They did. The guard looked up, mildly curious, and then mildly surprised to see the strange white face, and then horribly astonished when Lew stabbed him through the throat.
Back to pick up the rifle. With rifle in his left hand and the bayonet in his right—blade cleaned on the dead guard’s sleeve—he hurried forward, retracing his steps from yesterday afternoon.
Two men in uniform came out of a room ahead of him, failed to see him, and strolled away down the corridor, one of them lighting a cigarette for the other. Lew killed them both, one with the bayonet and the other with his hands, then went back to the room they’d come out of. It was a plain small office, empty although the light had been left on. Bound copies of The Economist filled a low bookcase under the windows; before Amin, the State Research Bureau had really been a statistical section.
The casement window wouldn’t open all the way until he broke the mechanism. Then he could look down and see that he was on the first floor, but with a fairly long ten-foot drop to packed brown earth. Floodlights glared out there, but they were concentrated on the parking areas and the barbed-wire fence, leaving the building walls in semidarkness.
Up the hill, through the trees, shone the lights of some sort of villa.
Lew dropped the rifle first, then jumped, carrying the bayonet. He lost it when he landed and rolled, but found both weapons and moved around the building, staying close to the wall.
Barbed-wire fence. A guarded front gate. But parked in front of the building was a black Mercedes-Benz, and pacing impatiently beside it was a tall white man in Ugandan Army uniform. A white man in Ugandan Army uniform!
Lew was too cheered by his good luck to question it. In that uniform, in that car, with his white face, surely he could get through the gate and away.
Again the rifle was left behind, this time with the bayonet beside it: he wanted no blood on that uniform. He moved through the shadows, crouching, stopping, easing on. The man paced back and forth, his range from just ahead of the Mercedes to two paces behind it. That was where Lew would get him; behind the car.
The man completed a circuit. He turned. Lew came up like a panther out of a tree, his arms reaching for the man’s head, closing, twisting.
“Lew Brady!”
His victim shouted it, and that half-strangled cry saved the man’s life. An inch from death, he hung there from Lew’s arms while Lew listened to the echo of his own name.
Still holding on, feeling the man taut but not struggling in his grip, Lew eased himself back, breathed deeply, moved slowly out of that killing mode in which he’d been operating. It was hard not to kill this man; it was very hard. Still holding him, still wanting to finish the move, he whispered in his ear, “Who are you?”
“Baron Chase! I’m here to get you out!”
Baron Chase. Frank had talked about him; Balim had mentioned him. His arm aching from the incomplete action, Lew released the man and stepped back as Chase turned, holding his throat, leaning back against the rear fender of the Mercedes for support. “My God,” he said, his voice very hoarse. “You’re damn good.”
“Explain yourself.” Lew had no interest in chitchat.
“Balim sent me word. I put on this uniform and came down to get you out.” Then Chase looked more closely at Lew, frowning at his eyes. “You haven’t hurt anybody, have you?”
Lew laughed at him.
15
When the second call came, at four-fifteen in the morning, Ellen and Young Mr. Balim—whom she now called Bathar—were playing Parcheesi at the elder Balim’s desk. Bathar, having just rolled doubles twice in a row, had captured two of Ellen’s pieces, and she, very involved in the game, said, “I need some good news now.” And the phone rang.
Bathar sat smiling fondly at her as she picked up the receiver and listened to the conversation. It was Baron Chase again, the same man who had called the first time, when Ellen had listened to Balim describe the problem with a wonderful slippery economy. This call, the conversation was even shorter.
“Package recovered,” Chase said to Balim, who had picked up his extension at home.
“Any damage?”
Ellen stopped breathing, waiting for the answer.
“Not to the package.” That had been said with some sort of inexplicable bitter twist. But then, more normally, Chase said, “I’ll ship it back to you in the morning.”
“Very good. Your help is appreciated.”
In the room, Bathar said, “You’re smiling.”
Ellen hung up while the two men were saying their farewells. “He’s all right,” she said.
“I could tell.”
“He’ll be back tomorrow.”
Bathar got to his feet. “Shall I drive you home?”
“Don’t you want to finish the game?”
“No.” Bathar seemed amused by something. “I don’t think I was going to win, anyway.”
She was so absorbed in the idea of Lew that it wasn’t until the next day that she caught his meaning.
The sky was heavy with clouds in the morning, great dirty pillows and blankets piled up and falling about, some moored in their places while, above or below, thinner layers scudded along in full sail.
Frank picked her up at the house—she’d slept fitfully, awakened early, breakfasted on crackers and Coke—and drove her out to the airport. He seemed bad-tempered this morning, but she hardly noticed; she was just grateful he wasn’t making any of his heavy-handed passes.
As they turned in at the airport entrance, he finally said something that attracted her attention by making the reason for his sulkiness clear. “You and Young Mr. Balim have a good time last night?”
Oh, for Heaven’s sake. Laughing at him, treating him like a pet, some shambling Saint Bernard dog, she said, “Wonderful. The positions he knows.”
“Very funny,” Frank said, and drop-kicked the Land-Rover into a parking space, where he beat it to death with his elbows.
A private charter plane was to bring Lew to Kisumu from Entebbe, but of course communication at these small airports was minimal at best, so there was no telling when he’d arrive. Ellen paced back and forth in front of the building, looking up at the cloud herds ranging over the sky, and after a few minutes Frank brought her a bottle of White Cap beer.
“I thought you were mad at me,” she said.
“I am.” But a self-conscious grin lurked behind his crossness. “But I figured it out,” he said, “and you wouldn’t be screwing anybody while Lew was in a jam.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Back in nineteen oh five,” Frank said, wiping the bottle mouth on his palm and taking a swig of beer, “the British provincial commissioner banned women from living in Kisumu.”
“Why?”
“They had too many plagues here already.”
“I see.”
He laughed heartily, delighted with his sally. Then, having apparently evened some sort of score and satisfied himself, he said, “No, but that’s just about right. This whole place used to be swamp before the British cleared it. And the gulf is so long and narrow, there isn’t much water circulation in from the main body of the lake, so what you had here was stagnant water plus swamps. So that meant malaria, dysentery, blackwater fever, bubonic plague—”
“Lovely,” she said.
“Sleeping sickness used to wipe out a lot of them,” Frank said, with some evidence of survivor’s satisfaction. “And when the British were here, it seemed like thinking about the diseases was sometimes as bad as catching them. They had plenty of suicides, people who couldn’t take the suspense anymore, wondering which sickness would get them. That’s why for a while they banned women.”