by Tom Clancy
“The lady tricked me!” Thomas hollered. His face red, tears bursting from his eyes. “She knew the dog was gonna be bad and she tricked me!”
“Thomas, I’m sorry you got frightened, but that’s not true.” Julia had pulled in the leash, straddled Vivian between her legs, and could already feel her subsiding. “I told you there was a chance—”
Thomas leaped to his feet, and the chair fell over with a crash. Ellen swept him into her consoling arms.
“No you didn’t!” he bawled. He’d clenched his hands into tight, white-knuckled fists and was shaking them at his sides. “You’re a liar! A mean, mean liar!”
Stanley rose from his chair and looked across the room at Julia.
“Under the circumstances, given how my son’s been traumatized—”
“A mean liar lady with a bad, stupid dog…”
“—I feel it’s best we reconsider this adoption,” Stanley said.
Julia somehow managed to arrest her smile.
“Mr. Wurman,” she said, “I have to admit those were exactly my thoughts.”
* * *
Macie Nze had done his best to mark the 4×4’s route, and by that guess its general destination. The sounds and smells coming through the open front windows made it apparent that he’d been taken into the bush. Deep into the bush to judge from the long, punishing drive, which already seemed to have gone on for half the night. Though his eyes were covered by a canvas hood or sack, he was convinced his captors had headed south for dozens of kilometers, and then east for dozens more, putting him somewhere near the Wonga-Wongé Preserve, if not within its actual boundaries.
Nze had fought to hang on to his wits, stay alert to surrounding noises, keep track of turns the vehicle had made… lefts, rights, curves wide or sharp. Orienting himself hadn’t been easy. Wherever he’d been brought and held for many hours after his abduction was clearly within the city limits, but he’d been forced to wear the hood the entire time and gotten only a vague sense of his starting point. Yet neither his negated eyesight, his fear, nor his constant discomfort — and occasionally dreadful pain — had stopped Nze from being able to tell when the 4×4 was crossing bridges or stopping at intersections. Or when its tires had left Port-Gentil’s paved streets and thoroughfares for the outlying bush country.
The feel of the unimproved roads he’d traveled ever since had held their own clues to his direction. Even a newcomer to the land could have differentiated between highway macadam and rutted wilderness path, and except for his four years abroad at university, Nze, who was a month shy of his fiftieth birthday, had lived in Gabon his entire life. He could identify the type of surfaces over which he’d been driven, whether coastal sand or laterite, a soft, iron-rich earth that was typical of inland marshes and lagoons, and would hold moisture through all but the harshest dry seasons. For a while now the laterite had been sucking at the vehicle’s wheels, causing it to pitch and yaw, repeatedly bogging it down in claylike red muck.
That continuous rocking was bad enough for Nze, but the jolts he took in the 4×4’s cargo section whenever it was pushed out of a bog were far worse, and had wrung stifled groans of agony through the thick band of duct tape over his mouth. After the abductors walked him from his temporary holding place — hooded, gagged, and at gunpoint — they had forced him to squat on his knees in the 4×4’s cargo section, and then bound his wrists and ankles together from behind with electrical cord. The first rattling bump had knocked Nze off balance onto his left side, flinging his body against a heavy tire stowed in back with him… presumably a spare. He’d remained there since, unable to pull himself up, the grooved pattern of its treads stamping into him through his clothes. Movement just worsened the abominable strain on his neck, back, and legs. And those sudden forward lurches of the vehicle, mon Dieu, they were almost unendurable.
And so the drive stretched on. Nze believed daybreak was fast approaching — for whatever it was worth, the coarse, heavy fabric over his face had not completely blocked his perception of light and darkness. Much earlier, before the 4×4 slipped out of the city, he’d distinguished the glow of traffic signals, streetlights, even the occasional glancing headlamp beams of other motor vehicles. Now he had discerned a faint lifting of the black outside the windows, coupled with the sounds of an awakened jungle. He could hear the discord of overlapping birdsong, and had thought he’d recognized a mangabey’s shrieky primate cry behind him on the forest road.
Part of Nze’s mind yearned for an end to the torturous ride. Another part of him, however, understood how insane a desire that was, what its fulfillment would likely mean for him. He had tried to ignore these emphatic inner warnings, banish them from contemplation, but they had persisted anyway.
Assistant Minister Macie Nze was a man of some fair reason, a trait that would not allow reality to be denied.
If only his capacity for logic and common sense had guided his recent actions, Nze supposed he would never have gotten into this wretched spot. But greed was an imbecilic spoiler that could overcome a person’s best instincts. In his case, it had happened once too often.
As the car rolled on over the dirt roads, Nze’s thoughts suddenly backtracked to when he’d been taken outside his home all those hours ago… and then reversed themselves a little further, to the very moment he was lured into the trap.
The call came shortly after eleven o’clock on what was now the previous night. Seventeen minutes past eleven, to be exact. There was a Berthoud clock on his living-room bureau, and Nze recalled having looked at the antique timepiece as he had reached for the phone, setting down his late-evening glass of wine.
“Bonsoir, Macie.” The voice in his handset had belonged to Etienne Begela. “Ça va?”
“Bien, merci.”
Nze had waited. Begela’s cordial tone had thrown him off guard, as it had at the hotel earlier that night. His superior in the Office des Postes et Telecommunications, and a Beti Fang of maternal family linkage, Begela had not spoken a word to Nze for weeks before the reception… not, in fact, since their tense conversation aboard the Avirex flight out of Libreville after the National Assembly voted its approval of the UpLink licenses. Begela alternately accused Nze of being a bungler and double-crosser for having withdrawn his opposition. Nze countered that political exigency had left him with no choice except to launch a strategic retreat. The Americans’ support among the PDG’s most formidable and senior members was overwhelming, he’d insisted. Continued challenges would merely label both of them obstructionists to their future sorrow.
“Don’t speak to me of sorrow,” Begela said once their plane left the Gamba airport runway. “It isn’t you who must face our backer.”
“He paid us to lobby—”
“He expected us to deliver.”
With that curt interruption, Begela had risen from beside Nze to take an unoccupied seat up the aisle, and afterward had presented him with nothing but silence and his back.
Until the 11:17 telephone call.
Last night.
Nze remembered standing quietly with the receiver to his ear for several moments after their exchange of pleasantries. Studying his ornate centuries-old clock. Noting the swing of its pendulum’s polished brass rod as droplets of light splashed over it from a chandelier overhead.
“We’ve gotten a break,” Begela had said. “I’ve met with the individual we spoke about on the plane. Things went far better than expected.”
“He doesn’t blame us for the vote?”
“Let’s say I’ve managed to raise his consciousness about the Libreville hearing, and our political system in general.”
“How so?”
“Our lack of success was a disappointment to him. As is the arrival of the UpLink advance group. But he understands the complexities we dealt with in the capital, has revised his objectives accordingly, and remains hopeful we can barter influence with our opposition, sway them to rescind their decision.”
Nze had shaken his head. “With the Americans
in our country, I don’t see any chance of making inroads—”
“Hear me, mebonto,” Begela broke in, using the familiar Fang term of address reserved for members of a nuclear kin group. “Our associate still asks for our favors, and we should oblige him. He knows it does not come without ample compensation.”
Nze had paused to think. He’d reached for his glass of Clos du Marquis, sipped. Begela’s implication was plain. The foreigner had been a brimming well of profit neither of them was eager to abandon.
“Was he specific about what he wants from us?”
Begela gave an affirmative grunt.
“It’s best we discuss that in person,” he said. “I’ll send over my car to bring you to the office.”
Nze was surprised. “At this hour? I’ve just gotten settled in…”
“Consider it worthwhile overtime,” Begela said. “We mustn’t delay. There are steps we can take in the morning that will reassure our backer, yet are consistent with a phased approach that will satisfy your cautious inclinations.”
Nze had taken another drink from his wineglass, let the warm and mildly bitter flavor of the Saint Julian grape settle over the back of his tongue.
Ample compensation.
“Give me fifteen minutes to get ready,” he’d said at last.
The black Mercedes 500E coupe pulled in front of his colonial townhouse a quarter hour later on the dot, and Nze had noticed nothing unusual approaching it across the empty sidewalk. Begela’s personal driver, Andre, had whisked around to the curb, nodding dutifully as he opened the rear passenger’s side door.
Nze was leaning into the Benz when he saw the man in its backseat — a man the coupe’s double-glazed windows had at first concealed from view. In his dark coverall fatigues, he very definitely was not one of the minister’s regular employees.
For a confused, off-kilter moment, Nze had wondered if he might be an official escort of some kind. But then a scent that was at once recognizable and incongruous wafted over him from the car’s interior… the pungent, leafy smell of khat.
Although the stimulant drug was legal in Gabon — as it was throughout the rest of Africa — Nze knew no ministerial guard would have the effrontery to chew it while on duty.
He’d stopped halfway inside the car, hesitant, suspicion abruptly taking root inside him.
A profanity was husked in his ear: “Encule-tête!”
Powerful hands closed around Nze’s neck from behind, wrenched it backward before he could react. The hood fell over his head and was pulled down below his eyes, his face. Then Nze was shoved into the rear of the car, where his mouth was quickly wrapped with duct tape outside the sack.
Someone pressed into the car after him and the door of the Mercedes slammed shut.
An instant later, Nze heard the driver get inside.
Nze made smothered sounds through the tape, struggled to move, but could scarcely wriggle his body. He’d been crushed between the man in dark fatigues and whoever boosted him into the car.
An object jabbed into his right side. Hard. The blunt barrel of a gun.
“Ça suffit!” The order to stop squirming had been spat by the same gruff, husking voice he’d heard out on the sidewalk. Again, close against his ear.
Nze became still, heard a different voice from his opposite side.
“Dépêche toi, vas-y continue!” the khat chewer shouted at the driver. Urging him to hurry up, get on with it.
The car had jumped forward into the street.
Nze was certain the hideaway to which they brought him was near the ocean harbor — perhaps a storage warehouse, or indoor berthing space. It had taken only minutes to get there. As they pulled him from the car, guiding him roughly along, he had felt the transition from asphalt to old wooden boards under his feet, smelled saltwater and diesel fuel, heard what sounded like the rhythmical knocking of a ship’s hull against its moorings. Then a roll-down security gate being raised on rusty metal tracks in front of him.
He was led indoors. Thrust into a chair. Told he’d be shot if he put up any resistance.
The gate clanged shut.
Nze sat without budging for hours before he was shuffled out into the 4×4. At the time, he had no idea why they had kept him at that interim place… but much later, after his captors passed out of the city, he would conclude they had been waiting for the night to run itself thin. It only made sense. The roads leading into the bush were slow to traverse by daylight, and filled with unseen hazards in darkness, becoming more arduous as Port-Gentil’s outlying townships and settlements were left behind in the distance. They would have wanted to limit the amount of ground that had to be covered before the first rays of dawn came bleaching through the sky.
Now the sun was up, its heat building in the cargo section around Nze as the 4×4 gyrated along over pebbled, foliage-tangled jungle roads and trenches. In September, the days were quick to grow sweltering, and air-conditioners were useless and unused in motor vehicles. He could feel sweat pouring down his face under the canvas hood, feel the tire rubber wedged against his side getting warm. His entire body ached, besides, and his arms and legs were tingling from lack of circulation.
There was no way to be certain how many men were riding with him, but Nze had mentally indexed at least four voices from snatches of overheard conversation. One of them was very soft, belonging to someone who spoke French with a perceptible foreign accent… an American accent, he believed. The khat chewer from the backseat of the Mercedes was also among his hostile, unchosen companions, and Nze did not have to hear the man speak to know it. The combination of his drug of choice’s sickly sweet odor and the stultifying heat inside the cargo section had pushed Nze to the verge of nausea. And his constant tossing about hadn’t helped. With his mouth taped, he’d been afraid he would choke on his own vomit if the trip stretched on much longer, heaving up what little was left of yesterday’s dinner — and fine wine, he recalled miserably, thinking of the glass he had set down to answer the phone.
Nze actually found himself grateful when the vehicle bounced to a halt, its engine cutting off with a shudder… and then was struck by how odious his circumstances must be to evoke such a feeling, the constant realist in him serving up another reminder that having reached his destination could not prove a good thing at all.
Doors on both sides of the vehicle opened, shut, and Nze heard footsteps scrambling over earth and scrub toward its rear. The cargo hatch was lifted. Arid — but fresh — air wafted through, easing the stuporous, khat-smelling heat around him.
This time Nze could feel no gratitude. He had already wasted his meager quota.
Hands seized the back of his perspiration-soaked shirt, pulling him from the open hatch like a trussed animal. Nze landed on his shoulder with a thud that knocked the wind out of him. He felt somebody take hold of the cords around his wrists, heard machetes hacking at foliage as he was dragged blindly over what seemed to be a rough footpath. Pebbles and thorns skinned his hands. A spiny clinging vine caught his left pants leg, raked it upward, and tore the flesh above his ankle. At some point he had lost one of his shoes, the foot that wore it twisting sharply. It had elicited a muffled whimper from him.
Nze did not know how far his abductors pulled him as they tramped on through the brush. Fifteen meters, twenty, perhaps farther. He did not know.
Suddenly, they stopped.
Nze was grabbed by the shirt collar again, pulled up onto his knees with a vicious jerk, and steadied from behind so he wouldn’t keel over, as he had in the four-wheel drive.
The tape around his hood was torn off. Then the hood itself.
Up and off.
Nze’s eyes filled with an explosion of glare. He grimaced as they adjusted to the daylight, blinked away stinging tears.
Swooning from fatigue, his vision a watery blur, Nze still found he could discern a great deal about his surroundings. He was in a small circular clearing, its edges shagged by high thickets of Marantaceae with dark green leaves the size o
f elephant ears. The clearing’s plainly defined boundaries and trammeled-down carpet of sedge suggested it was man made, slashed out of the forest with machetes like those his captors had used on the trail. Around and underneath Nze, the sawgrass growth was especially scorched, almost black, giving it the appearance of a large stain spread across the ground.
Then he spotted the tire lying in front of him. Doubtless the same tire that had been jammed against him in the cargo section for many hours. A portable metal gasoline can was beside it. A row of men nearby to the right, their knees level with his eyes.
He raised his head for a look at their faces. There were four of them — Andre in his conspicuous chauffeur’s suit, and two Bantu with semiautomatic rifles slung over their shoulders, dressed in coverall fatigues identical to those worn by the khat chewer. Nze could not see the latter, but thought he might be responsible for the shadow falling over him from behind… and realized now that he was not the group’s only user. As the minister knelt there before them, one of the Bantu removed a wad of the drug from a banana-frond wrapping in his hand, passed it to the other tribesman, then got a second wad and put it in his mouth with two fingers.
They chewed and watched him with hyped, bright eyes.
Nze looked away from them to the group’s single white, a lance-thin man in a safari jacket and bush hat. His eyes were pale blue, his skin the color of chalk.
Nze at once saw the camera hanging over his chest from a neck strap. It was a 35-mm with a large objective lens.
The white met Nze’s gaze with his own, studying him. Both hands in the gusset pockets of his jacket.
“Bienvenue,” he said in the lightly accented French that Nze remembered from their trip. “Por le maia distance, se bien regarder aà la lumiè‘re du jour.”
Nze was silent.