Authors: Nero Newton
But to Marcel it still gave no answers at all.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
The road widened
like a river widens at its mouth, and it spilled Amy Kellet’s Land Rover into a shallow sea of red mud. Scents of the cooling forest now wrestled with sharper smells of freshly cut wood and with wandering sewage fumes. She downshifted to second gear, trawled, and surveyed the logging camp.
The workers’ settlement formed an island seventy yards away, roughly in the center of the clearing. An equal distance off to her right, where the clearing met the forest, sat a white camping trailer with a gold stripe along its body. Guessing that the trailer was the seat of authority, she turned and maneuvered toward it. The mud was shallower here and a
layer of wood chips made for better traction.
As she stopped alongside the trailer, a slender but round-faced man emerged from it
. She hopped out to meet him, and he introduced himself as the foreman.
In halting but passable French, Amy
said, “I’m Francine Whelk, from the University of Illinois. The branch office gave me permission to interview some of the workers.” She handed him a letter printed on a faked replica of Sanderson Tropical Timber letterhead.
The foreman unfolded the letter
and frowned. “I wonder why they did not direct you to one of the other locations.”
“I told them I wanted to visit a site with a diversity of people. I understand there are over ten languages–”
“But the other camps are just as…diverse, and this one is closing down in less than a week. They’re moving us all to a new site. They decided just a few days ago.” He peered into the Land Rover. “You are here alone?”
“Only me.” She hadn’t meant to come alone, but the local man she was supposed to meet in Prospérité hadn’t show
n up, and she’d gotten impatient.
“I see you have the company’s permission to be here,” the foreman said. “ But I think these are not the best conditions for your work.
Excuse me for a moment.” He went back into his trailer.
Amy paced around the muddy ground
, feeling defeated. Her original reason for making this trip was already moot: barely two hours ago, she’d learned that the person she had come to find was no longer here. The man was a Cameroonian named Robert, a former park ranger she’d sent here to gather evidence that the logging company was abetting poachers.
Sanderson Tropical Timber
, the only American logging company with a wholly-owned operation in the region, had recently gotten a tentative gold star on its green report card. A year and a half earlier, its managers had reacted with explosively apologetic fervor to revelations of poaching and clear-cutting in their logging concessions. The corporation had taken a sustainable-forestry pledge, and had even allowed observers from environmental groups to come and monitor its operations at length.
But
harvesting at this particular site had begun after that round of observation ended. Activists who wanted to see the place had been stalled for weeks now, so the only quick way in was to get hired as a worker, which was what Robert had done.
I
t drove Amy crazy that the company had pulled such a slick PR coup. Environmentalists had finally come up with a way to boycott timber wholesalers – which normally have no name recognition among the general public – but Sanderson had danced around the scheme. They’d dumped sixty grand or so into damage control, sponsoring free eco-tours for foreign tourists who came to the area, giving donations to wildlife sanctuaries in various countries – including the U.S., where their efforts were most visible. A sleazy pretty-boy of a VP had actually convinced a lot of people that he was a convert to the cause of saving wildlife, that he was steering his company in the right direction. He’d become a minor celebrity for a while, going on talk shows and urging other corporate leaders to join him on his quest to preserve the natural world.
All that was fine as far as it went, but it hadn’t really gone all that far. The do
nations and the openness about logging operations had dwindled to practically nothing over the past year, yet the activist community had not renewed its pressure on the company to live up to its promise of responsible logging.
So Amy had taken it upon herself to ramp up that pressure again, sending
her best snoop into the camp, paying him nearly three times what he’d formerly earned monthly as a park ranger. She’d equipped him with the best telecom service available and a top-shelf smart phone, yet he had dropped out of contact ten days earlier.. Early on, Robert had told her that the geology of the basin made cell reception very spotty, but still she had grown more and more worried when she couldn’t contact him. After several anxious days, she’d cut short her work in Senegal, made her way to Equateur via short-hop flights and buses, bought the Land Rover, and headed into the bush.
And
on the way here, she’d finally heard from Robert. He’d gotten away from the camp safely a few days back, but his smart phone had gotten soaked during a heavy rainstorm. Since Amy’s number was programmed into his phone, he’d never memorized it, so the number was lost with everything else when the phone stopped working. Only today had he managed to get in touch with someone who could give him her contact info again. At the moment, he was still in the capital, trying to find a techie who could retrieve the data from the phone. He and Amy had probably been within a few miles of each other without knowing it.
“It will be worth whatever we have to pay to get that data back,” Robert had told her. “I got video of machine oils and other chemicals getting dumped straight onto the forest floor. I got poachers laying out freshly shot forest game. Chimpanzees, monkeys, hornbills, and a few other birds…those little red deer, and I think some scaly anteaters. At least half of what they’re shooting is on the CITES list, either endangered or threatened.”
Then Robert
had told her the best part: at least half of the bushmeat wasn’t getting hauled off to the city to fetch a higher price. At this camp, the logging foreman himself was the biggest buyer. According to one of the hunters, someone in the company’s management had instructed the foreman to routinely set aside the best of each day’s kill. Twice a month, a couple of guys came in a pickup truck and paid him triple the going price. Company money had even bought him a freezer for just that purpose.
A recording of t
hat conversation was one of the audio files he was hoping to retrieve from his phone.
All of that would be wonderful if the data survived
. But just in case it didn’t, Amy wanted to gather a little more evidence of eco-crimes, so she kept driving toward the logging site even as she spoke to Robert. He had apparently read her thoughts, and reminded her that getting in and out of the camp intact would be much more difficult for her than it had been for him, a French-speaking black African posing as a worker.
After promising Robert she wouldn’t head out to the camp herself
, she’d done just that.
And now that secondary objective was also a washout. There was
probably little or no information left to gather because this place would shortly disappear. With no direct flights from Senegal, she’d wasted a day and a half getting to the country, then half of yesterday finding a mud-worthy vehicle for sale in Prospérité, and a big chunk of today just driving here. Robert had said something about the camp shutting down soon, but Amy had thought he was just trying to dissuade her from coming here.
She noticed a
hint of wood smoke amid the general odor of bad sanitation and saw that a couple of women were laboring over cooking fires. She also detected the plain, sweet aroma of boiling tubers. Men trickled out of the forest and were greeted by shouting children. This was exactly the sort of population that had made the anthropologist story a workable cover for Amy and Andre back in the day.
Amy hadn’t had the chance to give
the foreman the full spiel today, which was probably just as well because she could never pull it off half as smoothly as Andre used to. He would ramble on for half an hour about researching the relations among different ethnic groups working together on cash-crop plantations, winging it the whole way. It had really never mattered precisely what he said; he had a strain of charisma that made most people want to help without ever really thinking about why. She pictured him gesturing with the folded sunglasses that were always in his hand as a prop, never on his nose.
After Amy had saved
Andre’s life, and he had laid himself and his millions at her feet, they’d gone on dozens of spying missions together. Andre had almost always done the talking in the field. He used to make up names for the different ruses they used, and had called the anthropologist routine “the Maggie Mead.”
But Andre was gone, Amy was five years
out of practice, and although she didn’t know it yet, the Maggie Mead was not working at all today.
* * *
Amy’s principle mistake had been signing the letter as Hugh Sanderson, the company president’s younger brother and VP in charge of African operations. He was the same guy who had been the company’s figurehead during its short-lived green campaign. She had calculated that a letter from him would make it look as though her visit had PR value.
Marcel had not bought that signature for a second. Once the decision had been made to close this camp, the company had no reason to let anyone come and look around. Even the observers who had been allowed into the other camps would not expect access to a place that
would shortly disappear. The letter was also written in French, and everyone knew that Hugh Sanderson had never learned French, even after a decade or so in Equateur.
Marcel wasn’t even sure Sanderson was in the country
at the moment. He hadn’t shown up when he was scheduled to have his picture taken with the relief trucks a week earlier.
Two security guards were sitting in the trailer with Marcel. The taller of them asked, “Do you think it’s about the
rub’ewa
?”
“It’s probably about the hunting,” Marcel said. “That’s the main thing the foreigners who visited the other camps wanted to know about.”
The other guard laughed. “She picked the wrong camp. I’ve only seen one hunter around lately, and maybe he’s gone, too.” This guard was almost as tall as his companion and his huge shoulders and chest gave him a barrel shape.
“Maybe she’s another one trying to find out what happened to that Tobin fellow,” the tall
er guard said.
Marcel shook his head. “No one’s asked about Tobin for
a couple of weeks. I think that’s done with.”
The barrel-shaped guard said, “Then it must be about the
rub’ewa
.”
The guards’ first language was unrelated to Marcel’s native Hausa, so they spoke with him only in French. But they had heard Marcel use the Hausa word
rub’ewa
, which meant “rottenness” and referred to the odor. They liked the word because it suggested the French
rubis
, pronounced roughly the same as its English equivalent, “ruby.”
Marcel picked up his cell phone. “I’m going to call Sanderson’s secretary, just to make sure he didn’t really sign this letter.”
The tall guard was looking out the window at the tall foreign woman. “Maybe Sanderson sent her himself,” he said.
“Why would he send someone to spy on his ow
n logging camp?” Marcel asked.
“
Because maybe he does know something about the
rub’ewa
, and sent her to find out more. If anyone else in the company knows about it, you can be sure they’ll want a piece.”
Yes, just like you two turds, Marcel thought.
The guards had muscled in on the operation after watching Marcel leave the camp one night, not long after Marcel himself had been recruited by the old man. Another bout of rain had left the forest muddy, and they’d followed the tracks of his pickup truck the next morning, then discovered the footpath and the sheds. Too bad they hadn’t opened one of the cages.
Marcel and the old man had agreed that they would need more hands, but these thugs weren’t what they’d had in mind.
“Well, it doesn’t matter who knows about it now,” Marcel said, “because it’s over. The camp is closing, and we can’t operate from anywhere else. A couple more nights and we’re finished with it for good.”
And then someone answered his call. He’d been holding the phone to his ear for so long that he had forgotten dialing.
A clerk listened to Marcel for a moment, then transferred the call to Wilson, the regional operations manager, the only person in the office who had any experience working with people at the actual logging sites. As far as Marcel could tell, Wilson’s main job was making sure no one at the camps was pilfering from the company. He came out every month or so with a couple of polyglot assistants and poked around.
“No, she sure as hell didn’t get permission to go there,”
Wilson shouted in English, “and nobody’s even heard from Sanderson in two weeks.”