For a long time Pierce sat there. Then he typed a response: “Truth is the only defense. So you tell me: do you have one?”
It was the question Pierce kept asking himself.
B
Y MIDMORNING, WHEN
C
LELLAN AND
V
ORSTER DROVE HIM TO THE
airport, Pierce still had no reply from Jomo—or from Dave Rubin, of whom he had requested, “Tell me what else you know about Ugwo Ajukwa.” When they arrived, Vorster passed Pierce a duffel bag. “I suggest you take this.”
“What’s inside?” Pierce asked.
“A handgun. Know how to use one?”
In the delta, Vorster was reminding Pierce, no one could protect him. “My cousin’s a cop,” he answered. “He taught me how to miss my foot.”
Vorster nodded. “Then put it in your suitcase.”
Reluctantly, Pierce took the bag.
A
S BEFORE, BARA
met him in Port George. Driving to the Okaris’ compound, the lawyer seemed preoccupied. “What’s wrong?” Pierce asked bluntly.
Intently watching the road, Bara answered, “To begin, Marissa’s at the jail. She’s sick of being passive, she says—the reason she hasn’t defied them sooner was fear of reprisal against Bobby.” His voice was somber. “Now her greatest fear is that he’ll die in prison. The only way to live is do everything she can.”
Pierce felt anxiety fray his temper. “Okimbo is there, for God’s sake.”
“She’s Bobby’s wife,” Bara said in the same quiet tone. “Caraway is using your report to try to alleviate Bobby’s suffering. That probably means she’ll be safe.”
Unable to voice his fears, Pierce stared out the window. After a time, he asked with weary asperity, “What else is there? More e-mails from Jomo?”
“It’s about the massacre.” Bara paused. “There may be a witness. We still have a network—hidden, but they’re working.”
Surprised, Pierce turned in his seat. “On what?”
“On things best undescribed until they ripen.” Bara’s face closed. “You’re a stranger here,” he admonished. “You’ll learn only what Bobby’s lawyer can use.”
More completely than before, Pierce felt like a man in a metaphoric version of the creeklands where, three weeks before, he had placed himself in the hands of a pilot whose name he’d never asked. When they reached the compound, it was late afternoon, and Marissa had not returned.
He sat on the patio, scribbling notes to pull together the threads of Bobby’s defense. At odd moments he found his pen stopping, his thoughts preempted by worry for Marissa. In the last few hours he had faced the core truth: above everything else, he had came back to Luandia because Marissa Okari was still here.
S
HORTLY BEFORE SUNSET,
she appeared.
Pierce turned at the sound of her footsteps, caught between relief and anger. “You’re an idiot,” he said.
She stopped there, two feet away, and slowly shook her head. “Please, don’t.”
She did not look at him. He went to her, placing his hand under her chin. When she met his eyes, it was as though her pupils had been exposed to too much light.
Pierce felt his stomach clutch. “Okimbo,” he said.
When Marissa could not speak, Pierce took both her hands in his. Then, in a monotone, she told him what had happened.
S
HE HAD GONE
to the prison with three Luandian friends, a woman and two men, members of the human rights community brave enough to join in an act of defiance that, however small, made them more vulnerable to those whose whims could end their lives. When Major Bangida appeared, he refused to let the others come with her.
As the gate closed behind her, Bangida took Marissa’s arm, saying, “Colonel Okimbo wishes to see you.”
For an instant, her legs felt disconnected from her brain; she remembered Omo looking back as Okimbo led her away. Then she saw the gallows and stopped, staring up at it. “Come,” Bangida said.
The young officer seemed emotionless. But when he led her to Okimbo’s office, opening the door for her, his voice was gentle. “Please step inside.”
When the door shut, she forced herself to look at the man who waited.
Okimbo sat on the front edge of his desk, his massive legs splayed, his single eye examining her. “Did you come to apologize?” he inquired with disquieting calm. “Since we last met, your lawyer said much about me in America. And yet I retain the power of life and death.”
Marissa fought against the images of Goro. “I want to see my husband.”
Her voice sounded parched. She watched the calculation surface in his eye. “What if you have weapons?”
She held out her empty hands, a gesture of entreaty for which she despised herself at once. “I meant beneath your dress,” he said.
Slowly, he stood, his body uncoiling like a cat’s. Anger and alarm made her voice defiant.
“No.”
“No? Then you must show me.”
Marissa could not answer. “Do you want to see him?” Okimbo demanded. “Alive, that is.”
Numb, Marissa touched the top button of her dress. She chose a place on the wall to stare at. After seconds that seemed like minutes, she felt and heard her dress whisper to the floor. All that concealed her were her bra and panties. “Everything,” Okimbo directed.
Mechanically, Marissa unhooked her bra. For some reason she clung to it, dangling it from the fingertips of one hand. “Look at me,” he ordered.
When she did, she was staring at the lens of a camera. She heard one click, and then the only sound was Okimbo’s breathing. A smile curved his lips.
As though in a trance, Marissa slid her panties to the floor. The camera clicked twice. Evenly, Okimbo said, “I will tell you what else to do. Then you will do it.”
The instructions that followed were soft, explicit. Willing her mind to leave her body, she complied. The clicking of his camera marked each stage of her humiliation.
Okimbo never touched her. “Cover yourself,” he ordered with faint contempt. “Before Bangida comes.”
As she bent to retrieve her dress, Okimbo turned his back. When the door opened, the only evidence of what had happened was inside Okimbo’s camera.
S
EEING HER ANGUISH,
Pierce asked only, “Did you tell Bobby?”
“I couldn’t.” Her throat worked. “He’s better now. He has light in his cell, and food.”
The dissociation in her voice left Pierce uncertain of what to do. “And you?”
“It was frightening and degrading.” Her voice filled with shame. “Worse than that. It’s been so long since any man . . .”
She could not continue. Overcome by confusion, Pierce reached out for her. Wordless, she came to him. He could feel the softness of her breathing.
At the sound of footsteps, Pierce turned an instant before Marissa did. Watching them, Bara’s face was studiously blank. “There’s someone we have to meet,” he told Pierce.
I
N THE DANK,
dark basement of the Okaris’ house, Bara knelt, a flashlight in one hand, reaching for a heavy barrel lid that sat on the stone floor. When Bara wrestled the lid aside, Pierce saw that the stone beneath it was not mortared. “Help me lift this,” Bara said.
Pierce and Bara pried loose the stone, exposing an open shaft in which Pierce saw the first few steps of a ladder. “It’s a tunnel,” Bara said. “One of Bobby’s precautions. The only others who know are the Asari who dug it. And now you.”
Pierce disliked darkness and confinement. After Bara disappeared, he made himself follow, straining not to show his apprehension.
Bara stood at the bottom of the ladder, roughly ten feet down. When Pierce reached the last step, Bara shone his flashlight into a passageway beneath the earth, propped up by makeshift carpentry. This close to sea level, the trapped air felt damp; when Pierce touched an earthen wall, moist dirt crumbled in his hand.
“It’s held so far,” Bara said phlegmatically, and Pierce felt his assessment of this lawyer rotate like the needle of a compass.
Bent from the waist, Bara began moving. Pierce followed, Bara’s body a dark form that half-blocked the light emanating from his hand. The walls felt closer. Enveloped by claustrophobia, Pierce thought that at any moment their hurried footsteps would cause the earth, collapsing, to swallow them alive. Still they moved deeper into the tunnel; for countless minutes, Pierce imagined himself vanishing without a trace. At last Bara stopped, his hand touching a ladder at the tunnel’s end.
At the top of the ladder, Bara pushed against a piece of wood. The shaft admitted a glimmer of moonlight, into which Bara vanished. When Pierce surfaced, inhaling deeply, he found Bara crouching in an abandoned shack barely big enough to hold them. Bara doused the flashlight. Peering out an empty window frame, Pierce saw, then smelled, the bleak terrain of a garbage dump at night: rotting food, scraps of metal, the rusted carcasses of automobiles. Hunching to avoid detection, Bara began scrambling across heaps of garbage. Stumbling behind, Pierce saw rats skittering between them.
Bara veered toward the corroding shell of a doorless jeep. Pierce slid beside him onto the rotting cloth of its back seat, the palm of one hand resting on an exposed spring. “What’s
this
about?” Pierce whispered.
From the seat in front of them a silent head rose. “Beke Femu is a soldier,” Bara murmured.
Bizarrely, the man extended his hand across the car seat. When Pierce briefly took it, Femu said simply, “I was at Goro.”
At once Pierce’s reflexes kicked in. “You saw it?”
Femu’s head inclined in a nod. In the same undertone he answered, “We committed murders.”
“Tell us,” Bara urged.
The soldier seemed to gather himself. “The eclipse was coming. We were going to Goro, Captain Igina told us, to arrest Bobby Okari. Our platoon was chosen because none of us were Asari.” Femu’s voice faltered. “We were waiting for the eclipse to fall when a helicopter landed, flown by an
oyibo.
The colonel who came with him I knew only by his eye patch.”
Pierce’s nerve ends tingled. “What did the white man look like?”
Femu looked from Bara to Pierce. “The man was big. With blond hair.”
“How old?”
“No longer young. His hair seemed also gray.”
“When you say big . . .”
“Tall. Not fat, but big in his body, too. Maybe with a belly beginning. They stayed there, talking, too far away to hear. Then the
oyibo
flew away.” Femu’s voice remained flat and quiet. “Colonel Okimbo ordered Captain Igina to form us up. Our orders had changed, he said. There was resistance from the Asari—we were to kill everyone in our path and burn Goro to the ground. Then the colonel laughed like a man insane.”
In Pierce’s mind, Femu’s voice merged with the landscape of waste and metal in a haunting coda to what Pierce had seen in Goro. Femu continued in his uninflected tone. “Before they died, Okimbo said, the women could be ours. Then he led us to the helicopters and gave us weed and gin.
“All this time, the moon drew closer to the sun. I smoked until only the space of a hand seemed to separate the moon and sun. Then Okimbo ordered us into the helicopters—”
“Who flew them?” Bara interrupted. “Men from PGL?”
Femu shook his head. “All I remember was darkness coming. When we landed, the sun was gone.”
For the next minutes, Pierce listened. The horror was much as Marissa had described it, except that the soldier, seized by trauma and memory, had lapsed into the present tense. “I am shooting,” he concluded, “until there is no one left to shoot. Then we are taking the bodies and throwing them in a ditch. Some are pouring gasoline and lighting the dead on fire.” He paused. “I’m still smelling this.”
“Why are you telling us?” Pierce asked.
Femu shook his head, as though bewitched. “My village was like Goro,” he said at last. “One day an oil spill turned our fields black and drowned our chickens. My father came in the house with legs black from the curse that swallowed his crops. But there was no Okari to speak for him.”
“So you want to help Bobby now.”
Femu hesitated. “Maybe yes. But how do I do this?”
“Come to Waro and let us record your story. Perhaps after that, they’ll be afraid to harm you. Then you can testify at Bobby’s trial.”
Femu looked around them. “For travel, I would need money.”
“We’ll cover your expenses. Helping us will cost you nothing.”
Femu slid toward the door. “Do not come for me. If I decide yes, I’ll come to you.”
Pierce had no choice; he had no ability to compel a witness. Without saying more, Femu slipped from the jeep. Pierce saw his shadow scurrying across a mound of refuse, too visible in the moonlight.
When Femu vanished, Bara touched Pierce’s shoulder. Looking around them, they left the corroding vehicle and hurried toward the shack, the only sound the crunch of their shoes on rusted metal. Then they retraced their silent journey beneath the earth. In the darkness, Pierce said, “It was Van Daan.”
“So it seems,” Bara answered. “But can we ever prove it?”
When at last they reached the Okaris’ basement, Bara went to Marissa, Pierce to check his e-mail. Rubin had written that he would be in Port George tomorrow to speak with Pierce in person. Jomo’s response said simply, “If you want the truth, you must meet with General Freedom. Yes or no?”
Sitting down, Pierce thought for a moment, then typed, “Yes.”
S
HORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT
, P
IERCE STIRRED FROM A RESTLESS SLEEP,
conscious of a presence in his room.
When he reached out in the darkness, he felt her cotton nightgown. She sat on the edge of the bed, silent, her slender back to Pierce. Her fingers curled around his.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Everything.”
She sounded utterly bereft. Shirtless, Pierce sat up, his chest grazing her arm. “Do you want to stay?” he asked.
He felt her body half-turn to him. “If you understand.”
“I do.”
Pierce drew aside the sheets. Marissa slid in next to him, her back against his chest. He felt a tenderness for which he had no words.
They lay there, quiet in the dark. He could feel the rhythm of her breathing, at first even, then slower and deeper until, at last, she slept. At some point in the night, Pierce followed.