Doors on both sides of the vehicle opened, shut, and Nze heard footsteps scrambling over earth and scrub toward its rear. The cargo hatch was lifted. Arid — but fresh — air wafted through, easing the stuporous, khat-smelling heat around him.
This time Nze could feel no gratitude. He had already wasted his meager quota.
Hands seized the back of his perspiration-soaked shirt, pulling him from the open hatch like a trussed animal. Nze landed on his shoulder with a thud that knocked the wind out of him. He felt somebody take hold of the cords around his wrists, heard machetes hacking at foliage as he was dragged blindly over what seemed to be a rough footpath. Pebbles and thorns skinned his hands. A spiny clinging vine caught his left pants leg, raked it upward, and tore the flesh above his ankle. At some point he had lost one of his shoes, the foot that wore it twisting sharply. It had elicited a muffled whimper from him.
Nze did not know how far his abductors pulled him as they tramped on through the brush. Fifteen meters, twenty, perhaps farther. He did not know.
Suddenly, they stopped.
Nze was grabbed by the shirt collar again, pulled up onto his knees with a vicious jerk, and steadied from behind so he wouldn’t keel over, as he had in the four-wheel drive.
The tape around his hood was torn off. Then the hood itself.
Up and off.
Nze’s eyes filled with an explosion of glare. He grimaced as they adjusted to the daylight, blinked away stinging tears.
Swooning from fatigue, his vision a watery blur, Nze still found he could discern a great deal about his surroundings. He was in a small circular clearing, its edges shagged by high thickets of Marantaceae with dark green leaves the size of elephant ears. The clearing’s plainly defined boundaries and trammeled-down carpet of sedge suggested it was man made, slashed out of the forest with machetes like those his captors had used on the trail. Around and underneath Nze, the sawgrass growth was especially scorched, almost black, giving it the appearance of a large stain spread across the ground.
Then he spotted the tire lying in front of him. Doubtless the same tire that had been jammed against him in the cargo section for many hours. A portable metal gasoline can was beside it. A row of men nearby to the right, their knees level with his eyes.
He raised his head for a look at their faces. There were four of them — Andre in his conspicuous chauffeur’s suit, and two Bantu with semiautomatic rifles slung over their shoulders, dressed in coverall fatigues identical to those worn by the khat chewer. Nze could not see the latter, but thought he might be responsible for the shadow falling over him from behind… and realized now that he was not the group’s only user. As the minister knelt there before them, one of the Bantu removed a wad of the drug from a banana-frond wrapping in his hand, passed it to the other tribesman, then got a second wad and put it in his mouth with two fingers.
They chewed and watched him with hyped, bright eyes.
Nze looked away from them to the group’s single white, a lance-thin man in a safari jacket and bush hat. His eyes were pale blue, his skin the color of chalk.
Nze at once saw the camera hanging over his chest from a neck strap. It was a 35-mm with a large objective lens.
The white met Nze’s gaze with his own, studying him. Both hands in the gusset pockets of his jacket.
“Bienvenue,” he said in the lightly accented French that Nze remembered from their trip. “Por le maia distance, se bien regarder aà la lumiè‘re du jour.”
Nze was silent.
“I assume you’ve guessed who I am,” the white said.
Nze gave a slow nod.
The tire, he thought.
The gas can.
The burn-stained ground around him.
He felt himself trembling with fear.
“Let’s hear you say my name,” the white said. “It’s been a grueling ride for everyone. But worn out as we are, we must strive to be polite.”
Nze started to answer and his voice cracked. He wet his parched lips, tried again.
“Gerard Fáton,” he rasped.
The white continued regarding him steadily.
“There you go,” he said. A trace of a smile on his lips. “Monsieur Nze, you should be honored that I’ve come down to say good-bye to you, and capture the moment so that it will be remembered and appreciated.”
Nze’s trembling worsened. He couldn’t make it stop.
“I’ve done nothing…”
“And your doing nothing has cost me.”
Nze shook his head.
“What happened in Libreville… I did my best,” he said. “My arguments were defeated… but your desires weren’t made clear to me until very late. Too late. I had to rush to understand them… to prepare. If I’d had more time—”
Fáton vented a sibilant breath through his teeth.
“Lie to me once more, and I’ll have your hands separated from your wrists to make the burning worse.”
Nze was shaking uncontrollably. There was no denying what was planned for him. He felt his bladder release and hardly cared that his abductors could see the moist stain spreading across the crotch of his pants. He could live with the shame, if he could somehow find a way to live at all.
“You changed your vote to curry favor with some no-rate government connivers,” Fáton said. “Vulgar rustres. Rubes and yokels who play act at being Mandarins.”
“I’ll try again,” Nze said. “I can do better. Much better. I never meant to give up, you must believe that—”
“Stop. Now. You offend me.” Fáton shut his eyes, inhaled through his mouth, stood quietly holding his breath. After a long while he expelled the air from his nostrils, raised his eyelids with a kind of reptilian slowness, and went back to staring at Nze.
“ ‘I don’t see any chance of making inroads’,” he said. “Does that statement ring familiar to you?”
Nze’s face showed the anxious terror of a captured animal. Familiar? Of course it was. Of course. Here was another piece of the trap’s framework. Fáton was simply repeating words that the assistant minister himself had spoken to Etienne Begela over the telephone what seemed a hundred years ago.
Fáton stared at Nze for a brief moment longer before turning to the small group of men beside him.
“Let us necklace this faithless swine and be done here,” he said.
Even as he spoke, one of Fáton’s armed guards went to the tire, crouched over it, and began filling it from the can, working the spout through a hole that had been gouged into the tire’s sidewall. He poured until the can was almost empty, took a handkerchief from his pocket, soaked it with whatever was left of its contents, and wadded it into the hole, leaving a small wick of cloth hanging out. Finally he tossed the can into the brush and was joined by another of the guards, who helped him lift the tire off the ground and carry it toward the patch of blackened sedge where Nze knelt helplessly and watched.
Nze tried to move, knowing it was futile. The khat chewer from inside the Benz — or whichever of his captors was standing behind him — had taken fast hold of the electrical cord that bound his arms and legs. He could only squirm with impotent terror in that solid, unbreakable grip.
The tire was lowered over Nze’s head to rest around his shoulders. Fuel sloshed inside it, the stench overwhelming him.
He sobbed.
“Very good,” Fáton told the pair of fatigue-clad men. Then, to Nze, in a tone of calm gratification: “You were warned about lying twice, little piglet.”