Night of Knives

by Jon Evans

  A long moment passes. Prester stares at them like he's never seen white people before. Then he demands, "What the fuck?"

  Veronica and Jacob don't know how to respond. Prester looks into the vehicle, sees Henry. "Who's this?"

  "My driver," Jacob says weakly. "Henry. He doesn't know anything, he doesn't have anything to do with this."

  "Anything to do with what? Why are you following me?"

  Veronica realizes they should have come up with some kind of cover story, some explanation, however thin. Now she can't think of anything but the truth.

  "Give me a fucking answer. Who put you up to this?"

  "Nobody," Jacob says, startled into the truth. "It's just us."

  Veronica gives him an alarmed look. Jacob just admitted that no one knows where they are or what they are doing, and that no help is on the way. His face falls as he realizes the same thing.

  "Holy shit." Prester's expression brightens with understanding. "Holy shit, you thought it was me, didn't you?"

  They don't dare answer.

  "You think I set Derek up." He shakes his head wonderingly. "You fucking idiots. This is why I told you to go home. You stupid fucking amateur-hour morons." Prester starts to laugh. It's a relieved laugh, not a mocking one, and after a moment Veronica allows herself to smile with the hope that Prester is actually not a bad guy, she and Jacob are not actually about to die.

  "I should have known," Prester says, and now he sounds amused and confident. "You drive right up to the club and think no one will notice a white couple just down the street with a camera big enough to choke a crocodile. Then you think I won't notice you following me. Turning your lights off in the middle of the road. Jesus. And I was actually worried. What a fucking joke."

  He calls out to the SUV behind them, speaking mostly in an African language, but Veronica hears the word "jammer." A moment later Jacob's hiptop, still sitting in the back seat, bleeps with approval. Prester digs out his phone and dials. Jacob freezes; and as Prester speaks, again in an African tongue, his own voice emerges from the hiptop, it's like listening to him on a surround sound system. Prester stops talking, lowers the phone, and stares at Jacob.

  "We, um, we bugged your phone," Jacob says apologetically.

  "No shit."

  "Let me just get that." Jacob dives back into the Toyota just long enough to switch off the hiptop. Prester finishes speaking into his phone, hangs up, and examines Jacob and Veronica again, this time more carefully.

  "Sorry," Veronica says. "I guess we were wrong."

  After a moment Prester says, "Come on. Follow me. Let's go get a beer. We need to talk."

  * * *

  The bar he takes them to was once a house, and might still be used for accommodations, Veronica isn't sure. Men and women sit on rickety chairs and couches, stand in the kitchen, or loiter on the barren dirt outside the building, drinking and smoking. Dreadlocks and rasta caps are overrepresented among the crowd, and reggae music pumps through air thick with the sweet smell of marijuana. The chief distinction between this and a house party, from what Veronica can tell, is that the pretty, bare-bellied young woman who walks around distributing beers and joints collects money from their recipients. When they enter, Prester hugs the hostess familiarly, exchanges complicated handshakes with a half-dozen other men, purchases three beers and two joints, and then leads Veronica and Jacob to a small room upstairs.

  The walls are of barren, splintered wood, the only furniture is a low table and a half-dozen torn cushions. The windows are empty of glass and a low babble of conversation filters up from the yard. Prester motions them to sit, cracks open the Nile beers with his teeth, and stations them around the table. Veronica doesn't like how close the walls are, but the open windows make the room tolerable.

  "Your driver's going to sit it out?" he asks.

  "He's not part of it. He's a Jehovah's Witness," Jacob says.

  "Yeah. And he's just your driver, not a actual human being, right?"

  Jacob blinks.

  "You want to get yourselves in deep shit, go right ahead, but if he's not part of it, you should have left him out. He would have died just like you if you'd actually been right about me."

  Jacob wordlessly acknowledges Prester's point. Prester lights up a joint, takes a drag, and offers it to them. Jacob declines. Veronica does not.

  "Derek was investigating you," Veronica says, after she finally exhales. She ignores Jacob's glare. Prester has proven himself trustworthy. "We found his notes."

  "Really? Where? How?"

  Jacob explains his cell-phone wizardry and their expedition to the Hotel Sun City.

  Prester nods slowly. "I'm impressed. Yeah. Somebody at the embassy is making millions off smuggling, and either Langley really thinks it's me, or whoever it is decided I was the perfect fall guy. Which is true. Criminal record, complicated history, nobody's going to believe I'm pure as the snows of Kilimanjaro, you know? Which I actually am, not that I expect even you to believe. It's like Saddam and the WMDs, the more they don't find anything, the more they assume I'm hiding something big." He shakes his head, half-appalled, half-amused. "I need to be corrupt in order to be less suspicious. It's so tragic it's almost hilarious. So they sent Derek to investigate me. I knew that. But instead he found out something else."

  "What?"

  "Don't know exactly. He never trusted me. Or anyone. I gathered, from what he let slip, probably to see how I'd react, he was looking for some guy named Zanzibar Sam, who he thought was the connection between the Arabs and the interahamwe. Sound familiar?"

  Jacob hesitates, but Veronica has decided to tell Prester the whole truth. He had them at his mercy and let them go; that's good enough for her. "Yes. It's in his notes."

  Prester takes a swig of his Nile and a puff from the joint. Then he says, ""The Arabs who come to the Congo, all the ones I've met, they come for gold. Locals pan gold from rivers up by Bunia, just like the Old West, complete with shitloads of bad guys with guns. Ever see Treasure of the Sierra Madre? Bogart. Great movie. Arabs come here, buy gold for a hundred bucks an ounce, then get it overland to Zanzibar or Sudan, cross to Yemen or Dubai on a dhow, sell it at market rates. Which last I checked were well north of five hundred an ounce. Damn fine profit margin, especially if you happen to cut out customs. But the locals, they've got cell phones, they've got the Internet, they know the price of gold. So as you might imagine you get some tension between them and the Arabs. So a lot of the Arabs start working with local warlords to keep the labour in line. People don't complain so much about being underpaid when the buyer has a gun to their head. Marx and Mao can tell you all about it. All control of the means of production comes out of the barrel of a gun."

  "What about the UN peacekeepers?" Jacob asks.

  Prester almost laughs. "Something like one peacekeeper for every hundred square miles around eastern Congo, and most of them stay in town and don't get out much. Can't say I blame them. They have about as much influence on day-to-day life in eastern Congo as the Kinshasa government does. Which is to say, very fucking little. Shit, I shouldn't need to tell you guys this, you were in one of those mines."

  "Don't remind us," Veronica mutters.

  "Trouble is, seems the CIA is now half-convinced that I'm the connection between Al-Qaeda and Athanase. Same mistake you made. They've got dozens of spooks and Special Forces in the Congo right now, looking for the bad guys. I should be with them. I'm the fucking local expert. But instead I find myself persona not particularly grata. Who needs me when you've got General Gorokwe, right?" He grimaces. "That lucky bastard should do very well for himself out of this. Current Washington policy, when fighting in unstable nations, is to find sympathic local strongmen like him and use them as an instrument. If the instrument in question isn't a complete idiot he comes out smelling of roses and Old Glory and thousand-dollar bills. Karzai in Afghanistan. Chalabi in Iraq, until he got too greedy. And now Gorokwe in the Congo. A week ago he was an evil general from a pariah nation. Today he's
a peacekeeper and a valuable ally in the war on terror, he's been shaking hands with high-level diplomats and getting shipments of all manner of shiny new guns to hunt and kill Al-Qaeda. And the interahamwe if they happen to get in the way, not that anyone really cares about them, they're yesterday's bad guys. My suspicion is the general sees no real reason to hurry the job." Prester finishes the joint. "But never mind him. It's my own future I'm worried about. So I spent the last few days looking for Zanzibar Sam myself, try to clear my name. This whole deal has made me start to seriously wonder about my future. I mean, it's fun playing James Bond, but it's a lot less fun when you suddenly find out M and Q and Moneypenny are suddenly lining up to stab you in the back. I don't want to spend the rest of my life dealing with this kind of bullshit. If all you do is use people and be used, you forget how to have friends. I know a million people here, some of them real big men, it's not ego when I tell you I'm a serious player. I can make a phone call and have someone killed or have a briefcase full of cash delivered. But you know how many real friends I have? Zero. No room for 'em. Beginning to think that calls for a certain re-examination, you know? Whole new lifestyle, maybe. Whole new life. Again."

  Prester falls silent. For the first time since Veronica met him he looks old, there are lines graven on his face. She realizes his eyes are red not just with smoke but with sleep deprivation, he's been awake for a long time, maybe days.

  "Very moving," Jacob says, "but what does it have to do with us?"

  "With you." Prester considers. "That remains to be seen. But for one thing," he looks to Veronica, "I found out a little something about your ex-husband."

  "Danton?"

  "The same. He, or at least somebody by his name, flew into Kampala yesterday, first class of course, checked into the Sheraton's presidential suite. Kind of a funny time to take a vacation in Uganda, don't you think? Unless, of course, you just found out that you and your CIA smuggling partner are being blackmailed by Al-Qaeda to cooperate with them or be revealed as having conspired with genocidal war criminals to smuggle slave-labour minerals out of the Congo. Nasty moral dilemma, that. Assuming you have any morals."

  Veronica stares at him. She doesn't know what to say or think.

  "Do you think it might be Strick?" Jacob asks.

  Prester rolls his eyes. "No. That's the one thing I am certain of. Strick is a prick, but he is not dirty. I've worked with him for years, I would know. And he's not senior enough to have gotten away with this. No, it's somebody higher. Some suit in the embassy."

  "OK. And Zanzibar Sam?"

  "Zanzibar Sam, I learned at the club, tonight, from an extremely fucking scary man, and for a painfully large fee, Derek was all wrong about. It's not a person. It's a package. Zanzibar Sams, plural. And they're supposed to arrive in Kampala tomorrow, for one night only, before being shipped off again the next day."

  "Where to?"

  "I have no idea. But would I ever like to know. The what it is, and the where it's going, and especially the who it's going to. And you know what else? I'm actually glad you two lost your minds and decided to stay and play Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. I'm beginning to think you might be able to help me out."

  Chapter 20

  "These are expensive," Jacob says, looking at the two iPod-sized lozenges of black metal on the desk in his study, sitting beside a metal box as big as a toaster that bristles with electronic apparati and LCD screens. "The GPS trackers are five hundred US each. If I don't get them back inside a week I'll have to pay for them myself. And the spectrum analyzer's more like ten thousand. That's like half my annual salary here."

  "If we get the evidence, those most high will cover your expenses, I promise," Prester says. "They've got plenty of black-book discretionary slush funds."

  "Why don't we just go to the embassy now?" Veronica asks. "We must have enough to convince them something's going on. They'll listen to all three of us."

  Prester shrugs. "I doubt it. Take it from me, put not your faith in the American intelligence services. They're not much sharper than any other batch of bureaucrats, and they're already half-convinced I'm the bad guy. But even if they do listen, then what? We don't even have a name. All we know is Derek got set up by somebody in the chain of command. If they find out we're poking around, they'll pull the plug, and poof, we got nothing but conspiracy theories and a cheese omelette on our face. We need names, dates, pictures, verifiable evidence. With any luck these little toys will help get us that tonight. Without … well, there's always plan B. Your ex."

  Veronica frowns. She doesn't want to crash Danton's hotel and start demanding answers. She came to Africa to get away from her ex-husband and everything he represents. She doesn't want to see him ever again, not unless and until she has the advantage. She can't even really imagine what that would be like. Danton always has the advantage. That's what it means to be rich.

  "Shouldn't be necessary," Prester says reassuringly, reading her face. He seems more cheerful today, and more rested. "Tonight should be plenty. Even if we can't plant these trackers, your amazing little number harvester should be highly helpful."

  "It's not just a number harvester," Jacob objects. "It's a full-feature GSM spectrum analyzer. Practically a mobile base station. And it doesn't actually register cell-phone numbers. Just handset and SIM card IDs, and signal strength. We can only get the numbers of Mango phones."

  "Mango or Celtel or MTC."

  "Celtel and MTC are whole other companies. I don't have any access to their database."

  "Celtel is minority owned by a CIA front," Prester says casually. "And we got an MTC engineer on our payroll too. There's a reason Derek recruited you to work at Telecom Uganda. Same reason we both got Mango phones once he started getting suspicious. It's the only cell company here we hadn't wormed our way into yet."

  Jacob stares at him.

  "More things under heaven and earth, son." Prester is considerably shorter than Jacob, and Veronica doubts he is more than five or ten years older, but right now the diminutive seems appropriate. "You're playing in the big leagues now. So don't get sloppy. Now what's the range on your precious spectrum analyzer?"

  "Maybe a hundred metres."

  "OK. Should be ample. You've only got two GPS trackers?"

  "That's all I could manage."

  Prester frowns. "Well, we'll make do. With luck whoever's smuggling these Zanzibar Sams won't have more than two vehicles. Strong magnets on these, right? All I have to do is put them somewhere on the chassis and they'll stay there, even on bumpy African roads?"

  "Not a problem."

  "They text their coordinates how often?"

  "It's configurable. Right now every ten minutes."

  "And if they don't have a cell signal?"

  "They store their locations in local memory, timestamped, and send them all in one burst the next time they get into coverage."

  "Good." Prester nods and turns to Veronica. "I need him with me, but you can sit at home."

  She hesitates, then shakes her head. "No. I want to come with you."

  "Sure?"

  "Danton might be there."

  "Not likely." Prester considers. "But not impossible. Seeing as how we have no idea what exactly these Zanzibar Sams are or why somebody seems to think they're so important."

  "Are you sure you know where they're going to be?" Jacob asks.

  "For the price I paid I better fucking not be led astray. But no, I'm not sure. People like this, you're never sure until the time comes." He looks at his watch. "Which is all too soon. Let's saddle up."

  * * *

  Prester navigates his Pajero through a huge market of rickety wooden stalls, colourful pyramids of vegetables, dangling carcasses of meat, bowls of spices, sacks of grains, and all the world's cheap clothing and plastic crap. They crawl slowly through the market's clogged streets, and then through ten minutes of grimy shantytown, as the sun hides itself behind the western hills.

  "Shouldn't we wait until dark?" Jacob asks from the bac
k seat.

  Prester shakes his head. "We'll stand out more if we wait too late. Not much traffic in this area after sunset. Besides, I want to get the lay of the land."

  Veronica is riding shotgun, which in this vehicle is the left-hand seat; Ugandans theoretically drive on the left, and this Pajero came from Japan. She looks around at the shantytown and winces when she sees a child with a large goiter bulging from her throat. All it would take to cure that girl's goiter is a little iodine.

  Every day this ramshackle sea of desolation expands further into the green landscape around Kampala, swollen by unemployed bayaye, the Ugandan name for disaffected youths and families who stream in from poor rural villages to this city that offers them neither work nor shelter - but it doesn't seem as bad to her as it once did. Veronica understand now that most Africans, even in shantytowns, are not trapped in relentless disaster and tragedy. They build houses, raise families, hang out with their friends, visit the big city, work when they can, play music, drink, gossip, and basically live normal, recognizable lives. But what they lack, desperately, is health care and education. If Veronica could actually fund and build a school for nurses here, it would help, it would make a real difference.

  They finally reach Kampala's small industrial belt of warehouses and repair yards. Here the foot traffic streams back towards the shantytown, tired men walking home after a hard day, and Prester has to nose the Pajero upstream through this human river like a salmon seeking spawning grounds, until he finally says, "Here."

  There is a scrapyard the size of several football fields ahead and to their right. It looks like a muddy parking lot hit by a massive artillery shell and left to rust, littered with the rotting hulks of cars, motorcycles, and other unidentifiable machinery, surrounded by a chainlink fence topped by a single strand of barbed wire. In its center there stands a single wide, low building, basically a hollow concrete block. Clusters of rebar sprout like some kind of steel vegetation from its roof. The yard's only visible inhabitant is a bored-looking watchman sitting behind the main gate, which is locked with chains and padlocks.