A Creature of Smokeless Flame

by Margaret Ball

  16. Djinns, devils, and assault rifles

  Lensky opened the door to a white-faced Finch.

  “That damned fool!” Finch said. His hands were shaking. “I warned him, Brad. I sent Mashika up to Garissa to get us some district papers, she isn’t back yet. He shouldn’t even have been there… I suppose he thought he could stop by and pick up his mail beforehand, and then he was late getting there. The idiot. The damned suicidal idiot.”

  Lensky drew him into the apartment.

  “I came as soon as I heard,” Finch said. He sank down at the table and stared right through me.

  “Heard what?”

  “Didn’t you – Isn’t it on the news? My God, they can’t hush it up. It’s murder, now.”

  Lensky sat down opposite Finch, exuding calm and solidity. He was very good at that. “Take your time, Nelson. No, we’ve heard nothing.” And he’d been listening to the local news all afternoon, waiting to hear about the scheduled bombing. “What do you mean, murder? Wasn’t everybody warned in time? Did the blast take out other offices, or what?”

  Finch drew a long, shaky breath and focused with a visible effort. “Oh, warned, yes, but that fool Taylor didn’t pay attention. He was at his desk when it went off.”

  “And it had been placed—”

  “Right under his desk, as we agreed. I told him, dammit!” Finch shook his head. “He didn’t make it, Lensky.”

  It had been obvious that was where he was heading, but I didn’t believe it yet. I couldn’t believe it. I – if this was true, then I had massively fouled up. My attempt to degrade the explosives remotely by Riemann heat must have failed. All our plans had failed. And now a man I knew and liked, Khamisi, had caused the death of an American agent whom I’d never met, but who had been supposed to be safe and out of harm’s way regardless of whether the algorithm Ben and I had developed worked out. I felt sick at my stomach, and Lensky – who didn’t even know about that second plan – looked worse.

  “Let me get this straight,” Lensky said. “You’re sure Taylor was there?”

  “I wish I weren’t. My God, surely they can’t hush up something like this?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” Lensky said grimly. “Maybe State is leaning on the Kenyatta administration – But how would they have known so soon?”

  Finch shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t understand anything. I was at Taylor’s house just last night, after your asset sent us word of the timing. I told him not to go to the office today. God, Lensky, I knew the man was sloppy and practiced bad tradecraft, but I never realized he was this stupid!” He shook his head again. “It’s – beyond belief. I’m going back now, somebody has to secure any documents or other materials that weren’t destroyed. I just – needed to see you, first.”

  “Can I help?”

  “No! I came to warn you, you have to exfiltrate immediately! If you stay here, if they connect you with the office, they might work the other direction and find Khamisi through you. It’ll set our work here back twenty years if the CIA office in Mombasa is found to have been blown up by our own asset. And worse, if you don’t get out… Lensky, you can’t risk an African jail. You can’t risk it for her.” He jerked his head at me.

  Lensky accompanied Finch down to the street. When he returned he told me that he’d seen the man into a tuk-tuk and had given the driver the address of a coffee shop near the office.

  “I’ve never seen anybody lose his nerve so fast.”

  I had had time to think while Lensky was out of the apartment. “We should have gone with him. Let’s go to the office building now.”

  “Thalia, we can’t do that,” Lensky said firmly. “I appreciate your wanting to take care of Finch, but you heard the man. We are at the center of this; if the police start looking at us, that may lead them to Khamisi. I don’t want to see the boy arrested for a murder he never meant to commit. We’ve already failed him by not clearing the office as we promised.”

  Actually, I wasn’t thinking about taking care of Nelson Finch. I was thinking that I did not believe him. What, there’d been a bombing in downtown Mombasa, a bombing that claimed the life of an American case officer, and the Kenyan government had immediately clamped down on all news organizations to stop them reporting on it? Our own government wasn’t anywhere near that efficient.

  “You’re – we’re not going to run away, are we? Leaving Khamisi to fend for himself? And Ben?”

  “No, of course not. Finch momentarily lost his nerve. Trust me, Thalia, there’s no way the Kenyatta administration is going to arrest American citizens on mere suspicion.”

  “You think they’re that much better behaved than our own government?” A branch of which had recently drugged me, thrown me into a windowless cell, and pepper-sprayed me, all in the name of the greater good.

  “No, but I think they need America a lot more than America needs them. You know that new desalination plant they want to build on the north coast?”

  “Um, no, why?”

  “Well. It could help avert a famine, come the next drought. But it’s not cheap, and they’re hoping to get the US to help pay for it. Uhuru Kenyatta is counting on that and other American-financed infrastructure projects to consolidate his hold on power; there were… questions… about the integrity of the last elections. So, no, he’s not about to do anything stupid while the new aid package is being negotiated.”

  Brad had more faith in the ability of governments to avoid being stupid than I had. But since I found the idea of giving up and running away, not to speak of abandoning those kids in the training camp, deeply distasteful, I wasn’t going to argue with him. Besides, I had other things to do. “I suppose you’re right,” I said, and took myself and my phone to the dimness of the back bedroom. Thank God we still had access to Mr. Prajapati’s wi-fi! I tapped the phone and scrolled through local, national and international news sites. None of the sites I visited had been blocked by censors. None of them had anything to say about a fatal terrorist bombing in the heart of Mombasa.

  I went back and searched the largest sites on “Mombasa,” “Bombing,” “Terrorism,” and “Rashiduni.” I found nothing but one weeks-old article arguing that al-Shabaab, not Jeshi-la-Rashiduni, had been responsible for terrorizing the residents of some island called Kisiwa cha Shetani.

  What had happened, then? Closing my eyes, I built the image of overlapping grids and surfaces that I’d used to reach my awareness into the bomb under LeShawn Taylor’s desk early that morning.

  I saw… nothing.

  Could I possibly have got everything wrong?

  Would it have worked better if Ben had been able to check the math?

  Could I go to the site myself and see what had happened?

  I didn’t know what would happen if I tried to teleport into an office that no longer existed because it had been blown sky-high by Semtex, and I was not eager to make the experiment. But I did have a pretty fair idea of what would happen if I tried to go there now by conventional means. It would mean a knock-down drag-out fight with Brad, for starters. And if I explained my private reason for doubting Finch’s story – the ‘failsafe’ plan I’d kept from both him and Finch – that wasn’t going to do my relationship with Brad a lot of good, was it?

  I chewed my nails, indecisive and confused, until I heard Brad’s cell phone ring. A moment later the bedroom door swung open. “That was Khamisi. The usual place. Can you bring him here?”

  Lensky might disapprove of using cell phones for clandestine communications, but they were a lot more efficient than strolling around town looking for chalk marks on walls. In the somnolent heat of late afternoon, the perfumer’s was closed and the market around it was almost empty. I took Khamisi’s hand and whisked us back to the comparative coolness of our apartment.

  “Are the Rashiduni happy with you?” Lensky asked as soon as we stepped out of the air into the living room.

  Khamisi’s grin was a bit shaky. “No, of course not. They are furious. I pret
ended to be equally furious; I pounded the table and demanded Anakijua’s head for giving me decayed, useless explosives. If I had really wished to blow up your offices,” he said, “I would have been angry. The man is incompetent. Allah only knows how long that Semtex has been knocking about Africa, stored in the sunshine most likely. It was so heat-degraded that the ‘explosion’ was about as impressive as throwing a brick.”

  I leaned my head back against the chair and closed my eyes, weak with relief. It had worked. Riemann heat had ruined the explosives – unless, as Khamisi believed, Africa had already taken care of that for us. Either way, I was not responsible for a terrorist bombing in the heart of Mombasa.

  Then my eyes flew open again. “Wait, you mean nothing happened?”

  Khamisi’s hands described an eloquent arc. “As I said – as impressive as throwing a brick.”

  “Finch was just here a couple of hours ago,” Lensky said. “He described it as something more. He said that LeShawn Taylor had been killed.”

  Khamisi shook his head. “Biradi, I was there, across the street. There was a very small thud and a little smoke, no more. The black man from your office came running outside. He was angry but not hurt.”

  “Brad, I’ve been looking for any mention of the bombing on local or national news,” I put in. “There is nothing.”

  Lensky’s eyebrows almost met. “But why would Nelson have told us the office was destroyed and Taylor killed?”

  “Perhaps to inspire us to run away?” I thought back to what had been said. “Maybe he told us what he thought had happened. He knew when and where the bomb was supposed to go off. He’d have had no way of knowing the explosives were a dud. Maybe he wasn’t anywhere near the office. Maybe he just assumed it had gone off as planned.”

  “Then how – what made him think Taylor was in the office, if he’d warned the man himself last night?”

  I could think of only one explanation for that, and it was not going to go over well with Brad.

  “If,” I said slowly, “for whatever reason, he did not warn LeShawn Taylor to stay out of the office today, then he might assume he would have been killed when the bomb under his desk exploded.”

  “And he would feel guilty as sin for not having made sure Taylor understood the warning,” Brad said. Neat! With a little twist of wording, he’d turned a suspicious omission into a simple misunderstanding, so he still didn’t have to see the danger in trusting his old friend Finch. “He was probably desperate to see that we didn’t suffer as well.”

  Khamisi’s eyes met mine. I had the feeling he found this interpretation as unlikely as I did.

  “He wanted us to exfil immediately – ah, leave town,” Lensky translated for Khamisi.

  “Ah. Yes. We must do that, of course.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I know where the training camp is,” Khamisi said. “After I fought with Anakijua over the bad bomb, I took the oath of loyalty.” He shivered. “It is an evil oath, haram and shirk. I hope Allah will count it in my favor that I meant no word of it.”

  Mr. M. decided to join the conversation. “The Prophet, peace be upon him, said, ‘Verily, Allah knoweth what is in the hearts of men as well as that which comes from their lips, and the vows of the heart shall weigh against those of the lips as gold weighs against a feather.’”

  “Did he?” Khamisi said. “I do not know that hadith. Is it verified? From whom came it?” He seemed more concerned that he might be discussing an apocryphal tale of the Prophet than that he was having this theological discussion with a turtle head attached to a metallic snake body. I suppose his ability to freak out had been temporarily overloaded.

  Mr. M. drew himself up and began a long chanted exposition of the sources for his quotation, only to be interrupted by a pounding on the front door of the apartment.

  This time it was Mr. Prajapati, coming to warn us that a hostile mob was gathering in the streets as people left the mosques. There was talk of djinns and devils and he had heard people saying that the wazungu who lived over his store were evil magicians. He intended to pull down the steel shutters at the front of his store before taking his wife to a good Hindu neighborhood, and he thought we too should flee before the mob reached here.

  “I’ll help you close up downstairs,” Lensky said, and headed down the narrow stairs at the side of the building. I was close behind him, and Khamisi followed me.

  No, I wasn’t selflessly dedicated to saving Mr. Prajapati’s store. While that might be desirable, it wasn’t anywhere near the top of my priorities. I intended to grab Lensky and teleport us both to some place safe. And I don’t know why Khamisi was joining the stampede into danger, unless he had figured out that I, and not my ‘jini’ Mr. M., was the key to getting us out of there alive.

  At least – I should have been the key. Turned out that galloping downstairs to the street was a very, very bad idea.

  There were already too many people in the street, but they seemed to be still in the milling-around-and-talking-trash mode. I rounded the corner of the stairs, headed for the door Lensky was already disappearing through, and… the world went away.

  When I blinked, I seemed to be back in our cardboard-darkened bedroom. A whole family of African drummers had taken up residence in my right temple, and my vision swam. Lensky was bending over me with a glass in his hand, and my face was wet.

  Nothing computed.

  “Thank God! You’re back with us.”

  “Alhamdulillah,” Khamisi breathed from the doorway.

  “I told you she was not seriously injured,” Mr. M. croaked from somewhere out of my sight.

  “Where?” I creaked.

  It was indeed the back bedroom. After the half-brick hit me, Lensky had thrown me over his shoulder and charged through the store, out the back, and up the back stairs. Then he’d alternated throwing water at me with grabbing vital supplies out of Prajapati’s and enlisting Khamisi’s help to drag them upstairs. The pillows were soaked; I must have been out longer than I’d thought.

  A noise like a hundred overturned beehives rose from the street in front of the apartment. I grabbed Lensky’s sleeve. “We have to get out of here. Come on!” But when I tried to visualize the construct that we used for teleportation, the intersecting two-dimensional shapes in a black and empty three-space, the bright shapes wobbled in my mind and became attenuated clouds of points, then curling ribbons… I put one hand to my aching head and groaned. “Can’t quite do it yet. I should be able to any minute though.” I hoped. Oh, I hoped. Could traumatic head injury have permanently destroyed the quirk in my brain that turned topological theorems into real-world actions?

  If so, the rising noises outside suggested I might not live to regret it. Not long, anyway. “The back stairs?”

  “No,” Lensky said. “There’s another crowd on Grand Mosque Road.” I stifled a second groan.

  He patted my hand. “Just rest. Let me know when you feel like you can teleport.” He disappeared in the direction of the living room.

  Lying down with my eyes closed didn’t really help; it just allowed me to focus on the relentless pounding in my head and the churning in my stomach. I made my way out of the bedroom and down the hall, touching one wall for balance.

  Lensky and Khamisi were sitting on the floor in the middle of a pile of trash, doing something with empty glass bottles. The room smelled like a gas station. It didn’t help my symptoms any. And I couldn’t make any sense at all of what they’d scavenged from Prajapati’s. I looked dubiously at a bag of tampons and maxi-pads. “Ah, Brad, I have enough feminine supplies already, and I don’t even use these brands.”

  “Wound dressings,” he said, pointing at the pads.

  “And these?” I picked up a package of tampons.

  “You can stuff one into a bullet hole. To stop the bleeding,” he explained at my blank look.

  Oh, so that would be a bullet hole in a person, not in a wall or anything. I had hoped we wouldn’t actually encounter that particul
ar problem.

  “And Superglue is good for closing the edges of a wound.”

  Something else I would have been happy never needing to know.

  Looking much too cheerful for a man in a potential war zone, Lensky set Khamisi and me to creating Molotov cocktails. “You poke some Styrofoam down the neck of a bottle, pour a little gasoline on it, you get a grand inflammable sludge,” he told us. “Experiment with the proportions, figure out what works best. When the bottle is full – well, partly full, you don’t want the stuff actually oozing out – dip a rag into the sludge and stuff it into the neck of the bottle.”

  “What rag?”

  A good question. Just like empty tin cans and scraps of paper big enough to write on, rags were valuable commodities in the poorer parts of Mombasa.

  “Well, there’s that red and purple coverup of Thalia’s.”

  “There is not!” I might be a tad woozy, but I wasn’t ready to let him ruin one of my few souvenirs. “Give me a knife, I’ll cut up one of the sheets.”

  Lensky produced a six-inch piece of black ceramic from his other ankle – I mean, the one that wasn’t already wearing a derringer. He snapped his wrist and a blade slid out with a menacing click. “Gravity knife. Have fun, Thalia!”

  He was certainly having the time of his life; he couldn’t stop grinning. While Khamisi stuffed Styrofoam down bottles and I ripped a sheet into strips, he went back to our bedroom and dragged out a flat metal box that I didn’t remember seeing before. He punched the combination lock on the top and flipped the lid open to reveal two long, black, ugly shapes.

  “Those things were under our bed? And you didn’t bother telling me?”

  White teeth flashed at me. “You’d have slept better if you’d known?”

  “Okay, you win. No, I would not have slept better knowing I was inches away from a couple of assault rifles.” I blinked and looked away. My vision was still messed up. Those long shiny barrels couldn’t really be undulating like snakes, could they?

  “Assault rifles? That’s a meaningless term,” he told me, watching my face while his hands slid and turned things on the weapons. Black bits moved over other black bits and fitted into place with quiet clicks. Apparently he didn’t need to look at what he was doing. Those stories about field-stripping weapons blindfolded must have been true. “To be precise, these are fully automatic AK-74Ms with built-in aiming optics, 30-round magazines and GP-34 under-barrel grenade launchers.” He sounded as if he was describing the charms of an old girlfriend – one I would not have liked.