Chapter 11

Tanzania

6:02 am GMT, 9:02 pm Local

Phythian covered the first three miles on foot. Then fate smiled on him and a Toyota Town Ace bounced up behind him in a torrent of dust. The vehicle was the color of rust, no hubcaps, tailgate missing, rear glass replaced with a sheet of carboard duct-taped to the chrome frame. The pick-up bed held several burlap bags of unknown contents, most likely sorghum or millet.

He recognized the vehicle and knew the driver. His name was Andwele Dourado, a local farmer who scraped a living out of the earth, growing whatever the unpredictable seasons would allow. He also fixed almost anything that had a small engine, dabbled in electrical repairs, and mended small plumbing leaks. He and his extended family—wife, two daughters, mother and mother-in-law—lived about twelve miles east of Phythian’s camp, and because of the narrow dirt road that passed by both properties, over the past four years they had come to almost be friends.

“Asubuhi nzuri, rafiki yangu,” Andwele greeted him, leaning across the seat and opening the door as an invitation. He was thin but every ounce of flesh on his bones was muscle, and a good guess would put him in his forties. His black skin glistened in the heat, and a faded John Deere cap was perched on his head. Visor in the front, the way it was meant to be worn under a punishing sun. “Unaenda wapi?” Where are you going?

“Terrat,” Phythian replied, never one for using more words than absolutely necessary.

“Where’s your truck?”

“Flat tire,” Phythian lied in Swahili. The truth was, he didn’t want to drive his own vehicle into town, leaving it to the elements—both human and natural—for an indeterminant amount of time until his travels permitted him to return.

“I take you,” the man said in English, welcoming him inside with a sweep of his hand.

The two men had established a polite camaraderie over the years, but they rode mostly in silence on the thirty-mile journey into town. Dourado spoke very little English and, similarly, Phythian had acquired just a thin grasp of Swahili. Each of them occasionally would try out the few words or phrases they’d picked up from the other or, in Phythian’s case, from the English-to-Swahili translator on Google. But the result was little more than an awkward language exercise that lasted a few seconds, and eventually led to more silence. This morning he had too many things on his mind to converse idly about ng’ombe wa ng’ombe (the cattle herd), mazao ya matunda (fruit crops), or bei za mboga (vegetable prices). Dourado eventually got the hint.

Five years ago, when Phythian purchased the two-hundred-acre plot of land and began to renovate the decaying buildings, he was pleasantly surprised to find it was blanketed by digital high-speed Wi-Fi, courtesy of a Silicon Valley multi-billionaire whose idea of a grand, charitable gesture was to bring the internet to every home in Africa. Coverage tended to be sporadic, but on good days, which here on the eastern fringe of the Serengeti seemed to be most of the time, Phythian occasionally fell victim to his deepest curiosities and connected to the outside world.

That’s how he’d learned yesterday of the wreckage that had been found in the mountains of Pakistan. He’d never known the precise location where the aircraft had come down, since he’d bailed out of the cabin not long after it had crossed back over the Lebanese coast. As he drifted down to earth, the broad nylon canopy billowing above him, he kept an eye on the towns and roads below. He knew there was always a risk that he would come down in unfriendly territory, but fate was with him that day, and he landed in a field about two miles east of Ain El Jaouzeh, dangerously close to the Syrian border.

As he’d gathered up his chute, the King Air 350 was already well on a course that would take it thousands of miles beyond where the G3 had expected it to hit the water. By the time the flight was reported missing over the Mediterranean, it would be cruising at twenty thousand feet above Iraq and Iran, an altitude it would maintain until its twin turboprops sucked every drop of fuel out of its tanks. With its rear door gone the constant drag of wind would cut its range, but Phythian didn’t care.

Nor did he care how long it might take for the wreckage to be discovered. Perhaps years, most likely decades. Thus, he was surprised to learn from the BBC last night that a photographer from a glossy pseudo-science magazine had literally stumbled upon the site in a region of Pakistan where almost no one ever went, and where nothing ever should have been found.

Phythian’s first instinct was to remain disengaged. This was no longer his business, and he wanted no part of it. The wreckage was but a remnant of his former life, one that he’d managed to tuck away in a dark corner of the past where he was sure it would lie, forever frozen in the permafrost of time. He’d managed to free himself from the vicious tentacles of the Greenwich Global Group and had made a clean break, even though he’d had to escape to the far reaches of Africa to do it. There wasn’t a country on any continent in the world where the motherfuckers didn’t have eyes and ears, and if they had even the remotest suspicion that he’d liberated himself from their clutches and was still alive, they would hunt him down wherever he might be. The fact that no remains of the plane or the victims were ever found would cause them to wonder, but they’d never know with any degree of certainty.

Not unless—or until—the wreckage was found.

Four months into his newfound freedom he’d found the abandoned safari camp in the Manyara region at the edge of the Tangarire River ecosystem. It was located in the ancient wash of an alkaline lake bed that had dried up thousands of years ago, but which thrived on an ample supply of groundwater that fed several year-round springs. While it consisted mostly of dry grasslands, the seasonal rains nourished groves of sycamore fig and quinine and mahogany, and attracted untold species of migratory birds and mammals.

The property consisted of a main structure fashioned from trees originally harvested on the property, perched on a knoll with three-sixty views that allowed him to see any cloud of dust in the distance that indicated someone was approaching. He’d torn down eight insect-infested wood platforms that, years before, had held the glamping tents where tourists would awaken to the sight of giraffes and bushbucks and Thompson gazelles. Where they once stood, he now tended a sparse garden of beans and potatoes, but he’d never had much of a green thumb and his efforts mostly were futile. The only outbuilding he’d kept intact was the brick cooking hut located fifty yards from what now served as his residence, which he’d learned during the renovation could be accessed by a reinforced tunnel four feet in diameter through which prepared food for safari guests could be transported via an old trolley. Apparently, it was to keep the predatory lions, leopards, and jackals from getting too close during human feeding time.

All land in Tanzania legally was the property of the government, with citizens granted rights of occupancy renewable for up to ninety-nine years. As Phythian quickly discovered when the camp’s rights-holder attempted to transfer the parcel into his name, foreigners were only permitted to hold land for investment purposes. Official negotiations were set to break down until the District Commissioner for Lands, Sub-leases, and Licenses—a self-important and dreary man in the equally dreary town of Babati—curiously found himself granting a rare exception to this oddly persuasive American.

Once the official signed and stamped the proper documents, Phythian set to work, finishing his renovation project just weeks before the December rains began to fall. The newly refurbished compound was a rustic example of African paradise accessible only by the dusty, two-rut trail that doubled as an animal path, which fed onto a wider lane before intersecting with the road to Arusha. One autumn night, after realizing he hadn’t thought of the G3 once in well over twenty-four hours, he decided to name the place Utuliva, the Swahili word for serenity.

“Amerika inaonekana kama mahali kama kijinga,” Andwele Dourado said this morning, out of the blue.

Phythian grinned, just as he always did when the cattle farmer and gracious entrepreneur mentioned the latest stupid thing that came out of the U.S. “Ndiyo sababu nilihamia,” he replied, his standard response whenever politics came up in conversation: That’s why I moved.

An hour later they rolled into Terrat. Dourado pulled his truck into a spot of shade under an acacia tree in front of the post office. It was a low-slung wood-and-clay structure with a sun-bleached canvas awning beneath which, it seemed, most of the village’s business was conducted. A half dozen men either sat on rickety chairs or squatted on the ground, sipping chai tea or coffee or, like one young man this morning, a can of Kabisa. Phythian thanked his friend for the ride and wandered inside, his watchful eyes warily drifting right and left as he focused on anything out of the ordinary. Old habits die hard, even out here in the African Serengeti.

A fan churned in a corner of the dusty room. Flyers flapped where they’d been pegged to a bulletin board, and a framed photo of the nation’s authoritarian president hung above a doorway. A young woman with a child in tow was munching on a candy bar, backhanding a swarm of pesky flies as she wandered back out into the sweltering heat.

When Phythian was satisfied that all was right with the world, or at least his small corner of it, he approached the postal worker standing behind a chipped laminate counter. “Asubuhi nzuri, rafiki yangu,” he greeted him. “Barua yoyote kwa ajili yangu?” Any mail for me?

“Samahani, si leo,” the young man said, shaking his head. His name was Elimu Juma, and he was dressed in a short-sleeve cotton shirt and khakis, head shaved close. Teeth that offered a massive grin, large black eyes that always seemed to welcome the world, including, as a subset of that, everyone who came into his post office.

“Nataka kununua tikiti ya Arusha,” Phythian told him. Besides being the place to get one’s mail and refuel on the daily update on local gossip, the post office also served as Terrat’s bus station. Since the village was located many times removed from the beaten path, there were only three transports a week that made the tedious, dusty journey to the city of Arusha which, for his immediate purposes, happened to have an international airport—of sorts—that could put him on a different continent by evening.

“Njia moja au safari ya pande zote?” Elimu replied. One way or round trip?

This was the question Phythian had been pondering ever since he’d made the decision to leave the serenity and security of Utuliva. He knew as soon as the plane wreckage was found that the overbearing Chairman and his officious sidekick Diana Petrie—in fact, the entire G3 executive board—would be on high alert and out for his blood. Their little mission to blow up the plane and kill him had failed miserably, and confirmation of that failure now was the lead topic of the global intelegraph, which was his term for the spymaster whisper mill.

Fingers would be pointing, heads would be rolling, and deputy directors would be calling for Phythian to be found and dragged in before…well, before what? The Hague? He couldn’t be arrested, couldn’t be tried. He couldn’t be convicted, and couldn’t be allowed anywhere near the press. He knew too much, and that knowledge made him a real threat, someone who could shift the balance of power around the world. Making matters worse, he had proof of the G3s numerous deadly transgressions, and that proof was known as Equinox.

Should that single device find its way into the wrong hands—any hands, in fact—the repercussions could be cataclysmic. In a world where information translated to power, Equinox was the Holy Grail, and the G3 would be furious that it had gone missing. The empty Faraday case investigators would have found in the plane wreckage was evidence of that, and the G3 would correctly assume only two people in the world could know its possible location: Rōnin Phythian, or the photographer named Monica Cross.

That meant her life was in grave danger and, through his actions of six years ago, he had put it there.

So, to answer Elimu Juma’s question, would he be needing a return ticket to Terrat?

“Njia moja, tafadhali,” Phythian told the inquisitive postmaster as he counted out fourteen thousand Tanzanian shillings. One way, please.