A Creature of Smokeless Flame

by Margaret Ball

  “Khamisi knows some people in Jeshi-la-Rashiduni,” I announced to start the ball rolling.

  “Whose side is he on?” Lensky demanded.

  I gave him a quelling look – at least, that was the intent. I’m not actually very good at quelling the man. “And he speaks fluent English. How about we pretend to have some manners here?”

  Lensky’s blue eyes flashed at me in a way that suggested trouble later, but he took my suggestion, imitated a relaxed pose and started over with something more like polite chit-chat.

  Khamisi told us that he had been approached by the Rashiduni, that he did not sympathize with them but that he had not actually said so; it was not wise, he said, to insult those people. Especially in his situation.

  He’d already told me everything except that aside about ‘his situation.’ I wondered what it was that made him feel especially vulnerable to the terrorists, but Lensky passed over that in favor of general chatting about the Rashiduni presence in Mombasa, their interactions with Khamisi and other people in Old Town, and Khamisi’s life plans.

  “Until – certain problems – are resolved,” Khamisi said tightly, “I can make no plans.”

  He said that he did not know many details about the Rashiduni organization, but he could confirm that Omar the Zanzibari was their leader. “Inshallah, I might be able to learn more…”

  Lensky exhibited more self-control by not actually drooling over this hint. It took another half hour of polite conversation to establish that Khamisi was being actively courted by the Rashiduni, that this situation put him in some danger already but that he might be willing to flirt with the leadership a little more. Lensky indicated, obliquely, that there would be significant financial rewards for anybody who brought him useful information. Khamisi indicated, obliquely, that such rewards would be more than welcome for a man with aging parents to support and student loans to pay back.

  “Student loans?”

  “Georgia Institute of Technology,” Khamisi said. “Chemical engineering.”

  I propped one hand under my chin to keep it from dropping, and reminded myself not to make patronizing assumptions about the “natives.” Next thing, I’d probably learn that Zawadi’s two years of American college had been spent at Sarah Lawrence.

  Clearly Khamisi couldn’t just drop in to the apartment whenever he had something to report; that would be bad for us and possibly fatal for him. He and Lensky spent some time arranging a communications system involving inconspicuous chalk marks on Old Town walls and the display of my bright orange beach towel at a window overlooking Grand Mosque Road.

  They did stall for a while on the matter of how to convey information. Lensky was used to setting up a system of dead drops, places where an agent could leave a report and he could collect it later so that they were never seen together. But Khamisi felt that the packages Lensky had used in Europe wouldn’t work in Mombasa. “You cannot leave a soft drink can on the street; somebody will pick it up to sell to aluminum recyclers. The same thing will happen to an empty food tin. Anything made of metal is valuable to somebody.”

  “That explains a lot,” Lensky murmured. He later told me that he’d been trying to make a low-tech perimeter around the terrace with trip wires around the edges, strung with empty cans that would jingle if anybody touched them. But the cans had kept disappearing…

  They explored other options without finding anything mutually agreeable. A hollowed-out piece of rock might work, but it would have to be a sample of the coral on which the island was built. It would take time for Lensky to find suitable rocks and get the CIA office to prepare them as containers. It would also take time for Lensky to familiarize himself with Old Town and find good drop sites. And the danger to Khamisi, if any of these classic systems didn’t work, was extreme. He could not assure Lensky that he hadn’t been followed from his encounters with the Rashiduni leaders; a gentleman, he said with a disdainful sniff, did not keep looking behind him like a frightened girl.

  But he sounded a lot like a frightened girl when we discussed having him write detailed reports to leave at a dead drop.

  “The perfumer’s,” I said when a discouraged silence settled on the bedroom.

  “Is that where you’ve been all morning?” said Lensky, startled. “I wondered why you smelled so…”

  “Flowery? Delicious? Seductive?”

  “Actually…”

  I decided to let him off the hook. “Samples. Don’t worry,” I said, waving my left hand and inadvertently assaulting him with another cloud of musk and patchouli, “I’m going to wash them off. The thing is, I have to go back to get my personally designed scent. And I can keep going back and asking for adjustments. I’ll just tell the guy my husband doesn’t like it.”

  “Well, I cannot hang around a perfume shop like a girl!” Khamisi said, sounding indignant.

  “No, but it’s in the middle of a busy market with lots of other places you can visit. Look, when you have information, you can chalk a number on the wall at one of the places you and Brad were talking about. One of us will check the walls regularly and at the time represented by that number, I’ll go to the perfumer’s. All you have to do is wave at the shop and look excited about seeing someone there – it shouldn’t be hard, I bet there’s always a bunch of girls out front – then you come over and we step out of sight behind the side curtains for a moment.”

  “I fail to see what good that will do,” he objected.

  That was because I hadn’t told him. I could see the light dawning on Lensky and Ben, though. How to put this? “Ah, Khamisi, you know about jini?”

  “Of course,” he said, “they are described in the Koran. But you should say majini, that is the plural.”

  Oh, great. Another language snob. Mr. M. was bad enough, the way he insisted that djnoun was the proper Arabic plural. Of course it had to be something totally different in Swahili.

  “Grammar aside,” I said, “you know that majini can transport themselves from one place to another in the flickering of an eyelash? And that they frequently take the form of a serpent? Well, Khamisi, I happen to have a djinn of my very own.” I stepped over to the wardrobe, reached up on my tiptoes and lifted Mr. M. down for Khamisi to look at.

  Credit where credit is due; our new agent turned the color of sour milk when Mr. M. lifted his head and complained about having his nap interrupted, but he didn’t faint.

  “This djinn,” I told him, “can transport us from the perfumer’s shop to this apartment, and no one will see our passage. You can report verbally in perfect safety, and afterwards we will send you to whatever place you choose.”

  After Khamisi left, Lensky asked me if I hadn’t been a touch patronizing.

  “You have to put things in a cultural context that people will understand,” I told him.

  “That’s why you blathered on about djinns and pretended that Mr. M. would do the actual teleporting? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to tell him the truth?”

  “In my experience,” I said, “people like that have a great deal of trouble understanding pure mathematics.”

  He blinked. “Thalia, I do believe that’s the first racist thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  “Oh, not Africans,” Ben and I said simultaneously. “Engineers.”

  12. Acting like newlyweds

  Once we’d wound up Khamisi and set him in motion, there seemed to be depressingly little more we could do to continue the search for the stolen children.

  “Is that how it usually is in the field?” I asked Lensky. “Moments of progress interspersed with long periods of nothing happening?”

  “Thalia, that’s how life usually is,” he said. But he rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “And yes, a lot of field work is like that too. But in a case like this, where there’s a very present threat, we would normally be putting more resources into the investigation – a lot more. We’d have people finding and surveilling this Omar al-Zanji, running down his contacts in Mombasa, getting at his cell phone and
tracking his online presence. The trouble is – well, for one thing, Harrison is already out on a limb with the Company just for sending us all the way to East Africa. You already know that the DDO – the Deputy Director of Operations – is not a fan of the theory that there’s been paranormal activity involved here. The official Company view is that the strike originated in the US and that the children are being held somewhere near Langley.”

  “What about the video?”

  “The Rashiduni may claim credit, but so could any other group. Nothing in that video proves that they really do have the children.” Lensky sighed. “There aren’t many more strings Harrison can pull to get support for us.”

  I gloomed over that for a while. “If we could just find out where Omar is staying, I could do camouflaged surveillance. Or Ben and I could take turns.”

  Lensky spread his hands. “It comes back to waiting for a report from Khamisi.”

  We were hot, edgy, and frustrated. And, of course, we didn’t know that the next move would be Omar’s.

  Lensky handles this kind of waiting almost as poorly as topologists do. After we spent the rest of the day twitching around the apartment in between hourly checks of the walls where Khamisi might leave a message, Victor came up with a suggestion to get us out of his hair.

  “Ma Prajapati,” he said over breakfast, “has been asking me why the honeymoon couple never does anything together. Why don’t you two go out and do things to support your cover story while you’re waiting? Buy tourist junk—”

  Brad failed to conceal his shudder at this reminder of my beautiful, hand-carved African mask.

  “—see the sights, go to the beach,” Victor concluded with an expansive wave of his hand that just happened to coincide with the disappearance of the last of the mahamri.

  “He’s got a point,” Brad said. “Maybe I am losing my edge after all; it’s not good tradecraft to completely ignore your cover story. Let’s go see some sights and try to act like a couple of newlyweds.”

  I considered pointing out that we were a couple of newlyweds, but decided it would be interesting to find out what Brad’s idea of putting on a good act was. It consisted mainly of kissing me in public at every opportunity. He picked me up and perched me on a cannon at the old Portuguese fort for a snapshot and a kiss, posed with me in front of the monster “elephant tusks” for Ben to take another picture, bought some local sweets resembling deep-fried sugar pretzels and nibbled them from my lips.

  He didn’t lose the plot until we turned down a street in Old Town and discovered the art factory.

  The street was lined for blocks with men hacking at dark wooden blanks and turning out African-styled sculptures.

  “Look, Thalia,” Ben said, grinning, “there’s your authentic mask! Only this one’s only two feet tall.”

  “And this must be the keychain version,” Lensky said, picking up a six-inch mask. “Or do you think it shrank in the laundry?”

  The proprietor of those two masks joined in, pointing out copies of my mask in every size from three inches to the four-foot version I’d been so proud of. The guys had a wonderful time.

  “You’re enjoying this so much, I’ll just leave you to it,” I told them, stalking down a side street while they laughed and pointed. Oh, good; there was that shop Victor hadn’t let me explore, the Mvita Boutique. I went into the cool, shadowy interior and bought a couple of things – the best was a piece of Masai beadwork, about twelve inches by six and fringed with tiny chains – before they caught up with me.

  At least my new purchases would be easy to pack.

  Lensky made amends for his part in that little episode by sweeping us off to a seafood restaurant Khamisi had recommended. Their lobster Thermidor was even better than the Royal Court Hotel’s version. I resumed calling Brad by his first name, and even moved a little closer so he could pat my knee under the table.

  “More sightseeing?” he asked when I’d reached the point of wanting to lick the plate. “Back to the apartment for a siesta? Or the beach?”

  “Beach would be okay with me,” Ben allowed. “I’ve got some super-powerful sunscreen back at the apartment.”

  Brad gave him a Look. “You are not invited. Honeymooning couples don’t usually have an extra man trailing around with them, haven’t you noticed? Tradecraft positively requires Thalia and me to spend some quality time alone together.”

  Ben grumbled that he hadn’t noticed his presence inhibiting Lensky that morning, but he cheered up when reminded that Mombasa boasted a crocodile farm called Mamba Village. “Oh, reptiles,” he said with the kind of anticipatory smile I reserve for things like lobster. (Cooked lobster. If it’s still swimming around in the water waving its claws, it’s Marine Life and Ben can have it.)

  Going to the beach was a lot easier now that I had a spot to teleport to, and there was the added advantage that we would totally frustrate anybody who might try to follow us. After sending Ben off with the address of Mamba Village I slipped into my new bikini, pulled a loose Africa-print coverup over my head, and zipped Brad and me straight to a blind corner between shops that I’d noted on the previous visit.

  “That’s pretty,” he said, looking at my cotton shift with its pattern of red zigzags around purple diamonds. “I haven’t seen it before?”

  “I just bought it this morning, while you and Ben were snickering at me in the Street of the Carvers.”

  “You’ve got to admit that was pretty funny.”

  “If you keep on about that damn mask, I’ll go back and change into the other thing I bought in the boutique. A twelve by six inch piece of Masai beadwork.”

  “I think I’d just as soon reserve that for a private viewing.”

  After he bought himself a swimsuit and a towel, we wandered down towards the water and claimed a patch of white sand. I slipped out of the coverup and turned to ask his help with sunscreen application, but the man appeared to have been turned into a statue.

  “I definitely haven’t seen that before,” he said. His blue eyes were very wide and very dark.

  I glanced down at the triangles of dark gold fabric. Okay, there was a lot of skin on view as well, but it wasn’t like any of the territory was unfamiliar to him. And after my previous beach visit, it was starting to look nicely tanned. “Don’t exaggerate. You’ve already seen everything you’re staring at apart from the actual bikini.”

  “That costume,” he said, “illustrates the vast difference between mere nakedness and seductive near-nudity.”

  “Oh, come on. This is a perfectly respectable swimsuit.”

  “It’s more than a few square inches short of ‘perfectly respectable.’ Did you wear this the other day? When you and Ben went to the beach?”

  His tone was veering from awed to censorious. I started feeling defensive in spite of myself.

  “You told me to go to the beach with Ben. You practically had the hotel van shanghai us. And you told me to buy whatever I needed. Don’t get all squinchy-eyed now just because you couldn’t be bothered to check out the results!”

  “And did Ben help you apply sunscreen to the copious acreage now on display?”

  “Only the back. I can’t reach everywhere, you know. You’ll have to do it for me now.” I plopped the bottle of sunscreen into his hand and lay face down on the big orange beach towel, hoping to cut this profitless discussion short.

  The feeling of Brad’s big hand moving in circles over my back, spreading the cool lotion, was… quite different from getting Ben to apply the stuff for me. That had been strictly practical; this was something else. After the first few slow, sensual passes over my back, I decided that he could do this for me any time. We didn’t necessarily have to go to the beach first.

  He seemed to be enjoying it too. At any rate, after he’d taken his time applying sunscreen to every uncovered inch of my back and thighs, he invited me to roll over so that he could continue his attentions on the front.

  “I can do that part,” I murmured out of the delicious
languor he had induced.

  “But we’ll both enjoy it more if I do it.”

  No argument there. I allowed him to continue lavishing attention on my breasts and stomach until a nagging sense of responsibility forced me to sit up.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You. You’re even more fair-skinned than Ben. You’ll look like an extra-crispy potato chip if you don’t protect your own skin.”

  “Or… let you do it for me,” he suggested with a grin, passing over the bottle of SPF 20 kazillion sunscreen.

  It was occasionally difficult to remember that this was a family beach, but eventually we managed to achieve a good distribution of sunscreen without getting in trouble for public lewdness.

  “You’re not to come here with Ben again,” Brad pronounced after I’d got his shoulders and chest properly anointed. I’d taken my sweet time, just like he had; if a thing’s worth doing, you know…

  “Sez who?”

  “I don’t want him ever, ever touching you the way you were just doing with me.”

  “Don’t worry. With Ben it’s all about avoiding sunburn. Strictly practical. He might as well be painting a wall.” Efficiency was Ben’s watchword when performing such menial and boring tasks. Though I supposed he might have found the job less boring if he’d been working on Annelise.

  “All the same.”

  “If you come too, you can do my sunscreen.”

  “I plan to. I’m not outsourcing that job to anybody ever again.” That statement was accompanied by an intense blue stare that made me feel short of breath.

  What with one thing and another, we were approaching a level of heavy breathing that was incompatible with the ‘family beach’ standard, so I waded into the water to cool down. Brad followed me.

  Of course, no matter what the label says, no sunscreen is really proof against rolling waves of salt water, so eventually we had to re-apply it. This time I tried to use conversation to dilute the sensual effect of his big-knuckled hand massaging my spine and spreading lotion. There were things we needed to discuss.