Invasive Species

by Joseph Wallace

  Trey bought a little carved warthog made out of rosewood, then walked over to a woman selling kangas, traditional garments made from cotton. She was wrapped in one herself, blue with a pattern of big gold leaves on it.

  Trey knew that kangas always came with a jina, a kind of motto or aphorism, stitched into the fabric. From a distance, he couldn’t make out what hers said.

  She was an old woman, somewhere between seventy and eighty, with a wrinkled-nut face and white hair cropped close to her scalp. Her eyes were sharp, though, watching Trey approach. Sharp and suspicious.

  He was used to that.

  “Habari, Mama,” he said.

  She inclined her head. “Mzuri.”

  Now he could read her kanga’s jina. It said, Majivuno hayafai: “Greed is never good.”

  He smiled, and again when she bargained fiercely with him over a red-and-blue kanga patterned with fanciful birds and a motto that read, “Humanness is better than material things.”

  Finally he handed over twenty thousand shilingi—about ten dollars, more than the woman had asked—and made a “keep it” gesture when she looked at him with raised eyebrows.

  The money disappeared into her kanga, and she handed over his purchase. Then, with a sigh, she lit a cigarette and said, “Yes.”

  Yes. Ask your questions.

  Trey said, “Mama, what killed the missionary lady and those other people?”

  “Fire,” she said at once.

  When he didn’t reply, argue, push, she watched him.

  “Have there been other such fires,” he said after a while, “in Ujiji and Kigoma?”

  After a pause, she nodded.

  “Many?”

  She shrugged and made a back-and-forth motion with her hands. “Some here. Some there. Not so many.”

  She looked up to the sky, where only a pair of vultures circled.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  Trey leaned against her table, looking out at the quiet marketplace before turning back to her. “Have you seen them?” he asked. “The wasps?”

  She nodded.

  “I have as well.”

  Her eyes were very dark. “I was . . . afraid.”

  “Yes. Me, too.”

  “Yet we both still live,” she said.

  He looked back at her. “Mama, why burn the house? Why blame the daughter?”

  For a long time, many seconds, she didn’t answer. Then she said, “They do not want anyone to know what happened.”

  “They?”

  “If people learn about this, who will be blamed?” she said. “We will. Tanzania. Aid will stop. Tourists will no longer come here.”

  “And everything depends on tourists.”

  “Yes.” She looked down at her pile of kangas. “We will go hungry.”

  Again they were silent for a while. Then Trey said, “The wasps. Have they always been here?”

  “The majizi? No. Of course not. Four months. Five, maybe.” She gestured at the oily lake beyond. “They came across. With the bushmeat and the live animals. The monkeys. And the hunters, too.”

  Trey took a breath. “What did you call them?”

  “Majizi.”

  Thieves.

  Trey said, “What is it they steal?”

  But the old woman only shrugged.

  Then, as she looked over his shoulder, he saw her face set. “Enough questions,” she said. “Go now.”

  A young man in a military uniform was standing at the other end of the uncrowded market. He was chatting with one of the vendors, laughing.

  “Just tell me,” Trey said. “The thieves, are they still here?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “They will never leave. But not only here.”

  “Where else?” Trey asked, although he knew the answer.

  She opened her arms wide.

  Out there.

  In the world.

  * * *

  AS HE’D SAID, Embassy was still at the hospital. He looked around hopefully to see if Trey had brought more food, then shrugged in a resigned way.

  “You almost didn’t make it in time,” he said. “They’ll be down in a minute or two.”

  “Sheila and who else?”

  “My boss and this lady from the NGO.”

  “Les Voyageurs?”

  He nodded. Then, for the first time, he reached up and took off his sunglasses. His eyes were very pale blue underneath sparse lashes.

  “I told you,” he said. “You’re not allowed to talk to her.”

  Trey was quiet.

  “Yeah. You can follow her like a lost puppy from here to Dar to Rome, but you can’t interact with her till you’re at JFK. Ignore that and you’ll be grabbed.”

  Trey didn’t even bother to ask on what grounds. When did that ever matter?

  Across the lobby, the elevator door opened and four people came out: two more embassy men (one of whose gray hair and more expensive suit indicated his seniority) and a fiftyish woman in an expensive suit. And Sheila Connelly.

  Tall, skinny, her skin pale, her short copper-red hair ragged. Dark hollows under her eyes. She was wearing black pants over hiking boots and a cheerful flowered blouse that she’d buttoned wrong.

  The woman from Les Voyageurs was holding on to Sheila’s arm, guiding her. Both embassy men had seen Trey immediately and were looking at him hard as they shepherded the two women toward the front door.

  Trey got to his feet and walked toward the group. Behind him, he heard Embassy sigh and rise as well.

  Sheila’s gaze shifted his way, but she showed no interest. Her eyes, which were large and an unusual dark blue-green, had a blankness that might have been drug induced or might not.

  Trey reached a decision. Hell. He hated being forbidden to do something.

  “Sheila,” he said.

  Her gaze sharpened a little as she looked at him.

  “I know that larva wasn’t from a tumbu fly,” he said.

  Already the two younger embassy men had him by the arms. But Sheila said, “Wait!” And her voice had so much authority that everyone stopped still.

  She took a step closer and stared into his face. Her eyes, irises so dark as to be almost black, seemed enormous in her gaunt face.

  “Do you know what it was?” she asked. Her voice was deep, hoarse.

  “I think so.”

  Red spots rose to her ashen cheeks. “Why did my mother die?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Trey said. “But I’ll find out.”

  “Okay,” the senior embassy man said. “That’s enough.”

  The two others spun him around. Trey twisted in their grasp. “Wait for me at JFK,” he called out as they yanked him toward the door. “Don’t leave there without me.”

  “I won’t,” she said.

  Her voice was little more than a breath, but he heard it.

  TWELVE

  DURING HIS CAREER, Trey had stalked rare birds, elusive frogs, poisonous snakes, a scorpion nearly the size of a lobster, even a shadowy, half-glimpsed pack of bush dogs in Suriname that he eventually realized was also stalking him.

  Never a human, though.

  Not until now.

  * * *

  HE SAT ON a blue plastic seat amid hordes of tourists in the spacious waiting area of Nyerere Airport in Dar es Salaam. Every once in a while, he’d raise his eyes from the battered paperback he was reading—a novel by Lee Child—and look across at Sheila Connelly.

  She was sitting beside the gate for the overnight Emirates Air flight they’d both be taking to Rome. From what Trey could see, she was dressed in the same clothes she’d been wearing earlier in the day.

  Beside her was the elegant woman from Les Voyageurs. Her outfit had probably cost more than a typical Tanzanian earned in a year.

&
nbsp; On Sheila’s other side was another embassy man, one Trey hadn’t seen before. He wore a gray suit and a white shirt and a red tie and sunglasses.

  Sheila and the Les Voyageurs lady seemed oblivious of Trey’s gaze, but not the embassy man. Every time Trey looked in his direction, he turned his head and gazed back, the lenses of his glasses like two distant blacked-out windows.

  Trey felt a lot like a stalker.

  He didn’t like it.

  * * *

  HE KILLED THE time by watching the tourists. Tanzania’s lifeblood. The only thing preventing the Serengeti, the Selous, the Ngorongoro, and the other fabled wilderness areas from being plowed under and converted to cattle pasture. The last thing keeping its famous herds of wild game alive.

  The tourists on their way into the country wore freshly bought khakis and were excited, anticipatory. The tourists on their way out looked exhausted, bug bitten, and deeply satisfied. They’d seen giraffes and wildebeests and lions and, if they were lucky, leopards and rhinos. Now they could head home, their adventures over, and get back to whatever they did with their lives.

  Trey felt a sense of dislocation a lot like sorrow. For a moment he envied those who could look upon the wilderness—or what was left of it—as a temporary break from real life, not life itself. For all the joy he got from hopscotching around the globe, from taking his life in his hands while sitting beside Malcolm in rattletrap prop planes, from trekking through disease-ridden and rebel-haunted forests, sometimes he wished that he could unlearn what he knew.

  That he, too, could dress up in adventurer’s clothes and choose to be blind.

  * * *

  THE HOURS PASSED. Trey read his book. Lee Child’s protagonist, Jack Reacher, was enormous: six-and-a-half feet tall and 250 pounds of pure muscle. He was smart and clever and relentless, but in the end he tended to solve problems with his fists. No one had fists like Reacher’s.

  Trey thought of his parents. His father had been tall and slender, nonviolent, gentle to the core. His mother, short and compact, had possessed a strength and volatility that made those around her instantly treat her with respect. Trey had never seen her lose her temper, not fully, but he always knew she would be a force to be reckoned with, to be feared, if she did.

  Still, neither she nor his father could have survived a single blow administered by any of the villains Jack Reacher shrugged off in a typical day’s work, much less by Reacher himself. There was something comforting in that superman’s strength, a sense that the world could be measured, controlled. That all it took was smarts and brawn to make things right.

  On the other hand, all of Reacher’s power would do him no good at all if he happened to run into the kinds of enemies Thomas and Katherine Gilliard had faced in their typical day. Their enemies, the villains in their stories, didn’t aim at you with a gun or stand toe-to-toe with hands clenched into fists.

  They attacked you as you sat eating dinner, as you drove to work, as you talked to a friend, as you made love, as you slept. They bit you or stung you—you might not even notice—or they simply entered your body in a mouthful of food or a breath of air. Then they got into your bloodstream and killed you before you even knew you’d been attacked.

  Jack Reacher could make the world right because all of his enemies were human.

  And humans were easy.

  * * *

  SHEILA AND HER chaperone were among the first to board. The embassy man watched them as they went through the gate and down the walkway. Then he spun on his heel and came over to Trey. His mouth was a line as he looked down through his sunglasses.

  “Not a word to her until you get to JFK,” he said.

  Trey smiled. “Yeah, I’ve been told.”

  “There’ll be an air marshal on board. You won’t know who he is, but he’ll be keeping an eye on you the whole flight.”

  Trey didn’t say anything.

  “He’s got orders to restrain you if you so much as approach Sheila Connelly. You’ll be detained in Rome, and you’ll never see her again.”

  That sounded like a threat, but not necessarily aimed at him. Trey said, “Why do you have your pants in such a bunch over this?”

  Of course the embassy man, scowling at the question, didn’t explain. But Trey knew anyway. It was obvious. They—the Tanzanian government, the U.S. Embassy, and Les Voyageurs—wanted her out of the country. They wanted Trey out of the country. And they wanted no complications in the meantime.

  He thought about the old woman in the marketplace, her gesture when she’d indicated where the thieves had gone. Out there. Into the world.

  All the cover-your-ass on earth wouldn’t be enough if she was right.

  “Don’t worry,” Trey said to the embassy man. “I’ll stay away from her.”

  The truth this time.

  He could wait a few more hours.

  * * *

  TREY WAS ONE of the last to board the 777. Already some of the tired tourists were asleep under mounds of blankets, while others were frowning at their iPads or getting ready to watch movies on their seatback screens. The atmosphere had a festive feel, as was typical of the onset of these long flights. A “we’re all in this together” vibe that would last for a while, until everyone started getting bored and cranky.

  Trey’s seat was on the aisle about halfway down the plane. He looked back and saw Sheila leaning against a window near the back, her pale face peaceful in sleep. Her chaperone, sitting next to her on the aisle, watched Trey, an unreadable expression on her face. He raised his hands in a placatory gesture, and after a moment she nodded.

  Trey took another quick look around.

  It took him about fifteen seconds to identify two plainclothes air marshals, one male, one female. The way they peeked at him reminded him of meerkats popping up from their burrows.

  He made sure not to let the marshals know they’d been spotted. He didn’t want them to feel bad.

  * * *

  TREY HATED SLEEP. Hated how much time it sucked up that could be better spent doing more productive things. Hated how it eventually won every battle, no matter how strong you were, no matter how hard you fought it.

  He hated being . . . away.

  But there was one thing he’d learned after hundreds of flights: If you didn’t sleep on airplanes, you were an idiot. Whatever else you could do on a plane, you could do better almost anywhere else. Sleep was the most productive thing you could get out of the way while strapped to a seat.

  So on both flights, all the way till the announcement came of their final approach to JFK, Trey read his book and ate airplane food, but mostly he slept. Knowing that when they arrived, and the important work began, he’d be ready.

  * * *

  HE GOT OFF the airplane in New York before Sheila and her chaperone. Waited by the gate as the hordes made their way past, faces bleached gray by the barren lights of the terminal. It was only eleven at night here, but most of these travelers’ bodies were stuck in the timeless limbo of jet lag.

  The two women finally came through the door. Sheila’s face was slack, but her eyes were alert. Beside her, despite her expensive clothes, the older woman just looked worn out.

  They came up to Trey. He said to Sheila, “I almost thought they’d spirit you away. Make you disappear.”

  The chaperone straightened and stared at him. “Are you nuts?” she said, her incredulity sounding funny expressed in such a crisp, cultured tone. “I’m handing her over to you, and now I’m done.”

  She brushed her hands together, the age-old gesture of dismissal. “One night in the airport hotel for me, and back home tomorrow.”

  Then, unexpectedly, she switched her gaze to Sheila, and her expression softened. “Are you sure of your decision, dear?” She looked back at Trey. “We were supposed to be met by someone from the New York office, but she didn’t want to.”


  “I’m sure,” Sheila said. “You can go.”

  The woman looked at Trey. Her expression said, Are you sure?

  No, Trey wasn’t. But he knew he had no choice. He nodded.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Which really meant, Better you than me, pal.

  * * *

  THE EX-CHAPERONE WAS barely out of earshot, her heels clicking away down the quiet terminal, when Sheila said to Trey, “Tell me what it was.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a copy of Jack’s drawing.

  Sheila stared down at it. “You’ve seen these?”

  Trey nodded.

  “Where?”

  “In southern Senegal.”

  He watched her take in the new information. It seemed she hadn’t been completely undone by her days of confinement, by exhaustion and grief. He shouldn’t have been surprised: You had to be strong to work with ill and dying refugees.

  “That’s where they’re native?” she asked.

  “We think so.”

  She blinked. “Who is ‘we’?”

  Trey looked around, saw a café still open at the far end of the terminal. He pointed to it and said, “Let’s sit, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

  First at the café and then, when it closed, on adjacent seats at a deserted gate, they talked. By the time they were done, it made no sense to try to find her a hotel room.

  “People coming through the city stay in my place all the time,” he said.

  Her gaze was unblinking. “‘People’?”

  “Folks I’ve met along the way. Scientists. Field researchers. Aid workers. People like you who have business here but can’t afford the rates.”

  “People like me,” she said.

  Trey waited.

  “Okay.” She paused. “Thank you.”

  Her acquiescence came a little quicker than he’d expected. He wondered whether it was because she already trusted him or whether she didn’t much care whether he was a friend or a psychopath.

  He thought she hadn’t quite decided, not yet, whether she had anything left to lose.