A Creature of Smokeless Flame

by Margaret Ball

  “Oh!” Brad put down his gun, sat on the bed and gave me a hug. “Somebody trying to get through the thief-wiring. He must have seen me leave and thought the room was empty. You probably scared him more than he scared you, Thalia.”

  “I doubt that!” My heart was hammering and I was having trouble making sense of what was going on. “Thief-wiring?”

  He waved at the decorative iron grille behind the bed. “That ironwork? It keeps people from reaching a hand through. Small-time thieves like to stick a fishing pole through the window and, well, fish for valuable trinkets. They’re usually not violent.”

  “Oh, good, then that’s all right.”

  Brad scowled at the thief-wiring. “No, it’s very far from all right. Dammit, I knew that terrace would be a magnet for thieves; I should have made Finch give me some decent alarms, instead of trying to improvise my own system. I should have insisted Prajapati put heavy shutters up. I should have…”

  Now that his arm was around me, I’d stopped shaking. “It’s all right,” I repeated. “No harm done, and we can talk about shutters in the morning, or whatever you think needs to be done.” I thought back on our first days in Old Town. “All those artistic iron grilles that I was admiring? They’re really low-tech home security systems, aren’t they? That’s why you grinned every time I pointed out a new pattern. You rat. You could have told me!”

  “Ah, I didn’t want to make you feel bad. You were ticked off enough after we stumbled across the Street of the Carvers.”

  He didn’t leave the room again. He turned the lights out, Mr. M. coiled up on the bureau in a state of high alert, I snuggled up to Brad, and eventually I got back to sleep.

  In the morning I awoke to the banging of a hammer and a very dim room. Lensky was tacking flattened cardboard boxes to the window frame.

  “I didn’t feel right about demanding expensive shutters from Prajapati when we’re going to move out anyway as soon as I can set up new protocols with Khamisi,” he explained. “These should do for a couple of days, just to discourage voyeurs and small-time thieves. I’m afraid it’ll make the room kind of dark, though.”

  Better than the alternative. If I needed to find anything I could always turn on the overhead light. And I could still read in here; all my reading matter was stored on a Kindle with a backlit screen. The e-book format works fine for fiction. (It’s not always so good for mathematics involving lots of diagrams and drawings, which is why I was missing my topology library. Those books were way too heavy and expensive to lug overseas. Lectures on the Topology of 3- Manifolds alone had set me back more than my Kindle Paperwhite.)

  Later, Mr. M. told me that it hadn’t been just my screams that scared off the thief. “Just before he woke you, a wave of cold air startled him and made his hands shake. That was how he came to touch you with the end of his fishing pole; I think he would not normally have been so clumsy.”

  Cold air.

  “TheSila?”

  Mr. M. inclined his head. “I, of course, was aware that she was watching.”

  “You didn’t tell me?”

  “She did no harm, and possibly some good. There was no need for her to interfere with the thief’s explorations; I believe she does not wish you ill.”

  That was not terribly reassuring. I wasn’t all that happy with the concept of even a benevolent djinn watching Brad and me acting like a couple of newlyweds.

  “Can she see through the cardboard?” I nodded at the newly covered windows. The dim light made me feel as though I was sitting at the bottom of a well, not in a second-floor room overlooking a pretty little rooftop terrace. And the cardboard closed off the breezes that made this room comfortable. Oh well, it was only until we found something better and gave Khamisi our new address.

  Mr. M. was not entirely sure that TheSila couldn’t see through cardboard, but he thought it unlikely that she could do something that was beyond even his advanced skills.

  Oh well, it was only another couple of days, etc., etc.

  They were a tense couple of days. In no particular order:

  -Ben made a series of telephone calls to his optometrist in Austin and managed to have his prescription sent to a Kenyan optometrist who would make him a replacement pair of specs immediately… for an African value of “immediately.” The guy was in Nairobi, so Ben couldn’t even go visit his office and pressure him in person.

  -Lensky and I did not talk about whether Finch could be trusted.

  -Victor decided to stay with a friend until we vacated the apartment and, for preference, his life. The glamor of CIA work seemed to have disappeared once it threatened his research plans. I couldn’t blame him.

  -Ben stole my Kindle, because he could set the font big enough to read without glasses, and complained because I had selfishly loaded it up with the kind of things I liked to read. He said he was drowning in romantic suspense and lightweight fantasy. “Fine, I’ve just bought Euler’s Gem,” I told him. That was more in the genre of popular mathematics than serious stuff, but Dr. Verrick’s honors course in topology hadn’t gone into the history of the field; I had quite enjoyed reading about Euler, Catherine the Great, polyhedra, and the origins of topology. “Or check out the Kipling anthology. I’ve got lots of stuff that isn’t goopy romance; you’re just not looking.”

  -Lensky and I continued not talking about Nelson Finch.

  Finally there was a chalk mark at one of Khamisi’s locations. I teleported to the perfumer’s at the indicated time and picked up both Khamisi and my own personally blended perfume. A successful trip.

  Well, reasonably successful. We were all disappointed to learn that Khamisi still hadn’t identified the spot where the training camp video had been made. We couldn’t really complain, though, because he had gotten himself into potentially serious trouble through pushing Omar al-Zanji’s second-in-command for more information about the camp.

  “Who exactly is this guy?” Lensky wanted to know.

  “Like half the Swahili men in Mombasa, his name is Muhamed. The Rashiduni do not use their family names, so he goes by a nickname: Anakijua, ‘The one who knows,’” Khamisi said, “and he claims to know everything about the camps and forces of the Rashiduni. It took me a day and a half to get to talk to him, and then he told me such information was not for those who were not fully committed to the cause. I told him that Al-Zanji’s speeches had shown me the true light and that I desired nothing more than to take their blasphemous oath – may Allah forgive me! – but he said that I must prove myself worthy of the oath.” He stopped short and stared through me.

  “Ah – he has something in mind? Or are you supposed to think up a way of proving yourself to them?” Lensky prodded after a moment.

  Khamisi laughed, but not as though he though anything was funny. “Oh, Anakijua has something in mind, all right. You will appreciate the irony of this, Biradi. He wants me to blow up the CIA office here in Mombasa and kill both the wazungu field officers.”

  15. A modification of fire

  “What, he wants to kill Brad?” I gasped. “How does he even know about us?”

  “No. Biradi was not mentioned. Two men called Finichi and Talori are the targets.”

  “Finch and Taylor… Ben, could you make some coffee?” Lensky asked. “And don’t let Khamisi leave,” he added in an urgent undertone before drawing me into the dimness of the back bedroom.

  “You can’t suspect Finch now, Thalia! His life is in danger.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “We need to bring him in on this. Can you take me to his office?”

  I took his arm. “Picture it as clearly as you can.”

  We popped into the office out of thin air and startled Finch into a hasty step back. He almost tripped over his own chair, but we didn’t have time for acrobatics; I grabbed his arm on the way down and he completed his fall onto the coconut matting in our shadowed bedroom.

  “You—why—what?” he gasped.

  “I did tell you,” said Lensk
y, “that my wife had certain special abilities that could be a great help in this investigation, but you didn’t want to hear me.”

  Khamisi blinked when three people came through the bedroom door instead of the two who had gone in, but he kept his composure better than Finch. Of course, he’d already been teleported a couple of times, even if he did think Mr. M. was a djinn who’d done the heavy lifting.

  Lensky outlined the situation but finished by saying that of course Khamisi couldn’t be asked to do this.

  Nelson Finch demurred. “If he refuses to do it, haven’t we just painted a big target on his back? These people don’t take well to being turned down. They might kill him on the grounds that he can’t be trusted.”

  Khamisi’s eyes were showing a great deal more white than usual.

  “Tell you what,” Lensky said. “Khamisi, can you make sure your bomb doesn’t affect anything more than our office? Like, it won’t be big enough to blow up the whole building?”

  “Of course I can,” Khamisi said. “Chemical engineering, Georgia Tech, remember?”

  “Right,” Finch said without blinking, “that’s probably why they tried to recruit you in the first place; they need your skills. They’ve got plenty of shooters and panga gangs…”

  “Panga gangs?”

  “Specialize in murder by machete,” Lensky said briefly. I decided I didn’t really want to know more.

  Finch didn’t seem surprised by Khamisi’s academic background, and I reluctantly revised my opinion of him just a tiny bit. If he already knew about Khamisi’s education maybe he was a reasonably competent operative in his own right. Maybe it was just his bitterness, the constant catty swiping at Lensky and dismissive cracks about Taylor, that made me dislike and distrust him. And that attitude of his probably went right over Brad’s head; he had too generous a spirit himself to understand that some people felt threatened by others’ competence, were so insecure that they always had to put down those around them.

  “Getting back to the bomb question…” Lensky prodded.

  They eventually agreed that Khamisi would insist the bomb had to be a package small enough to fit under LeShawn Taylor’s desk.

  “That might slow them down,” Khamisi said. “If they were planning to use ANFO…”

  “Mix of fuel oil and fertilizer,” Lensky explained quickly.

  “Popular with terrorists,” Finch added.

  “But bulky,” Khamisi finished. “God willing, they will have to procure something else, and that should buy us time.”

  Khamisi would tell us when it was scheduled for; Finch would take that day off. He would also give Mashika, their part-time secretary, an errand that would keep her out of the office all day.

  “What about Taylor?”

  Finch scoffed. “The man just casually dropped in this morning after being out ‘sick’ for days, and he probably considers that to have satisfied his work requirements for the week. If you insist, though, I can contact him and make sure he doesn’t come into the office that day – whatever day it is. Maybe we can invent an American holiday to explain our absence.”

  It didn’t buy as much time as we’d hoped; Khamisi reported that same evening that Anakijua had promised him Semtex. By tomorrow. The bomb would be planted at dawn on the day after.

  After Lensky left to deliver this information to Finch in person – he was becoming extremely paranoid about saying anything more than ‘Good morning’ over a cell phone – Khamisi lingered to talk to Ben and me.

  “There is still some reason to hope that the bomb will not explode,” he said. “In Africa it is necessary to protect Semtex from the heat. It can lose its plasticity, get hard and even disintegrate.”

  “Wouldn’t Anakijua notice that?”

  Khamisi shrugged. “I do not think he intends to get his own hands dirty. They will expect me to assemble the package.”

  “In that case…” Ben began.

  Khamisi started shaking his head before Ben could even finish the sentence. “They will watch me. If I fail to connect the detonator properly…”

  “There are other things we can do,” Ben said.

  Khamisi brightened. “Your djinn? Can it disconnect the detonator?”

  “Something like that,” Ben said. “Give us as much time as possible between placing the bomb and the detonation, can you do that?”

  He nodded. “I can insist on making the placement before dawn, when I have the best chance of entering the building unobserved. I can also insist on setting it to detonate in mid-afternoon; I will tell them that the wazungu are lazy and only come to the office when it is so hot they want to enjoy the air conditioning.”

  “That should be enough time, don’t you think, Thalia?”

  “Depends on exactly what you’re thinking of.” I had done a lot of small object manipulation, but only working with familiar objects. Playing cards. Coins. Most recently, little balls of sticky rice. The detonator on a bomb? That would be tricky, not least because I didn’t know what it would look like. When last confronted with a bomb, I’d elected to teleport out of range rather than attempt defusing it. “Mr. M. likes military hardware…”

  Khamisi indicated that if we were planning to consult with Mr. M., he would really prefer to be elsewhere, and I teleported him to one of the blind spots we’d selected earlier.

  “Yes, at first I was thinking of fiddling the detonator,” Ben said when I returned, “but I’ve had a much better idea since then!”

  I regarded him warily. Ben’s ‘better ideas,’ had a checkered history at the Center. There was the time he’d set the office on fire in a misguided attempt to generate light, for instance. “Just tell me this doesn’t have anything to do with Riemann fire.”

  “I was actually thinking of a modification of that,” Ben said with wounded dignity. “Don’t you see, Thalia? Semtex decays in heat. All we have to do is cook the bomb after Khamisi places it.”

  “Why not before?”

  “We won’t know exactly where it is, will we? Once it’s under LeShawn Taylor’s desk, we can strike with surgical precision. Well, you can, anyway, you’ve seen the office now.”

  “In that case, why don’t I just teleport there, remove the thing and drop it offshore?”

  “Because this will preserve Khamisi’s cover! Don’t you see, this is already a known liability of Semtex. When it doesn’t go off, he can yell at Anakijua for giving him outdated materials that hadn’t been protected from the heat!”

  There was a certain beauty to that notion; enough that I spent an hour with Ben and a notepad, sketching exactly how to modify the use of Riemann surfaces to produce intense local heat around the bomb package without actually setting anything on fire. If it worked, Khamisi would be off the hook in a totally undetectable way. And if it didn’t work – well, Finch had promised that the office would be empty anyway.

  To Ben’s chagrin, I worked out the modifications before he did. He was handicapped by the fact that without his glasses, he could barely make out the relevant diagrams. He kept asking me to draw them larger until I rebelled. “I’m working on four sheets of paper taped together already.”

  “Yes, but the lines are too thin for me to see properly.”

  “Sorry. All I’ve got is a No. 2 pencil. You want nice thick lines, get me an oversized drawing pad and some sticks of charcoal.”

  Annelise’s call couldn’t have come at a better time.

  “You should absolutely go to Nairobi to meet her,” I told Ben.

  “And leave you to do this alone?”

  “At least I can see what I’m trying to do! I’m afraid your visualizations will be as blurry as your physical vision. I’ve got this, Ben. Take the express train to Nairobi. Have a couple of fun-filled days with Annelise. Get your new glasses and come back! We’re not going anywhere.”

  Or so I thought then.

  After he went off to get a train ticket, I tidied up the apartment. I picked up all the pieces of paper we’d been scribbling on, memorized
the topological construct I’d need to visualize, tore up the papers and turned them into papier-maché with tap water and soap. There was nothing left, physically, to give anybody a clue to our plans.

  Of course I would tell Brad about our failsafe, when he returned.

  I ought to tell him.

  He really didn’t like it when I surprised him with unauthorized topological meddling.

  Against that, though, I had to weigh the danger that he’d give our plan away to Finch, whom I really did not trust. That might not be a problem in itself, but Finch had already shown that he was extremely careless and insufficiently paranoid about being spied on by Rashiduni agents. And letting the Rashiduni know that we had foreknowledge of the bomb and had acted to disable it… that could get Khamisi killed.

  I really didn’t have a choice; the stakes were too high. Brad and I had recovered from worse rough spots in our relationship, but Khamisi would not recover from what the Rashiduni would do if they thought he’d betrayed them.

  My cell phone rang then. It was Ben, calling from the Royal Court Hotel. On leaving our apartment, he’d recognized two of the guys from Majengo who’d beaten him up, loitering at the corner. He’d camouflaged himself and drifted close enough to eavesdrop; unfortunately, they were speaking Swahili, so he couldn’t pick up much beyond the fact that they kept using the word majini. He’d decided to teleport to the hotel before calling to warn me.

  “You,” I said, “definitely need to make yourself scarce for a couple of days. Lensky and I will be fine; they’ve never seen us. Take a cab to the railroad station, get your ticket and don’t come back here. Just get straight onto the train. Okay?”

  Then I hung up and brooded. True, the Majengo thugs hadn’t seen Lensky or me. But… Ben had teleported directly here from that nasty confrontation in Majengo. How had they even found this apartment? I could think of only three possibilities. One, it was pure coincidence. Two, they had a djinn of their own that had followed Ben here.

  Or three, they had been pointed at this apartment by somebody who recognized Ben and knew where he lived.