It was a tempting thing to be offered a way to wash such dirt off the surface of his soul. “I’m still surprised.”
“We’re not all cut out for this kind of work, Paul. You never were. But with those losses I’ve got no choice but to use you. I can’t send Natalia down there—a woman wouldn’t do. Don’t worry. I’ll be right there with you.”
That was the first and last time Sam had let it be known that he could see Paul’s secret soul. After Rome, the evidence of Paul’s cowardice had become too glaring for even an old classmate to ignore. Drinking tall caffe lattes in the too-cold terminal, they had smiled at each other the way they had been trained to smile, and Paul had decided that, even if his old friend didn’t feel the same way, he certainly hated Sam.
This radical shift in emotions wasn’t new. Paul had always been repelled by those who saw him for what he was. In high school, a girlfriend had told him that he was the most desperate person she’d ever known. He would do anything to keep breathing. She’d said this after sex, when they both lay half-naked on her parents’ couch, and in her adolescent logic she’d meant it as a compliment. To her, it meant that he was more alive than anyone she’d known. It was why she loved him. Yet once she had said it, Paul’s love—authentic and all-encompassing—had begun to fade.
In a way, Paul felt more affection for the two very dark strangers questioning him now than he did for Sam, because they didn’t know him at all. It was twisted, but that was just the way it was.
“Listen to this guy,” said the lanky one in the T-shirt and blue jacket, who had introduced himself as Nabil. He spoke as if he’d learned English from Hollywood, which was probably what he’d done. He was speaking to his friend. “He wants us to believe he doesn’t even know Sam Wallis.”
“I do not believe it,” the friend—one of the two men who’d abducted him at gunpoint—said glumly. His English was closer to the formal yet quaintly awkward English of the rest of Kenya, though neither man was Kenyan.
“I might believe it if I was an idiot,” Nabil said. “But I’m not.”
Though they were probably still within the Nairobi city limits, both these men, as well as the gunman in the hall, were Somali. He suspected that simply being outside their wild fortress of a country, stuck in a largely Christian nation, made these jihadis nervous. From his low wooden chair, Paul raised his head to meet their gazes, then lowered his eyes again because there was no point. The windowless room was hot, a wet hot, and he found himself dreaming of Swiss air-conditioning. He said, “I work for Banque Salève. I don’t know Mr. Wallis personally, but I came here at his request. Where is Mr. Wallis?”
“He wants to know where Sam is,” said the unnamed one.
“Hmm,” Nabil hummed.
Paul had followed Sam to Nairobi that very morning. It was on the long taxi ride down Mombasa Road that he’d received the call from Geneva station that Sam had gone missing. Yesterday, a Kenyan witness had spotted him in the neighborhood of Mathare with his Aslim Taslam contact. A van pulled up beside them, and some men wrestled Sam inside and roared off, leaving the contact behind. That hadn’t helped his upset stomach, nor had the black Mercedes following him from the airport all the way to the hotel.
There were rumors that Aslim Taslam, in an effort to collect money as quickly as possible, had entered the black-market organ trade. Occasional victims appeared with slices in their lower backs or opened chest cavities, missing vital parts.
But not even in his secret soul did Paul fear this. He could live with fewer hands, with half his kidneys or one less lung. He would never wander willingly into that world of pain, but he didn’t fear it with the intensity that he feared the actual end point.
For most people it was the reverse: They feared pain but not death. Paul could not understand this. When a film ends, the viewer can replay it in his head for the rest of his life. But each person is the sole witness to his own life, and when that witness dies, no memory of the viewing remains. Death works backward; it eats up the past, so that even that sweat-stained couch on which he’d stopped loving his girlfriend would cease to exist.
Paul said, “I’m not going to pretend I’m not scared. You’ve locked that door, and I saw the gun the man outside is wearing. I can only tell you what I know. I work for Banque Salève, and Mr. Wallis asked me to fly here to perform an account transfer.”
The unnamed one, who had earlier used his fists on Paul’s back, spoke quickly in Arabic, and Nabil said, “All right, then. Let’s do the transfer.”
“I’ll need Mr. Wallis’s authorization. Where is he?”
“I don’t think you need Sam.”
“You don’t understand,” Paul said patiently. “The transfer is done with a computer. It’s in my hotel room. It has a fingerprint scanner, and we calibrated it to Mr. Wallis’s index finger.”
“Which hand?”
“Excuse me?”
“The left or the right index finger?”
“The right.”
Nabil pursed his lips. He had a young, pretty face made barely masculine by a short beard that reached up to his cheekbones. Paul imagined that he would have had to work particularly hard to be taken seriously in an industry full of battle-scarred compatriots. He wondered if, in a final need to prove himself, Nabil would someday end up driving a car full of explosives through a roadblock, or sitting in the pilot’s chair of a passenger airplane, praising his god and then holding his breath. Men like Nabil were careless about the only important thing. They were as foolish as Sam.
* * *
—
There had been a Kenyan contact waiting in his stuffy hotel room. Benjamin Muoki, from the National Security Intelligence Service, was sitting on Paul’s bed when he entered, sucking on a brown cigarette that streamed heavily from both ends. After they had exchanged introductory codes, Benjamin said, “This is what happens when you run an operation without proper help.”
“Sam got your help, didn’t he?”
“This isn’t help. I’m giving you a machine, that’s all. This is what happens when your people are not completely open with us.”
“I don’t think we’re the only ones keeping secrets,” Paul said as he began to unpack his clothes.
“Is that what Washington tells you?”
“Washington doesn’t have to tell us anything.”
“We get no points for giving you a president?”
“If another Kenyan tells me that I’m going to have a fit.”
Benjamin sucked on his cigarette and stared at the floor, where a heavy black briefcase lay. His color was lighter than that of most of his countrymen, his nose long, and Paul found himself wondering about the man’s parentage.
“That’s the computer?”
Benjamin nodded. “You know the codes?”
Paul tapped his temple. “Right here. As long as the machine works, it should be a cinch. You’ve tested it?”
The question seemed to make the Kenyan uncomfortable. “Don’t worry, it works.” He lifted the case onto the bed and opened it up to reveal an inlaid keyboard and screen. “Turn it on here and press this to connect to the bank. Type in the codes, and there you are.”
“Where’s the fingerprint scanner?”
“The what?”
“For Sam’s authorization.”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
Paul wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be a joke. “Does it really connect to the bank?”
“How should I know? I’m just the courier.” Benjamin closed the briefcase and set it on the floor again. He squinted as if the light were too strong, though the blinds were down. “They picked up Sam yesterday. They suspect him, and so they suspect you. They will be after you.”
“They already are,” Paul told him. “They followed me from the airport.”
That seemed to surprise the Kenyan. “You are very cold about this.”
Paul slipped a shirt onto a wooden hotel hanger. “Am I?”
“Were I you, I would be planning my escape from Africa.”
Paul didn’t bother mentioning that he was here to clean his soul, or that the idea of running had already occurred to him a hundred times; instead, he said, “Leaving’s not as easy as it sounds.”
“All you must do is ask.”
Paul reached for another shirt, waiting for more.
“Listen to me,” said Benjamin. “I keep secrets, and so do you. But no matter what Washington tells you or Nairobi tells me, we are in this together. Your friend Sam, he’s been captured. He was stupid; he should have asked for my help. There’s no need for you to follow in his footsteps. If you show up dead, missing your liver or your heart, then that is a tragedy. The operation is already blown. If you stay, you will die.”
Benjamin Muoki made plenty of sense. More than Sam, who placed abstract principles above life itself. Only a man with such a twisted value system could have been able to forgive Paul his failure in Rome. So he agreed. Benjamin whispered a prayer of thanks for Paul’s sudden wisdom. They settled on an eight o’clock extraction, and Benjamin insisted that Paul remain in the hotel until then.
Paul didn’t contact Geneva, or Sam’s case officer in Rome. They would either agree to eighty-sixing the operation, or they wouldn’t, and in that case, he didn’t want to be forced to refuse a direct order. There were far better places to die when the time came. Places with air-conditioning. He repacked his bag, left it beside the briefcase computer, and went down to the ground-floor bar. It was there, during his third gin and tonic, that they arrived.
He hadn’t been able to see the faces that had followed him from the airport, but he knew that these were the same men. Tall, hard-looking, pitch black. They asked him to come quietly, pressing into his back so that he could feel their small pistols. He began to do as they asked, but then remembered the simple equation Benjamin had drawn for him: If you stay, you will die.
He swung his arms above his head. They wanted quiet, so he screamed. Hysterically. “I’m being kidnapped! Help!” The bartender froze in the midst of cleaning glasses. Two Chinese businessmen stopped their conversation and stared. The other few customers, all Kenyans, ducked instinctively even before they saw the guns his kidnappers began to wave around as they shouted in Arabic and pulled him out onto the street, into the waiting Mercedes.
They were infuriated by Paul’s lack of cooperation. While one drove, the other pushed him down in the backseat and kept punching his kidneys to keep him still. It made Paul think that, if nothing else, they had no plans to take that organ. But all hierarchies are riddled with fools and bad communication, and there was no reason to think that later, in the operating room, the Aslim Taslam surgeon wouldn’t recoil at the sight of his bruised and bloody kidneys.
* * *
—
It was cooler when Nabil finally returned. No one had turned off the blaring white ceiling light during the hours he’d been gone, but Paul suspected it was night. Nabil looked pleased with himself. He said, “You can do what you came here to do.”
“And then I can leave?”
“Of course.”
“Then let’s get to it.”
Nabil tugged a black hood from his pants pocket. “We’ll take a trip first.”
During his long wait, Paul had begun to believe that things were going too easily for him. Though he was still sore from his rough abduction, once he’d arrived in that bare room, no one had laid a finger on him. They had talked tough and hadn’t offered him anything to eat or drink, but other than his hunger he was feeling fine.
Nabil walked him hooded through corridors, down a narrow staircase, and outside into the backseat of a car. An unknown voice asked him to lie on his side. He did so. They drove for a long time, taking many turns, and Paul believed they were turning back on themselves in order to confuse his sense of direction. If so, they were successful. Before they finally stopped, they drove up a steep incline noisy with gravel they later crunched over as Nabil walked him into a building.
When the hood was removed, Paul stood facing three men in a long, wood-paneled room that seemed built solely to hold the long dining table that filled it. Two small, barred windows looked out on darkness and the bases of palm trees; this room was half in the earth. Two of them he recognized from the kidnapping; they smoked in the corner, and the one who had earlier helped Nabil with the interrogation even gave him a nod of recognition. The third one, a heavy man, wore a business suit. His name, Paul knew, was Daniel Kwambai.
Sam was the one with the long Kenyan background, not Paul, and so before leaving Switzerland Paul had browsed the Kenya files for background. Daniel Kwambai, the one Kenyan in the room, was a former National Security Intelligence Service officer who, after a falling-out with the Kibaki administration, was suspected to have allied himself with the Somali jihadis just over the border. The reason was simple: money. He was a gambling addict with expensive tastes that he couldn’t give up even after washing out of political life. Here, then, was the evidence. Whatever good that did him.
Kwambai held out a hand. “Mr. Fisher, thank you for coming.”
Unsure, Paul took it, and Kwambai’s shake was so brief that he got the feeling the man was afraid to hold his hand too long. Then he noticed that the computer briefcase wasn’t anywhere in the room; there was only a crystal ashtray on the far end of the table, which the kidnappers used. Paul said, “Well, I didn’t have much choice. Can we get this over with?”
“First, some questions,” said Kwambai. He waved at a chair. “Please.”
Paul sat at the head of the table. Behind him, Nabil had withdrawn to the door; the kidnappers remained in their corner, smoking. Daniel Kwambai sat a couple chairs down and wove his fingers together, as if in prayer. He said, “We would like to know some more about Mr. Matheson, the man you know as Wallis. You see, we discovered that he was working for the Central Intelligence Agency. He wanted to purchase something from us, and we think that by this transaction he was going to try and destroy us.”
“By giving you two million euros?”
“Yes, it seems unbelievable. But there it is. Nabil here fears trackers.”
Paul shook his head. “It’s my bank’s computer, and it hasn’t been out of my sight.”
“Except when you left it in your room and went to the hotel bar.”
“Well, yes. Except for then.”
Kwambai smiled sadly. “Nabil puts his faith in trackers and things he can hold in his hands. I put my faith in the ephemeral. Data, information. No, I don’t think there’s a tracker on your computer. I think the act of transferring the money is part of the plan.”
Uncomfortably, Paul realized that Daniel Kwambai was nearly there. As Sam had explained it, the virtual euros sent to their account were flagged, leaving traces in each account they touched. As Aslim Taslam moved the money among accounts, it left a trail. Tracking it to a final account was unimportant, because within that data flag was a time bomb, a virus that would in two weeks clear the entire contents of that final account, then backtrack, emptying whatever accounts it had passed through. The more accounts it moved through, the more damage it caused.
In the Geneva airport, Sam had said, “I know, I don’t understand it either, but it works. Langley tested it out last month on some shell accounts—wiped the fuckers out.”
Now, on the outskirts of Nairobi, Paul said, “I wouldn’t call myself an expert in these matters—I’ve only been at the bank two months—but I don’t see how that could be done. If the money moves through enough accounts, tracking it becomes impossible.” He shook his head convincingly, because that part was the truth—even having Sam explain it to him had made it no easier to understand. “I don’t think
it could be done.”
Kwambai considered that. He rapped his knuckles on the table before standing up. “Yes, I don’t see it either. But something else has ruined our transaction. Which is a shame.”
“Is it?”
“For you, yes.”
The man’s tone was all too final. “What about the transfer? I just need Mr. Wallis’s—Matheson’s—fingerprint.”
Behind him, Nabil moved, and Paul heard a thump on the tabletop. A hand. A roughly chopped hand, the severed end black with old, stiff blood. Paul’s stomach went bad again.
“As you see,” said Kwambai, “we were prepared to do the transfer. But there’s one problem. Your computer. It’s not in your hotel room.”
That cut through his sickness. He stared at the politician, mouth dry. “It has to be.”
“Your suitcase, yes, full of clothes—you hadn’t even unpacked. But no magical computer.”
Despite the old fear slipping up through his guts, Paul went through possibilities. Benjamin had taken it. He had either secured it because he didn’t think it would be needed, or he had stolen it for his own reasons.
The hotel staff—but what use would they have for it?
Or Daniel Kwambai was lying. They had the case somewhere and were sweating him. That, or…
Or they had found the case, then checked it for one of Nabil’s trackers. And found one. Sam had sworn that there would be none, because they were too easy to detect. But…Lorenzo and Saïd. Perhaps this was some act of posthumous revenge. Perhaps Sam had cared about life after all.
“I don’t believe you,” Paul said, because it was the only role left to him. He heard the door behind him open and glanced back full of nerves. Nabil was leaving; the hand was gone. “Where’s he going?”
“I’m going, too,” said Kwambai. “It hurts me, it really does. Know that.” He spoke with the fluid false compassion of a politician.
“Wait!” Paul said as Kwambai began to walk away. The kidnappers, still in their corner, looked up at his outburst. “Tell me what’s going on.”
The Big Book of Espionage Page 71
