Night of Knives

by Jon Evans

  Veronica turns around. "We let her get rid of us too easy."

  * * *

  "My rule for couples has not changed in five minutes," Lydia says. Her voice is cool and distant, but Veronica sees wariness in her eyes.

  "We'd like to ask you some questions about Derek." Veronica indicates Jacob. "He was Derek's best friend."

  Lydia frowns. "He has never spoken to me of any friends."

  "What did he speak to you about?"

  "I think it is time for you to go."

  "We're not going anywhere until you start talking."

  Lydia takes a step back and begins to close the door. Jacob jumps forward and interposes himself before it closes.

  "If I raise my voice my protectors will come running here in two minutes!" Lydia says sharply. "With knives and guns! They will -"

  Jacob says, "Derek's dead."

  Lydia stops in mid-expostulation and stares at him as if slapped.

  "Haven't you heard?" Veronica asks, amazed. "It's been all over the news. Especially here. TV, newspapers, everything. He was one of the tourists kidnapped in Bwindi and taken into the Congo. So were we. We were with him."

  Lydia shakes her head faintly. "I do not read the newspapers."

  "But he should have called you by now, shouldn't he?" Veronica guesses. "Doesn't he call you every week?"

  Lydia says nothing, but her expression is confirmation enough.

  "I'm sorry," Jacob says gently. "It's true. He's gone."

  After a moment she asks, desperately, "If you say you were his friend - then what was the name of the girl who gave him his tattoo?"

  "Selima. In Sarajevo. She died the next day. There was a picture in his apartment."

  Lydia stares at Jacob and Veronica as if they are not just messengers but avatars of death. Then she sags backwards and sits down hard on the bed. Veronica sees for the first time how frail and sickly she is, how gaunt.

  Veronica enters the room. Jacob follows her and starts to close the door, but she grabs it before it shuts, it's bad enough being in this tiny room with an open door - bad, but Veronica doesn't feel in danger of a panic attack. She's too intent on what she's doing, they're so close to finding out something important, she can feel it.

  "You did something for him, didn't you?" Veronica asks Lydia, in the soft voice she used with anxious patients when she was a nurse. "Not sex. You were a friend. You did him favours."

  Lydia doesn't answer.

  "We're his friends too. We're trying to find out who was responsible for his death."

  "What will I do?" Lydia asks plaintively. "What can I do?"

  "Was he supporting you?"

  She laughs bitterly. "What do you think? Who else would have? I am illegal, from the Congo. I have no family here. I am too weak to work, I am dying. I have no clients any more, everyone can see I am sick. Derek brought me the new medicines, but it is too late for me, they don't work for me. He paid for this room, for my food, my life, everything. Without him I have nothing. I will die alone on the rubbish heap."

  "We'll take care of you," Jacob says. "Trust us."

  "Trust you." She sounds like she wants to spit.

  Veronica says nothing.

  When Lydia eventually speaks there is an awful resignation in her voice, as if she knows these are her last words. "He kept another room here. He came twice a week. He pretended that he came for me. Sometimes he brought his computer, but it is not there now. Yesterday I looked to see if he had come. It is almost empty now. A mobile phone, some papers."

  "A secret office," Jacob breathes. "No kidding. Let's go see this cell phone."

  "And papers," Veronica says.

  Jacob nods perfunctorily, as if paper is only an antiquated afterthought.

  Chapter 17

  "It's a Mango phone," Jacob reports happily, as he types on his computer and interprets the results that scroll across his screen. They have taken the fruits of their investigation - a wrinkled notebook and a cheap Nokia phone - back to his apartment. "Activated three months ago. Involved in a very small set of calls. None to me, none to Prester, none to that refugee camp, no overlap whatsoever with calls from his other phone. He made sure this one was totally separate. Calls to a Celtel number in Jinja, and get this, to a bunch of international numbers. Tanzania, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and the USA. Virginia area code. He received calls from the Zimbabwe number too. Those were the only incoming calls."

  Veronica stops leafing through the spiral-bound notebook. "Prester."

  "Prester?"

  "Look."

  She shows him the notebook. The front and back pages are empty; but a single page of enigmatic point-form notes is hidden in the middle, written in a close, spiderlike hand.

  "That's Derek's writing," Jacob confirms. "Know it anywhere."

  The single sheet of scribbled notes says:

  -Prester? Langley thinks yes

  -plausible: method, motive, opportunity

  -plus he's long-term consultant to Kisembe

  -$50 mil exports, "negligible" production, one conclusion

  -Coltan too

  -Ultimately minority owned by Selous Holdings - D.

  -Who is Zanzibar Sam? R. says arriving Kampala in a few weeks

  -Need second-source confirmation - wait on L.

  -Zanzibar - connection to Muslim world - Arab gold buyers in Congo

  -interahamwe smuggling unquestionable, Islamists only hearsay

  -Western connection likewise, likely through deniable cutouts

  -Freeze bought-off locals' bank accounts, see who they call?

  -Need. Hard. Evidence.

  "It'd be nice to find something that actually answers more questions than it asks." Veronica gloomily rereads the notes for the third time. "Zanzibar Sam? D and R and L? Kisembe? Langley?"

  "We'll make sense of it," Jacob reassures her. "We just have to be methodical about it. The scientific method."

  Veronica frowns. This doesn't feel anything like science to her. It feels more like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing, without even knowing what it's meant to represent.

  "Langley," Jacob says, rereading the notes. "Of course. That one I know. Langley, Virginia. CIA headquarters."

  "How do you know?"

  "I watch a lot of movies. Kisembe sounds like something we can Google." He opens a web browser, types, reads, nods. "A Ugandan gold mine. Which Derek thought was being used to hide gold smuggling. Minority owned by Selous Holdings." He types again, and frowns. "Which is not Googleable. Maybe on Edgar, or some other financial database -"

  "No," Veronica says suddenly. "No, you won't find anything. Selous is based in the Cayman Islands."

  Jacob turns and stares at her. "How do you know?"

  "Because I remember Danton talking about it. With business associates. At dinners and conferences. It was one of - I don't know if it was his, exactly, but it was a company he was involved with." She stares at the D. scrawled next to Selous Holdings. D for Danton. That D is her connection to Derek, the reason he invited her to Bwindi, the reason she was abducted, the reason she is here.

  "L for Lydia?" Jacob suggests. "Maybe she knows more than she's saying?"

  "I think she would have told us," Veronica says faintly. She feels dizzy.

  "I guess there's a lot of Ls out there. Don't suppose you got Mister Strick's first name, back in Goma?"

  She shakes her head. She feels warm fury beginning to burn inside her. Danton. This is all his fault. Their kidnapping, her week of horror, Derek's death, whatever the terrorists are plotting now – none of this would have happened if it wasn't for her ex-husband's squalid, criminal greed.

  "Wish we knew when this was written," Jacob muses.

  Veronica takes a deep breath and looks back at Derek's notes with new resolve. After a moment she says, "Does it really matter? Never mind all the complicated stuff. He was set up by whoever was making money off the smugglers. Look. First name on the sheet. First word. Prester."

 
; Jacob inclines his head slowly. "Yeah. Yes, it all makes sense. Derek gets sent here to look for evidence that Al-Qaeda are working with interahamwe, smuggling stuff in from the Congo. Then he starts suspecting his new partner is working with the smugglers too. That explains why he sets up a secret office in the Sun City. He went out to that refugee camp because that's where the smuggling happens. He makes some international calls from the Sun City and finds out that your ex's company is taking the gold and coltan, pretending they mined it here legally, and exporting it. With the help of some high-up Ugandans, see that last line? 'Bought-off locals?' And remember how Prester said his other clients were mining companies?" He shakes his head angrily. "Fifty million a year. That's a lot of money. Plenty of profits for everyone. Except the Congolese slaves, and who gives a fuck about them, right? Derek gets too close, Prester finds out, and gets his interahamwe friends to grab us all in Bwindi. Maybe he knew they were best friends forever with Al-Qaeda, maybe not. Anyway they outsource it to their friends, Gabriel and Patrice and company. It all makes perfect sense. Prester. It was all Prester all along."

  Veronica thinks of Prester in Goma, of the genuine grief in his voice when he talked about Derek. Suddenly she isn't so sure. It feels like they're forcing together two pieces that don't quite fit. "Except there's no evidence."

  "It's all circumstantial," Jacob admits. "But it all points his way."

  "Yes, but - I don't know. I don't think Prester is the type."

  "The type? What do you know about the type?"

  She smiles bitterly. "I was married to one, remember?"

  Jacob doesn't say anything.

  "Maybe we should go to Strick," she suggests.

  "No. For all we know Strick is in on it too. Even if he isn't, like you said, we don't actually have any evidence yet. All we have is a hypothesis, now we have to test it. We need hard data before we can go to the authorities. Something inarguable. Like he says here. Hard evidence. Proof."

  "Proof? How?"

  He says, "Prester has a Mango phone."

  * * *

  "I can't believe you can do this," Veronica says.

  Jacob shrugs. "A cell phone is just a two-way digital radio. The service provider controls the software. I have admin access to the service provider's systems. We can do pretty much anything we want."

  "But even when it's not turned on?"

  "Oh, it's on. It just looks off. From now on, when Prester pushes the off button, his screen goes dead but his phone stays active. It'll burn through juice faster than a phone that's really off, he'll have to recharge it more often, and the battery might stay warm. But the new Razr has good battery life and heat sinks, he probably won't even notice. His own fault for having a flashy new phone, really. I don't think I could do this to an old phone, their OS can't handle it."

  Veronica shakes her head wonderingly.

  "It's voice-activated, too," Jacob explains. He seems very proud of the surveillance software he has uploaded to Prester's cell phone. "Basically it comes to life when it hears something loud enough to understand. Otherwise it would chew through the battery in just a few hours, and we'd have to sift through endless junk. There's enough junk as is."

  That much is true. They have already spent most of an hour listening to Prester flirt with a girl at the post office, order a coffee somewhere, discuss Arsenal's Champions League prospects with an opinionated Chelsea fan, and complain to Uganda Online about DSL failures: not exactly the stuff of thrilling espionage stories.

  "I looked up Derek's calls from his secret phone," Jacob says. "The ones to Tanzania were actually to Zanzibar. It's like a province of Tanzania, but it's all Muslim. His notes talk about Zanzibar Sam, and Zanzibar as a gateway to the Islamic world. I figure this Zanzibar Sam is the link between the interahamwe and Al-Qaeda."

  "Makes sense."

  "Yeah. Almost everything makes sense. Almost."

  "What doesn't?"

  Jacob says, "Zimbabwe."

  Veronica looks at him, confused. "Zimbabwe? What do you mean?"

  "It just keeps popping up. Derek's calls to and from Zimbabwe. Those were the only calls he received on that phone. Those soldiers that rescued us, and their general. Susan used to work in Zimbabwe. And Danton's mother was born there, right?"

  "Sort of. It was called Rhodesia back then."

  Veronica tries to remember what she knows about Zimbabwe. Until a decade ago it was wealthy and prosperous nation, by African standards. Then its president, Robert Mugabe, went crazy and threw out almost all its white landowners, their farms were ruined and disused, the violence stopped tourists from coming, and Zimbabwe's economy nosedived. Now it has the lowest life expectancy in all of Africa.

  "Maybe it's just coincidence. But it's kind of weird. I was thinking of calling that number there, seeing who answered."

  "You think that's a good idea? What are you going to say to them?"

  "I don't know. Now that Prester's back I figure we should wait on him. He's our best bet for a breakthrough."

  A long silence falls.

  "I went to the Speke Hotel for a beer last night," Jacob says. "Start wondering about what this place was like when Amin was in charge. I read about him before I came here. He ran the whole country into the ground. You couldn't even get candles or light bulbs, so almost everything was dark at night. And in the day they didn't have air conditioning, so they kept all the windows open in the government buildings. They'd torture people to death every day there, and the windows were open, they had to be, otherwise it was too hot to torture. People sitting in the fancy hotels across the street, diplomats and mining executives and journalists and so on, they'd hear the screaming, and they'd just keep on eating their lunch. Crazy, eh?"

  Veronica grimaces.

  "The more I know about this continent, the crazier it gets. Have you actually gotten to know any Africans? I mean, personally?"

  She thinks a moment. "No. Not really. Lots of expats and NGO workers. I live in a bubble. We all do. There are lots of Africans at work, they're big on local hires, but I don't really talk to them."

  "Did you notice Henry has a furball dangling from his rearview mirror? Like fuzzy dice. He says it's muti, magic, a fetish, keeps the car safe. And he's a Jehovah's Witness. I figure, OK, basically no formal education, ignorant cultural superstition, right? But these African guys at work, they're Western-educated, university degrees, super-smart. I started talking to them about it, and they got all weird. Like scared. Changed the subject, walked away."

  "Athanase had a little fur pouch around his neck," Veronica remembers.

  "Derek said it was a big deal around here. Black magic and witch doctors. No one talks about it to Westerners, but it's a huge, huge influence. And tribes too, tribal politics, their tribe matters to them a lot more than their country. Why shouldn't it, it was Europeans who mapped out their borders, right? Derek said a lot of the things that apparently don't make sense in Africa, at least to our eyes, are actually down to black magic and tribal politics."

  "Yeah, well, he's dead now, isn't he?"

  Eric stares at her.

  "Sorry. I don't want to talk about Derek. I know you were his best friend. I'm sorry."

  "It's okay."

  "I hardly knew him, right? I shouldn't care." Veronica sighs, decides to confess. "I had this monster crush on him. I didn't even want to admit it, not even to myself, but, like, the morning after I met him, I woke up with part of my mind imagining our future together. That kind of crush. You know what I mean?" Jacob nods. "Like he was the man I should have married. It was crazy. I'm sure it was just, I don't know, rebound, psychological reaction to divorce, whatever. But it felt like he was all I ever should have wanted in the first place."

  Jacob shrugs. "Well. If it's any consolation, he was a great guy, but I never thought he treated his girlfriends particularly well. Actually he was kind of an asshole to women. Sorry."

  She doesn't say anything.

  "I knew him since I was eleven. We were the two
biggest geeks in junior high. We used to spend every lunch hour playing Dungeons and Dragons. Just the two of us, because no one else would talk to us. We were best friends the whole way through high school. Even in university, even when he got into drugs and flipped out, we still hung out all the time. He even got me laid. Quite a feat back in those days."

  "I can imagine," Veronica says without thinking.

  Jacob laughs good-naturedly. "You have no idea."

  "Then he went to Bosnia?" she asks, interested despite herself.

  "Yeah. He must have barely passed the physicals. But when he came back he'd turned into, like, a Superman action figure. All muscle. Like you saw." Jacob pauses. "He was different when he came back. I don't know. Haunted. But we were still friends. I don't know if we would have been if we had met then for the first time, but we had momentum, you know? So we stayed pretty tight."

  Veronica nods.

  "And it was cool being friends with him. I'd brag on him all the time, my adventurer best friend working in all these crazy places. Haiti, Thailand, Iraq, then here. The last five years, we didn't see each other much, he didn't get along well with his folks, he'd come back to Canada maybe once a year. I was so looking forward to coming out here and hanging out with him. I was kind of sick of living vicariously, you know? This was supposed to be my big adventure. It was going to be so great. And now, bam, he's gone. If he'd gotten cancer or something there would at least have been some warning, you know? It feels like he's not supposed to be gone. I keep half-thinking like somehow he actually faked his death and he's going to pop up any moment with a big grin on his face and tell me the whole story."

  Veronica can't think of anything to say.

  The computer speakers come to life. Both of them twitch with surprise, lean towards Jacob's laptop and listen intently. The sound quality is claustrophobic and muffled, like that of an accidental pocket-call from a cell phone, and further blurred by engine noise from some kind of vehicle, so Prester's voice wavers between clear and indistinct:

  "Just got back into … halfway from Entebbe … tomorrow night … Yeah … No shit. Well, I'm ready to bring in Zanzibar Sam. Tonight? Usual time and place, then. Cheers."