The Informationist: A Thriller

by Taylor Stevens

  “It’s where we go next,” she said, “Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea.”

  Bradford took the booklet and flipped through the pages.

  “Ever been there?” she asked.

  He placed the ticket on the table and with a half smile said, “Nope. But it’s where Titan has its oil wells.”

  Munroe said nothing and then, after a moment of silence, “It’s odd that none of the reports mentioned that.”

  “Is it a problem?”

  “I don’t know.” She ran her fingers through her hair and then folded her hands and placed her chin on them. “It does seem a freakish coincidence.”

  His eyes moved from the paper on the table up to hers. “What do you mean?”

  “I suspect that Emily disappeared along the Equatorial Guinean–Gabonese border.”

  Bradford took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. He sat back in his chair, silent for a moment, and then leaned in toward her. “I know the rules, and I’m not questioning your judgment, but I have questions.”

  She nodded.

  He was quiet again, head down, and then he looked up. “I was there, Michael, I was part of the team. I’ve seen the reports, I’ve spoken to people who saw her before she disappeared. How do you make the leap from Namibia to Equatorial Guinea?”

  “I have information that others didn’t have—a copy of Kristof Berger’s passport, for one. I also grew up in this area, spent a number of years in Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo, and the DRC, which was Zaire back then, so I know the history and legends in a way most don’t.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” he said.

  “How familiar are you with local history and politics?”

  “Richard told me about Cameroon and Gabon, so I’ve done some research. Not a lot, but some. He didn’t mention Equatorial Guinea.”

  “As an American, you don’t need a visa to get into Equatorial Guinea, so I didn’t bring it up. It’s a strange and paranoid little country—anyone from around here who has lived there will tell you the same thing. Have you ever read Frederick Forsyth’s book The Dogs of War?”

  “Heard of it, never read it. Should I have included it in my research?”

  She smiled wryly. “It’s fiction, Miles, unless you believe the rumors. It’s about a group of mercenaries who get hired to take over a small country when big business realizes it’s cheaper than paying for mineral rights.”

  He nodded his appreciation of the idea and ran his finger around the rim of his glass.

  “Forsyth was in Malabo when he wrote the book. No guess as to where he got the idea. Naturally, the book is banned in EG, although that makes no sense. It’s the rest of the world that poses the threat.” She picked up her glass and took a long drink, then continued. “A few years ago, a group of mercenaries nearly succeeded in turning the book into reality. They got busted purchasing arms in Zimbabwe.”

  “I remember,” he said. “What a fiasco that was. Wasn’t it Margaret Thatcher’s son who pled guilty to financing the plot?”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Since then Equatorial Guinea has hired armed forces from Angola for protection, and last I heard, the Israelis are training the Moroccan presidential guard—which is no surprise, since they’ve been handling training in Cameroon for over a decade. Paranoid. But I digress.”

  “I understand about Kristof’s passport,” he said. “Visa stamps, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “What does local history have to do with it?”

  “Equatorial Guinea History 101,” she said with a chuckle. “It takes some backtracking. Up for it?”

  He nodded.

  “In 1969, shortly after EG gained independence from Spain, President Macías Nguema claimed the country had been handed over with virtually no currency reserve. That was the start of, or trigger for, deteriorating governmental relations with the Western world and is where the nickname ‘Auschwitz of Africa’ comes from.”

  She paused.

  “Go on,” Bradford said.

  “In 1979, the current president, Teodoro Obiang, led a nearly bloodless military coup against his uncle, and here’s where local history diverges and the facts differ depending on who you ask: Before Nguema was tracked down and executed, he had taken what remained of the national reserves, supposedly around five million dollars, and buried it in a hut outside his house in his home village. By the time it was dug up, most of it had decomposed. He claimed he’d done it to protect it from thieves. I can’t say it’s entirely true, because the story changes slightly depending on who’s telling it. And,” she said with a shrug, “that story is brought to us by the same people who say that Obiang hacked Uncle Macías to death when he found him, while published history says Macías was executed about a month later by hired Moroccans. I tend to believe the latter.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because Macías Nguema made himself out to be a god and ruled by divine right. The locals believe that he drank the blood of his victims to imbibe their power. The stories of death, torture, and human-rights violations are well enough documented to put some credibility to the rumors. In any case, because of the superstitions surrounding him, I doubt that any of his own people would have done the actual killing—not even Obiang, whom, I might add, the state radio claims can kill with impunity because he is in daily communication with God.”

  Bradford was quiet for a moment. “So folklore and local history says Nguema buried the country’s currency reserves before he died. And this ties in with Emily’s disappearing here because …?”

  “This begs another question. How familiar are you with the transcripts of Kristof’s conversations?”

  “Not very.”

  “There was a phrase he repeated several times to the investigators and that he reiterated to me when I went to see him: ‘We went where the money was buried.’ It makes no sense taken on its own, but when put together with the country’s history and the stamps in his passport …” She pointed her finger into the table. “It pinpoints here.”

  Bradford rubbed his palms over his eyes and let out a long breath. “I see where you’re going with this,” he said. “But how would Kristof have known the legend, and why would that be the one thing he says to both you and the investigators?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  He leaned back until the chair’s front legs came off the floor, placed his hands behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling. After a moment he brought the chair down firmly. “So where is Nguema’s village?”

  “Nsangayong. On the eastern edge of the mainland, several miles from the Gabonese border.”

  “And you think that’s where they disappeared?”

  “I highly doubt it.”

  Miles narrowed his eyes and drew his lips tight. He placed the palms of his hands flat on the table, and Munroe wondered then if he might be ready to strangle her. He shook his head slightly, opened his mouth to say something, then shut it again. Finally he said, “If not where the money was buried, then where?”

  “Where most people would have assumed that the money was buried. Nsangayong is a nondescript hamlet that doesn’t even show up on a very good map. My money is on Mongomo, the current president’s village, which is a whole lot bigger. It’s only a few miles north of Nsangayong and where most people think Macías Nguema was from.”

  Bradford picked up his ticket and flipped through the stiff pages. “We’re flying to Malabo—on the island. That’s something of a detour.”

  She smiled. “Yes and no. The only way to the mainland from here is by sea or road—neither by any form of scheduled transport, so it’s a tedious trip no matter how you look at it—and from Malabo we can catch a local flight. But besides that, everybody who’s anybody in the country spends the bulk of their time in Malabo, and it’s also where the government branches are located. I’d like to make the acquaintance of a few name-droppable people before wending our way to the backwoods of the mainland.”

  Bradford motioned to the waite
r and ordered another drink. He turned to Munroe and nodded in appreciation. “So that’s where the indicators point. Not bad for a week’s worth of work.”

  “It helps to know the country and the history,” she said, and then, “Miles, are you married?”

  He laughed at first, but, realizing that she was serious, he stopped. “Divorced twice, but the second marriage only lasted eight months so it shouldn’t count. Are you hitting on me?”

  She smirked. “If I decide to hit on you, there will never be a doubt in your mind. In all seriousness, Miles, if you have anyone in your life who’s important to you, call that person before we go.” She leaned toward him in earnestness. “I know you’ve survived some pretty rough places, and being around the world as you have, it’s easy to believe that one despot-run country is much like another. In most places you’d be right. But Equatorial Guinea is different. Maybe it’s the years spent under communism, maybe it’s because it’s so small and so easily controlled, certainly some of it has to do with attempted coups, but I can’t even begin to describe the level of suspicion and paranoia that runs through that country or the power to destroy that the president and his cronies have when you’re within their borders.

  “We’ll be going in there asking questions of people who interpret questions as an insult and a challenge to their authority. If anything we do or say happens to raise the ire of the government, we will more than likely join a long list of ‘disappeared.’ You know as well as I do that our own government will be useless in helping us out. If you remember the Zimbabwe fiasco, then I’m sure you also know that there was already a ground crew inside Equatorial Guinea, and every person suspected of being a merc or in on the coup plot, whether guilty or not, is either wasting away in prison or has joined journalists and political opponents in front of the firing squad. It would be no different for us.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” he said, and then, with a teasing grin, “It can’t be all bad. Surely you have at least one good story.”

  Munroe flashed a smile. “A few hundred miles to the north, Nigeria produces some of the world’s highest-grade sweet crude, and to the south is Gabon, another oil-producing country. At the time Cameroon was producing as well, and Equatorial Guinea, communist and dirt poor, managed to acquire short-range missiles.” She waved her glass in a wide arc. “Needless to say, when the madman at the helm of that little country got his hands on his own private arsenal of warheads, the neighboring countries were not pleased. Such is the beauty of oil. The United States intervened by putting pressure on the sellers to get the explosives back. Naturally, the Equatoguinean president refused. So the sellers told him that the warheads were reaching their expiration date, and if they didn’t get reset, they’d explode.”

  “So what’d they do when the bombs didn’t go off?”

  “Oh, the president was smart enough to return the missiles before the ‘expiration date,’ and that was pretty much the end of that.”

  Miles laughed and chugged down the last of his drink. “You’re not going to tell me that’s real history.”

  She shrugged. “I heard it from one of the locals, but who knows?” She drummed the flat of her hands on the table and then stood to go. “You’re not taking prophylactics, are you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Didn’t think so. Ever had malaria?”

  “Dengue fever, twice.”

  “Where we’re headed, the malaria is particularly lethal.” She handed him a small box. “You break a fever, take the pills. They’ll keep you alive until we can get you medical treatment.”

  THERE WAS NO point in taking a taxi when walking would speed up the acclimatization, and so at Munroe’s insistence the return to the hotel was on foot. They navigated the pedestrian traffic in silence and had gone nearly half the distance when they passed a storefront advertising phone service. Munroe paused and then, with Bradford following, entered the shop through a swinging half door that served more as a demarcation than anything else.

  To Bradford she said, “I want privacy,” and he stepped back to the street, leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed.

  The interior was narrow, partitioned off from a clothing business that dominated the space. At the front was a counter and beyond the counter a hallway connecting four small pressboard cubicles.

  Like the hundreds of similar businesses that dotted the city, the vendor filled the demand left by a national telephone company that took weeks if not months to process a request for phone service and required a deposit equivalent to the average person’s yearly earnings for a line with international access.

  Munroe chose the cubicle farthest from the front and from there called Kate Breeden. Ignoring an echo that bounced her voice back, she walked Breeden through the assignment to the present, laying out the line of intent for moving into Equatorial Guinea.

  “Does Burbank know where you’re headed?” Breeden asked.

  “I spoke to him before leaving Europe. He knows I’m in Cameroon. He sent a babysitter, so I’m sure he’s up to date. When I’ve got something definite, I’ll give him a call, but until then a conversation would waste both of our time.”

  The primary purpose of the call was a contact arrangement: As long as Munroe was in Equatorial Guinea, she would communicate on a weekly basis. A skipped contact and Breeden should assume that something had gone wrong—it would be the only way for her to know. Breeden held Munroe’s will and final instructions; she knew what to do.

  The conversation had taken six minutes, and the woman who ran the service charged for nine. Munroe placed payment for seven on the counter and held up her wrist. “I timed it.”

  “Didn’t you know,” the woman replied, “time is different in the United States?”

  “Every minute in the United States has sixty seconds,” Munroe said, “just like it does here in Cameroon.” And then, switching to the woman’s tribal tongue, “You have your money.”

  Back on the street, Bradford said, “How many languages do you speak?”

  “It’s in my file,” she replied dryly.

  “Yes, I know,” he said with a smile. “As an estimate.”

  “Twenty-two.”

  He let out a low whistle. “Is that any kind of world record?”

  “Another forty and I might start getting close,” she said. “Sometimes dialects count, sometimes they don’t.”

  “How do you do it? I mean, outside of Arabic, the one other language that I do speak, I struggle with the bits and pieces. How do you manage so many?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Language has been with me as far back as I can remember. A blessed curse or a poisoned gift—if you know what I mean.”

  “No, not really.”

  She turned toward him. “There was never a time I didn’t understand whatever was spoken around me. By six I spoke English, my nanny’s tribal tongue Mokpwe, Ibo of our Nigerian-born driver, Fang of the cook and gardener, and French, the language of the country. Then I started picking up dialects, and the locals began to view me with suspicion. They said I was a child witch because I knew things I shouldn’t have known—they were afraid of the juju.”

  “Juju?”

  “Witchcraft, power—superstition is very strong in the culture. I was young, I didn’t really think much of it—like I said, language had always been with me—and I spent so much time mixing with the locals that it all made sense. But when I was a teenager, I moved to Douala and a wider social circle. Within a couple of months, I’d added Greek and Arabic to the mix, and by then I realized I was different.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t end up working for the NSA or the CIA or one of the other alphabet-soup organizations.”

  “I noticed that was absent in my file as well.”

  “What was?”

  “The recruitment attempts and job offers.”

  “I take it you turned them down.”

  She gave a sarcastic laugh. “They don’t pay as well.”

  “Hey,” he sai
d, “where’s your sense of patriotism?”

  She grew quiet and turned the question around in her head and then rolled it out in a whisper. “Patriotism?” She looked at him. “How many years were you in the armed forces, Miles?”

  “Felt like half a lifetime.”

  She nodded. “You and every person who serves merits thanks and commendation, and you most certainly have it.” She was silent for a moment. “I can appreciate patriotism, but that’s about as far as it goes. I’m not like most people,” she said. “I have no devotion or affinity to any particular country—for that I assume I’d have to experience a sense of belonging.” She looked at him and searched his eyes for an indication that he understood, then added, “Patriots defend their homeland, Miles. Where is my home?”

  “What do you mean? You’re an American.”

  “Am I?” she asked. “What makes me an American? That I carry an American passport?”

  “Well, partly that. It’s also where your family is from.”

  “But is it where I’m from?” She sighed. “I was born here in Cameroon. Spent nearly eighteen years living here or around the borders, but I’m not Cameroonian. I understand the Turkish language and culture even better than I understand the American culture. But I’m not Turkish. I carry passports from three countries, have lived in thirteen, and speak twenty-two languages. To which country,” she asked, “should I be patriotic? To which do I belong?”

  “Which one do you identify with the most?”

  She stared at him. “None of them.” And then, regretting that she had said so much, changed the subject. “You didn’t make any calls when we were at the phone vendor.”

  “Don’t read too much into it,” he said. “The people in my life know that what I do can be dangerous. I made my peace before I took the assignment.”