Night of Knives

by Jon Evans

  Veronica opens her mouth and shuts it again. She can't believe she's hearing this, especially not here in this surreal place. She feels like she's in a movie, like some director is about to shout Cut!

  Jacob says, "You mean Strick?"

  "No. Strick is many shitty things, but on the take is not one of them. He's an asshole but a clean one. All God and country and ramrod up his ass. No, it's gotta be some shark in a suit further up the food chain. Someone in Kampala, in the embassy. That's all I can tell you, I don't have any names." He looks at Veronica. "But you had one for me, didn't you? Danton DeWitt."

  "Danton's not in the CIA," she says shrilly. "This is ridiculous."

  "No. He'd be the outside partner. I looked him up today. Commodities trader, right? Legal smuggler, in other words. With lots of holier-than-thou charitable interests in this here dark continent, right? And an Old Rhodey mother? Makes sense to me."

  "No," she insists. "Danton's not … he's a selfish prick, but he's not evil. He wouldn't have worked with monsters like that. No. It's not possible."

  "I bet he didn't know," Prester says softly. "That's how it works around here. You don't ask where the diamonds and the gold and the coltan and the timber came from. You don't ask where your good buddy got all those dollars, or why he needs all those guns and pangas and whips. You don't ask how many slaves died and how many women got raped and how many children got press-ganged. You don't want to know."

  Veronica shakes her head. "No. I still don't believe it. Danton wouldn't get involved with this."

  "Yeah? You think he's too goody two shoes? That surprises me. His daddy made all the money, didn't he? I've met lots of spoiled rich kids, and none of them ever struck me as particularly lawful good."

  "No. You don't understand. Danton wouldn't do it because he'd think it was beneath him. He already has money. What he wants is to be a big shot. Smuggling gold or whatever in Africa would be too small-time for him. Too pathetic."

  A moment of silence hangs over the apocalyptic wasteland.

  Then Jacob says to Prester, intently, "What else do you know?"

  Prester shrugs. "That's all I got. The good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Derek. He kept his whole life close to his vest."

  "So what do you expect us to do now?" Veronica demands.

  "Do? Nothing. Quite the opposite. The whole reason I'm telling you this is to keep you out of trouble. I heard you talking earlier, on the patio. I'm warning you. Don't do it. Don't go poking around wondering what happened to him, or what your ex-husband was up to. Not even when you get back home, and definitely not here. This cover-up added up to at least six corpses already. Once you've gone that far it's real easy to add two more. And you ask me, our terrorist friends are far from finished. You know what was in the phone that British girl picked up in their camp? Cell-phone numbers for two hundred Western NGO workers in Congo and west Uganda."

  Jacob sucks in breath sharply.

  "Yeah. We figure they were going to try to lure them into ambushes, capture more hostages. We should be able to stop that, but I expect they've still got plenty up those long sleeves. So you go home. Leave the intelligence to the professionals, be glad you've still got your heads on your shoulders, and don't go asking anyone any awkward questions. You are way out of your league here. Clear?"

  Neither Jacob nor Veronica answers.

  "I'm sorry. He was a good man. He loved Africa. And not in that let's-fix-it way most white folks get when they come here. He loved it for what it is. More than I can say." He takes one last look around the lava field. "Come on, let's head back. Be dark soon. Strick's made arrangements for you both to fly out tomorrow, collect your shit in Kampala, then fly back to New York. First class, on the government dime. Enjoy the ride. I figure you've earned it."

  * * *

  Veronica can't sleep. Partly because she can't find any position that doesn't aggravate one or more of her blisters and bruises and wounds. Mostly because she can't stop thinking.

  Veronica knows she should go home. It is the right thing to do, the safe thing. The idea of staying is crazy. She can be on an airplane out of Africa tomorrow. But an airplane to where? She has no idea where home is any more. The black hole that was her marriage consumed her career and most of her friends. The whole point of coming to Africa in the first place was to forge a whole new life for herself.

  Eventually she gets up and goes for a walk, makes her way down the walkway to the patio, careless of the pains that stab through her feet. A warm breeze wafts through the night air. Occasional airplanes groan along the flight path directly above the hotel. To the north, a livid crimson glow hangs in the night sky, emanating from the summit of volcanic Mount Nyiragongo; red light burning from a sea of molten rock seething within an open crater. Prester was right when he called it Mount Doom.

  She supposes she should feel miserable. She's gone through unspeakable horror, been wounded and traumatized, and now she's supposed to abandon her new life. But standing here, in this surreal, cinematic place, breathing the night air of Africa, Veronica feels strangely jubilant. She came so close to death that every breath now seems a precious gift. She feels as if some kind of shell has been burnt away from her, leaving her lighter and freer, even younger. The downward spiral of her life during the last year, the divorce, her return to relative poverty, her inability to cope with life in Africa – these things all seem so trivial now. She's young and healthy and alive. That's all that matters. Not a divorce from a man she never really loved.

  Danton. Derek thought, and Prester thinks, that her ex-husband was somehow involved in her abduction; that he was the partner of a corrupt American intelligence agent in the Uganda embassy who knew that the interahamwe smugglers were harbouring Islamic terrorists, and who ordered the capture and murder of Derek, and anyone unlucky enough to be with him in Bwindi, before Derek discovered too much. But the more Veronica thinks about that theory, the more it sounds both crazy and wrong. There's just no way Danton would have been involved in anything like that. Either Derek was just plain wrong about Danton - or there's something else entirely going on here. But what could that possibly be?

  She shakes her head angrily. It shouldn't matter what Danton is doing. He's not supposed to be part of her life any more. Seven years of her life wasted, and now these seven days of horror, and the awful death of a man she could have fallen in love with. Except it seems even Derek was only interested in her because she was Danton's ex-wife. It feels like that's all she will ever be for the rest of her life. Especially if she goes back to America.

  Veronica can't think of any reason to go back to America. There's nothing waiting for her there. It would feel like surrender. She came to Africa to reinvent herself. Just because she went through one awful week of torment doesn't mean she has to abandon that dream and go home to whatever squalid life awaits her in America. She can stay here now, she's sure of it. Life in Kampala will be a breeze after this week. She's taken the worst Africa can throw at her, and she's still standing. She doesn't have to give up now just because everybody assumes she will. That's just another reason not to go.

  * * *

  The sun has not yet risen over Rwanda when Jacob and Veronica arrive at the helipad just outside peacekeeping headquarters. Strick shakes their hands goodbye while the bored-looking Indian UN soldier inspects their orders.

  "Don't take this the wrong way," Strick says, "but I don't ever want to see either of you again. Go home and don't come back."

  He turns and walks away before they can respond. The Indian officer hands them back their paperwork. Veronica was surprised to receive actual military orders, on an A4 sheet with her name and new passport numbers printed beneath official UN and MONUC logos, along an official UN boarding pass, a brand-new passport good for one year, a first-class British Airways ticket from Kampala to JFK via Heathrow, and five new twenty-dollar bills in an envelope labelled "per diem."

  "Wait," the Indian soldier says, and directs them to a gaggle
of troops, all of them Indian too, sitting crosslegged in the shade of the nearest big white helicopter. Jacob and Veronica join them. Strick drives away in his Jeep. Two soldiers in a blue beret appear with a plastic bag full of still-warm chapatis and a samovar full of sweet Indian chai. They eat and drink gratefully. The soldiers look at them sidelong but do not otherwise interact with them. Veronica supposes she and Jacob must look somewhat grotesque; her head is still bandaged, and they are both moving stiffly and covered by scabbed-over cuts and scrapes.

  Eventually an officer stands and begins to bark loud orders in Hindi. The Indian peacekeepers climb in and begin to strap themselves into the fold-down seats around its cargo area. After a few confused moments Veronica and Jacob join them. The seats are surprisingly comfortable. The cargo space is full of all manner of boxes, crates, and bags, enough for a small truck, all tied down with netting. There are about forty passengers. Only a few seats are left folded up and unoccupied.

  "I wish we could have said goodbye," Veronica says. They tried, but Tom, Judy and Susan were still under sedation.

  Jacob nods.

  "Are you going back to Canada?"

  "No."

  "I'm not going back either."

  He looks at her, surprised. "Why not?"

  "Because I don't want to."

  Jacob doesn't say anything.

  "Are you still going to try to find out who did it? After what Prester said?"

  He says, simply, "Yes."

  The pilots are the last to board. Doors are closed, interior lights come on, the engine shudders into life, and the big chopper's two rotors begin to spin. A peacekeeper gives Veronica and Jacob earplugs. Even with them it is soon too loud to think. The rotor above them becomes a translucent blur.

  The world wobbles for a moment, and then the ground falls away. Veronica's stomach lurches, but after the first few dizzying moments, the flight is surprisingly stable. The sides of the helicopter are open and she can see Goma to the north, divided by the jet-black lava field that snakes in an unbroken line up to smoldering Mount Nyiragongo. On the other side lies placid Lake Kivu. Veronica thinks of what Prester said about the tons of lethal gases trapped in that lake, how it too is a killer. She is glad to be leaving. She reaches out and takes Jacob's hand, and he squeezes hers comfortingly.

  They fly north, between two of the spectacularly jagged Virunga peaks, and over a sea of rolling hills. At one point they pass right over a particularly deep and dense patch of green, and Veronica sucks in breath sharply. Beyond the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest a red lacework of roads begins. The helicopter continues east above the roads and emerald hills of Southern Uganda, and then across the huge blue expanse of Lake Victoria, so vast that water is all they can see in every direction for some time. It takes them about an hour to reach Entebbe.

  Kampala's airport is an enormous field of tarmac dotted by buildings, airplanes, and vehicles. They land on the military side of the airfield, and the helicopter powers down. The soldiers allow Veronica and Jacob to disembark first. Strick told them that a Jeep would take them to customs and then Kampala, but nobody seems to be waiting for them.

  "Military efficiency," Jacob mutters. "Hurry up and wait."

  They sit in the shadow of the huge helicopter and watch their fellow-passengers file across the tarmac to one of the long, low buildings on the periphery. Peacekeepers walk and drive up to and around the helicopter, load and unload cargo. They hear the white-noise scream of a jet taking off on the other side of a huge hangar. Veronica feels like an ant who has found her way into the innards of some vast and incomprehensible machine.

  At length she says to Jacob, "Listen. I don't think you should get any more involved in this." She knows he doesn't want to hear it, but feels like she has to try. "Prester was right. It's too dangerous. You're not, you're not trained for this. Think about it. I mean, rationally. You're an engineer. All this crazy stuff, spies, Al-Qaeda, smugglers, war criminals, genocidal killers - I mean, no offense, but honestly, Jacob, what do you think you can really do except get yourself in more trouble?"

  He smiles darkly. "More than you might expect."

  It sounds like empty bravado. Veronica shakes her head and looks away.

  "More than anyone expects, now that Derek's gone."

  She blinks and turns back. "What do you mean?"

  Jacob says, "I mean there's a reason Derek asked me to come to Uganda. Just like there was a reason he invited you to Bwindi. I'm not here just because he wanted my smiling face around. I'm here because he knew what I can do."

  "What can you do?" Veronica asks, curious despite herself.

  A Humvee pulls up beside them, driven by an Asian man, maybe Filipino, in a military uniform.

  "Tell you what," Jacob says. "Come by my place sometime and I'll show you."

  Part 2

  Uganda

  Chapter 14

  Veronica wakes to clammy heat. The power has gone out, the balky generator in the basement has once again failed to automatically kick in, and the ancient air conditioner set in the window beside her mahogany bed is silent. Kampala is a kilometre above sea level, but it's right on the equator, and the mid-morning heat and humidity are oppressive. Her sheets are damp with sweat.

  She feels enervated, all she wants to do is lie where she is, but she makes herself stand up and walk to her bathroom. The floorboards creak beneath her feet. It has been five days since her return to Kampala, but her legs are still wobbly, and when she looks in the mirror her body is still covered by purple and yellow bruises. At least the cuts and scrapes on her face have diminished from scabs to blemishes.

  She brushes her teeth with bottled water and cools down with a quick shower. When she emerges she feels much better, almost good enough to go into work, but Veronica decides against it. Maybe tomorrow, for half a day. Maybe not until her face is fully healed. Bernard told her she could have as much time off as she wanted.

  Bernard also told her that journalists have been calling for her, and a British tabloid has actually offered money for her story. The notion repulses Veronica. It would feel like blood money, and people who pay for a story will tell lies to make it better. The offer wasn't even for very much. She supposes the gory details are already available on YouTube for free, and besides, most Westerners don't much care about anything that happened in Africa.

  Downstairs the maid is mopping the kitchen's tiled floor. Veronica can never remember her name. The maid smiles but keeps a respectful distance as Veronica starts the generator, makes coffee, takes some bread from the bridge, and goes out to the verandah. Their askari gate-guard waves at her, and she waves back. At least the servants are treating her normally again. Her housemates have reacted to her return with awkward and increasing discomfort, as if Veronica might have contracted some hideous and hyper-contagious disease in the Congo, become a carrier of Ebola virus. Twice she has walked into the living room and caught Belinda, Diane and Linda speaking in whispers.

  Veronica sees a huge marabou stork standing by the hedges in the corner of the property, feeding on something. Kampala is infested by hundreds of these storks, carrion eaters with eight-foot wingspans and sharp beaks the size of meat cleavers, standing on spindly legs to nearly half Veronica's height. Their scab-encrusted heads and the huge gullets of pink flesh that dangled from their throats make them look obscenely diseased, like pigeons grown to gargantuan proportions by a mad scientist who didn't care about cancerous side effects. But they keep Kampala relatively free of refuse. Like those birds that clean crocodiles' teeth. Veronica has a sudden image of a dozen marabou storks feeding on Derek's headless corpse, and turns away.

  After breakfast she lights a cigarette and considers the day ahead. The heat makes her weak and listless. Maybe she will just sit in the house and watch satellite TV all day, again. She feels like she should go somewhere, do something; but the idea of arranging for a driver seems hideously complex and oppressive, and their house is too far from any destination to walk, at least in her
current condition. Maybe she could walk to Makerere University, but there's really nothing there to do, and everyone will stare at her.

  Veronica returns to the living room, switches the television on, and turns up the volume to drown out the generator. She channel-surfs between CNN and BBC World for some time, paying little attention until she flips to CNN and sees the graphic behind the news anchor has changed to a picture of Osama bin Laden inside the outline of the African continent. The caption says: AL-QAEDA IN AFRICA.

  "Last week's Congo hostagetaking may have been only the opening skirmish in a new front on the war on terror," the pretty Asian woman says. "Several jihadist web sites have reported that Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network has claimed responsibility for the attacks. Meanwhile, American special forces, aided by Zimbabwean soldiers, are in hot pursuit of the terrorist leaders who escaped last week's dramatic rescue of five Western hostages. Three other hostages were murdered before the rescue. CNN today has an exclusive interview with General Gideon Gorokwe, the Zimbabwean general who commands the allied force. Nigel Dickinson has the story."

  The picture cuts to two men in comfortable chairs. One is a grizzled, ponytailed white man in khaki, the other, presumably General Gorokwe, is built like a heavyweight boxer and dressed in an expensive suit. He looks relaxed and comfortable. The décor behind them is blandly expensive, like a room in a luxury hotel.

  "This is General Gideon Gorokwe," the white man says to the camera. His accent is British. "A general in the Zimbabwe army whose soldiers have been based in the Congo for years. Last week, after Al-Qaeda kidnapped eight Western hostages and took them into the Congo, General Gorokwe volunteered to help American forces track them down, and his soldiers were instrumental in their rescue. He did this even though General Gorokwe, like all senior Zimbabwe government and military figures, is under American sanctions that specifically prevent him from travelling to or trading with America or Europe. General, let me just begin with some background. Our viewers may be wondering, why exactly are your soldiers in the Congo in the first place, a thousand miles away from home?"