American Spy

by Lauren Wilkinson

  I’d learned from Awa, the embassy secretary, that he lived in the first house on the street. It was hidden behind a wall topped with glass; other than that, there wasn’t much to see. As I paced back and forth in front, trying to figure out the best spot over it, I heard a sound from the direction of the boulevard and pressed myself against the wall. A young man on a bicycle rode into the floodlight, where he stopped and waited. I hadn’t been anticipating anyone else being on the street at that time of night. Although there wasn’t much distance between us, he didn’t notice me—I was totally hidden by the dark. A girl came out into the street. They talked for a while, standing close as they spoke, the boy straddling his bike, then she got on behind him, and they rode off back up the road.

  I waited a few more minutes until my heart slowed. No one else appeared. I took the comforter from my bag and folded it up before taking a couple of practice runs toward the wall. On my first real try, I only managed to get two steps up the wall’s smooth surface before sliding back down in what seemed to me like a very loud fashion. I waited, terrified that someone had heard me, but the night stayed quiet.

  I started from farther back and ran at top speed toward the wall—then up it—draping the comforter on the sharp shards of glass on top and pulling myself over in the same motion. I dropped down into the yard. I looked around and froze—I’d come down too close to Slater’s night guard. He was lying on the bench beside the gate, his hands sandwiched between his thighs, his plastic sandals tucked under the bench. I held my breath and watched him. Once I was sure he was still asleep, I moved forward as quietly as I could, tucking my comforter back into my bag. It was a compound-style home, and the only light was coming from the middle building, a kitchen illuminated by a fluorescent bulb, its door propped open. The building to the right was small, so I thought it must be a bathroom. I looked to the three buildings to the left; I had no way of knowing which one Slater was inside. I started with the first building. The door was unlocked. I cracked it open slowly and found a living room with a television and sofa. I glanced around quickly, but there wasn’t much furniture to hide anything important inside.

  The door to the second building was locked. That seemed more promising. I took out my tension wrench, giving thanks to my hours of living room practice. Once I’d picked the lock, I took out my flashlight—there was a desk against the far wall that I trapped in my beam of light; above it hung a busy gold and black tapestry. I went to the tapestry and lifted the edge to check for a wall safe. Nothing. But there were a number of items lined up along the wall behind the desk: a red crate filled with tall Coke bottles, a long metal crate containing Kalashnikovs, a few bottles of Slater’s brand of Scotch, a carton of French cigarettes. A mailing envelope that I peeked inside. There was cash inside, which is why I took it. Later, I’d discover it also contained something else important: several sets of blueprints. I pulled the door closed.

  The third building was his bedroom. Nicole was asleep in bed beside him, which I hadn’t been expecting.

  “Slater,” I said, and then I kicked him awake. Although he was still drowsy, his eyes were open when I shot him.

  25

  NICOLE WAS STILL SCREAMING AS I backed away from the bed. Something metal struck me on the back of the head and pain ripped through me. As I turned to face the guard, he hit me again.

  I came to in the courtyard with a terrible headache. The guard was pointing my gun at me; it was obvious he’d never held one before. He was like my own night guard who was just a deterrent, not a trained security expert. I stood, and as I advanced on him he shouted for Nicole. His hands shook as he tried to pull the trigger, but I toppled him at the knees before he could. As we struggled for the gun, Nicole threw herself into the fray. I grabbed it, and pointing it at them both, I backed through the gate.

  The sun was starting to rise. I started up the bike and sped out onto the boulevard, where I had to swerve to avoid a 4x4 filled with soldiers. Nicole must’ve called members of Compaoré’s presidential guard. As the vehicle chased after me, I sped around the few other commuters on the road at that hour then veered sharply onto the quiet road I used to get to HDF. I accelerated. Went right over the plywood bridge, which fell into the sewer behind me, and turned into the light traffic flowing on that street. I glanced back and saw the 4x4 stopped at the sewer, the soldiers climbing out of the car.

  I raced out of the city. I blew past the péage, despite the guard there waving for me to stop. Just a few miles out of the city the paved road ended abruptly. There was virtually no traffic. The savanna was red and flat and dotted with scraggly trees, the sky empty of clouds.

  Sudden Kalashnikov fire startled me. The 4x4 was in my mirror, the driver signaling for me to stop. I panicked and veered away from the car tracks I’d been following. At Quantico I’d had a class on emergency vehicle operations, but my FBI training hadn’t anticipated the reality of that moment. I sped across the bright landscape, thinking of nothing beyond outrunning the truck.

  The XS1 was the nimbler vehicle. I mowed over errant scrub and sped around copses of anemic trees, putting more and more distance between us. It felt right speeding on the bike, like fast was the natural expression of the vehicle. I could no longer see the truck in my mirror, but still I kept on. When I finally glanced behind me and saw that I was alone, that they must’ve turned back, I let out a whoop, adrenaline buzzing through me.

  I continued on, and passed into a barren pocket of land. I rode past a sight that was almost magical: The wind had managed to form a tiny dust storm. It swirled a foot above the soil, like a hovering tumbleweed. It was beautiful, and I thought of Helene, who would’ve insisted we stop and investigate. She’d always been so interested in the world.

  About a mile farther, I slowed to a stop. My excitement quickly gave way to fear as I looked around. There was very little about the wide openness of the terrain that made any part of it distinct for me. I’d never been agoraphobic, but suddenly understood the condition: I felt a natural terror in that landscape. There was nowhere to hide if a large animal were to suddenly appear, no tree that was tall enough to get me out of danger were I to climb it.

  I took out my compass and map, even though it wasn’t particularly detailed, to make sure I was still headed south, in what I hoped was the direction of Pô, the city nearest the border. I thought that if I could reach it, I could get a ride across the border to the city of Tamale, where I could catch a bus down to the airport in Accra.

  But I ran out of gas far too soon. I continued, pushing the XS1, aiming back toward the car tracks at what passed for the road; the bike was incredibly heavy, and it made my going excruciatingly slow. The sun on my skin was brutal, my back was soaked in sweat, the heat terrible. I realize as I write this that I should’ve been worried—or something—but I’d shut down. Ill with fatigue, I sat and allowed myself a ration of water.

  The sun began setting—the impending darkness made my fear finally kick in. Although I was exhausted, I slept fitfully on the hard ground, waking up to the sound of small scurrying animals and intense starlight.

  My mind kept returning to the story Thomas had told me in the car ride back to Ouaga. The tour guide I’d seen—Kwaku—was Ashanti, and in a mix of English and French he’d told the group a story about the lake his village was built beside, Lake Bosomtwe, which is considered sacred. I’ve told it to you before, but a gentler version.

  A certain hunter was running through the forest after an antelope. He shot the antelope, which hit the ground (I’m reminded of my sister as I write this, the hoofs on her doe still moving). Thinking the animal was dead he approached it, but it suddenly leaped up and ran away. The hunter pressed after it, and when he came to a clearing, found that the antelope had run up onto the surface of a small pond. As he approached the pond, it got wider, and the hunter looked on, astonished at the way the body of water seemed to be protecting the antelope. As he watched the a
nimal walk on water, he realized that it was in fact a spirit. Taking his inability to kill it as a good omen, he went home and told his wife that they would resettle closer to the banks of the pond. The hunter had good fortune there and other families started to settle nearby. Over time the pond grew bigger, and so did the settlement. It eventually became the village where Kwaku had grown up.

  I’m not sure why I thought about that story so much. It must’ve been because it reminded me of Thomas.

  I woke at dawn and looked out at the wide-open savanna. I was all alone. I started out, covering a few more miles before I had to stop. I could push the motorcycle no farther. Leaving it where it dropped, I crawled toward the paltry protection of a frail tree and lay on the ground underneath it. At one point—it couldn’t have been later than midday—the sky suddenly grew dark and the wind picked up, causing dust to sting my exposed skin, blow into my face, and scorch my eyes. I reached for the helmet and put it on, grateful for the yellowed visor. My world was black-blue. Then, just as quickly as the storm arrived, it passed and the sky abruptly brightened. The sun returned with a vengeance. I was covered in red dust.

  Hours slipped by, and my fear gave way to bland exhaustion. I drank the last of my water. It was oppressively quiet, almost mystically so, and disorientation inclined my thinking toward the magical. I thought I was going to die. If I ever were going to be spoken to by a burning bush, that would’ve been the moment. If an antelope spirit were going to lead me, it would’ve been then. But no divine magic struck.

  Until I heard the rumble of an engine and looked up to watch a hazy spot on the horizon evolve into a lumbering truck. I waved. My heart lifted when it came toward me and stopped. A wiry driver jumped down from the cab, and as he came toward me he said something in a language I didn’t speak.

  “Français?” I said hoarsely, my voice cracked and dry. I tried to sit up.

  “What happened?” he asked in French as he helped me to my feet. “Did you break down?”

  I nodded.

  He was stronger than he looked and easily lifted me into the cab. He reached over me toward the driver’s seat and picked up a bag of water, which he put in my hand on the seat.

  “Gas?” I said.

  He shook his head. “The truck’s diesel, but someone at the village will have some.”

  In the relative dark of the truck, my eyes took a long time to adjust. They hurt. In the cool, the sunburn on my shoulders, chest, and back seemed even more intense. He closed the cab door and I heard him wrestling my motorcycle up into the bed. I bit a corner off the bag and quickly sucked down all the water. Then he climbed up into his seat and started the truck. I closed my eyes and leaned weakly against the door. As he drove he asked: “It’s a little early for the start of the harmattan. Did you cause the storm?” He laughed, evidently making some joke I didn’t have the energy to understand.

  “Is that a helmet or a mask?” he continued, playing with the rhyme, casque and masque.

  “Don’t worry,” he said when I didn’t respond, even though he himself sounded worried. “We’ll be there soon.”

  He continued to chat idly to fill the space. He told me we were going to the village where he’d grown up. His uncle’s younger wife was in labor, and he was going to take them to the maternity hospital in Koubri. “She’s been asking to go to the doctor for a while; it’s the first pregnancy that she’s ever said that. But she’ll be okay. You both will be.”

  We’d been driving for only twenty minutes before he stopped the truck. I opened my eyes. Squinting, I saw that we’d arrived at a village. It was closer than I was expecting, but I would never have been able to find it on my own—he’d been following landmarks that were too subtle for me.

  He started driving again, slowly passing a few mud huts hunched in the savanna, then stopped in front of a compound where an older woman was sitting outside its mud wall beside a cooking fire, slicing eggplant on a large metal plate. The driver got out of the car and came around to help me out of the cab. Dizzy, I leaned on him heavily. There was a blue school nearby with a mural of Africa on the wall; three young teenagers were resting in the thin strip of shade that its roof created along the building’s edge. As the driver got out of the truck he called out what must’ve been instructions to them, and one of the girls stood and took off running.

  The woman greeted us as we went through the gap in the mud wall. We walked along a narrow corridor formed by the wall and the back of several huts in the compound, accompanied by a boy of three or four wearing just an oversized shirt. He ran along in front of us, glancing back at me occasionally, unable to hide his curiosity.

  The driver helped me into one of the huts, which was dark and surprisingly cool. The floor was on an incline and I sat in the lower half. On the higher side a woman in labor lay in bed, her husband dabbing at her sweat-glistened face with a damp cloth, while a small, compact woman who must’ve been the midwife spoke quickly. The driver went over to them, pointed at me, and said something in Mooré to his uncle, who nodded once, apparently indifferent to my presence, before returning his attention to his wife.

  There were two blue plastic lawn chairs stacked beside me near the doorway and a prayer rug along the wall that was piled with books. Above my head there was a ledge lined with kitchenware, one identical to a pot Helene had often used to make meals for us: white aluminum with that ubiquitous blue cornflower embossed on it.

  I was loopy from heatstroke and nearly laughed then, absurdly, to be reminded of home when I’d never been so far away from it. The girl who’d taken off running behind the school now came into the hut with a bidon full of water on her head, poured some into a plastic tumbler, and handed it to me. I got a bandana from my backpack and wet it, pressed it against my forehead and the back of my neck. I rubbed my face with it to get the dust off. My shoulders were throbbing.

  I asked the girl’s name, but she only shook her head, smiled, and said something in Mooré. She left again, and I heard her speaking to someone outside, then a boy came in and squatted beside me.

  He and the girl must’ve been siblings, maybe even twins: They had the same high foreheads and triangular eyebrows, a similar shape to their mouths. When he spoke to me in Mooré, he did so slowly, as if that would resolve the problem of my total ignorance of the language. He tried again: “Màm yuur la a Kamal.” Pointing to himself, he repeated, “Kamal.”

  “Marie,” I told him, the first time I’d used my real name in two weeks. I was surprised by my lapse into honesty.

  “Marie. Bonjour.”

  Kamal was wearing a T-shirt similar to one I’d occasionally seen in Ouagadougou, a silk screen of Thomas’s face. I pointed and gave him a thumbs-up. He nodded and said solemnly, “Nous vaincrons.”

  I gestured to the woman in the bed and asked, “Ta maman?”

  He nodded, and when his mother let out a loud moan, Kamal’s head snapped in her direction. He got up and went over to the bed, where he jockeyed with his father and the midwife for space. Finally, his father put an arm around him. Speaking gently, he pointed Kamal back to the doorway. Kamal crouched beside me again. Gesturing toward his mother he put his hand up with his palm out. “Cinq jours. Très difficile.”

  He pantomimed driving, then drew a cross in the air with his pointer finger. “Koubri. Lògtór yírì.”

  The truck driver had said the hospital was in Koubri, but I couldn’t understand why Kamal was making a cross to represent it until I remembered that the Burkinabè Red Cross ran a busy hospital in Ouagadougou, near Zone du Bois, appropriately enough off the avenue de la Croix Rouge. There was a giant red cross on its roof.

  The midwife poured water into a tumbler from the shelf above me and gave it with some pills to Kamal’s mother. She then had her turn on her side and began massaging between her shoulder blades. I kept hearing the same word Kamal had used, lògtór yírì. Hospital. The only other w
ord I recognized, because it sounded like English, was Pitocin.

  The truck driver stuck his head through the doorway, having returned with a hose, a bottle filled with gas, and a big guy in his wake. I followed them outside, where I found that the XS1 was out of the truck bed. There was a tower of mattresses inside the truck, some of them wrapped in flimsy plastic.

  The two men were having a serious conversation. The driver turned to me and said in French, “We’re talking about the news. We will win.”

  “We will win,” the other man repeated in thickly accented French. Their solemnness made my stomach flip.

  “What news? About the PF?”

  “He was attacked at a meeting last night.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Missing.” He gave me an incredulous look. He must’ve been about to ask how I could’ve missed such big news before realizing I’d been in the desert.

  I was so overcome that I pressed my face against his chest and started to cry. I’d never done something like that—crying on a stranger—in my entire life. He put his arms around me, comforting me as best he could. I was still too dehydrated to produce real tears, but wept until I couldn’t anymore.

  “Are you all right now?” the driver asked.

  I nodded. The big guy said something, and the driver translated for him, “He wants to know where you’re going.”

  “I’m trying to get to Tamale.”