“I know she was here. I found her flip-flop.”
“Did you? She must be getting out of practice.”
“I thought she was having it off with Lukas.”
“You do have rather a habit of jumping to conclusions, don’t you, Mr. Haddock? We did think of bringing you into it all. But we decided it might be too much for you-and you do have rather a complicated past.”
Haddock rubbed the back of his neck, then spat his chewing gum onto the floor and ground his teeth. He didn’t like this girl. She was making him feel stupid, and he suspected she was laughing at him. He’d quite like to hit her but he didn’t dare. Nothing else came into his head for a bit. Then he said, “Phyllis. Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. You have work to do with her, Mr. Haddock, if the opportunity comes your way. In your own interests, I’d give her a miss for quite some time.”
“You mean, I don’t call her, she calls me?”
“Yes and no.”
“Oh, hell. Can I go now?”
“Yes and no. Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”
He went. They found him in the morning in the plantation. He was fast asleep with his head on his golf bag, snoring.
YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON by Olen Steinhauer
PAUL
What troubled him most was that he was afraid to die. Paul believed, though he had no evidence of it, that other spies did not suffer from this. But evidence holds little sway over belief, and so it was for him.
He thought of Sam. The last time they’d spoken had been in Geneva, in the international lounge before Sam’s flight back here to Kenya. Years before, they had trained together, and while Paul had done better than Sam on the written tests, it was on the course that Sam had shown himself superior. Later, when he heard rumors that Sam was plagued by suicidal tendencies, he understood. Those unafraid of death usually were better on the course.
But the visit was a surprise. After Rome, the only way he’d expected to hear from Sam was via a disciplinary cable or at the head of a Langley tribunal. But Sam’s unexpected invitation to the Aeroport International de Geneve had included no threats or reprimands.
“You’re just following,” Sam told him in the airport. “You’re the money, a banker; I’m the deal maker. I’ll use my Wallis papers-remember that. You won’t have to say a thing, and they’ll want to keep you well so you can take care of the transfer. It’s a walk in the park.” When Paul, wondering if any operation in Africa could legitimately be called a walk in the park, didn’t answer, Sam raised his right index finger and added, “Besides, I’ll be right there beside you. Nothing works without this fingerprint.”
The target was Aslim Taslam, a six-month-old Somali splinter group formed after an ideological dispute within Al-Shabaab. Over the last month Aslim Taslam had begun an intense drive to raise cash and extend its contacts in preparation for some large-scale action-details unknown. “We’re going to nip them in the bud,” was the way Sam put it.
Sam had come across them in Rome, just after things had gone to hell-perhaps because things had gone to hell. Aslim Taslam was in Italy to establish an alliance with Ansar al-Islam, the very group that he, Paul, Lorenzo, Said, and Natalia had been performing surveillance on.
Now, their cover was information. Sam-energetic, perpetual-motion-machine Sam-had contacted Aslim Taslam’s Italian envoy with an offer of two million euros for information on the Somali pirates who had been plaguing the Gulf of Aden shipping lanes. Which was why he’d called this rushed meeting in the airport. In three days-on Thursday-Paul would show up in Nairobi as a bank employee. He would carry a small black briefcase, empty. His contact at the hotel would have an identical case containing the special computer. “Once we make the transfer, you board the plane back to Geneva. Simple.”
But everything sounded simple from Sam’s lips. Rome had sounded simple, too.
“You’re still pissed off, aren’t you?”
Sam shook his head but avoided Paul’s eyes, peering past him at the pretty cashier they’d bought the coffee from. He’d just returned from a working vacation in Kenya, a cross-country race that had left a permanent burn on his cheeks. “It’s a damned shame, but these things do happen. I’ve gotten over it, and you should, too. Keep your head in this job.”
“But you can’t let it go,” Paul said, because he could feel the truth of this. Only three weeks had passed since Rome. “Lorenzo and Saïd-they’re dead because of me. It’s not a small thing. You deserve to hate me.”
Sam’s smile was tight-lipped. “Consider this a chance to redeem yourself.”
It was a tempting thing to be offered a way to wash such dirt off the surface of his soul. “I’m still surprised.”
“We’re not all cut out for this kind of work, Paul. You never were. But with those losses I’ve got no choice but to use you. I can’t send Natalia down there-a woman wouldn’t do. Don’t worry. I’ll be right there with you.”
That was the first and last time Sam had let it be known that he could see Paul’s secret soul. After Rome, the evidence of Paul’s cowardice had become too glaring for even an old classmate to ignore. Drinking tall caffe lattes in the too-cold terminal, they had smiled at each other the way they had been trained to smile, and Paul had decided that, even if his old friend didn’t feel the same way, he certainly hated Sam.
This radical shift in emotions wasn’t new. Paul had always been repelled by those who saw him for what he was. In high school, a girlfriend had told him that he was the most desperate person she’d ever known. He would do anything to keep breathing. She’d said this after sex, when they both lay half-naked on her parents’ couch, and in her adolescent logic she’d meant it as a compliment. To her, it meant that he was more alive than anyone she’d known. It was why she loved him. Yet once she had said it, Paul’s love-authentic and all-encompassing-had begun to fade.
In a way, Paul felt more affection for the two very dark strangers questioning him now than he did for Sam, because they didn’t know him at all. It was twisted, but that was just the way it was.
“Listen to this guy,” said the lanky one in the T-shirt and blue jacket, who had introduced himself as Nabil. He spoke as if he’d learned English from Hollywood, which was probably what he’d done. He was speaking to his friend. “He wants us to believe he doesn’t even know Sam Wallis.”
“I do not believe it,” the friend-one of the two men who’d abducted him at gunpoint-said glumly. His English was closer to the formal yet quaintly awkward English of the rest of Kenya, though neither man was Kenyan.
“I might believe it if I was an idiot,” Nabil said. “But I’m not.”
Though they were probably still within the Nairobi city limits, both these men, as well as the gunman in the hall, were Somali. He suspected that simply being outside their wild fortress of a country, stuck in a largely Christian nation, made these jihadis nervous. From his low wooden chair, Paul raised his head to meet their gazes, then lowered his eyes again because there was no point. The windowless room was hot, a wet hot, and he found himself dreaming of Swiss air-conditioning. He said, “I work for Banque Salève. I don’t know Mr. Wallis personally, but I came here at his request. Where is Mr. Wallis?”
“He wants to know where Sam is,” said the unnamed one.
“Hmm,” Nabil hummed.
Paul had followed Sam to Nairobi that very morning. It was on the long taxi ride down Mombasa Road that he’d received the call from Geneva station that Sam had gone missing. Yesterday, a Kenyan witness had spotted him in the neighborhood of Mathare with his Aslim Taslam contact. A van pulled up beside them, and some men wrestled Sam inside and roared off, leaving the contact behind. That hadn’t helped his upset stomach, nor had the black Mercedes following him from the airport all the way to the hotel.