“So,” he said. He covered the phone with his other hand so he could look at the Lebanese while he talked. The Lebanese was getting a lot of money to do the job, but could he do it? Carmine wondered if he should get rid of the man and start over. No, there wasn’t time. “I don’t care about that,” he said into the phone when the other man started to give him details. “All I want is your assurance that everything will be ready for the celebration. Your absolute assurance.” When he heard the reply, he grunted and switched off, but the grunt was a positive one. He trusted the man in Malindi.
He spat. He couldn’t spit like that without a certain run-up, a certain amount of sound not unlike retching. He went back to the table and waved a hand at one of the other men, who came over and poured him more coffee and then backed away.
Carmine took a biscotto in his right hand and, holding it between his thumb and third finger, used it to lecture the Lebanese. “I want the only face on this to be Muslim, you follow me?” Carmine came from a village where they had still now and then been visited by puppeteers who did plays from the romances about Saracens and Christian knights; his sense of Islam was based in that half-sophisticated, half-ignorant past. “That’s what the world is to see. That’s what Jean-Marc is for.” He gestured with the cookie at the handsome translator, who was actually a freelance television journalist and who smiled at them as if he was on camera. “You deliver Mombasa,” Carmine said to the Lebanese. He dipped the biscotto, sucked the now-soaked end. “No mistakes. You don’t get a second chance. Eh?”
“Of course, of course—” The Lebanese was afraid of him and showed it — never a bad idea with Carmine, who liked fear in the people around him. The Lebanese tapped the glass top of the table. “I have everything arranged—” He stopped. The translator was shaking his head at him.
Carmine hawked and spat and waved his left hand. “Don’t tell me details. Tell Carlo or somebody. Get out.” He looked toward a door. “Carlo!”
The Lebanese was hustled out, his right hand halfway up to give a parting handshake, his mouth still open. He would be back in his Christian village in Lebanon by midnight. It might seem he would have nothing to fear there from somebody living in Sicily. But he knew better.
Carmine sat at the table with the translator, wiping his mouth with a cloth napkin. “What do you think?” he said.
“I think I don’t understand what is going on, Don,” he murmured.
“You don’t need to understand!” Carmine’s head was down like a bull’s. “You do what I pay you to do — you talk nice, look pretty on the camera, you keep saying what I tell you. You don’t hear nothing, you don’t know nothing, you weren’t here today, and you didn’t meet this no-balls Lebanese! Yes?”
“Yes, yes — of course—Don.”
Carmine sat back. He fingered a cigarette out of a pack on the table without looking. “You want to keep a secret, you chop it into pieces and you give each guy a piece. They look at it, they say ‘I don’t know what I got here.’ That’s how it stays a secret.”
He lit the cigarette and turned and looked across the terrace at the sea, his legs spread, his forearms on his knees and his hands joined, smoke blowing from the side of his mouth. The sea was empty but he seemed to see something there, because he said, “The U.S. Navy, that’s what I worry about. Fucking U.S. Navy.”
DAY ONE
16 August 1999
1
Laura had tarted herself up so that she was quite a distraction, he thought, watching her approach the passport-control slot with her hidden contraband. She walked with a bouncy stride that wasn’t really her own, chest up and out, her rear also very much on view in tight yellow shorts that barely reached her hips. Her navel rode calmly in all this motion, its ring with the diamond chip winking. Laura had made herself, in fact, all distractions, and every male eye in the shedlike arrival area was on some part of her. The fact that she didn’t have a really pretty face was irrelevant.
Alan Craik grinned despite himself. She was enjoying it! He, on the other hand, was nervous, for her as much as for himself, and he tensed as she sashayed to the passport-control booth and started to chat with a security officer. More balls than he had, he thought. He had only to move a 9mm pistol through; she had something far more dangerous.
He flexed his fingers to relax them, felt the odd sensation in his left hand where two fingers were missing. Or, rather, were red stumps. He forced himself to look at them, felt disbelief, slight disgust. My hand. The fingers had been blown off by a bullet seven weeks before. There had been talk of his leaving the Navy.
He balled the hand into a fist and forced himself to concentrate. Back to work.
Alan laid his U.S. passport, a twenty-dollar bill sticking from its top, in front of the black man at passport control. The man, too, had been looking at Laura, and Alan grinned.
“Maridadi,” Alan said. Pretty.
The man’s eyes flicked over Alan’s shoulder again to Laura, fifty feet away, and he growled “whore” in Swahili, which Alan wasn’t supposed to understand. He stamped the passport and waved Alan through. The twenty had disappeared.
Alan took three steps, clearing passport control, and looked for her. For a moment he lost her, then saw the bright yellow of her buns swinging up the stairs to the balcony above. He guessed that she had seen the sign up there for a ladies’ room, used that excuse to bypass customs temporarily. Up there, however, farther along the balcony, was a uniformed Kenyan soldier with an automatic weapon, strategically located between the stairs and the exit at the far end that led directly to the terminal. He was there to turn back anybody who tried to get out that way.
The yellow shorts flashed and the door to the ladies’ room closed. Alan turned and walked out.
He waited for her in the terminal hall. His pulse had leveled off again, and the sweat that had threatened to leak down his sides had stopped. His part was over: he had moved the weapon and fifty cartridges through the airport’s security. Now, if Laura didn’t get arrested for moving drugs—
A wooden dhow moved south along the Kenyan coast, nearing Mombasa. It was going slowly under motor power, its sail useless in the humid breeze that blew from the shore. The men aboard could smell the land beyond, an odor slightly spicy, smoky, earthy, overlaid with the moist decay of the mangrove swamps where Africa met the ocean.
A dark man sat at the foot of the mast, waiting for the first sight of the city. Just now, he could see only blue-green haze where the land lay, and here and there a darker mass where a point thrust out. He had binoculars hung around his neck, but he did not use them. He was in fact seeing far more clearly with an inner eye, which looked beyond the haze, beyond Africa even, into his future.
In four hours, he would be in paradise.
He believed this more completely than he believed that he was sitting on a ship on an ocean on a ball rolling through space. He believed with both passion and simplicity; he believed utterly. He had no fear of the destruction of his physical self that would send him there. They had assured him that he would feel nothing: a flash, a pressure, and he would wake in paradise.
Another man approached him. He had a bag of tools in one hand and, in the other, a black plastic case that held a detonator. “Time,” the man said.