Black Star Nairobi (26 page)

“Nice try, but you’re not sleeping in my room,” Muddy said to O. “Maybe his?” She pointed at me and laughed along with the clerk.

“It happens, sir,” the clerk said to O, as he gave him another key card.

It was that simple. Anyone watching us walking into Mr.
Kimani’s room would have thought we were going in for a drink before splitting up. We were learning fast. A few weeks ago, we would have flashed a badge; now we had just pulled a con.

Kimani, dead asleep, didn’t hear us enter. O gently shook him awake, as Muddy turned on the TV and I turned on the lights. Kimani looked around to make sure he was still in the Hilton—and before he could scream, O put a gun to his head.

There was a near-empty bottle of champagne on the night-stand; next to it, an empty glass and a bucket, in which an ice pick floated among thin pieces of ice. I poured some champagne into the glass and he gulped it down fast.

“You know who we are?” O asked.

“Yes, I know who you are,” he replied, his eyes angrily darting from O to me and Muddy.

Kimani had one of those faces that you immediately identified with—dignified. He was what I thought an African looked like before I went to Kenya—the Africans in the movies—wise, tall, slightly balding, with a well-trimmed goatee and, of course, the eyeglasses that he had reached for and was now adjusting. We’d chosen him because he was black and African, and we could pass for him—we certainly didn’t look Norwegian or English.

“But do you know who I really am?” he asked in return.

“Why don’t you tell us,” Muddy said to him carelessly.

He glared at her and I knew she was on to something. If there was one thing this guy wasn’t used to, it was women talking to him as if they were equals.

“My name is Martin Kimani …” he said and went on to list all his credentials.

O whistled.

“Walk out of here now and I promise you a safe return to Kenya,” he said, now that we were sufficiently impressed.

“But how well do you know me?” O asked him, now smiling. If I were Kimani, I would have chosen my next words very carefully, but he didn’t know that the tables had turned. Maybe in Kenya, before the bomb explosion and Mary’s death, Kimani could “senior” and “superior” his way out of a meeting with O. Used to exerting power from the shadows, he thought that he could use raw power and money to buy us out. But not in a Hilton Hotel in California, where O didn’t really exist, and not after Mary’s death.

“I’m sorry about your wife. She need not die in vain. You can do some good. A scholarship in her name at Kangemi Primary School—all the way to university, a job guaranteed at the end,” he said, sounding so genuine that I had no doubt he meant it. He was part of that old generation whose word meant everything. And so, when they were wrong, people like Mary died.

“Whatever you want I can offer ten times over. You walk out now—and in five years, you are the police commissioner. If you want to retire, how about a twenty-acre farm anywhere in the country? Perhaps you’d like a hotel in Mombasa?” he continued.

Muddy, as if understanding what was going to happen next, turned up the volume on the TV and Kimani lost a bit of his composure.

O stepped away from him.

“Take off your pajamas,” he said, in a tone that sounded more like a suggestion than a command.

“I will most certainly not, I am old enough to be your father,” Kimani said defiantly. “And not in front of a woman young enough to be my daughter,” he added, pointing at Muddy, who merely shrugged.

This is what it boiled down to. Kimani had information we needed—and we had his life in our hands, and between the two
was his dignity. And not just dignity but that inviolable bond that holds societies together—that even in great adversity is upheld. This wasn’t just a Kenyan thing; in each society there are some things that are worse than death. For Kimani, it was for an elder of social standing to strip naked in front of a young woman.

O walked up to him and suddenly swung the butt end of his Glock so that it caught Kimani in the mouth and broke two of his front teeth, splitting his lips open. O picked up the ice pick.

“I’m going to ram this into your gums. You will scream in pain and then I will ram it into your throat to shut you up. Then we move on to the motherfucker in Room 318. Do you understand me?” O asked him, with that same smile still on his face. A smile that said he would rather Kimani gave us nothing, so he could do it.

Kimani took off his clothes and O marched him to the bathroom and pushed him onto the toilet seat. Shivering even though it was warm, he’d lost the dignity he had exuded a moment before. Now he was just a scared, naked old man.

“Now, tell us everything,” O said, and Kimani, as if relieved to confess things he had kept bottled up, started talking through his two broken teeth, his split lips, and the blood that kept dripping onto the marble bathroom floor.

“Outcome! That is what we control,” he began. If it weren’t for the circumstances, it would have sounded like he was about to give a PowerPoint presentation.

“We look at a situation and we decide what the bottom line is. God wants people to reform, to be good. The Devil wants them to be evil. We don’t care whether they are good or bad; we just draw the line at extreme good or extreme evil. Hitler and Gandhi, revolutionaries and terrorists, Mother Teresa and Pinochet—all of them are the same to us—where we find them,
we execute them … can I have some aspirin?” he asked as he winced in pain.

I went to his desk, found two Tylenol tablets, and gave them to him. He looked at me, defeated—I must have had the same type of look on my face a few seconds before Mary was shot.

“Who is we?” Muddy asked him. He looked at O, as if asking for permission to answer, and O nodded yes.

“I would like to get dressed … I assure you of my full cooperation. Let’s talk—like men,” he said, trying to reclaim his dignity and eyeing Muddy.

Muddy went to the closet and came back with underwear, a suit, and a tie.

He took the clothes, dressed, and washed the blood off his face. He adjusted his tie and tugged at his shirt cuffs. The suit really did make the man: he was back to being the commanding elderly African.

“Please, gentlemen and lady—shall we talk in the sitting room over a drink or two?” he asked. I suppose that even we were taken by surprise by the transformation and wanted to see where he would take this, so we said yes and followed him out of the bathroom. He went the mini-bar and came out with three small Johnnie Walker bottles.

“You know how you can tell a man who has never poured a drink? He pours the whiskey before the ice,” he said.

“What is IDESC?” I asked him, and he looked at me as if trying to judge how much I knew.

“Look at the most powerful men in the world. Think about them. The photos you know of them, the stories about them—there is always a shadow, the figure of an unnamed man in the background. What if the shadow was the actual man and the man the shadow? Did you ever think of that? That is the illusion
of power. What we—the managers, the assistant directors, the press secretaries—discovered was that we wielded the real power. Directors come and go—who remains? The assistant director. The manager comes and goes; the assistant manager stays …”

“What the fuck are you talking about? You’re telling us that a bunch of middle managers are blowing up hotels?” I interrupted him.

“You are not listening to me. Do you know the term ‘institutional memory’?” he asked.

We shifted about uncomfortably like we hadn’t done our homework. I had heard the term—the Madison Police Department had a racist institutional memory even though it had a black chief—but I had never really thought about it.

“You have the visionary, the charismatic boss who comes and makes changes. But the institution doesn’t change with the leader; the institution is run by the middle management, down to the secretaries and the guys collecting the garbage. There are the rules and regulations, and then there is the way things have always been done. We are functionaries who have realized their power. The boss decides the color of the car, we decide the make and how much to spend. IDESC is the most powerful organization in the world, because we control the men and women who control the world,” he went on.

“Your powerful people, do they know what’s going on?” Muddy asked.

“No. Isn’t that the whole point? We need their honesty. In Kenya, after creating a vacuum, our fronts are going to be called in to help guide and stabilize the government.

“Look here, my friends, we have disaster prevention programs for just about everything—epidemics, floods and hurricanes, wildfires—but not for political disasters. People die from
hunger because of bad politics, malaria has not been eradicated because of bad governance, and then there is war. This is where we come in. We manage political disasters before they happen,” he said, banging his hand on the table excitedly.

He paused. “May I refresh your glasses?” he asked, standing up and walking to the mini-bar. We declined and he fixed himself several double shots.

“Kenya is our coming-out party. We are going to take Kenya, bring it to its knees, and then rebuild it,” he said.

“Why not start with Somalia?” I asked.

“Are you listening to anything I’m saying? You have to have institutions; cut off the head, replace the organs, transfuse blood, and something new and beautiful grows. Somalia is a Frankenstein of a state,” he continued, explaining patiently.

“IDESC—Kimani, let’s get back to that,” O said, and looked at his watch.

“Let IDESC take Kenya and see what we do with it. If you don’t like the results in five years, come for me, come for all of us,” he said, sounding like he expected us to join him in the end, like we were bound to see things his way in time.

“Why the meeting? What did you discuss?”

“Delaware called the meeting—to give us an update and to suggest we take countermeasures in case we had been exposed.”

“What countermeasures?” O asked.

“Disband—and walk away—and start afresh. We are the organization,” he answered. “Our plan was working. If you hadn’t interfered, we would be in control by now.”

“Delaware—what else does he have planned? More bombs?” O asked.

He sipped his drink and winced in pain, but he didn’t respond.

“You’re running out of time. Tell us what you planned at the meeting and we will let you live,” O said, sounding a bit tired.

Kimani looked at his watch and smiled painfully. Somewhere in the back of my head I heard Sahara’s plane lifting off. We had been filibustered.

O hadn’t broken him—he had scared him into taking us seriously, but the sudden show of violence and the humiliation hadn’t really made a difference. The information he was giving us was already old news. Helpful, in that we now knew things we didn’t know before, but it was all yesterday’s news. This is why we had found nothing in Sahara’s office, and why he had blown up the IDESC offices, and why, in this room, a man who had come to a business meeting had no useful papers, no laptop, not even a briefcase.

Once we entered the room, Kimani’s strategy had been to try and win us over, because at that moment there were only two possible outcomes—we converted or we killed him—what middle ground could there be? And when that failed, to keep us in the room as long as he could, to buy time for Sahara.

I wanted to get at least one concrete detail that we could use. By this time tomorrow there would be nothing linking IDESC to the Norfolk bombing, and it would reconstitute itself into something else—change location, move personnel around. We weren’t going to get them all, but we sure as hell could take out Sahara. With their military arm cut off, it would take longer to regroup.

O also knew the interview was over—in the same way that Kimani knew he had taken it as far as it could go. O turned up the volume and he started walking toward Kimani, but then I motioned for him and Muddy to leave.

Kimani’s eyes opened wide in disbelief, trying to beg for his
life, as he saw me walking back toward him, holding a pillow. I placed it on the back of his head and pressed it down with my Glock. In spite of himself, he was shaking.

“One last chance … you think you don’t have a choice. Tell us what we need to know, and I will walk out,” I said to him.

“How do I know you won’t kill me after I am of no use to you?”

“Because I give you my word between two men—you understand that language,” I said. He didn’t respond.

“You knew Jack Mpande was at the hotel, yes?”

“Yes—we knew,” he answered.

“Why did you want to kill him?” I asked.

“You know why,” he countered.

“Are there more bombs?”

“I am a believer, Mr. Ishmael. I am a believer in what we do. How can I betray my faith?”

“Kimani, you might not think so, but you’re done. It was over the moment the bomb went off, when your organization killed O’s wife, when you cornered us … but tonight we can all walk out of here, for now …” I reasoned with him. I guess that in the same way he had wanted us to take his offer, I now wanted him to take mine.

He sighed.

“I’m very sorry this is the choice you’ve made,” I said.

“Son, I too am sorry that this is the choice you have made,” he said to me. He started whispering a quick prayer.

Suddenly, the phone rang. He stopped his prayers and looked at it.

I shot him.

There was one last thing we had to do before leaving the U.S. Amos—we had to go see his parents, explain what had happened, give them closure, and, with a little bit of luck, learn exactly what it was that got him killed. We had to do it—it was the reason we were in the States.

Our cover had been blown and we were risking being thrown into Guantánamo or some other hellhole, or simply being tried for murder in the U.S.—it was stupid not to just leave, but that ever-blurry line between us and the criminals had to be maintained. That’s how I explained it to myself, yet I also knew I wanted to claim back a bit of my conscience from this thing I had become.

Amos’s father lived in an apartment complex in Compton, and I drove us there in a nondescript white Hyundai that Julio had managed to “rent” for us.