The Informationist: A Thriller (8 page)

“Not too much,” he said. “I had to ask directions once or twice, but I was lucky to bump into people who spoke English.” He glanced around the low-lit L-shaped room. “It looks like the reward will be worth the effort.”

He had come on foot as she’d hoped. She suppressed a smile. “So,” she said, “how long have you been working for Burbank?”

“Technically I don’t. I’ve done a few things with him off and on over the years, but I work for myself—contracts.”

“That’s what I thought. He referred to you as ‘his people,’ made it sound like you were one of his employees.”

“His people, huh?” Miles smiled an easy smile of straight white teeth and settled back into his chair. “He’d certainly like to think so. We go way back, him and me, but no, I’m my own boss, and like most businessmen, I go where the money is.”

“And I assume there was money in the search for Emily?”

“Richard paid me well, as I’m sure he’s paying you well. But I went to Namibia for Richard, for Emily—for all of us, really. She was a good kid. I’ve known her since she was nine or ten.”

“I’m sorry,” Munroe said. “I didn’t realize.”

A grin crossed his face. “Well, I’m sure Richard failed to put that into my file.” The waiter brought the wine menu, and Bradford said, “Shall we order a bottle?”

“I don’t drink when I’m working, but feel free.”

He handed the menu back. “In that case I’ll have what you’re having. What’ve you got?”

“Water,” she said, and then, after Bradford had requested a bottle of Selters, “Look, Miles, you seem straightforward and likable enough, but to be honest, I don’t want you here. I work alone. I’ve never been babysat, and the only reason you’re sitting in front of me is because Burbank offered
me a hell of a lot of money to put up with the inconvenience. Things being as they are, I want to get a few of the ground rules straight.”

“Fair enough.”

“This is my investigation. I run the show, I call the shots. You’re along for the ride—whether it’s to pass on information to Burbank or cover my ass, I’m not sure. You do what you have to do, but don’t get in my way, and don’t question my judgment. Most of all, don’t screw things up. If I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it. If you have a problem with any of that, I need to know now.”

“No problem at all,” he said. His words came calmly, and the tone was nonchalant. He flicked the napkin over his lap and reached for the bread basket. “But since we’re talking about ground rules, I have a few of my own so that I can do what I’ve been hired to do.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’m being paid to watch your back and keep you alive,” he said. “Richard’s got peace of mind, not to mention money, riding on you, and I’m his insurance policy. I know for certain that you’re capable of taking care of yourself, but this was Richard’s call, not mine. If it were my assignment, I wouldn’t want me here either, so I understand your position. But like I said, it was his call, so don’t take it out on me by making my job harder. You do what you have to do, I’ll stay out of your way and keep my thoughts and opinions to myself. But I do need to know where you are every minute of every day and night, who you’re talking to, and who you’re paying off, and for what. If you can uphold your end of the bargain, I can uphold mine. Deal?”

“I’m not happy about it, but I can live with it.”

“Good,” he replied with a nod, and then, “Richard has told me next to nothing on where we go from here. What’s the plan?”

“We start with Cameroon,” she said. “Our flight leaves tomorrow morning for Douala. I’ll update you as things unfold, but for now be sure you get eight sets of passport photos taken before we leave. I need them in my possession before we’re on the plane.”

The conversation had already been interrupted several times by the attentive waitstaff, and it took a longer pause with the arrival of the main course. The discussion strayed from small talk to the similar aspects of their work to small talk again, and it was over coffee when
Munroe reached for the folder by the foot of her chair and pulled out the file of her life’s history that Burbank had given her. She slid it across the table. “You’ve probably gone over this already,” she said. “But if not, it’s only fair that you have it—I have yours.”

Bradford put down his cup, reached for the file, and slid it back to her. “I assembled that file, Michael,” he said. “I don’t need it.”

Munroe leaned back and allowed silence to engulf them. Bradford said nothing, offered no explanation or justification; he simply sat and returned her gaze with a placid expression. It was a rare reaction. Most of humanity, when trapped in an uneasy silence, would say something, anything, in order to free themselves from the discomfort of quiet.

“If you’re the one responsible for that,” Munroe said finally, pointing to the folder, “you certainly left out a lot of key information.”

“Yes, I did.” His voice was low and smooth, and he leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table. “Some information I couldn’t get, but the rest didn’t seem pertinent.”

Munroe kept quiet, and when once again he didn’t take the bait of silence, she angled toward him so that her face was close to his and in a whisper said cynically, “It’s interesting that you’d find psychiatric evaluations to be so much less pertinent than a history of broken bones.”

“I would have included them if they were accurate,” he said. “But you and I both know that they aren’t.”

“You’re not only a hired gun, you’re also a psychologist? That’s very impressive.”

He smiled and leaned back against the chair. “Am I wrong?”

“I don’t know. You’re the expert.” And then she mirrored his shift in seating position. “So,” she said, and she smiled back and waited half a beat, “what’s your theory on the scars? Apparently you don’t believe that I’m suicidal or prone to cutting.”

“Would it matter if I did?” he asked.

“Actually, yes, thank you for asking, it matters a lot. It determines what types of reciprocal behavior I can expect from you when we find ourselves under stress.”

“Then no,” he said, “I don’t believe it—it contradicts everything I know about you. If you were planning to end your life you’d do it in a chuteless BASE jump off Angel Falls.”

Munroe drew a slow, deep breath and then held up her right hand and spread her fingers. “Fewer than these,” she said. “That’s how many people grasp what you’ve just said.” And then, after another moment of silence, “The funny thing is, everything I told them was true.” She shook her head. “What a fucking mind job. You reach out for help and get labeled delusional.” She pulled back a collection of beaded bracelets from the base of her left wrist and turned it over for him to see. “The scar’s real, as are all the others, but they weren’t self-inflicted.” She turned her right wrist over, blemish-free, and placed it next to the left. “When I do a job, I do it properly.”

“There’s a lot I don’t know about you, Michael,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what you told your doctors, and it’s pretty evident from the file that I haven’t been able to fill in the blanks of your teenage years. I do know that when you arrived in the United States, you didn’t adjust very well and were later expelled from high school.”

Munroe nodded and motioned for him to continue.

“In that same year, you were barred from several eskrima training facilities and kicked out of nearly every martial arts class you attended. Getting expelled from school I could understand, but the knife fighting and martial arts made me curious—especially the places you were going—tough guys aren’t easily threatened, and if you go too far, they’ll just as soon beat the crap out of you. It took me a while, but I managed to track down your first balisong instructor—he remembered you well and not at all fondly. He said you’d come close to killing him a couple of times, says you easily could have, and he still doesn’t understand what stopped you. The stories from the others weren’t much different.” Bradford paused for a sip of coffee. “That ability and the spark of crazy that terrifies the hard-assed, it came from somewhere, Michael, and I have no doubt that’s where the scars came from as well.”

“You’re a very perceptive man,” she said. “Maybe I’ll keep you around for a while—perhaps you can appreciate the mastery born from the will to survive.”

T
HE FLIGHT OUT
of Frankfurt connected in Paris and touched down in Douala at seven-thirty in the evening. Munroe stepped from the cool, dry
interior of the plane to the open-air concrete halls of the terminal, and warm moisture washed over her as if she’d opened the door to a steam room.

In a shifting line that converged and separated, the passengers moved through the halls toward passport control. Dampness settled on Munroe’s skin, weighing down her hair and fogging up the glasses of a tourist who walked beside her. And then, as if the heat had entwined itself around their bodies and in doing so encumbered their limbs, the speed of the pack slowed to a softer pace. By the time the first of the travelers arrived at health control, wet patches had spread under the arms and on the backs of their shirts, and some showed visible signs of exertion.

Munroe asked Bradford for his passport, and he gave it to her. At health control she handed over her yellow card and both of their passports with the pink-red border of a ten-euro bill peeking from between the pages. To the woman on the other side of the small kiosk, she said, “We seem to have misplaced one of our vaccination cards.” The woman flipped slowly through both passports, and when at last she was finished and came to Munroe’s yellow book, she studied the information and finally said, “Your vaccinations are expired.”

The woman handed back the vaccination booklet, and Munroe placed another ten-euro bill between the pages and handed it back again. “I never noticed.”

On the other side of the counter, the woman wrote something and then handed back both passports, two new yellow vaccination booklets filled with doctors’ stamps and signatures, and two pieces of hand-cut paper stamped with the purple ink of her official stamp, signifying that each traveler was healthy and fully vaccinated. The euros had disappeared. “Go to passport control,” she said.

Munroe walked slowly, breathing deeply, and took in the odor of mold and decay and smiled. It was the fragrance of year after year of rain and humidity that had permeated the walls and paint and become as much a part of the building as the steel rods that supported the structure and the bodies of the immigration personnel that exuded the acrid aroma of old sweat and unwashed clothing worn day after day.

It took a twenty-euro bill for Munroe to get through immigration
on the expired Cameroonian residence card. At customs the official methodically went through their luggage and, finding nothing of value, nothing contraband, and nothing that might guarantee the night’s drinking money, shoved the contents back into the bags and allowed them to pass.

Outside the building, under the dim fluorescent lights of the terminal, taxi drivers called out and porters jostled and chaos reigned.

The hotel was Parfait Garden, an aging multistoried structure off the sidewalk of Boulevard de la Liberté. The building had fewer amenities than the newer and higher-starred hotels in the city, but it had managed to maintain its aura of dignity, and Munroe had chosen it for the memories. It stood less than a kilometer down the road from the roundabout that branched toward Buea, and as she stepped from the taxi, she glanced in the direction that once was home.

Home. Whatever “home” was supposed to mean.

So close and still so far away, nothing there and no reason to return. Her mother had since repatriated to the United States, and Dad had married a Cameroonian and moved northwest to Garoua. She had not seen or spoken to either of them since leaving Africa; perhaps when the job was over, she would make the trip to the country’s desert north and find the man who had been her father for thirteen years.

The staff at the front desk was polite and courteous despite Bradford’s requirement of seeing and approving both rooms prior to check-in. Worse was that he insisted Munroe accompany him, the first of no doubt many inconveniences that having a babysitter-slash-bodyguard would bring. They bypassed the hotel’s only elevator and climbed the wide carpeted stairway that wound through the center of the building. The musty scent of the venerable permeated the air.

Adjacent rooms next to the stairwell on the third floor met with Bradford’s approval, and once he had left her alone, Munroe dumped her duffel bag and backpack at the foot of the bed, turned off the air conditioner, and opened the windows. Warmth and humidity filled the room. True acclimatization would take a week or more, and the air-conditioning would only slow down the process; until her body adjusted, the climate would siphon off her strength, leaving her sluggish and tired—better to get it over with as quickly as possible. From her backpack she retrieved
double-sided tape and tacked the day curtains in place around the windows. It wasn’t quite mosquito netting but would do the job until she could pick up the real thing.

She lay on the bed with her hands behind her head and stared at the ceiling. Whatever she thought she would feel upon returning, such contentment was a surprise. It was five weeks until Christmas, and this was the closest to home for the holidays she’d been in at least a decade.

M
UNROE WAS UP
with the sun, and for over an hour the sound of lively traffic and busy sidewalks had filtered through the open windows, calling her to meet them. She’d given Bradford her word that at least this once she would wait for him before leaving the room, and she was dressed and lying on the bed deep in thought when he knocked.

They took breakfast in the hotel’s small dining room. The mood between them was light and the conversation friendly, and when they had finished and were waiting for the waiter to bring a second round of coffee, Munroe stood. “I’ll find out where he’s gone off to,” she said.

The waiter had been on his way back from the kitchen when she stopped him. She placed a capsule of powder in the palm of his hand and followed it with a twenty-euro note. “My friend has been very difficult about taking his medication,” she said. “If you put this in his coffee, the money is yours. If you get it in the wrong drink, you’ll pay.”