by C. S. Graham
“No. What is it?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“We shouldn’t be long. I think there’s a small airport outside of Soria where you can land.”
“Soria? Where the hell you going?”
“A place called Medinaceli.”
Chapter 52
High Atlas Mountains, Morocco: Monday 5 February 10:25 A.M. local time
Noah took a grand taxi out of the city toward the southwest, climbing up into the towering peaks and fertile valleys of the High Atlas Mountains. As they rose higher and higher, the road narrowed into a series of hairpin turns cut through a stony, barren landscape. Earth-colored pisé hamlets, far flung and half deserted, clung to the high slopes or huddled in wadis beside trickling streams. By the time they climbed to the Tizi-n-Tichka Pass, a cold wind was buffeting the ancient Mercedes and Noah could see icy streaks of snow lying in the shadows at the edge of the road. He realized too late that he was plunging blithely into a wild, primitive, sparsely inhabited land. And he felt it again, that shameful, sick fear that brought a sheen of sweat to his face and clenched his gut.
On the far side of the pass, his driver turned off onto a bleak, deserted road that dropped down a steep valley to the casbah of Telouet. Once, this had been the grand residence of el-Glaoui, the pasha of Marrakech. But then el-Glaoui had made the mistake of supporting the French in their war against the king. When the French pulled out, el-Glaoui and his family were exiled, their lands seized, their gracious, fortified palaces left to crumble. Now, Telouet was little more than a huddle of humble houses sheltered behind the shattered towers and red-toned high walls of the ruined casbah.
Opening the car door, Noah staggered as the brisk cold wind hit him in the face. The driver, a Berber by the name of Mustapha, pointed to his watch in warning; they would need to leave within the hour if they wanted to make it back to Marrakech before nightfall. Noah certainly had no desire to be stranded in the wilds of the Atlases after dark.
Winding around the side of the casbah’s soaring red walls, Noah followed a dusty track to the hamlet itself, a huddle of small shops and high-windowed houses with thick pisé—rammed earth—walls and flat brush roofs. He was just wondering how the hell he was supposed to find Michael Hawkins if the man chose not to be found when he spotted the American missionary seated in a slice of sunshine at one of the battered white metal tables in front of a combination rustic café and rug shop that faced the road.
Gone were the preppy chinos and pressed white dress shirt of the smiling young man in Linda’s photograph. In their place, Hawkins wore the striped handwoven djellaba of the Berbers, with a pointed hood he had pushed back off his head. He was sipping a cup of chai and watching Noah’s approach through narrowed eyes.
Stepping up onto the flagstoned terrace, Noah set Linda’s silver-and-enamel ring on the rusty surface of the table before the young missionary. “A mutual friend said to give you this.”
Hawkins stared at the ring. He made no move to pick it up. After a moment, he raised his gaze to Noah’s face. “What do you want?”
“Information. I’m a journalist.”
Hawkins laughed. He took one more sip of his chai, grimaced, then pushed to his feet and walked off down the road toward the casbah.
Noah scooped up the ring and shoved it back into his pocket as he followed. “I understand you were a missionary in Sierra Leone,” Noah said, trotting to catch up with him.
Hawkins cast him a quick glance but kept walking, his boots kicking up little eddies of dust as he cut across the heaps of crumbling rubble. After a half century of neglect, much of the palace was collapsing into rusty red mounds of dissolving brick and fragmented stone. “And if I was?” he asked after a moment.
“I want to know what happened to the former president of Sierra Leone.”
Wordlessly, Hawkins ducked through a low doorway.
After a moment’s hesitation, Noah followed him.
He found himself in an ancient courtyard of worn earth-colored walls and sagging arcades, still miraculously standing against the elements. Hawkins was already disappearing down a shadowy passage. Noah plunged after him.
“How much do you know about Warren Patterson?” Hawkins asked without looking back.
Noah said, “I know he’s been a leading member of the radical religious right for years.”
Hawkins gave a soft laugh. “That’s one way to put it. Before Patterson, most churches were either apolitical or dedicated to social work. They tended to focus on the part of the gospels where Jesus says stuff like, ‘Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave me food; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you invited me in; naked, and you clothed me; I was sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me.’ ”
“So what happened?”
“Warren Patterson happened. He’s probably the most successful—and wealthy—televangelist in history. He started a religious television network—Ministry Broadcasting Network, or MBN—using money donated to his church. On the surface that seems okay because his network was running a lot of Christian programming. Only it started making so much money that it could no longer be part of his ‘nonprofit’ ministry. So Patterson had the ministry sell MBN to him, personally, for almost nothing. And then he took the company public and made several hundred million dollars from the sale of the stock.”
The passage they were following erupted suddenly into a vast, stunningly well-preserved reception room with Andalusian-style engraved stuccowork and a painted wooden ceiling that took Noah’s breath away. It was a moment before he could say, “Is that legal?”
Hawkins swung to face him. Here, in this frigid, abandoned Arabian-nights setting, he looked more like a Berber warrior than a Christian missionary. “Legal? What does legality have to do with it? The only thing that matters is that no one in the Justice Department has the balls to go after a certified ‘man of God’ like Patterson. So Patterson was free to take his hundreds of millions and look around for some investments.”
“And he looked at Sierra Leone? Why Sierra Leone?”
“Because it’s one of the richest countries in Africa—or rather, it should be. The problem is, all that mineral wealth goes to one man: the president. Up until six months ago, that was a guy named Jeffrey Koboto. Imagine your typical African dictator on steroids, and you’ve got President Koboto: torture, extortion, extrajudicial killings, systematic rapes, child soldiers—you name it, he was into it. Things got so bad the UN slapped sanctions on him, and the U.S. went along with them. So Koboto went to Patterson.”
“I don’t get it. Why?”
“Patterson and his buddies have a long history of snuggling up to dictators. The dictators let the evangelists come in and set up missions—with the force of a very nasty state behind them. In return, Patterson and his friends have the connections to get the U.S. government to ignore things like UN sanctions or give them huge arms packages. So Koboto announces that—thanks to Patterson—he and his countrymen are all saved for Jesus, and Patterson convinces the State Department that Koboto is really a misunderstood nice guy so they ought to lift the sanctions. Then Patterson and his buddies get a huge diamond mining concession from Koboto as a way of saying thank you.”
“Who are Patterson’s buddies?” Noah asked sharply.
“Keefe Corporation and Carlyle Enterprises. The three of them formed a company in the Cayman Islands they call Kingdom Mining.”
“That’s sick. How do you come into all this?”
“I was part of the window dressing. Koboto dedicated Sierra Leone to Jesus, and I was sent in to help coordinate the missions to convert the natives.” A muscle went into convulsions along Hawkins’s jawline.
“And?” prompted Noah.
The missionary went to stand before one of the vacant windows, its broken wrought-iron lights silhouetted against the barren landscape beyond. He
sucked in a deep breath that lifted his chest. “It’s . . . it’s a strange, twisted version of Christianity they’re pushing in Africa these days. This is not your grandmother’s gospels. It’s heavy into demons and witches and warriors, and it’s gotten all twisted up with the native-African religious beliefs into something that is truly ugly. I’ve seen little kids—sweet, innocent things no more than four or five years old—branded as witches by their village pastor and driven off into the jungles to die. Sometimes they’re killed outright, either by the other villagers or by their own parents. We’re talking about thousands of children, all across Africa, being killed in the name of Jesus. It’s . . . horrific.”
“Good God. Why?”
“Because the best way to unite people behind you is to give them a common enemy—an ‘other’ to hate and fear.”
“Their own children?”
Hawkins shrugged. “It works.”
“Patterson did nothing to stop it?”
“Patterson believes in witches and demons himself. They’re in the Bible. Besides, by that point, Patterson had problems of his own. You see, once Koboto got the State Department to lift the sanctions, he started making noises about taking away Patterson’s diamond mines and giving them to some Israeli outfit that was offering to sell him arms. So Patterson hooked up with Koboto’s nephew and arranged to have Koboto killed.”
“How do you know about this?”
Hawkins kept his gaze on the scene outside the window. A dusty Land Rover had driven up and disgorged two tourists. They were wearing djellaba similar to Hawkins’s over their frayed jeans and had camera bags thrown over their shoulders. Hawkins said, “I was there. I saw it happen. I saw how they did it.”
Noah felt his blood thrum with excitement. “So how did they do it? How did they kill him?”
Hawkins shook his head and swung away from the window.
Noah followed him through another low door, onto a terrace that looked out over the ruined bulk of the casbah and the harsh stony valley beyond. Noah said, “Koboto had a heart attack, right? He was forty-six years old and healthy, then he suddenly dropped dead. I heard they even had an autopsy done in France, to prove it wasn’t just another of your typical African coups. The autopsy showed nothing suspicious, just like with Vice President Bill Hamilton. You have heard about that, haven’t you?”
“I’ve heard.”
“I was in Davos when it happened. Standing right there, no more than a dozen feet away. I didn’t see a thing. You’ve got to tell me: How are they doing this?”
Hawkins turned his face into the wind. His voice was a whisper. “If I tell you, they’ll kill me.”
Noah cast a significant look around, taking in the dusty red, windswept slopes and crude huddle of houses. “Are you kidding? They’re looking to kill you right now and you know it. That’s why you’re hiding here, in the middle of nowhere. Because you’re afraid they’ll kill you for what you know. Don’t you understand? Telling me, now—helping me bring these guys down—is the only chance you’ve got.”
Hawkins gave him a long, hard look. “Why should I trust you?”
“Because the woman who gave me the ring trusts me.”
The missionary set his jaw, hard. But after a moment, he seemed to come to some kind of a decision. “I’ve got something to show you.”
Noah followed Hawkins down a set of worn steps that curved around to come out on the far side of the casbah. There, a row of three houses with earthen walls and high windows framed with ancient wood faced onto the ruined palace. Ducking through one of the low doorways, Hawkins emerged a moment later carrying something small and dark. “Here,” he said, handing it Noah. “Take it.”
Noah found himself holding a black rectangular box connected by a wire to a small cylinder. He stared at it. “What the hell is it?”
Hawkins shook his head. “I don’t know. All I know is, don’t press that button and point it at anyone you don’t want to die.”
Noah turned the strange device over in his hands. Carefully. “How did you get it?”
“After they killed Koboto, they gave it to me to get rid of. Can you believe that? Like I was one of them. They just took it for granted I’d have no problem with the fact they murdered a man.”
“Sounds to me like if anyone ever deserved to be eliminated, it’s this Koboto character.”
“You’d think. Except, believe me, the nephew makes Koboto look like Mother Teresa. It wasn’t Koboto’s crimes that got him killed. It was all that money. As far as Patterson is concerned, he and his cronies can do anything they want. Anything. It doesn’t matter how vile it is as long as they’re doing God’s work—or what they convince themselves is God’s work. They lie, steal, kill—just like David and Solomon. Because, you see, as far as they’re concerned, they’re the new Chosen Ones, which means they’re held to a different standard of accountability.”
Noah glanced up at him. “You don’t believe that?”
Hawkins shook his head. “Seems to me if God were going to work through people, he’d hold them to a higher standard of accountability than everyone else. Not a lower one.”
“So you took this device and ran?”
Hawkins drew in a breath that raised his chest and nodded.
“Why here?”
He shrugged. “It’s where I ended up. The Berbers are an incredibly hospitable people. They don’t judge me. They don’t try to proselytize me. I’ve learned a lot from them.” He gave a wry smile. “And I can repay them by helping them sell their rugs. I was a marketing major in college, you know.”
Noah held up the deadly device. “Can I have this?”
Hawkins put up both hands, palms facing forward, as if holding Noah at bay. “Please. Take it.” He squinted up at the westering sun. “If you’re planning to make it back to Marrakech before nightfall, you should get going.”
They turned to walk along the base of the casbah’s towering walls, toward where Noah had left his grand taxi. They could see the two tourists farther up the hill, near the café/rug shop. One of them, a woman, had the hood of her djellaba thrown back, revealing long, straight blond hair.
Noah stared at her.
Hawkins said, “You will write about this? Get the story published?”
Noah glanced at him. “Can I quote you on any of this?”
Hawkins drew up sharply, the heels of his boots scraping across the small stones in the path as he pivoted to face Noah. “God, no.”
“But without you as a source—”
“No.” Hawkins nodded to the strange device in Noah’s hands. “You have the weapon. It’s enough. Or at least, it’ll have to be enough. I can’t—”
He broke off. Following his gaze, Noah saw the blond woman reach into her camera bag and come up with a machine pistol.
Chapter 53
“Jesus Christ!” Noah shouted, diving behind the low earthen wall beside them just as the two “tourists” opened fire. Looking back, he saw Hawkins throw up his hands and stagger, jerking again and again as the bullets ripped into him. Then he went down hard.
Noah didn’t want to look at what the spray of bullets had done to the missionary’s head and chest. Choking back a sob, he hunkered low, bending almost double as he ran along what smelled like a goat pen. Reaching the backs of the houses, he darted out into the road and saw the dusty old grand taxi barreling toward him.
Noah waved his arms frantically. The driver hit the brakes and threw open the passenger door. Noah dove in just as the Moroccan gunned the accelerator again.
They peeled off, stones flying, the door swinging shut as Noah struggled to right himself. A round of machine-gun fire chewed into the side of the Mercedes, shattering the window of Noah’s door and sending glass flying.
“Y’allah!” shouted the driver, roaring up the hillside.
Jerking the seat belt down across his chest, Noah threw a quick glance behind. Through the dust he could see the two killers running for their Land Rover. He realized he was still h
olding the cylinder of Hawkins’s strange weapon clenched in one hand, the rectangular piece dangling by the wire. Sitting forward he swung his pack off his back and brought it into his lap. He was shaking so badly he had a hard time opening the zipper so he could shove the contraption inside.
They tore up the narrow, twisting road, tires squealing on the turns, engine laboring hard as the incline steepened. Piles of sun-blasted red boulders reared up on their left, the other side of the road falling away in a sickening plunge Noah tried not to think about.
“Haihum jayyeen,” said the driver, his eyes on the rearview mirror. “Meen hummeh?” He threw a quick glance at Noah. “Meen inta?”
Noah shrugged his shoulders helplessly, not understanding. Slewing around in the seat, he saw the Land Rover come roaring up behind them. His heart felt as if it were wedged up in his throat. As he watched, the woman leaned out the passenger window, her blond hair flying in the wind, and sprayed them with another round of machine-gun fire.
Noah yelped and ducked low. He could hear the bullets pinging into the metal, glass flying as first one, then another window blew out.
“Can’t you go any faster?” he shouted over the wind rushing in through the broken windows.
The driver—a plump, middle-aged man with a dark, sweat-sheened face and thick, gray-streaked mustache—gripped the steering wheel with both hands, his knuckles white. “My taxi,” he kept repeating over and over. “Look what they are doing to my taxi.”
Accelerating into a hairpin curve, he sent the big old Mercedes careening around the switchback, rear end fishtailing, just as the woman in the Land Rover opened fire again.
Bullets ripped the upholstery, shattered the dashboard. Noah felt a warm spray hit his face and knew it was blood. The big Mercedes spun out of control.
“Mustapha!” Noah screamed.
The taxi slammed sideways into the rocky cliff face. The impact sent the heavy car airborne. Noah had a weird sense of moving in slow motion, his world narrowing down to a tunnel-like vision of red rocks and barren scrub viewed through a cracked windshield as the car tilted sideways and kept going. It was as if they flew through a strange, dust-swirled, silent void, the old Mercedes executing a graceful pirouette through space.
