tried again. “You got along with them?”

  “I had a funny moment with Gwen her first day. She came out of her trailer wearing a T-shirt that hardly covered her chest. I told her that wasn’t how we did things here. To her credit, she was more appropriate after that. Made the effort. Hailey and Owen worked hard, and even Scott. Though I didn’t like him much. Spent his time either insulting or screwing Gwen, from what I could see. Why she put up with it, I don’t know.”

  “And how well did you know Suggs?”

  “Suggs. Anybody ever tell you about the chairs?”

  Wells shook his head.

  “No reason they would have. A couple years back, the Kenyan members of parliament decided they needed new seats on which to rest their royal asses. They found these chairs that cost, I think, twenty-five hundred dollars each. The Kenyan parliament has more than two hundred members, so they’d be spending half a million dollars on these chairs. In a country where the average income is about two dollars a day. Naturally, the newspapers found out and made a stink.”

  “And the MPs backed off.”

  “They went right ahead. What I’m trying to say is that the Kenyans, they’re very friendly people. And they aren’t all crooks. Plenty of them are honest. But, blame it on poverty or loyalty to tribe or whatever you like, the me-first attitude runs deep. Suggs was one of those guys, we paid him well, he helped us, but I never trusted him. He looked like a gangster. That was intentional. He liked everybody to know he could work both sides. I don’t know if he set this up, but I wouldn’t be shocked.”

  “But when you talk to staff—”

  “If they know, they aren’t telling. And I’ve talked to them all.”

  “Did Suggs suggest the Lamu trip to Scott Thompson?”

  “Don’t know. But a couple weeks ago, Suggs and Scott Thompson drove off together. They said they were going to another camp to see if they could start deliveries there. It didn’t make sense then and it makes even less now.”

  “You think Suggs set him up somehow?”

  “I’m telling you what I saw. I can’t guess what it means.”

  “Suggs was from Nairobi, right?”

  “No, Mwingi, west of here. His family lived in Nairobi.”

  “In Eastleigh.”

  “No. He wasn’t Somali.”

  “But he’d worked at Dadaab awhile.”

  “That’s right. He was connected in the camps. But let me tell you something you might not want to hear, Mr. Wells. I don’t care what you’ve done over the years, how tough you think you are, you are not going to be able to go into Hagadera or any of these camps and crack skulls and get answers—” The last five words were delivered in a parody of a tough Mickey Spillane voice. “These people can see you coming a hundred kilometers away. And what will you threaten them with? You can’t send them back to Somalia, you can’t arrest them, you don’t know anything about them, you have no leverage. All you are is another mzungu poking at them.”

  “Guess I’ll have to use my charm, then.”

  “Good luck with that. And before you ask, I don’t have any great ideas for you. But I thought you should know.”

  The warning didn’t come as a surprise, but it was depressing anyway. Wells took another glance around. No photos or personal items of any kind, just the desk, the fridge, and the battered furniture. “Tell me about yourself.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I’ve seen prison cells are better decorated than this.”

  “Sentiment’s a luxury, as I suspect you understand.”

  “How long have you worked for WorldCares?”

  “Three years. I was at the Red Cross, but they stopped promoting me and Jimmy came looking, told me he wanted to professionalize WorldCares. He’d gotten dinged for spending too much money on fund-raising and overhead, not enough on projects on the ground. He said he wanted to do a better job.”

  “And.”

  “And he did. In Haiti and here. The year before I came, WorldCares raised five million dollars and only a million-two hit the ground. Last year it got up to sixteen, seventeen million dollars and maybe six million went to programs. About half in Dadaab. Do the math, we were spending twenty-four percent on programs. Now it’s thirty-seven percent.”

  “So that’s good.”

  “Yes, but if you look at it the other way, overhead’s gone from four million to ten million in three years. Jimmy makes eight hundred thousand a year, plus benefits. Which are big. He lives rent-free in a nice house in Houston, gets a new Lexus every year, flies first-class. Really, he’s paying himself over a million. Look at the way he lives, you’d think he worked for Exxon. Not a charity serving the poorest people in the world. I mean, he’s a right smart fund-raiser, you saw it in Nairobi. Puts a tear in your eye and a lump in your throat.”

  “You’re reaching for your checkbook and your credit card at the same time,” Wells said.

  “Exactly. But I always thought the idea was to raise money to do good work. I fear Jimmy has that equation reversed.”

  Wells nodded.

  “I’ve done all right, too. He started me at three hundred thousand. Now I’m at three-fifty and he’s offered to bump me to four ’cause he’s worried I’m serious about quitting. Which is a lot for these jobs, believe me. Truth is I just put it in the bank anyway. I don’t have kids, I spend eleven months a year here, and
you see my fashion sense. But I’m starting to feel like he’s buying me. Which I can’t abide.”

  “You’ve told him this.”

  “And he tells me fund-raising is part of the game, it takes money to make money. And look, we spend three million dollars a year here, we do some good. My big project for next year, before this happened, was supposed to be getting glasses and dental work to the kids here. Those maybe sound like luxuries, but they’re not. You can’t see, you don’t have much chance in a place like this. Your teeth hurt all the time, it’s misery. That’s the upside of working with a guy like Jimmy. Places like the Red Cross, they’re in love with their own bureaucracies. Anything new takes years to approve. Jimmy lets me do what I want, long as I send back pictures he can use for fund-raising.”

  “Were you surprised when he came over for so long?”

  Moss sipped her water. “Smart boy. Yes. I thought it was for the reporter from Houston. His hometown paper and he wanted to look hands-on, and if that meant putting in a few weeks here, he would.”

  “Now you’re not so sure.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t figure it. I know I mentioned the insurance. But the fact is I can’t see Jimmy risking those kids. He may be greedy but I’ve never seen him as a psychopath. And I can’t believe the four of them, or five if you count Suggs, are hiding in a hut somewhere, watching the world go crazy. Maybe Scott would think it was a lark, but not the others. Gwen wouldn’t put her family through that worry for all the money in the world. I’m sure. Beyond that, anything’s possible.”

  Anything’s possible. The world’s epitaph. “I come up with anything else—”

  “I’m here. Not much to do right now. I wasn’t sure about you, thought you might be a cowboy, but now I see you’re serious, I’m happy to give you the run of the place. You can stay in Hailey and Gwen’s trailer. It’s empty. Not counting the beauty products Gwen left behind.”

  “Further proof she was planning to come back.”

  Moss laughed, the sound surprisingly sweet. “That is the truth.”

  —

  The trailer was cluttered with what Wells would always think of as girl stuff, nail files, shampoo bottles, and panties. He assumed the Kenyan police had left the mess. Still, he found himself glad to be in his forties, too old even to imagine being with women so certain that their looks would carry them through life. He poked around halfheartedly, but the search depressed him. He hoped he didn’t find anything too intimate, not just topless photos or love letters, but the private stumblings that everyone had at home, expired vitamins and half-finished doodles and unread Christmas cards.

  After a few minutes he felt foolish for his modesty. The girls would trade loss of privacy for freedom in a heartbeat. So he stripped the beds and looked under the mattresses. He turned out Gwen’s backpack and the twin chests of drawers and even looked through her magazines, hoping for a scrawled phone number or email address.

  By the time he finished, the sun was down and Wells could hear the compound’s electric lights droning outside. He straightened up the place and walked over to Owen and Scott’s trailer to repeat the search. Wilfred intercepted him.

  “Bossman. Superbossman. Great mzungu. A guard, Ashon, he told me, two, three weeks ago, he saw Suggs with all these papers, brochures for houses in Johannesburg. Like he wanted to jet”—Wilfred raised his hand like a plane taking off—“out of Kenya.”

  “People have fantasies.”

  “Suggs hid the papers when Ashon saw them.”

  “People don’t always want to share their fantasies. Did Ashon tell the GSU?”

  “He tried, but they told him to shut up. Like you, man. They don’t listen. Ashon said Shabaab, Shabaab, Shabaab is all they talk about.”

  The fact that Suggs had been checking out real estate didn’t interest Wells nearly as much as the fact that the police didn’t care. They seemed intent on ignoring any lead that didn’t point to Somalia.

  “Nice job, Wilfred. You get anything else, you tell me.”

  Wells spent the next couple hours searching Owen and Scott’s trailer, which was littered with brochures for safari camps in the Tsavo game parks. Those were two hundred miles southwest of Dadaab, nearly as close to Dadaab as Lamu. The parks would have been a natural choice for a vacation, one that Owen and Scott seemed to have considered. Then they’d decided to go to Lamu instead, with Suggs encouraging them. Suggs. Wells wondered if he shouldn’t have stayed in Nairobi, tried to find Suggs’s wife.

  He was leaving the trailer when his phone buzzed. Shafer.

  “How’s it going?”

  “I’m in Dadaab.”

  “Finding anything?”

  “Bits. Suggs, the fixer, I think he was probably involved, but it’s just my gut so far. And the Kenyan police seem obsessed with proving Shabaab’s behind this. From what I can see, they’ve hardly looked at him. They’re not even here. You get anything from Fort Meade?”

  “You think I’m calling just to hear your voice? They ran all three numbers. The international is clean. Incoming calls from the families, press, WorldCares in Houston. One of the locals is the same. Thompson used it for calls to other Kenyan numbers, and we’ve found almost all of them. The police, other aid agencies, other local WorldCares employees.”

  “And the third number?”

  “That one’s a problem. The problem is it doesn’t exist. It’s not a working number in Kenya or anywhere else. Never has been. You sure you wrote it down right?”

  Wells eyed his phone like a baseball player checking out his glove after an error: I blame you. “Yes. He gave it to me twice.”

  “Did you call it when you were in the room with him, hear it ring?”

  “No.”

  “You know, four years ago the Texas attorney general investigated the charities in the state that spent the most money on fund-raising and the least on programs. WorldCares was high on the list. Thompson wasn’t indicted or anything like that, but the report isn’t pretty.”

  “The woman in charge here told me something similar.” Wells explained what Moss had said. “But she also said they’ve come back strong. Tripled fund-raising and spending more on programs. Why blow everything up?”

  “Think like a grifter, John. When things are going good, that’s when you press your luck. Double down.”

  “If you’re right, why would he let me come here and give me the run of the place? He didn’t have to. Could have said it was too dangerous for me.”

  “Maybe he thinks you’re too dumb to find anything.”

  “Thank you, Ellis.”

  “Another fun fact. You know Thompson’s got that new book coming out. It’s not even being published for two months, but since that press conference it’s number one on Amazon.”

  “You think he’d let his nephew get kidnapped for a book?”

  “I think you better get that third phone of his so the smart boys can trace it.”

  “Unfortunately, he’s in Nairobi.”

  “Then get him to Dadaab.” Shafer hung up.

  —

  “Couldn’t stay away?” Moss said when he walked into her office.

  “How many phones does James have?”

  “Two, I think.” She scrolled through her own phone. “I have two numbers for him. One local, one U.S.”

  “Could he have had a second local handset?”

  “Don’t know why. We all use Safaricom here and it works fine.”

  “Can you get him back here?”

  “That’s up to him. He’s the boss, remember?”

  “Okay, say I can convince him to come back. Can he charter a plane tonight?”

  “Nobody sane will fly to Dadaab at night. Tomorrow morning is the best you can do. But you’ll need a good reason.”

  “I’ll think of one.”

  “He has another phone?”

  “I saw it. Last night in the hotel. And he lied to me about it.”

  “So what will you tell him?”

  Wells
paused. “What about, I think I’ve found the volunteers, that they’re here, and I want to saddle up tomorrow and go in and get them. I’ll tell him I’m gung-ho and locked and loaded. And if he asks you, you tell him that you think I’m dumb enough to do it.”

  “But what if you’re right and he knows they’re not here?”

  “Then he has to come. To stop me from causing a riot or worse. Whatever he’s got planned, that’s not part of the program.”

  “Okay, say it works. You get him on a plane. But there’s one thing I don’t see. What are you going to do with him when he lands?”

  7

  LANGLEY

  Age brought wisdom. So Shafer had heard. He disagreed.

  He was closing in on seventy, old enough to know the truth. His friends and neighbors and college classmates hadn’t grown wiser over the years. They’d just grown more like themselves, become more of whatever they were when they were young. The introverts faded into oblivion. The lazy divided their time between television and naps. The business guys played golf every day, shooting ninety-five with fifteen mulligans. The drinkers . . . they drank. Until they died.

  Shafer didn’t understand any of them. So few winks left on this mortal coil, and they wanted to golf? He tried not to spend time with anyone his age, though all too often he had no choice. Only his wife understood how he felt. His friends didn’t want to hear about their mortality, and nobody under fifty had a clue what he meant. They thought they did, but they didn’t. They couldn’t help but find him ridiculous. Young people always found their elders ridiculous. Just you wait, sonny . . .

  So Shafer worked. A few months ago, he’d admitted the truth. No more talk of retirement. He would come to Langley until the guards locked his office and dragged him out. He guessed he’d become more like himself, too. He was sharper and more impatient and more cynical than he’d been when he joined the agency almost forty years before. And he’d been plenty cynical then. Working in Africa in the 1970s had wiped away any and all his illusions about human nature. Sometimes he thought that Idi and Mobutu and the rest of the Big Men were running their own private game to see who could be most brutal, most decadent, most flat-out evil. I’ll see your gold-plated electric testicle clamps and raise you a soup bowl made of a human skull. First prize was eternity in hell. Second prize was eternity minus a day. But young Ellis Shafer didn’t protest. No one from the agency did. Human rights had been even lower on Langley’s priority list back then.