Edo, the houseboy, let him in. Pierce did not ask for Marissa; he did not yet have the heart to describe his meeting with Caraway. Instead, he went to the patio, gazing out at the lights of Petrol Island as he sorted through his options.
The ringing of his cell phone broke his concentration. “Yes?” he answered.
There was silence on the other end, then the brief crackle of static. “Is this Damon Pierce?” a man’s voice said.
“Yes.”
“This is Trevor Hill. I assume you know who I am.”
Pierce was startled. “You’re in charge of PGL’s operations in the delta.”
Another pause. “I’d like to see you. Tonight.”
Swiftly, Pierce considered the ethics of meeting a key PGL executive—a witness in Bobby’s lawsuit—outside the presence of Clark Hamilton. That this could lead to Pierce’s punishment by the California Bar was not, after the day’s events, nearly enough to stop him.
“Tell me where,” he answered.
6
HILL SENT TWO YOUNG LUANDIAN SOLDIERS TO DRIVE PIERCE FROM the compound.
Sitting in the rear of the jeep, Pierce considered the entwinement between PGL, who no doubt paid these men, and the Luandian military. But they served a purpose besides providing transportation: the state security men outside the Okaris’ gate did not follow. The soldier stationed at the entrance to PGL’s walled compound waved them through without question.
Inside the walls, Pierce felt as if he had entered a world utterly foreign to the menacing squalor of Port George. It was past eleven; the well-lit streets, manicured gardens, and uniform ranch houses reminded Pierce of a middle-class American suburb whose residents, all respectably employed, had retired to bed. He wondered at the schizoid life of a white petroleum engineer who, leaving his family in this ersatz version of home, risked kidnapping or worse outside these walls.
The jeep entered a tree-lined cul-de-sac that ended at a sprawling villa, shadowed by palms, whose windows showed the faint glow of light from the inside. One of the soldiers pointed toward a pathway to a carved wooden door. “It’s unlocked,” he said. “You can enter.”
Pierce followed the path in a darkness so quiet that it sharpened his sense of a surreptitious meeting. Reaching the door, he hesitated. Then he turned the iron knob and stepped inside.
He stood in a tiled alcove. To the right, illuminated by a single lamp, was a spacious living room. Even in the shadows, the decor bespoke a love of Africa: wooden masks; statuary carved from mahogany; wall hangings of patterned mudcloth or woven mats; a framed map of colonial Luandia, faded to sepia by time. To Pierce the surroundings reflected a man who had embraced Luandia as his home. Then Pierce saw Hill, sitting in a high-backed African chair with a tumbler of amber liquid in his hand. “Evening, Mr. Pierce,” he said in a grainy British accent.
Hill stood, putting down his drink with exaggerated care. When he crossed the living room to shake Pierce’s hand, Pierce caught the scent of whiskey. Pierce’s first impression was of ruddy, weathered skin, reddish hair, sky-blue eyes, and the frank expression of someone schooled in practicality rather than politesse. Hill’s calloused grip was firm. “Care for a drink?” he said. “I’ve been at it since sundown.”
His enunciation was clear enough, though its deliberation, perhaps a compensation for drink, also conveyed a sense of quiet despair. “Whatever you’re having,” Pierce said.
Hill walked to a thatched bar tucked into a corner of the room, producing a heavy crystal glass and a bottle of Bushmills. “Good choice. Do you drink whiskey like a Brit or an American?”
“Neat is fine,” Pierce said. “Ice melts.”
Briefly, Hill laughed, then handed Pierce the tumbler with an air of decorous courtesy. He waved Pierce to a chair near his own, its twin. “I suppose you’re wondering what this is about.”
Though Hill seemed steady enough, Pierce sensed a man on the edge of a psychic implosion, drinking either to dull his apprehension or to liberate his conscience. “A little.”
Hill looked at him sharply. “You missed my deposition. A deposition, I discovered, is no place for subtle truths. All it does is deepen one’s disquiet.”
Pierce smiled a little. “How many times, I wonder, have I told my clients things like ‘Only answer the question asked’ or ‘Never volunteer information’ or ‘There are many ways to tell the truth.’ You probably heard all three. The effect is often to leave the witness with his job intact and a guilty conscience. Assuming he has one.”
Hill’s expression turned inward. “Ever read Heart of Darkness?”
“In high school, yes.”
“Then I assume you remember Mr. Kurtz, who immersed himself in Africa only to experience man’s descent into the barbarism that lies waiting in our souls. By the end, all Kurtz could do was mumble, ‘The horror, the horror.’”
Pierce tried to ascertain the rules for this surreal but oddly civilized conversation. “Is that your experience of Luandia?”
“Not until now.” Though suffused with melancholy, Hill’s tone was calm and lucid. “I was born here, when Luandia was still a British colony. My parents were missionaries in Port George before anyone struck oil; to me, this was home. I loved the outdoors, the creeklands, the fishing. Most of all I loved the people, fractious though they were, the traditions through which they found harmony with the earth. Compared to now, living outside modernity was not so mean a fate. And then came oil, the serpent in what—if not the Garden of Eden—was a place that did not destroy its peoples’ souls.
“I was near college age. I thought, as did my father, that this elixir would provide roads and health care and education.” His tone filled with rueful memory. “So I went off to become an oil geologist, planning to return here. By the time I did, after years in the Middle East, the delta was in the last throes of a wasting disease that had devoured nature and man himself.”
This explanation as expiation, Pierce intuited, was a precursor to discussing Bobby Okari. Standing abruptly, Hill returned to the bar, his careful movements seeming to derive from muscle memory. He poured himself a full tumbler of whiskey and brought the bottle back with him, placing it on the table between his chair and Pierce’s. Then he sat back a moment, gazing about, as though he perceived something in the light and shadows that no one else could see. “Still,” he said in a tone of weary rumination, “I felt the bad old days of oil extraction were slowly coming to an end. What I didn’t fully appreciate was that PGL had become inextricably entangled in a nightmare of our creation that we lacked the power to end. Before anything else, my charge was securing the safe operations of PGL in a moral twilight—not just our equipment but the lives and safety of our people. And so I, too, became complicit in the horror.”
Pierce took a swallow of whiskey, feeling once more the shadow of Goro. “Gladstone might say you had no choice.”
Hill’s bark of laughter was surprisingly harsh. “I could have resigned—or been fired. But I told myself that that would be like deserting my troops in a foxhole, surrounded by enemies and enemies posing as friends: thieves, kidnappers, a government contemptuous of its people, ‘protectors’ who oscillate between being predators and murderers and whose secret alliances may change from day to day.” His voice softened. “Survival is a dirty business, Mr. Pierce. No one in my job stays clean.”
Pierce poured himself another inch of Bushmills. “I think I understand.”
Hill shook his head, a gesture of reproof. “I sat in that deposition the other day, answering questions from your smart young partner, Ms. Rahv. And every answer, however true in itself, falsified an environment she’ll never understand. She can’t—you can’t—imagine what it is to live without law.” Suddenly, his voice quickened with anger and remorse. “You arm men who should have no arms. When you call on them to protect your people, as we did after Asari Day, you’re nauseous with fear about what they’ll do. And no one else wants you to get out. Not the government; not the West; not FREE; not the o
ther crooks and kidnappers; not our management or shareholders getting rich at a safe distance; not the avatars of American oil strategy who imagine us the Praetorian Guard of national security. Who would you have in your place, they ask, the Chinese? They’d destroy what’s left of the environment and empower Karama to do whatever he wants.
“So PGL and the government have become like a couple trapped in an abusive marriage. The partners despise each other yet wallow in their dysfunction, afraid of what will happen if they divorce. For Karama, we’re reliable and technologically superior—quite reasonably, he doubts whether the Chinese could generate as much for him to steal. For PetroGlobal, the longer it stays, the more it makes: if the world price of oil spikes because of some fresh tragedy in Luandia, it profits; if operations are more stable, production rises and it profits. At whatever cost, a corrupt regime with a brutal military delivers a certain predictability—God only knows what might follow Karama. So, like any toxic relationship, it ends up changing who you are.”
“And you?” Pierce asked.
After taking another sip, Hill spoke more quietly: “I’ve become a man in a catatonic trance, perfectly aware of the evil all around me but unable to speak or move. I still know what the delta needs: leaders who care, revenue sharing, and a sense of community. But that’s like dreaming of Utopia in a Hobbesian state of nature. In the end, only Okari claimed to still believe in Utopia.”
They were approaching the heart of Hill’s malaise, Pierce sensed. “’Claimed’?” he repeated.
Hill poured himself a more cautious share of whiskey. Pierce took stock of the toll liquor was adding to his own fatigue; his tongue and brain felt a few clicks slower. “Perhaps he’s innocent,” Hill responded. “Perhaps not. Perhaps he caused the deaths without wishing to know that. Violent death happens here almost at random, as though you’re stepping off a sidewalk when a careless driver careens around a corner. Karama and Okimbo don’t have a monopoly on killing.”
“But what do you think?”
Hill cradled the tumbler in his lap. “That Okari is the only person who proposed, by his actions, to transcend the savagery of the delta. Personally, I thought him gifted with intelligence, charisma, and a very considerable ego.” Hill gave a rueful smile. “Only a man with an elevated self-concept could truly imagine healing this place. So I took him for a more or less honorable man.
“Of course, who knows about anyone, really? There’s only one thing I’m sure of: that Okari, like Gladstone, is caught up in forces beyond his control.”
Warmed by whiskey, Pierce chose to reveal some of his own uncertainty. “Gladstone puzzles me,” he conceded. “I can’t figure out whether he’s a decent man or merely a polished businessman.”
“You look for polarities,” Hill said in mild rebuke. “As though he were a character from a book for boys. By now not even Michael knows what he is for sure.
“I’m sure you plan to question his American superior, John Colson, the chairman of PetroGlobal. I assure you that Colson would much prefer to make money in Luandia by doing the right things. The man beneath Gladstone—me—is too mired in the swamp to believe that possible. So Michael passes on our chairman’s well-intended policies, fearful that they may become a ‘Chinese whisper’: when you tell Karama or Okimbo that your people ‘need protection,’ it’s like Henry the Second in Becket asking, ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’”
“Henry knew,” Pierce retorted. “So does Gladstone. As for the chairman of PetroGlobal, I’ve represented far too many executives to think he’s so naive.”
Hill pondered his tumbler of whiskey. “To PetroGlobal,” he said at length, “PGL’s become a mutation that frightens its parent. PetroGlobal can’t control it, can’t fix it, and can’t get rid of it. So its executives don’t want to know the truth—that part of PGL’s genetic makeup comes from men like Okimbo and Van Daan. It seems you mean to show them.”
“I mean to save Bobby Okari,” Pierce answered. “How did Van Daan come to work for you?”
Hill paused, as though facing a decision. “It’s as I told Ms. Rahv,” he answered. “Okimbo said he wanted to work with him—as though I’d consider a reference from someone I sensed might be a murderous psychopath. When I told Gladstone not to hire Van Daan, Michael replied that Ugwo Ajukwa was pressing him to do so.”
“What was your problem with Van Daan?”
“Other than that Okimbo knew him? Most Afrikaners I know are good people; they’ve accepted that apartheid had to go. But Van Daan’s among the worst, involved in half the dirty wars in Africa—as if there’s any other kind. A whiff of racism and brutality follows him into the room.”
“Did you say that to Gladstone?”
Hill gazed pensively at nothing. Pierce sensed his divided loyalties: on one side was his loathing for what had happened; on the other, a life of loyalty to PGL. “What I told Michael,” he said at length, “was that I didn’t think we could control him. It wasn’t only that Van Daan was Ajukwa and Okimbo’s man, and therefore that I questioned his allegiance. I didn’t believe we could predict his methods—by temperament and background, he wasn’t likely to internalize corporate memos on ‘human rights and community relations.’ But Ajukwa insisted, and Gladstone acquiesced.”
This last was said in a tone of fatalism, as though it were a turning point. After a moment, Pierce asked, “When did you come to believe that Okimbo had carried out a massacre at Lana?”
Hill no longer looked at him. “There was an oil spill in Lana. Most likely the villagers had sabotaged a pipeline, hoping to get a ‘cleanup contract’ from PGL. I told Okimbo I didn’t want to pay them, that extortion was part of the sickness—impoverished villagers destroying their own environment for money. His response was that I should pay him and he would make these saboteurs see reason.
“I refused. Though I doubted it, the leak might have been an accident; too many of our pipes are old. So I decided to visit Lana and see for myself.” Hill turned to Pierce, regret etched in his weathered face. “Before I could travel there, reports came back that the village had been destroyed, with many dead. Okimbo told me that another ethnic group, the Ondani, had attacked Lana in a squabble over the proceeds of the anticipated ‘cleanup contract.’ Just as well, he said; Lana would be no more trouble.”
“Did you accept that?”
“No. I thought it was a transparent cover story, not meant to be believed. But I had no way to disprove it. Weeks later, rumors filtered back to me through Okari’s people that the attackers had been dressed as civilians but acted like soldiers. In this account, a survivor claimed to have seen a big man with an eye patch directing the attack.” Hill’s tone was weary. “If so, my complaint to Okimbo had become my own Chinese whisper; when I failed to give Okimbo carte blanche, he used Lana to demonstrate how effective his methods could be. The next time, his tacit message went, PGL should pay him to make our problems disappear. It was my failure to pay for Lana, I believe, that led to Van Daan’s ascent.”
“But when you told Gladstone about these rumors, he assigned Van Daan to investigate.”
“Yes. You know the result: Van Daan reported that it was Asari propaganda.” Hill’s voice mingled despair and disgust. “’Those people kill each other,’ Van Daan told me, ‘whenever they get bored.’ In Van Daan’s account, Okari was exploiting ethnic violence to advance his cause through lies.”
Hill poured himself another measure of Irish whiskey and, without asking, one for Pierce. Pierce sipped his for a time, then broke the silence by asking softly, “When those workers were hung, who did you think did it?”
“Possibly the Asari. Possibly not.” Hill sat back, his lids heavy. He started to bring the tumbler to his mouth, then stopped. “It occurred to me,” he said baldly, “that anyone who could decimate Lana, then blame it on someone else, could do the same thing by killing three of our workers. To pin their deaths on Okari would give Okimbo the equivalent of a hunting license.”
Pierce le
aned forward. “Did you say that to Gladstone?”
Hill slowly shook his head. “Not in those words. By then my position was tenuous. Ajukwa was agitating to have me fired—inspired by Van Daan, I think. But Gladstone wanted to save my job. His compromise was to give Van Daan his own budget, cutting me out of the loop on ‘security matters’ relating to the Asari. Making such an accusation would be fatal, I told myself—I could do no good as an ex-employee.” He paused, still staring straight ahead. “So I made my own compromise and wrote the now famous ‘rubber bullet’ memo. My reward for this act of courage was to be confined to quarters with the other employees—for my own protection, Van Daan insisted. My castration was complete.”
Though stated without self-pity, the quiet words exposed Hill’s internal wreckage more nakedly than a show of feeling. “And Goro followed,” Pierce said.
In profile, Hill nodded. “In the literal sense, I still don’t know what happened. But essentially, I do. Okimbo and Van Daan planned the massacre your clients saw.”
“And Gladstone?”
“Didn’t know. Now, like me, he grasps too late the price of his Faustian bargain. Like mine, his job was to protect PGL for the benefit of all those who want us in Luandia. So he turned to the men others had forced on him.” Hill faced Pierce at last. “If there was a conspiracy against Okari, Gladstone wasn’t part of it. The conspiracy is between Okimbo, Van Daan, and whoever else they work for—or with. Take your pick.”
Pierce leaned forward. “What do you know about the trial?”
“That you’re making it appear that Van Daan is helping pay for evidence. It seems Michael’s quite upset.” His gaze broke. “I’m on the sidelines now. As you see, I’ve turned to drink—Michael thinks I’ve lost my grip, like a soldier in Iraq suffering from combat fatigue. Soon PetroGlobal will rotate me out of Luandia. If they knew you were here, they’d wish Michael had acted sooner.”
“Is that all they’d wish for?” Pierce said with real anger. “What about PGL’s obligation to stop this legal charade it’s part of?”
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