As usual, Hailey was a step ahead of her.
“Think we’re still in Kenya?”
“No idea. I hope so. Same reason.”
“Me, too.” Somalia seemed like a whirlpool, sucking down everything that came its way. “Are you scared?” As soon as Gwen said the words, she knew the question was the real reason she’d woken Hailey.
Who didn’t hesitate. “Of course not. I’m counting my money from the book deal we’re gonna get. Now, hush before you wake our buddy.”
For the first time since they’d been taken, Gwen felt they might be all right. Then she heard a rustling. She opened her eyes to see Sunglasses standing. The guard turned the lantern all the way up and reached for his chair and slammed it against the floor until the cheap plastic split down the middle. He stepped close to Gwen and tore off his sunglasses and tugged on her chain until her arm twisted painfully behind her. A forest of red veins covered his eyes. No wonder he wore the wraparounds. Gwen hated and pitied and feared him all at once. She forced herself to hold his gaze.
He grabbed the lantern, stalked out of the hut. The darkness was absolute.
“Sorry,” Gwen whispered. “I’m sorry.” No one answered.
—
A few minutes later, Sunglasses returned with the Joker, who wore a loose white gown that looked like something her grandmother might wear. Gwen hoped they lived through this just so she could tell her family about this moment, about their captor, a three-hundred-pound man in a nightie and a Halloween mask. He knelt beside Gwen, squeezed her arm. His hand circled her skinny biceps easily. “Do you know why we don’t feed you?”
Gwen shook her head.
“Answer me.”
“To punish us, I guess.”
“No.”
“So we know what it’s like to be hungry.”
“Wrong again. Because if you’re hungry and weak, you won’t make trouble. If you fight, try to escape, I may have to hurt you. I don’t want to do that. You’re worth more undamaged. Understand?”
She nodded.
“I would have given you a decent meal tomorrow. Another day or two, I might have let you talk. You’ve spoiled that. You’ve broken the only rule I gave you. Woken me in the middle of the night.” He shouted something in Swahili and Sunglasses walked in, holding the hoods.
He turned to Gwen. “Meshack here says that you spoke the most by far. So you must have a hood.” He looked away from her, at the others. “But as for you three, you have a choice. Wear the hood. Or sit without one and watch her suffer.”
Gwen held herself silent. She was sure that any objection would only anger him. He had chosen the penalty perfectly. The other three already blamed her for getting them in trouble. Now the Joker was forcing them to choose between their sight and their honor.
Hailey raised her hand first. After that, the other two had to follow. Gwen watched as the Joker pulled the black bags over their heads. Then her turn came. She bent her neck forward. The Joker pushed up her chin and stroked her face with his hand, and she bit her lip to keep from screaming. He grabbed her long blond hair and pulled it back. She closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, the world was dark.
4
N
AIROBI
, K
ENYA
T
he Airbus 340 set down onto the tarmac and stopped so smoothly that it hardly seemed to have been moving at all. “On behalf of your Virgin Atlantic flight crew, I welcome you to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Local time is 9:30 a.m., three hours ahead of GMT.” Nothing more. As if they’d flown four hundred miles instead of four thousand. English understatement hadn’t entirely disappeared.
The layover at Heathrow had proved a blessing of sorts, giving Wells time to catch up on the kidnappings, the Kenyan response, and the broader refugee crisis. The Kenyan Interior Ministry was blocking Western journalists from Dadaab. Wells wondered whether the government in Nairobi wanted to hide how much it was doing to find the hostages—or how little.
Either way, the police had placed checkpoints around the camps and the roads that led to Dadaab. According to the media reports, the police were detaining any white person who didn’t have permits from national police headquarters and the Kenyan Department of Refugee Affairs. As far as Wells could tell, the lockdown had succeeded. He’d seen no articles written directly from Dadaab.
Years before, Wells might have found a driver willing to hide him and race to Dadaab straight from the airport. But these days he made the police his enemy only if he had no other choice. Especially here, where he had no on-the-ground knowledge and couldn’t blend in. Getting caught at a roadblock and returned to Nairobi for deportation would be anything but heroic. So Wells planned to spend the day persuading government officials to give him the permits he needed. By persuading, he meant bribing.
Wells looked out the jet’s narrow window, shielding his eyes from the equatorial sun. He felt an unexpected anticipation. For all his years living outside the United States, he’d seen little of Africa. The closest he’d come was Cairo, which was two thousand miles north, and more Arab than African. And the simplicity of this mission pleased him. Get them out.
If getting them out meant making a deal . . . Wells would decide when the moment arrived. The United States government claimed it never negotiated with hostage-takers, that payoffs only led to more kidnappings in the future. But Wells wasn’t working for the government. If he felt a ransom was the only way to save the lives of the hostages, he’d probably agree. Even so, he wasn’t planning a payoff. The offer he expected to make went more along the lines of
Let them go. Or die
.
His diplomatic passport carried him quickly through immigration. He slipped on his Ray-Bans and stepped outside the terminal to find a sunny day, cooler and more pleasant than he’d expected. Nairobi was about a mile above sea level, a fact that had proved crucial to its fortunes. The city hadn’t even existed before the late 1800s, when the British settled it as a depot for the railroad they were building from the Indian Ocean to Uganda. Its mild weather and lack of malaria-carrying mosquitoes appealed to Europeans and local tribesmen alike. Now Nairobi had four million residents and was the most important city in East Africa. But its deep poverty had made it one of the most violent and dangerous cities anywhere. Expatriates called it Nai-robbery.
Still, the taxi line belied the city’s fierce reputation. Cabs queued neatly at the curb. Wells slid into the front seat of the first. The driver was a skinny man who wore fingerless leather racing gloves, as if he were driving a Ferrari and not a gray four-cylinder Toyota.
“Where may I take you?” Because of the British occupation, Kenya’s public schools taught English. Nearly everyone in the country spoke some. A break for Wells.
“Anywhere I can buy a local cell.” Wells didn’t think the agency had a problem with him being here. But if Duto or someone else at Langley decided otherwise, Wells wanted the option of disappearing. Prepaid local phones were tougher for NSA to track than American numbers. Though not impossible, as more than one al-Qaeda operative had realized too late.
“A cell?”
Wells had forgotten. Only Americans called them cells. “A mobile phone. Then downtown.”
“To your hotel?”
“The Intercontinental,” Wells said, picking a name at random. “Let’s go.”
“Very good. Be sure to look to your left in a minute, sir. The giraffes are visiting.”
So even before the Toyota left the airport grounds, Wells saw his first African wildlife, a herd of giraffes munching contentedly on the open plains to the west. If he hadn’t known better, he would have wondered if they were animatronic props for tourists:
Welcome to Kenya. Have you booked your safari?
“How can they live so close to the city?”
“We have a national park that extends almost to the airport.”
As Wells watched, one of the giraffes loped away. Its first steps were uncertain, but stride by stride it gained speed until it galloped over the plain. The others followed. Wells wondered if the animals had sensed a threat or were taking flight preemptively.
Fifteen minutes later, Wells was the proud owner of two new handsets. Basic models with inch-square screens and twelve-button keypads. Nothing fancy, nothing with a GPS locator for the boys at Fort Meade to trace. Plus four different SIM cards, two each from Safaricom and Airtel, the main Kenyan carriers. The driver glanced at Wells as he clicked cards into handsets. “You collect phones?”
“What’s your name?” Wells liked the guy. The gloves hadn’t lied. He drove with an edge.
“Martin.”
“How much to hire you for the day, Martin?”
“Ten thousand shillings, sir. Plus petrol.” About $120, in a country where most people lived on a few dollars a day. Martin sounded like he couldn’t believe he was asking for it.
“Okay, ten thousand, good. Long as you drive fast. Get me where I’m going.”
“I can do that, sir. Thank you.”
“And call me John.”
“Of course—”
But Wells was already making his first call. Before he went anywhere, he needed a fixer.
“
New York Times
,” a woman said. “Nairobi bureau.”
“Jeffrey Gettleman, please.” Gettleman was the bureau chief. Wells had never met him, but he’d seen the byline for years.
“Who’s this?”
“I have information about the aid workers, the kidnappings.”
“He’s not in. I can have him call you.”
“Trust me, he’ll want it now. If you can give me his mobile.”
A pause, then the numbers. Wells dialed.
“This is Jeffrey.”
“Mr. Gettleman. You don’t know me, but my name’s John Wells.” Wells had thought about using a fake name but decided not to start with a lie. He might need Gettleman later. “I just landed in Nairobi and I’m reaching out because I’ve been hired to investigate the kidnapping.”
“Hired by whom?”
“I have a favor to ask.”
“That was quick.”
“A small one. I need a fixer.”
“You called me for a recommendation, Mr. Wells? Like I’m Zagat’s?”
“Good enough for
The
New York Times
, good enough for me. You help me, I promise I won’t forget.”
“Tell me who hired you, I’ll hook you up with the best guy in town. He’s connected everywhere. Smart. He can give you all the background you need on the camps. And the political situation, which is complicated.”
“Nothing free with you guys. Always trading.”
“You called me.”
Wells couldn’t argue the point. “You can’t use this, not yet, but Gwen Murphy’s family brought me in.”
“From the U.S.?”
“Yes.”
“Have they gotten a ransom demand?”
“No. The fixer, please.”
“His name’s Wilfred Wumbugu. I’ll text you his number. Will I see you at the press conference tonight?”
“Anything’s possible.” Wells hung up, thinking,
Press conference?
—
But first the permits. He called Wilfred, explained what he needed.
“It’s not possible. Since the kidnapping, there’s no access. Essential aid workers with existing permits only. No exceptions.”
“I’ll pay. Whatever it costs.”
“We talk in person. At Simmers. Thirty minutes.”
“Simmers.”
“Your driver will know.”
They were closing—slowly—on downtown Nairobi. To the northwest, office towers marked the central business district. Kenya remained desperately poor, but after decades of stagnation, its economy was reviving. New apartment buildings and office parks rose along the highway. Billboards advertised low-fare airlines connecting Nairobi with the rest of East Africa. And the traffic was horrendous, as the new middle class jammed dilapidated roads. Despite his frustration, Wells almost had to smile. Back in Montana, Evan probably imagined him with pistol in hand, cracking skulls. Instead he was stuck in traffic on his way to get a permit. The thrilling life of the secret operative.
Though Wells didn’t doubt the skull-cracking would come.
—
Simmers was a restaurant and dance hall under a big tent in the midst of the office towers, smoky, almost shabby, with plastic chairs and tables and a barbecue grill. A cantina, really. Wells liked it immediately. A man at a corner table caught Wells’s eye, waved him over.
“I’m Wilfred.” He was a slim man in a crisp white shirt and wire-rimmed glasses. Back home Wells would have pegged him as a Web designer.
“How’d you guess it was me?” Wells was the only white person in the place.
Wilfred waved over a waiter. “You want something?”
“A Coke.”
“Not a Tusker? The national beer.”
“I try not to drink before noon.”
“In here, time doesn’t matter. Simmers never closes. Open twenty-four hours. We call them day-and-night clubs.”
“Coke.”
“Two Cokes,” Wilfred said to the waiter. “Now tell me again what you want.”
Wells did.
“You understand, these camps, all of eastern Kenya, it’s dangerous now. Because of Shabaab. You know about them?”
“Yes.” Al-Shabaab was a radical Muslim group that controlled much of Somalia and enforced strict sharia law in its territory. Women wore burqas. Thieves faced amputation. But the group also had a criminal side, smuggling sugar into Kenya and protecting the pirates who kidnapped sailors off the coast. The United States and United Nations had tried to destroy Shabaab for years. Lately they’d made progress. United Nations peacekeepers had pushed Shabaab’s guerrillas out of Mogadishu, the Somali capital. And Kenya had briefly sent troops into Somalia from the west. Still, Shabaab remained a threat. The Kenyan government had publicly announced that the group was the prime suspect in the kidnapping.
“But doesn’t the government or the UN try to screen Shabaab out of the refugee camps?”
“Wait until you see them. A half-million people. Almost ten percent of the population of Somalia. And you think they tell the truth about who they are? Oh, yes, I’m Shabaab, I shot three peacekeepers. They know the story to tell to get in. The UN doesn’t even try to screen them anymore.”
“Everyone gets in?”
“They call the policy prima facie. You’re Somali, you get across the border, you’re an automatic refugee. In the United States you would call them illegal aliens. But here CNN runs pictures of starving babies, so they’re refugees. If you’re a Kenyan living in Kenya you don’t get free food and shelter, but if you’re a Somali you do.”
Wells saw what Gettleman meant about the complexity of the political situation. He hadn’t considered how the Kenyans viewed the refugees. “Would that anger extend to the aid workers? Could a Kenyan gang have kidnapped them?”
“Possible. It wouldn’t be political. Just for money. But I don’t know how they would get paid without getting caught. In Somalia it’s much easier. There’s a whole setup.”
“So you think it’s Shabaab.”
“That’s the most likely. And the police say so. Though in Kenya the police say lots of things.”
“Why I need to go up there myself. Today.”
“You can’t hide up there, mzungu”—the not-entirely-friendly Swahili term for a white person. “Everyone will know you’re American.”
“I’m not so sure,” Wells said in Arabic.
“Arabic?”
“Get me the permits or I’ll find a fixer who can,” Wells said, still in Arabic.
Wilfred looked at Wells’s coiled hands and broad shoulders. For the first time he seemed to understand who Wells was,
what
Wells was. “You have money? Not one, two hundred dollars. Real money.”
Wells handed Wilfred a packet of hundreds from his backpack. “This enough to start?”
Wilfred riffed the bills. “Castle House first. If the Department of Refugee Affairs approves you, the police will follow. By the way, my rate is two hundred fifty a day in Nairobi. Whether I get these permits or not. If I go to Dadaab, five hundred.”
Wells felt he had to protest, if only to prove he wasn’t a total sucker. “Gettleman said your rate was a hundred.”
“Gettleman didn’t see how much money you have.”
—
The refugee department was headquartered west of downtown. Martin slalomed through traffic on a broad avenue shaded by oak trees, then swung onto a rutted road hemmed by concrete-walled houses. The neighborhood’s wealth reminded Wells of the fancier precincts of Los Angeles. The homes here had similar private guards, security cameras, and signs promising armed response. “There’s money here.”
“You want poor people?” Wilfred said. “We’ll take you to Kibera. Over the hills just southeast. A few square kilometers, maybe a million people, no one really knows. No running water, no open space, no legal electricity. Shacks and shacks and shacks. After the elections in 2007, the politicians stirred them up and they rioted. Tribal warfare, the Kikuyu against everyone else. Five hundred died, maybe one thousand. The police waited for them to fight themselves out. Like animals.”
“Nice.”
“Don’t let what you’re seeing here fool you. This country, a few hundred thousand live well. Two, three million more have a decent job. Teachers, truck drivers. Everyone else feels hungry just looking at the price of sugar. You want to see, I promise you’ll see. Now let me talk to the DRA so we can get this piece of paper.” Wilfred reached for his phone.
Four calls later, he was shaking his head. “Everyone says the same. It’s impossible.”