Night of Knives

by Jon Evans

  "Of course, Nigel, and thank you for this opportunity," Gorokwe says with a smile. His voice is warm and powerful, his mild accent almost aristocratic. "As your know, the Congo has been wracked by civil strife for many years. We came here as peacekeepers."

  "You volunteered your soldiers to help America fight Al-Qaeda even though you personally are specifically targeted by American and European sanctions. That's a surprising decision. Could you explain your reasons?"

  "I would hope the reasons are obvious." Gorokwe seems slightly surprised. "It's true my country has been the victim of American and European sanctions, but the fight against terror is everyone's fight around the world, far more important than whatever differences we may have. I see it as my moral duty to help America in this war. And I personally hope also to show Americans that Zimbabwe is not your enemy and these sanctions are the result of a misunderstanding. I studied in America, at the University of Michigan. I admire America. I am a friend to America. And I truly believe Zimbabwe and America can be great friends as well."

  "What does your President Mugabe think about all this? He has repeatedly condemned America in his speeches."

  Gorokwe's face clouds slightly. "I have not yet consulted with him. He's presently away at a summit in China, and my command here is quite independent. But I'm sure he would agree that we cannot allow the scourge of Islamic terror to spread into Africa."

  "Thank you, General. For CNN, this is Nigel Dickinson."

  Veronica wants the interview to continue, she'd like to hear more from the man who was so instrumental in her rescue, but CNN switches back to the anchor desk and a new story about military deaths in Iraq. Restless, Veronica turns off the television and wanders back out to the verandah.

  Veronica wonders if staying in Kampala was such a good idea after all. She feels like her Congo ordeal should have been followed by ceremonies, press conferences, ticker-tape parades. Maybe it would have been, if she had flown back to America. She could have been a guest on morning shows and Larry King, big-name newspapers would have hounded her for interviews, she might have had to hire a press agent. America loves its victim-survivors. And she's still wounded. Her cuts have scabbed over but there's plenty still wrong with her. Surely what she needs most right now is rest and recuperation, a long vacation in a secure, comfortable place.

  No: what she really needs is a time machine. A giant REWIND button for her own life. She would go back a long way, if she had one. Eight years. It would be so good to be twenty-four again, to live as if life was an adventure and the world her playground, to live fearlessly, as if she had forever in which to undo whatever mistakes she might make. When she was twenty-four Veronica believed it was better to regret something you had done than something you hadn't. Now she knows better.

  She was a better person when she was twenty-four. Hard to admit but true. Not just tougher, but also kinder, more forgiving. Then for seven years Veronica spent money without knowing or caring where it came from, had her bed made and most of her meals prepared by servants, lived in a world where inconveniences are outsourced. It made her lazier, weaker, more selfish, less understanding, shade by incremental shade. She didn't even notice it happening until she was suddenly expelled from that world. Now when she looks at herself she hardly sees the girl she used to be at all. Though maybe she's come back a little in the last two weeks. Maybe that's the only good thing to have come out of the Congo.

  When she was twenty-four the world seemed so full of opportunity, a cornucopia of possibilities. Now Veronica feels like she only has one or two chances left to get her life right. If Africa doesn't work out, she doesn't know what she'll do. She supposes that's why Derek made such an impression on her, even though she hardly knew him. It wasn't just that he was dashing and handsome, there was something about him that hinted at an opportunity to get things right at last, some fairytale notion of falling in love, for real this time, and living happily ever after.

  Her cell phone rings. She looks at it, doesn't recognize the number, answers.

  "Veronica? How are you?"

  "Oh, hi," she says, surprised, recognizing Jacob's faintly nasal voice. "Fine. You?"

  "Pretty good. You busy?"

  "Not really."

  "Want to come over? I've got something you might be interested in."

  She hesitates, not sure if she wants to see Jacob and be reminded of Derek. "I'm kind of stranded today. No driver."

  "No problem. I'll send mine."

  After a pause she says, "OK. Sure." She can't hide in her house forever.

  Jacob's driver is a quiet, bespectacled middle-aged man with a pot belly named Henry. His vehicle is a sightly dented but clean Toyota. Veronica wishes she had a driver of her own. During her marriage she travelled everywhere in luxury automobiles. Danton had a Jaguar and a chauffeur, a Ferrari, a Lamborghini. He loved driving hyperpowered sports cars, and so did she, it was one of the few things they had in common.

  Their route takes them through downtown Kampala's densely packed warren of shops, hotels, banks and government buildings, all perched on the most central of the city's seven hills. The Sheraton Hotel looms atop this hill. On the other side of downtown they pass the concrete-walled complex of the US Embassy: the workplace, if Prester was right, of the person ultimately responsible for what happened to them in the Congo, a traitor conspiring with terrorists for his or her own gain.

  Then along the Jinja highway and through the vast shantytown that surrounds Kampala, thousands of tiny, misshapen wooden huts leaning drunkenly on one another, their tin roofs patched with garbage bags and weighed down by rocks. Children play soccer on narrow, uneven dirt roads, women sell food from cloths laid out on the muddy ground, men sit or lean in the shade, doing nothing, as if waiting for a messiah to come. When Veronica first came here it seemed an abyss of misery, but witnessing the Congo's real wretchedness has opened her eyes to its merits. Most shantytown inhabitants do not live in interminable suffering. Some do - refugees, AIDS orphans - but most are just poor. Very poor, desperately poor, and with little hope of ever being wealthier, but it's still much better than life in the Congo.

  The New City complex stands on a hill above the shantytown like a mirage in a desert. Henry continues past this gleaming, modern shopping mall into a leafy and exclusive suburb. Jacob lives in an apartment complex that wouldn't look out of place in the West, except for its guardpost and barbed-wire fences tastefully hidden by bushes and trees. His askaris look at her curiously. They've probably never seen such a dire-looking mzungu woman before. It isn't until she's at the door to Jacob's apartment that she begins to wonder why he invited her.

  Chapter 15

  Jacob says, "These are all of Derek's phone calls."

  He looks from the computer screen to Veronica. Her expression is hard to read; the half-healed cuts on her once-perfect face make her look like an extra in a zombie movie. Jacob supposes he still resembles an acne-scarred teenager himself. At least his goatee conceals the worst of the damage.

  He wishes he'd cleaned up his apartment a little before she came over. It's a nice enough place, two bedrooms all to himself, but it isn't really ready for guests. His bedroom is strewn with scattered clothes and books, and the rest of the place is devoid of furniture except for his computer desk and a couple of chairs. The white walls are bare, the kitchen cabinets are empty, and most of his possessions are still piled in suitcases and toiletry bags. He doesn't even have bookcases yet: dozens of science-fiction novels and technical texts sit in stacks on the carpeted floor of his computer room.

  Jacob looks back to his computer, and to the Google Map of Uganda on its screen, a map half-covered by little orange and red balloons that serve as place markers. Red outnumbers orange by a wide margin. Most are clustered in Kampala, but there are a fair number out west, near the Congo border, and a few orange balloons scattered in other places as well.

  "Red is Derek," he explains, "orange is the other participant, if they're on Mango."

  "Wher
e did this come from?" She sounds more perplexed than impressed.

  "Oh." Jacob realizes he has been remiss in providing context. "Derek had a Mango cell phone. Mango is a division of Telecom Uganda. I work for Telecom Uganda and have admin access to their databases. And the reason they hired me is there isn't much I don't know about mobile communications systems. This is what I've got so far. Would have been more, but I spent my first three days back basically fully zoned out."

  Veronica nods with understanding.

  Jacob switches briefly to a black window full of orderly rows and columns of text. "The records of every call Derek ever made or received, including," he points at columns on the screen, "the other number involved in that call, Derek's location, and if the other participant was also had a Mango phone, their location as well. I converted this data to XML and plugged it into a Google Map. Et voila."

  "Location? You can actually track cell phones? I thought that was just in movies."

  "No, you can, for real. What happens is, we record which base stations handled the call, and the signal strength they got from your phone. Base stations are the cells, the fixed antennas your phone talks to. We know their exact location. So if three or more were in range, we can triangulate a phone to a single patch of real estate."

  "How close can you get?"

  "Well, it varies." Jacob decides not to get into too much detail. "Depends on how many base stations and how far apart. Error margin is probably somewhere from forty metres in downtown Kampala to half a kilometre in rural areas. It's not quite like the movies, you can't actually track individuals, because the closer you can get, the more densely populated the real estate, they got lost in the crowd. But you can get a pretty good idea of their general vicinity."

  "And you have names too? You know who he called?"

  "No. Unfortunately. Mostly. If they're actual Mango subscribers, yes, but almost every phone in Uganda is prepaid, not subscription. But I bet if we look hard enough at this list we'll find some interesting stuff."

  "This is why Derek brought you to Africa," she says slowly.

  "Exactly. To track the call records of whoever he was interested in."

  "You really think you can find out who set him up from this?"

  "There's a lot more I can do than just this. But it's a good place to start. Retrace his steps, work out who he's been talking to." Jacob switches back to the Google Map. "Red is where Derek was during the call, orange indicates the other person's location, if it was a Mango-to-Mango call. I can't track people on other networks."

  "So that red marker up at the Congo border means Derek was out there?"

  He nods. "Yeah. Good example. Let's take a closer look at that."

  He scrolls over and zooms in. One red and one orange balloon, both labelled with question marks, float over the Semiliki district, right up against the Congo border a good three hundred kilometers north of Bwindi. Jacob clicks on each marker and examines the call data that pops up on the side of the screen.

  "He was there three weeks ago," he reports. "Or at least his phone was. And this orange one there, this other number, it's Mango too, he called it repeatedly over the last month."

  "Prester said there was a smuggling ring," Veronica remembers. "From the Congo to Uganda. And Semiliki's right near the border."

  "Exactly."

  "What do the question marks mean?"

  "Geographical uncertainty. If there's only two base stations in range of a phone, then you can only track it to one of two locations, where their circles of coverage meet. But Semiliki is way out there. Only one base station."

  "So we can't tell where exactly he or the other phone was."

  "Probably not. Unless - let me check." Jacob switches back to the black window full of text, and opens up an SSH connection to Telecom Uganda's master database server. His fingers rattle with machine-gun speed over his keyboard as he composes a moderately complex database query, calling up the exact details of all calls involving Derek made near Semiliki.

  He runs the query. Telecom Uganda's servers ponder the question for a few seconds; then rows of numbers begin to scroll rapidly down across the screen. Jacob persuses them. After a moment he grunts with surprise. Both the handsets in question, Derek's and the other one, were used far enough away from Semiliki station that their signals regularly arrived twenty microseconds out of sync from their allotted timeslot. That's something. Radio waves move at the speed of light: three hundred thousand kilometres per second, aka six kilometres per twenty microseconds. There's no way to work out the handsets' direction from the station when they were used, but Jacob knows they were exactly six kilometers away.

  He relays this information to Veronica, and adds, "Semiliki's a small town, more like a village, there's nothing else out there. And the base station's right in town. So what was Derek doing that far out?"

  "Maybe that's the smugglers' hideout?" Veronica suggests tentatively. "Maybe Derek went out there, and that's how he found out too much?"

  Jacob frowns. It sounds a little too neat. "Maybe. I don't know. It's not like a secret terrorist cell would have called up a white boy and invited him out to come look at their operation. Tell you what. Let's take a look at what's out there."

  Jacob launches Google Earth. A new window opens up on his computer screen, and within it an image of the world as seen from orbit. He copies and pastes data from the other window, instructing the software to traverse the six-kilometre loop around the coordinates of the Semiliki base station. Veronica murmurs with surprise as the image zooms in towards the earth, as if the window was a camera on a falling satellite.

  The virtual eye in the sky swoops downwards from orbit, towards Africa, into Uganda. They see roads, forests, clouds over the bristling Ruwenzori mountains south of Semiliki, the blue expanse of Lake Albert to the north, the gray grid of Fort Portal. The virtual camera levels off a few thousand feet above ground and begins to fly in a tight loop. Jacob smiles at Veronica's surprise.

  "This is the six-kilometre radius around Semiliki base station," he explains. "What you're seeing are real recent satellite photos, stitched together automagically into a single landscape. Pretty cool, eh? It's like having your very own Pentagon war room, for free."

  Hilly terrain scrolls past, and is interrupted by what looks like a wide red scar in the green earth, a blotchy discontinuity several square kilometers in size. The resolution is too vague to see details, but within the red smear, oblong green and gray shapes are arranged in vaguely geometric patterns that suggest human habitation.

  "What's that?" she asks.

  Jacob freezes and peers at the display. "Must be some kind of town. Weird. Deeply weird. It looks way bigger than Semiliki, but it's not on any of the maps. Let's do a quick web search on latitude and longitude and see what we get."

  He launches a web browser.

  "Fast connection," Veronica observes. "Mine's really slow."

  "Yeah. There's no fiber link to east Africa yet, everything's through satellite, it's a pain in the ass, high latency. But this computer has a DSL connection to the hub, and I've given my personal data the highest priority on their satellite link. Making this literally the fastest Internet connection in Uganda."

  He goes to Dogpile.com and types in the geographical coordinates of that mysterious settlement near Semiliki. Dogpile delegates the request to all of the world's major search engines, and assembles the collective results into a single list. The first entry is entitled UNHCR Semiliki.

  "UNHCR?" Jacob asks, perplexed.

  "I know that one." Veronica leans forward, interested. "United Nations High Commission for Refugees. It must be a refugee camp. Didn't Susan say the camp she worked at was in Semiliki?"

  "Did she? But that's not Susan's number." Jacob doublechecks. "No. She's not on Mango. This is another phone. Someone else at that camp."

  "Someone else." Veronica considers. "Maybe Susan knows who. Maybe Derek didn't invite her to Bwindi just because she's blonde and pretty. Maybe she was a lead
."

  "Huh." Jacob leans back instinctively to think, winces as the pressure causes the five whip wounds on his back to flare up, and hunches forward again. He closes his eyes and tries to arrange all the facts swimming in his mind, order them into some logical sequence. "OK. So Derek was investigating a smuggling ring and rumours they were connected to terrorists. He invites you and Susan to Bwindi because he wanted to make friends and sound you out, Susan because she worked at the camp, you because of Danton."

  "Where else?" Veronica asks. "Where were his other calls? Where in Kampala?"

  Jacob switches back to the map full of balloons, and zooms in on the Google street map of greater Kampala. There are markers almost everywhere in the city, both red and orange, but a few dense clusters stand out.

  "This is here," Jacob says, indicating a little cluster on the east side of the city. "Calls to my phone. This is Derek's apartment, by the Sheraton." A dense clump of red near the center of town. "And here's his office." A thick cloud of red and orange to the north. "Those orange markers in his office, that other number, that must be Prester."

  "What about this?" Veronica asks, pointing at a pile of orange markers a little south of downtown, between the Sheraton and the taxi park.

  "No idea. They're all the same number. Not Prester, not the Semiliki number, someone else." He checks back against the raw data. "He started calling that number three months ago, and he's been calling them ever since, a couple times a week. What do you think that means?"

  "I don't know. None of this makes any sense to me." She looks at him. "Why are you showing me all this?"