“Not a bad idea, Peter. Not a bad idea at all. There is this African proverb—God helps those who help themselves. Yes, give them my address. The dinner begins at six. Can they come around seven? That will give them enough time to clean the cars and dry them before the guests depart at eight thirty. Make sure they are on white-people time and not African time. And what are their rates?” Sahara asked.
“I don’t know—something reasonable, I’m sure,” Peter said.
“I like to help but I don’t like to get ripped off,” Sahara said, sounding like a concerned businessman.
“Where are they from? If it’s Nigeria or Kenya, forget it,” he added, now laughing again.
“You’re in luck—they are from Ghana—they appear to be trustworthy,” Peter said, laughing along nervously.
We had a whole day tomorrow before we were going to head over to Sahara’s. We couldn’t leave Peter alone. We would have to trust him to go to the airport alone, because it was too risky to go with him. But it was one thing to leave him alone for two hours and another to let him have a whole day to cook up other schemes. But we also couldn’t take him to Michael’s and expose our base. So we decided to stay put. We sat around drinking the remaining Tuskers. And then we tied up and gagged a protesting Peter when it was time to sleep.
Helen’s call woke me up at 7:00. As I stepped into the kitchen, everyone stirred awake.
“The names of the guests, yeah, I found something and it doesn’t make sense. These names are so fucking random. Ansfrid Godfrey, a former grants advisor for the Norwegian government, Bruce Jackson teaches African history and Kiswahili at Ohio University—he used to be Jimmy Carter’s press secretary—and Dan Gordon is Bob Geldof’s manager, you know Geldof?” Helen asked me.
“Yeah, the Live Aid guy,” I answered.
“The fourth guy, Martin Kimani, he is an assistant manager at Kenya’s Pineapple Growing and Canning Company—he worked for a year as Moi’s special advisor before resigning,” she said.
His resignation from the government of Daniel Arap Moi—the dictator who’d ruled Kenya from 1978 to 2002—alone made him seem like a nice guy. If it weren’t for his association with Sahara, he was the kind of man you wouldn’t give a second look to—the kind that made money quietly, dignity intact because he didn’t grovel for contracts.
Now, I knew a bit about the Pineapple Canning Company because poor kids sometimes sneaked through the barbed wire to steal the fruit, and once in a while a Alsatian guard dog would maul one of them to death. It would make the news, but of course no prosecutions ever followed.
“How did you find out who they are?” I asked her, wondering what connected them.
“A girl has to have her secrets …” she said, laughing. “But I’ll give you a hint. I peeked into a few international criminal databases—Interpol, you know—found nothing. Then I tracked their names by nationality and peeked into the intelligence databases and bingo. These guys are listed only because of who and what they work for. They are nobodies, the paper-pushers, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, but they do have something in common—an interest in Africa, if we add Sahara,” I said.
“But Africa is huge, think about it—it’s like saying we have a common interest in Europe, China, and the United States combined. Remember what Sahara told you about Africa not being a country?” she said. “We need more names. We can establish a pattern that way.”
“Tonight—I will get you more,” I said. We would have access to car registrations.
“And I have the addresses you asked for,” she said. She hung up and texted me the addresses. Now that we knew where Sahara was, I was interested only in where Amos had lived. We would get Sahara tonight, and then I would be able to tell Amos’s parents not only what had happened to their son, but that justice had been served.
Peter left to start his airport pick-ups at 3:00 and we headed back to Michael’s to brief Julio and the teacher. We had to trust Peter, or at least hope that between us instilling fear in him and his wanting to break free from Sahara, he wouldn’t betray us. And we needed to start making travel arrangements to get back home, once again going through Mexico before flying out to Nairobi. Things would be happening fast now. This was good for O, for all of us—no downtime meant no time to remember.
Around 5:00 p.m., there was a knock on the door. It was Mo, and seeing her brought back memories of Madison and the realization of just how desperate I was to see my parents, my friends, even my ex-wife. We hugged and, leaning against me, she said hello to everyone else. Mo hadn’t changed—beautiful, talkative—a mixed-race bohemian, as Muddy had once described her.
The first and last time they had met was in Rwanda, when we went to bury the white girl, at the end of the first case O and I worked on together. Without Mo, O and I wouldn’t have survived the case—we would have been killed and the truth buried with us. Mo’s exposé and the media coverage that followed saved our lives. We needed her once again. We briefed her about Amos, the bomb, Mary—and how and why we were in the United States illegally. We would know more after tonight, we promised. The thing about Mo was that she had energy, and soon she had us feeling like we were bouncing off the walls.
“I see another Pulitzer on the horizon,” Mo said when we were done. “Well, my friends, this is what we can do. Bring the story out in installments. We start with the bomb explosion, Sahara and his men, the death of O’s wife, Al Qaeda and the Somalis as a cover. That is the first part—I can have that ready to go in a day but I assume you want to be back in Kenya before I run it. The second part—let’s see what you come up with first, but most of it should be about the things you’ve uncovered. And the last installment will be about closing the case,” she said, gesturing busily with her hands to show us how the coverage would play out.
Once her story ran, our being on the terror list would become a non-issue, but we needed to be out of the U.S. If it came down to it, the Kenyan government, or whatever was left of it by the time we got back, would be careful about giving up its citizens to the U.S. And if some bounty hunters decided we were worth capturing or killing for some people somewhere, we would be on even ground.
It was time to go. Julio was too valuable to come with us. If something happened to him … he was our ticket through Mexico. In any case, we couldn’t explain a Mexican in an African crew, so we had to leave the teacher behind as well. We put on the blue Ninja Cleaners hats and overalls—they compensated for how they looked by being good for concealing weapons and vests.
“Better hot and safe than cool and dead, huh?” Mo said, after I complained about how hot I felt.
CHAPTER 14
FINDING SAHARA
In the dry near-desert climate of California, Sahara lived in an oasis, or more precisely, an orchard. Off the main road and onto a rocky path, a mile or so from the highway, we suddenly came to a plantation of windmills. There were rows and rows of avocados, oranges, bananas, and pineapples growing in the imported black soil. We drove through the tangy smell of citrus until we came to a gate with two armed guards. In Kenya, they would have seemed ordinary enough, but in the U.S. armed guards at a residence called attention to either how dangerous or how important Sahara was.
They stopped us and looked into the van.
“Ninja Cleaners, huh! But you aren’t Japanese,” one of them observed dryly before making a call and waving us through.
As we went up the driveway, we saw Peter coming out of the house to meet us. The dinner meeting had been going on for an hour, and he had been hanging out in the kitchen waiting for us.
So far we had seen only the two armed guards at the gate. Peter had seen another two men in the house who looked like ex-military to him. Assuming he was correct, that made four. We had no ears in the house, no intelligence collected over months of tailing the suspect, no long-term informant attached to the man. We just knew that Sahara was in that house with ten guests and probably four armed men to protect him.
Understa
nding who he was and how much time he had spent in Africa, we assumed that he would insist on meeting us before paying us. There would be no sense of completion for him if he just gave the money to Peter. It was one of those things that can’t be explained unless you have lived in Africa for a long time. There is a personal touch in most interactions and a need for closure.
If you buy something from a store, it’s normal to stay an extra minute and chitchat about this or that, or complain or laugh with the seller and the other customers. This was something that had rubbed off on me without my realizing it, until I came across fellow Americans who just seemed gruff and abrupt. Sahara would have lived long enough in Africa to be infected with this particular strain of African hospitality. That’s when we would grab him.
There were five Porsches and Benzes to clean. Peter rolled a hose down the long driveway as we unloaded our new equipment: handheld vacuum cleaners, non-scratch pads, polish, buckets, and Armor All car wash. I moved from car to car, vacuuming, as O and Muddy wiped the insides. Then Muddy hosed the outsides, while O and I scrubbed, rinsed, and gave them a shine. I was also busy with something else: gathering the plates and registration papers. Under normal circumstances, cigarette butts and napkins for DNA and fingerprints off the GPS screens would have been gold, but without a lab, we had to work with a bare minimum.
The names—again, none of them were familiar to us. I texted them to Helen and she soon texted back a collection of the same kind of random details as she’d sent before. There were twelve men meeting with Sahara. Four of them we knew about already. The other five had also worked for powerful people: Thatcher’s office manager, Reagan’s personal assistant, Clinton’s onetime legal advisor, Kofi Annan’s special advisor, and an assistant managing director of the Mandela Foundation. Another three were associated with the IMF, the World Bank, and the U.S. Endowment for Democracy.
“So we have these guys, all connected to powerful people or formerly powerful people, meeting with Sahara. We know Sahara planted the bomb in the Norfolk. We know he scouted other locations in Kenya, but we didn’t find anything. Yet he wanted to stop our investigation. So he wasn’t done yet. There’s gotta be more—Norfolk was just a beginning,” O said as we quickly converged on one car.
We were talking and interacting normally, as people who made a living together would—trying to whisper and hand each other notes would simply look suspicious. If Sahara knew we were here, we would have to wait until he made his move. And if he didn’t, there was no way in hell he would expect us to be out in his driveway washing cars.
“Yeah, but we also have Jason and Peter with two different agendas. Jason wants Sahara found, but Peter wants to continue the Al Qaeda campaign. Depending on who’s in charge, we were brought in because we weren’t expected to go far, or because we were expected to go all the way,” I said, to add to the confusion.
“The key is the men meeting in Sahara’s house. We find what connects them, we find out what is happening,” Muddy said, sounding like a seasoned detective.
“Shit, guys, could fucking Mandela and Tutu and the rest of the do-gooders be planting bombs in Nairobi?” O voiced what we were all thinking. We had to laugh out loud.
“Or Jimmy Carter?” I said.
“It doesn’t make any sense—Reagan, dead and a conservative, Thatcher, conservative, and Carter and Mandela are liberals—some might even say revolutionary. What could possibly bring them together?” Muddy asked.
“There are several possible scenarios here, right? It could be these guys are fronting for others—you know, using the offices of the do-gooders—a few using the rest. It could be a recruitment party. We don’t know. But we can be sure no good is coming out of whatever this is,” I said, even though it didn’t quite make sense to me.
My phone buzzed. It was Helen on the other end and she was excited—she had something for us.
“Two things: am I a genius or a genius? Carter, Mandela, and Tutu all belong to the same organization—the Elders, you know it—moral influence to shape a world gone rogue. Oh yeah, and ‘cigar in Monica Lewinsky’s you know what’ Smoking Bill Clinton is also associated with it. The four of your men who worked for Reagan, Thatcher, the IMF, and the World Bank—they are all board members of an organization called International Democracy and Economic Security Council, or IDESC,” she said.
“What does IDESC do?” I asked her.
“They promote international democracy and economic security,” she said with a laugh. “No dirt on them from anywhere.” She hung up and texted me the address of the IDESC office. It was in Oakland.
I conveyed the info to O and Muddy.
“If our friends here weren’t meeting with Sahara, they would just be another group of people trying to save the world,” Muddy said.
O started laughing so hard that we joined him without knowing why.
“What was the South African’s name? The guy working for the Mandela Foundation?” he asked, barely able to speak.
“Jack Mpande,” I said as I looked at the text from Helen again. Even before he said it, I flashed back to the Norfolk and I was putting out my hand to greet Jack Mpande.
“Shit! They were trying to kill him—like they did with Amos. Jack Mpande—he was about to do something they didn’t want. No one would have tied his death to anything. That’s why the motherfucker isn’t here. We get Sahara and then we go back and find Jack,” I said, starting to feel the end of what I could not yet completely define.
“Think he might be back in S.A.?” O asked.
“You better make the call,” Muddy said to him.
O called Hassan, explained the situation briefly, and asked him to hold Mpande. The chief didn’t ask where we were, or if we had proof. He simply said he would find him if he was still in the country.
“For now, Sahara is our man,” O said. We agreed.
The cars didn’t need any more cleaning—this really was charity work—but we went over them again as if they did. Finally, when we’d killed enough time, Peter came and called us inside to eat. In the sprawling kitchen, the size of his apartment, we found elaborate dishes of joll of rice, peanut stew, some kind of fish, and Heinekens.
We didn’t eat. Sahara was too dangerous and we had come in blind—we didn’t want to risk getting caught off-guard. Then Peter left to drive some of the guests back to their hotel. Soon after the expensive engines roared off a tall white man with a crew cut called us to the sitting room to meet Sahara.
“He’s very happy with the job you’ve done—he would love it if this became a regular thing,” the man said to us in a booming voice.
“We try,” Muddy said, as we wound up a long passageway. At last we came to a massive sitting room.
“Where is our employer?” Muddy asked, sounding as African as I had ever heard her.
“Oh, he’s waiting to see you in the office,” the man boomed back. “Mr. Delaware would like to know how much he owes you.”
“Fifteen dollars per car,” O answered.
I was trying not to speak—it would have been hard to hide my American accent behind a fake Kenyan accent.
“Mr. Delaware will like the price. You know, he will be happy to see some Kenyans making something of themselves. If I was you, I would double the price—this is America,” the man advised as he reached for the double doors.
Without any warning, O kicked the man through the double doors so that they swung wide open and shot him in the back of the head. As I wondered what the fuck was going on, O rolled onto the floor into the office, got on one knee, and let out two shots in quick succession. Muddy took cover behind the wall, looked in once and then again, and let out a single shot. It had taken less than five seconds. I still hadn’t gone for my weapon. By the time I made it in, four men were lying on the floor. Three of them were dead. The man Muddy shot was one of the guards who’d been at the gate, and he was bleeding from a bullet to the stomach.
“Where is Delaware? Tell me where he is and we will call you an am
bulance,” O said. Mary’s death seemed to have made O more reasonable, more willing to let motherfuckers live. But I knew differently—he was so determined to get Sahara and avenge Mary’s death that he was willing to make concessions that just a few weeks ago he wouldn’t have made. And for me, who knew O, that made him all the more dangerous in the long term.
“He left, he is gone … I don’t know … please, I don’t want to die,” the man said, staring at the blood pooling on the floor.
Using a letter opener from the desk, Muddy tore off a sleeve from one of the dead men and gave it to the guard.
“Press hard,” she instructed him.
“Someone warned him—soon after the meeting—someone called him … told him who you were,” the guard said, now looking a little more convinced that we might let him live.
“Did he take anything with him?” I asked.
“A small suitcase and his laptop … you gotta call now,” he pleaded.
“How were you going to get in touch with him?”
He pointed to the man with the booming voice, dead on the floor.
“He was supposed to call,” the guard said.
I went over to the dead man and retrieved his phone. I didn’t have to go far through his contacts before getting to an entry with the name Big Chief. In the meantime, O and Muddy were rummaging through Sahara’s desk, looking for anything that might be useful.
“Call him—tell him we are all dead—you were the only one who survived. The faster you get off the phone, the sooner we call 911,” I told him.
“Mr. Delaware, they are all dead, all of them,” he shouted desperately into the phone. “The car washers—my friends, all of them are dead …”
“Calm down … they are all dead?” we heard Sahara ask in disbelief.
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