The Exile

by Andrew Britton

  What happened from that point forward was anyone’s guess. For the most part, the huge crowd gathered outside cared nothing about what happened to Joubert. Many were die-hard Mbeki supporters; others disenchanted followers of Zuma. A sizable group of people asserted the whole trial was a distraction, a sham in which Joubert had willingly participated to turn attention away from Zuma’s dishonesty.

  For the Blackwater team it added up to a mess. In short order the courtroom doors would open, and they would have a potentially serious problem on their hands.

  A familiar voice caught Whysall’s attention now, and he quickly adjusted the secure Motorola receiver/transmitter nestled in his right ear. “This is Whysall. Go ahead.”

  “Whysall, Kealey. What’s happening out there?”

  Whysall took a quick look around, trying to gauge the mood of the crowd. Ryan Kealey, he knew, was inside the courtroom, sitting not more than a few feet from the South African president. Zuma had insisted on attending the last day of the trial, and despite his best efforts, Kealey had not been able to talk him out of it.

  “The people out here are getting antsy,” Whysall said. “And additional police units arrived in the square a few minutes ago. Six more vehicles and fifteen officers, for a total of fifteen and eighty—damned if I know whether they’re friends or foes. Otherwise, there’s nothing to report.”

  “Okay, just sit tight. The jury’s coming out now. Make sure everyone is ready to move. Out.”

  “Copy that, out.”

  Whysall immediately relayed the information to the rest of the team, then returned his attention to the crowd milling around him. Approximately five minutes later he heard a rumble of activity on the other side of the courtroom doors. Whysall knew the sound could only mean Zuma had finished testifying in the main chamber.

  Around him, beneath the building’s gilded ceiling, dozens of reporters immediately began fighting for position, thrusting their microphones and cameras at arm’s length over the rope line. Behind the assembled media, the crowd of onlookers and protesters pushed forward, so that the narrow aisle leading from the main chamber to the courthouse entrance seemed to grow narrower with each passing second.

  Whysall studied the chaotic scene with a sense of rising dread. He didn’t understand why the general public had been granted access. It made for a security nightmare despite the manned checkpoint and the magnetometer positioned inside the main entrance. As bad as it was inside the building, though, it was ten times worse outside. The Johannesburg police had set up blocks on either end of Von Brandis and Kerk, the two intersecting streets in front of the courthouse, but their focus had been limited to vehicular traffic. They had done virtually nothing to prevent the unruly mob from congregating in front of the building, and Whysall suspected that the police would not be inclined to wrestle with those people when the time came for them to leave, especially after what had just transpired inside the main chamber.

  Jacob Zuma had just testified against the head of the SAPS. With some of Joubert’s supporters having managed to find their way onto Zuma’s security detail, it seemed possible—even likely—that many of the police officers guarding the building were privately supporting the crowd elements hostile to the Zulu president. That the police might not be eager to facilitate Zuma’s safe departure was something Whysall hadn’t considered until this moment, avoiding it in his reluctance to let his mind stray into the intricacies of South Africa’s affairs. But this was one instance when a client’s standing with an internal arm of his own government might well have a direct bearing on his safety.

  Whysall knew what it could mean if he was right, and he decided to pass his concerns up the ladder. Just as he was about to speak, though, his earpiece crackled to life.

  “All lobby personnel, tighten up on the rope line. We’re on the way out.”

  Whysall immediately acknowledged the transmission, then listened as the rest of the team followed suit. Thirty seconds later he was in position, and he watched as the heavyset police officer standing in front of the courtroom doors lifted a radio to his lips. The man mumbled a few words, then stepped to one side of the massive oak doors. The doors were pushed open from the other side, and two plainclothes police officers quickly locked them into place against the walls. Then the crowd erupted as Zuma and his entourage swept out of the main chamber and into the lobby.

  CHAPTER 5

  KHARTOUM, SUDAN

  Walter Reynolds, the U.S. chief of mission in the Republic of Sudan, stood at the small, barred window of his corner office and sipped from a cup of steaming black coffee, his twelfth of the day. As he took in the sweeping view of downtown Khartoum—the chaotic jumble of dun-colored buildings, olive green trees, and domed mosques that formed the city center, all of it backed by the towering flats of Barlaman Avenue and divided by the twin routes of the Nile—he was suffused by a sense of burning resentment, the same bitter anger he felt each time he stopped to consider the prospect of another two years in the sweltering pit of North Africa.

  Reynolds had assumed the post of chargé d’affaires just ten months earlier, shortly after leaving his previous post in Côte d’Ivoire, but he was already sick of the place. In fact, he had been ready to leave the day he arrived, and it wasn’t just because of the heat.

  In his thirty years with the Foreign Service, Reynolds had come to understand just how vast the cultural gap between the United States and the rest of the world actually was. Nevertheless, he had always made an effort to appreciate the cultural practices of the countries to which he was assigned, even when he found them personally distasteful. He’d also learned that what counted as “acceptable” social behavior could vary greatly from country to country. He had done his best to take this in stride, and for the most part, he’d succeeded. After all, that was part of being a diplomat. Some level of feigned interest—or acceptance—was occasionally called for, and Reynolds could disguise his inner disgust with the best of them. During his time in Sudan, he’d found it necessary to do just that, and with far more frequency than usual.

  At least, that was how it had been prior to the disastrous events of April 4. Since the barbaric attack on Camp Hadith, everything had changed, and Reynolds no longer felt the urge—or the need—to mask how he truly felt. Over the last two months diplomatic relations between the United States and Sudan had essentially ceased to exist, and up until the previous afternoon Reynolds had been expecting the inevitable call from the State Department that would bring him, his wife, and the rest of the embassy staff home. Privately, he’d been wondering why the evacuation was so long in coming. Now he was starting to suspect it might not happen at all.

  Walter Reynolds was one of the few people who had known about Lily Durant’s presence in West Darfur—as well as her closely guarded relationship to the president—right from the start. He had met her just once, on the day she had first arrived. That had been several months earlier. They had kept the meeting short for the sake of discretion, but despite the brevity of that encounter, he’d found her to be an exceptionally charming, if somewhat naïve young woman. The fact that she had volunteered for such thankless work was more than enough to earn his genuine admiration, as he had visited the camps of West Darfur, and he knew just how terrible the conditions actually were. Not just for the refugees, but for the aid workers themselves.

  The knowledge that someone would actually choose to live in such squalor in order to help others had done much to restore his faith in humanity, which had been sorely lacking since he had arrived in Khartoum. The only thing that worried him was Durant’s blatant lack of concern regarding her personal security. She had politely but firmly brushed off his warnings, despite what had happened to John Granville, a senior USAID official who had been killed in Khartoum some years back, along with his driver, a Sudanese national. Reynolds had painted a colorful picture with that story, trying to impress upon her the danger of working in such an unstable environment. But she would not be dissuaded, and he could not help but admir
e her tenacity even as he privately feared for her personal safety.

  He deeply regretted that he had been right all along, and although he had tried, he couldn’t seem to erase that terrible day from his memory. He could still remember every word of the frantic call he’d taken from Gregory Beckett, the doctor stationed at the camp in West Darfur. Beckett was the primary eyewitness to the entire event, as well as the first person to report what had happened. As he’d listened to the doctor describe what he’d seen, Reynolds had tried to tell himself that it wasn’t true—that Beckett had either made a terrible mistake or was playing some kind of sick joke. But the lingering fear and shock in the younger man’s voice had made it impossible for Reynolds to doubt what he was saying, and he didn’t have to wait long to discover that his first instincts had been correct. The doctor might have been a coward who had fled at the first sign of danger, but he was telling the truth.

  Beckett’s call had come in at 6:00 a.m. local time, and by noon they had had all the proof they needed. Although his aides had strongly advised him not to, Reynolds had personally flown to West Darfur to identify Durant’s body. He had not had a decent night’s sleep since. Even with just a couple of months to reflect, he knew that the things he had seen in the charred ruins of Camp Hadith would haunt him for the rest of his life. If he had despised the central figures in the Sudanese government before he’d walked into that hellish scene, by the time his plane had touched back down in Khartoum, he’d hated them all with a passion…every single minister, general, and district governor who’d ever seen fit to support the monstrous regime of Omar al-Bashir.

  And that was before he had seen the tape.

  It had been released two days after the attack; presumably, it had taken that long for the copies to reach their final destinations, as none were later determined to have been hand-delivered. Al-Jazeera, the controversial Qatar-based Arab news network, was the first station to air it, followed soon thereafter by Syria Satellite, Tunisia National Television, and NBN in Lebanon. Less than an hour after Al-Jazeera ran the tape for the first time, it appeared on Somali TV. Seeking to one-up its competitors, the Mogadishu-based station elected to stream the recording over the Internet, giving the whole world access to the last horrific moments in Lily Durant’s life.

  Reynolds had tried to watch the tape, reasoning that it could not be as bad as what he had seen firsthand in the camp. He was wrong. The full-length recording was less than a minute long, but even with the volume turned down, he’d been able to sit through only the first fifteen seconds before the blind fear and utter despair in Durant’s face had compelled him to turn it off. To make matters worse, her state of undress confirmed what everyone had feared right from the start: that her torture had gone far beyond a physical beating. The autopsy, which was carried out three days later at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, verified that Lily Durant had been raped repeatedly before she had died. Unsurprisingly, the cause of death was listed as the gunshot wound she sustained in the tape’s closing seconds.

  The public outcry that followed the tape’s release had been predictably deafening, particularly in the United States, where David Brenneman was halfway through his second term in office. While his popularity with the voting public was lukewarm at best, the fact that his niece had been killed in such brutal, dramatic fashion had touched something deep within the American psyche, weary as it was from the Iraqi conflict overseas and economic turmoil at home, imparting a sense of moral outrage that united the country in a way that hadn’t been seen since 9/11.

  Or maybe the nation’s outrage had less to do with morality than the need to vent amid the innumerable hardships people were going through. Maybe it was a collective purging of frustration in the wake of record home foreclosures, joblessness, and unending threats from abroad. One day North Korea was testing nuclear missiles in defiance of international condemnation, the next Iran was building them in its factories, and by the way, America, your stocks are worthless, Detroit has gone to hell, and your credit line’s been cut.

  Now, here in this place, the most heinous of acts had been committed against a U.S citizen on a humanitarian mission, a pretty young woman who could have been the girl next door but just happened to be the niece of the country’s highest elected official. And the perpetrator was a foreign leader considered a pariah in the civilized world, a figure as hated and loathed as Osama. Knowing the man responsible had given the American people a clear target for their anger, and they had responded accordingly.

  How did that old Rolling Stones song go? It had been a favorite in Reynolds’s college days. Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away.

  Yes, he thought, a shot away. It was possible, he supposed, that a country in need of a bloodletting had found a convenient target for its wrath. That would certainly be the cynic’s explanation, although he’d somehow managed to avoid it in spite of his backstage perspective on global politics, and intimate familiarity with the maneuverings that went on behind the scenes…. Call him a die-hard believer in man’s higher nature.

  Reynolds drank more of his coffee, realizing he should probably eat something to soak it up a bit, never mind that he hadn’t mustered any kind of appetite today…a sure sign of his growing anxiousness. He already felt a hot, acidic gnawing in his stomach and knew it would turn into full-fledged indigestion by the time he was ready for bed. Sleeplessness, bad dreams, and stubbed toes during urgent midnight trips to the bathroom—there you had the touch-stones of a career diplomat’s dedication to his post.

  He sighed. Whatever force, or combination of forces, had been driving the national consciousness back home, there seemed to be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Omar al-Bashir was the guilty party. A poll conducted by Newsweek one week after the incident had shown that 84 percent of Americans believed the Sudanese dictator had ordered the attack. Of those, an astonishing 92 percent believed he had done so with the knowledge that the president’s niece would be specifically marked. Al-Bashir, in turn, had vehemently denied any involvement, but that was only to be expected, and for the most part, his word carried no weight outside of Sudan.

  Reynolds was a student of history, and he believed with every fiber of his being that in the weeks following Durant’s death, David Brenneman had had more power at his fingertips than at any other time of his presidency. It was the kind of global support that gave its bearer a blank check, the ability to launch a devastating attack on the Sudanese government without regard for the consequences. And yet, shockingly, Brenneman had done virtually nothing to take advantage of the political climate. There had been no retaliatory strikes, no threats of retribution, no additional sanctions…nothing at all. Stranger still, there had been no explanation for the president’s refusal to act. He had neglected to issue a statement, other than the usual condemnation of the Sudanese government’s role in the ethnic cleansing of West Darfur, and in the weeks following the attack, he had said nothing at all about his relationship to Lily Durant, the sole foreigner to die in the raid.

  Faced with this inexplicable silence, the hugely frustrated press corps had sought answers through alternative channels. But Lou Samberg, the White House press secretary, had been just as reticent to comment, as had the rest of the senior White House staff. In short, there was no explanation as to why the president was willing to let the Sudanese government get away with murdering his own niece. As the silence stretched on, it became more and more obvious that nothing was going to happen, and then the inevitable came about as a result. Public sympathy for Brenneman’s personal loss began to erode, along with his approval ratings. Now, two months after that tragic incident, he was facing the darkest days of his presidency.

  Reynolds tossed back what remained of the potent brew in his cup, turned away from the window, and took a seat at his desk, absently scanning the dusty surface, which was cluttered with books and stacks of unread files. He was conflicted inside. In the end a president’s approval was a visceral thing for Americans, less about his spe
cific policies than an estimation of character. To some extent, he couldn’t blame them for abandoning Brenneman. After all, how could they be expected to support a man who wouldn’t stand up for his own family? More to the point, if he wasn’t willing to act on behalf of one person, how could he possibly be counted on when the lives of hundreds, thousands, or millions of Americans were at stake?

  These were fair questions, and yet, Reynolds had met David Brenneman on several occasions, and he couldn’t bring himself to concede that the press had it right. He couldn’t accept the idea that Brenneman had sacrificed the memory of his niece, mainly because nothing in his past—including a record of commitment to fulfilling the promises he’d made as a candidate, and a willingness to buck the polls and his opposition in order to overcome Washington’s inertial tendencies—suggested that he was the type to cave in without a fight, especially to a hardened thug like Omar al-Bashir. At the same time, the evidence was laid bare for all to see, and the senior diplomat had to admit that it didn’t look good. Brenneman’s inaction seemed to speak for itself, and even Walter Reynolds, one of the president’s staunchest supporters, couldn’t help but wonder if the pundits had been right all along. Maybe the man had lost his nerve.

  As he sat there brooding at his desk, he checked his watch with a combination of annoyance and frustration. The person he was expecting was late, but Reynolds supposed that was his prerogative. After all, somebody with the consultant’s political backing did not have to be prompt for anyone, especially a washed-up old diplomat with a terrible diet, an aversion to exercise, and the waistline to show for it. In recent months, Reynolds had taken to wearing oversize sport coats and loose-fitting pants to accommodate his bulk. The way he saw it, there was no point in being uncomfortable, as he and his counterpart in the foreign ministry were still giving each other the silent treatment. It was a battle of nerves that didn’t seem likely to end anytime soon, and since he was holed up in his office all day, there was no reason not to take advantage of a less stringent dress code.