Bond strolled down the street in Bayswater for the second time and joined the back of a long queue at a bus stop and took in his surroundings at leisure. Across the street was a small shabby parade of shops – an ironmonger, a newsagent, a grocery store and a seemingly empty premises with a hand-painted sign above the grimy plate glass window that said ‘AfricaKIN’. Sellotaped to the glass was a poster of a starving child with rheumy eyes and a distended belly holding out a claw-like begging hand. The caption was: ‘Genocide in Dahum. Please give generously.’
Bond crossed the road and rang the bell.
He heard a clatter of footsteps descending some stairs and sensed a presence behind the door scrutinising him through the peephole.
‘Who are you? What do you want?’ an educated English voice said.
‘My name’s James Bond. I’m a journalist,’ Bond explained, adding, ‘I’m going to Zanzarim on Friday.’
The door was opened after a key had turned in a lock and two bolts were drawn. A slim African man stood there, in his forties, smart in a pinstriped suit with his head completely shaven and a neat goatee beard. His gaze was watchful and unwelcoming.
Bond showed his Agence Presse Libre card. The man smiled and visibly relaxed.
‘I’m looking for Gabriel Adeka,’ Bond said.
‘You’ve found him. Come on in.’
Bond knew from his further researches that Gabriel Adeka was Brigadier Solomon Adeka’s older brother. A successful barrister, educated at Rugby School and Merton College, Oxford, he had given up his lucrative legal career to found AfricaKIN, a charity dedicated to alleviating the suffering in Dahum. Bond saw, as he entered, that the linoleum-covered ground floor contained a fifth-hand photocopier and, to one side on a decorator’s trestle table, a light box and a typewriter. It must be quite a contrast to his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, Bond thought, as he followed Adeka up the creaking carpetless stairs to his small office on the floor above.
Adeka’s office was papered with his various distressing posters and was occupied by a table and chair surrounded by yellowing piles of flyers, news-sheets and booklets about AfricaKIN and the plight of Dahum. He shifted some cardboard boxes and found a stool behind them, placing it in front of his desk for Bond to sit on.
‘May I offer you a cup of tea?’ Adeka said, gesturing towards an electric kettle and some mugs on a tray on the floor.
‘No, thank you . . . I don’t drink tea,’ Bond added in explanation.
‘And you call yourself an Englishman?’ Adeka smiled.
‘Actually, I’m not English,’ Bond said, then changed the subject. ‘You seem to be very much on your own here. One-man band.’
‘I’ve a ready supply of volunteers when the need arises,’ Adeka said, with a weary smile. ‘But most of my funds have gone. I gave up my practice two years ago and as we all know, money – alas – doesn’t grow on trees. Also, we find ourselves very harassed by the state. Inexplicable electricity failures, visits by aggressive bailiffs claiming we haven’t paid our bills, break-ins, vandalism. All this costs me. AfricaKIN isn’t welcome – Her Majesty’s Government has made that very clear.’
‘Maybe you should move to Paris,’ Bond said.
‘I’ve thought about it, believe me. Without our French friends . . .’ He stopped. ‘I wouldn’t be talking to you, Mr Bond, if you didn’t work for a French press agency.’
‘I’m very grateful.’
‘So, what takes you to our benighted country?’
‘I’m flying in to Sinsikrou, yes – but then I plan to make my way south, to Dahum. I want to interview your brother – which is why I’m here.’
The kettle had boiled and Adeka made himself a cup of tea – no milk, no sugar. He sat behind his desk and looked at Bond, candidly, silently for a second or two, as if weighing him up, analysing him. Bond sat there, happy to be scrutinised – for some reason he liked Gabriel Adeka and admired his futile ambitions, his sacrifice, his crazy integrity.
‘Why do you think I might be able to help you?’
‘Well, you are his brother.’
‘True. But I haven’t spoken to my “little brother” since Dahum seceded in ’67,’ he said with heavy cynicism. ‘Solomon can be very persuasive. He told me what he was planning to do – to secede, to establish a “new” country, keep the potential oil revenues for the Fakassa people. He had very, very big dreams. I begged him not to do it, told him it would be a disaster for the Fakassa, a kind of race-suicide.’ His face tautened. ‘I derive no satisfaction from being proved right.’
‘So why didn’t he listen to you?’
‘You wouldn’t understand, Mr Bond. You have to be a Fakassa to have that depth of feeling, that closeness . . .’ The words seemed to fail him. ‘We’ve lived in the Zanza River Delta for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. It’s our homeland – our heartland – in every passionate, instinctive sense of the words.’ He smiled, emptily. ‘I don’t expect you to know what I’m talking about. You’re not African.’
‘No, I can understand,’ Bond said. ‘You make sense. There’s no need to patronise me.’
‘I apologise. Do you own a house?’
‘I have a flat.’
‘Do you like living there?’
‘Very much.’
‘What would you say if your neighbours came in one day and took away your carpets and your furniture, your treasured possessions?’
Bond shrugged. ‘It doesn’t relate. The Zanza River Delta is part of Zanzarim.’
Adeka looked a little contemptuous. ‘Zanzarim, and before that, Upper Zanza State, and before that Neu Zanza Staat was a construct of European colonialists. They only arrived a few decades ago, at the end of the last century. They drew the country’s boundaries on a whim one afternoon when they had nothing better to do.’ He grew more serious. ‘To the Fakassa people the Zanza River Delta, our tribal homeland, is our birthright. It has no connection with twentieth-century neocolonial politics or the venal ambitions of European adventurers. Can you understand that?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
Adeka yielded a little. ‘All the same, my brother, Solomon, should never have tried to create an independent state. It was madness. I told him so. We fought, spoke very harsh words to each other and we haven’t seen each other since.’
‘Your arguments didn’t impress.’
‘He couldn’t see sense. Wouldn’t. Not surprisingly.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Have you any idea how much oil lies beneath the Zanza River Delta, Mr Bond?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I suggest you try to find out – and then calculate roughly how many hundreds of millions of dollars will go to whoever owns it.’
He stood up. ‘I can’t help you, I’m afraid. You’ll have to find someone else who can introduce you to my brother. All I ask is, if and when you reach Dahum, you tell the world exactly and honestly what you see there.’
Bond rose to his feet. ‘You can count on that,’ he said. ‘We’re not in the propaganda business.’
Adeka led him back downstairs and at the door handed him his business card.
‘I’d be most grateful if you’d send me your articles.’
He extended his hand and Bond shook it, firmly, not thinking about the reality that lay behind his journey to Zanzarim.
‘I’ll give your salutations to your brother,’ Bond said.
‘Save your breath,’ Adeka said evenly, with no bitterness. ‘Solomon looks on me as the worst kind of traitor – he thinks I’ve betrayed my people.’
They made their farewells and Bond stepped out of the small shop on to the street and heard the bolts on the door slide shut behind him.
Bond wandered up the street, thinking, heading for the Bayswater Road. He glanced around him, remembering Adeka’s words about continual harassment, wondering if the AfricaKIN office was under surveillance and, if it were, whether his visit would have been noted and logged. Something was making him uneasy, a prickling between his shoulder blades, an uncomfortableness. He always responded to these instinctive promptings – whenever he’d ignored them he had usually regretted it – so, looking for an opportunity to check his back, he turned into a convenient cinema and bought a ticket for the show but, instead of going into the auditorium, lingered in the foyer, to see who might be following him in. After five minutes he began to relax. No one else arriving at the kiosk to buy a ticket could have been any threat at all.
An usherette approached him asking if she could be of any help, reminding him that the film was due to start in ‘four and a half minutes’. Bond reassured her he was aware of that fact and moved outside beneath the cinema’s awning, glancing up and down the street. Nothing. Then his eye was caught by the poster. The Curse of Dracula’s Daughter starring Astrid Ostergard. Bond smiled. There was Astrid/Bryce, naked in a bed, a tattered blood-boltered sheet just about covering her impossibly ripe body, a dark looming shadow of some vengeful monster cast over her. It wasn’t a bad likeness, Bond reflected, remembering the glimpses he’d been afforded a few days ago. So this was where he’d seen her name before – B-movie horror-shockers. At least that much was clear now. Yet here was Bryce Fitzjohn/Astrid Ostergard again. Was there any significance in this curious recurrence? Anything he’d missed . . . ? Stepping into a random cinema foyer couldn’t be construed as anything malign or manipulated – this was a harmless coincidence pure and simple. He had another look at the poster and smiled to himself, thinking he really had to make contact with her again once this whole Zanzarim business was over, and turned on to the street and strode confidently on towards the Bayswater Road, looking for a passing taxi he could hail.