White Bone (7 page)

M
r. Knox, it’s the front desk. Just a reminder, sir, of your four
P.M.
departure to Kibera.”

Knox checked the room’s clock radio: 16:05. Knox felt the floor shift beneath him. “I didn’t—” He caught himself. He hadn’t ordered a car to Kibera, wherever that was.

“The tour of Kibera. You signed up with the concierge.”

He knew the name now. Kibera, one of the world’s largest slums. He hadn’t signed up for anything. Had Winston signed him up? Dulwich?

“Is there a problem?” asked the concierge.

Or maybe the damn kid from the airport was trying to play tour guide.

“Right. Sorry, I fell asleep. Give me a minute. I’ll be right down.” It didn’t escape him that an arranged trip, one he had not signed up for, could well be a trap. But staging an abduction while he was in the company of other hotel guests had to be the lamest idea he’d
ever heard. Knox checked for messages on both phone numbers he carried, switching out the SIM cards and restarting his phone. Nothing.

Moving through the lobby, he made note of everyone he saw, including a husband and wife in the gift shop. Nothing out of the ordinary, not that he found that reassuring. He was unlikely to spot a true professional.

Outside, flags hung, lifeless, in the painfully hot exhaust-filled air. Taxis waited in a queue, drivers sharing smokes. Hotel guests came and went on foot, some asking questions of the various bellmen. The traffic was as bad as the night before.

Approaching a white high-top van bearing a tour company logo, Knox remained on high alert for a possible attempt to grab him. His gut wrenched at the thought of Grace, coming down these same steps, facing this same street.

The van held a half-dozen anxious-looking hotel guests. Knox spoke his name for the sake of the driver and ducked inside. He apologized to the others, crammed his legs in behind the passenger seat. A bellman slid the van’s side door shut, his eyes expressionless, his smile practiced.

“Please enjoy,” he said.

Knox studied the faces of his fellow passengers. A woman riding shotgun was using the visor mirror, attempting to rub the white of her sun cream away. Knox used the mirror, too; watched for anyone overly interested in him, anyone reaching for a phone. He scratched off his list the retired couple from Ohio who’d been outfitted by Orvis. The African slacker and his Princeton-semester-abroad redhead were too small and self-absorbed.

He assessed the remaining three: solo travelers; a buttoned-up middle-aged woman who showed little joy; and two black businessmen, one in his thirties, the other twice that. Nothing registered.
He smelled body odor and suntan lotion, cologne and perfume. He saw camera bag straps and sunglasses and water bottles, jet lag and anticipation and a lot of sweating.

The guide turned out to be the woman Knox had taken for the joyless middle-aged traveler. In guide mode, she snapped into an all-too-cheery robo-caller voice, nasal, with a thick South African accent. Kibera had been created as a land gift for Nubian soldiers returning from war in 1904, she told them. Over a century of use and expansion had left a sea of corrugated metal huts, open drains and overcrowding. The government estimated the population at a tenth of its nearly million souls. She rattled off some do’s and don’ts. Don’t pay anyone to take their photo; don’t buy bottled water from the children, it’s street water; negotiate every sale; be respectful; remember nearly everyone speaks English and can understand what you’re saying.

Their arrival drew hordes of kids, trying to sell them souvenirs or the aforementioned bottled water. The guide cut a path through them and led her flock ahead. The smell of open sewers carried on a light breeze. Several tour guests clasped handkerchiefs over their noses, a practice the guide discouraged.

The large number of roaming children, like flights of winter birds, followed in waves, adding to Knox’s sense of tragedy. He hated being associated with an “edutainment” tour, of curiously inspecting a place where a bottle cap was currency.

The guide led them down narrow lanes between open-stall stands that sold everything from trinkets to Coke. Other Kibera residents had set up souvenir stands on inverted crates, displaying craftwork made from recycled plastic, aluminum cans and bottle caps. The people were clean, as were their colorful clothes. Their smiles genuine. Houseflies outnumbered people a thousand to one.

Knox kept track of the guide as she took a moment with a woman at a souvenir stand. He witnessed an exchange, the passing of a note along with money. It went the wrong direction for Knox’s taste, saleswoman-to-guide. He could have taken it as a payoff for the guide steering the tourists in this direction, but the look the guide gave Knox told him it involved him. Another surge of adrenaline. Knox had three exit strategies at the ready.

As the guide herded the rest of the group to a larger shop across the hard-packed dirt, she blocked Knox with an extended arm. Knox stopped, every nerve sparking.

“You, Mr. Knox, are certain to find this other shop the more interesting.”

He told her he was in no mood for a sales pitch.

“These particular goods are special. They are important to you, Mr. Knox. This shop is
just for you
.”

“I don’t think so.” Knox could see himself outnumbered and pushed through the shop’s black plastic wall, carried deeper into Kibera. Into a van. Into a pit.

The guide rose to her toes. “You
must
trust me.”

“But I don’t,” Knox said. He rummaged through some of the craftwork laid out on a board supported by inverted milk crates, ready to run. Dried pieces of eggshells, reinvented as decorations. Paper litter, now sculpture; leopards, gorillas and chess sets made of discarded computer parts.

“Please, mister,” said the stall’s bone-thin proprietor. He had drooping eyes and a pencil neck. “More in back.” He motioned Knox toward the plastic wall at the back. Knox didn’t move.

“This was arranged for you,” the guide whispered.

“I’ll bet it was.” Knox reached inside the Scottevest, the Mary Poppins bag of windbreakers. Inside its seventeen zippered pockets
he carried everything from money to a switchblade, which he now palmed and hid up his right sleeve.

He couldn’t blame the tour guide or hope to get anything out of her. She’d been paid to deliver him. The people behind such arrangements created multiple layers of self-protection.

“You go first,” Knox said.

“I must see to the group,” she said.

“And you can. Right after you go through and hold open that sheet.” To his surprise, she didn’t quibble.

“Very well.” She stepped forward.

Knox grabbed the back of her shorts. She caught her breath. He held tightly, cinched the shorts into her crotch to remind her who was in control. He nudged her forward, watching the bottom of her short-cropped hairline. The neck was the tell-all of danger. As she drew the plastic sheet aside, the static electricity lifted her fine hairs. But her neck did not incriminate her. Knox glanced over her head to see a fashionably dressed, blue-jeaned African woman in her early to mid-thirties. His first guess was journalist. His second, lawyer. No wedding ring. Hands empty, she carried a messenger bag purse, slung at her side.

The shack had walls assembled of junkyard materials but was sturdily built. The crate the woman sat on was immediately adjacent to someone’s former screen door, now blockaded by an improvised metal crossbar. At first blush, it appeared that the woman was being cautious about their security.

“Leave us,” she said to the guide. She spoke with confidence, the tone of one in charge.

Knox released his grip and the guide slipped around and past him. “We will not leave,” she told Knox. “You will find me and join us after. She knows where.”

Knox swallowed dryly as he looked back at the mud-rutted lane. He propped open the plastic sheet in order to see out.

Before him was a cramped, sour space: a mattress made of three garbage bags filled with Styrofoam peanuts. A tattered piece of a former green-and-white awning apparently served as a blanket. A wall of stacked cardboard boxes held everything from food to toiletries.

He moved closer. The woman had baker’s-chocolate skin, haunting brown eyes and a nearly shaved head.

“I am called Maya Vladistok,” she said.

“I left you a phone message.” She’d been on Winston’s list.

“Indeed. And I am answering that message.”

The two shook hands—hers were callused, with short nails. Knox angled a remaining plastic tub to allow him a view of the woman, the screen door and a sight line through the open plastic sheet.

“Please pardon the theatrics. Necessary, I’m afraid. I am no friend of this current government, nor do I trust the hotels. As to my name, my father was Russian. My mother Kenyan. So that’s out of the way.”

“Understood.” It was the second time politics had been mentioned in the past few hours.

Vladistok appraised him. “You will be better suited to take a room away from downtown. Something small, in the suburbs. Karen, perhaps. There are small inns. Fewer eyes and ears.”

“You’re saying—”

She cut him off with a finger held to her lips, and acted out a request for Knox to surrender his phone. Passing it reluctantly, the switchblade still warming in his palm, Knox watched as, to his horror, Vladistok stuck a piece of chewing gum over the microphone hole and, fishing a crumpled sheet of aluminum foil from her bag, wrapped the phone tightly before returning it to him.

“Sorry. I’m a lawyer. Though I’m considered an activist—a label I detest.”

Knox congratulated himself on his ability to read first impressions. “I run a small import/export company. I’m on a buying trip.”

“Are you? Professionally, Mr. Knox, I am a legal consultant. Corporate security. But my life’s work is to get things right in the courts. To get the poachers tried. In five out of six cases, paperwork is lost; the case never comes to trial. Midlevel civil servants, paid small amounts to misfile, shred, divert. They are paid off by businessmen. Arab. Chinese. Somali. Elephant and rhino is big business. They use helicopters now. Automatic weapons. ATVs. It’s wholesale slaughter. Big business. And remember, the fewer animals, the higher the price for the tusk and horn. So with each kill, each harvest, they increase the value of the commodity.”

“Crime syndicates?” Knox had seen automatic weapons in use on the battlefield; she’d put a picture into him he couldn’t stomach. Rhinos were bigger and slower than buffalo; elephants, ten times that.

“That word is overused. Is there organized crime here? Of course. But it’s not like what you hear. It’s my belief that the influence of outside crime syndicates, not including the Chinese, is almost nonexistent in Kenya. There are certainly organized criminals in this country. The Chinese are the market makers for elephant tusk. Vietnamese for the rhino horn, though the Chinese export it. But overall, poaching is less connected to terrorism and outside influence than others would lead you to believe. This is what I told Ms. Chu.”

Knox’s throat went dry. “Did you?” Grace would react more viscerally to the poaching than terrorism or corruption. She was made a child by the sight of a stray dog or cat.

Maya looked into and somehow through Knox. Not a dead stare, not a flirtatious stare. More like some of Tommy’s looks. X-ray.
Probing. “I met with her when she first arrived. We discussed many issues. My work with corporate security and Internet issues, as well as the recent failure of a major vaccination program.” Her face remained unreadable. An attorney, indeed. “As she explained it, that program was privately funded.”

Knox had no interest in politics, humanitarian aid or theatrics. “Have you spoken to her in the past two days?”

“I have not.”

Wrapping his phone in the aluminum foil struck him as overly paranoid. Who was it she feared? Only the most sophisticated agency possessed the capability to listen in on digital phones.

“You were in contact often?” Knox asked.

Her eyes darted more quickly. “Three times, I believe. She sat where you are sitting.”

Knox felt a little sick. “Okay.”

“The clinic at Oloitokitok interested her.”

“Tell me about the Internet protocol.”

“She wanted to know the sophistication of spyware employed by the state, the military, outside agencies. I warned her to be careful. Many prying eyes.”

Knox’s throat remained overly dry. “I’ll bet,” he croaked.

Vladistok spoke more softly. “A kilo of rhino horn is worth two hundred dollars fresh off the kill, as I said. Ten times that to a Somali broker. A quarter million U.S. by the time it reaches Vietnam.”

“Grace wasn’t investigating poaching.”

“She was investigating corruption. In Kenya, the two are never far apart.”

“The clinic has ties to poaching?”

“This was her concern as well. But the clinic is closed now. It no longer matters.”

Knox swallowed, clearing his throat. “If she has been kidnapped?”

“Why say such a thing?”

“We’re approaching two days of silence.”

Vladistok answered carefully. “In Central and West Africa, the paramilitaries will kidnap for political gain. Here, it’s for money or show. If she has been abducted, it could be to send a message, to pressure others not to investigate as she did. It could be for money.” She grimaced. “How can I help?”