Roberts rubbed his eyes and peered at me through the morning shadows cooling the beach. The sun was not yet over the mountains, but the sea was already hard blue. I’d spent the night at a guesthouse across town as the news from the north began to break. Local radio stations buzzed with chatter about a rumored cholera outbreak. Were the authorities trying to cover up an Ebola outbreak? Why was Musala cut off? Sierra Leone’s shock jocks had questions; no one from the government had answers.
“Where did he sleep?”
“Who? Sleep where?”
Roberts was wrapped in a bright orange kikoi, which he patted in vain looking for a packet of cigarettes. I offered him a Marlboro. He took it.
“The engineer, the big Irish fella you were talking about the day I arrived. Where did he sleep?”
“He . . .” Roberts dragged hard as I lit his cigarette. “. . . at the Barmoi, on the peninsula.” He exhaled a fog of blue smoke and jerked his thumb behind him, pointing up the beach. The beads on his wrist clicked. “What time is it?”
“No, here. When he stayed here, where did he sleep?”
“What? Max, man, I don’t . . .”
“Juliet said he was supposed to stay here, with you, again, but you got a call to say he’d been casevaced.”
“Cazzie-what?”
“Come.” I pushed past him into the beach house. Even though it was just getting light on the beach, the darkness inside was disorienting. The door opened onto a living space of rugs and furniture. A long mosquito net cordoned off a sleeping area, which made up a third of the room. A palm oil night-light burned on a dresser by a low, wide bed. It lit the shape of Juliet curled up like a baby under another circular net hanging from the ceiling. There were two doors ahead of me. I turned to look at Roberts.
“What the fuck, man?” he hissed, and then, after reading my expression, “On the right. The door on the right.”
I stepped in and found an old-fashioned round light switch—the sort you might have found in England in the 1950s. It clicked a sixty-watt bulb into life, suspended over a shiny poured-concrete floor. Against the far wall was the metal frame of a single bed, the mattress made up with simple white linen. The mosquito net suspended from a metal hoop above it was furled and tucked to one side. At the foot of the bed, there were a writing table and chair fashioned from reclaimed wood and next to those, on the left-hand wall, a brightly painted wardrobe. The center of the room was marked by a loosely woven red cotton mat. Roberts and Juliet were not rich, but they lived pleasantly enough—or at least, I supposed, she made sure they did.
I stopped still.
The sound of the ocean pulling on Lumley Beach filtered into the room. There was no movement from Juliet next door. Roberts stood beside me. He was breathing hard. He was, I suspected, in the process of realizing that he had no idea who I really was, what I was really doing—or what I could, or would, do. As much as he might not have liked that, he was wound into whatever was happening as much by our disquieting road trip north as by the money London paid him to be my tour guide.
Right then there were only two possible outcomes for Roberts: submission or rebellion. I turned to him.
“It’s cool. We’re cool,” I reassured him. “There’s something here. Something the engineer left behind. May have left behind.” Roberts’s shoulders relaxed. He smoothed his left palm over his ragged braids and down his neck. “I need it, need to find it.”
“What, like now? It’s six o’clock in the fricking morning.”
“Yeah, like now. And it’s already six forty-two. You’re going to love working with me. Go and put the coffee on. And don’t wake Juliet.”
I turned back toward the bed and shrugged the day bag off my shoulders. The door clicked shut softly behind me. How Sonny Boy had ever laid out his six-foot-six length on that tiny single mattress was a mystery. I put the bag down and went to work. I stripped the bed and ran my fingers around the stitching at the corner seams. Nothing. I unfolded the black sprung knife and made a lateral cut the length of the mattress. Foam and springs. No clues.
Then I went clockwise around the room—starting at the headboard. Then the wastepaper basket, the wardrobe, desk, chair, mat. Nothing. Within a few minutes the room looked like it had been hit by a tornado. A cockroach bolted for the door. The drawer split apart with a sharp crack as the hardened steel blade cantilevered the wooden base upward. If that didn’t wake Juliet, nothing would.
But it was Roberts who walked in, coffee in hand.
“What the fuck are you doing? Dis is ma fuckin’ ’ouse, mate! Seriously!”
He was aghast, and scared.
“I told you what I’m doing.” I was on my knees, sweeping my palms under the carcass of the wardrobe.
And then I saw it.
“Give me a hand.”
Roberts waved the coffee cups around and then, failing to find a flat surface other than the floor, put them down on the smooth concrete. Together we lifted the iron bed frame and turned it over. Submission, not rebellion. Roberts was now an accomplice, part of the enterprise.
“Rest it on its back.”
The bed frame languished in the middle of the room, stranded like an upturned metal beetle. The mesh of springs spanning the frame sagged pathetically. I wondered if it had been defeated by Sonny Boy. The four legs pointed toward the ceiling. Three of them were capped with a disk of soldered metal. One had been sheared open, a dark eye socket staring blankly at the lightbulb. I took the torch out of my pocket and shone it down the tube.
Nothing.
I spat on my index finger and gently rotated it knuckle deep around the inside of the bed leg and then withdrew it slowly. Stuck to the pad of my finger was half a cigarette paper, damp with saliva. Shining bright blue in the glare of the LED beam was one word handwritten in Biro: Juliet.
I turned around. She was standing there, naked except for a pair of white cotton briefs and a silver pendant glistening at her neck. She covered her breasts slowly with crossed forearms and stared at me, mouth open, realization dawning. She was, simply, beautiful. Which—although it shouldn’t have—made everything that followed all the harder.
“Why are you here?” Her eyes darted around the room and then back to me. “What are you . . . what have you done?” She took a half step back into the gloom of the living room.
“Don’t run,” I warned her. I turned to Roberts. “Neither of you. Sit down. Both of you.”
“Or what, hard man? Eh? Man, fuck you! My house! In my house! No, fuck you.” Roberts’s eyes were wild, but he didn’t move. I handed him the cigarette paper. He looked at it and then at Juliet. “What the . . . ?”
“I said, sit down.” I scooped up the sheet I’d taken off the mattress and tossed it to Juliet. She kept one hand across her breasts; with the other she caught the sheet and pulled it across her chest. She sat down. Roberts followed suit. I squatted on my haunches in front of her.
“Sonny Boy, the man who was here, the big Irish engineer—he gave you something.” She broke my gaze and looked at the floor. “Look at me. He gave you something. You have to give it to me. Do you understand?”
She looked up, and tears rolled down her cheeks. I could hear Roberts’s breathing and the chirp and drone of distant morning traffic creeping its way into the bedroom.
“Now.”
She didn’t move. Neither did Roberts. I could feel the SIG in the waistband of my trousers. I contemplated pushing the tip of the silencer into the hollow between her breastbone and her trachea—but unlike with Micky, I couldn’t shoot Juliet, or even threaten to. I needed Roberts. And she wasn’t guilty of anything, except maybe infidelity.
Juliet moved her hands up, slowly, to behind her neck. The sheet fell away. Roberts grunted his disapproval. Looking neither at me nor at Roberts, she unhooked the clasp of the necklace and dropped it into my palm. I stood up and backed away from them and then turned the pendant over between my left thumb and forefinger. It was a plain, hinged silver locket, about an inch long, engraved with the initial J.
“He gave you this?” Roberts and I spoke simultaneously.
“You said it was from your mum,” Roberts continued. “What the fuck? It’s got your fucking initial on it. . . .” He ran both his hands down his face and then held them up as if in surrender. “Jules, baby . . .” He stopped and looked up at me and then at the floor.
“Calm down,” I said, fiddling with the catch. “It’s not her initial. It’s probably his mother’s, right?”
“Oh, that’s fine, then, yeah? Like totally fine. Like man-mountain Irish Romeo gives my woman his mother’s locket? Yeah, that’s great, fucking great.” He looked at me again. I touched the SIG behind my back and spoke to Juliet.
“Don’t run. Promise?” She nodded. Her hands hovered out in front of her, palms up, fingers apart. Tears dripped onto her breasts. I told her to cover up and she wrapped herself absentmindedly in the sheet, toga-style, wiping her eyes as she did so. She looked sad and alone.
The locket popped open under pressure from my thumbnail to reveal a recent portrait of Juliet, taken on the beach by their bar. She was looking into the lens, happy, her hair like a mane of fire in the setting sun. I opened the knife again and worried the tip under the photo. It popped out to reveal a piece of folded plasticized paper packed into the recess of the pendant. I handed the locket back to Juliet. She gripped it tightly. The silver chain looped over her wrist. She remained on the floor, but Roberts picked himself up. He was hesitant, calculating possibilities.
I folded the knife back on itself, pocketed it and unfolded the piece of paper that had been hidden in the locket. It was a three-by-two-inch photograph and showed a balding white man—a scientist, Micky had said—walking between two traditional round African huts. His face was deeply tanned. He was in his mid-sixties. There were other figures in the background, out of focus, some with black and some with white faces. In the bottom right-hand corner of the image was a red, burned-in date stamp: the photograph had been taken five days before Sonny Boy had been evacuated back to England. The image caught the man midstep, exactly between the two thatched rondels, walking left to right. He was looking down, as if watching his step, face quartered away from the camera toward the lineup to his left. His arm was crooked, as if about to deliver a salute. It was, unquestionably, the man caught on camera with Colonel Proshunin by the school in Kabala; it was, unquestionably, my target.
I turned the photograph over. By now Roberts was standing beside me, looking at the paper. Written on the back in a thin, spidery hand were the words: “Karabunda. Cód Súlúch.”
“Karabunda,” he said. “That’s way up north. My grandad used to hunt there when he was a kid.”
“What’s it like?” I asked. “The terrain, I mean.”
“Hot. Riddled with caves. It’s a million miles from anywhere.” He stretched a finger out and pointed at the scrawl. “What’s that?” he asked me. “Cod what? It’s not Limba.”
“Code ssoo-luke,” I said. “It’s Irish.”
The room was growing hot. Juliet had stopped crying. Beads of sweat swelled at Roberts’s temples. We were standing close to each other. He looked at me and asked again what it meant.
“Code Zulu,” I said.
“Right. Great. My missus has been havin’ it off with the Jolly Green Giant and now you’re speaking gibberish. What does it mean, Max? What does it fucking mean?”
“Maraigh gach éinne,” I said. “It means kill them all.”