He doesn’t know what to make of the lone word. Did its author mean to write DEBT and misspell it? Or is Aar meant to read it as DEATH with a missing A? Aar is no fool. He is fully aware that among the UN’s Somali staff there are Shabaab recruits, hordes of them, who will carry out a threat to kill on behalf of the terrorist organization. They go for soft targets, aiming for a publicity stunt. And nothing works better than killing foreigners — never mind their nationality, so long as they are of the infidel variety — in the name of Islam. On many an occasion, they’ve killed fellow Muslims, but do they care? The UN is a particular magnet for terrorist groups because of the huge international coverage any damage inflicted generates. Aar remembers when, back in 2003, al-Qaeda operatives used a bomb-laden cement truck to target the Canal Hotel in Baghdad where UN Special Representative Sérgio Vieira de Mello was staying, trapping him in the rubble for hours before he lost his life, as did twenty-one members of his staff.
He drops the envelope to the floor and, with his knees knocking, manages to pick up his mobile phone and ring Bella. He needs to speak to someone, not necessarily to discuss the letter and its brief but disturbing contents, but just to touch base, to share a moment of amity, evidence that he is still alive. But Bella does not answer.
Aar knows that further action will have to wait until tomorrow. He wonders if the driver who gave him the envelope will be back on duty then. He may already have reported to one of the terrorist cells to share his reconnoitering with Shabaab intelligence, who would most probably assign him to other duties elsewhere now that this part of the mission has been carried out.
Of course, Aar has expected threats from Shabaab to come his way since the day he arrived in Mogadiscio. And in a way, it annoys him that the menacing missive has come just when he is a couple of days from departing for R&R and a celebration of his son’s birthday in Nairobi. If he manages to leave, he knows he won’t be returning to Mogadiscio soon, maybe ever.
And now that he is deciding what his next step is to be, he feels a surge of further fear. His hands all of a sudden become conscious of each other and the uses to which he can put them. He secures the door and the windows, and he sets the alarm in hope that it will bring help if somebody breaks in. At eight in the morning, he is not sure if he is safer staying at home, where the alarm is now on, or going to work, where there is comfort in knowing that he is not alone. Then the trilling of his mobile phone startles him.
It’s Keith Neville, the UN’s local chief of security, an Englishman, who wants to call on him. Aar doesn’t bother to ask why, and Keith Neville doesn’t volunteer an explanation. Does he know about the letter from the driver? As soon as Aar rings off, he is seized by an urge to phone his children, Dahaba and Salif. He dials their numbers, feeling that it is essential for him to hear their voices, and they his. But, like Bella, they do not answer; and so he leaves them messages, in which he informs them that he is coming home to Nairobi a day earlier than previously arranged. He encounters the same worrying silence when he calls the home of the principal of their school and his wife, two generous souls who have been playing host to Dahaba and Salif in Nairobi. Again he leaves messages, telling Mr. and Mrs. Kariuki of his plan to arrive on the morrow.
In his desperate need to reach someone close to him, Aar rings Gunilla Johansson. Mercifully, she answers and, hearing the worry in his voice, wonders aloud if everything in Mogadiscio is well.
Gunilla is a colleague of Aar’s back in Nairobi, and the two of them have recently become secret lovers, seeing a lot of each other when Aar is home and his children aren’t around. The children have met Gunilla twice, the first time when they camped out together in the Rift Valley and the next on the one time she came to dinner. Undemanding, generous to a fault, Gunilla is the sort who understands Aar’s predicament as the father of two teenagers who are difficult to please, immodestly possessive, and given to asking if there is something going on between him and any woman he greets. Still, he is unsure why he’s kept the true intimacy of his relationship with her a secret, not only from the children but also from Bella, whom he’s often told about his other women. He ascribes this to his general wariness about making a serious commitment after what happened with Valerie.
And yet it was she, not Mahdi or Fatima, his closest Somali friends in Nairobi, whom he took into his confidence on his last visit home, requesting that she store his essential documents, including the notarized photocopies of his passport, his most recent will, and the details of his bank accounts and other assets, in her safe box. She agreed and also insisted that he provide her with Bella’s coordinates, just in case, along with those of Valerie and her lover. Bella’s details he could readily provide, but as for Valerie, the best he could do was to give his former mother-in-law’s e-mail and phone number.
Not only did he do all this, but he also gave her power of attorney over all his assets before he left for Somalia. He did not tell this to either the children or Bella. Perhaps this was because Aar leads a compartmentalized existence, and no one person, not even his sister, has access to the sum of his secrets.
Now Gunilla is asking why he sounds so feverish, on edge. He tells her that his days have been hectic lately and that he’s been returning home exhausted. But he doesn’t tell her about the letter. Nor does he tell her that he’s been so restless that one day last week he woke up to find his feet on his pillow and his head where his feet ought to have been.
She says, “I am glad you’re coming to Nairobi. It will be great to see you and for you to see the children.”
They chat about this and that, and then he rings off to wait for the chief of security with the serenity of a man awaiting a pizza delivery.
The calmness doesn’t last long, however. Keith Neville calls back to advise Aar not to open the door to anyone until he gets another call from Keith, which he should not answer, and then a text message from someone called RatRoute. Aar waits, his heart beating loudly in his ears, especially after the missed call from Keith. He draws gulps of nervous air into his lungs.
When Keith finally arrives, he is accompanied by a man who, like him, is wearing a sky-blue UN uniform and helmet, though the companion has larger feet, which Aar can make out through the peephole. The men carry themselves with a professionalism that sets them apart from the local ragtag soldiery. Aar deliberately keeps them waiting at the door until, growing restless, the other man draws close to Keith to say something. This affords Aar a glimpse of the man’s face.
It’s Cadde, Keith’s deputy, who once served as a bodyguard to a radical religionist who is now a high-ranking Shabaab figure. Not that Cadde will ever admit to having been close to his former boss, now a wanted terrorist. Cadde is advisedly moderate in his ways, never openly condemning the young Somali women who work in the office and move about with their heads uncovered. He is soft-spoken and unusually polite. But Aar won’t be humbugged, no sir.
Keith Neville, on the other hand, is a former bodybuilder gone to fat. When Aar opens the door at last, Keith is the first to enter, with the bearing of a great actor asked to do an uninspiring cameo in a bad movie. Face dotted with liver spots, eyes bulging and as red as beetroot, maybe from illicitly acquired beer and liquor, the Englishman has told Aar that he doesn’t want to be in Somalia. A former marine and subsequently a mercenary with Ian Smith’s Rhodesian army, lately of Blackwater and their ilk, who have employed him in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, he has done all the dirty work that a dirty man can get away with.