The Informationist: A Thriller (15 page)

Don Felipe rested in the chair. He was silent for a moment, his eyes focused on Munroe. Finally he stood and shook her hand, “All respectful visitors are welcome in our land.” He walked with her toward the door and opened it. “It’s unfortunate,” he said. “Some have entered who are unwelcome—dangerous people from the neighboring countries. My men and I do the best we can to keep the peace. If you choose to stay, that is your decision, but please know we cannot guarantee your protection against such unwelcome elements.”

“I thank you for your graciousness and concern,” she said. “Your people are blessed to have a protector such as yourself.” She turned, and with Bradford ushered out next to her, the door closed.

It would have been less than a ten-minute walk back to the hotel had Munroe opted to go on foot. Instead she flagged a taxi. Bradford raised his eyes in question as she did so, but she offered no explanation. She remained silent for the ride, her head kicked back against the seat, staring up at the roof of the car, and Bradford, too, said nothing.

At the hotel she headed toward her room and would have shut the door without a word if Bradford hadn’t placed a hand against it. “Michael, I really want to understand what just happened.” She paused and then held the door open for him.

He sat on the chair by her bed, and she walked to the glass door that led to the balcony and stared out the glass. “I didn’t catch even half of what went on in there,” he said. “What did he give you?”

She was still staring out at nothing. “Emily’s death certificate.”

Silence filled the room, and after a moment Munroe turned toward Bradford. His shoulders were slumped forward, and his head was in his hands. He ran his fingers through his hair and then straightened. “So she’s really dead?” His face was tight and expressionless. “I never supposed that when we got the news it would come so unceremoniously.”

Munroe turned again toward the balcony. “That paper is worthless. Trust me, if there was even a remote possibility that the document had value, I’d be out of here in a heartbeat—job over, mission accomplished—collecting a fat bonus for providing hard evidence of what happened to Emily.” She turned to Bradford. “No, the search just got a little more dangerous and a lot more complicated.”

“I’m not questioning your judgment,” he said. “If you believe there’s
still a chance she’s alive, I’ll grasp at that straw, but I really have no idea where you’re going with this.”

Munroe walked to the bed, sat down, and opened the envelope. “We’ll start with this,” she said, “although there are so many things wrong with it, it’s hard to know
where
to begin.” She bit on her lip and squinted at the document. “For starters, there’s the paper itself.” She held it up so he could see the designs printed around the border and the details of the heading. “See the number at the top? It’s five-thousand-CFA paper—government paper. It has to be purchased from the Ministry of Finance.”

His face was completely blank.

“Anytime people want an official document, they have to buy one of these and then take it to whatever government branch has the information they need. If you want goods processed through the port, the approvals are put on government tax paper. You want a birth certificate? Government tax paper. You want a license for your vehicle? Government tax paper.” She handed it to him. “Someone had to pay for this at the Ministry of Finance and bring it to the police station. I doubt that the clerk who typed it out and is making fifty dollars a month was the one to do it.”

“So what you’re saying is that whoever requests an official document has to supply the tax paper in order to get it?”

“Exactly,” she said. “And that brings us to the next glaring inaccuracy: A death certificate in this country is meaningless. Nobody has them or has use of them. When there’s a death in a village, there’s no autopsy or police report—certainly no ‘cause of death’ to be determined. There’s a village ceremony, a burial if the person is lucky, and that’s the end of it. You ask the government for a death certificate and the big question is going to be, what for?”

“But we’ve got one.”

She nodded. “I’ll get to that in a minute. This document is just a lot of misspelled wordiness that certifies that the person named died in the Republic of Equatorial Guinea.” She pointed at the paper. “No details whatsoever. It doesn’t even say where it happened or what nationality she was. For all the flaws of this country’s government, let’s not forget the ten years they spent under communism. They’re real big on redundant paperwork and following procedures by whatever the day’s formula
may be. At the least we should expect an indication of whether she died on the mainland or the island.”

“Look, Michael,” he said, “I want to believe you more than you can possibly know, but why would they even have that document? Wouldn’t it be so much easier for them to simply say that they have no idea what we’re talking about?”

“I can think of several possible answers to that question,” she said, “but here’s what I think holds the most water: This piece of paper doesn’t even prove that Emily was in the country. They got Emily’s name from us—copied it off the bio we gave Mba at the ministry. What this piece of paper means is that someone who was educated abroad, who knows what a death certificate means to people like us, doesn’t want us snooping around the mainland and hopes that this is enough to convince us to go home.”

Munroe took the death certificate and sealed it inside the Ziploc bag that held her passport and that she kept in a security belt worn underneath her pants, around her waist.

“Miles, things are going to get dangerous from this point. We were issued a threat, and if we’re not careful, someone’s going to make good on it. Maybe you should call Burbank, see if he’ll let you out of the assignment.”

“I stay,” he said. “So what’s next?”

“We need to get out of the city as soon as possible, preferably in the direction of the mainland.” She looked at her watch. “We’ve got time before the GEASA office closes.”

Like most places of business in the city, the airline headquarters was located on the first floor of a three-story building. The office was small, dark, damp, and empty but for a desk on either side of the room. There were two people in the office, one a secretary or clerk, the other someone of importance who took their money and wrote out the ticket information by hand. The transaction was completed within fifteen minutes—they would be on the first flight leaving in the morning.

On the way out of the office, Munroe handed Miles his ticket. “Flying to Bata is a bit like playing Russian roulette,” she said. “Literally. The machines are old Russian planes that get no maintenance. They’re stuffed beyond capacity and flown until they go down—usually into the ocean. Hopefully tomorrow won’t be the day.”

Munroe stopped midstep and searched up and down the street through the pedestrians and a steady stream of vehicle traffic. Bradford followed her eyes.

“Did the Shadows follow us here?” he asked.

“I was certain of it,” she said.

“So was I.”

“Think they could’ve gotten good enough to avoid our spotting them?”

“I doubt it,” he said.

“So do I.”

Munroe and Bradford walked the return trip to the hotel hoping to spot a Shadow and find relief in the normalcy of being tailed, but instead they found that they were alone.

Over dinner they said little to each other, and for the first time since arriving in the city Munroe heard the wisps of threat. It came not in words but in the silences, in things unspoken and in the background banter among the hotel employees that was no longer there.

The waiter, previously friendly and good-humored, was tonight solemn and taciturn. He brought their drinks, and Munroe had them sent back, requesting unopened cans, and then in unspoken agreement neither she nor Bradford ordered anything to eat. Rather, they sat in silence nursing Coke out of the can, pretending to be amused by a rowdy party of drunken expats two tables down. And when they had sat long enough so as to keep up appearances, they left the patio to return to their rooms to wait for light and get out of the city.

They had decided that it would be best if they both slept in the same room. Bradford returned to his to retrieve some of the bedding as well as his belongings, and while she waited for him, Munroe kicked off her shoes. When she tossed them against the bed, the first signs of dizziness hit. She doubled over to steady herself, braced herself against the bed, and felt darkness closing in. She opened her mouth to yell for Bradford, but no sound came. She crumpled to the floor, and the last thought to go through her mind was to wonder how the hell it had happened.

A
wareness came slowly through a haze of confusion, and Munroe struggled toward lucidity, attempting to attach meaning to the stimuli hammering at her senses. First came the dank smell of oxidized metal and then the cold of steel through clothing. It was dark, and the air had a salty dampness to it. She lay on her side, gagged and hands secured behind her back. Her feet were bare and, as far as she could tell, bound to something heavy. Cigarette smoke hung in the air, and voices spoke hushed and rapidly in a language that had no meaning.

Where the hell was Bradford?

There was movement—the erratic regularity of a small boat rocking on the open ocean. From behind came the low whine of an engine that indicated slow forward speed. There was starlight, and a lamp on the prow highlighted the shadows of four men. The boat was no more than fifteen feet long and, but for a small cabin on the bow, open-aired. She could smell rain in the distance, knew they could smell it, too.

Three feet away one of the men lolled against the gunwale. Near his face was the soft glow of orange that brightened as he inhaled. On his belt he had a knife and, holstered close to it, a sidearm.

The mental fog continued to lift, and confusion segued to anger. The patio with Bradford, the hotel room, darkness. The images merged and
collided. Internal pressure built steadily, was rising from her gut into her chest, a hammer percussing as a war drum whose beat would end when blood was spilled. Her vision blurred to gray, and she wrestled it back. Thought before action, knowledge before battle.

Her eyes followed the guard as he smoked, and she twisted so that her hands could reach her ankles. Wrapped around her feet was a chain that ran through a section of metal pipe. A weight. An anchor. Hauled off to be dumped like garbage. No questions, no accusations, no torture, and no chance for explanation or pleading—brought to the water to disappear, to be wiped off the face of the earth.

The fucking bastards.

The internal drumbeat pounded harder, faster, and the urge to strike became unbearable.

Breathe. Think.

In the distance the sky was tinged by the glow of natural gas burn-off. She turned to the stars and, as she had on so many occasions in the past, found the map written in the equatorial night sky. The flare worked as a marker to gauge the distance. They were close to the coast. Close enough to swim if she could survive the treacherous currents. How far out were they? A quarter of a mile? It had to be less.

The man at the gunwale straightened and turned. She froze. He came closer and reached his hand out, snapping his fingers in front of her face, and when he received no response, he kicked her in the ribs. She groaned. He turned his back, and the light on the prow framed his profile. In spite of his weapons, he wore civilian clothes. He dropped the cigarette and faced her again, squatted and fumbled with the buttons of her shirt.

The percussion rose higher, louder, drowning out the sounds of the boat. One movement, swift and soundless, a serpent’s strike, was all that it would take to reach for the knife, slit his throat, and dump his body in the ocean. She tested the strength of the nylon that held her wrists. The guard’s commander barked an order, and the man stopped, stood, threw a second kick to her gut, then lit another cigarette and walked back to join the others.

Take him, take them all. Pilot the boat to the shore and then … and then what? Return to Malabo with no place to hide while attempting to
smuggle herself off this prison of an island? Breathe. Think. Time. Time was necessary in order to gain information, to understand, to strategize.

Munroe glanced at the glow on the horizon. The oil companies used helicopters to airlift their sick employees to Cameroon. It was an option. She gritted her teeth, yanked her right thumb out of its socket, squeezed the hand free of the restraint, and then relocated the thumb with a silent, painful snap. She looped the nylon around both wrists to hold her arms in position and then tested the chains on her feet and found them loose. Careful so as not to let the metal grate on itself, she pulled her ankles out and, confident it would not be a problem to get free of the anchor, replaced them.

Luba. She could take the boat to Luba and refuel there.

And then the moment of opportunity was gone. From behind, the engine cut and the boat coasted, rising and falling with the rhythm of the water. Hands pulled her up by the scruff of the neck and then, positioned under her arms, dragged her to the hip-high gunwale and propped her up.

Another burst of rapid discussion in that indecipherable language. The hands slackened momentarily, and the dead weight of her body slumped forward. The hands picked her back up, and then there was silence. Through half-opened eyes, she saw the commander reach for his weapon, and in that instant she understood the argument.

He raised the gun, and she pushed with her legs, propelling herself backward, falling headfirst over the edge, into the ocean. Water churned around her with an audible hiss. Bullets. Heat like a knife blade caught her left arm below the shoulder. The anchor tightened, and the weight at her feet flipped her right side up and plunged her downward. Unable to loosen the chains, she kicked. With her hands she pried until her right foot came out. The plunge stopped ten yards below the boat, and still the anchor held tight around her left ankle. Her lungs ached for air, and in panic she clawed at the chain. No time. Think. She forced her fingers between her foot and the chain, bought an inch, and then was free. She kicked off from the ocean floor and swam toward the light, removing the gag as she went.