The Informationist: A Thriller (18 page)

The deep roar of a generator split the silence and drowned out the human voices. The lights in the room blinked on and off and then put out a steady wattage. A breeze cut through the stale air in the room as the fans began to oscillate. The temperature had changed, dusk had
come. The mosquitoes would be out in force, held at bay by the netting that covered the windows.

Footsteps on the porch were followed by another barrage of shouting. The voice was familiar. She was awake now, and uncomfortable. She shifted on the sofa. The front door slammed open and shut. He stormed into the room and then, making eye contact, stopped in midstep, almost tripping over himself.

B
eyard righted himself, then stared at her for a moment. “Hello, Essa,” he said finally, the words rolling off his tongue in a rich, thick mixture of accents. The initial shock that had registered on his face faded, and all that replaced it was nonchalance.

He walked toward the kitchen without another look and said, “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Yes, please,” she called out after him. “Water will be fine.”

Cupboard doors banged. “I must say”—his voice was raised but muted by the distance—“when my boys told me I had a visitor, you were the last person I expected.” He walked back into the living room. “I’m surprised to see you here. Not just here, you know, although yes, it is even more unexpected, but to see you at all …” He paused and motioned around the room. “In the same room with me, or even in this country.” He handed her the glass. “It’s tepid. The idiots who work for me let the generator run out of fuel.”

She raised her glass toward him and took a drink.

They both sat in silence, he facing her, his forearms on his knees, she with her legs stretched over the edge of the chair. He rolled his glass between his palms. She watched him, studied him. He was more muscular, his hair no longer sun-bleached blond, his tan not as deep, but he was
still weather-beaten, his chiseled features emphasized by the lines that only extended outdoor exposure could bring. His eyes were still strikingly blue.

He was the first to break the silence. “How did you find me?”

“I was in Kribi a few days ago and spoke with Boniface. He mentioned you’d set up shop in this general direction. I knew what I was looking for.”

He leaned back and with a half smile said, “Atavistic in the end,” and then, after a long pause, “So you asked about me?”

“Yes, I did.” She waited, unsure of which direction to take the conversation, and then said, “How’s business?”

His face still wore the half smile, and as he watched her, she knew that his mind had kicked into analysis mode. “You didn’t travel halfway around the world from wherever it is you came from to ask me about business, just as you didn’t meet with Akambe to find out where I was.”

“No,” she replied, meeting his gaze and then shifting to look around the room. “I’m making small talk. Other business brought me to Boniface, and I asked about you because I wanted to know how you were. I hadn’t intended to drop in at your hideaway.”

“But here you are.”

“Yes,” she said slowly, “here I am. Unfortunately, it’s that same ‘other business’ that has brought me here. I need a ride off the island, and I’m willing to pay you well for it. I’d also like to hire your expertise.”

He said nothing, and his eyes wandered to the grimy piece of cloth still wrapped around her arm. Then he stood. “Have you eaten?” he asked.

She cocked her head to the side to look up at him and remained seated and silent.

“Whatever it is you want,” he said, bending toward her and lowering his voice to almost a whisper, “can be better discussed on a full stomach. Come.”

She followed him into the austere kitchen, and he lit the burner under a pot that sat on the stove. Against one wall was a tiled counter that ended in a metal sink. Handmade cupboards had been built into the far-right wall. The stove and refrigerator sat side by side on the left wall, fitting together only because they were both so small. The stove was divided in two, half of it running off propane and the other half on electricity. A screened window over the counter looked out into the yard.
Against the coming darkness, he closed the shutters from the inside, the slanted wooden slats allowing air to continue to circulate.

A small table and two handmade chairs stood against the remaining wall. Like the living room, the kitchen was sparse and clean. He pulled a place setting out of the cupboard. “Don’t ask what it is,” he said as he served her from the simmering pot, “it won’t kill you.”

Forest rat, monkey meat, it made no difference—whatever it was, she’d had worse. He sat across from her and watched as she ate, and when she finished, he took the plate from the table and placed it in the sink. “How long since you’ve eaten?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Dinner sometime yesterday.”

He nodded toward her arm. “What happened?”

“Drugged, beaten, and shot. I would have been dumped into the ocean except I jumped first—I’m supposed to be dead.”

He propped himself against the sink, arms crossed at his chest, legs crossed at the ankles, staring at her in silence with the slightest semblance of a smile. He shook his head almost imperceptibly and then went to the refrigerator and pulled out two bottles of beer. He handed one to her, knelt beside her, and took her left arm in his hands. He lifted the bloodstained material away from the wound and pressed lightly around the edge of it, and she winced. He put his hand to her forehead. “You’re burning,” he said.

“I know.”

“The bullet needs to be removed. I’ve got a bottle of Black Label somewhere in the house. You might want it.” She gave him back the unopened beer.

He returned to the kitchen with the whiskey and pulled a shot glass from the cupboard, then handed both to her. “How long has it been since I saw you last?” he asked. “Ten years?”

“Nine.”

“Nine years. It’s a long time. You look good, by the way.”

“So do you.”

He set a pot of water on the stove and then left the kitchen again, returning a few minutes later with a small metal kit that brought with it another wave of memories. He dropped a few items into the boiling water.

After several minutes he withdrew from the pot a pointed precision blade that looked like a scalpel. “It’s been a long time,” he said, and he laid it on a cloth on the table in front of her, together with several other items. “Do you trust me?”

She dumped a shot of the whiskey into her mouth and swallowed. “I always have, Francisco.”

He removed the wrapping from her arm. “Misplaced trust can be a dangerous thing.”

She downed a second shot and then a third. “Was that a warning?”

He shrugged. “A lot of time has gone by, Essa. You’ve changed. I’ve changed.”

The bullet had hit when she was still upside down and had entered underneath the arm and traveled in the direction of the elbow. The alcohol took the edge off as Beyard sliced into the muscle but didn’t do much when he removed the bullet. She wanted to scream, wanted to hit him, resisted both. Beyard extracted the bullet from its resting spot and held it up to the light, examining it before placing it on the towel before her. “A souvenir, perhaps,” he said. She downed another shot as he irrigated the wound with hydrogen peroxide.

“You’re lucky, you know.” He pushed a needle into her, threading the first stitch through the open wound.

She clenched her teeth. “How’s that?”

“That you found me here.” His face held a look of concentration, and another bolt of pain went up her neck. “I’m not here that often. Tonight I dropped off a load of supplies and planned to head out for the next month—wasn’t even planning to stay the night. What would you have done if you hadn’t found me?”

“Dunno,” she said, and her voice shook as he pushed in the needle for another stitch. “Probably wait as long as I could, use a mirror to do what you’re doing now, eat through your supplies, write an IOU, and then do the long-walk thing back to Malabo.”

Beyard laughed an involuntary laugh, and she flinched as his hand moved. “I guess at the core you haven’t changed much.”

“Have you?”

His face grew serious, and he drew the last stitch. “As long as there’s
no infection, you should be fine,” he said. “You might have to baby it for a while, I had to cut pretty deep.”

By the time he finished, she’d downed nearly three-quarters of the bottle. Drunk and exhausted, she made no protestation when he undressed her and put her in his bed. He left the room, and she collapsed into a grateful fog of forgetfulness.

When she woke, it was dark, and even with her eyes closed the bed floated in soft circles. She was aware of time having passed; in spite of the dark, it had to be at least afternoon. On a low-lying table on the other side of the mosquito netting, she found four half-liter water bottles. She took one and drank from it, dampening the fuzzy dryness that coated her mouth and then, in spite of the spinning room, pulled herself up out of bed. She fumbled in an attempt to open the shutters and let in some light, realized that a blanket had been nailed up over them, and couldn’t remember if it had been there last night.

But for her panties, she was naked. She searched for her clothes and instead found a freshly laundered pair of Francisco’s pants draped over a chair with her security belt lying on top of them and a shirt hanging off a nail on the wall behind them. Off to the right of the chair was the bathroom, a bare rectangular room with a concrete floor that slanted toward the northwest corner and ended in a metal drain cover. To the right of the drain was an eighty-liter bucket filled with water. Using a scoop, she bathed with the cold water, taking care to avoid the wound on her arm.

She found Francisco in the kitchen. He was silent as he busied himself, and when he saw her in the doorway shielding her eyes from the day’s brightness, he stopped and closed the shutters. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I was just getting ready to check in on you.”

“Thank you for the clothes,” she said. “And for your bed.” She took a seat at the small table and put her head in her hands.

“How’s your arm?” He set a mug of coffee and two white pills in front of her, took her arm and rolled up the sleeve, examining the makeshift bandaging.

“It doesn’t hurt as bad as my head.”

He pressed lightly on the wound and then lowered the sleeve and
placed her arm back on the table. “Paracetamol is the best I can do,” he said. “I’ll change the bandages when you feel better.”

“Thanks,” she said, and swallowed the pills with a sip of the black coffee.

He transferred the food onto a plate and set it on the table. “If you’re hungry,” he said, and then he left the kitchen. Food was the last thing she wanted, but it was necessary. She toyed with the fork as she listened to him knocking about in the bedroom, and she’d managed to finish about half the plate when he returned to the kitchen.

Beyard pulled the second chair out from the table, turned it around, and sat down, resting his arms on the back of it. “I didn’t sleep much last night,” he said. He jabbed an index finger toward his forehead and twisted it. “Too many questions and a lot of memories.”

Munroe started to speak, and he held up his hand, “There will be time, I hope, to answer the questions and lay the memories to rest. Last night you said you wanted to pay me to take you off the island. I want to hear more about this—regardless of what my answer may have been, perhaps I now have little choice. I need to know, Vanessa: Who wants you dead and does whoever it is know you are here?”

She was quiet for a moment, and finally she said, “I don’t know.”

He sat in silence, watching her, and she knew he would not speak until she had answered fully.

“I have ideas,” she said. “I know why and have a vague notion of who gave the order. I wasn’t followed here, but of course in spite of my precautions there is the possibility that when the boatman returns home, he will talk, and talk will travel, and eventually it will get back to Malabo.”

“And this … what did you say? Notion. This notion of yours?”

“I’ve been hired to locate a girl who went missing four years ago, and so far the information I have points to the Mongomo crossing into Gabon. There were two of us. My assignment was to find the girl, my partner’s assignment was to keep me out of trouble—not that it did much good. I have no idea what’s happened to him.” She stopped and took another slow sip of coffee. “We were followed from the airport and watched closely when we went about town.”

“You were in Malabo asking questions?”

“Yes.”

“Brilliant.” There was no attempt to hide the sarcasm.

“It gets better,” she said. He raised his eyebrows. With an effort she reached around and pulled the belt from under her pants. Her body was stiff and painful. She opened the Ziploc bag, removed Emily’s death certificate, and handed it to him. He took it and, while his eyes scanned the paper, said, “You say she disappeared in Mongomo?”

“I believe it was in that area. I can’t be certain until I’ve gone there to prove it one way or the other.”

“And you got this paper in Malabo?”

“Yes, from the chief of police. He called in one of his people and had this delivered to me, then afterward suggested I return home.”

“A veiled threat.”

“Not so veiled.”

Beyard stared at the paper and read it through a second time. His brows were furrowed. “What’s in this for you?”

“A lot of money,” she said.

Beyard sat back from the table. “It’s not the way they do things here. Hauling you into the police station for questioning, yes. Torture, yes. Death from beating and starvation at the Black Beach Prison, yes. But to put you in a boat and dump you into the ocean, I’ve never heard of it. Who were the men that did this?”

“I’m not sure. They wore civilian clothing and spoke a language I haven’t heard before.”

“The presidential guard?”

“I speak Arabic.”

“Angolans?”

“Perhaps. They were packing Makarovs, not that it narrows the playing field by much.”

He stared again at the death certificate, then placed it in the bag and handed it back to her. “And you say they had this waiting for you?”