by Allan Folsom
President Harris grinned. “My sense is that you’re right. Probably what you’ll end up with is a week’s all-expenses-paid vacation at an island paradise.”
Marten put down his fork and stared at the president. “Aw, come on, cousin, you can find somebody else.”
“As competent and trustworthy as you?”
“There are hundreds, probably thousands of people as competent and trustworthy as me. Probably even more competent and trustworthy.”
The president looked up and let his eyes find Marten’s. “Perhaps, my dear friend, but I don’t know them.”
7
BIOKO. 12:20 P.M.
Marten felt harsh sunlight cross his face. A second later there was a jarring bump, and his body flew upward only to be caught in a restraint of some kind and forced back down. Abruptly he awoke and through the fog of a deep, exhausted sleep saw that the cuts and scrapes on his right leg and left arm had been bandaged. Immediately there was another jolt, and his head cleared enough to realize that he was in a moving vehicle. Startled, he looked up and found staring at him perhaps the most captivatingly beautiful woman he had ever seen. With medium-length dark hair tucked behind her ears, a little turned-up nose, and dazzling green eyes, she was petite, sexy, and impish in a way that was wholly natural.
“This road is filled with potholes,” she said in accented English. “You have been sleeping. You were quite tired.”
Marten tried to shake off the lingering stupor and looked around. They were in the backseat of a battered, mud-splattered Toyota Land Cruiser that was traveling rapidly over a rutted dirt road. Two young, uniformed black men rode in front, one driving, the other sitting next to him. Marten looked over his shoulder. A second Land Cruiser was following close behind. It was dirty and plastered with mud as well. To the right, he could see open swampland dappled with splotches of bright sun that cut through an overcast sky. To the left, steep hills rose up sharply to disappear in a thick blanket of low-hanging mist.
“My name is Marita Lozano.” The young woman smiled. “I am a physician. My companions in the car behind are medical students. We have come to Bioko from Madrid to give AIDS education to the people in the southern part of the island. As you probably know, a civil war has broken out here. The army ordered to us to return to Malabo immediately.”
“The army?” Marten was suddenly alarmed.
“They stopped our cars a short time ago and told us to follow them.”
Marten looked past the uniformed men in front and through the dirty, mud-streaked windshield to see an Equatorial Guinea army Humvee of sorts kicking up mud and gravel some thirty yards ahead of them. Uniformed soldiers were seated inside, while another, standing, manned a roof-mounted machine gun.
Marten looked back to Marita. “Did they see me?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “They seemed to think you were one of us, and I let them. I simply said you were tired and were sleeping.”
“They didn’t ask for identification?”
“Only mine. Our guides told them who we were and what we were doing here.” She smiled gently and with it came the perky impishness he’d seen before. “I knew you had been caught up in the fighting in the south and that you escaped the soldiers, so naturally I assumed you didn’t want to be questioned by them.”
“How do you know all that?” Marten was incredulous. Instinctively he glanced at the guides and then looked back to Marita.
“You told us. Myself and my colleagues; the guides, too. We saw you walking on the beach. You stumbled and fell and didn’t get up. When we got to you, you were quite exhausted and exceedingly dehydrated. A little disoriented and frightened, too, when you saw the guides in their uniforms. Of course you had no way to know who we were.”
Marten studied her carefully. “What, exactly, did I tell you?”
“That your name is Nicholas Marten and you are an English landscape architect in Bioko to study native plant life. You said you met a priest who took you up into the rain forest and showed you some of the flora you were looking for. You were returning to his village when fighting erupted there, the army trucks came, and the priest told you to run and you did.”
Marten stared at her in disbelief.
“You have no memory of telling us, do you?” she said gently.
“No.”
“Whether it’s the truth is not my business.” This time there was nothing gentle in her manner, nor any hint of impishness.
“It is the truth. Just the way I said it.”
“Good, because you will want to repeat it when we get to Malabo.”
“What do you mean, repeat it?”
“The army is going to question us when we arrive. They said so. It’s why they ordered us to follow them.”
“By us, you mean me, too?”
“Yes.”
Questioning by army interrogators was the last thing Marten wanted. It was impossible to know how much they knew of his connection to Father Willy or if they had known about the photographs all along and had been trying to trap him and anyone he might have shown the photos to or told about them. Brutal as they were, they were fighting a war and would do anything to get as much information as they could about what was going on and who was involved with arming the rebellion. Father Willy had been with the natives a long time and that made him a prime suspect in anything that might appear to be supporting the insurgency. The soldiers had seen Marten with him, and Marten had turned and run when they came after him. That in itself would make any question-and-answer session with them long and probably ugly, maybe even fatal.
Abruptly he looked to Marita. “There’s no need for me to make things difficult for you. Why don’t you tell your driver to just pull over when we go around a bend in the road and let me off. They won’t see it happen, and that way I’m out of your hair and you won’t have to answer questions about me when they find out I wasn’t part of your group to begin with.”
“They know how many of us there are, Mr. Marten. If there were to be one less we would have to explain it and they would want to know why and then there would be more trouble all around. Even if we did stop and you got out, where would you go? Into the rain forest? How long would you be prepared to stay there? This is an island, Mr. Marten, and not terribly hospitable, as you already know. Whatever your private circumstances are, I would think it best that you settle them sooner rather than later.”
“You do,” Marten said flatly.
“Yes, I do.”
Marten looked off. He knew she was right and that the best thing he could do would be to face whoever interrogated him and hope he could bluff it through. The idea of calling the president, using the direct-dial twenty-four-hour-a-day number Harris had given him, or calling anyone else for that matter, was not an option. This was not the United States, not Britain, not Europe. Demands to make a phone call would, he knew, be met with laughter and more likely with physical punishment. Maybe worse. He turned back to her. “Alright. I’ll follow your suggestion.”
“That being the case”—Marita grinned a little, and the impishness returned—“please tell me your story again, and precisely as you did before. That way we will all have everything comfortably in mind before you and we and the soldiers meet.”
Marten smiled at her pluck. Here was a beautiful young doctor on some kind of mission of mercy or education or both in the middle of a poor-as-dirt jungle region who understood something of the underbelly of the world around her and could smile about it even as she determined how to deal with it. People like that didn’t come along very often.
12:42 P.M.
8
MALABO, CAPITAL OF EQUATORIAL GUINEA. 4:18 P.M.
Conor White stood alone under the arch of a public building, and out of a light rain, watching the street at the end of the block. Now and again people passed by. Mostly they were native women and children, their men seemingly elsewhere. The whites, Americans, Europeans, South Africans—mostly people in the oil business or in one way or another conne
cted to it—were absent altogether, either still conducting the day’s business or already gathered in the bar of the Hotel Malabo, where most of them spent their free time. To them, neither Malabo nor the entire island of Bioko, the old Spanish Fernanado Pó, nor even Rio Muni, the Equatorial Guinea mainland across the Bight of Biafra from Bioko, was a place for civilized man. If you weren’t in oil or somehow trying to profit from it, there was no reason in hell to be there at all.
4:22 P.M.
White pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, ran it over his neck, and then wiped his forehead. It was hot and humid as it always was, ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit when he’d left the air-conditioning of his motor home office/sleeping quarters ten minutes earlier.
The neighborhood here was a hodgepodge of old colonial buildings in varying stages of disrepair. Most had crumbling archways and tattered or broken window shutters and front doors that looked as if they had been repaired by crate makers. All were topped by slanted, grooved metal roofs, the majority of which were in danger of rusting through. The buildings themselves, made of white concrete and two or three stories high, were, he imagined, probably built in the 1930s or ’40s. No doubt once elegant and well kept, in all probability they’d remained that way until 1968, when Equatorial Guinea gained independence after one hundred and ninety years of Spanish rule and the series of brutal dictatorships began, slipping the country into a morass of untold riches for the few and deep poverty for the rest. The buildings now were inhabited by the latter and had not only fallen into sad disrepair but along the way had been painted a combination of colors that made no sense at all. One was faded yellow with an equally faded pink balcony, another a dreary white with one archway of light blue and another of muddy orange; still another was bright pink but had shutters that were salmon on one side and brilliant green on the other.
Conor White had been around the world more times than he could remember, and nothing he had seen quite matched the cheerless atmosphere of rust and decay and near all-invasive poverty that was Malabo, or at least the part of it where he stood now.
4:30 P.M.
Again his eyes went to the end of the block.
Still nothing.
They were to have arrived at four twenty-five. Where were they? What was the delay? He could radio, he knew, easily enough. Just reach into his jacket and click the piece on. Tell SimCo dispatch what he wanted, and in less than thirty seconds he would have location coordinates and a corrected, near exact time of arrival. But he didn’t. There was no point in revealing his impatience, even to his dispatcher.
4:33 P.M.
Ten feet away a rooster wandered along the sidewalk, clucking around a dead palm tree and then strutting boldly across the cracked asphalt street under a collection of weathered low-hanging wires that dangled hazardously between metal telephone poles.
4:34 P.M.
Again White looked down the street. An old man turned the corner on a bicycle and came toward him. Behind him the street was empty. Patience be damned. He started to reach for his radio. Then—
There they were, rounding the corner and coming toward him: a muddied Army of Equatorial Guinea machine-gun-mounted Humvee followed in close order by two mud-crusted Toyota Land Cruisers and then a second army Humvee, the one that would have picked them up as a tail car when they entered the city.
White stepped back under the arch and out of sight as they passed. Seconds later the caravan pulled beneath the overhang of a crumbling two-story building across the street. Armed soldiers jumped from the army vehicles and pulled open the doors of the Land Cruisers. In a heartbeat the occupants of both cars were brought out and led into the building. They were eight in all. Four were young Spanish medical students he knew about. He had their names and passport numbers and home addresses in Madrid. Two others were uniformed native guides. The seventh was a young female doctor, from Madrid, whose personal information he had as well. The last was the individual he wanted most to see and was the reason he had come there and waited as he had. At this point he had no information about him at all. What he knew was what he saw. A ruggedly handsome male Caucasian in his midthirties, about six feet tall, slim and dark-haired. He was the man the soldiers had seen with Father Willy Dorhn, the same man who had run from them in the rain forest. He was the real person of interest here. Someone who might well know about the photographs the priest had taken and the missing camera memory card that went with them.
White had wanted to see him in person, get a sense of him before the army interrogators took over. If the army didn’t get the information he wanted, he would have to find a way to do it himself. Experience had taught him that if possible it was best to get a sense of your quarry before he had any idea that you even existed, especially when you had no information about him. It gave you a step up, a chance to see how he carried himself, what his attitude was, what he might be like physically and mentally if you had to go up against him. It wasn’t much, but it was more than the other man had.
9
4:47 P.M.
The room was unbearably hot.
The soldier’s uniform had no name tag, just gold oak leaf clusters on his epaulets. The best Marten could construe was that he was a major in the army of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea. He was big and powerfully built, well over six feet and easily two hundred and fifty pounds. A fearsome tribal scar covered most of the left half of his face, while a similar scar was on his right forearm. Taken together they gave him more the appearance of a bush warrior than a military officer. Yet none of it compared with his eyes. Dark brown and bloodshot, they were like those of the soldier who had come after him in the rain forest. Homicidal and wholly merciless, they were the gateway to the possessor’s soul and something Marten would fear for the rest of his life.
“Speak into the microphone,” the major commanded in a deep, heavily accented voice, sweat glistening on his forehead, the microphone of an old-style cassette tape recorder held inches from Marten’s face. “State your name, profession, and place of residence. Then describe what took place yesterday when you were in Bioko South.”
Marten was seated on a straight-backed chair in the center of a dimly lit room. Sweat soaked his hair, running down his neck and his face and into his shirt. To his left two solidly built uniformed officers stood erect and in silence. Beyond them, two more uniformed men guarded the door. The men at the door were clearly not officers but everyday soldiers, young and alert and eager. Their eyes locked on Marten, they seemed almost hungry, as if they were hoping he would do something so they could act on it.
All of them were dressed in the same sweat-stained jungle-green camouflage uniforms, their trouser legs bloused over heavy, laced-up combat boots. Each wore a dark red beret with some kind of bright yellow and black insignia stitched on the front. The major and the two officers carried sidearms, while the men at the door fingered light machine guns.
The room itself was large, its floor covered with cracked linoleum. An aging wooden table was just inside the door and had several old and rusted chrome kitchen stools standing alongside it. The walls were water-stained plaster, long ago painted a sickly green. What little illumination there was came from three bare lightbulbs that hung by frayed electric cords from the ceiling, and from the spill of afternoon daylight that crept in through broken shutters in the room’s only window. A lone ceiling fan turned slowly above Marten’s head, barely moving the stifling air.
Beyond all that, the thing that caught Marten’s eye was a young male goat tied to a leg of the wooden table happily chewing on a stack of old newspapers. Whether it was a pet or regiment mascot or some kind of indigenous good-luck charm or was there for some other reason entirely, there was no way to know, but his presence seemed strange, even in a frightful place like this.
“Sir, speak into the microphone,” the major commanded again. This time his voice resonated with impatience. “State your name, your profession, and place of residence. Then describe what took place yesterday when you were in Bio
ko South.”
Marten hesitated, then began. The best thing, he knew, was to go along with them. Do just as they asked. “My name is Nicholas Marten,” he said, patiently telling them what he had moments earlier when they’d first brought him into the room, taken his photograph and searched him, then took away his still-damp passport and wallet and the neck pouch in which he carried it. Immediately afterward the major demanded he tell them his name and what he did and where he was from. “I am a landscape architect. I live in Manchester, in the north of England.”
Carefully, he went on with the rest, repeating the story he’d told Marita on the way there. It was a narrative, which, as he thought now, was something he must have quickly and subconsciously put together the day before when the soldiers were pursuing him through the rain forest and he had been certain he would be caught. A simple yet detailed explanation of who he was and why he was in Bioko.
“I came here on a five-day trip to study equatorial plants for possible inclusion in a tropical green house a client would like to build on his estate. You can verify the date I arrived in Bioko by the stamp on my passport. I took a room at the Hotel Malabo for the duration of my stay. My things are still there.”
Marten paused and casually looked around to see how the others were reacting. If they had relaxed. If they believed him. What might happen when he was finished. There was no response at all. The soldiers stared at him in silence, their focus and attitude unchanged.
Marten cleared his throat and went on. “While I was in the southern part of the island I met a priest who introduced himself as Father Willy Dorhn. He asked me about my travels, and when I explained my reason for being there he kindly offered to show me some rain forest vegetation I had not yet seen. Later, as we returned, we heard gunfire in his village. The father was very concerned about his people and left me to go to them. It was then the army trucks came. He looked back when he saw them, and I could tell he was frightened. He yelled at me to run for my life. Which I did. I had no idea what was going on, but the sound of his voice and the fear in his eyes was enough. I ran into the jungle with armed soldiers chasing me. Shortly afterward I slipped from a cliff and fell into a river. The water carried me a long way. Then it became night, and in the morning I found I had reached the sea. I was lost and thirsty and hungry. I had no choice but to start walking, and I did. Sometime later the Spanish doctor and her medical students found me.” Marten stopped and looked directly at the major. “You know the rest.”
