The Informationist: A Thriller (10 page)

With Francisco’s approval Pieter had taken it upon himself to train her to fight—“to defend herself” were the words he had used when presenting the idea. Even if Pieter had returned to South Africa, he still would have been too close. Yet she was forced into his presence for hours every day. She couldn’t refuse. Francisco had given the order, and she worked for Francisco—more, she revered him. Eleven years her senior, Francisco was the older brother she’d lost when she was barely old enough to understand why.

Pieter’s training had started as he promised—as training. Away from the rest of the camp, he set about teaching her to fight. The location of the camps changed, and sometimes so did the country as the crew moved nomadically with the pickups and deliveries, but her being in Pieter’s presence remained constant. She didn’t know where he’d learned his technique or what exactly he taught; he claimed to be a master in several martial arts, and she wouldn’t have known one way or the other. She knew only that no matter how much she learned, she would return to her shelter bruised, bloody, and aching, and nobody at the camp would say anything about it.

Those were the good times.

As her skills progressed and she learned to fight back, Pieter would keep at her until she was spent and unable to move. Every day it ended the same, with her flat on her back, held down with a knife to her throat as he raped her, whispering taunts into her ear while his sweat dripped into her face.

He threatened to hunt down her family and kill them if she left camp—she had no doubt he would make good on his promise, and no matter what she felt about her family, death and torture by a sadistic madman was not what they deserved. They had no idea where she was, and even if they had, there was nothing they could do. The only person
who would care if Pieter slit her throat would be Francisco, and physically he could never best Pieter—none of them could.

Then Pieter brought the knives into the training session. Each time the sparring began, she wasn’t sure if she would live through the fight. Pieter deliberately cut her and regularly threatened to kill her. She fought to win, she fought to make him bleed, to end it, for the hell to be over. When her knife would connect with his flesh and the red liquid of life would smear across the blade, a shock of euphoria would go through her, always followed by the pain of his knife slicing another part of her body, and still it would end the same.

The better an opponent she became, the more Pieter tormented her. In an attempt to escape him, she refused to fight and then announced to Francisco—within earshot of Pieter—that she was trained and didn’t need more. Pieter came to her that night and gagged her. He pinned her down on the ground and slit one of her wrists, mocking her as she struggled against him. After she had lost considerable blood, he pulled her out of the dirt and bound her wrist to stanch the bleeding. He stroked her face gently, kissed her, and told her that if she ever defied him again, he would slit both her wrists and dump her in the Atlantic for the sharks.

He left her alone for a few days, and she knew it was to provide time for her to think about what he’d said and allow recovery from the loss of blood.

Then she had tried to manipulate him off the team by begging Francisco to send him away. Unable to tell the real reason, she hoped he might indulge her, and when he didn’t, she weighed the risk of the truth and chose life.

Then the sparring sessions were no longer enough to satisfy. Pieter began to trap her around camp. She never knew from which structure, tree, or rock he would appear; he seemed to take pleasure in devising ways to startle her. There was no place of solace or peace, and she lived on an emotional razor’s edge.

Staying away from Pieter consumed her waking thoughts, and she found safety by sticking with other people. If Francisco was there, she stayed by his side, and if he was away, she sought out Jean Noel. She could sense Pieter hovering, and if he caught her eye while she was under the
protection of company, he bore her a sweet sadistic smile. When she escaped during the day, Pieter would come at night, and so she took to sleeping away from camp in hidden places. The better she became at avoiding him, the more he seemed to take pleasure in hunting her down; the harder she fought, the more he came back.

With his viselike grip around her throat, he would draw the flat of his blade across her cheek and goad her with what he was capable of. He would pull her face toward him so that her eyes could not avoid him, and he would laugh.

“You will never be as strong or as fast as I am, Essa” was his taunt. “You cannot escape me.”

She had no idea how old he was or how long he had been fighting for money, nor if the sadism came with the job. He told stories of coup attempts, of murder, of violence. That he was a killer she had no doubt, but she held everything else suspect.

Relief came from making runs to Kribi or Douala for supplies, or while on a delivery. They traveled to Kribi by boat, using Francisco’s trawler and leaving the faster cigarette boats behind. On a delivery, during the two or three days it would take to motor or trek through the jungle on remote, soggy footpaths, she would be left alone to do her job, and when it was over, the torment would start up worse than before.

Knowing that escape was impossible, she subsisted on thoughts of revenge, and hearing Francisco and Pieter argue had given her hope. If there was a disagreement, Pieter might leave.

And with that thought her throat constricted, cut off the air, and she struggled to breathe.

It would not be beyond Pieter to force her to go with him. Her hands began to shake, and her mind raced. She was worthless to Pieter. If it was convenient, he would just as easily dump her overboard as rape her. But she was worth a tremendous amount to Francisco, and spite would be reason enough for Pieter to haul her out of the camp. The argument turned to shouts.

And then Pieter stormed out of Francisco’s structure and headed for the mangrove swamp that led to the boats. Darkness was coming, and the wind blew stronger, thunder drew nearer; the rain wasn’t far away.

She hadn’t thought; she’d merely acted. She traced her way back to
her bed and the stashed tranquilizer gun that no one else had use for and that Jean Noel had let her keep. She knew the routes as well, if not better, than Pieter, and she circled behind him, walking barefoot through the sludge, following from afar, alert, cautious not only of Pieter but of the elements. The last thing she needed now was to run into a mamba or any other poisonous creature that infested the lowlands. She would need to have a perfect shot, couldn’t risk getting close; he was faster and stronger, and if she missed, she was dead.

His back to her, he untied the mooring of his boat. If he planned to leave in this weather, he would be preoccupied with getting out as quickly as possible, and so she risked shortening the distance. She crept closer until she could clearly see him. Aimed. Fired.

The discharge, like nearing thunder, shattered the stillness of the jungle.

The dart hit Pieter between his shoulder blades. He stumbled and fell to his knees. When she was certain it had begun to take effect, she moved closer, fired the second for good measure, and then stood over him, one foot on either side of his body. His eyes rolled up in their sockets. She drew a knife and paused; the words of the Old Testament screamed,
Thou shalt not kill
.

She pulled his head back, knelt on his chest, and slit his throat. The blood gushed from his veins in spurts like a broken fountain staining her. She watched him bleed and felt nothing, then let his head drop to the ground, stood over him, and whispered,
“The race is not to the swift, nor battle to the strong, nor yet favor to men of skill; time and chance happens to them all.”

She couldn’t leave him on the path; better to drag him into the jungle and let the animals have his body. She went to his boat and checked the fuel supplies. It was enough to get to Douala if she emptied every extra storage container. She brought the engine to life and guided the boat upstream. With Pieter Willem gone, nobody would look for it—she needed to sort out the options.

The rain began to come. It started in slow, large drops of water, and the downpour intensified until the torrent was powerful enough to sting. By the time she crept back to the camp, darkness had long enshrouded the jungle, and she dripped water. There was not a sign of blood on her;
the rain had washed away the evidence. She shed her wet clothes, and climbed through the mosquito netting to her bed, where she curled in the fetal position and wept with racking sobs.

W
HEN
M
UNROE FINALLY
stood and left the rooftop, the first taste of sunlight had ushered the sky into hues of violet, and the bustle on the city streets shouted that the day had already begun. The internal voices were only whispers now; they’d bled themselves dry through the night.

How many passages were tumbling inside her head? She’d lost count. She had her father to thank—or curse—for every one of the verses that bubbled into consciousness.
Father
.

There had once been awe, inspiration, maybe love, always the desire for his approval, although it came in small conditional doses. On the rare occasions that he was around, his sole interest seemed to lie in the Book, and so she’d studied it, memorized it, and, like a monkey for an organ grinder, recited it to gain attention and praise. Mother wasn’t much better, alcoholic that she’d become.

Life in Africa was sluggish, her mother had once said, moving like a languid fan stirring hot, stale air in circles; time lost meaning. The scarcity of amenities, convenience, and infrastructure added to the asperity of life.

For all the pieces of history Munroe was short on, one thing she knew: Her middle-aged parents hadn’t expected another child when they’d taken the call as missionaries to Cameroon, and if there was ever a mistake, she had been it.

And so she’d grown up untamed, the local children as playmates, her playground the dirt roads that wound through the small hillside town. She ran with the others, ragtag and barefoot, kicking deflated soccer balls toward imaginary goals and jumping out of the way of the occasional car or share taxi. She hauled water from the creek with her friends and learned to pound cassava and cook in large aluminum pots on open fires behind their homes. She knew the native plants that passed for vegetables and sometimes sold fruit at the local market. She spoke their language and understood their customs.

Unlike the others, her house had air-conditioning, refrigeration, a
maid, and a cook. Her father had a full-time driver, and there was a gardener who kept the aggressive foliage from reclaiming the property. All this until Munroe was thirteen, and her parents, in the ultimate act of pretending to care, sent her to Douala to be educated at the American School. It was a personalized version of boarding school, where meals and nights were spent with friends of the family. And there, at first behind her parents’ backs and later as blatantly as possible, she began to run wild; biblical passages were all she possessed of home, hollow words that translated into abandonment by parents more interested in saving the lost than their own flesh and blood.

Munroe let out a sigh as she passed Bradford’s room. His door was open, and although she didn’t see him, she knew that he was aware of her having been gone for the night. Chances were he’d spent the same sleepless hours guarding the landing that led to the roof. She didn’t bother returning to her room with subtlety; she merely opened the door and headed for the shower.

T
hey shared an uneasy truce, Bradford mostly silent as he accompanied Munroe about town. It may have been his way of giving space, although he was more likely nursing a grudge. If there was going to be payback, Munroe was confident it would come only after the hunt for Emily had ended, and so, over a late lunch, attempting to make nice and bring back some of the rapport they’d previously shared, she handed him an air ticket to Malabo.

“It’s where we go next,” she said, “Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea.”

Bradford took the booklet and flipped through the pages.

“Ever been there?” she asked.

He placed the ticket on the table and with a half smile said, “Nope. But it’s where Titan has its oil wells.”

Munroe said nothing and then, after a moment of silence, “It’s odd that none of the reports mentioned that.”

“Is it a problem?”

“I don’t know.” She ran her fingers through her hair and then folded her hands and placed her chin on them. “It does seem a freakish coincidence.”

His eyes moved from the paper on the table up to hers. “What do you mean?”

“I suspect that Emily disappeared along the Equatorial Guinean–Gabonese border.”

Bradford took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. He sat back in his chair, silent for a moment, and then leaned in toward her. “I know the rules, and I’m not questioning your judgment, but I have questions.”

She nodded.

He was quiet again, head down, and then he looked up. “I was there, Michael, I was part of the team. I’ve seen the reports, I’ve spoken to people who saw her before she disappeared. How do you make the leap from Namibia to Equatorial Guinea?”

“I have information that others didn’t have—a copy of Kristof Berger’s passport, for one. I also grew up in this area, spent a number of years in Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo, and the DRC, which was Zaire back then, so I know the history and legends in a way most don’t.”

“Why am I not surprised?” he said.

“How familiar are you with local history and politics?”

“Richard told me about Cameroon and Gabon, so I’ve done some research. Not a lot, but some. He didn’t mention Equatorial Guinea.”

“As an American, you don’t need a visa to get into Equatorial Guinea, so I didn’t bring it up. It’s a strange and paranoid little country—anyone from around here who has lived there will tell you the same thing. Have you ever read Frederick Forsyth’s book
The Dogs of War
?”

“Heard of it, never read it. Should I have included it in my research?”