Night of Knives

by Jon Evans

  "Who is he?" Jacob asks.

  "His name is Casimir. He is from Rwanda."

  Veronica blinks. That wasn't the answer she expected. "He's Muslim?"

  Surprise flickers across Rukungu's face. "No. No Muslims are with the interahamwe."

  "He came with the Arab man, right? He and his three friends? Maybe earlier this year?" Jacob asks.

  Rukungu looks at Jacob, perplexed. "No. Casimir has been with Athanase for many years. Since we left Rwanda. There are no Muslims. The only Arab who comes to Athanase is a man who comes to buy gold. That man has no religion but money."

  Veronica looks away. Since we left Rwanda. That's all the confirmation she needs. Rukungu is interahamwe, a mass murderer.

  "That doesn't make sense," Jacob says, puzzled. "Your buddy Casimir here is the guy who killed Derek. Chopped his fucking head off with a machete. If he's not Muslim, why was he wearing a dishdash? Are you totally sure this is him?"

  "This is Casimir. I have no doubt. I have known him for twelve years."

  Veronica frowns. "Then why was he in a dishdash?"

  Jacob reflects. "Maybe for TV. Maybe they didn't have any real terrorists handy who were willing and able to swing the panga, so they dressed up the big interahamwe guy for the camera."

  Something about his phrasing nags at Veronica. She tries to figure out what it is exactly, but it won't come to her.

  "Figure it out later," Jacob says. "Let's sleep on it. I'm beat. And we should keep a low profile anyways. I saw a couple other white folks earlier, but we still stand out too much. I vote we stay here until nightfall."

  Rukungu looks from one of them to the other, looking perplexed. She supposes they're speaking too quickly for him, his English is good but slow, every sentence is carefully thought out before he speaks.

  "And just hope Strick doesn't find us before then?" Veronica asks.

  "I think he'll figure we've gone straight back to Kampala."

  She stares at him. "You think? That's the best you can do?"

  Jacob shrugs. "Sorry. I'm all out of guarantees."

  Chapter 27

  Veronica is bored and frightened. There isn't anything to do in their hotel room, no TV, not even a Gideon Bible to read. Jacob sleeps peacefully on the queen-sized bed beneath the wobbling blur of the ceiling fan, but Veronica feels too wired for sleep. She wants to go out and explore the streets of Fort Portal, but she doesn't dare. She allows herself to go to the balcony, listen to the chatter and watch the bustle on Fort Portal's main drag, and look southwest, past rolling hills covered with banana trees, to where the otherwise blue sky is occupied by thick clouds clinging to the Ruwenzori, entirely covering the so-called Mountains of the Moon. But even this radiant view eventually grows boring. She wishes she had thought to bring a book from Kampala.

  She sighs, lies down on her side of the bed, closes her eyes, tries to make herself sleep. It doesn't seem possible. She should be tired, yesterday was truly draining and she only slept a few hours in the car, but she feels much too keyed up to fall asleep. If not for Rukungu she would have died last night. And they're still a long way from safe.

  She opens her eyes, rolls onto her side, and looks over at Jacob. He looks peaceful in his sleep, like a little boy. She wonders if he's as frightened as her. Probably not. To some extent Jacob seems to be treating all this as some elaborate game, an intellectual challenge to overcome. He's working on the assumption that he's much smarter than their antagonists, and therefore safe. The assumption is probably true, but Veronica isn't at all sure about the conclusion. It is amazing however what Jacob can do with just a few pieces of electronic equipment. His hiptop is like Batman's utility belt.

  Jacob shifts a little, opens his eyes and looks at her blearily, his subconscious must have noticed he was being watched. She smiles. He reaches out a long arm and pulls her close to him, and she lets him, fits her body against his, puts her head on his shoulder and holds him tightly. He grunts with sleep satisfaction and closes his eyes, and she does too, and they lie there for some time. He is warm and comfortable, and comforting. Veronica's breath and heartbeat begin to slow down in time with his. She dozes.

  When she opens her eyes she isn't sure how much time has passed; the room is still full of sunlight, but not as bright. Jacob has gone to the bathroom. He returns to bed and this time it is she who reaches out for him. They nestle together again, this time with their eyes open, their faces close to one another. Neither of them speak. Veronica's feels Jacob's heart pounding as he lifts his hand, reaches out a trembling finger, touches and traces the line of her cheek. When she does not pull away he leans forward and kisses her. She closes her eyes.

  They kiss for a long time before he dares to slip his hand beneath her shirt. At first she isn't sure she wants this. He senses her hesitation and pulls back. A minute later she decides, and pulls her shirt off herself. He fumbles awkwardly with her bra strap before it finally opens. Veronica moves on top of him, feeling his long, lean body beneath hers as his hands and lips come to her breasts. She pulls away long enough to pull his shirt off too, and presses herself against him, luxuriating in the bliss of skin on skin. She stays on top. The sex is slow at first, tender, unhurried, but gradually becomes urgent and passionate, and she loses herself in it, forgets everything but pleasure.

  Afterwards they lie naked together, both limned in sweat. Jacob looks a little stunned and Veronica has to keep herself from giggling. She feels irrationally giddy, like a teenager.

  "I don't know about you, but I feel much better," she says, stretching catlike.

  He laughs. "Me too."

  "It's kind of been a while."

  "Me too."

  They lapse into silence. Jacob rolls onto his elbow and looks her closely, as if inspecting her. Then he reaches out and touches her very gently, running a still-tentative hand up and down the curves of her body. She murmurs appreciatively.

  He says, wonderingly, "I honestly never thought I'd ever sleep with anyone as beautiful as you."

  "Aw. You're going to make me blush."

  "I suppose I should have brought condoms, eh?"

  She almost laughs again at his concerned expression. "Funny how you didn't think of that in the heat of the moment," she mock-scolds. "They'll throw you out of the Boy Scouts if you don't watch it."

  "Actually, they kicked me out for hacking into their computers."

  "Oh. Well, anyways, I think we've got much bigger things to worry about."

  "True. Until tomorrow anyways."

  "When did you want to leave?"

  Jacob thinks. "After it gets dark."

  "Good." She snuggles up against him, puts her open palm on his damp chest, feeling his breath and heartbeat. "That gives us time for more."

  * * *

  Jacob reminds himself that his life is in real danger and he should not feel giddily triumphant. But it's hard not to grin as Veronica walks naked from the bathroom back to the bed and curls up in his arms again. She's addictive, he can't stop looking at her, can't stop running his hands all over her perfect body, hardly believing she's allowing him to do so.

  "Mmmm," she says, arching her back at his touch. "I almost wish we could stay here longer."

  "Me too. But we can't. It's hard for us white folks to hide in Africa. If they're looking for us, I think they'll find us pretty soon. Maybe tomorrow. I was thinking we should call Prester."

  "What for?"

  "We know he's on our side," Jacob says. "And he seems to know everyone in Kampala, he can give us some names to go to for help, if there's any trouble."

  "If he can even answer. If his phone's in his hospital room. Or if he isn't… I mean, we don't know his condition."

  Jacob digs his hiptop out of his jeans pocket. "Worth a try though."

  "You sure they can't track that?" Veronica asks worriedly. "Or my phone?"

  He smiles. "Good thinking. But no. I've erased all traces of our phones from Telecom Uganda. We're invisible."

  Jacob dials P
rester. His phone rings five times but there's no response. He tries again; same result. "His phone's on, but he's not answering."

  "Can you track him? Where is he?"

  "I can track his phone." Jacob connects to the Telecom Uganda master switching database and runs the shell script he's written that plots a Mango phone's current location on a Google Map. He peers at the hiptop's small screen. "Huh. That's weird."

  "What?"

  "According to this, Prester's phone is in the middle of nowhere. An empty space on the map about fifty K north of Kampala."

  "What does that mean?" she asks.

  "I have no idea." Jacob sits up crosslegged on the bed, peering down at his hiptop. "Google Earth won't work on this. I could maybe get some satellite photo. Or, no, wait a minute. That idea you had."

  "What idea?"

  "About triggering his camera phone remotely. Let's see if that code I wrote actually works."

  Jacob has tested the software in question, but not in a real-life situation, so he is very pleased when the hiptop's screen begins to fill with a picture silently taken by Prester's phone, at Jacob's behest, and then sent over Uganda's cellular network. It's a blurry picture, the victim of a lossy compression algorithm, but Jacob can make out a table lamp, viewed from below, and wooden slats above, arrayed circularly like spokes in a wheel. Prester's phone must be lying flat on some table with the camera lens aimed up.

  "A banda," Jacob realizes aloud. One of the circular huts that dot Uganda's landscape, wooden or bamboo frames filled with mud. Wooden bandas are usually found in tourist camps.

  "A banda? He should be in a hospital," Veronica says, shocked. "He was shot in the chest two days ago, he has a perforated lung. What's he doing in a banda?"

  "I don't know. He's not answering." Jacob hesitates. "Wait a second."

  He sets Prester's cameraphone to take a picture every half-second for the next twenty seconds, then dials its number again. If there's anyone there, maybe they'll at least look at the phone to see who's calling.

  It takes a full minute for each picture to be uploaded from Preser's phone and downloaded to Jacob's hiptop. The first three contain nothing unusual. But the fourth displays a familiar face.

  "Oh, no," Jacob says, as the new picture fills his hiptop's screen. "Oh, shit."

  Veronica sits up quickly, grabs his arm, looks, and gasps. The picture that has been taken is a somewhat warped view of Strick, viewed face-on from below.

  "They got him," she whispers.

  "Maybe they just got his phone. Let's see."

  They wait anxiously. Seconds crawl by. The next picture is also of Strick, but this time a white-haired white man with a thin face is looking over Strick's shoulder. Jacob has never seen him before. Neither has Veronica.

  Three similar pictures later, they finally get a partial shot of the phone's surroundings. It's on an angle, and blurry, the phone must have been in motion when the camera fired, maybe it was being put back on the table. Light streaming from an open window drowns out almost all the rest of the picture. But this light clearly illuminates, in one corner of the frame, a dark-skinned wrist handcuffed to a metal bedframe, and a few loose cables of dreadlocked hair.

  "No," Veronica says. "Oh, no. That's him. That's Prester."

  Jacob nods grimly. "And they think he knows where we are."

  "Oh my God. What do you think they're -"

  "I think I don't want to know what they're doing to him," Jacob says harshly. He shakes his head. "Sorry. Shit. We have to get to the embassy as soon as it opens. That's all we can do."

  * * *

  The darkness outside their car is almost perfect. There are no street lights on Ugandan highways, and almost no night-time traffic. Earlier they drove through a swarm of tiny flies as dense as fog, and then a hammering tropical downpour, lightning flickering around them two or three times a second, illuminating the ghostly silhouettes of roadside bandas and tin-roofed huts. Now the clouds have cleared and the pale skein of the Milky Way is visible in the moonless canopy of countless stars above. They pass through dusty villages so quiet by night that they look deserted, across tumbling rivers that glitter in the headlights. There are only a few roadblocks, and the police who man them seem tense and nervous, as if whoever drives by night carries the devil as a passenger. Jacob and Veronica are waved past without inspection.

  They stop for Veronica to relinquish the wheel. Both she and Jacob are exhausted, but neither can sleep. As they resume their motion Veronica looks over her shoulder at Rukungu, lying sprawled across the Toyota's back seat, sleeping like a baby. She thinks of what she has read about the Rwandan genocide in which he participated.

  There were eight million people in Rwanda, seven million Hutu and one million Tutsi, when the Hutu leaders decided to murder all the Tutsi. The weapons of choice were clubs and machetes. In the cities, interahamwe death squads hunted door-to-door, killed whole families in their homes, dragged them out to be executed in public, stopped carloads of Tutsis at roadblocks and slaughtered them on the spot. Children proudly told passing death squads where their neighbours were hidden. Doctors invited them into hospitals to murder their patients. As the weeks of genocide progressed, order Hutus increasingly eliminated the middleman, killed their Tutsi acquaintances themselves and moved into their houses. In rural areas Tutsi were hunted down like vermin, hunting parties went out every day to find the "cockroaches" hidden in fields and forests, slaughtered man and woman and child alike. Tutsi women, famous for their beauty, were usually gang-raped before they were slaughtered.

  The survivors of the first few weeks congregated in caves, churches, schools, stadiums, with no food, no water, no hope. Some tried to flee to cities not yet affected, but genocidal bloodlust spread inexorably through the nation like a virus. The slaughter at some of the sanctuaries lasted for weeks. Massacring people by hand is hard work. Sometimes, too exhausted to actually murder those trying to escape, the killing mobs just severed their victims' Achilles tendons, then came back to finish the job in the morning. Dogs and crows multiplied, fed on the countless bodies that littered the nation's streets and fields.

  Meanwhile, every government official, every radio host, called for the completion of the genocide. "Exterminate the cockroaches," they said. "Wipe them out. Every one of them. To your work, all of you. The graves are not yet full."

  Athanase was one of those leaders, one of the chief architects of the genocide. Rukungu was a member of one of the interahamwe death squads who spearheaded the genocide. Veronica wonders how old he would have been at the time. Late teens, maybe. She wonders how many women he raped, how many children he murdered, both in Rwanda and afterwards, when the interahamwe were finally driven out into the Congo, where their campaign of murder and rape continued. Probably dozens. Maybe hundreds. Any reasonable person would call him a monster. But she owes him her life.

  * * *

  Jacob and Veronica wait in the same embassy meeting room where they talked to Strick. Veronica's eyelids feels like anvils, and she is not so much sitting as drooping on her chair. They drove all night across half of Uganda to get here, taking turns at the wheel, and then fought their way through Kampala's rush hour to drop Rukungu off at the Hotel Sun City. But they made it. If they're safe anywhere in Africa, it's here in the U.S. embassy.

  Jacob reaches out and takes her hand, lifts it to his face and kisses it. She smiles back absently. Part of her is already wondering if this sudden relationship is going to make any sense when the extraordinary circumstances that threw them together are gone. She squelches that notion. She will worry about the future next week. This week she will pretend the future never existed, she will just enjoy being alive.

  The door opens.

  "My name is Julian," says the man who enters. He's in his thirties, with a square jaw and a crew cut. "I'm the assistant deputy head of mission."

  Jacob says, "We need to speak to the ambassador."

  Julian shakes his head. "The ambassador isn't in today, he's at
a ceremony in Jinja, his schedule is fully booked for the whole week. I'm sorry, I know you said it's urgent, but I'm as good as you're going to get on such short notice."

  "Does Strick work for you?" Veronica asks.

  Julian looks sour. "Gordon Strick works at this embassy for the State Department. He does not report to me."

  "What about Prester?"

  Julian blinks. "Who?"

  "He worked with our friend Derek," Jacob says. "For Strick, indirectly. He was shot the night before last."

  "Is he an American citizen?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Then I wouldn't know anything about him. Please. We're wasting each other's time. Why are you here?"

  Jacob and Veronica look at one another. She nods.

  "All right." Jacob speaks in a clipped, factual, voice, an engineer reporting on the data. "We have proof, we have pictures of Russian surface-to-air missiles being smuggled into the Congo last night." He puts down a CD-ROM he burned at an Internet cafe before coming to the embassy. "We have physical evidence that Derek Summers believed a company run by Veronica's ex-husband Danton DeWitt was involved with this smuggling ring, there's a scan of his notes on that CD, you can check it against his handwriting. Derek said just before he was executed that he was set up, and he accused Danton being involved. We have telephone records, also on that CD, strongly implying that Mr. Strick and Athanase Ntingizawa were conspiring to smuggle goods from the Congo and Uganda, and photos showing that Strick has since kidnapped and tortured Prester."

  Julian stares at Jacob.

  "We also have beliefs and conclusions we've drawn, but I want to stress that what I've told you so far isn't just suspicion, there's evidence on that CD, hard evidence."