The Informationist: A Thriller

by Taylor Stevens

  The conversation had already been interrupted several times by the attentive waitstaff, and it took a longer pause with the arrival of the main course. The discussion strayed from small talk to the similar aspects of their work to small talk again, and it was over coffee when Munroe reached for the folder by the foot of her chair and pulled out the file of her life’s history that Burbank had given her. She slid it across the table. “You’ve probably gone over this already,” she said. “But if not, it’s only fair that you have it—I have yours.”

  Bradford put down his cup, reached for the file, and slid it back to her. “I assembled that file, Michael,” he said. “I don’t need it.”

  Munroe leaned back and allowed silence to engulf them. Bradford said nothing, offered no explanation or justification; he simply sat and returned her gaze with a placid expression. It was a rare reaction. Most of humanity, when trapped in an uneasy silence, would say something, anything, in order to free themselves from the discomfort of quiet.

  “If you’re the one responsible for that,” Munroe said finally, pointing to the folder, “you certainly left out a lot of key information.”

  “Yes, I did.” His voice was low and smooth, and he leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table. “Some information I couldn’t get, but the rest didn’t seem pertinent.”

  Munroe kept quiet, and when once again he didn’t take the bait of silence, she angled toward him so that her face was close to his and in a whisper said cynically, “It’s interesting that you’d find psychiatric evaluations to be so much less pertinent than a history of broken bones.”

  “I would have included them if they were accurate,” he said. “But you and I both know that they aren’t.”

  “You’re not only a hired gun, you’re also a psychologist? That’s very impressive.”

  He smiled and leaned back against the chair. “Am I wrong?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the expert.” And then she mirrored his shift in seating position. “So,” she said, and she smiled back and waited half a beat, “what’s your theory on the scars? Apparently you don’t believe that I’m suicidal or prone to cutting.”

  “Would it matter if I did?” he asked.

  “Actually, yes, thank you for asking, it matters a lot. It determines what types of reciprocal behavior I can expect from you when we find ourselves under stress.”

  “Then no,” he said, “I don’t believe it—it contradicts everything I know about you. If you were planning to end your life you’d do it in a chuteless BASE jump off Angel Falls.”

  Munroe drew a slow, deep breath and then held up her right hand and spread her fingers. “Fewer than these,” she said. “That’s how many people grasp what you’ve just said.” And then, after another moment of silence, “The funny thing is, everything I told them was true.” She shook her head. “What a fucking mind job. You reach out for help and get labeled delusional.” She pulled back a collection of beaded bracelets from the base of her left wrist and turned it over for him to see. “The scar’s real, as are all the others, but they weren’t self-inflicted.” She turned her right wrist over, blemish-free, and placed it next to the left. “When I do a job, I do it properly.”

  “There’s a lot I don’t know about you, Michael,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what you told your doctors, and it’s pretty evident from the file that I haven’t been able to fill in the blanks of your teenage years. I do know that when you arrived in the United States, you didn’t adjust very well and were later expelled from high school.”

  Munroe nodded and motioned for him to continue.

  “In that same year, you were barred from several eskrima training facilities and kicked out of nearly every martial arts class you attended. Getting expelled from school I could understand, but the knife fighting and martial arts made me curious—especially the places you were going—tough guys aren’t easily threatened, and if you go too far, they’ll just as soon beat the crap out of you. It took me a while, but I managed to track down your first balisong instructor—he remembered you well and not at all fondly. He said you’d come close to killing him a couple of times, says you easily could have, and he still doesn’t understand what stopped you. The stories from the others weren’t much different.” Bradford paused for a sip of coffee. “That ability and the spark of crazy that terrifies the hard-assed, it came from somewhere, Michael, and I have no doubt that’s where the scars came from as well.”

  “You’re a very perceptive man,” she said. “Maybe I’ll keep you around for a while—perhaps you can appreciate the mastery born from the will to survive.”

  THE FLIGHT OUT of Frankfurt connected in Paris and touched down in Douala at seven-thirty in the evening. Munroe stepped from the cool, dry interior of the plane to the open-air concrete halls of the terminal, and warm moisture washed over her as if she’d opened the door to a steam room.

  In a shifting line that converged and separated, the passengers moved through the halls toward passport control. Dampness settled on Munroe’s skin, weighing down her hair and fogging up the glasses of a tourist who walked beside her. And then, as if the heat had entwined itself around their bodies and in doing so encumbered their limbs, the speed of the pack slowed to a softer pace. By the time the first of the travelers arrived at health control, wet patches had spread under the arms and on the backs of their shirts, and some showed visible signs of exertion.

  Munroe asked Bradford for his passport, and he gave it to her. At health control she handed over her yellow card and both of their passports with the pink-red border of a ten-euro bill peeking from between the pages. To the woman on the other side of the small kiosk, she said, “We seem to have misplaced one of our vaccination cards.” The woman flipped slowly through both passports, and when at last she was finished and came to Munroe’s yellow book, she studied the information and finally said, “Your vaccinations are expired.”

  The woman handed back the vaccination booklet, and Munroe placed another ten-euro bill between the pages and handed it back again. “I never noticed.”

  On the other side of the counter, the woman wrote something and then handed back both passports, two new yellow vaccination booklets filled with doctors’ stamps and signatures, and two pieces of hand-cut paper stamped with the purple ink of her official stamp, signifying that each traveler was healthy and fully vaccinated. The euros had disappeared. “Go to passport control,” she said.

  Munroe walked slowly, breathing deeply, and took in the odor of mold and decay and smiled. It was the fragrance of year after year of rain and humidity that had permeated the walls and paint and become as much a part of the building as the steel rods that supported the structure and the bodies of the immigration personnel that exuded the acrid aroma of old sweat and unwashed clothing worn day after day.

  It took a twenty-euro bill for Munroe to get through immigration on the expired Cameroonian residence card. At customs the official methodically went through their luggage and, finding nothing of value, nothing contraband, and nothing that might guarantee the night’s drinking money, shoved the contents back into the bags and allowed them to pass.

  Outside the building, under the dim fluorescent lights of the terminal, taxi drivers called out and porters jostled and chaos reigned.

  The hotel was Parfait Garden, an aging multistoried structure off the sidewalk of Boulevard de la Liberté. The building had fewer amenities than the newer and higher-starred hotels in the city, but it had managed to maintain its aura of dignity, and Munroe had chosen it for the memories. It stood less than a kilometer down the road from the roundabout that branched toward Buea, and as she stepped from the taxi, she glanced in the direction that once was home.

  Home. Whatever “home” was supposed to mean.

  So close and still so far away, nothing there and no reason to return. Her mother had since repatriated to the United States, and Dad had married a Cameroonian and moved northwest to Garoua. She had not seen or spoken to either of them since leav
ing Africa; perhaps when the job was over, she would make the trip to the country’s desert north and find the man who had been her father for thirteen years.

  The staff at the front desk was polite and courteous despite Bradford’s requirement of seeing and approving both rooms prior to check-in. Worse was that he insisted Munroe accompany him, the first of no doubt many inconveniences that having a babysitter-slash-bodyguard would bring. They bypassed the hotel’s only elevator and climbed the wide carpeted stairway that wound through the center of the building. The musty scent of the venerable permeated the air.

  Adjacent rooms next to the stairwell on the third floor met with Bradford’s approval, and once he had left her alone, Munroe dumped her duffel bag and backpack at the foot of the bed, turned off the air conditioner, and opened the windows. Warmth and humidity filled the room. True acclimatization would take a week or more, and the air-conditioning would only slow down the process; until her body adjusted, the climate would siphon off her strength, leaving her sluggish and tired—better to get it over with as quickly as possible. From her backpack she retrieved double-sided tape and tacked the day curtains in place around the windows. It wasn’t quite mosquito netting but would do the job until she could pick up the real thing.

  She lay on the bed with her hands behind her head and stared at the ceiling. Whatever she thought she would feel upon returning, such contentment was a surprise. It was five weeks until Christmas, and this was the closest to home for the holidays she’d been in at least a decade.

  MUNROE WAS UP with the sun, and for over an hour the sound of lively traffic and busy sidewalks had filtered through the open windows, calling her to meet them. She’d given Bradford her word that at least this once she would wait for him before leaving the room, and she was dressed and lying on the bed deep in thought when he knocked.

  They took breakfast in the hotel’s small dining room. The mood between them was light and the conversation friendly, and when they had finished and were waiting for the waiter to bring a second round of coffee, Munroe stood. “I’ll find out where he’s gone off to,” she said.

  The waiter had been on his way back from the kitchen when she stopped him. She placed a capsule of powder in the palm of his hand and followed it with a twenty-euro note. “My friend has been very difficult about taking his medication,” she said. “If you put this in his coffee, the money is yours. If you get it in the wrong drink, you’ll pay.”

  It was several minutes after the coffee that Miles began to show visible signs of somnolence. Monroe reached over and placed her wrist to his forehead. “Everything all right?” she asked. “You don’t look very well.”

  “Not so good,” he said. His words were slightly slurred. “I feel so tired.”

  “It might be the climate and the jet lag,” she said. “It does that to you. It can take a while to get used to it. Let’s get you back to your room.”

  By the time the elevator had taken them to their floor, Bradford was slumped over her shoulder. With some difficulty she got him into his bed, removed his shoes, and made sure the air-conditioning worked properly. Knowing he would wake thirsty, she set out a bottle of drinking water and tucked the light blanket around him.

  It was a crappy deal. She would have preferred another way, but there were things to be done that belonged to no one else. “Sleep well,” she whispered. She left his key in the room and, using a skeleton set, locked the door behind her.

  She checked her watch; she’d be lucky to get back before dark.

  The streets of Douala were narrow and full of loud and chaotic life. Bicycles laden with goods stacked five feet into the air fought for road space with Peugeot cars converted to share taxis and packed with twice as many people as they were built to carry. Traffic surged in disarray, vehicles jostled for position, their horns being applied as frequently as the brakes. Pedestrians crowded the sidewalks. Colonial buildings sat side by side with modern structures, and green fronds peeked above walls that separated homes from the cacophony of the streets.

  First stop was the Société Générale de Banques au Cameroun and an account left abandoned when she had fled the country so many years ago. Munroe expected that it would have been closed due to inactivity, the money vanishing into the ether, or at the least be inaccessible. Rather, it was all there and had even accrued a modest sum of interest. She folded the bank statement and then at the FOREX window changed five hundred euros into Central African francs. It would be enough small change to last a while; most of the hotels and airlines accepted and sometimes preferred euros to the local currency.

  Outside, Munroe hailed several taxis and sent each yellow car on its way until she got a newer vehicle, its engine integrity less questionable, the seats still solid and without the grime and reshaping of those that had borne too many passengers; with the driver she negotiated a return rate to Kribi, that sleepy party town three hours south of Douala.

  Known for its pristine beaches, Kribi was quiet and relatively empty for most of the year but swelled beyond capacity during holiday periods. It was in Kribi that the past would converge with the present. She needed documents, and the man who could get them would be found there—she had spent several hours on the phone last night making sure of it.

  Out of Douala the traffic congestion eased to the occasional overladen minibus. The road to Kribi traced its path inland and then parallel to the ocean, with farms of short palm trees used for producing palm oil bordering each side, their monotony broken by an occasional building or the intermittent sight of young boys herding goats, pushing the animals along the road’s dirt shoulders. The highway’s two lanes provided enough room for oncoming vehicles to pass without forcing one off the tarmac. A steady breeze blew in off the ocean, and Munroe spent most of the trip alternating between reviewing her notes and staring lazily out the window, watching memories fly by with the scenery.

  Unlike yesterday, today brought pangs of guilt and an overwhelming sense of sadness. There were tremors in the back of her mind, and the voices began to stir, the first she had heard from them since accepting the Burbank assignment.

  Perhaps the decision to return to Kribi had been a mistake.

  chapter 6

  Boniface Akambe was a large man. Not only in his height and girth but in that he wore fine clothing, drove a new four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser, and owned several successful businesses. He was also a good-looking man with soft skin and a desirable-size gap between his top front teeth. Akambe had twelve children borne by three wives, two of whom lived in Douala while the third, the youngest, kept house in Kribi. His situation had improved since Munroe had seen him last. He’d been younger then—they all had been—and he’d had only one wife, though if he’d had his way, Munroe would have soon become the second.

  It was Akambe’s family name and political connections that bought him protection and helped the businesses that fed his large lifestyle, but it was a lesser-known enterprise that had compelled Munroe to make this trip.

  Kribi was exactly as she remembered—a small and lazy town with only a few main streets connecting the parts of the whole and far too many hotels for its size. Several new buildings had been added, but otherwise little had changed, and it took only a few minutes for the taxi driver to find the place Munroe had described.

  The office was nondescript, on the ground floor of a three-story structure with peeling paint on the outside walls and water condensation dripping in a steady flow from an air-conditioning box that protruded over the sidewalk. Inside the office it was cool and fragranced by the lingering smell of mildew, and in several places the linoleum on the floor turned up its corners. A receptionist sat on a wooden chair behind a metal desk worn of its paint and showing makeshift repairs done over the years. In front of her was a manual typewriter and to the right of it an arrangement of manila folders, haphazardly stacked.

  In the nine years that Munroe had been away from Africa, not once had the Fang language rolled off her tongue, but it came now in a familiar bur
st. “Hakum ayen Akambe,” she said. “Please notify him that I am here.” She didn’t need to provide more information, that she spoke in Fang was her calling card. With a look of surprise, the woman stood and went for a door on the opposite wall.

  And then from behind came the rumble of Akambe’s voice.

  “Es-sss-sa,” he said, drawing her name into three syllables. He exited the door of his office, arms wide in welcome and a huge grin spread across his face. “Essa,” he said again. He clasped his hands together and then placed them on her shoulders and, holding her at arm’s length, said, “It could only have been you. How have you been? How many years now?”

  “It’s been a long time,” she said, returning the smile and relishing the warmth. “A very long time.”

  “Come, take coffee with me,” he said, and then barked a few phrases to the woman who had returned to the desk. He stepped aside so that Munroe could pass into his office. In contrast to that of the front room, the furniture here was new, the flooring and paint clean, and his wooden office desk so large it nearly filled the back wall. Akambe sat in the oversize chair behind the desk and Munroe on the sofa that rested perpendicular to it.

  “Essa,” he said again after the coffee had been served. “Where have you been hiding yourself all of this time?”

  “I’ve been across the ocean, studying and working.”

  “Ah,” he said, and he leaned back and placed his hands on his wide midsection. “You went to your people. Quite the trouble it made when you left. Francisco spent a small fortune trying to find you. He finally stopped when he knew for sure that you were alive and had left the country.”

  A stab of guilt and the hollow ache that followed brought on a chorus of voices, chanting and calling her name, fighting for attention. She held eye contact with Akambe and, when the internal din had ebbed, said softly, “Have you heard from him?”