The Night Ranger jw-7

by Alex Berenson

  “Three hundred thousand? For an aid worker?”

  “That includes housing allowances, six to eight weeks of vacation. These are tough jobs. People need a break. Insurance, medical and life. It adds up. The locals are a lot cheaper. Plus the United Nations encourages aid groups to hire locally.”

  “Build expertise.”

  “Correct.” A phone buzzed in Thompson’s pocket. He pulled it out, looked at it. “The Associated Press.” He stuffed it away. “They can wait. You were saying?”

  “So why bring over these volunteers?”

  “‘Volunteers’ being the magic word. The cost to us was close to zero. And when my nephew proposed it, I initially thought they’d be around six weeks or so. Not three months–plus.”

  “They get along with the full-time workers?”

  “As far as I know, John. Look, you’ve seen the pictures. Who wouldn’t want Gwen and Hailey around? Gwen tutored English, Hailey worked at the hospital, Owen and Scott helped with manual labor. All in all, I’d say they did a decent job. Better than I would have predicted.”

  “When did they decide to go to Lamu?”

  “Maybe two weeks ago. Scott’s idea.”

  “Any particular reason? They could have gone on safari or climbed Kilimanjaro or come to Nairobi for the weekend. Why Lamu?”

  “I didn’t ask, but I think Lamu has a certain cachet among aid workers, backpacker types. One of those places that only the cool people know about.”

  Odd that Thompson didn’t put himself in the category of aid worker, Wells thought. But then, he was more of an executive, right down to his use of Wells’s first name in the conversation. Always use the other person’s name; it establishes a bond. Every management seminar on earth taught the trick.

  “Ever been to Lamu yourself, James?”

  “Truth is I haven’t spent all that long in Kenya. I came just about five weeks ago. I’d heard that the situation was getting tougher and I wanted to see for myself. In fact, I was supposed to leave this week, be in Haiti right now.”

  “Before that, when was the last time you were here?”

  “Maybe a year ago. I split my time between Houston and the country ops.”

  “So who’s in charge on a day-to-day basis?”

  “Her name’s Moss Laughton. Irish. Her title is director of logistics.”

  “And she’s up there now?”

  “Better be.”

  “Okay. So this trip to Lamu, you didn’t mind.”

  “My understanding before this happened was that parts of the camps were troubled, but eastern Kenya was mostly safe. Al-Shabaab has a few thousand men at most, and they’ve lost ground. They’re in Dadaab because they’re getting squeezed.”

  “But haven’t there been kidnappings in Lamu?”

  “That was before the Kenyans went into Somalia. Since then, no. The locals there know that tourists pay the bills.” Thompson leaned forward, put his meaty hands on his knees, locked eyes with Wells. “John, I swear to you, I told Gettleman the truth. If I thought my nephew was in danger, I wouldn’t have let him go.”

  He spoke with conviction. Whatever the truth, Wells didn’t doubt he’d pass a poly. “Tell me about the driver. Suggs, right? He hasn’t come up much. Are you keeping his name out of it on purpose? Could he have been involved?”

  “Possibly, yes. We called him Suggs, but his real name was Kwasi. He was our best fixer and he’d worked for us since almost our first day here. We paid him one hundred twenty thousand shillings a month. Close to fifteen hundred dollars. The most by far of our Kenyan employees.”

  “But much less than the mzungus. He ever get upset about that?”

  “Just FYI, John, the plural of ‘mzungu’ isn’t ‘mzungus.’ It’s ‘wazungu.’” Letting Wells know exactly how much he didn’t know. “And no, he never got upset. Local nationals know the score. As a rule, they’re happy to have these jobs.”

  Wells wasn’t so sure. “He have a family?”

  “Married, two kids.”

  “They live in Dadaab.”

  “No. Nairobi, I’m not sure where. Suggs was Kenyan, not Somali. But he’d worked the camps long enough that he was connected inside.”

  “You met his wife?”

  “Not yet. I should.”

  “And you’ve talked to the other fixers and Suggs’s contacts in the camps?”

  “Moss and our security guys have talked to everyone who works for us. Nobody will admit to knowing anything. As for the camps, that’s harder. Our security guys don’t have any authority. It’s up to the police.”

  “And have the police had those interviews?”

  “If they have they haven’t told me.”

  “Doesn’t that bug you? They’ve been quick to put this on Shabaab.”

  “It disturbs me. It doesn’t necessarily surprise me. Kenya’s deeply corrupt and the police are what you’d expect. If not worse.”

  “They’re not Sherlock Holmes.”

  “They’re not even the Pink Panther.”

  “Okay, going back to the trip, your nephew specifically asked for Suggs to drive.”

  “That’s right. A few days before.”

  “Did Scott say whether he’d suggested the trip to Suggs or the other way around?”

  “It wasn’t clear. I think he phrased it like, ‘We want to go to Lamu next week. Suggs says he’ll drive if that’s cool with you.’ That’s how Scott talks. I said fine.”

  “Let me just detour for a second. Gwen and Hailey. They ever complain about problems with men in the camp, harassment, anything like that?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “Okay. So, in the days leading up to the trip, anything unusual happen?”

  “Not that I can think of. My publisher back home had sent me the final proofs for my book. I was spending time on those. And Paula, this reporter from Houston, was coming to visit, so I wanted to make sure everything was ready.”

  Wells barely stopped himself from saying something like: Sounds like you were very involved in feeding hungry kids.

  “I can guess what you’re thinking,” Thompson said. “But the Chronicle story was going to be important for fund-raising, and fund-raising matters. There’s a lot of good causes in the world. We don’t get our share of donations, we can’t do the work we want. I was happy to have Paula come, see our work. Naturally this was before the kidnapping. She set up the trip a couple months ago.”

  Wells wondered if Thompson had come to Kenya to be here when the reporter showed up. A hands-on chief executive instead of a guy calling the shots two continents away. But so what? Up close Thompson came off as slicker than Wells would have liked, but the truth was that WorldCares was a business, with employees all over the world.

  “Okay, the big day comes, they pile in the Land Cruiser, head out. You say good-bye?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t say good-bye to your own nephew?”

  For the first time, Thompson seemed slightly defensive. “I thought he’d be back by the end of the week.”

  “Then what happened?”

  Thompson went to the window, looked out into the Kenyan night. “They vanished. Into thin air, that’s the cliché, right? And true in this case. No emergency calls, emails, nothing. Scott told me that they were planning to go north to Dadaab, then west to Garissa and down, but I guess the Kenyan police had blocked the road north that morning, so they went south instead.”

  “Was that typical, the roadblock?”

  “Moss could tell you better, but I think so. Maybe once, twice a month. But the roadblocks don’t usually last long. Anyway, I don’t know why Suggs didn’t wait, but instead he decided to take this one-lane dirt track that goes maybe a hundred miles south and eventually hits another little track that runs east-west. If they’d taken that second road west, they would have linked up eventually with the main road to Mokowe. But they never got there. The police found the Cruiser on the first road, about ninety miles south of Dadaab.”
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br />   “In an abandoned village.”

  “Not exactly. When you get there, you’ll see. Eastern Kenya is mostly scrubland and watering holes. The settlements are a few houses each, extended families. The photos show a single hut nearby. Crumbling. Maybe somebody started to dig for water there and thought they had something and then it dried up.”

  “Any reason they would have been taken there?”

  “From what the cops showed me, the road turns in a way that makes it easy to block.”

  “And the car was just left there?”

  “Taken off the road, next to the hut. The police found it when they drove down the next day.”

  “Is there phone service down there?”

  “I think so. From what I’ve seen, even the most desolate parts of the scrub have at least some service.”

  “Did you know where they were staying?”

  “They were planning to pick a hotel after they reached the island. So, that afternoon, I was talking to the reporter and then, I’ll never forget, Jasper—our security guy—he came in, said he had to tell me something. Since then I just keep waiting for them to show up, like if I take a cold shower or chew off my tongue or something, they’ll walk right in.”

  Again, the answer felt canned to Wells. Thompson didn’t strike him as the type to fade into this-must-be-a-dream wish fulfillment. “I’m sorry. I know it’s late and I have just a few more questions. Have you talked to my old friends from Langley?”

  “At the embassy, after I was done talking to the State guys, a man who said his name was Gerald came in. He didn’t give me a card, just a phone number. I felt he was more or less telling me where he worked without saying it. He asked for numbers and email addresses for the volunteers and Suggs, too. He gave me an email address, told me to forward any ransom demands. Even if they didn’t seem real. He said they checked the satellites, too, but they didn’t have anything in the area that afternoon.”

  “Too bad. That would be the easiest way to track them. He get back to you?”

  “Not yet. Which kind of upsets me.”

  “It sounds like they’re running databases. They may not be able to do much more. I wouldn’t count on them having too many sources inside Shabaab, and if it’s a smaller group it’s even less likely. One last thing. Tell me about the ransom demands.”

  “All junk. Someone emails from a Kenyan email account asking for a million dollars to an account in Dubai. I ask for proof, I get a Photoshopped picture from the paper.”

  Wells took a final look around the suite. Two laptops sat on the coffee table beside a black leather wallet. A map of Kenya lay on the bedside table, along with two phones, a Samsung touchscreen and a cheap local handset like the ones Wells had bought.

  Then Wells realized. An international phone . . . a local handset . . . and at least one more mobile, the one in Thompson’s pocket. Three phones, if not more. Wells carried multiple handsets so he’d be harder to trace. What about Thompson?

  “You have a phone fetish,” he said. “Like me.”

  Thompson followed Wells’s gaze to the bedside table. “Local and international.”

  “Plus the one in your pocket.”

  “Oh yeah, I like to have two local carriers just in case.”

  “Sure. Can you give me all your numbers?”

  “Of course. And my emails too, the private and the public.” They traded numbers. Wells stuck out his hand. Thompson ignored it and enveloped him in a hug, his thick arms heavy on Wells’s back, palms moist through Wells’s shirt. “You think you can find them, John?”

  “I’ll do my best.” Wells extricated himself. He’d never been the hugging type.

  “And you’ll go up there tomorrow?”

  “Probably.”

  “I’m going to fly back in a couple days. I’ll see you up there.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  —

  Nearly three a.m. in Nairobi, seven p.m. in Langley. Back in his room, Wells called Shafer.

  “No rest for the wicked.”

  For a heartbeat, Wells found himself back on the couch at Castle House, his mouth on Christina’s.

  “John? You there?”

  “I have numbers and an email for the elves to trace.” He gave Shafer everything he’d gotten from Thompson.

  “And these belong to—”

  “The CEO of WorldCares.”

  “Getting conspiratorial in your old age.”

  “I just spent an hour-plus talking to the guy. He answered every question I had.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know. Probably nothing. He drinks.”

  “How much?”

  “A bottle of wine for dinner.” It didn’t sound that bad when Wells said it out loud.

  “Don’t be such a Muslim neo-Puritan.”

  “Forget the wine. Tell me why he has two local phones.”

  “I’ll do my best to find out. Maybe I’ll do a little bit of research into WorldCares, too. That press conference rated five hankies. I wanted to go over there my own self.”

  “You do, I’ll feed you to the lions.”

  “How Old Testament. I’ll call you after we run the numbers. Could be a day or two.”

  “Night, Ellis.”

  “An honest man’s pillow is his peace of mind.” Click.

  5

  LOWER JUBA REGION, SOMALIA,

  NEAR THE KENYA/SOMALIA BORDER

  Little Wizard knew about the hostages. Four wazungu and a fat Kenyan. They were over the border in Ijara District, north and east of Ijara town. Of course Little Wizard knew. He knew everything that happened in the lawless zone where Somalia met Kenya.

  Little Wizard was twenty years old. He’d been born Gutaale Muhammad, but no one called him that. Not since a firefight four years before in Mogadishu. Gutaale was at the point, leading a half-dozen other teenage soldiers. He was a scrap of a boy, wiry and strong, with light brown skin and tightly curled hair. They walked around a corner, past a burned-out building that had been a guesthouse for aid workers decades before, in happier times. Gutaale looked up to see a boy even younger than he was leaning out a second-floor window twenty meters away. The boy swung an AK out the window, shooting wildly. Not a boy, then. An enemy soldier. Gutaale was about to fire back when all the air went out of him. Like he’d fallen from the top of a high tree. A killing shot. He doubled over, went to his hands and knees. Blood trickled from his stomach, just below his ribs. A wrecked pickup truck lay five meters away. He dragged himself to it and lay halfway under it in dust and mud.

  He closed his eyes and listened to the pops of AK fire. Then the unmistakable whoosh of a rocket-propelled grenade. An explosion shook the truck above him, followed by a high-pitched scream. Waaberi, Gutaale’s best friend, always carried an RPG. Gutaale’s killer would die with him. The thought pleased him.

  The shooting and shouting went on awhile. Gutaale didn’t much care. He closed his eyes and listened. The noise seemed to be a long way off. Finally it stopped. His friends would surely come for him now.

  “Move on,” yelled Samatar, their nineteen-year-old commander.

  “Gutaale,” Waaberi said.

  “We can’t help him now. He’s gone. On the way back.”

  Their feet crunched as they walked past the truck. They turned a corner and the shooting started again, single shots at first, then longer bursts. Gutaale lay in the dust and waited. No doctors or hospitals for him, not even the room at the back of the mosque that served as an infirmary for wounded fighters. A few minutes more passed. The shooting moved away. And Gutaale realized something strange. He felt stronger.

  He crawled from under the truck, forced himself to his hands and knees. He raised his head over the side of the pickup. He was alone. Smoke billowed from the second-floor window where the boy who shot him had stood. Gutaale stumbled across the road and hid behind a pair of rusted oil drums. He breathed deep, feeling the burn in his belly. The bullet hole glowed pink in his brown-black skin
. He reached down for it, pushed the tip of his finger inside. As gently as if he were touching a woman. Still too hard. The muscles around the wound pulled back and the pain spiraled inside him. Foolish. He reached behind his back, found the exit wound just above his hip, the skin around it slick and wet. He put his fingers to it, careful this time. He found a trickle of blood, nothing more. Like water from the dried-out wells in Bay Region. He wasn’t sure how, but he sensed that the bullet had gone through him without hitting anything important. Not the heart or the lung or the other parts whose names he didn’t know.

  He would have to get the wounds stitched up. He would have to take the money hidden in his shoes to buy the special cream that kept them from getting infected. But he was sure he wouldn’t die. When boys were dying, their eyes rolled up. They soiled themselves and screamed. They couldn’t talk or stand. The fear settled into their eyes and then it left and then they died. Not everyone who died had all those things, but everyone had some. He had none. He was going to live.

  The bullet had come and his body had rejected it, pushed it aside. Like he was metal and it was flesh instead of the other way around. Gutaale remembered a movie called Terminator about a man who was a robot. But he wasn’t a robot. He was hungry and thirsty like other boys. He wanted women like other boys. So he was better than a robot, he was a man with a robot’s strength. He was a wizard. He brought his fingers to his lips and kissed them and tasted his wizard blood.

  A minute later, his friends came back around the corner, their heads hanging. Gutaale wondered if they were sad, sad he’d died. He ducked behind the oil drums and waited. They could have spotted him, but they were looking for a corpse, not a living boy. Not a wizard.

  “Gutaale,” Waaberi said.

  “His own doing,” Samatar said. “He danced around, dared them to shoot. Like no one could hurt him.”

  The wizard—for Gutaale already thought of himself that way—didn’t remember dancing or daring anyone. No matter. Samatar was more right than he knew. No one can hurt me.

  “He fought the best of all of us,” Waaberi said.