“Yes, sir.”
“Thanks. Pull the door shut as you leave.” To me he said, “I want to hear you say it.” He let the carafe languish on his desk. Poured no coffee. “I want to hear exactly what you’re proposing.”
“Well, just what you said a few minutes ago, what you suggested.”
“Which is?”
“That you pay me off and let me stroll out of here. And I get back to what I was doing, and see if the deal is still in motion, or if the deal can be started up again, and see if we can bring the parties together as arranged.”
“The parties to this proposed, this alleged, this fucking unprecedented criminal conspiracy.”
“Yes. Those parties.”
“You, and these Israelis, and the people Sergeant Adriko represents. If such exist.”
“That would be the objective.”
“A sting operation.”
“That sounds,” I agreed, “like the applicable terminology.”
“I think we’ve already deployed the applicable terms, fairy tale, for instance, and bullshit, what else, God,” he said, “there’s not a shred of doubt in my mind. You are fucking with us.”
“And yet — here we are.”
“I can’t deny it. Since nine-eleven, chasing myths and fairy tales has turned into a serious business. An industry. A lucrative one.”
“Are we talking price now?”
“What a silly, silly man.”
“But if we were.”
“Then I suppose this would be the moment when you say a number.”
“They want two million.”
“Cash? Or account?”
“Gold.”
“They expect gold?”
“Would that be possible?”
“Gold. What’s the price of gold these days?”
“Around forty-five a kilo, US.”
“Forty-five thousand. So, forty-some kilos. Forty-four plus.”
“Call it forty-five.”
“Forty-five kilos of gold.”
“Could you do it?”
The look in his eyes made me sorry for him. “Do you want to hear the truth?”
“Yes.”
“We can do anything.”
* * *
Early afternoon. I lay on my bed. I heard the sound of a helicopter coming down.
The walls of the tent rippled. Then they convulsed. I determined to stay inside and avoid the dust, but I was visited with an intuition. I knew. I went outside.
I stood by the sandbag hedge and watched the man I still believe to have been Colonel Thiebes, now in officer’s dress, heading for the chopper as it swayed in its descent, a duffel grip in his left hand, his right hand cupping the elbow of Davidia St. Claire.
Davidia and her protector stopped and let the red cloud overwhelm them while the machine completed its landing. It was a utility helicopter, but not a Black Hawk, something smaller, I don’t know what kind. Davidia leaned toward its skis as they felt for the ground. She concentrated on that vision. No backward glance. The chopper had hardly touched down before they were in motion toward it.
I ran to overtake her. I called her name. She couldn’t hear me for the roar of the blades. I called again—“Davidia!” I screamed it many times over.
I gave up running and turned my back against the dust. In a few seconds the wind fell off and the noise got smaller. The craft must have been traveling low, because when I looked around again I could hear it, but I couldn’t find it in the sky.
I went back into the tent and closed and zipped the flap and sat on my bed, blinking my eyes and beating the dirt from my hair hand over hand.
* * *
I felt a touch on my shoulder, and I woke up frightened. It was dark, quiet — very late.
Patrick Roux said, “These are your clothes.”
He sat there in our only chair. I could see he held something in his lap. “It’s time to get dressed.”
He was speaking Danish.
“What?”
“It’s time to go. Right now the way is open.”
“Wait. Wait … what?”
“It’s time to go. Just take some items for grooming. What you can fit in your pockets. Here’s your wristwatch back.”
Great joy powered me out of bed. “You fucker,” I said. “I knew it.”
“You prefer English?” he said in English.
“Or German,” I said. “I went to Swiss schools. The truth is I hardly speak Danish at all. Is this my shirt? I went to English-speaking schools.”
“We have six more minutes.”
“They’ve shrunk my shirt.”
“Let’s be prompt.”
* * *
When I’d kicked my pajamas aside and dressed and was all ready to go, we delayed, I on my bed, Patrick in the chair, with nothing to do, it seemed, but listen to the rumble of the generators and the giant buzzing of the floodlights outside. He peered at his wristwatch. My own watch, the cheap dependable Timex, read 1:15 a.m.
After two minutes he said, “Now we’ll go.”
We stepped into the orange glare and a soft, glittering rain. Patrick zipped the tent’s fly behind us and we walked across the grounds and right through the open gateway, passing without a challenge between two gunnery emplacements, five soldiers on each, in their helmets and night goggles and armor. The gate rolled shut behind us and we entered the dark.
The rain let up, but still we had no moon. For thirty minutes we walked along the road without flashlights, going north, feeling with our feet for the ruts and the boggy soft spots. We didn’t talk. The din of the reptiles and insects, our steps and our breaths, that’s all we heard.
Headlights came up on the road far behind us. Shortly afterward, we heard the engine.
We stepped to the side, and the headlights stopped fifty feet short of us, and Patrick went to the vehicle, a Humvee, I thought, but I couldn’t really see, and in a minute his silhouette came toward me and then disappeared as the car turned around and accelerated back the way it had come.
Now Roux directed our steps with a small flashlight. I could make out a sizeable package dangling from his arm. He slung it over his shoulder. As we walked it gave out a kind of clicking and muttering.
For quite a while the vehicle’s aura remained visible behind us. I would have expected them to run blackout headlights, but they didn’t seem to care.
When they were well away, Roux said, “We’ll get off the road here, and take a rest.”
“Let’s not drown in a mudhole.”
“No, it’s good ground.”
He found a spot he liked, laid out a handkerchief, and sat with his back to a tree. Between his knees he set down the package, a canvas haversack. He unbelted the flap, and I knelt beside him while he unpacked the contents by the beam of his penlight — it showed eerily on his eyeglass lenses, like two sparks in his face.
On top, a large manila envelope, inside it a map of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And cash. US twenties. “This is my money.”
“Your funds when you arrived. It’s all there.”
No wallet, no cards of any kind. “Where’s my passport?”
“You don’t need it.”
Also, a manila folder — the one I’d seen on the desk of the man from USSOCOM — holding, as far as I could tell in the dark, printed copies of my e-mails, as well as my handwritten pages, and not copies, but the originals themselves. “They’re dusting their hands of me completely, aren’t they? I bet they’re burning my pajamas too.”
Roux made no answer while I looked at some items wrapped in a hand towel. A metal fork and a spoon. A folding knife with a single blade. A penlight. “But what about a cell phone? How will I stay in contact?”
“They’ll be able to locate you.”
“Of course they will.”
At the bottom of the sack rested two one-liter bottles of water, and at the very bottom, a cloth bag. Roux set the bag on the ground and opened it and trained his light on a lot of metallic lozenges, each wrapped in tissue paper.