“Is that likely?”
“It’s possible.” Martel took another sip of Meursault. “Suppose Luandia goes off-line. The price of oil could shoot up twenty-five dollars a barrel, helping to trigger a worldwide recession. Suddenly our military, which runs on oil, will have to pay for gas instead of troops. Less fortunate Americans can’t drive a car; retirees on fixed incomes can’t heat their homes; more companies can’t sell their products overseas. Freight haulers raise prices; their customers transport fewer goods to fewer buyers. Pretty soon the stock market crashes, wiping out the baby boomers’ retirement plans. In the bleakest scenario, our recession becomes the economic version of nuclear winter.”
“All because of Luandia,” Pierce said in a skeptical tone.
“Sometimes our worst fears turn real. Imagine a shutdown in Luandia at the same time Al Qaeda sets off a WMD in Saudi Arabia.” Martel’s voice softened. “My point is that there are people at the Defense Department, the NSA, and my former agency for whom Karama equals stability equals supply.”
Dinner arrived—poached lobster for Martel, rare ahi tuna for Pierce. “There are Americans in Luandia who could help you,” Martel added. “Our ambassador, Grayson Caraway, has good contacts and good judgment. There’s also an ex-colleague of mine, Dave Rubin, who gives strategic advice to multinationals trying to navigate the Luandian murk. I’ll put you in touch with both.”
Thanking him, Pierce decided to let Martel enjoy his meal without interrogation. At its end, Martel ordered Armagnac for both of them. Though he swirled his snifter before sipping, savoring its aroma, his look of abstraction suggested that his thoughts were elsewhere. “There’s something more,” he said at length. “Did you know that Karama and Okari once were friends?”
Pierce was startled. “That’s hard to imagine.”
“Nevertheless, it’s true. A few of my former colleagues speculate that the two had some sort of corrupt relationship, followed by a falling out, and that Okari is either more or less than he seems.”
Pierce put down his snifter. “From what Marissa describes, the events in Goro suggest more than a ‘falling out.’”
Martel shrugged. “I don’t know Okari. But neither, I expect, do you—after all, you haven’t seen him for twelve years. For all you know, he’s capable of murder.” His tone became philosophical. “Luandia’s a hard environment, Damon. The absence of moral restraint can warp people in terrible ways. In that sense corruption and murder arise from the same conditions—no one has to account for what they do.” He paused to drain his Armagnac. “The age-old question is whether men refrain from evil out of a higher morality, or only when they fear the consequences. Luandia supports the skeptics’ answer.”
2
FLYING INTO PORT GEORGE AS NIGHT FELL, PIERCE GAZED OUT AT THE twilit maze of creeks at the heart of the Luandian Delta.
Somewhere in this web of palms and mangroves and polluted water was Asariland and Bobby Okari’s ruined village; concealed throughout were the armed militia that preyed on PGL. As the skies darkened, the flames of a hundred gas flares appeared like torches, turning the maze into a surreal replica of Dante’s inferno. In the distance appeared the lights of Port George.
Shuddering, the plane swooped toward the runway. The woman beside him gasped; the lights of the descending plane captured the rusted skeleton of an airliner that had crashed several years before. “Maintenance error,” Martel had told him wryly. “They left it there as a metaphor for the country.” Pierce was almost glad to land.
An hour later he had passed through a customs station guarded by armed Luandian soldiers and into the chaos of a cavernous but shabby airport where Africans pushed in all directions. In the press of bodies and babel of dialects, a bulky man grasped the handle of Pierce’s suitcase and offered a ride in English so rapid that Pierce found it less comprehensible than threatening. Wrenching back the suitcase, Pierce said, “No,” and kept weaving through the crowd, absorbing the strangeness of being a white man surrounded by blacks in such an alien place. A quick glance at a newspaper rack revealed the headline “Three Killed in Cult Attack.”
As someone grabbed his arm, Pierce started. The firm grip belonged to a short, intense-looking man in his early thirties wearing a blue sport shirt and gold-rimmed glasses. Perceiving Pierce’s anxiety, he looked both impatient and amused. “I’m Atiku Bara,” he said, “Bobby’s lawyer. Keep moving.”
Though Pierce complied, his sole reason to trust the man clutching his elbow was that he had named the man Marissa was sending. Bryce Martel’s last injunction echoed in his brain: “Trust no one—not Okari, not even Marissa Brand.”
“This way,” his guide directed sharply.
They rushed through an exit door to a sidewalk crammed with shouting cabbies and double-parked cars and taxis until they reached a beat-up sedan. After opening the passenger door for Pierce, his new guide scurried into the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition, and floored the accelerator. The car lurched into a space in traffic Pierce had not perceived, joining a disorderly scrum of cars and cabs and trucks hurtling toward Port George on what would have been, were any rules obeyed, a two-lane road. “The trick is not to stop,” said Pierce’s supposed escort. “Or be followed. Welcome to Luandia.”
Still apprehensive, Pierce decided he had no choice but to trust this man until he could get his bearings. He hesitated, then asked baldly, “How’s Bobby?”
Bara—if indeed he was Bara—glanced at him, his eyes narrowed. “A week after his arrest there are still no charges, at least not formally. Nonetheless his punishment proceeds. They took him to a military compound in Port George. He is often chained, sometimes beaten, fed very little, and forced to shit in a bucket they seldom remove from the cell he shares with rats. Even as his lawyer I cannot see him outside the presence of the butcher Okimbo.”
Beneath his rapid speech—a rhythmic patois that evoked Jamaica—Pierce heard both fatalism and anger. Before Pierce could respond, the headlights in the opposite lane revealed a gap into which Bara accelerated, throwing Pierce back into his seat as they passed a doorless van crowded with Luandians. “A necessity,” Bara said coolly. “There are those who wait by the road for oilmen to kidnap. Driving with a strange white man is not my favorite thing.
“As for Bobby, physically he was never strong. He has suffered greatly. But his spirit remains unbroken. He will not speak of the horrors he endured, only those he saw.”
“According to the government,” Pierce said, “Bobby saw no horrors. All Okimbo’s soldiers did was overcome armed resistance.”
“Yes. From chickens, goats, children, and headless old men. For which our grateful women showered them with sexual favors before dying from the pleasure of it.” Bara’s voice softened. “I’m alive because I came too late to die. I was returning from a trip to England; on the road to Goro that day, I saw a mother and daughter who had managed to escape. They tried to tell me what was happening, though the words came hard. Then they vanished into the forest—perhaps the only witnesses save for Bobby and Marissa. I decided to turn around.”
“Had you expected a massacre?”
“After the traitors abandoned Bobby? Yes.” Eyes fixed on the road, Bara added quietly, “Perhaps I was late on purpose. I did not wish to die.”
He fell silent. Captured by the headlights, Pierce spotted what could have been, had his mind accepted it, a charred corpse protruding from the bushes at the shoulder of the road. As Pierce turned, staring back, the phantom disappeared.
“Yes,” Bara said matter-of-factly. “I saw him driving out.”
The car struck a pothole, lifting Pierce from his seat and shooting a spasm of pain through his spine. “Do you know what happened?”
Bara shrugged his shoulders, both hands still grasping the wheel. “Perhaps he was a robber, perhaps worse. If the would-be victims overwhelm an attacker, they will sometimes beat him to the ground, put a flat tire around his neck, douse the tire in gasoline, and immolate the wron
gdoer.” He spoke with weary resignation. “It’s a form of citizen justice—the police do nothing they aren’t paid to do. The rule of law in Luandia is rhetorical.”
“So it seems.”
Bara glanced sideways. “African savagery, a Westerner might say. But before the English came, our communities were self-policing. It was from the British we learned that the police could be tools of violence and repression, indifferent to all crimes but dissent. Our police have simply jacked up the violence and corruption.”
Above the darkened wetlands the scattered lights of Port George appeared closer and brighter. “The police we fear most,” Bara went on, “are those we can’t detect. The state security services are everywhere, spies waiting for us to commit whatever crime Karama chooses to invent. Imagine the forces of law in the hands of someone who can make an opponent vanish in the middle of the night, or order police to assassinate him and disguise it as a murder-robbery. One can die for taking pictures of something Karama wants to erase from public knowledge. Like the rubble of a village full of mutilated bodies.”
“By now I assume the bodies have vanished.”
“Yes. They have gone to a better place—a mass grave.”
Pierce stared into the darkness. At length, he turned back to Bara. “How is Marissa?”
“As well as can be expected. You will see, tonight.”
Imagining Marissa, Pierce realized that the car felt hot and stuffy. “Can I open a window?”
Bara shook his head. “Best not to. We’re approaching the outskirts of Port George.”
Abruptly, they reached the edge of a shantytown, an enveloping web of garbage-strewn alleys between wooden structures with corrugated roofs. The streets were dirt and rutted with potholes.
Bara’s eyes darted from one side to the other. “Keep watching,” he instructed Pierce.
“For what?”
“Anyone. Even though the soldiers have come, the gangs may suddenly appear. They fight one another for territory, the right to kidnap people or tap pipelines, and their tentacles reach deep into the creeklands. They are what happens when impoverished people see their leaders getting rich.” As the road widened, cars passed in the opposite direction, weaving to avoid ruts. “For you,” Bara continued, “what I fear most is kidnapping. But if warfare breaks out in the street, we could get caught in the cross fire. Thirteen people died from gunshots last week, one inside her home when a bullet shattered a window.”
The city closed around them. They passed between two-story buildings and beneath tangled phone lines stretching from crooked poles. Dense smoke from what seemed to be a slaughterhouse fouled the air. On a corner Pierce saw a dimly lit gas station from which projected a line of perhaps twenty cars, surrounded by beggars or peddlers.
Bara followed Pierce’s gaze. “Ironic, isn’t it? We ship billions of dollars of our oil to America, while Luandians wait in line for gasoline. Port George is our nightmare.”
Pierce was gripped by the strangeness of it. “Who lives here?”
“The deluded. People who thought there was work here, and discovered that the work was violence, robbery, and prostitution.” He pointed ahead. “Look there.”
From the haze and darkness materialized a massive garbage dump, amid which raggedly dressed scavengers, their faces masked against the fumes, appeared and disappeared like ghosts. “That is their profession,” Bara said. “Grubbing through our offal.”
Beyond the garbage dump, Pierce realized, must be the Gulf of Luan-dia. Outlined in the torchlight of a gas flare was a massive complex of steel railings and satellite dishes seemingly suspended above the water—an oil platform no doubt owned by PGL. “Let’s find dinner,” Pierce requested. “I need to talk with you before I see Marissa.”
Stalled behind two cars, Bara accelerated past them. “Once you’re spotted with me,” he answered, “the police will mark you. But they camp outside the Okari compound, so I suppose it doesn’t matter. The real problem is that our dinner might end before dessert. The kidnappers know where white men go.”
Pierce strove for a certain fatalism. “Whatever I do, it seems the outcome is pretty random. Why be kidnapped hungry?”
Bara’s glance suggested disapproval of Pierce’s careless manner. In an arid tone, he said, “Then we’ll go where you’ll fit in.”
Abruptly making a U-turn, he sped down one side street and swerved onto another. “It’s best to reach our destination quickly,” he said. “The neighborhood draws trouble like flies. Even the locals are careful.” As they turned onto a thoroughfare dense with cars and Luandians hurrying on foot, Bara added, “They are going home. They fear the gangs and soldiers.”
Ahead Pierce saw the spire of what appeared to be a mosque. “Are there Muslims here?” he asked.
“Some. Not so many as in the north.”
The wail of a siren split the air. The taxicab in front of them screeched to a halt, Bara braking with a jolt to stop inches from its bumper. Feeling a spurt of nausea, Pierce saw an SUV convoyed by two police trucks speeding through a cross street, nearly hitting a pedestrian. Then the flashing lights disappeared, and the wails receded into the night. “Most likely an oilman,” Bara said tightly, “arriving on a business trip—they pay the police as though hiring their own militia. If this one’s smart, he won’t leave his hotel.”
At the side of the road Pierce saw a watery trench. “Is that an open sewer?”
“Yes. But then the shantytown we just drove through is a sewer of its own—no electricity or running water. Even here you have four or five or six people living in a room, sharing a toilet with thirty or forty others. Potable water’s hard to come by. So people get malaria, TB, diphtheria, typhoid, cholera, and, of course, HIV/AIDS.”
The traffic began moving again. “How many people live here?” Pierce asked.
Bara’s brow furrowed. “Two million or so—no one knows for sure. After the oil boom, it grew without the government or the oil companies caring how. So Port George became the desperate place you see.” He pointed to the wall of a brick dwelling on which was painted, in white, THIS HOUSE NOT FOR SALE. “The latest fraud is selling houses that don’t belong to you. Home owners are wise not to go on vacation.”
Pierce sat back. “Hard to believe.”
“Why? Do you think a man can move here and start up a business? One needs money to buy a generator; or bribe our officials for a business license; or pay the police for the protection they won’t give.” He turned to Pierce, anger etched in his youthful face. “Our people lack what you Americans call a ‘social safety net.’ They are not criminals—they’re resourceful, intelligent, industrious, and determined to survive. So they do what they must. But all Westerners see, if anything, is oil and corruption . . .”
Bara braked abruptly. Pierce saw the police van speeding from an alley a split second before it sideswiped Bara’s car. Together they skidded to a stop, the van looming in their front window.
Bara froze behind the wheel. Two policemen with semiautomatic weapons jumped from the van. The taller one strode swiftly to the driver’s side, staring in at Bara as the second man stood with his gun aimed at the windshield. “Get out,” the first man ordered in English. “Both of you.”
When Bara cracked open the door, the policeman jerked him upright. Pierce got out, approaching them with the reflexive confidence of an American accustomed to having rights. Then he felt the second policeman put a gun to his temple.
Bara’s eyes widened, a warning to Pierce. All Pierce could do was breathe.
The first man grasped Bara’s collar. “You damaged our car,” he said. “You should go to prison.”
Bara slumped. “I was careless. Truly, I am sorry.” He hesitated. “Can we help with your repairs?”
Still clutching Bara’s shirt, the policeman studied him with rheumy, bloodshot eyes. Turning to Pierce, he demanded, “Who are you, oyibo?”
Pierce felt the gun pressed harder against his temple. He forced himself to stay calm. “I’m
a businessman.”
“American or English?”
Pierce hesitated. “American.”
Cars inched around them, their drivers’ eyes averted. At once Pierce understood that the policeman could shoot him in the middle of the street, and those near them would turn blind. Sweat glistened on Bara’s forehead.
“Five hundred dollars American,” the first man told Pierce. “Or your driver goes to jail. You can walk these streets alone.”
Slowly, Pierce reached into the back pocket of his khakis for the decoy wallet with some cash and a credit card, calculated to keep the police or robbers from searching him for more. Mouth dry, he counted out five one-hundred-dollar bills.
Releasing Bara, the policeman took them. “Disappear,” he said.
To disappear was Pierce’s most fervent wish. He waited with Bara as the two men drove away.
Bara expelled a breath. “By the way,” he said, “oyibo means ‘white man.’ You’re likely to be hearing it again, and seldom as a compliment.”
3
THE RHINO BAR, BARA TOLD PIERCE, WAS A HANGOUT FOR EXPATRIate oil workers.
They sat at a table near the back, Pierce registering his companion’s distaste at the atmosphere around them. The floors were wooden and worn; the walls featured framed rugby shirts, beer signs, and a flat-screen TV broadcasting a soccer match; the sound system blared throbbing American dance music that drowned out the cacophony of talk and laughter and shouts from partisans of one team or the other. The men were white; the women black. Two of the women were dancing and grinding against white guys twice their age. Nearby a tall and stunningly beautiful Luandian woman in a shiny short skirt danced provocatively in front of a doughy man who sat at a table drinking and smoking and watching her as though appraising merchandise.
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