The MP froze. “Impossible,” he said.
“It’s true.”
Mickels sat quietly. He bit his lip and then he let slip: “That little shit.”
The last time they’d seen each other, Mickels had attacked Grip without getting the slightest pushback. Now Grip had scored.
“That’s not the only thing.” Grip was cool. He smiled disarmingly, and his tone wasn’t mocking but still. “You missed some forensic evidence.”
“The hell I did,” said Mickels, no longer roaring with confidence.
“The six rifles from the shooting range . . .”
“No one has touched them since I collected them from the shooting range. And I’ve had them here since. You want to see them?”
“Sure.”
Mickels rose slowly from the desk, keeping his eyes on Grip. He held a pen between his fingers.
“Missed?” he said, turning his back on Grip and walking toward the gun cabinet.
The lock to it beeped, and the bolts slid back with a muffled metallic sound when Mickels turned the handle. “Here, all six guns.”
Grip stepped forward to peer into the cabinet.
“Yes, I’ve checked the numbers on them,” said Mickels, no doubt pleased that all the rifles were still in the cabinet, despite Grip’s hint, “and each one checks out as the personal weapon belonging to MovCon personnel.”
Grip looked at the gun rack. “All six, identical.”
“Exactly.” Mickels, still on his guard, was struck by a thought. “Checking the fingerprints would be meaningless, when there were so many people . . .”
“That’s not what this is about.” Grip unfolded the printed-out color photo he’d brought along. The one from the shooting range that showed the whole group—the swarm of people and guns. He handed it over. “Spot the difference,” he said. “You’ll find it on the picture, not in the cabinet. Something happened between the time the picture was taken and when you collected the weapons. Yes, beyond the lieutenant getting shot.”
Mickels looked baffled.
All six weapons had clean barrels. Someone had seized an opportunity and then carefully removed the evidence. “It starts with laser and ends with sight.”
Mickels had turned away from the photograph and was looking into the cabinet when suddenly he understood.
“Radovanović?” he asked.
Grip was a little amazed that this was the only possible connection Mickels could make. But why change it? “Maybe,” he replied. Above all, Grip needed to protect his bluff and keep Radovanović for a little while longer. Also, he didn’t want to risk Mickels asking Hansson awkward questions.
Mickels closed the cabinet. He turned around, stood in his normal position with his legs apart again. “Besides,” he began, “what does a missing laser sight prove, really?”
“Well . . .” but then Grip stopped himself. He resisted the temptation; he wouldn’t strike again now. Mickels could only stick to his preconceived ideas. “. . . Only that it’s missing.”
Mickels stayed firm, but he was puzzled. That was enough. Maybe he’d cut Grip some slack. At the very least, he wouldn’t yell at Grip the next time they met.
22
She was an unlikely vision of impeccable style: very overweight, her hair in a smooth gray pageboy, always dressed in black, and always announced by the click of her high heels. Yet she never seemed to sweat a drop.
“You realize that Djibouti wasn’t my top choice,” she said, the first time they met. That body of hers, in suits that fit so well—Grip thought they must have been hand-tailored. Also, no one had ever seen her wobble on her high-heeled pumps. She had a built-in radar for the cracks that made the Djibouti sidewalks a minefield for those heels. She radiated neither class nor cool but more that she was a controlled force of nature. Under her patronage, no one felt completely safe.
Judy Drexler, that’s what it said on the business card she’d left at the Kempinski’s reception. It had a gold eagle, with UNITED STATES EMBASSY embossed in one corner. “Call me” was the short message, written on the blank back. They were meeting at La Mer Rouge, an upscale seafood restaurant located on the outskirts of the city. Someone had gone beyond the usual attempt to dress up a pizzeria as a British pub, in their efforts to extract money from the Europeans and Americans. Instead, there was an open floor plan with black wicker furniture and tasteful touches in beige. Not quite the French Riviera, but a good try.
“You shouldn’t eat every meal at the Kempinski,” Judy said, as soon as they sat down. She was the one who’d chosen the place.
“The Djiboutians call this the best fish restaurant in Africa. Let’s just say that in the Horn of Africa, there isn’t a lot of competition.” She laughed, but to make sure Grip wouldn’t judge before he’d tasted the food, she added, “It’s good here.”
Around sixty, Grip guessed. Old enough to be getting a pension, but she liked the game too much.
“Coordinator of Consular Affairs,” she replied when he asked, rolling her eyes as if the title was necessary but, in some obvious way, also a lie.
To order, they approached a counter where fresh seafood was artfully displayed on a bed of ice. The waiter gave a short lecture on which was which, the various accompaniments, and how each would be prepared. Grip didn’t recognize any of the names, except tuna and lobster. “We’ll just have it grilled,” Judy said, halfway through the list of sauces, pointing to a couple of fish and returning to the table.
They made small talk while waiting for their food. They chatted about the heat, the chilled pool at the Kempinski, and the question of who could possibly be paying for the containers full of brand-new Chinese trucks in the port.
“So, I got in touch with you,” she said, placing the cloth napkin on her lap. “You’re the police officer who’s investigating what happened at the shooting range.”
“Right.”
“Flown in from Sweden, I understand.” He nodded.
“How’s it going?” she asked, directly.
“Fine, thank you.”
She laughed out loud. “I didn’t invite you to lunch at La Mer Rouge to hear that everything is going fine. All investigations are going fine. That’s what everyone says, anyway, until the day you have to present your conclusions.”
“I’m not there yet.”
“And I’m not looking for a written statement.”
“Written or not, why are you even interested?”
“The accident occurred at an American shooting range. It took place on our turf, and we just want to follow up.”
“If the American base commander, General So-and-So, had sent me an MP carrying a stack of neatly filled-out forms, I would have believed his version,” Grip said.
“I’m sure he’ll show up in due time, as soon as he gets his papers arranged. But I can also keep him out of your hair.”
“Is that a threat?” Grip asked.
Grip smiled. Drexler smiled back.
“We can exchange threats some other time. My job is to gather gossip, you know that.”
The waiter appeared behind Grip’s back. He bumped Grip with the plates he was carrying, and then there was some confusion over who was having what. When he left, Grip touched his neck below one ear and found what looked like tomato sauce on his fingertips. He turned around to see the waiter, but now there was no one behind him. Grip took his napkin and looked at Drexler inquisitively as he wiped off the dark red from his neck and hands.
“So, what’s the word on the street in Djibouti, for real?” he asked.
“About the shooting range?” Judy said, chewing, having already started in. “A remarkable event in which a Swedish lieutenant was shot, and a local worker named Ghermat was charged and arrested.”
“And then released.”
“Yes, I heard that too. But why?”
“It was a matter of one person’s word against another’s, and also the credibility of the witnesses.”
“I understand that. Still, was it so
wise to release him?”
“At the jail, the police were going to beat him to death.”
“People can withstand more than you think.” There was silence for a moment.
“Have you been in contact with Colonel Frères, by the way?”
“Yes, we’ve spoken.”
“You see, I told him that you’d probably need his help, when I heard about the shooting. I guess he’s the one who contacted you?”
Grip nodded.
“Good, he does what he’s told,” she continued. “The French can sometimes be difficult, but the man owes me a few favors. Please let me know if you need anything more from Frères.”
“I think I’ve gotten what I need.”
“But the colonel failed to convince you that Ghermat should remain in jail? You realize that once he’s released, you’ll never get him back.”
“I never spoke to Frères about it. But it doesn’t matter, Abdoul Ghermat is no longer a suspect. He didn’t fire the shot.”
“You have other theories?”
“Yes, a few.”
“May I ask you, Ernst Grip, how long you’ve been here in Djibouti?”
“Just over a week.”
“Three years, that’s how long I’ve been here. For three years, I’ve listened to the chatter, gossip, and tips, read the surveillance reports and the interrogation transcripts, and watched people come and go under every imaginable circumstance. One thing you learn quickly is that if you have someone in your sights, you don’t take your eyes off them.”
“He didn’t shoot the lieutenant.”
It was as if Judy Drexler didn’t hear him. “A month ago, we received a tip that a certain Abdoul Ghermat was loading and unloading goods on transport planes controlled by Al-Qaeda. You don’t want that type getting near your planes, so we checked it out. The report said he was a local worker with close ties to the unit’s lieutenant. They sometimes went out for coffee together, or at night to the downtown dives, and so on. We might call it inappropriate, fraternizing that way, but hardly more than that, so we dropped it. But then a week ago the lieutenant dropped dead on our shooting range, and Ghermat was arrested.”
Drexler lifted her fork, just as Grip was about to answer. “No, he might not have shot his friend, but Abdoul Ghermat is mixed up in something. And you know, he’d probably have been willing to tell you a bit about it, to avoid ending his days in that cell. The Djiboutians could have done that for you, but you gave him a free pass right back onto the street.” She cut another piece of grilled fish, and smiled. “Don’t be softhearted. You can’t afford to be in a place like this.”
Grip shrugged. “Softhearted, maybe. But what bothers me is that you spied on the Swedish MovCon unit. On us.”
“Who said anything about spying? I simply listen to what people say.”
“And what about this source? One little tip, and you do all that work?”
“I’m not terribly interested in what goes on in Djibouti. Ultimately, it’s all about Somalia. My job is to collect information and analyze it for the machinery that determines whose car ends up in the drone sights, and whose doesn’t. And the source who pointed to Abdoul Ghermat has been very reliable—at least, up until now—I can tell you that. But this time the source was wrong. No Al-Qaeda or Al-Shabaab.”
“Couldn’t the source be out to hurt Ghermat?”
“That can’t be ruled out. But it doesn’t matter now. The lieutenant is dead and we’ll never see Abdoul Ghermat again. I thought you might want to know. You might need a crash course in the myths and facts of Djibouti.”
“So what other advice do you have, while I’m so far from home?”
Judy put down her fork and pointed to Grip’s glass. “They usually make the ice out of bottled water, but . . .”
“. . . you never really know where the water in the bottles comes from,” Grip said. “All right, so nothing is what it seems in Djibouti. And maybe I released Ghermat too soon. But not long afterward, someone slid a note under the door to my hotel room. Cryptic, but very interesting. Who knows, maybe it was a kind of thank-you? Maybe there’s more than one way to get to the bottom of things?”
Judy Drexler stretched. Her whole being signaled that she could lower the temperature between them to subfreezing in a millisecond. But that wasn’t what she wanted with Grip. She laid a few fingers on his hand. Not in a gentle way, but well intentioned. “I didn’t come here to lecture you, Ernst Grip. I wanted to tell you that we missed something important, only that. And I think you’re about to make the same mistake.”
23
The bottle hit the bottom of the bucket. This was an early end to the day’s water supply, not even three o’clock. Jenny dropped it, postponing her drink, and looked at her children. Sebastian was half-asleep, his sweaty hair standing straight up, while Alexandra played with a lone ant on the floor next to her mattress.
The only part of their life that remained normal was Alexandra. She was weak, of course, but not sick. Moreover, she kept to a schedule: she got out of bed every morning, making a point of it, and did the same when she said good night. In the rush to leave the boat, she’d grabbed two books: a math book and a random paperback. In the morning, she did math—she’d taken a pencil too—writing microscopic calculations in the white margins of the book. But she solved only a few problems at a time, never more than five, saving them like candy.
Then in the afternoon, when the worst of the heat had passed but the darkness hadn’t yet begun to fall, she read her novel. But if Jenny had patted her affectionately on the cheek, seeing how carefully the math problems were measured out, her daughter’s regimen with the second book made them anxious. Alexandra read three pages, exactly three, not a sentence more. Jenny had taken the book while Alexandra and the others were asleep. It was a 520-page-long mystery, with a small dog-ear here. Jenny herself hadn’t managed to keep track of how they’d been kidnapped and held in their oven of a house for twenty-one days, but her daughter had. And her daughter had calculated that they might remain there for at least 150 days. In the dark that night, Jenny wept silently for so long that, in the end, she couldn’t even taste her own tears.
Soon after the jeeps arrived one afternoon, a man wearing pleated pants and a white shirt came into the room. He simply looked around and went back out again. Jenny positioned herself to watch him in the front room, through the half-open door. He was a Somali like the others, but he made a very different impression. Darwiish stood and spoke to him, in his usual intimidating way. But although this other man looked younger, he talked back, and appeared both forceful and self-possessed.
He looked cool, that’s what Jenny thought, as if he’d just drunk his fill and put down the empty, misty glass. All the pirates were affected by the heat, with their half-closed eyes, but this gaze was different. He took everything in and kept his distance. This godforsaken place was just dust in the sand he walked through. His shoes had lost their shine, that was all. This was someone who would return to a city. To some kind of civilization. There, he’d wipe the dust off the leather, and then the place, the buildings, and the heat would simply be left behind. But wouldn’t he make something happen, wouldn’t he talk to someone?
Jenny felt ashamed about her appearance. She was a victim, not him.
They came for Carl-Adam and closed the door. But the door was only made of thin boards, and Jenny got up and put her ear by the hinge, where there was a crack she’d used before.
A few words of Somali, then steps going away. It seemed that Carl-Adam was left alone with the man in the outer room.
“Do you understand the situation that we face?” The man’s English was not what Jenny had gotten used to hearing. It flowed smoothly, sounded educated, and there was something familiar about it.
“I and my family have been kidnapped by pirates,” said Carl-Adam. He made an effort, trying to sound angry when he said it.
“And is that all?”
“Yes.”
“Pirates, that i
s one version. Another is that these are fishermen, and you have shot and killed one of them.”
“But . . .”
“What happened to your hand?” the man interrupted.
“They . . .”
“They shot you, in return. You were lucky. That way your entire family escaped being massacred, and you yourself have escaped with your life.” A long silence followed, before the man continued again.
“Of course, they are pirates, and you can think what you want about Darwiish. But now he has the upper hand—he has you. Therefore, it is his way of looking at things that is valid here. Not your way, not his men’s way, and not mine.”
“Why are you here, then, if you have no say in the matter?”
“I am here because I do not belong to Darwiish’s gangs. He has hired me because everything has stalled, and because he, you, and everyone else need someone independent to solve this. I am not on anyone’s side. I negotiate, I resolve conflicts. I bring you good advice.”
“Why?”
“So much in this world is lost through misunderstandings.”
“And this good advice comes absolutely free?”
“I have expenses.”
“I forgot my wallet at home.”
“It is not you who will pay.”
“So what would your best advice be?”
“I do not think that you are truly in need of good advice right now.”
“No?”
“You need another voice, someone to talk with people at home. Do you understand that Darwiish has nothing to lose? He can simply shoot me when I come out here, and it means nothing. It would have not the least consequence for him, and I’m a Somali. Out here, the lives of you and your family are worth less than that.”
“Ten million dollars.”
“Wrong. You are only worth the trouble of keeping you here if Darwiish believes there is someone willing to pay.”
“He says ten, I tried . . .”
“Darwiish can come in here and suddenly change that to hundreds, or just three. And then that’s the way it will be. Or he can come in here and say that he has gotten tired of the whole thing. Then he will send your cut-off fingers in the mail, or maybe he won’t even have patience for that. But ten million US dollars—don’t you think that is reasonable? Does the sum surprise you? You are used to dealing with acquisitions, you must deal with shareholders who resist. Ten million can’t be an unusual amount to pay, can it?”
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