A Creature of Smokeless Flame

by Margaret Ball

  “He had been back to Zanzibar,” she said, “and he had taken another wife!”

  “Ah – that’s permitted, isn’t it? In Islam?”

  “Yes, but I told him I would not share a house with that fiend he married – and he divorced me! And then his friends wanted to share me, and I ran away to a house I knew of in the city. But they did not want anybody to think it was possible to leave al-Shabaab, so they sent someone to the house to kill me. That is how I got this,” she said, pushing back the black folds around her face to reveal an ugly scar on her cheek. “But that was good luck, because they failed and I was taken to the Red Cross hospital, and when I told them what happened an mzungu took me to this place and said I would be safe here. And so I am, but there is no one to talk to and nothing to do and I want my mother!” She burst into tears and I patted her shoulder, feeling extremely awkward. It did seem to me that going home to Mother would be the best thing for the kid, but after that short burst of weeping she told me that it was absolutely not possible. She had dishonored the family by running away from her husband and they would have to kill her if she came home and everybody knew what had happened.

  I couldn’t believe that. “What, running away from a jerk who had divorced you anyway is worse than sticking around to be abused by his slimy buddies?”

  It took Mr. M. a while to translate that, but when he did get it across, Fadiya nodded and sniffed dolefully and started to repeat herself. It took me a while to understand that in her culture, what actually happened wasn’t nearly as important as what was known. She felt absolutely sure that no amount of explanation would erase the scandal of her returning to Mombasa alone, without her husband.

  I still wasn’t quite so sure, but when she said, “You don’t know my father,” I found myself nodding reluctantly. I’d said the same thing to various friends who didn’t grasp how crazy my father was.

  I’d never been afraid that he’d kill me, though.

  Lucky me.

  “So… is Omar still in Mogadishu?”

  “Oh, no. He left soon after he divorced me. He had always been unhappy that his comrades in al-Shabaab did not care about freedom for us Swahili, and that fiend he married in Zanzibar persuaded him to leave and start his own group. They call themselves Jeshi-la-Rashiduni.”

  Jerry had mentioned that name, or something very like it.

  “And so he went back to Zanzibar?”

  “No. It is too hard to travel from there, to organize and make attacks. He is in Mombasa now. And he said that if I troubled him, he would tell everyone he had divorced me for being with another man. So you see, I cannot possibly go back there.”

  But Brad and I could go there, couldn’t we?

  I was so excited about what I’d learned that I actually ignored the single most important word Fadiya had used.

  Twice.

  7. A pessimistic culture

  It took us nearly as long to get from Mogadishu to Mombasa as it had to fly from Frankfurt to Mogadishu, which makes absolutely no sense when you look at a map. The world map in the back of the airplane magazine, for instance, made Mogadishu and Mombasa look like two little dots barely a finger’s width apart. That just shows you how useless map drawing skills are; good thing I never wasted my time acquiring any. In real life what matters is how you get there, and this time we were stuck with commercial flights. Lensky explained that there is barely any CIA presence in Mombasa; they think it’s a backwater, an occasional target for terrorist attacks but not a source of them. They may have been correct before the formation of Jeshi-la-Rashiduni. So there wasn’t any convenient military aircraft for us this time, nor did we have a whole lot of support from the CIA in Mogadishu; they thought we were going on a wild-goose chase.

  Their main reason for doubting my lead, it seemed to me, was that I was a girl and I’d gotten my information from another girl and so all my data was covered with icky girl cooties. Leads were supposed to be developed by strong, silent men sweating them out of other strong men in basement cells lit by a single naked bulb… oh, all right, all right, Brad says I’m over-dramatizing and he may just possibly be right. The fact that I wasn’t CIA-trained may have been the real problem. In any case, he and Ben didn’t question the value of my lead on the kidnappers, and that was all that really mattered.

  It was a drag, though, having to take a commercial flight from Mogadishu to Nairobi, then waiting half a day to catch a flight from Nairobi to Mombasa. Brad was forced to deal with more security officials for permission to keep his weapon, and he was not happy about that. He gets all the more credit for not questioning what I’d learned from Fadiya, not all of which bore directly on Omar the Zanzibari. It would have been rude to rush off the minute I’d learned what I wanted to know, and besides, I hadn’t expected to see the guys again for some hours. So I’d stayed there, chit-chatting and picking up Swahili phrases – and, okay, racking my brains to think of some way to help Fadiya. I drew a total blank there.

  “Don’t beat up on yourself,” Brad said when I got to that part. “It’s a very tricky business, fixing the problems of somebody from such a different culture. Easy to do more harm than good, especially when you don’t know how the society works.”

  I made a few rude comments about a ‘culture’ that punished little girls for having been abused by the men their parents sold them to.

  Brad made soothing comments back at me.

  “Okay,” I said finally, “but after we finish this job, I want to do something for Fadiya.”

  Brad sighed. “Let’s talk it over with the Mombasa field office. They probably understand the situation better. What else did you learn from Fadiya?”

  “Nothing directly relevant to finding the kids, I don’t think. She did teach me a handful of Swahili phrases. It seems to be a very pessimistic culture.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You know how you say hello in Swahili?”

  “Sure. Jambo. It’s in all the movies.”

  “That,” I said sweetly, “is the cut-down, simplified, vastly inferior version of Swahili used inland – I mean, up-country. In Mombasa you say Hujambo. That means, ‘You don’t have any news, do you?’ And the answer is supposed to be Sijambo. ‘No, I don’t have any news.’” I’m no more talented with languages than any other normal American; I quite enjoyed this first chance to explain the finer points of a foreign language to somebody else.

  “Considering the nature of recent headlines,” Brad commented, “I’m not sure whether I would call that pessimistic or merely realistic.”

  Once we landed, he insisted that we not take the first taxi assigned to us. He stepped aside and motioned a pair of Japanese tourists forward, then a group of American students who wanted to be taken straight to Diani Beach. The third taxi, driven by a turbaned Sikh with a chin net confining his full beard, met with his approval. “Royal Court Hotel!” Lensky shouted over the noise of airport traffic and announcements. The driver took off with a squeal of rubber, cutting around the taxi in front of us where the American students were still getting themselves and their luggage sorted out.

  I had planned to take in every minute of the taxi ride; based on recent experience, this might be the only time Lensky allowed me a view of the streets. But after the episode with the overloaded truck (men hanging off each side; good thing they weren’t very fat) and the subsequent plunge through an entire rank of funny little three-wheelers painted in bright colors, my nerve failed me.

  “You’re missing the elephant tusks!” Ben shouted at me.

  I opened my eyes and peered up at the enormous arch, made up of two white tusk-shaped things with crossed points, that rose across our side of the road. A matching arch stood over the other side. “Nuh-uh. Those things are way too big to have come off of any elephant.”

  “Of course not,” Lensky said. “I think they’re aluminum, actually. If they were made of ivory, they’d have been cut to pieces and stolen by now.”

  A black Mercedes flanked by
armed motorcycle riders cut us off with easily half an inch to spare.

  “Politician,” Lensky commented.

  I closed my eyes again.

  “Don’t you want to see?” Ben was clearly disappointed in me.

  “No. If I’m fated to die on the streets of Mombasa, I don’t want to see it coming. I’ll just go gently into that good night.” Anyway, I could hear more than enough. Brakes screeching, some kind of sonorous horn (I learned later it was someone at the Hindu Temple blowing a conch shell), pedestrians shouting, an echoing chant (the call to prayer, from roughly fifty-seven different mosques with fifty-seven overloaded loudspeakers), beggars whining… I could get overwhelmed without ever opening my eyes.

  The Royal Court Hotel was large, and red, and air-conditioned. I approved.

  “You missed a lot by not looking.” Ben wouldn’t stop harping on that. “It was like Casablanca, only in color. There were guys in white dresses, and a bunch of fruit and vegetable stands right out on the street, and a whole row of shops with nothing but burlap sacks full of some kind of different colored powders, and these dinky mini-buses with people hanging off the sides, and some real dark guys wearing nothing but some kind of towel wrapped around their hips, and a bunch of women who looked like somebody threw black bags over their heads…

  “That’s a bui-bui,” I told him, “Fadiya wore one. She showed me how to tie it on and drape it, too.” A tardy thought occurred to me. “How come you weren’t scared to look?”

  “It’s a different philosophy,” Ben told me. “I wanted to see whatever was about to kill me.”

  Lensky regarded us with the tolerant smile of an adult listening to the children’s bickering.

  We had time to wash and change clothes before meeting the local CIA contact for dinner – right there in the hotel. “Isn’t that kind of, um, public?” I asked. While I was shaking out my respectable dress, Lensky had explained to me that the funny business with the taxis wasn’t anything that unusual; just good tradecraft, he said, never taking the first option anybody offers you.

  “Or good paranoia.”

  “Often a basic part of tradecraft,” he allowed.

  Sitting down to dinner with the head of the Mombasa field office, right there in the hotel restaurant, didn’t seem terribly consistent with that level of paranoia. I had the feeling Lensky wasn’t totally happy with it either, but the message had been waiting when we checked in and he didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot with this guy.

  He looked a lot happier when we walked into the restaurant and a tall, dark-haired man rose to greet us. “Finch! What are you doing here? I thought the local office was run by someone named Taylor.”

  The dark man grimaced. “My titular boss. He’s out of the picture for a few days; some kind of fever, or so he says. Not that it makes a lot of difference; I do most of the day-to-day work anyway.”

  “Well, it’ll make a difference to me,” Lensky said heartily. “I couldn’t have asked for better luck! Thalia, Ben, this desperate character is Nelson Finch. We went through our training at the Farm together, so you can believe me when I tell you not to trust him farther than you can throw him! Nelson, my wife Thalia, and her, ah, colleague Ben Sutherland.”

  Over dinner Lensky and Finch reminisced about good times at the CIA training facility known as the Farm. Nothing seemed to make them happier than remembering the time they got themselves first tangled up in blackberry bushes, then lost in a swamp, and finally almost drowned on a training exercise to exfiltrate a compromised agent. I wondered if they’d actually enjoyed it as much at the time.

  Then they moved on to discuss the variety of weapons they’d learned to fieldstrip and clean, blindfolded, and the conversation got really boring. Ben kept trying to interject knowing comments, which was difficult because he doesn’t know any more about guns than I do. I suppose it was the Testosterone Imperative: Real Men Like Guns. Me, I kept my head down and concentrated on my excellent beer and the beyond-excellent Lobster Thermidor recommended by Nelson Finch. I wasn’t sure why the mix of lobster, cream and cognac stuffed into a lobster shell was named for a month in the short-lived French Republican calendar, but whoever was responsible for the recipe could call it anything he liked as far as I was concerned. I just wanted to remember the name for future reference.

  “Remember the time we totally demolished that school bus with twenty pounds of C-4?”

  I looked up, shocked, and Brad patted my hand. “It was empty, Thalia.”

  “Oh, good.”

  They went on into stuff like improvising pressure bombs with a condom and aluminum foil, using graphite to smuggle a pistol past a metal detector, and the best way to mix fertilizer and fuel oil for a really satisfactory explosion. By now Ben was hanging on every word. What is it about men and explosives, anyway? First Colton got into the building demolition business, and now Ben was storing up everything these two said for future reference. I remembered Ingrid saying that she hoped Ben’s interest in applying topology at the molecular level never led him to thinking about bombs. I had a feeling that ship had just sailed.

  We retired to our hotel room for after-dinner coffee and serious discussion.

  “Oh, don’t worry, Lensky, the room’s not bugged!” Finch brushed aside my husband’s suggestion that perhaps they should find a more secure locale.

  “And you know this how?”

  Finch shook his head and treated us to his slow, charming smile. “Trust me, I know my territory. Now what’s brought you pell-mell to the most boring field office in Africa, Lensky? Trying to get the Company to pick up the tab on a honeymoon tour for you and your lovely wife?” He turned the smile on me, full wattage, and I batted my eyelashes at him. I do not care for men who try to charm me as a way of annoying or distracting Lensky.

  A brief description of the crisis that had brought us here, including my role in developing this lead, had Finch’s smile looking more like that of a man who was politely trying not to laugh in our faces. “You’ve been out of the field for a long time, haven’t you, Lensky?”

  “Fifteen months,” he said tightly.

  “How odd, I thought it was longer since you got run out of Romania.”

  “I did not go directly Stateside from Romania,” Lensky said.

  That was news to me; in Brad’s all-too-brief mentions of his CIA career before being posted at the Center for Applied Topology, he’d always segued from Romania to his current posting as though there’d been nothing to mention in between.

  “Oh? Where did you go?”

  “Need-to-know,” Lensky said dismissively.

  “Oh, but you can tell me. Or is it simply too boring to discuss?”

  “You could say that.”

  I knew when Brad was being evasive, and it usually wasn’t because the subject was boring. Evidently his dear old friend Nelson Finch didn’t know him quite that well, though, because he accepted the evasion at face value. I would have to conduct my own interrogation later.

  “Well, it can hardly have been as boring as Mombasa. Nothing ever happens here, bar an occasional al-Shabaab attack, and those guys come from the north and zip right back into Somalia before the Kenya cops get around to investigating anything. Believe me, this is the last place to look for any kind of terrorist activity. I’m sure your lovely wife is eager to make her contribution, but we really cannot run this office on the basis of gossip among the ladies.” He treated me to another smile with oodles of charm.

  A dismissive insult all wrapped up in fake flattery and that I’m-so-cute smile. I was rapidly developing a strong distaste for Brad’s old friend. He was being pretty damned dismissive of Brad, too.

  “If there’s so little going on,” Brad said now, “I’m surprised the Company keeps two of you here.”

  “We-el, for all practical purposes it’s just me,” said Finch, oozing self-satisfaction. “LeShawn Taylor doesn’t do much. Typical Affirmative Action hire, you know?”

  “I do not,” Lensky said with a
snap. “The Company is not given to hiring people who can’t do the job, whatever their color.”

  Finch shrugged. “If you stay here long enough, you’ll probably meet him. But I suppose you’ll be heading right back to Mogadishu, where the real action is.”

  “Oh, I think we’ll stay and look around for a while,” Lensky told him. “As you said, it’s a much better spot for tourism than Mogadishu. Take my wife to the beach, take her shopping, that sort of thing.”

  Finch laughed. “If you can get the Company to spring for your honeymoon trip, far be it from me to interfere.”

  “We’ll need some place less conspicuous to stay.”

  A shrug. “Why? This is one of the best hotels in Mombasa, and they have a courtesy van to the beach. You’ll be quite comfortable here – and it’s not as if you’ll have to pick up the tab.”

  “Not good tradecraft,” Lensky said.

  “Oh, well, come by the office tomorrow and we’ll work something out.” Finch dropped a card on the table and stood up to leave.

  I picked up the card while he and Lensky were saying good-bye. “Columbia Import Association?”

  Lensky closed the door behind Finch. “What, you thought it would say CIA?”

  “Might as well, don’t you think?” If the Company wanted to play silly initial games it was not my problem. Something else was bothering me, but I waited to raise it until Ben had left.

  “Brad,” I said once we were alone, “how well do you really know Nelson Finch?”

  Lensky looked at me, eyebrows raised. “How well? Weren’t you listening at dinner? We went through everything together at the Farm. The man’s like a brother to me.”

  Given that Lensky’s only brother had been a compulsive gambler who came to a nasty end at the hands of a New Jersey gang, this did not impress me as a great recommendation. “Well, he doesn’t seem to have much respect for your judgement.”