The Informationist: A Thriller (28 page)

Still grimy but minus the mud and in clean clothes, they gathered in the pilothouse. For Wheal’s benefit, Beyard summarized the events that had brought them back to the ship. He spoke in English and even with
his lack of fluency was descriptive in the telling of it, although his version neatly left out all mention of the guesthouse from the moment the pistol had been placed to his head.

When he was finished, they sat in silence. There was no need to say what they all were thinking. The minutes passed slowly and were emphasized by the regular ticks of the radarscope that filled the quiet. Beyard bit on the edge of his thumb, Wheal tapped a pen against the table, and Munroe sat with her head kicked back and her legs stretched out.

Wheal was the first to speak. “I want to know what happens next.” He turned to Munroe. “You know that if you go back in, you’re playing against terrible odds—it’s a high-risk venture, the stakes being your life and”—he paused and nodded at Beyard—“more important as far as I’m concerned, Francisco’s, if he decides to go with you. Is what you’re after worth that much?”

Munroe tapped her fingers against the table, a steady Morse rhythm, and then nodded almost imperceptibly in answer to Wheal’s question. “Yes and no,” she said. “I’m willing to put my life up against it, I’m not willing to put up Francisco’s—or anyone else’s, for that matter. It’s a decision he has to make for himself, but I’ve got to go back in regardless.”

Wheal rested his forearms on the table. “Listen,” he said. “We’re all a little nuts to be in this business, a little fucked in the head, a little short on fear. I don’t give a rat’s ass that you’ve got a death wish, but what you’re setting out to do is suicidal, and that’s where I draw the line. Not because of you. Go fucking die, I don’t care.” Wheal nodded again toward Beyard. “My job is to keep him out of trouble, and you”—he pointed at Munroe—“are trouble.”

“Oh, how sweet,” she said with the high pitch of patronization. “You’re playing daddy. Does Francisco get grounded if he breaks curfew?”

Predictably, Wheal eased back from the table, straightened, and crossed his arms. Outwardly, Munroe’s face was placid; inside, she was amused. He had an eight-inch, hundred-pound advantage, and his was the posture of an alpha male adept at intimidation. She’d taken on guys his size before, and what she lacked in bulk and strength she more than made up for in speed and agility. In another time and another place, the
challenge would have been more than welcome. She would’ve continued to provoke him until he exploded, then, and like lightning, would have gone up over the table, and the pain from the ensuing fight would have been cathartic—but not here.

“I can’t give you what you want,” she said. “The status quo has already been disrupted, and even if I walk away, nobody, especially not you or me, has the power to put things back the way they were. I don’t want to see what you have here ruined any more than you do, but it’s out of your hands now, you know that.”

“If I’m going to lose my friend, I’d like to know it’s fucking worth it.”

“I have no answers for you, George. It’s possible we’ll wind up a couple of decomposing bodies in a ditch. It would be tragic and, considering statistical probability, long overdue. Yes, I could walk away and guarantee myself a few more days, but for what? So this can haunt me for the rest of my life? No thanks. Whether I want it or not, I’m locked in. I’d also like to get my hands on the bastard who wants me dead. And there’s the issue of Emily Burbank: If she really is alive, I need to find her, out of principle and to fulfill a promise I made to a mother in Europe.” She turned to Beyard. “I appreciate what you’ve done for me, and I really don’t expect you to accompany me, but I
am
going back, and when I start setting things in motion, it would be helpful to know what you’re planning to do.”

Beyard, who had been silent throughout the exchange, with his arms crossed and his chin on his chest, raised his eyes and said, “Do you even have to ask?”

Wheal leaned forward into Beyard’s line of sight. “This thing is worth your life?”

Beyard let out a snort. “You know me better than that.”

“Then why the hell go?”

Beyard sat back and wrapped an arm over the chair. “I have my reasons.”

Wheal stood and placed his hands on the table, leaning down so that his head was almost level with Beyard’s. “This is fucked up, Francisco, you know it’s fucked up. You’re risking everything we’ve had. Seven years of friendship.” Wheal snapped his fingers. “Seven years of partnership. For what?”

When Beyard said nothing, Wheal walked toward the door. “The two of you can sort it out. This is insane, and I want no part of it.”

When Wheal had left the room, Beyard said, “I’ve crossed the Rubicon.”

“You can still change your mind.”

Beyard rested his elbows on the table and placed his chin against his folded hands. “No,” he said. “Regardless of how events play out, there’s no going back.”

Munroe put her feet on the table and tilted back in the chair. “All right then,” she said. “We’re going in again, and this time we do it my way.”

The look of concerned sadness that had been on Beyard’s face opened into a smile of amusement, but he said nothing. Munroe ignored what the smile implied. War was a boys’ club that she’d infiltrated long ago, and he, like so many others before him, would figure it out eventually. “We’ll need supplies that you don’t have,” she continued, “so I’ll need to make a few calls. If you’ve got connections and friends in the government, this would be a good time to call in some favors, find out what they know, and see if we can’t learn something.”

“Do you still have the number that you got from Salim? What we get when the phone is answered could be enlightening.”

“It’s pulp in one of my pockets.”

It took Beyard an hour to make the rounds by phone, during which time Munroe assembled a supply list that she e-mailed to Logan, and then, unable to reach Logan by phone, she and Beyard retreated to the galley, where they put together a meal from an odd assortment of frozen and canned goods. It was the first they’d eaten in over a day, and between shoveled-in bites they discussed what little Beyard had learned.

The events that had transpired off the coast of Bioko Island and by the edge of the Boara River had apparently never happened. No word or rumor floated through the capital, and if the orders had come through official channels, they had escaped each of the people Beyard relied on for information. The U.S. embassy in Malabo provided few additional clues. Notification of Munroe’s death had come from a fisherman who’d described in graphic detail a body found along the shoreline and who’d produced a residency card he claimed had come from it.

Munroe brought a piece of paper to the table and began to sketch.
“We’re working through an information blind,” she said. “What are the givens?”

“We know that this girl was alive a few months ago,” he said. “That she lives in Mongomo, that she’s married to or is the mistress of Timoteo Otoro Nchama, vice minister of mines and energy, and that someone in the Equatoguinean government is willing to kill to prevent you from getting to her.”

Munroe kept her eyes on the paper and rapidly diagrammed. “The big question to which we have no answer is why. We also don’t know who.”

“Have you considered the possibility that this girl does not want to be found? That it is she who is pulling the strings to keep you away?”

Munroe stopped writing, looked at him, and one corner of her mouth turned up, twisting her lips into a half grin. “I’ve considered a lot of possibilities,” she said. “But not that one.”

“It’s worth a thought.”

“Yes it is,” she said, and returned to the paper. “We can assume that wherever Emily is, she’s being watched—protected or threatened. We can assume that, like in Bata, at each of the country’s gateways someone is watching for me, and that no matter how many times I attempt to enter, I will be tracked. I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but since it’s me that the trouble follows, I won’t be going in again.”

“What the hell, Essa? Two hours ago you nearly started a fight with George because you insisted you were going back.”

“Oh, I’m going,” she said. “But not as me.”

Munroe stopped writing and turned the paper around so Beyard could follow. “There’s one group of foreigners who can come and go as they please. They have the president’s blessing, nobody hassles them, nobody looks, nobody wants to know: Israeli military.” She tapped the pen onto the paper and continued to diagram. “So under the cover of an envoy out of Cameroon, we enter from the northeastern gateway and beeline south to Mongomo.”

Beyard stared at the paper, his lips drawn tight, and shook his head slightly. “I’m not sure if you’re completely mad or a fucking genius.”

“I guess we’ll soon find out,” she said, and returned to the paper once again. “Since this is the dry season and the roads are passable, best-case scenario we can be in and out in two days. Worst-case …”
Munroe paused and sighed. “There are a few critical unknowns making it difficult to define worst-case. It should be a clean in and out, there and gone before anyone is even aware of our presence. Should be …” And her voice trailed off.

“Mongomo will be our point of greatest vulnerability. It’s what concerns me most,” she continued. “There are any number of reasons that looping back the way we enter might not be possible, and the way I see it—and you have more experience in this than I do—we have two alternative return routes out of the country. Potentially fastest and most problematic is east into Gabon—a roughly five-kilometer run to the border. Second is working the tracks through the center of the country to the coast—more dangerous because of time spent inside the country and the variables that could turn up along the way, but once we get to the coast a much cleaner getaway.”

“Both are viable,” Beyard said. “If we have trouble in Mongomo, we have to rule out Bata as a gateway—we’ll be expected there. Mbini would work. It’s slightly farther south, off the beaten path, and I have contacts there.” He leaned back and after a moment said, “Last word has it the Israeli presence is extremely small and limited to specific areas. There are no female forces in the country, and should we encounter genuine troops, our cover will be blown.”

“All true,” she said. “Which is why two days from now I will be heading to the training base outside of Yaoundé to get a feel for what the Israeli operations are like in Cameroon, get onto the base if I can—make a dry run of it. I’ll be gone for a couple of weeks.”

“It sounds like an unnecessary risk,” he said. “Cameroon may not be Equatorial Guinea, but it’s not far from it. You get caught and you’ve not only blown your original objective, you’ll lose the next ten or fifteen years of your life rotting in some hole of a prison.”

“I know,” she said. “But I also know what I’m doing. I won’t get caught.”

“Considering the way things have gone so far, you sound extremely confident.”

Munroe stopped and stared at him and then without further explanation said, “Gathering information is what I do for a living. I won’t get caught.” She returned to the paper. “Your job: We’ll need transportation
with plates and papers for Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon. If we locate Emily and she wants to come with us, we need to be prepared to extract her and as many as three children. The two of us will also need Israeli military passports.”

“Two vehicles?”

Munroe nodded.

“It’s all doable,” he said. “And I’m certain Boniface can handle the vehicle papers and plates, even the papers for Emily and a few kids. I’m not so sure about the military passports. He’ll have to go through Nigeria for those, and even still, Israeli military passports are pretty rare—especially if we need two of them. Imitations would work. The border guards certainly have not seen enough of them to know one from the other.”

“Imitations are fine,” she said, and she continued to sketch, “although it’s not the border guards I’m concerned about. The vehicles will have to be fitted to smuggle weapons and equipment.”

“None of this should be a problem,” he said. “But we’re looking at a serious amount of cash, and it’s my understanding you haven’t got much money with you.”

“Once we get into Douala, I can front you sixty thousand dollars. The rest will take a few days—I’ll need to have it wired over. We’re going to need weaponry,” she said.

“Except for the MP5s we keep onboard, I’m limited to Russian or East European, sometimes Chinese.”

“We need to keep it as authentic as possible.”

“I’ll figure something out.”

“Ammunition?”

“Have plenty.”

“Lupo was using a Vintorez when he was playing sniper on the pilothouse roof. What are the chances I can have it?”

“Everything is negotiable,” he said. “If the price is right, I’m sure we can arrange something.”

By the time Munroe got Logan on the phone, he’d already started work on the supply list. “Some of these items are going to be hard to come by,” he said. “Might take a couple of weeks to track them down.”

“Two to three weeks should work, but there’s a catch this time—I need you to deliver most of it to me in person.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I kid you not. There are a few things I need sent ahead to the FedEx office in Douala: the pilot uniforms and the Hebrew-English learning system. For everything else get yourself a visa and prepare to fly to Douala. Funding goes standard through Kate. Having you courier this stuff in is the only way I can guarantee that it gets into the country. I figure you’ll know how to pack it to avoid hassles going through airline security, but if not, let me know and I’ll walk you through it. Can you clear your schedule?”

Logan’s response was a barely audible grunt, and she could hear the keyboard clacking in the background.

“E-mail me your flight itinerary as soon as you have it. You’re looking for the earliest return possible, preferably in and out on the same day, even if it means different airlines.”

Another grunt.

“If for any reason funding is going to hold things up, use my retainer; it should cover everything. And, Logan, last thing: I’ve got two days,” she said. “After that I can’t guarantee when or how often I can call, so does that give us enough time to confirm everything for the time frame we’re working?”