We shifted about uncomfortably like we hadn’t done our homework. I had heard the term—the Madison Police Department had a racist institutional memory even though it had a black chief—but I had never really thought about it.
“You have the visionary, the charismatic boss who comes and makes changes. But the institution doesn’t change with the leader; the institution is run by the middle management, down to the secretaries and the guys collecting the garbage. There are the rules and regulations, and then there is the way things have always been done. We are functionaries who have realized their power. The boss decides the color of the car, we decide the make and how much to spend. IDESC is the most powerful organization in the world, because we control the men and women who control the world,” he went on.
“Your powerful people, do they know what’s going on?” Muddy asked.
“No. Isn’t that the whole point? We need their honesty. In Kenya, after creating a vacuum, our fronts are going to be called in to help guide and stabilize the government.
“Look here, my friends, we have disaster prevention programs for just about everything—epidemics, floods and hurricanes, wildfires—but not for political disasters. People die from hunger because of bad politics, malaria has not been eradicated because of bad governance, and then there is war. This is where we come in. We manage political disasters before they happen,” he said, banging his hand on the table excitedly.
He paused. “May I refresh your glasses?” he asked, standing up and walking to the mini-bar. We declined and he fixed himself several double shots.
“Kenya is our coming-out party. We are going to take Kenya, bring it to its knees, and then rebuild it,” he said.
“Why not start with Somalia?” I asked.
“Are you listening to anything I’m saying? You have to have institutions; cut off the head, replace the organs, transfuse blood, and something new and beautiful grows. Somalia is a Frankenstein of a state,” he continued, explaining patiently.
“IDESC—Kimani, let’s get back to that,” O said, and looked at his watch.
“Let IDESC take Kenya and see what we do with it. If you don’t like the results in five years, come for me, come for all of us,” he said, sounding like he expected us to join him in the end, like we were bound to see things his way in time.
“Why the meeting? What did you discuss?”
“Delaware called the meeting—to give us an update and to suggest we take countermeasures in case we had been exposed.”
“What countermeasures?” O asked.
“Disband—and walk away—and start afresh. We are the organization,” he answered. “Our plan was working. If you hadn’t interfered, we would be in control by now.”
“Delaware—what else does he have planned? More bombs?” O asked.
He sipped his drink and winced in pain, but he didn’t respond.
“You’re running out of time. Tell us what you planned at the meeting and we will let you live,” O said, sounding a bit tired.
Kimani looked at his watch and smiled painfully. Somewhere in the back of my head I heard Sahara’s plane lifting off. We had been filibustered.
O hadn’t broken him—he had scared him into taking us seriously, but the sudden show of violence and the humiliation hadn’t really made a difference. The information he was giving us was already old news. Helpful, in that we now knew things we didn’t know before, but it was all yesterday’s news. This is why we had found nothing in Sahara’s office, and why he had blown up the IDESC offices, and why, in this room, a man who had come to a business meeting had no useful papers, no laptop, not even a briefcase.
Once we entered the room, Kimani’s strategy had been to try and win us over, because at that moment there were only two possible outcomes—we converted or we killed him—what middle ground could there be? And when that failed, to keep us in the room as long as he could, to buy time for Sahara.
I wanted to get at least one concrete detail that we could use. By this time tomorrow there would be nothing linking IDESC to the Norfolk bombing, and it would reconstitute itself into something else—change location, move personnel around. We weren’t going to get them all, but we sure as hell could take out Sahara. With their military arm cut off, it would take longer to regroup.
O also knew the interview was over—in the same way that Kimani knew he had taken it as far as it could go. O turned up the volume and he started walking toward Kimani, but then I motioned for him and Muddy to leave.
Kimani’s eyes opened wide in disbelief, trying to beg for his life, as he saw me walking back toward him, holding a pillow. I placed it on the back of his head and pressed it down with my Glock. In spite of himself, he was shaking.
“One last chance … you think you don’t have a choice. Tell us what we need to know, and I will walk out,” I said to him.
“How do I know you won’t kill me after I am of no use to you?”
“Because I give you my word between two men—you understand that language,” I said. He didn’t respond.
“You knew Jack Mpande was at the hotel, yes?”
“Yes—we knew,” he answered.
“Why did you want to kill him?” I asked.
“You know why,” he countered.
“Are there more bombs?”
“I am a believer, Mr. Ishmael. I am a believer in what we do. How can I betray my faith?”
“Kimani, you might not think so, but you’re done. It was over the moment the bomb went off, when your organization killed O’s wife, when you cornered us … but tonight we can all walk out of here, for now …” I reasoned with him. I guess that in the same way he had wanted us to take his offer, I now wanted him to take mine.
He sighed.
“I’m very sorry this is the choice you’ve made,” I said.
“Son, I too am sorry that this is the choice you have made,” he said to me. He started whispering a quick prayer.
Suddenly, the phone rang. He stopped his prayers and looked at it.
I shot him.
CHAPTER 16
AMOS’S FATHER
There was one last thing we had to do before leaving the U.S. Amos—we had to go see his parents, explain what had happened, give them closure, and, with a little bit of luck, learn exactly what it was that got him killed. We had to do it—it was the reason we were in the States.
Our cover had been blown and we were risking being thrown into Guantánamo or some other hellhole, or simply being tried for murder in the U.S.—it was stupid not to just leave, but that ever-blurry line between us and the criminals had to be maintained. That’s how I explained it to myself, yet I also knew I wanted to claim back a bit of my conscience from this thing I had become.
Amos’s father lived in an apartment complex in Compton, and I drove us there in a nondescript white Hyundai that Julio had managed to “rent” for us.
Kimani was still on my conscience—O, Muddy, and I had yet to talk about it—not even after we got back to Michael’s for a sleepless night. And now that Mo was with us, on our mission to see Amos’s father, it gave us more time to bury what had happened with silence.
For all the barbed wire wrapped around sharp metal stakes on the concrete walls, there was no gate and so we just walked in. We didn’t attract any curiosity; our look of desperation ensured that we fit right into this hard world of poverty, drugs, violence, and most of all hopelessness. That was the difference between the projects and Julio’s slum—hopelessness. In Julio’s slum, there was still fight left in the residents.
There was a black cop, alert and ready to prove himself, doing his beat. He glared at us and smacked his lips, daring us to make one wrong move. It wasn’t because he recognized us from anywhere; it’s just what you’re supposed to do when you make eye contact in the projects—you convey violence. I looked back at him casually, because to look away would suggest that we were doing something wrong. With his nightstick, he pointed to the door. He had to have the last word and that was okay
by us.
We walked up steps that smelled of stale urine. Eventually we got to the apartment and I knocked. An old man, dressed in faded, blue-striped pajamas in spite of the time of day, opened the door without even looking through the dusty peephole. He was holding a bottle of Hennessey in one hand and a joint in the other. He waved us in.
“Sir, ain’t you gonna ask who we are?” I asked him, trying to sound like I still belonged.
He looked at us and laughed.
“You planning on telling—ain’t yah?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just shrugged his shoulders, and so we walked in. He cleared an old black leather couch for us and asked us to sit down.
I introduced myself, then O and Muddy, giving him our real names and professions. I explained that Mo was a reporter from the Madison Times and she was writing a story about the case we were working on.
“That’s a name you got on you there, son. But you ain’t from Africa …” he said to me after I was done.
“I’m from Madison, Wisconsin,” I said.
“What is a country boy doing living all the way up in Africa?”
I explained as best and as fast as I could.
“Now, what I can do for you?” he asked. He passed the bottle and the weed over to me. I took a small sip and passed both to O. For a moment, I was young again and back in Madison with my boys, being all tough in an empty Wal-Mart parking lot, drinking and smoking cigarettes.
“Sir, I’m afraid I might have some bad news,” I said.
“Of course you do, son, of course you do. Why else would you ‘sir’ me? Out with it … time is no longer on my side,” he said, tapping at his wrist.
“You have a son by the name of Amos Apara?” I asked.
“Yes, that’s my boy,” he said, standing up and walking to the mantel. He took down a photograph and gave it to me. It was a photo of Amos at KICC, posing with the magnificent Jomo Kenyatta statue.
“He got bit by the Africa bug, just like you—you dig? And Africa has taken his life. I know coz, you see, son, my wife, she saw it before she passed on a year ago. She tells me … don’t wait for our boy, he ain’t coming back.” He motioned to us to walk with him.
We followed him to Amos’s room—the only room that didn’t have the stale smell of whiskey and weed in it. It was clean and recently painted. There were even fresh flowers beside a well-made bunk bed.
We looked at him in confusion. If he knew his son was dead, what was all this?
“No graveyard for my boy, this is where I come,” he answered our unasked question. “At least with my wife and our girl, I have some place I can go talk to ’em.” He excused himself and left the room.
Hanging on the wall, there were photos, arranged chronologically, of Amos in various countries. The last ones were all from Kenya and they had something in common. Counting the one downstairs where he was standing in front of the Kenyatta statue, they were all taken at the sites IDESC had been scouting. Was he trying to tell his parents, and now us, something? Or was it because his tourist sensibilities kicked in every so often? We had, after all, scoured the sites from top to bottom and found nothing. But it seemed like something bad was going to happen in all these places. We just had to find out what, and how far along Sahara was with his plans.
Mo called to us. She was taking a photograph of a short handwritten letter from Amos to his parents, dated four years ago. Muddy started reading it aloud.
“Popsicle and Momsicle,” the letter started, and in spite of the solemnity of the “graveyard room,” we had to laugh.
If you had a chance to kill Hitler before he became Hitler, wouldn’t you? Not exactly my work, but we have a chance to do a lot of good by preventing a lot of bad. I can’t say more but just know I am out here doing the “Lord’s work” as Popsicle would say.
Your Sonsicle,
Amos
It made sense in the context of what Kimani had told us … they wanted to prevent political disasters before they happened. We still didn’t have a clear picture … until we spoke with Mpande and Sahara we wouldn’t know exactly what was going on. But that they were on some kind of preemptive agenda gone bad was clear.
Next to the letter, there was a cryptic postcard, posted a few days before the bombing: “Resigning. Coming home soon. Almost done!”
He had drawn an arrow pointing to the face of the postcard. On the front of the card there was an ostrich burying its head in the sand. Amos had died fighting Sahara and his men, after he stopped pretending that he didn’t know what was going on.
Amos’s father walked back into the room, dressed in a heavily decorated Vietnam War–era soldier’s uniform. He holstered a pistol before standing at attention, then falling back at ease.
“Now, in this room, tell me what happened to my only son,” he said. He could sense from the moment we walked in that we were here to confirm what he already knew. He had been in mourning for so long that he could afford to delay the moment of truly knowing until he was ready. I explained all we knew, with Muddy and O filling in bits here and there. All the while, he was listening, sometimes asking a question, other times just nodding.
“I want to shed blood for my son, not my tears. I want the men you say did this,” he said, his voice heavy, trembling in anger and determination.
“You cannot come back with us,” Muddy said gently. “But I promise you we will get the men who killed him. But first bury your son … properly.”
“No, let him rest in Kenya—his ancestors are from Africa. He is home. I want blood—you have names. Give them to me,” he half-pleaded and half-commanded.
I started to say no, but he walked over to O.
“Your wife, my son …” he said fiercely.
O asked me for my phone and copied the names and addresses of the five IDESC men residing in California onto a piece of paper.
“I’ve been holding my peace too long—what good is it? Peace fed my family to the dogs—picked off one by one by thugs, police, and by life itself—don’t make the same mistake,” he said as Muddy looked at me.
“We’re leaving for Kenya. You are on your own, old man,” I said, not sure why I was angry with him.
“Ain’t that the truth, son … ain’t that the truth,” he said, reminding me of Mary’s mother.
“It’s suicide—you get one or two—then what? Let us do our jobs?” I said, half-heartedly trying to talk him out of it.
What did it matter anyway? We were never going to get them all. The most Mo’s story would do was embarrass them into resigning—they would regroup. Their brand of evil—patient, cold, methodical, and impersonal—would survive anything human. They would be at it until we won or they were all killed off, every last one of them.
“My boy, he thought history was more important than family—and he wanted to change the world—things he saw down in South Africa, things I seen in Georgia …” he began, as if giving the eulogy that he had been practicing for years. Like mourners in a funeral, we had to let him finish, no matter how long it took.
I wanted to pull the old man to the side and talk to him—I wanted to tell him just how exhausted I was, how for days I hadn’t slept more than a few hours. And then he would ask why, and I would say that the life I had been living and the one that I wanted to live were pulling me apart. I would point at Muddy and say “because I love her” and say “there is O, my best friend and best man.” I would tell him that was real but so was all the wrong behind us. And what did I want him to say? If he were a wasted old man at Broadway’s, what would he say? That you cannot live two lives? I silently promised myself that if Muddy and I survived Sahara and his madness, I would take her to meet my parents. It had been years since I had felt that I was a son with responsibilities to those who called me “son.” If a father’s duty didn’t end, even after the death of his son, how could mine to my parents, who were still living?
I still had the Glock and the extra clips from the cop back in Berkeley. I placed the one I had
used to kill Martin Kimani on the table.
“Look, old man, that is the gun I used to kill one of the men responsible for your son’s death. If you ain’t planning on coming back, take it,” I said.
He took it.
“A one-way ticket to hell,” he said absentmindedly, as he removed his World War–something pistol from his holster and replaced it with the Glock, which fit awkwardly.
Muddy pulled me away and took his hand, then hugged him. “Kill as many of them as you can,” she said. I imagined that he had held on to life just long enough for us to walk through that door and make his revenge mission possible, to kill one enemy for all the other wrongs that had been done to him and those he loved.
“This shit is getting way too crazy—I can’t be a part of it,” Mo said, looking angrily at me. She was right, I should have kept her at a protective distance, but I had been in Kenya too long.
“We’re a long way from Wisconsin. You can walk away, go to the police, or you can stay with the old man and hear his whole story,” I said to her.
“Think of yourself as embedded—a covert front line,” Muddy said humorously.
The old man took Mo’s hand and led her toward the kitchen.
“I got a lot speaking to do. I got another bottle of something sweet stashed somewhere,” he said.
“Shit, old man, I might as well drink my damn career down the drain,” Mo said as she followed him.
If Christ had rejected the idea of a messiah, the trappings and cultishness, and yet believed he was the messiah—that would be Sahara. He worked well with others; he hated anything that got in the way of the mission. He was efficient, ruthless, but always for a reason. Imagine Jesus with all that power, now imagine if all he had was the clarity of his mission—that was Sahara. It didn’t stop others from believing in him—and doubting him: that was the paradox. The more he shunned the messiah complex, the more people believed in him. But Amos had doubted, and he had died.
O and I shook Amos’s father’s hand, and the three of us left, knowing one thing: it was going to get messier.
Black Star Nairobi Page 21
