The American Mission

by Matthew Palmer

  “Land mine?” he asked the boy.

  “Yes, Father.”

  Antoine tapped his leg and showed the boy his cane.

  “Me too,” the priest said softly.

  The boy nodded his empathy for their shared plight and pocketed the priest’s money.

  “I’m still not sold on this idea,” Alex said, picking up the conversation where they had left off. “I accept that Ilunga is an admirable man. He tried to lead his country in a different direction. And he paid a price for it. But Ilunga has been out of politics for more than six years. How can he lead the Congo out of this mess?”

  “There are many who still look on him as the legitimate ruler of a truly democratic Democratic Republic of the Congo. There are many who believe we wouldn’t be in this predicament if Ilunga had been allowed to take the office that he won in a fair election.”

  “But that’s exactly the point. The army didn’t let him do that. Instead, they arrested Ilunga, sent him off to Makala Prison, and that moment was lost. He spent three years in solitary confinement. As long as Silwamba retains the loyalty of the security services, I don’t see why that wouldn’t simply happen again. Silwamba may not be popular, but he has the guns. That still counts for too much in this country.”

  “The people are with Ilunga. All that is needed is a spark and they will rally to his cause.”

  “What kind of spark are we talking about?”

  “The Lord will provide,” Antoine responded with assurance.

  “I wish I could be certain of that.”

  “Me too.”

  Antoine stopped abruptly.

  “Here we are,” he said.

  Kintambo was a relatively green and leafy part of the city. Mature shade trees planted along the sidewalk offered a welcome break from the heat. Ilunga’s villa was larger than Alex had expected, with a two-story house and a couple of smaller outbuildings visible from the street. It had, however, seen better days, and Alex hoped that the villa’s faded glories did not represent an ill omen for Ilunga’s political future. The house was set back from the street behind a tall stucco wall with a single gate. Shards of broken glass set in concrete on top of the wall were meant to discourage unwelcome evening visitors. In case that was not enough, a guard sat to one side of the gate on a low stool in the shade of a mahogany tree. As Alex and Antoine approached, the guard looked up from the magazine he was reading. Although he was unarmed, it would have taken an exceptionally brave thief to challenge him. The man would have looked right at home guarding the gates to hell. The right side of the guard’s face was a mass of scar tissue, and he had only one eye. He seemed to be expecting Antoine, however, because he nodded and returned to his magazine.

  There was no sign on the building, just a small bronze plaque by the gate that gave the address as 36 RUE LUKENGU and then in slightly smaller letters HEADQUARTERS OF THE CONGOLESE FREEDOM COALITION. Underneath those words was a perfect circle about two inches in diameter. Alex touched his chest and rubbed his finger over the scar that had healed as a raised ridge of flesh.

  “Is this really the headquarters for the Freedom Party? I thought the party was outlawed? It seems kind of dangerous to advertise it this way.”

  “The Freedom Coalition isn’t a political party,” Antoine explained. “It’s a civic organization that offers vocational training and job placement to wounded veterans, whether they fought with the regular army or the militia. The house is all Ilunga has left. The government seized all of his other assets. But he still has some well-off supporters and they provide him with some resources to run this center. Ilunga lives here, but he has also offered lodging to some of the veterans. As long as he stays out of the public spotlight and away from active politics, the regime tolerates him.”

  Antoine opened the wrought-iron gate and ushered Alex through. A slightly built man came out of the main house to greet them. When Alex had been a Peace Corps volunteer, Albert Ilunga had been an up-and-coming political leader looking to challenge Silwamba’s leadership. Alex had left the Congo some years before the election that had resulted in Ilunga’s arrest, but the man’s face was familiar to Alex from television and newspaper accounts at the time. Even so, had he not been expecting to meet him, Alex would not have recognized the man walking down the front steps. Ilunga looked to have aged twenty years in the last six. He wore his gray hair cut short and his face was lined by both the sun and his years in the jungle prison. He was dressed simply in a short-sleeved white dress shirt and gray slacks. His shoes were inexpensive and in need of a polishing. There was something about him that bespoke a deep humility. Alex wondered just how an unjust prison sentence changed a man, particularly when most of the time was spent in solitary confinement.

  His greeting was warm and welcoming, and Ilunga clasped his left hand onto Antoine’s shoulder as they shook their hellos. Then he turned and looked at Alex. “So this is the young man you were telling me about. I am pleased you brought him here.

  “Hello, brother,” Ilunga said, extending his hand. “Welcome to my home.” His grip was firm and his handshake emphatic.

  “My pleasure, Mr. Ilunga. I just learned that this is also your office.”

  “Call me Albert, please. Yes. This is where the Freedom Coalition does its work. It’s a terrible thing to work and live in the same place, you know. It’s more like living in your office than working in your home. Plus, I can’t seem to stay out of the refrigerator. I’m afraid I’ve been putting on weight.” Ilunga could not have weighed more than one hundred pounds.

  “Well, you have the satisfaction of doing important work.”

  “It’s mostly social work, but I do agree that it is of some value. The veterans need help, and most of the international aid agencies don’t want to have anything to do with ex-militia. The Freedom Coalition helps them find productive work, teaches them skills. More importantly, we try to convince them that their lives have value.”

  “The men live here with you?”

  “Some do, but most come and go. Some tell me where they go. Others choose not to, and I don’t ask. All I offer is an opportunity. Come, let me show you.”

  Ilunga led Alex and Antoine into the building. He walked with exaggerated care, and Alex remembered reading somewhere that the prison guards had beaten him so badly that he suffered from chronic back pain and could no longer raise his arms above his shoulders.

  The first floor of the main building was divided into classrooms. Most were in use. As far as Alex could tell, the students were all men, but there were a few female instructors. In one room the students were learning about HIV/AIDS. War had killed millions in the Congo over the last decade, but AIDS had proven an even more efficient instrument of death. The instructor was an older woman in a yellow cotton dress wearing heavy stone jewelry. She was slipping a condom over a banana with the ease of considerable practice and trading ribald comments with the men.

  “Do you carry those in a larger size?” one of the students asked.

  The instructor held the banana up in front of her face.

  “If you have more to offer than my little friend here, I’ll marry you right now,” she said to riotous laughter from the class.

  Next door, a middle-aged man was teaching three other middle-aged men to read from a dog-eared copy of a Honda Accord repair manual. Across the hall, a group of mostly younger men were learning computer skills. There were five ancient-looking computers set up in the room, but they were connected to the Internet and the instructor clearly knew what he was doing. A blackboard along one wall was filled with charts and diagrams and symbols. It looked to Alex like the students were learning to design websites and code in HTML.

  Ilunga led them through a side door into the garden and toward the largest outbuilding, a cinder-block structure about the size of a double-wide trailer.

  “We’re fortunate enough to have several skilled instructors in the
computer courses,” Ilunga commented. “These are primarily for the younger veterans, however. They are still adaptable. Some of the older men have never so much as seen a computer. We have them learning more traditional vocational skills.”

  Inside the cinder-block building, a group of some twenty former soldiers were practicing carpentry, metalworking, and other blue-collar trades. Most stopped working when they saw Ilunga enter. More than a few bowed their heads in silent thanks. Ilunga introduced Alex, and he shook hands with most of the men and asked them about their projects.

  Lunch was served outside in the garden in the rear of the building. The three men sat at a small café table while students from Ilunga’s school served them a simple but filling meal. Ilunga ate sparingly, mostly rice with a little beef and chili sauce. The lemonade was fresh and tasted incredibly good as the noonday sun pushed the heat index up well over one hundred. They kept the conversation light. Alex and Ilunga discovered a shared love of music, particularly African jazz. Antoine mostly listened, clearly pleased that his two friends seemed to be hitting it off.

  When the meal was finished, Alex shifted the conversation in a more serious direction. “Do you ever think about getting back into politics? I expect that the work you are doing with the Freedom Coalition is personally pretty satisfying. But is that enough for you? I’m struck that the name of your operation here echoes the name of your political party. It feels a little bit like unfinished business.”

  “You have a point,” Ilunga agreed, “although I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about it in such explicit terms. I still have ambitions for political change in this country. The current regime is well entrenched but not invulnerable. Everywhere in the world, power has a structure. Power in the Congo is concentrated in only a few hands. That is a strength, but also a vulnerability. The fewer the players, the deeper the suspicions. The power centers in this country distrust each other. If they can be set against each other, the regime cannot stand.”

  “The system runs deeper than a few people at the top. How do you keep the new people in power from taking over where the old ones left off?”

  “The affairs of the Congo should be run by the people of the Congo. I would expel the soldiers of our neighbors. We have Rwandans, Ugandans, Zambians, and Burundians fighting on our soil. They must leave. I would ensure that the mineral wealth of my country benefits the people of my country. The big foreign firms would be welcome as partners but not as masters. And finally, I would ensure that the government speaks with the voice of the people, a real democracy with real representative government and checks on those in power.”

  “Nothing important was ever accomplished by men who lacked ambition,” Alex replied. “But what about the mechanism for change? The elections, when they bother to have them, are rigged. Last time around, Silwamba dispensed with any opponent and extended his term in an up-or-down referendum in which he took . . . what . . . ninety-seven percent of the vote? The media is under the control of the government. The security services are loyal to Silwamba. How do you bring about your vision of the future?”

  “When the time for change comes, the Lord will show the way,” Ilunga replied, and Alex noticed that he touched his chest in the place where Antoine had told him the coalition leader carried a circular scar similar to his own.

  “It’s a little surprising to me that the government lets you do even this. They thought you were dangerous enough to lock you up for three years. You still have a popular following, even if you don’t maintain a public presence. There haven’t been any threats to shut you down?”

  “I suppose I have managed to persuade them that I am harmless. In jail, I was something of a celebrity and a constant thorn in their side. Amnesty International wrote letters about me. Your Hollywood stars called for my release from prison. Now I am just an eccentric old man teaching other old men how to read and how to make furniture or repair motorcycles. It would cost more to oppress me than they stand to gain.”

  • • •

  They had to walk through the main house to get to the front gate. Almost in the exact center of the building, Alex noticed one door that seemed oddly out of place. It was made of steel, where the other doors were wood, and it looked brand-new. A large dead-bolt lock set in the middle of the door marked it as guarding something of some importance.

  “What’s in there?” Alex asked.

  Ilunga looked thoughtfully at the door for a moment and then inquiringly toward Antoine. The priest nodded once.

  Ilunga pulled a large key out from under his shirt. It was hanging on a metal chain around his neck. The lock turned easily.

  The door opened outward, and Ilunga had to use all of his strength to pull it open. Alex resisted the temptation to step in to help, something he knew would have been humiliating for the older man.

  Behind the door was a set of stairs.

  “The basement,” Ilunga explained. “We keep some of our . . . school supplies . . . down there.”

  It seemed unlikely that the Freedom Coalition was storing pencils and copier paper behind a five-thousand-dollar door.

  Ilunga hit a light switch inside the frame and closed the door behind them when they started down the stairs. The light was set right over the stairs so most of the basement room was still in shadow when they reached the bottom. Ilunga touched another switch on the wall and the room was bathed in a bright incandescent light.

  Racks of AK-47s, grenade launchers, and other small arms reflected and amplified the light. The basement was packed almost wall-to-wall with weapons of various types and calibers.

  Albert Ilunga was building a private army.

  21

  JULY 14, 2009

  KINSHASA

  That night he had the dream again. It was the first time the dream had visited since he had come to Kinshasa. The dream, like the illness that spawned it, was patient and adaptable. It bided its time. It evolved. This time, the Tsiolos appeared in the dream. Father and daughter. Anah was there with him as well. Father and daughter. And when the riders came on horses the size of mountains, there was nothing he could do to save them. Waking, Alex found the sheets wrapped tightly around him like a cocoon. He untangled them and stripped the sodden mass from the bed.

  It was early. The sun was just coming up, so Alex decided on surya namaskara, the sun salutation, for his morning yoga. He felt immeasurably better after the workout, and a shower and shave helped to further clear his mind. He had a decision to make that he had been putting off since his visit to the headquarters of the Freedom Coalition—whether he was going to report to Spence and Washington what he had learned about Ilunga’s private armory.

  The answer to that question eluded him throughout a day of meetings and reports. The Silwamba administration was stepping up its attacks on Congolese civil society. He and Leonard had coffee with the head of the Center for Public Integrity, a local organization working to expose political corruption in Kinshasa. The center had just been raided by the police, and Alex promised to see what he could find out from a contact at the Interior Ministry. It was clear that the regime was growing nervous and looking to reassert its dominant position. There was no telling how Silwamba and his security services would respond to reports that one civil-society leader was stockpiling weapons.

  It was easy to imagine what the Congo might be like with someone like Ilunga in charge rather than the loathsome and avaricious Silwamba. Ilunga’s leadership qualities and the force of his personality were compelling. There was something about his passion for justice that reminded Alex of Marie Tsiolo. He had been thinking about her quite often since his visit to Busu-Mouli two weeks ago. She was stubborn and opinionated, but also smart and compassionate. She was also, he admitted to himself, extremely attractive. He wondered idly what kind of excuse he might be able to manufacture to make another visit to her village.

  • • •

  Alex wrapped up his work at a
bout seven and chatted with Anah for twenty minutes. Skype had helped to take some of the sting out of the enforced family separations that were an inescapable part of diplomatic life. Anah seemed bubbly and happy, showing off a starfish that she had found on the beach that morning. He missed her terribly, and it felt like there was a hole in the pit of his stomach after he broke the connection to Brunswick.

  Before leaving the office, Alex ran a stack of classified traffic through the shredder, then removed his hard drive from the computer with a special key and locked it in the safe. The Marines swept the office every night looking for unsecured classified material. Alex’s newly restored clearances were still provisional, and Viggiano clearly had it out for him. He could not afford any security violations. When he was satisfied that there were no loose confidential papers anywhere, he punched the exit code into the alarm system to secure his office.

  He did not feel like going home to brood further on his dilemma. Instead, he drove to a jazz bar that he remembered in the Ngaba section of Kinshasa near University City. At one time it had been a popular hangout for Peace Corps volunteers on their infrequent visits to the capital. The Peace Corps was long gone, but Leonard had told him that the Ibiza was still there and the music was still good.

  He parked on the street in front of the bar, a nondescript concrete building painted a cheery canary yellow and wedged between a block of apartments and a small supermarket. A date palm growing in a pot by the door was hung with colored Christmas lights.