Once again he found himself behind the World Bank woman, and he began to wonder if something in his subconscious was causing him to follow her. Latent stalker or Galahad complex? Either one was possible, he thought cynically — both fitted well enough with the James Bond mode he was trying for, at any rate.
‘This passport is out of date!’ spat the man in passport control.
‘I assure you it is not…’ answered the woman, frowning. ‘It will not expire for—’
‘Five months! It must be at least six months from expiry! This is serious!’
She turned around at last, her eyes wide with shock. ‘I had no idea! They called me in at the last moment! I only had twelve hours to get my stuff together and catch the flight from Boston to Paris!’ She was explaining to Richard, in English.
Without a second thought he was at her side. ‘How serious?’ he demanded in his brutal French. ‘This serious?’ Richard produced twenty-five dollars.
The man frowned.
‘This serious?’ Richard added another twenty-five dollars. Fifty dollars now lay beside the passport.
The stamp came down. ‘Remember in future,’ the passport controller said. He handed up the passport. Richard took it and handed it to her. ‘See you in baggage claim, Dr Holliday,’ he said. She walked away hurriedly without looking back at him. He slid his own passport into the booth. There was already ten dollars in it. He was getting the hang of this, he thought.
The baggage hall was busy. There were people everywhere, many more than had just come off the KLM Boeing. A good number of them looked local. And not just the taxi-touts, the hotel drummers, or the ubiquitous men in white and camouflage with their sidearms and their submachine guns.
The cinnamon-skinned World Bank woman was nowhere to be seen, so Richard contented himself with looking for his bags. When they arrived, they were so battered that he only recognized them because he had cinched distinctive personalized straps around them. Narrow-eyed, he heaved them off the carousel and carried them through to the next security section which stood between baggage claim and customs. This time the pallets were bigger. Cases went through X-ray searches, as did his laptop, keys, belt, BlackBerry and cellphone once again. And as did his knees once more when the alarm sounded.
And he found himself another twenty dollars poorer by the time he caught up with his cases and effects.
He re-threaded his belt, slipped his BlackBerry into his breast pocket with his passport and put the Benincom cellphone in his right jacket pocket conveniently to hand. Then he put his laptop bag over his shoulder and hefted his cases into customs.
The first thing that he saw there was a selection of ladies’ underwear so adventurous as to be almost shocking. It was being held up by the customs official going through a suitcase. And a second glance all too clearly revealed that the case belonged to the woman from the World Bank. Her cheeks were no longer cinnamon: they were mahogany with embarrassed blushes.
Enough is enough, thought Richard, and he shouldered his way through the hall and slammed his cases down beside hers. The simple noise distracted the sniggering officials. Then they registered his height and his presence. And the look on his face. The woman’s underwear was roughly shoved back and her case closed then marked ‘PASSED’.
‘Are these bags yours?’ demanded the tallest of the three in French that was almost as brutal as Richard’s own.
‘Yes.’
‘Open them…’
Ten minutes later, sixty dollars poorer and lighter by most of his exclusive toiletries, Richard carried his cases out into the main arrivals hall. This was even busier than the baggage claim had been. It was as much a market as an airport. People ran here and there, jostling the new arrivals, trying to sell them knick-knacks, local fruit and produce. There were men and women, boys and girls all in a jostling crowd offering everything from help with luggage to cigarettes to local currency and promises to guide.
The woman he had been following was standing, helpless, at the heart of a crowd of feral children who were pawing at her, apparently intent on tearing the very clothing off her back. ‘Hoi!’ bellowed Richard without thinking, using his quarterdeck voice — the one that could carry half the length of a supertanker in the middle of a storm. Every head in the place swivelled towards him. The crowd of boys broke away from her and descended on him like piranhas. She staggered a few steps, only to find herself confronted by a soldier clutching a Ruger MP-9 submachine gun. One of Colonel Kebila’s best by the look of things.
She looked over her shoulder, her eyes wide and desperate.
Richard decided that he had had enough. He dropped his cases and reached into his pocket for the Benincom cell pre-programmed with the number of someone capable of getting him out of this.
But his pocket was empty.
The phone was gone.
‘Stop thief,’ he yelled at once in French. ‘Someone has stolen my phone!’ Quick as a flash, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out his BlackBerry. He had left it switched on and programmed with the Benincom cell’s own number. He pressed speed-dial and immediately the phone began to ring. ‘Help! Stop thief,’ he yelled again. ‘Au secours! Voleur! Arrêtez le voleur!’
One of the urchins who had been circling the woman and Richard himself seemed to freeze, then in a flash he was gone. But the ringing carried on.
‘It’s here!’ said the soldier with the submachine gun. And several others joined him at once. Numbly, moving like a zombie, the girl from the World Bank reached into her bag and pulled out Richard’s phone. She stood there, gaping at the shrieking instrument, suddenly alone with the accusing soldiers in a widening space in the centre of a vanishing crowd. Richard strode forward, his clumsy thumb fighting to break contact with his BlackBerry.
And, as he did so, a slim wiry figure in a Colonel’s uniform also stepped into the accusing vacancy. ‘Ah, Captain Mariner,’ purred the familiar Sandhurst-polished voice of his old adversary Laurent Kebila, Chief of State Security. ‘Still having problems with the ladies, I see. Perhaps you had both better come with me.’
THREE
Oyster
Anastasia Asov watched Celine Chaka as she rang the chapel bell. It was six o’clock local time. Sunset would be swift and soon — especially under the gathering western storm clouds and the overspreading forest canopy. It was time for the Christians amongst their charges to hold their shortened Evensong, and for the Muslims to perform their Maghrib or sunset Salat. Then they would all have supper and start to tuck down. During the last twenty minutes or so, the two young women had rearranged the schoolroom desks and chairs into the chapel’s rows of makeshift pews, and had transformed the teacher’s desk on the slight platform in front of the whiteboard into a rudimentary altar. Just as the bell — a school bell in the daytime — was now transformed to a chapel bell at sunset. Now they stood, breathless and running with perspiration in the suffocating humidity of the early evening.
Above the rhythmic chime of the bell, the call of the camp’s muezzin suddenly rose, the power of it still able to make the hair all over Anastasia’s lean body rise in goosebumps. The two religions covered the majority of the children here — given only, Anastasia suspected darkly, that many of the older boys had already been initiated into the local forms of magic animism of the Poro secret bush societies. Certainly there was a large number of ritual scars on a good few backs and cheeks. And, she suspected, a good few of the older girls had been taken into their female equivalent — the Sande. A percentage of both genders — though blessedly few girls — had been circumcised. This in spite of the fact that most of the children here — the better part of three hundred of them at the last count — were from lost families and ruined villages. Which begged the question of who on earth was out there managing to initiate them. Obi and Ngoboi, perhaps; the great spirits of the dark places.