She stepped forward again, letting out the leash, guiding Viv toward Thomas.
The kid was a natural for the role of animal provocateur, she had to give that to him.
“I love you, kitty-cat,” Thomas cooed. He nestled Leona in his arms, scratched behind her ear, buried his face in the thick fur of her nape, and gave her a series of smoochy lip-smacking kisses. “I love you best of all, love you so, soooo much—”
All in an instant Vivian launched forward, straining at the leash. She was growling, her teeth gnashing inside the muzzle as she thrust her long snout at the cat. Before Julia could yank her away from him, Thomas screamed and flinched back in his chair, slamming it hard against the wall. Hissing, spitting, her fur on end, Leona took a defensive swat at Viv. Then she sprang out of Thomas’s arms to the floor, went scrambling wildly across the room, and bolted out the doorless entry to the storefront with a loud mewling screech.
“The lady tricked me!” Thomas hollered. His face red, tears bursting from his eyes. “She knew the dog was gonna be bad and she tricked me!”
“Thomas, I’m sorry you got frightened, but that’s not true.” Julia had pulled in the leash, straddled Vivian between her legs, and could already feel her subsiding. “I told you there was a chance—”
Thomas leaped to his feet, and the chair fell over with a crash. Ellen swept him into her consoling arms.
“No you didn’t!” he bawled. He’d clenched his hands into tight, white-knuckled fists and was shaking them at his sides. “You’re a liar! A mean, mean liar!”
Stanley rose from his chair and looked across the room at Julia.
“Under the circumstances, given how my son’s been traumatized—”
“A mean liar lady with a bad, stupid dog…”
“—I feel it’s best we reconsider this adoption,” Stanley said.
Julia somehow managed to arrest her smile.
“Mr. Wurman,” she said, “I have to admit those were exactly my thoughts.”
Macie Nze had done his best to mark the 4×4’s route, and by that guess its general destination. The sounds and smells coming through the open front windows made it apparent that he’d been taken into the bush. Deep into the bush to judge from the long, punishing drive, which already seemed to have gone on for half the night. Though his eyes were covered by a canvas hood or sack, he was convinced his captors had headed south for dozens of kilometers, and then east for dozens more, putting him somewhere near the Wonga-Wongé Preserve, if not within its actual boundaries.
Nze had fought to hang on to his wits, stay alert to surrounding noises, keep track of turns the vehicle had made… lefts, rights, curves wide or sharp. Orienting himself hadn’t been easy. Wherever he’d been brought and held for many hours after his abduction was clearly within the city limits, but he’d been forced to wear the hood the entire time and gotten only a vague sense of his starting point. Yet neither his negated eyesight, his fear, nor his constant discomfort — and occasionally dreadful pain — had stopped Nze from being able to tell when the 4×4 was crossing bridges or stopping at intersections. Or when its tires had left Port-Gentil’s paved streets and thoroughfares for the outlying bush country.
The feel of the unimproved roads he’d traveled ever since had held their own clues to his direction. Even a newcomer to the land could have differentiated between highway macadam and rutted wilderness path, and except for his four years abroad at university, Nze, who was a month shy of his fiftieth birthday, had lived in Gabon his entire life. He could identify the type of surfaces over which he’d been driven, whether coastal sand or laterite, a soft, iron-rich earth that was typical of inland marshes and lagoons, and would hold moisture through all but the harshest dry seasons. For a while now the laterite had been sucking at the vehicle’s wheels, causing it to pitch and yaw, repeatedly bogging it down in claylike red muck.
That continuous rocking was bad enough for Nze, but the jolts he took in the 4×4’s cargo section whenever it was pushed out of a bog were far worse, and had wrung stifled groans of agony through the thick band of duct tape over his mouth. After the abductors walked him from his temporary holding place — hooded, gagged, and at gunpoint — they had forced him to squat on his knees in the 4×4’s cargo section, and then bound his wrists and ankles together from behind with electrical cord. The first rattling bump had knocked Nze off balance onto his left side, flinging his body against a heavy tire stowed in back with him… presumably a spare. He’d remained there since, unable to pull himself up, the grooved pattern of its treads stamping into him through his clothes. Movement just worsened the abominable strain on his neck, back, and legs. And those sudden forward lurches of the vehicle, mon Dieu, they were almost unendurable.
And so the drive stretched on. Nze believed daybreak was fast approaching — for whatever it was worth, the coarse, heavy fabric over his face had not completely blocked his perception of light and darkness. Much earlier, before the 4×4 slipped out of the city, he’d distinguished the glow of traffic signals, streetlights, even the occasional glancing headlamp beams of other motor vehicles. Now he had discerned a faint lifting of the black outside the windows, coupled with the sounds of an awakened jungle. He could hear the discord of overlapping birdsong, and had thought he’d recognized a mangabey’s shrieky primate cry behind him on the forest road.
Part of Nze’s mind yearned for an end to the torturous ride. Another part of him, however, understood how insane a desire that was, what its fulfillment would likely mean for him. He had tried to ignore these emphatic inner warnings, banish them from contemplation, but they had persisted anyway.
Assistant Minister Macie Nze was a man of some fair reason, a trait that would not allow reality to be denied.
If only his capacity for logic and common sense had guided his recent actions, Nze supposed he would never have gotten into this wretched spot. But greed was an imbecilic spoiler that could overcome a person’s best instincts. In his case, it had happened once too often.
As the car rolled on over the dirt roads, Nze’s thoughts suddenly backtracked to when he’d been taken outside his home all those hours ago… and then reversed themselves a little further, to the very moment he was lured into the trap.
The call came shortly after eleven o’clock on what was now the previous night. Seventeen minutes past eleven, to be exact. There was a Berthoud clock on his living-room bureau, and Nze recalled having looked at the antique timepiece as he had reached for the phone, setting down his late-evening glass of wine.
“Bonsoir, Macie.” The voice in his handset had belonged to Etienne Begela. “Ça va?”
“Bien, merci.”
Nze had waited. Begela’s cordial tone had thrown him off guard, as it had at the hotel earlier that night. His superior in the Office des Postes et Telecommunications, and a Beti Fang of maternal family linkage, Begela had not spoken a word to Nze for weeks before the reception… not, in fact, since their tense conversation aboard the Avirex flight out of Libreville after the National Assembly voted its approval of the UpLink licenses. Begela alternately accused Nze of being a bungler and double-crosser for having withdrawn his opposition. Nze countered that political exigency had left him with no choice except to launch a strategic retreat. The Americans’ support among the PDG’s most formidable and senior members was overwhelming, he’d insisted. Continued challenges would merely label both of them obstructionists to their future sorrow.