Ezra set down a couple of cokes and a bunch of small red bananas on the table. An electric fan stirred the heat. Outside, boots drilled and stamped. Inside, the room was filled with the high-pitched whine of blast-damaged eardrums. I was filthy, bleeding and ravenous.
We’d left the city immediately in the back of a private ambulance that the Israeli had conjured up from a side street in the slum. We’d driven up into the hills near Regent, not far, I guessed, from Micky’s villa. I worked on stabilizing Juliet with his kit as we climbed east, Ezra shaking off questions with terse monosyllables at the checkpoints that were springing up across town. After forty minutes we emerged not at a hospital or a private house, but in a police barracks. “The training school for the Special Security Division,” Ezra had informed me as we disembarked. With evident pride, he told me that the whole enterprise was funded by Israel, not the British, and was commanded by him. Roberts’s arm had been bandaged. Juliet had been carried away at the double to the clinic by men wearing black fatigues and smart red berets.
“He’s good,” Ezra said. “Toufiq. The surgeon. From Beirut. It’s a long time he and I work together.” He was looking at Roberts. Roberts was staring at the door. Elsewhere on the compound Juliet was having her chest opened up. “There are no promises. God willing, she will live. But she needs time.” In the way some Israelis shape English sounds, his accent was guttural, almost French, and he littered his sentences with Hebrew words. “And you”—he looked at me—“what do you need?”
“A plane,” I replied. “A Cessna. A 172.” I reached inside the day bag and pulled out the bundles of dollars. “That’s eighty grand.”
“When?”
“Today.”
“OK.” Ezra shrugged. “Will I get it back again?” I shrugged. “What else?” he asked. I looked at Roberts.
“He’s not coming with me.”
“About this you are one hundred percent correct.” He smiled his crooked smile. “There is no possibility whatsoever I will allow him, or her, to go anywhere with you. They are safe here with me. No one will touch them.” There wasn’t even a flicker of irony in his speech. “This”—he opened his palms wide and looked from side to side, to make it clear it was his whole operation he was talking about, and not just the room we sat in—“is the president’s personal project, paid for by the Knesset. It’s as safe here as Tel Aviv.” I raised an eyebrow. “OK,” he conceded, “safer.”
“Maybe this time don’t look after him by shooting him,” I suggested.
“About that”—Ezra smiled—“I make no promises. Whatever works, eh?”
“Roberts said you worked with the Americans after the war. They’re not”—I chose my words carefully—“onside.” Ezra stared at me. His eyelids drooped over his irises. One moment he looked like he was about to explode; the next, as if he were half-asleep. It was too late for talking around it. “OK, to be clear, yesterday an American tried to kill me,” I confessed. “Micky Montague. He was with the CDC.”
“That fuck? Ta’aseh li tova! No, Micky is not CDC. Or whatever that other shtuyot aid agency is.”
“USAID?”
“Ken, that one. Micky is CIA. Sure barur. Trust me on that.”
“Did you kill Micky?” Roberts snapped his eyes away from the door. I tilted my head in affirmation.
“He tried to kill me. But here’s the thing: I shot a Yank spook—and it’s Spetsnaz and a bunch of local boyos that come after us.”
Roberts coughed.
“Those boyos nearly buried us, bruv.”
It was a fair point. I’d been replaying the chase in my mind during the drive from the creek slum to the barracks. Juliet and Roberts had slowed me down, forced bad choices on me. But I needed Roberts. Left to my own devices, I reassured myself, I wouldn’t have allowed any of the shooters to leave the woods alive. But lose Juliet, and I’d have lost Roberts. I told myself I needed them both. And then I checked myself. No, I didn’t. I didn’t need Juliet alive; I just wanted her to survive. I wanted Ana María to survive, too. But you can’t always get what you want.
“Spetsnaz? Ulai. You are certain about this?”
“The black guys, no. They were all in uniform, old Sierra Leone Army kit.”
“Rebels?” Roberts asked. “From Kabala?”
“Maybe. They were well trained—that’s for sure. But the shooter who came to the house? He had a tattoo, you know, their scorpion.” Now I said it out loud, it sounded less convincing. I didn’t mention that we knew Colonel Proshunin had been on station.
“Max, how many tattoos do you have?” Ezra asked.
“None.”
“Me as well—I don’t have any. It would look good, eh? Israeli Defense Forces right here.” He traced his right index finger down his left forearm. “Or maybe here?” This time he drew his finger across his throat.
“OK, well, I killed a Yank and someone wants me to think Spetsnaz is after us.”
“This I agree with.” Ezra shrugged again. “But so what? They are with God now. It does not matter who they are, or how good they are. You know this. I know this. It matters only how good you are, eh?” He took a folded newspaper from his field-jacket pocket. “This guy . . . I don’t think he was good enough.” Ezra handed me the paper. It was that morning’s edition of the Awoko newspaper. The headline: “Cholera in Kabala, Musala: Citizens Told to Stay Calm, Remain Indoors. UN to Take Action.”
“Turn it over,” Ezra said. “Under the fold.”
Underneath the leader, Awoko ran a story titled “Murder in Makeni.” A British diplomat visiting the Makeni area had been found dead by his car on the road back to Freetown. The hack who penned it concluded the embassy man had been “mown down by brigands” and his valuables “looted.” A Faces of Death–style photograph of the corpse lying flat on its back adorned the lower right quarter of the page. White man, fifties, slight build, weak jaw. Utterly ignorable. Absolutely MI6. His bloodied white shirt was riddled with bullet holes. His face was serene and untouched, save for one neatly drilled entry wound in the center of his forehead.
I’d been wondering who next. Though I couldn’t know for sure, he was almost certainly the Official—an MI6 officer openly declared to the Sierra Leone government by our government—who’d “collected” the photograph of Colonel Proshunin and the target outside the school in Makeni. Most likely he’d taken it from Global Assistance Committee volunteer Marie Margai by killing her and stealing her camera. Maybe killing her had been part of the plan. Maybe he’d panicked. Maybe Micky had held his hand. Maybe London had told him to. Now he’d been taken out, too—and in Makeni, where Micky had just come back from.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. But the way I saw it, there was one fact: me aside, Roberts and Juliet were the last loose ends left in-country.
All bets were off.
“This cholera shtuyot. This is to do with you?”
“No, it isn’t. And it’s not cholera. Or Ebola. But there’s someone making shit up north and we’d like them to stop. Permanently.”
“Ah, it’s ‘we’ now, eh? Mazel tov. It looks like they are helping you a lot, this ‘we.’ Maybe they will find you your Cessna?” The crooked smile was back. There was nothing to say that wasn’t untrue and unkind to everyone in London who’d put me here. Myself especially. “Do you have a plan?”
“No.” I looked at the pips on his shoulder. “I don’t know shit about strategy, Colonel. But I do know that no plan survives contact with the enemy. Especially when you don’t know who the enemy is.”
“Bediyuk.” He nodded, grinning. “In Israel we say ‘No plan survives contact with an officer,’ so it is just as well I don’t have one, either, eh?”
Ezra raked the bundles of hundred-dollar bills off the table and made to leave. “I will go and check on your woman now.” He was speaking to Roberts but looking at me. “Do you need anything else?” he continued. Roberts went to answer. I spoke first.
“Yeah. A clean phone, a Thuraya.”
“OK.”
“And an emergency beacon if you have one, that works off Iridium sats.”
“Ken. But careful, eh? With this you will light up the jungle like the menorah. They will see you from fucking Mars, my friend.”
“Yup, that’s the idea. And some det cord in case I need to clear a landing site for a casevac. Oh, and there’s one other thing.”
“Betach. Anything.”
“Some clean fatigues. I smell like shit.”
“Ken, this I also agree with one hundred percent.”
Ezra left with the cash. Roberts and I sat alone. The room was stuffy, stifling even. Outside, Ezra barked orders first in Hebrew, then in Krio.
I sat and scrolled through Micky’s local phone. I’d given up on his iPhone—if the NSA struggled to get into them, I didn’t stand a chance. The names and numbers were all unremarkable: a mixture of neutral first names and acronyms, Sierra Leonean and international mobiles. All except one: the contact VX had a London landline and an extension, 309.
VX: a particularly nasty nerve agent. Hardly remarkable for someone from the Centers for Disease Control to have that in his phone. Or maybe V Cross—Vauxhall Cross. He wouldn’t be the first CIA operative to have a contact number for MI6 HQ.
Fuck it. Roll the dice. I pressed the green key and listened.
“Embankment.” The voice was crisp, clean, confident. I pretended I couldn’t hear.
“Hello? Is that Embankment?” I said in my best American accent.
“Yes. Embankment. What extension do you require?” Matter-of-fact. Almost impatient.
“Three-oh-nine.”
Pause.
“Connecting you now. Stand by.” I looked up and realized I was holding my breath. Roberts shrugged his shoulders at me as if to say What the fuck? I put my index finger to my lip and frowned.
“Three-oh-nine.” A second voice confirmed the transfer. Softer this time—a secretary, not a gatekeeper. I exhaled, slowly.
“This is Montague.” I kept up the accent.
“Connecting you now.”
Pause.
“Mason.”
I hung up and removed the battery from the phone.
“Fuck.”
“You OK?” Roberts asked.
“Yeah. No. I don’t know.”
“Is it safe, to call out?”
“Fuck no! But it’ll keep the boys and girls in Cheltenham busy.”
“OK, whatever. Mate, I can’t work out if you really know what you’re doing or if you’re just making it up as you go along.”
“Fifty-fifty. How you bearing up?”
He slumped forward in the battered old armchair he’d pulled up to the table and wiped the sweat from his face.
“Yeah, I’m OK. If she’s OK, I’m OK. Thank you, for what you did back there. I mean, fuck you for what you did back there. But thank you, too, you know?”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. And then, pointing at the phone: “That was bad news. I . . . er . . .” May as well say it, I thought. “I don’t know if I’ll be coming back.”
He looked aghast and then smiled quickly.
“Well, I’m not going to fucking kiss you good-bye, you cunt.” We both laughed, and for a moment I saw a flicker of the Roberts that had met me at the heliport only four days before.
“Ditch your phone. Ezra will give you a bunch of SIMs with sequential numbers. If I call you, burn the SIM afterward. I’ll call on the next number the next time. Got it?” He said he did, so I took a pen out of my trouser pocket and scrawled Jack Nazzar’s cell phone number on the newspaper Ezra had left with us.
“This number belongs to a grumpy old Jock. He’s the only person I trust.” I thought about that for a moment and saw Commander Frank Knight in my mind’s eye dressing me down in Caracas. “The only person. He’ll help you. Don’t mention any names. None. Forget any names you’ve heard from me. Just tell him that all work and no play makes him a dull boy. He’ll lead you from there.” Roberts ripped the corner of the paper off and tucked it into his jeans ticket pocket. Then he took his bracelet off. The black, red, gold and green beads clicked against the little metal lion with its missing foot. He handed it to me.
“For luck,” he said. Worry and fatigue were etched into his face. I put the bracelet on. He smiled weakly, and we lapsed into embarrassed silence. Then I remembered Micky’s Glock. I reloaded the little pistol and passed it to him, grip first.
“For luck,” I said. “It’s a double action. Six rounds, plus one up the spout.”
“Double what?” Roberts turned it over to inspect it and squinted along the barrel.
“Just pull the trigger. Put it in your pocket. You’ll know when to use it.” He tucked it away and cleared his throat.
“What are you going to do when you get to Karabunda?”
I realized I’d been thinking about little else for days, and with no clear answer. I’d told Ezra the truth: there was no plan. And there never had been. But the solution was suddenly clear. I replied spontaneously, knowing exactly what was to be done. It was as if the thought had always been there, waiting to be spoken.
“Precisely,” I said, “what Sonny Boy told me to do.”