Chase smiled, leaning forward to put his elbow on the edge of the desk. “The Swiss man, yes. The one who is buying the coffee, as you put it.”
“You told him the coffee would be stolen,” Juba said, then immediately looked doubtful, as though wishing he’d been more roundabout.
“I told him the coffee would be stolen?” This was a distortion of the truth, but still it was more than Chase had thought these people might have. “Why would I say such a thing to a customer? And who says I did?”
“The Swiss man told it to the English Sir.”
The fool! Grossbarger’s enslavement to friendship had landed Chase in the soup. At his scornful best, Chase said, “And I suppose the English Sir told President Amin.”
Juba looked smug; he was at last on sure ground. “He told Patricia Kamin.”
So that was it. The Kamin bitch was the source of his trouble. He wasn’t surprised; she’d been out to get him for a long time. His mind already dealing with thoughts of revenge, Chase said, “There seems to be something wrong here. Did I tell the Swiss man we must have good security because some Ugandan coffee has been stolen? That is possible. Did he repeat this to the English Sir? Why not? And did the English Sir—In bed, I suppose? With the Kamin woman, were they in bed when they talked?”
“That makes no difference,” Juba said.
“So the English Sir, trying to seem brave and dramatic in bed with his whore, tells her a story about danger to the coffee shipment. And for this you bring me here at night, you waste my time, you tell me falsely that President Amin will be here, you—”
“You shut up now!” Juba banged his palm down flat on the desktop.
“I will not shut up! When President Amin learns what you have done—”
“These are his orders!”
Chase sat back, arms folded, gazing without expression at Juba. The situation was out in the open now, and he knew everything he needed to know. He had nothing further to say.
Juba too realized the situation had changed, and relaxed into the thug he really was. Speaking slowly, gazing unblinking at Chase, he said, “When you speak together with your friends, do you talk of ‘the English Sir,’ or do you say ‘Sir Denis Lambsmith’? Do you think I am a great ignorant fool?”
“Not a great ignorant fool.”
“Now you shall learn!” Juba gestured at his assistants. “Search him.”
“Too late,” Chase said. Withdrawing from its forearm holster in his left sleeve the chrome-plated Firearms International .25-caliber six-shot automatic, he fired once, the bullet hitting Juba just under the right eye with enough force to penetrate the brain and kill him but not enough to knock him out of his chair.
Chase was already moving, rolling leftward, kicking the witness’s chair backward, rolling once toward the wall and coming up onto his feet with the automatic trained on the beer-slowed captain and major. Those two, nothing but big loutish boys with slow brains and too much good living, lurched in front of him, wanting to rush but afraid. “Move back to the wall,” Chase told them.
They wouldn’t. Uncertain but belligerent, they stood, weaving slightly, and the major said, “You shoot, they come here.”
“Nobody knows there’s a prisoner in here,” Chase said. “Not even me. That’s why you couldn’t search me before. Move back to the wall.”
“They come,” insisted the major.
The captain said something in Kakwa. It was infuriating to have the wrong language! The major shook his head, then replied; by his eye movements, he was saying they should rush, one to the left, the other to the right.
No, no, can’t permit that. The .25 automatic is really a very small gun; it won’t slow people down, and it isn’t accurate over much distance. Suddenly leaping forward, gun arm extended full in front of himself like a swordsman, Chase shot the major in the mouth, then jumped to the side, reaiming at the captain.
Who stared with disbelief as his comrade slowly fell, hands to his face, then jerked once on the floor and was still. Terrified now, cold sober, a sudden white froth of sweat appearing in his wiry hair, the captain gaped at Chase and dropped to his knees. “Mercy!” he cried.
“Get up. I have use for you alive.”
But the captain merely knelt there, clasping his hands, staring at Chase with full expectation of death. He had too little English, obviously, not much more than that ironic mercy; wherever could he have learned such a word?
In a hurry, Chase at last lifted his self-imposed ban and spoke in Swahili. “You will live if you do what I say. Get on your feet; go over there; stand facing that wall.”
The captain, as astounded at hearing Swahili as if Chase had performed a Biblical miracle, scrambled to his feet, saying, “Yes, sir, yes, sir, I’ll do what you say,” in his own slurry rural version of the language. He retreated to the side wall and jittered there, the white foam of sweat sudsing in his hair and running in droplets down over his collar.
Chase found a total of four handguns on the two dead bodies. Returning the .25 to its forearm holster, he chose a Browning .38 revolver to carry. “All right, Captain,” he said. “Now we go to work.”
It was important that Juba and the others not be found yet, but fortunately in this building disposal of bodies was not a problem. Chase made the captain strip the dead men of their uniform coats, which bore their rank and symbols of office, and hang them with the other coats in the closet. Then he had him carry the major while Chase himself carried the thinner lighter Juba down through the empty midnight corridors—Chase knew where the sentries were and how to go around them—to the concrete-floored room at the back where bodies were placed prior to removal. There were only two corpses here at the moment; a slow night.
Juba and the major were dumped beside the first two. Then Chase said, “Give me your coat, Captain.”
“Oh, sir,” the captain said. “I did what you wished. Let me go home now. Far away from here, not even Uganda. Near Adi, sir,” he said, naming a Zairian town just a few miles from both the Ugandan and Sudanese borders. “I go there, sir, I never come back.”
“Give me your coat.”
“All my family is there, sir. I go live with them, I never bother you again, sir.”
In the end, Chase had to strip the coat off the body himself.
There were a few papers he could use from his own office in the Bureau building, a few weapons, nothing much. He sat at his desk a moment, looking around the barren room—he hadn’t come here often, preferring his sunnier happier office in the Parliament Buildings—and reflected that this part of his life was over. Just in time, he had made his preparations for the future. On the other hand, the preparations themselves seemed to have hastened his departure.
Oh, well. In the world of the living, only Idi Amin and Patricia Kamin knew there was so much as a shadow over his head. His papers would still give him safe-conduct for some time to come, and his orders would still be obeyed. Leaving his office, he walked downstairs to the duty room, where he said to the duty officer, “Give me an arrest form.”
“Yes, Captain Chase.”
Chase filled out the form, naming Patricia Kamin as the person to be arrested, and giving both her home and Sir Denis Lambsmith’s hotel room as possible locations where she might be found. In the appropriate block he wrote “Charge Not Specified.” Under Authority he printed “IAD,” which the duty officer would know stood for Idi Amin Dada. And under Date of Implementation he put not the usual “Immediate” but “Night, 27 May 1977.” Meaning tomorrow night, Friday, after the coffee caper had been successfully pulled off. Finally, he wrote the word “Jinja,” meaning she would not be brought here, where she might be able to contact friends in the Bureau to rescue her, but to Jinja Barracks, where she was unknown.