“I am.”
“A lot of people have already looked, Sam. Sixty years’ worth of people.”
Fisher smiled. “I love a challenge.”
“You got a vehicle?”
Fisher dug into his shirt pocket and came up with a business card; he handed it over. “My travel agent set it up for me. A Range Rover.”
Aly nodded and handed it back. “I know this man. He’ll treat you right. You know where you’re going?”
“More or less.”
Less rather than more, Fisher thought. All he had were a pair of latitude and longitude coordinates, the first two hundred miles to the northwest, deep inside the Great Rift Valley in the Kenyan highlands; the second a hundred fifty miles to the east near Lake Victoria’s Winam Gulf. What he would find, if anything, at these spots he didn’t know, but he was trusting that Peter had known and that somehow, someway, these two spots were connected to Carmen Hayes’s disappearance, North Korea, Bolot Omurbai, and the PuH-19.
Fisher was ready for some answers. He, Lambert, Grimsdottir, and Redding had been staring at this seemingly unsolvable puzzle for too long, and Fisher’s instincts told him that whatever was happening, it wasn’t far off.
“Gear, rations, et cetera?” asked Aly.
Fisher nodded to his Granite Gear Stratus lying beside his chair.
“Gun?” she said.
“They confiscated my bazooka at the airport.”
She clucked her tongue. “We’ve got highway bandits in the backcountry. They’ll steal your skin if they think they can sell it,” she said solemnly, then gave him a wink. “No worries, I’ll fix you up. You know how to handle a gun?”
“Just point the end with the hole in it at the bad guy and pull the trigger.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, then decided he was kidding and laughed. “Right.” She checked her watch. “Go catch a nap. When you wake up, I’ll take you to supper. I know a place that serves a parrot fish that’ll knock your socks off.”
The parrot fish had in fact been fantastic. They returned to her home just as the sun was setting. As promised, the rental agent had delivered his Range Rover to the house, complete with extra jerricans of water and fuel.
Fisher went to his bedroom, turned on the bedside lamp, and stretched out. His satellite phone chimed, and he checked the screen: Grimsdottir. “Morning, Grim.”
“Evening, for you.”
“Feels like morning to me. What’s up?”
“I’ve got the colonel on the line, too.”
“Lamb.”
“When do you leave?” Lambert asked.
“Five in the morning.”
“Omurbai’s been on the air again doing his Hitler imitation. Remember he mentioned Manas? ‘The scourge of Manas’?”
“Yes.”
Grimsdottir said, “That’s a reference to something called the Epic of Manas. It’s a traditional Kyrgyz myth-slash-poem set in the ninth century. It’s a cornerstone to Kyrgyz national identity. It runs almost half a million verses, twenty times longer than Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad combined.”
“Should I put it on my reading list,” Fisher said, “or are there CliffsNotes?”
“Well, here’s the condensed version: Manas and descendants go on a variety of adventures, waging war, looking for a homeland, and just generally being heroic. Harvard’s got an electronic version, which I downloaded. I’ve scanned the thing from start to finish, and I can’t find any mention of the phrase ‘the scourge of Manas.’ ”
“So Omurbai’s taken some creative license,” Fisher replied.
Lambert said, “The shrinks at the CIA don’t think so. Omurbai’s used it seven more times in press conferences. They think it’s more than just a catchphrase he’s using to stir the masses. They think it has tangible meaning for him.”
Fisher was silent for a few moments. “Scourge,” he said. “Could have two meanings. Scourge, as in a tormentor, in which case he’s probably talking about himself. Or, he’s using it in the literal sense: scourge, as in a flail, or a whip.”
“In other words,” Lambert said, “a weapon.”
“Not just a weapon,” Fisher corrected him. “A weapon worthy of an epic, nation-saving hero.”
29
Fisher pulled the Range Rover off the dirt track and beneath the canopy of trees hanging over the plank shack. The hand-painted red and white sign was so faded it was barely legible, but he could just make it out: JIMIYU’S. A scrawny, marginally feathered chicken jumped off the shack’s tin roof and landed with a squawk on the Rover’s hood.
“Adede, go, go!” a male voice called. A black man, standing at least six and a half feet tall, ducked out of the shack’s doorway, waving his hands at the chicken. “Bad girl, bad!” His English had only a slight accent.
The chicken stalked across the hood and hopped down.
Fisher opened the Rover’s door and climbed out. “Mr. Jimiyu?”
“Mr. Barnes?” the man replied, walking forward to shake hands. Jimiyu was rail thin, the bones at his elbows and wrists knobby, and he had perfect, white teeth and lively eyes. “Welcome to Kapedo. How was your drive?”
Fisher had left Nairobi just before dawn. It had taken him nearly six hours to cover the one hundred seventy-five miles to Kapedo. Aly’s warning about highway bandits had been prescient. Twice he’d had to use the vintage M-14 rifle she’d loaned him, once on the road between Nakuru and Nyahururu Falls when an ancient Subaru Brat full of pangawielding teenagers had started tailgating him and gesturing for him to pull over; then again north of Nosoguru, where a trio of men had demanded a toll (they’d wanted the Range Rover itself) for crossing a bridge. In each case, Fisher’s casual brandishing of the M-14 had resolved the debate.
“You had no trouble, yes?” Jimiyu said.
“No trouble.”
“Good, good. And tell me: How is Irving?”
Surprisingly, Fisher’s contact for this final leg of the journey to what he assumed/hoped was the Sunstar’s crash site had come not from the CIA but from Lambert himself, who’d simply given Fisher Jimiyu’s name and a four-word guarantee: “You can trust him.” No explanation offered. When Fisher had pressed him for an explanation, Lambert simply winked and said, “Another time.”
“He sends his regards.” Fisher walked to the rear of the Rover, lifted the hatch, and pulled out his backpack. “He had a message for you.”
“Oh?”
“He said, ‘Barasa is doing fine.’ ”
Jimiyu clapped his hands once and grinned broadly. “Excellent. Come, follow me. We’ll have something to eat, then be on our way. With great luck, I will have you there before nightfall.”
An hour later, Jimiyu led Fisher down a jungle trail to a plank-and-tire dock at the river’s edge. Bobbing gently on the river’s muddy brown surface was a circa World War II eighteen-foot U.S. Navy motor whaleboat sporting a fresh coat of battleship gray paint and a pair of trolling motors sitting on a transom board in the stern.
“Nice,” Fisher said. “Where’d you get it?”
“I found it,” Jimiyu said proudly, his teeth flashing. Fisher cocked his head at the Kenyan. “Truly,” Jimiyu added. “I was fishing near Tangulbe when it came floating down the river. It was empty and barely afloat. A ghost dhow. I swam out, towed it back to shore, then a friend with a truck helped me bring it here. I fixed it, and here it is,” he finished, spreading his hands as though unveiling a magic trick.
“How fast?”
“Twenty-four kilometers per hour. With extra fuel cans, we can go nearly two hundred forty kilometers.”