The American Mission

by Matthew Palmer

  6

  JUNE 14, 2009

  CONAKRY

  Alex did not leave the next day, and Spence had not actually expected it. Moving between countries and cultures was an inevitable fact of Foreign Service life, but it was still enormously dislocating and logistically complicated. Life before Anah had been much simpler. Alex had had few material attachments and was free to pull up stakes at a moment’s notice. The place where he lived at any particular time was little more than his address. Anah changed all that. In building a home for his daughter, Alex had inevitably accumulated a houseful of possessions. Moreover, his was no longer the only voice that mattered in planning for the future. After hanging up with Spence, Alex spent a few hours thinking about how best to raise the issue with Anah of an imminent move to Kinshasa.

  Sunday breakfast was always pancakes, with Alex and Anah doing the cooking together.

  “Anah, there’s something I need to talk to you about,” Alex began, as his daughter was tearing through her second stack of silver-dollar pancakes with grim determination.

  “What is it, Daddy?” Anah asked through a mouthful of pancakes.

  “I got a call last night from Uncle Spence. He wants us to move to Kinshasa so that I can work for him there.”

  “Okay.” Anah seemed completely undisturbed by this news.

  “It means leaving right away, honey, like, in a couple of days.”

  Anah’s eyes narrowed and she put her fork down on her plate.

  “What about Maine?” she asked accusingly. “Is this going to mess that up?”

  “Maybe a little,” Alex admitted. “You can still go, but I may not be able to spend any time with you and Grandma this summer. Mrs. Mabinty can take you there, and I’ll ask her if she’d be willing to stay with you and Grandma at the house.”

  “Will I stay the whole summer?”

  “Do you want to? You don’t have to.”

  “No, I want to.”

  The thought of nearly three months separated from Anah was depressing, but Alex knew that she would be happier in Brunswick than in Kinshasa for the summer months, especially as he had no idea what kind of hours he would be working. It would be different once school started in the fall and she had friends and activities.

  “I’ll Skype with you every day,” Alex offered, somewhat nonplussed that his daughter seemed to accept the idea of a summer apart so readily.

  “That’d be nice, Daddy. Billy promised me that he’d take me camping this summer, and Uncle Leo said I could go out on the boat with him and catch lobsters. I don’t really like lobster, but the traps are cool and sometimes there’s crabs inside too.”

  Alex’s heart filled with love for his little girl, and he felt it press against his chest as though it had suddenly grown in size. The smile he offered her had a slight tinge of melancholy.

  “I’m going to be sad without you, sweetie.”

  “I know you will,” she said innocently.

  • • •

  Alex’s farewell call on his ambassador was similarly easy. The Ambassador, a veteran Africa hand named Stephen Fry, already knew about Spence’s offer. Ambassadors were usually deferential to each other and rarely went poaching personnel without permission. Although he had a quick and incisive mind, Fry—a short, round man with a bulbous nose and receding hairline—looked more like an insurance adjustor than a U.S. Ambassador. He had to crane his neck at a sharp angle as he stood to shake hands and congratulate Alex on what both of them agreed was a tremendous opportunity.

  The next day, a cable came from Washington announcing that the Bureau of Diplomatic Security had reinstated Alex R. Baines’s Top Secret clearance, including access to Special Compartmentalized Information, the most sensitive human and technical intelligence. Although written in dry bureaucratic language, the memo oozed grudging reluctance from every line. There were caveats. Alex’s clearances were interim and subject to immediate revocation at the discretion of the DS Assistant Secretary. Moreover, the clearances were not automatically transferable. His eligibility for a Top Secret clearance would be reviewed upon completion of his assignment in Kinshasa. He had never seen a message like it. Department cables were negotiated documents. The language reflected, he understood, a bloody interdepartmental battle that Alex’s side had won, but only by a whisker.

  The following days were a blur of activity, preparing the consulate for his departure, supervising the pack-out of his household effects, and finding someone to buy the twenty-year-old Land Rover he had been driving since the week he had arrived in Conakry. Four jam-packed days after his conversation with Spence, Alex drove Anah and Mrs. Mabinty to the airport. As he had suspected, Mrs. Mabinty had jumped at the chance to spend the summer with Anah and Alex’s mother in Maine. The grossly overweight housekeeper had packed a heavy carry-on bag full of Guinean treats, including chips made of fried taro root, dried plantains, and an enormous plastic tub of peanut soup.

  “U.S. Customs will never let you bring that into the country,” Alex warned her.

  “Don’t worry,” Mrs. Mabinty replied confidently. “I’m going to eat it on the plane.”

  He hugged his daughter tightly at the gate and kissed her forehead. Anah hugged him back fiercely. Her eyes were shining with tears that she refused to shed, and for a moment Alex thought about tossing their tickets to Augusta in the trash and booking them both on his flight to Kinshasa. He knew, however, that that was selfish. He was thinking more of his feelings than of Anah’s.

  “Take good care of Grandma and Mrs. Mabinty, okay?”

  “I will. I’ll miss you, Daddy.”

  There was a lump in his throat, but Alex put on a brave face for his daughter.

  “I love you, Anah.”

  • • •

  The next day Alex was back at the airport, this time to catch his own Air France flight to Kinshasa. The four-and-a-half-hour flight was uneventful, but when the pilot announced that they had been cleared for descent to Kinshasa airport, Alex felt a sharp, electric thrill. He was getting back into the game.

  Conakry was a city of some two million people, but it was a small town in comparison with Kinshasa. The arrival terminal at N’djili International Airport was packed wall-to-wall with a mass of humanity that moved—if it was moving at all—in currents and tides rather than with any kind of linear purpose. It was just how he remembered it when he had landed on the Sabena flight from Brussels as a green Peace Corps volunteer more than ten years ago.

  Almost magically, the crowds parted in front of him and Alex was confronted by two Congolese men, one short and heavyset, the second tall and almost comically thin. The shorter man was wearing a garish Hawaiian shirt with one too many buttons open at the top, khakis, and leather sandals. He also sported a thick gold chain around his neck and a gaudy gold watch on his wrist. The second man was dressed simply in jeans and a plain white T-shirt. His clothes hung on his bony frame as if from a wire hanger.

  The shorter man smiled broadly and stuck out his hand.

  “Mr. Baines,” he said. It wasn’t really a question. Alex was almost certainly the only white person in the terminal.

  “Alex. Are you with the Embassy?” Alex shook hands with the two men. The taller man’s hands were thickly calloused like a farmer’s.

  “Yes,” said the shorter man, who was clearly the boss. He fished an embassy ID card out of his pocket to establish his bona fides. In truth, his flawless American accent was almost as good as the ID. “My name is Leonard. I’m your fixer.”

  Everywhere in the world, American diplomats relied heavily on the guidance, experience, and local knowledge of Foreign Service Nationals. In the more chaotic environments, FSNs were essential for helping the American staff maneuver through complicated and unfamiliar bureaucracies. The practice was known as “fixing.” A good fixer could minimize, but not eliminate, the arbitrary inefficiencies inherent in the thir
d world.

  Leonard had Alex give his claim checks to the tall man along with five dollars in cash for the dollops of baksheesh that would ensure his bags made it from the airplane to his new house on time and intact.

  They swam through the crowd to immigration control, where Leonard led Alex to a window on one side with a sign above it in faded yellow letters that said DIPLOMATIQUE. The unsmiling middle-aged man in the booth looked at his passport suspiciously before applying a sudden flurry of rubber stamps to the inside pages.

  “Welcome to Kinshasa, Mr. Alex,” Leonard said, when they were outside the terminal.

  “Thanks, Leonard. It’s good to be back.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Goma before I joined State. We used to come in and out through Kinshasa, and the volunteers in the east would take R & R here.”

  Leonard seemed impressed. “Goma, huh? Things have been very bad out there over the last years. It’s gotten much worse since the genocidaires came.”

  The genocidaires were Rwandan Hutus who got their name from their role as the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide. When the Tutsi had retaken power, thousands of Hutu had fled across the border into eastern Congo, which they used as a base camp for their proxy war against the new Tutsi-dominated government in Kigali. The genocidaires had also fought against their Congolese hosts, and the fighting they instigated in the Congo’s far east had tipped the country into civil war.

  “When I was there, it wasn’t as bad as it is now. Mine was the last class of Peace Corps volunteers in the Congo. It was just starting to get really dangerous. I’ve kept in touch with some friends there over the years, and I’ve tried to keep on top of what’s happening. It’s enough to break your heart.”

  “It is that, Mr. Alex. But the Congolese people still have a lot of heart left in them. You’ll see. Come on. We’re parked over here.”

  Alex didn’t need to be told which car it was. The enormous Suburban sitting heavy on its wheels from the armored plates that Alex knew were welded in the door panels practically screamed “U.S. Embassy.”

  Leonard drove like a lunatic, weaving in and out of Kinshasa’s incredible traffic, which mixed cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, scooters, pedestrians, and various forms of animal transport into a single anarchic mass. It was impossible to tell from the traffic alone whether the Congolese drove on the left or right. All the while, Leonard kept up a running monologue on Congolese politics, the U.S. Embassy, and Alex’s great good fortune in working for “Ambassador Spence.”

  “It sounds to me like you have spent some time in the States,” Alex observed, when Leonard paused for a brief moment to catch his breath and dodge a motorcycle that seemed as though it were being driven by fifty chickens.

  “Graduated from the University of Michigan in economics. I had to come back when my father got sick. Now I’m head of my family. Not a position I can easily fill from Ann Arbor. I miss the U.S., of course, but home is where the family is.”

  Leonard’s colloquial American-accented English was so good it was almost disconcerting. Alex could easily see him at a frat party in Michigan with a plastic cup of beer in one hand and an arm around a pretty sorority girl.

  Leonard pushed the Suburban through a gap in the traffic that Alex would have sworn was barely large enough for a Volkswagen Beetle, passing an open army truck carrying heavily armed teenage conscripts.

  “What’s the security situation like?” Alex asked, nodding toward the truck.

  “Not so bad in Kinshasa, at least during the day. Outside of town is something else. Don’t go anywhere alone. Don’t go anywhere without armor.” Leonard rapped his knuckles affectionately on the thick Plexiglas fitted over the Suburban’s side-panel windows. “If a cop tries to pull you over, don’t stop. At a minimum, it’s a shakedown. More likely, it’s a kidnapping attempt. Don’t kid yourself into believing they’re just enforcing traffic laws.” He waved vaguely at the absolute anarchy around them.

  It was about a forty-five-minute ride in bumper-to-bumper chaos from the airport to Gombe, Kinshasa’s diplomatic district. The American mission was as immediately identifiable by the concrete jersey barriers that circled the building as by the enormous flag that flew overhead or the Great Seal that decorated the gate. The Embassy building dominated the neighborhood, a pink granite monster surrounded by dingy three-story concrete-block houses. A long line of Congolese families snaked around the compound, waiting for their opportunity to interview for a visa.

  Leonard pulled the Suburban through a gap in the jersey barriers and stopped in front of an enormous metal gate painted a bright yellow. He killed the engine and popped the hood. Three local guards in sky blue short-sleeved shirts and dark blue slacks searched the car for explosives. One walked around the vehicle with a mirror on a pole looking at the undercarriage. A second checked out the engine while the third opened the rear hatch and shone a flashlight into the wheel well. Two black-clad members of the Special Police stood to one side with AK-47s held at port arms.

  When they got the all clear, Leonard started the engine. The heavy gate rolled open, and Leonard drove forward fifteen feet before stopping at a second gate. Only when the first gate closed behind him did the second one open.

  “Here we are,” Leonard said, as he pulled through the gate and onto the driveway in front of the chancery building. “Home sweet home.”

  • • •

  A slim Asian man in a light charcoal gray suit and maroon tie was waiting for Alex at the front door.

  “I’m Mark Fong,” he said, as they shook hands. Fong looked like he was barely out of school. Kinshasa was likely his first tour of duty. “I’m your deputy in the political section. Good to have you on board.”

  “Even better to be here,” Alex replied. “I’m looking forward to getting to work.”

  “That may be sooner than you had planned. Ordinarily I’d show you around and let you get settled, but I’m afraid we have something of a situation. The Ambassador wants you to come upstairs first thing.”

  Mark handed Alex a laminated Embassy ID on a cheap metal lanyard. His picture and name were framed by a gold border, indicating that he was cleared for classified information and had unrestricted access to all parts of the mission. His ID badge in Conakry had had a blue border. He slipped the lanyard around his neck.

  Now just don’t blow it, he thought.

  The Ambassador’s office was on the fourth floor, behind layers of security that included a Marine Security Guard who controlled a heavy mag-lock door from behind a screen of bulletproof glass, a badge reader in the elevator that activated the button for the fourth floor, and a cipher lock on the door to the executive suite.

  The Front Office was spacious and plush, with thick carpets and leather armchairs. Two secretaries sat at desks positioned just in front of the private offices for the Ambassador and Deputy Chief of Mission. The secretaries, both overweight middle-aged women with short gray hair and glasses, looked as if they could have been sisters.

  “Hello, Peggy,” Alex said to the Ambassador’s secretary. She looked up from the spreadsheet on her computer screen and smiled when she saw who it was.

  “Well, look who we have here. Come give your Aunt Peggy a kiss.” With a visible effort she got up from the overmatched Aeron chair and hugged Alex. Peggy Walker had been Spence’s assistant for the better part of twenty years. She went everywhere with him and did just about everything for him. Alex had known her since his first week in the Service and had tremendous respect for both her sheer competence and her obvious devotion to Spence.

  “It’s good to have you back, Alex,” Peggy said when she finally let go. Her eyes were shiny with tears. “I’m glad that you’re getting another chance.”

  “Thanks, Peggy. It’s good to see you too.” Alex was not surprised that Peggy knew about his troubles with DS. Ambassadors had few
secrets from their secretaries.

  Peggy sat down heavily in the Aeron chair, which let out a thin squeak of protest. Back in command of her desk, she was all business. “The Ambassador is expecting you, Mr. Baines,” she said. “Please go in.”

  Spence was sitting at a long oak conference table deep in conversation with a group of half a dozen people when Alex entered. On the center of the table, he could see a detailed map of what looked like a stretch of the Congo River. Most of the group at the table wore conventional business attire, but the one woman in the room was wearing an army uniform and the man next to her was dressed in what looked like a white linen suit with a red silk tie emblazoned with some sort of crest. This was definitely not standard State Department issue. The body language of the group was tense. Only the slight man in the tropical suit looked unruffled.

  Even so, Spence smiled broadly when he saw Alex enter the room. He stood up and gave Alex a firm handshake, clasping Alex’s shoulder with his left hand. At just about an inch over six feet tall, Alex was not a small man, but Spence was at least two inches taller and built like a bear. It had been more than a year since they had seen each other and Alex was struck by how much Spence had aged. His hair was now more gray than black and there were deep creases around his eyes.

  “Spence, you look like hell.”

  “You don’t know the half of it, Alex,” he laughed, shedding at least five years in doing so. “Let me introduce you to the team.”

  Turning to the group at the table, Spence announced in his deep ambassadorial baritone: “Colleagues, allow me to present Alex Baines, the new head of the political section and a dear friend. Alex, I think you know Bob Jeffries, my DCM.” Alex and Jeffries had worked together on a crisis action team in Washington following a failed coup attempt in Uganda. Alex remembered Jeffries as a technically competent but cautious officer, more inclined to focus on potential danger than opportunity.

  Alex nodded at Jeffries. “It’s good to see you again, Bob,” he said.