I thought about registering The Bull's site with Yahoo or Google, flooding them with traffic from every headcase who searched for words like "evisceration" on the Net, but while this would be a petty form of justice it would probably just make them move to a fallback location and alert them that their cover had been at least partially blown.
I was composing my dead-man-switch letter to the world's media organizations when Talena called me back.
"Paul?" She was almost whispering.
"Yeah."
"This is some sick shit."
"Yeah."
"What are you going to do?"
"What makes you think I'm going to do anything?" I asked, trying for an innocent tone.
"Paul."
"Okay," I said. And I told her my plan.
She didn't seem impressed. But I was past caring. While writing my To Whom It May Concern letter, documenting down all the facts of the situation in cold impersonal prose, I had felt that cold fury well up inside me again. Twice as intense as before. It made me feel strong, and I didn't think it was going to go away this time. I promised myself it wouldn't. I promised myself there would be no repeat of that moment I had whimpered and cringed before Morgan Jackson.
I wrote the letter as simply and clearly as possible, the way I'd written my Thorn Tree post, but this time I left nothing out. I included a pointer to the complete contents of The Bull's site on my XDrive account, and the login and password required to access those contents. I cc'd the major newspapers in as many First World countries as I could find, and added Agent Turner's contact details. No doubt she would thank me for that.
Then I configured my Yahoo Calendar account to send that e-mail one month from today, and again two months from today. That way if even if my plan went utterly wrong, in the worst way, and even if Talena walked in front of a bus, everything I had found out would still get out. I was being unnecessarily paranoid, I knew. After all the first step in my plan was to tell every detail to several more people. But I didn't want to take any chances that might benefit those five fuckers who played at the game they called The Bull.
Five serial killers, awarding one another style plaudits over the Internet. It was like hotornot. com for murderers. I mentally christened them The Demon Princes, after a surprisingly memorable sci-fi series I had once read about a man who hunts down the five arch-criminals who killed his parents. I wasn't going to be as obsessive and ruthless as Kirth Gersen, the protagonist of those books, who had lived for nothing else except hunting down and killing each of the five in turn. Not quite as obsessive. I was only after one of them.
By now it was a blood oath. One way or another Morgan Jackson was going down. And now I thought I knew the way. I had a plan. It felt like a good plan. It felt right. It felt appropriate that this ended where it began.
Africa.
Chapter 22 Dark Continent Dreaming
There were twenty of us in Africa. Hallam Chevalier, our laconic and casually competent Zimbabwean driver. His gregarious Kiwi wife, Nicole Seams, radiator of good cheer. Steven McPhee, a St. Bernard of a man, a brilliant mechanic, a big friendly Aussie a lot smarter than he looked. Those three were in theory the official representatives of Truck Africa, the company that owned the truck and sent it across the continent every so often. But after a couple of weeks there was no distinction between them and us.
The passengers came from around the world. Claude, a French teenager who had come on the truck barely speaking any English, a wildlife expert, a proudly lazy good-for-nothing loved by everyone. Mischtel, a lanky Namibian/German girl with an inimitable deadpan sense of humour. Jose, a phlegmatic Mexican with a razor-sharp mind, easily the smartest of us. Lawrence, a hard-drinking, hard-nosed Kiwi who somehow always got his mitts on the last beer. Aoife, an Irishwoman who could cook like Julia Child and find music anywhere in the world. Carmel, a garrulous Australian computer guru who liked everything about Africa except the chocolate deprivation. Melanie, a Scottish chiropractor and oceangoing sailor who simply refused to be fazed by anything.
And a crowd of Brits. Chong, nicknamed "Chong the Indestructible," a ferociously fit marathon man, the most British person on the truck despite his name. Emma, aristocratic and model-pretty, who was ready for absolutely anything so long as her moisturizer supplies were adequate. Her "slightly less evil twin" Kristin, a movie producer back in Real Life, who had the rare gift of making people who assisted her with anything feel afterwards as if they were the ones who had been done a favour. Michael, the most charming man alive, taking every disaster in stride as if it was the day's entertainment, with an amazing knack for finding hashish in even the most remote corners of the globe. Robbie, a good-natured London club kid with a first-rate mind on the rare occasions that he chose to use it. Rick, a social animal armed with sandpaper wit that stripped the slightest hint of pomposity from anyone within twenty paces, and a heart of gold beneath. Michelle, everyone's little sister, a slightly dazed and comic-book-pretty little blonde girl who seemed incredibly out of place in Africa but handled it with surprising aplomb.
And Laura Mason, everyone's sweetheart. And Morgan Jackson, the Great White Hunter. And me.
Aside from Hallam and Nicole none of us knew each other before the day we met. From a certain perspective the whole trip sounds like either a Survivor-esque reality show or some kind of ethically questionable psychological experiment: take a large group of perfect strangers, force them together nearly 24 hours a day and 7 days a week for four months, give them an extreme task such as driving across West Africa, make them work for the bare necessities of life such as food and shelter, and see how they cope. We coped all right. It turns out that people are good at coping when they have no other choice.
In chemistry, when chemicals are brought together in conditions of extreme heat and pressure, certain combinations are apt to violently explode. Other combinations repel one another and simply will not mix under any circumstances. However there are some rare chemicals which will only bond under those conditions — and will form stronger bonds than those found anywhere else in nature.
I think people are the same way. I think groups of people in intense situations will explode, fragment, or gel. Our truck group didn't go to war together, we didn't survive a plane crash together, but compared to the plastic existences led by most people in the First World at the end of the twentieth century our time together was unspeakably raw and intense. And we had the right combination. There were other overland trucks who attempted to cross the continent at roughly the same time, and we heard of some that fragmented, where the driver and passengers battled daily, where half the group fled the truck for weeks on end to travel independently and returned only reluctantly if at all. But we had just the right combination.
In chemistry they call it sublimation when a substance moves from a gas to a solid without ever becoming a liquid. Something similar happened to us. We started as strangers and somehow became a tightly-knit tribe without ever really passing through the stages of acquaintancehood and friendship. Many of us would never have become friends. It wasn't in us. But members of your tribe do not have to be friends. Sometimes it is better that they are not. That was the most important lesson that Africa taught me.
This was my plan:
I wanted Morgan Jackson dead. I was willing to kill him myself. I was sure of that now. I wanted to turn the tables on him, track him down in some desolate corner of the Third World and do unto him as he had intended to do unto me.