Purgatory

by Guido Eekhaut

  A young girl walked in with a couple of leather folders. She didn’t carry them in front of her, like the other secretaries would, but had tucked them under her arm. But then, she was no mere secretary to him.

  “Yes, Serena,” he said.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Maxwell,” the girl said. “These are the financial reports from last week.”

  “Thank you,” he said. She had joined his office two, no, three years ago. She had been working for his company for a year already in another capacity. Their first meeting had been remarkable because of what she said. She said she admired a man who could still talk about God and faith, even in front of his staff. That had caught her attention, she said. And she had blushed while admitting that. There is no shame in speaking about God, he told her.

  A few weeks later, she was back. They discussed religion. Inspiration, faith, education. He had given her time. He had her background checked. Nice family, exemplary educational record. White as snow.

  Gradually, slowly, he fed her information. Just innocent bits at first. About a certain religious organization. About the fate of humanity. About being inspired by an all-encompassing divine inspiration. He watched her reactions. He liked her reactions. He became convinced she would be an asset to the society. A true believer.

  Only after half a year had he confided in Serena. Well, no, not exactly. He had trapped her in the web he had been spinning. He spoke of the community of people who possessed the only true faith, free from any conventional religion. He continued to feed her information, bit by bit, less innocent this time. He spoke of the dangers to the members of such a community, the dangers from a secular, vindictive world.

  And then, one Friday, he suggested she’d spend a weekend with some like-minded souls.

  She hesitated for a moment. Then she said yes.

  And so it had begun.

  Now she was a member of the society. She was one of his most loyal supporters. Now she was convinced, like they all were, that humanity needed a final and all-encompassing purification.

  Courier, who in normal life went under a different name and who was not a courier at all, dropped his red cell phone on his desk. In a few moments, he would have a meeting with the first secretary of the minister and two senior officials. What was that meeting about? Funding the local police support services and their needs for rolling stock. A mundane but unavoidable subject. He was never excited about such issues. But the police had to have their new vehicles.

  Afterward, he would casually inquire with the two officials about certain cases he had heard about. He was most interested in those that had yet not been mentioned in the newspapers. Wanted to stay informed. The first secretary would be knowledgeable, but he wouldn’t communicate with Courier concerning these matters. Too much gossip going around already. Courier didn’t mind. He always found someone who would be indiscreet.

  He knew it to be a matter of vanity. The most beautiful of sins, along with greed. If people were not led by greed or vanity, how could he manipulate them? Life for him would be less attractive.

  The AIVD would have no idea, he assumed, how often their affairs were commented upon by minor bureaucrats and overheard by people like himself. Sometimes people had to be encouraged to share certain information with him, but more often they were glad to show how involved they were in police matters. Which they weren’t. But they loved their own vanity.

  Except they would not talk to journalists. There was a subtle but clear distinction. Gossip, yes, but only with people they saw as their equals.

  Courier worried about his relationship with Baphomet. The man appreciated his efforts, certainly, but just now he had sounded less than pleased. Entirely understandable. Relations between them had cooled somewhat after the Ardennes disaster.

  But Courier was certain he would remain part of the inner circle. Those who would, in the end, be purified. And that was all that mattered.

  13

  THE DOCTOR AND TWO nurses were watching the northern horizon with interest. All around them, the savanna was slowly turning into a desert, a process that would likely take another few years. The last green patches struggling against the inevitable change would soon turn to brown or spidery gray. Another sight, however, held their attention. In the far distance the sky had turned a dirty purple with a deep, disturbingly dark front below it.

  “Storm coming,” the doctor said.

  “Is it a strong one?” the youngest of the nurses wanted to know. She frowned back at where Linda stood, without actually addressing her. “Maybe we should secure the tents with more rope,” she added.

  “Storms are always bad in this part of the world,” the doctor said. As if he had experienced many African tornadoes and barely escaped with his life.

  “What did the lieutenant say?” the other nurse inquired, a distinct tremor in her voice. “Do we have to worry?”

  She had addressed the doctor but then turned toward Linda. Linda was convinced that despite her discretion they all knew about her little trip with Odinga, and so she’d become an authority on what the man thought. In the few hours they had of free time, all the doctors and nurses could do by way of entertainment was read or gossip. Few were readers. They liked gossiping, particularly about Linda. She didn’t care. There was much they didn’t know about her.

  The doctor, a Frenchman with a stylish tuft of graying hair under his lower lip, shook his head as if he had made an important decision. “It will be all right, that storm. The locals don’t seem concerned. Why should we?”

  To Linda, he was a fool and his remarks proved it. He never spoke to the people in the camp. He tended their wounds and gave them medicine and asked them simple questions through an interpreter, but he only asked about their medical problems. He knew nothing about them. He was an idealist, surely, but he kept a distinct distance between himself and the locals, as if their poverty and suffering might rub off on him. Perhaps he had a career in mind, after this, but not in medicine. He would be a politician, perhaps. Linda put more trust in the nurses’ motives; they would still be nurses after this.

  The nurses the doctor had been talking to walked toward the tent, heads down. They had been here for several months now and had seen death under all its guises. They were not afraid of a storm. But they would be, later, Linda suspected, when the front was overhead and a direct threat.

  They would learn to fear nature.

  Linda stowed her logbooks and her inventory sheets in a steel coffin and folded the metal table she used as a desk. She glanced at the neat white tent next door, home to the UN representatives. Their equally white Toyota Land Cruiser was parked in front of it. They had planned to take it for a trip a hundred miles northeast and bring back supplies, but they seemed to have delayed their departure. Neither had the supply truck shown up yet, probably due to the approaching storm. Current supplies would last for no longer than a week.

  Holding onto the logbooks and the inventories might prove pointless if the whole operation were canceled due to the storm and its aftermath. But then, wasn’t everything pointless, in the end? A human life was like a grain of sand in the desert. In the Netherlands, newspapers would chastise politicians if twenty children a year died in traffic. Here no statistics about life and death were kept at all.

  Beyond the tent, she noticed six Kenyan soldiers, torsos bare and without their weapons, keeping an eye on the approaching storm. She recognized one of them, a young sergeant she had seen at the gorge. Over there, he had looked frightened, confronted with an event he could not comprehend. He would not share his fear with the lieutenant or with his men, but she had noticed it. He had shared it with her as if he expected from her some rational explanation for the horrid ritual.

  She had no explanation to give. She knew nothing of Africa. She knew nothing of Somalia and the local people. She had arrived here, her head filled with carelessly collected ideas about what would await her—images mostly remembered from films and novels. What she didn’t expect was the smell. Nothing in th
e movies and novels had prepared her for the odor of the savanna, the heated, salty soil, the grainy sand, the dry hot air, and the subtle but raw organic smells from distant cadavers. Old smells that remained in the atmosphere for a long time. It was the smell from ancient times, before the ascent of man. The only odors missing were industrial smells, exhaust fumes, machines, hot concrete, and bitumen.

  The dry heat was another thing she had to adapt to. It sucked energy out of her. Energy she could hardly replenish with food and water. She had been confronted by the unwillingness of the locals, the refugees, to see themselves for what they really were, fugitives. They seemed unable to understand what exactly their current situation was, displaced as they were, cut off from their known universe. Her position? She was a stranger to them, hardly worth their attention. The concept of foreign aid was almost alien to them, although they accepted the medical assistance.

  “They’re much stronger than we are, in many respects,” one of the doctors had said, a few days after her arrival. “They are reduced to the bare reality of survival. And for their fatalism they are mentally stronger than we. But make no mistake, the grief of an African mother losing her child is as real as when a European child dies. Life counts as much here as it does elsewhere. Even despite their fatalism.”

  She realized Lieutenant Odinga was standing next to her. She’d been lost in thought.

  “Do these storms happen often?” she asked. Her voice trembled a bit, and not because of his presence. To hell with the nurses and their gossip.

  For a moment, he didn’t seem inclined to answer. He wasn’t from around here. How could he know about local weather? Then he said, “This morning it was explained by the locals what these storms can do. How extensive their power can be. The sky will be dark as the entrance to hell, they said. And there will be wind and thunder to match that. Sound enticing? The savanna will undulate as if coming alive. Animals hide where they can, if they can, or risk getting caught by the wind. Imagine what will happen to humans. The thunder gods show their anger by throwing the clouds through the sky, by blowing the sand of the desert around in great heaps. What else do you need to know?”

  “Should we leave?”

  “Leave?”

  “Break up the camp and leave?”

  He laughed hoarsely. “And go where? A storm front like that spreads its infernal wings over maybe fifty miles. It moves fast. Faster, perhaps, than we can travel. If the gods are angry, they’ll be angry for the right reasons. We will not escape their wrath. They will deal with us and with the camp however they please.”

  She had never wondered before if he believed in gods or the supernatural. Was he a Muslim? A Christian? It didn’t really matter. When you saw the darkest of storms approaching, it didn’t really matter what sort of religion you adhered to.

  “My men will secure the tents with extra lines. Everything valuable will be stored in boxes and crates. We still have a couple hours. Use them wisely.”

  She noticed extra activity around the army tents, but nobody seemed in a hurry.

  “I will send you some assistance,” the lieutenant said, and left.

  She had wanted to know what would happen to the bodies in the hills, but he was gone. She knew the answer: nothing would be done about them. They would be left hanging there and would remain there for hundreds of years. As was fitting for a ritual.

  She continued packing. She had no idea what was valuable and what was not. It was just administration. Order forms, lists of equipment, a list of medicines used by the doctors. Maps of the area—none of them reliable—and flight schedules for the plane, although it never flew on time. None of this mattered. None of what they had done mattered. Doctors and nurses would pack their instruments and medical supplies, which were the only things they needed to rescue.

  Except for the people, of course.

  But they couldn’t rescue the people.

  She left the rest of her stuff as it was. The time remaining was too short anyway.

  Let the wind blow it all away.

  She went outside. A dozen soldiers occupied themselves with anchoring the tents. Half the sky had already turned gray, veined with dark green and purple. Even the colors were alien to her. The end of the world was nigh.

  The end was nigh for the people in the camp as well. They ran about, without purpose but equally without panic. She noticed women chasing their children into the tents, but what good would the tents be with the impending storm? Old men lugged mattresses, equally useless. She saw young boys helping the grown-ups with bags and pans. Nobody was going anywhere.

  The soldiers dragged large olive-colored boxes and trunks into the trucks. But none of the vehicles were leaving. Odinga was right, she assumed: there was no escaping the storm. There was no escaping the wrath of the gods.

  The medical team gathered in the main tent. It was rare to see the whole team together. “It’s like Sudan last year,” one of the nurses commented. “But those were sand storms. Bad enough, but nothing like this.”

  “We went through an earthquake in Pakistan once,” another said. “Three years ago.” All relieved from their usual duties, they suddenly had time to chat. Under normal circumstances they hardly had time for personal histories, too tired as they were for conversation.

  Linda suddenly wondered again why Odinga had taken her to the hills, the only nonmedical staff member. If he’d needed a medical opinion on what he’d found there, he would have taken a doctor.

  Was it on account of what she said earlier, that she didn’t believe in the supernatural? Or did he merely want to impress her? Well, she had been impressed. No, she’d been horrified.

  She became aware of a sound in the air. There had been the distant rumbling of thunder and the wind, but this was another sound, coming closer, as if a large airborne creature was approaching.

  And it got stronger.

  Of course, it got stronger.

  One of the nurses looked out of the tent, but not in the direction of the storm. “Good God,” she said.

  “Yes,” a doctor said. “Heavy weather ahead.”

  “No,” the nurse said, “It’s a helicopter.” She pointed east. Low over the horizon a large and powerful helicopter approached. Only now did Linda hear its engine over the noise of the storm. It turned out to be a military craft, Russian in origin like all helicopters in this part of the world. As the helicopter banked, she noticed rocket launchers and machine guns and the faces of the pilots behind the plexiglass. With some difficulty, it landed a few hundred yards from the tent.

  “A helicopter in this weather?” the doctor said. “They’re not going to evacuate us, I assume?”

  A man in military fatigues jumped from the cabin of the helicopter. Lieutenant Odinga hurried toward him. He spoke to the man without shaking his hand. The man showed him a document. Three other men disembarked, soldiers armed with automatic rifles. They scanned the horizon.

  Odinga gestured in the general direction of the camp and then toward the medical tents. Then he pointed at the hills. What was said Linda could only guess. Odinga gestured some more, but the visitor didn’t seem impressed.

  The two men approached the tent and entered. “Ms. Weisman?” the newcomer asked, in English. He looked like an Arab, maybe he was Indian or Pakistani. He surely wasn’t Somali or Kenyan.

  “That’s me,” she said.

  “I’m Colonel Saeed Al-Rahman of the Saudi Intelligence Service, and I need to ask you some questions.”

  She looked at him in surprise. Then at Odinga. “What is this?” she asked. “The Saudi Intelligence Service?”

  “He has properly identified himself,” Odinga briefly said. “He is authorized by the Somali government to visit this site. And ask questions.”

  “I was informed,” the newcomer said to Linda, “that you come from the Netherlands, and you have seen the sites of the sacrifices.”

  She noticed the other members of the team had all departed, probably finding shelter in the trucks and vehicle
s.

  They both sat down on folding chairs.

  “Why,” Linda asked, “would Saudi Intelligence be interested in what happens in a secluded spot somewhere in Somalia, even if human sacrifices are involved?”

  “Mutaween, ma’am,” he said with a winning smile. “I am, more precisely, an officer of the Mutaween. Which is the Saudi religious police. But such a designation has an unfortunate negative connotation in the West.” He spoke English with a pleasant British accent. “These people—their sacrifices have a clear religious orientation, if that’s the correct word. We investigate such phenomena.”

  “I find it difficult to believe that, Colonel,” Linda said. “You appear here out of the blue, in this godforsaken place, with a helicopter, while none of our own pilots would dare fly, and all that on account of a religious matter?”

  He slowly nodded and pressed his lips together. “The conditions are extreme, I grant you that. But I must work according to a . . . how do you say, a very strict agenda.” He smiled again. “To us, ma’am, religion is very important. But I’m sure you’re aware of that. However, I cannot give you any more details on why I’m here. This is not just about religion. We are dealing here with people with very sinister political intentions. It seems we all have an agenda.”

  “Are you talking about terrorists?”

  “You could call them that. Now, questions?”

  “Lieutenant Odinga seems to know more than I do.”

  “Lieutenant Odinga,” Al-Rahman said, indulging her, “is an intelligent man. His experience and knowledge are very important, concerning the local situation. But he also does not stray beyond his narrow personal concept of religious phenomena.”

  She wasn’t sure what that meant. “Oh,” she said.

  “Exactly,” said Al-Rahman. “And you’re an outsider. You come from a largely secular society. Your perspective is different than that of, well, me and the lieutenant. What is it you have seen? Your interpretation?”