Night Of Knives Part 23

They kiss for a long time before he dares to slip his hand beneath her shirt. At first she isn't sure she wants this. He senses her hesitation and pulls back. A minute later she decides, and pulls her shirt off herself. He fumbles awkwardly with her bra strap before it finally opens. Veronica moves on top of him, feeling his long, lean body beneath hers as his hands and lips come to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She pulls away long enough to pull his shirt off too, and presses herself against him, luxuriating in the bliss of skin on skin. She stays on top. The s.e.x is slow at first, tender, unhurried, but gradually becomes urgent and pa.s.sionate, and she loses herself in it, forgets everything but pleasure.

Afterwards they lie naked together, both limned in sweat. Jacob looks a little stunned and Veronica has to keep herself from giggling. She feels irrationally giddy, like a teenager.

"I don't know about you, but I feel much much better," she says, stretching catlike. better," she says, stretching catlike.

He laughs. "Me too."

"It's kind of been a while."

"Me too."

They lapse into silence. Jacob rolls onto his elbow and looks her closely, as if inspecting her. Then he reaches out and touches her very gently, running a still-tentative hand up and down the curves of her body. She murmurs appreciatively.

He says, wonderingly, "I honestly never thought I'd ever sleep with anyone as beautiful as you."

"Aw. You're going to make me blush."

"I suppose I should have brought condoms, eh?"

She almost laughs again at his concerned expression. "Funny how you didn't think of that in the heat of the moment," she mock-scolds. "They'll throw you out of the Boy Scouts if you don't watch it."

"Actually, they kicked me out for hacking into their computers."

"Oh. Well, anyways, I think we've got much bigger things to worry about."

"True. Until tomorrow anyways."

"When did you want to leave?"

Jacob thinks. "After it gets dark."

"Good." She snuggles up against him, puts her open palm on his damp chest, feeling his breath and heartbeat. "That gives us time for more."

Jacob reminds himself that his life is in real danger and he should not feel giddily triumphant. But it's hard not to grin as Veronica walks naked from the bathroom back to the bed and curls up in his arms again. She's addictive, he can't stop looking at her, can't stop running his hands all over her perfect body, hardly believing she's allowing him to do so.

"Mmmm," she says, arching her back at his touch. "I almost wish we could stay here longer."

"Me too. But we can't. It's hard for us white folks to hide in Africa. If they're looking for us, I think they'll find us pretty soon. Maybe tomorrow. I was thinking we should call Prester."

"What for?"

"We know he's on our side," Jacob says. "And he seems to know everyone in Kampala, he can give us some names to go to for help, if there's any trouble."

"If he can even answer. If his phone's in his hospital room. Or if he isn't... I mean, we don't know his condition."

Jacob digs his hiptop out of his jeans pocket. "Worth a try though."

"You sure they can't track that?" Veronica asks worriedly. "Or my phone?"

He smiles. "Good thinking. But no. I've erased all traces of our phones from Telecom Uganda. We're invisible."

Jacob dials Prester. His phone rings five times but there's no response. He tries again; same result. "His phone's on, but he's not answering."

"Can you track him? Where is he?"

"I can track his phone." Jacob connects to the Telecom Uganda master switching database and runs the sh.e.l.l script he's written that plots a Mango phone's current location on a Google Map. He peers at the hiptop's small screen. "Huh. That's weird."

"What?"

"According to this, Prester's phone is in the middle of nowhere. An empty s.p.a.ce on the map about fifty K north of Kampala."

"What does that mean?" she asks.

"I have no idea." Jacob sits up crosslegged on the bed, peering down at his hiptop. "Google Earth won't work on this. I could maybe get some satellite photo. Or, no, wait a minute. That idea you had."

"What idea?"

"About triggering his camera phone remotely. Let's see if that code I wrote actually works."

Jacob has tested the software in question, but not in a real-life situation, so he is very pleased when the hiptop's screen begins to fill with a picture silently taken by Prester's phone, at Jacob's behest, and then sent over Uganda's cellular network. It's a blurry picture, the victim of a lossy compression algorithm, but Jacob can make out a table lamp, viewed from below, and wooden slats above, arrayed circularly like spokes in a wheel. Prester's phone must be lying flat on some table with the camera lens aimed up.

"A banda banda," Jacob realizes aloud. One of the circular huts that dot Uganda's landscape, wooden or bamboo frames filled with mud. Wooden bandas bandas are usually found in tourist camps. are usually found in tourist camps.

"A banda banda? He should be in a hospital," Veronica says, shocked. "He was shot in the chest two days ago, he has a perforated lung. What's he doing in a banda? banda?"

"I don't know. He's not answering." Jacob hesitates. "Wait a second."

He sets Prester's cameraphone to take a picture every half-second for the next twenty seconds, then dials its number again. If there's anyone there, maybe they'll at least look at the phone to see who's calling.

It takes a full minute for each picture to be uploaded from Preser's phone and downloaded to Jacob's hiptop. The first three contain nothing unusual. But the fourth displays a familiar face.

"Oh, no," Jacob says, as the new picture fills his hiptop's screen. "Oh, s.h.i.t."

Veronica sits up quickly, grabs his arm, looks, and gasps. The picture that has been taken is a somewhat warped view of Strick, viewed face-on from below.

"They got him," she whispers.

"Maybe they just got his phone. Let's see."

They wait anxiously. Seconds crawl by. The next picture is also of Strick, but this time a white-haired white man with a thin face is looking over Strick's shoulder. Jacob has never seen him before. Neither has Veronica.

Three similar pictures later, they finally get a partial shot of the phone's surroundings. It's on an angle, and blurry, the phone must have been in motion when the camera fired, maybe it was being put back on the table. Light streaming from an open window drowns out almost all the rest of the picture. But this light clearly illuminates, in one corner of the frame, a dark-skinned wrist handcuffed to a metal bedframe, and a few loose cables of dreadlocked hair.

"No," Veronica says. "Oh, no. That's him. That's Prester."

Jacob nods grimly. "And they think he knows where we are."

"Oh my G.o.d. What do you think they're -"

"I think I don't want to know what they're doing to him," Jacob says harshly. He shakes his head. "Sorry. s.h.i.t. We have to get to the emba.s.sy as soon as it opens. That's all we can do."

The darkness outside their car is almost perfect. There are no street lights on Ugandan highways, and almost no night-time traffic. Earlier they drove through a swarm of tiny flies as dense as fog, and then a hammering tropical downpour, lightning flickering around them two or three times a second, illuminating the ghostly silhouettes of roadside bandas bandas and tin-roofed huts. Now the clouds have cleared and the pale skein of the Milky Way is visible in the moonless canopy of countless stars above. They pa.s.s through dusty villages so quiet by night that they look deserted, across tumbling rivers that glitter in the headlights. There are only a few roadblocks, and the police who man them seem tense and nervous, as if whoever drives by night carries the devil as a pa.s.senger. Jacob and Veronica are waved past without inspection. and tin-roofed huts. Now the clouds have cleared and the pale skein of the Milky Way is visible in the moonless canopy of countless stars above. They pa.s.s through dusty villages so quiet by night that they look deserted, across tumbling rivers that glitter in the headlights. There are only a few roadblocks, and the police who man them seem tense and nervous, as if whoever drives by night carries the devil as a pa.s.senger. Jacob and Veronica are waved past without inspection.

They stop for Veronica to relinquish the wheel. Both she and Jacob are exhausted, but neither can sleep. As they resume their motion Veronica looks over her shoulder at Rukungu, lying sprawled across the Toyota's back seat, sleeping like a baby. She thinks of what she has read about the Rwandan genocide in which he partic.i.p.ated.

There were eight million people in Rwanda, seven million Hutu and one million Tutsi, when the Hutu leaders decided to murder all the Tutsi. The weapons of choice were clubs and machetes. In the cities, interahamwe death squads hunted door-to-door, killed whole families in their homes, dragged them out to be executed in public, stopped carloads of Tutsis at roadblocks and slaughtered them on the spot. Children proudly told pa.s.sing death squads where their neighbours were hidden. Doctors invited them into hospitals to murder their patients. As the weeks of genocide progressed, order Hutus increasingly eliminated the middleman, killed their Tutsi acquaintances themselves and moved into their houses. In rural areas Tutsi were hunted down like vermin, hunting parties went out every day to find the "c.o.c.kroaches" hidden in fields and forests, slaughtered man and woman and child alike. Tutsi women, famous for their beauty, were usually gang-raped before they were slaughtered.

The survivors of the first few weeks congregated in caves, churches, schools, stadiums, with no food, no water, no hope. Some tried to flee to cities not yet affected, but genocidal bloodl.u.s.t spread inexorably through the nation like a virus. The slaughter at some of the sanctuaries lasted for weeks. Ma.s.sacring people by hand is hard work. Sometimes, too exhausted to actually murder those trying to escape, the killing mobs just severed their victims' Achilles tendons, then came back to finish the job in the morning. Dogs and crows multiplied, fed on the countless bodies that littered the nation's streets and fields.

Meanwhile, every government official, every radio host, called for the completion of the genocide. "Exterminate the c.o.c.kroaches," they said. "Wipe them out. Every one of them. To your work, all of you. The graves are not yet full."

Athanase was one of those leaders, one of the chief architects of the genocide. Rukungu was a member of one of the interahamwe death squads who spearheaded the genocide. Veronica wonders how old he would have been at the time. Late teens, maybe. She wonders how many women he raped, how many children he murdered, both in Rwanda and afterwards, when the interahamwe were finally driven out into the Congo, where their campaign of murder and rape continued. Probably dozens. Maybe hundreds. Any reasonable person would call him a monster. But she owes him her life.

Jacob and Veronica wait in the same emba.s.sy meeting room where they talked to Strick. Veronica's eyelids feels like anvils, and she is not so much sitting as drooping on her chair. They drove all night across half of Uganda to get here, taking turns at the wheel, and then fought their way through Kampala's rush hour to drop Rukungu off at the Hotel Sun City. But they made it. If they're safe anywhere in Africa, it's here in the U.S. emba.s.sy.

Jacob reaches out and takes her hand, lifts it to his face and kisses it. She smiles back absently. Part of her is already wondering if this sudden relationship is going to make any sense when the extraordinary circ.u.mstances that threw them together are gone. She squelches that notion. She will worry about the future next week. This week she will pretend the future never existed, she will just enjoy being alive.

The door opens.

"My name is Julian," says the man who enters. He's in his thirties, with a square jaw and a crew cut. "I'm the a.s.sistant deputy head of mission."

Jacob says, "We need to speak to the amba.s.sador."

Julian shakes his head. "The amba.s.sador isn't in today, he's at a ceremony in Jinja, his schedule is fully booked for the whole week. I'm sorry, I know you said it's urgent, but I'm as good as you're going to get on such short notice."

"Does Strick work for you?" Veronica asks.

Julian looks sour. "Gordon Strick works at this emba.s.sy for the State Department. He does not report to me."

"What about Prester?"

Julian blinks. "Who?"

"He worked with our friend Derek," Jacob says. "For Strick, indirectly. He was shot the night before last."

"Is he an American citizen?"

"I don't think so."

"Then I wouldn't know anything about him. Please. We're wasting each other's time. Why are you here?"

Jacob and Veronica look at one another. She nods.

"All right." Jacob speaks in a clipped, factual, voice, an engineer reporting on the data. "We have proof, we have pictures of Russian surface-to-air missiles being smuggled into the Congo last night." He puts down a CD-ROM he burned at an Internet cafe before coming to the emba.s.sy. "We have physical evidence that Derek Summers believed a company run by Veronica's ex-husband Danton DeWitt was involved with this smuggling ring, there's a scan of his notes on that CD, you can check it against his handwriting. Derek said just before he was executed that he was set up, and he accused Danton being involved. We have telephone records, also on that CD, strongly implying that Mr. Strick and Athanase Ntingizawa were conspiring to smuggle goods from the Congo and Uganda, and photos showing that Strick has since kidnapped and tortured Prester."

Julian stares at Jacob.

"We also have beliefs and conclusions we've drawn, but I want to stress that what I've told you so far isn't just suspicion, there's evidence on that CD, hard evidence."

"Christ," Julian says, in a very different tone of voice than that in which he began the conversation.

"In particular, we believe that Al-Qaeda has been blackmailing Strick into giving them material a.s.sistance for an attack they are planning in the very near future."

"Wait," Julian says, holding his hands up as if a wall is about to fall on him. "Wait, slow down, please."

Jacob falls silent.

"I need to go get my boss," Julian says. "Stay right there. I'll be right back."

He all but scampers out of the room. Veronica and Jacob look at one another.

"Well," she says, "at least they're taking us seriously."

Less than a minute later the door re-opens and a thin man in his fifties enters the room. The white-haired man's skin seems unnaturally pale, and even his facial features are thin, seem slashed into taut skin. He is the same man they saw yesterday, in the picture taken from Prester's camera phone. His appearance is surreal, it's like he has stepped out of that picture into real life.

"I'm Dr. Murray," he says, "the chief of mission here. I understand -"

Then he recognizes them and suddenly falls silent. Veronica gapes at the white-haired man. For a heartbeat he is no less surprised to see them, his eyes widen and his step falters, but he quickly recovers his possession and continues smoothly, "Mr. Rockel. Miss Kelly. I wasn't told it was you. We're all so glad you're safe after what happened."

Jacob and Veronica are too stunned to speak.

"Is something wrong?" Dr. Murray asks. His voice is like warm silk.

"No," Jacob manages. "No, we're just very tired, we drove all night to get here."

"Drove from where?"

Jacob flashes a panicked look at Veronica. She doesn't know how to respond. Her mind is whirling. It doesn't seem possible that this Dr. Murray is in league with Strick and Al-Qaeda. But there's no other explanation. Yesterday he was in the same room as Prester's phone, a room where Prester was handcuffed to a bed, those are established facts.

"From the border," Jacob says haltingly. Veronica supposes there's no point in hiding that now. They just admitted everything. "Near Semiliki."

"Indeed. And what were you doing there?"

After a long moment Jacob begins to tell the story, speaking slowly, starting back in the Congo, expounding on irrelevant details while leaving out as much as possible. Veronica realizes he's stalling, playing for time. They have to do something. Murray already knows they know too much. They have to get out of here.

"Where's the bathroom?" Veronica interrupts.

"Just down the hall," Dr. Murray says absently, his thin face rigid with contemplation.

Veronica slips out of the room and closes the door behind her, dizzy with exhaustion and panic. She walks down the hall, barely aware of the world around her, walks right past the bathroom and has to double back. She's thankful it's empty. Veronica sits in a stall, locks the door, covers her face with her hands, and tries to think.

Her gut tells her to run, to escape and leave Jacob behind. Murray won't allow them both to leave. He'll think of some reason to have them arrested, their evidence will be destroyed. She has to get out before he calls security, once he does that it's all over, the US emba.s.sy is probably the single most secure building in all of Kampala. Jacob knows all this. He wants her to escape right now, without him, she is sure of it.