“We can give you Mutacol or Dukerol if you want,” Ackroyd said. “Neither are available in the States, yet, anyway. We have about seven hundred people here, all women and children, and maybe half are ill. It’s one of the smallest IDPs in Liger, but that doesn’t necessarily make things any easier. We’re a little worried because we don’t have water purification equipment, and the last convoy of water trucks was hit by the rebels. Only one made it through with potable water. Two were captured and two were destroyed. The water just poured out onto the ground. We’re boiling what we can, but we’re running out of kerosene to boil, too, and gas to power the generators. You could save almost everybody if you could just rehydrate them, but that’s proving to be more difficult than we thought it would be. I’m sure you know this already, but don’t drink any water unless it’s bottled or boiled, don’t eat anything that hasn’t been well cooked and isn’t still warm, don’t eat any fruit you didn’t peel yourself, and don’t, it goes without saying, go in the river. I mean, don’t go swimming.”
“Why is this camp all women and children?” Mack asked. “Where are the men?”
“There are camps with men, too,” Ackroyd said. “The feeling was that the Muslims didn’t want men and women housed in the same camp. Evelyn Warner thinks they just want to put the women where they know they can find them. It’s not safe here and all we’ve got is about thirty AU troops, led by a young corporal named Okempo who’s never actually fired a weapon in his life. We took a mortar round last night that killed a dozen people. It came in from across the river. For no reason, just to kill people and make them afraid.”
“From who?” Mack said. “IPAB or LPLF or someone else?”
“What difference does it make?” Ackroyd said. “That’s the infirmary. The staff compound is behind it—that’s where you’ll be staying.”
She saw lights ahead, a GP-large tent illuminated from inside with electricity, glowing orange beneath the African stars, oversized human figures projected in silhouettes against the canvas. She heard generators starting and cutting out. She felt, as she followed her guide, utterly conspicuous, the eyes of the sufferers who surrounded her watching her, mothers and children, but unlike the crowds she’d seen on the streets of Port Ivory, where kids begged for handouts and adults clamored for assistance, here everyone was for the most part silent, save for the occasional low voice of someone singing a lullaby to help her baby sleep.
At the tent, Ackroyd left her alone while he made inquiries. He returned to say that Dr. Chaline was out having a walkabout in the camp, and that his assistant, Dr. Leger, was attending a birth, even though the mother was so underweight and malnourished that the survival of either mother or newborn seemed doubtful.
A white woman, mid-thirties, Mack guessed, sat at a folding table outside the staff tent, smoking a cigarette beneath a broad acacia tree, a Styrofoam cup of coffee on the table in front of her. A young black woman was seated across from her. The white woman was wearing a pair of short-sleeved loose-fitting navy blue coveralls, the zipper drawn down to reveal a white tank top beneath it. The black woman wore green fatigues and a white short-sleeved shirt.
“This is Evelyn Warner, who I was telling you about,” Ackroyd said, “and this is Cela, our translator and a relief worker. Evelyn, Cela, this is Mary Dorsey from the United Nations Women’s Health Initiative.”
“Have you eaten, Stephen?” Warner said, nodding to MacKenzie.
“I will,” Ackroyd said. “I wanted to go check on section ten to see if Udal brought them the lime they needed.”
“Why don’t you eat now and check on that later?” Warner said.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Stephen said, making his exit. “Mary, it was nice meeting you. I’m sure I’ll see you around.”
“Mary Dorsey, welcome to Camp Seven,” Warner said. “We heard a rumor that a new Obroni was on her way—you wouldn’t happen to have come with a load of diapers and infant formula, would you?”
“I did,” MacKenzie said. “They were unloading the helicopter when I left.” Warner closed her eyes and sighed with relief, then opened them, smiling.
“I didn’t mean, ‘Did you have any on you?’” Warner said. She turned to Cela. “That must be where Claude went. Now if we just had something to mix the formula with, we’d be all set, wouldn’t we?”
She turned her attention again to the visitor.
“So do tell, Mary Dorsey, what exactly is the United Nations Women’s Health Initiative? And forgive me for being blunt, because I was going to say, ‘What can we do for you?’ but frankly, I’m much more interested in what you can do for us.”
“I’m here to learn,” MacKenzie said. “Just to see for myself, I suppose. I can’t make any promises, but what I can do, when I get back, is make recommendations.”
Warner didn’t say anything. Mack wondered if her accent had given her away somehow. There had been times, during her career with counterintelligence, when MacKenzie had taken a certain amount of pleasure, even pride, in the role-playing her job required her to do, and in fooling people. This was not such a time. This was one of those times when she hated—hated—having to lie to people.
“I suppose that must sound terribly inadequate to you,” she continued, “and for that, I apologize. The bottom line is that we can’t commit relief funds without verification. That’s why I’m here. That probably seems hard to believe, for you, when the proof is all around you, but in New York, they can’t rely on word of mouth or satellite photographs, so they sent me. I was hoping to take with me a list of what your needs are.”
“What our needs are?” Warner said. She exchanged glances with Cela, and then the two women laughed, a prolonged chuckle despite the Englishwoman’s best efforts to suppress her mirth. “Oh dear, that’s rich,” she said. “I’m so sorry,” she said at last, “we’re not laughing at you, really we aren’t, but I think the first thing we’d need would be a very long roll of paper upon which to write you a list of the things we need. Maybe it would save time if we told you what we don’t need. We don’t need dirt. Or fresh air. Everything other than that, we need.”
“We’re also worried about security,” MacKenzie said, sticking to her agenda. “My superiors are worried about relief supplies falling into the wrong hands.”
“And whose hands would those be, exactly?” Warner said.
“Maybe you could tell me,” Mack said. “The Council on Relief is concerned that anything we bring in will be seized by IPAB forces led by John Dari—that sort of thing.”
Again, Warner exchanged glances with Cela.
“Well, first of all,” she said, “you should tell your bosses to get it straight, because John Dari doesn’t lead IPAB forces. The people he leads don’t call themselves anything, though I’ve heard them referred to as the SJD or the ‘Sons of John Dari.’ And second of all, this oh-so-delicious corn-soy porridge that Cela and I have just supped on, of which you will also surely partake if you stay with us, may have been originally shipped by Oxfam or President Bo or the U.S. or whoever wants to take credit for it, but it was delivered into our hands by John Dari’s men after it sat in a warehouse on a government air force base in Baku for God only knows how long, so you should tell your ‘superiors,’ if I may use that word, that John Dari is not your problem.”
Mack felt like she was being scolded by a kindergarten teacher.
“Forgive me, Mary, I don’t mean to snap at you,” Warner said, “because I know it’s not your fault, but you should know that while people elsewhere spend time arguing about who to give aid to or how to get it here or who should transport it or who gets credit for where it comes from and all that sod-off crap, the people here who are waiting for it are dying, in great numbers, every day, in this camp and in others. So when we see people on ‘fact-finding’ missions, we tend to think, my God, if they could just send one shipment of food for every observer and famine-tourist they think they need to send, real people would be alive.”
MacKenzie stood
still while Cela gave Evelyn Warner a look.
“Now I must ask you, with all the humility I can summon, Mary Dorsey, to forgive me,” Warner said. “That was completely out of line. You’ve just arrived, you mean good entirely, and I’ve gone and made you feel like you’re to blame. You know, the thing is, we’ve actually noticed this—Stephen and I were talking about it. You live here and you get very angry, and it builds and builds inside you, but we all feel the same thing, so what’s the point in talking about it? And then someone new comes along, and we dump on them, just because we have somebody new to dump on. Can you forgive me?”
“Of course I can,” MacKenzie said. “Of course. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel that way.”
“Human? Speak for yourself, but I won’t be 100 percent human again until I can get a nice dry martini and a big red steak,” Warner said, getting to her feet. “If you’ll forgive me, I really need to find Dr. Chaline, but maybe Cela could show you the nursery. Cela? Would you mind? Take Corporal Okempo with you. I think that would be a good place to start. We can show you the rest in the morning. Give you more facts than I imagine you really want to find, but it is why you’re here, isn’t it?”
Mack followed the black woman, who said she was Kenyan by birth but had lived in Liger since she was a teenager. Corporal George Okempo looked younger than advertised, a lanky man with a broad smile and big ears that stuck out from the edge of his blue beret. He carried his weapon awkwardly, as if he were trying to not carry it, or to hide it. The nursery was another GP-large, about fifty feet from the staff area, lit inside by a single kerosene lantern in the middle, propped up on a wooden crate. In the tent, Mack saw the faces of perhaps thirty or forty children, ranging in age from newborns to five-year-olds, some held by older girls but many who were alone. A large woman in the middle of the room sat on a short stool, surrounded by children gathered at her feet.
“These children,” Cela said softly, so as not to disturb the proceedings, her accent thick, “have no mothers or fathers. This is the orphanage, yes? Some came here with them and their parents died, but some were alone when we found them. A few have AIDS, but mostly no. The queen mother, the woman there, is telling them a story.”
The large woman in the center of the circle took a small stick, stuck the tip of it into the flame of the kerosene lamp, and then used it to light two dozen candles on a large unfrosted birthday cake. The children’s faces lit up as the woman lit the candles.
“The government said they were sending us a million candles,” Cela explained. “And we were glad until we learned that they were only birthday candles. So we have parties, whenever a new child enters, we say it is his or her birthday.”
The old woman asked the children a question, and the children responded with a loud cheer.
“She asks them if they would like to hear a monster story,” Cela said, translating as the woman spoke, leaning forward conspiratorially, gesturing broadly with her expressive hands. “Once upon a time, a monster lived in a jungle near a volcano. He is picked up in a truck accidentally and goes to the city, and when the sun comes up, he runs and hides in a bakery.”
MacKenzie leaned in, even though she didn’t understand a word. The queen mother had an animated, dramatic speaking style.
“So when the baker comes,” Cela translated as the woman spoke, “the monster hides in a flour bin. He is only so big, like a bush baby, but with long scary teeth. So the baker scoops it up accidentally, because she does not see it, and then she puts the monster in a cake mix, and then in the oven, but the monster is from the volcano, yes? So it likes the heat in the oven and falls asleep and wakes up inside the cake.”
The children giggled.
“Do they have birthdays and cakes in Liger?” Mack asked. Cela shook her head.
“We tell them about what the children in America do,” she said. “Some of them hope to go to America. So the monster wakes up and hears children singing the birthday song, and then he hears the little girl tell her mother, ‘Mother, give me the knife and let me cut the cake, because I’m old enough now, I think. Nothing will go wrong.’ She pokes the cake with the knife and the monster giggles because it tickles.”
The children tittered again.
“And then a child at the party dips his finger in the frosting and the cake giggles again. Oh, no—what will happen next? So all the children at the party lean in, and then the birthday girl puts the knife in the cake… and then… the monster jumps out of the cake and shouts, ‘Hey now, what is it that you’re trying to do to me?’ And the children run away!”
The camp orphans screamed with delight, laughing and hugging each other in mock fear.
“But then they come back, the children, and they are angry, and they say, ‘You bad monster, you ate all our cake—give it back!’ And the monster says, ‘I will get you another one,’ so he goes back to the bakery and returns with a great big cake and he says, ‘Now children, here it is, but I cannot guarantee that there isn’t a monster in this one, too.’ And the children, no matter how much they want to, they cannot eat it because they are afraid, and so they leave, and do you know what? The monster eats the second cake too!”
Again the children howled. The storyteller waited until they had quieted down.
“And do you know what the moral of the story is?” the narrator asked them. They shook their heads. “Well,” Cela translated, “there are two. First, just because there is a monster in the first cake doesn’t mean there’s a monster in the second one. That is the first moral. And the second lesson is, never listen to a monster, because they do not tell the truth.”
She brought out the cake, which was made out of mud, and then the child who was being honored blew out the candles, and the others clapped.
It was all MacKenzie could do to keep from crying.
DeLuca was in his room at the Hotel Liger in Baku Da’al, standing on the balcony that overlooked the central market, when his SATphone chirtled. The central market was closed for the night, a handful of colorful canopies and umbrellas lit from below by dim light bulbs or the glow of television sets powered by gas generators where the merchants lived in their stalls. As he answered his phone, the lights of the city extinguished themselves in unison, save those powered by generators, Baku having power only for two hours of electricity in the evening and two in the afternoon. On the phone, Zoulalian explained that all was well, and that an agent of Rahjid Waid had met his plane to take him to the IPAB training camp. He wasn’t sure when he’d get a chance to report in next.
“My driver doesn’t think much of the recruits they’re getting,” Zoulalian said. “He used an Arabic word that translates more or less as ‘hillbillies.’ Personally, I always thought the concept of ‘Islamic brotherhood’ was a contradiction in terms. They don’t get along any better than anybody else. Anyway, if you’re a veteran from Iraq, you’re pretty much golden around here. Thanks for getting Khalil on the blacklist—it can only help. By the way, I don’t know if it means anything, but my driver’s never heard of John Dari. Maybe the guy’s keeping his head down even inside the brotherhood, but I found that odd. Gotta go.”
The next call came from MacKenzie. DeLuca wasn’t surprised to hear that Evelyn Warner was in country—she was the sort of person who went wherever she damned well wanted to go, one of those people the Pentagon hated, always insisting on showing, in her television news reports for the BBC, the cost of war in human terms, the collateral damage, “all that kid-crying-with-no-pants-on shit,” as DeLuca’s former commander in Iraq had called it, adding, “Why don’t they ever talk about the good that we do?” That commander had resigned when an investigation indicated that he’d given his men an order to fire on a group of Iraqis who were trying to surrender, including an eight-year-old boy; now the guy was showing up on Fox News, talking about “the good that we do.”
DeLuca found Evelyn Warner a bit more credible. Perhaps it was because he’d spent twelve hours being held hostage with her, and another twe
nty-four crossing the Iranian border with her, but he knew her to be brilliant and resourceful and good company, even with her hands flex-cuffed behind her back and a bag over her head. There’d been an attraction, but that was all. Mack told him what Warner had said about John Dari.
“Could you run the name ‘Stephen Ackroyd’ for me?” Mack said. “He’s a journalist I met here. It’s not a lead, I think. I’m just curious.”
DeLuca used his CIM to Google the name, but nothing turned up. He sent Walter Ford a quick e-mail, asking him to run a more thorough search, then went down to the bar, taking the stairs when he remembered that the elevators weren’t working.
The hotel bar was in the corner of the ground floor, open-aired on two sides, filled with wing-back rattan chairs and leather sofas polished from use, potted palms, rattan footstools, a terra-cotta-tiled floor, woven grass rugs and African masks on the walls, the walls painted a lovely periwinkle blue, offset by trim painted a high-gloss white. There was a monkey cage the size of an elevator car by the door to the lobby, empty, and a wall of bookshelves where travelers were free to take a paperback they hadn’t read yet on the condition that they leave one they had. A second large cage containing two huge blue parrots sat by the front door, where the parrots served as greeters, though neither seemed particularly hospitable today.
The hotel front opened onto a large veranda with broad low eaves to protect against the tropical rains, the view blocked by a bank of sandbags six feet high, and a concierge’s desk manned by four soldiers carrying machine guns, but other than that, the lounge retained its colonial charm, accented by the candle globes on the tables and bar. There were bamboo groves and fragrant flowering plants, the yard in front of the hotel landscaped with date palms and fan palms and bird-of-paradise and hypernic plants within its walls, the palms shading small circles of Adirondack-style chairs, unoccupied.
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