But that wasn’t the reason. The reason was that this man Chase had robbed Mr. Balim of his son. He had made Mr. Balim unhappy in a way that no robbery of money or power could do. He had stolen the light from Mr. Balim’s eyes. Charlie could see it, if none of the others could; and Charlie loved Mr. Balim above all human beings; and that was why.
He walked over to where Baron Chase was seated, and bent over him as though solicitously, in a posture he knew Chase would like to see. “Sir?” he said.
Chase glanced up with casual recognition. “Yes?”
“Look,” Charlie said, and withdrew from his sleeve the long narrow extremely sharp blade. As Chase opened his mouth, his hands beginning to move, Charlie inserted the blade between the man’s ribs and pressed it home, directly through the heart.
It hit Chase like a drug. First there came the rush, the jolt, the shock; his eyes bulged, his neck muscles tensed, his hands curved like talons, his feet kicked out. Then the drug took hold; his eyes lost their luster, his mouth sagged open, his hands lay peacefully at his sides. The drug was death.
Charlie watched the death rise like mist, until it covered Chase to the eyes, and above the eyes. Then he drew out the blade and slipped it back under his sleeve. The heart was not beating, so there was almost no blood. Charlie strolled away into the darkness behind the floodlights.
76
Lew wished Patricia wouldn’t persist in holding his hand. He understood she was only doing it because she was frightened; he was certain Ellen couldn’t see it; and under the circumstances he wasn’t likely to become aroused by it; still, he wished she wouldn’t do it.
He also wished Ellen would get over her mad. But more than anything else, he wished he’d been able to find Bathar. (Since the poor guy was probably dead by now, or soon would be, he deserved his own name, not that dismissive Young Mr. Balim.)
“Here they come again,” Ellen said.
Patricia squeezed Lew’s hand even tighter as he said, “Where?”
“Ten o’clock high.”
Leaning forward, ducking low so he could look up past Ellen’s left ear, Lew was just in time to watch the two jets flash across the black sky from left to right, blazing with noise and light and speed and their own significance. For the last fifteen minutes these two had been skating back and forth up there, like kids who didn’t realize they were late for supper. At first Lew had been convinced they would spot the Cessna with no trouble and would simply shell them into abrupt oblivion—the golden-red instant fireball would be beautiful against the night sky, too bad he wouldn’t be around to see it—but as the jets kept flashing back and forth, nervous hunting dogs who had lost the scent, he realized their very speed and power worked against them. A poky little Cessna, running without lights, skimming the treetops just south of the A109, was beneath the range of their vision.
Which didn’t mean they couldn’t get lucky. Ellen was doing her best to avoid all ground lights, but the jets’ angle of view constantly changed; if one of those pilots looked in just the right place at just the right time, and if he saw a little black object pass between himself and some streetlamp or lit-up house, he’d be on them in a second.
“I wish they’d give up,” Ellen said, echoing Lew’s own thoughts.
“They don’t dare,” Patricia said. “Amin would slice them to pieces. They’ll stay up until we’re found or they run out of gas.”
“I’d rather you lied to me,” Ellen said.
“I’d prefer it myself,” Patricia answered, and squeezed Lew’s hand again, this time suggestively.
Uh-oh. Lew had been on enough cliff edges for one day. Gently but firmly, he removed his hand and grasped his other elbow with it. So she put her hand on his thigh.
Ellen said, “Do you see them?”
“What, the jets? No.”
“Not out this side,” Patricia said.
“I’ve got to cross the road,” Ellen explained. “Jinja’s up ahead, I don’t want to go over the lake, they’d be able to spot us there against the water.”
“They’re not around,” Lew assured her. He didn’t mention, because of course both women already knew, that the jets tended to arrive very fast, without advance warning.
“Now or never,” Ellen said. She’d already been barely a hundred feet in the air, and now she banked sharply to the left and dropped even lower. Lew could see a kerosene-lit living room through a curtainless window in a roadside house as they flitted by. The man reading a book on the sofa was just lifting his head at the engine noise; then they were past.
Jinja had seemed quite dark when he had driven through it, first in the pickup and then in the coffin, but from the sky it was a blaze of light; particularly if you were trying to avoid light. Ellen kept angling farther and farther north, and then to complicate matters Jinja Airport was dead ahead, so she had to turn westward again, back toward Kampala, flying low over the little villages, dirt roads, small isolated lights.
“There they are!” Patricia cried, her hand convulsively clutching Lew’s thigh. “Over on the—Over there!” She was making herself angry and panicky by being unable to describe simply and quickly where the jets were. “To the right! Up!”
“Three o’clock high,” Lew said, ducking down to look for them out Patricia’s window. Realizing he was putting his head in her lap, he immediately sat up again.
“I hate this,” Ellen said. She throttled back, and Lew felt that roller-coaster feeling in his stomach when the Cessna slowed and dropped another twenty feet.
“Oh, my God,” Patricia said, and simply came over and wrapped her arms around Lew and his seat back both. He had no choice but to hold her.
Ellen said, “How tall do the trees grow around here, Miss Kamin?”
“Patricia. Call me Patricia.”
“All ri—Where are you?” Because of course Patricia’s voice had come from directly behind Ellen, where Lew was supposed to be sitting.
Patricia clung to Lew, staring around. “Are they gone?”
“Yes,” Ellen said. “Lew?”
“Here,” said Lew.
Returning to her own side of the plane, Patricia said, “I’m sorry. They just scare me, I can’t help it. I don’t know about trees, but I think they must grow taller than this.”
“After Jinja we’ll be all right,” Lew said. “There aren’t any more big towns till Tororo, right at the border.”
“I can hardly wait,” Ellen commented, swinging the Cessna around through the north to an easterly direction again.
Patricia gave Lew a shaky smile, her face mysterious in the faint green light from the instrument panel, her dark skin gleaming with a sensually metallic look, as though she were the alien beauty in a science-fiction movie. “I am sorry,” she said. “I’m under control now.”
In the Toyota, on the way to Entebbe, he had told her what he and Ellen were to each other, so he knew she now meant she wouldn’t make any more trouble. “It’s all right,” he assured her. “We’re all a little tense.”
“There’s the Nile,” Ellen said.
“So just relax,” Lew continued, patting Patricia’s hand, “and listen to our tour guide.”
“Oh, shut up,” Ellen said, but she sounded a bit less bad-tempered.
Brightly lighted Jinja lay away to their right. Ahead, to the east, the darkness seemed unbroken, but there would be plenty of lights to greet them along the way.
For fifteen minutes they droned eastward, Jinja dropping away behind, the A109 angling north to meet them, the little towns passing with their dim half-hidden lights. Their only route to safety, just as though they were an earthbound automobile, was that narrow line of highway down there. Anyone going to Kenya tonight, by air or by land, would follow that road.