“I know. It’s just…”
They kissed.
“I’ll be in touch just as soon as…” he shrugged, “as it’s all over.”
“I’ll go back to Kallani,” Sally said, “settle a few things there, then take the first available flight to London.”
“I’ll tell Catherine you’re on your way. She’ll give you the spare pass key to my place. And then…” He smiled and drew her to him. “Why do we always have less time together than we want? If it’s not work, it’s blessed extraterrestrials!”
They laughed, then kissed farewell.
He presented his softscreen at the check-in, turned to wave at Sally, and passed through.
He was alone in a vast lounge. A sliding door at the far end, giving onto the tarmac, opened and a figure stepped through. A tall, dark European woman, in her thirties, strode through and fixed him with a professional smile. “Mr Allen, if you would care to follow me.”
They left the lounge and stepped into the blistering sunlight, and crossed the tarmac.
“Are you…?”
“I was hired by an agency to meet you and your colleagues.”
“My colleagues…?”
If she heard him, the woman gave no sign.
They paused before a silver, corrugated hangar, and the woman indicated a sliding glass door.
Allen stepped through. When his vision adjusted to the shadows within, he saw a sleek, jet black delta-winged plane in the centre of the hangar.
He looked behind him. The woman was nowhere to be seen.
He crossed to the plane. At his approach, a ramp extruded. He hesitated at its foot, peering up into the vessel’s darkened interior.
He climbed.
Again his vision took time to adjust as he ducked through the plane’s entrance. The interior was furnished with four seats, two to a side, facing each other. Three of the seats were occupied. He made out a tall African woman, a young man of Asian origin, and a middle-aged woman who might have been Arabic.
As he stared at each of them in turn, he realised that they were unconscious.
The fourth seat was empty.
He moved forward, hesitated, then sat down.
Instantly a luxurious lassitude engulfed him. He wanted to laugh out loud at the wondrous sensation as he descended towards oblivion.
He felt a subtle vibration — the plane, moving? — and then lost consciousness.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SALLY HAD AN aversion to using bribery to get what she wanted — aiding and abetting a system that was responsible for much that was at fault in the continent of Africa — but in this instance it was the only way to achieve her goal.
It cost her one hundred US dollars, slipped into the cold palm of the desk sergeant, to be allowed into the holding cell at the Kallani police headquarters.
She was taken to a tiny concrete room, divided by floor-to-ceiling bars, with a plastic bucket seat positioned on either side of the bars.
She sat down. A minute later the door in the other half of the cell opened and Josef Makumbi, shackled hand and foot, shuffled through.
He looked sullen, and his eyes widened fractionally when he saw her.
He slumped into the seat and stared at her.
“Hello, Josef.”
He stared at his lap, then looked up at her. “What do you want, Dr Walsh?”
She looked at the man who had cold-bloodedly taken the lives of at least four of his colleagues. She was tempted to ask him why, but restricted herself to the reason for her visit.
She said, “Three days ago I was taken, along with Dr Ben Odinga, by three men who drove us north and held us prisoner. One of the men was named Ali.” She hesitated. “Who was he, Josef?”
He stared at her with bloodshot eyes, and surprised her by asking, “Why haven’t they beaten me, Dr Walsh? They brought me here, locked me up, and then one man, a big sergeant, he comes in with a baseball bat… I could see the look in his eyes. He wanted to kill me, Dr Walsh. He wanted to punish me for what I did.” He shook his head. “And he tried to. He lifted the bat, tried to hit me, but something stopped him.”
She said, “I want you to tell me the full name of your accomplice, Ali, and where I might find him.”
“Will they kill me, Dr Walsh? I know they want to, for what I did.”
She shook her head and ran a tired hand over her face. She felt the sweat and grime of her long drive north. She said, “Please, tell me Ali’s full name and where I might find him.”
He stared at her.
She returned his gaze, looking into the eyes of one of the last men on Earth, she realised, to commit the act of murder. At any other time she would have been curious to know what had motivated the man to turn on his colleagues — but all she wanted now was to confront the man who had tormented herself and Ben, to hear his side of the story.
“Well?” she said.
“If I tell you, they will not beat me to death?”
She inclined her head. “I promise.”
He nodded, licked his lips. “His name is Ali al-Hawati, and he is from the village of Benali. He has a wife there, but no children. He works as a fisherman on the river.”
The village was a hundred kilometres east of Kallani, on the border with Kenya. It would be a long, hot drive, with no guarantee at the end of it that she would be able to find and confront the man who would have willingly taken her life and filmed the process for all the world to see.
She would never have had the courage to attempt to track down her tormentor, normally. But, with the coming of the Serene, things were very different.
She stood. “Thank you, Josef.”
“You will make sure they will not beat me to death, Dr Walsh?”
She stared down at him. “You have nothing to worry about on that score,” she told him, and left the cell.
EARLIER THAT DAY, after arriving at Kallani from Entebbe, she had met Yan Krasnic and told him of her decision to leave Kallani and return to England. She offered to work until the end of the month, but Krasnic smiled and said, “No, you can go now. The relief team arrived yesterday, and since the coming of the starships… well, we can concentrate on treating victims of the drought, of famine. No more do we have to contend with the casualties of war and bush skirmishes, though for how long that might last…”
“And you?” she asked.
He looked through the window of his surgery. Krasnic was in his early fifties. He looked about seventy. “I’m okay… After what happened the other day, I too have decided to return home, to Croatia. It’s a beautiful country, Sally. I miss it. I think I will retire.”
She hugged him before leaving, then found Ben Odinga and said goodbye.
“God is great,” he said, smiling at her. “I will miss you.”
She returned to Mama Oola’s, packed her scant belongings, and said a tearful goodbye to the matriarch, promising to return one day.
Then she had made her way to the police headquarters and bribed the grinning desk sergeant.
She left Kallani at one o’clock and drove east. While at Entebbe that morning she had booked a flight to London on a plane leaving Uganda at noon the following day. That would leave her with enough time to do what she had to do, for her peace of mind, and return to Kampala in the morning.
As she drove through the drought-stricken, sun-pummelled land, a hellish landscape devoid of life, where even the trees stood stark and leafless like charcoal twigs in the parched earth, she considered her motives in confronting Ali al-Hawati.
What did she want? For that matter, what did she expect?
She did not want to know of his motivations, for she could guess them. He was politically driven, or religiously driven — they were one and the same. He wanted his worldview to prevail, and saw her and her fellow aid workers as legitimate targets in the war against decadent Western liberalism.