Black Star Nairobi (28 page)

In the United States, we had operated without the usual resources of a government behind us. In Kenya, we had had the run of the place until just a few weeks ago. Now we didn’t know who to trust, who the next police commissioner would be once the deals for the new government were reached, or if we would have a government, let alone one that might back us up when the
accusations came and calls for extradition were tied to foreign aid. But we knew our way around the “black roads,” as O had jokingly called the underground Kenyan criminal life.

Joe Sherry didn’t ask any questions. He gave us rooms and we went to bed.

Helen and her timing—I hadn’t slept for more than an hour when my cell rang. She had broken through the encryption. She texted me a Web address and a password so I could access the file. Muddy and I woke O up, and we went to Joe Sherry’s office. After trying to connect a couple of times, we finally opened the file, which turned out to be an IDESC Project Assessment File put together by the New York–based African Open Society.

It was a study of the military coups that had assassinated political leaders of all stripes, and the counter-coups that had in turn killed off the military leaders. It looked at revolutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where sitting leadership had been tried, jailed, or simply killed off. It factored in the interference of U.S. and Russian governments in these coups and revolutions and the conclusion was always the same—the body cannot survive without its head, no matter how rotten. But even with successful operations, hundreds if not thousands of people would die before a new non-corrupt leadership could be formed and installed.

The bottom line was that the study gave the IDESC Africa project a 25 percent chance of success. In the end, the good people at the African Open Society were asking whether that 25 percent chance was worth the risk of destroying a country and the loss of thousands of lives.

Sahara and IDESC had answered yes; the future was worth
a little blood-letting in the present. We looked over and over the document, trying to understand it—figures and percentages about human life. People playing the gods of change, life measured against life.

Yet if I had been reading this document in the comfort of a classroom or bureaucratic office, I would have argued against it, but only to look for ways to improve the plan. It made sense, but only on paper. I had seen the idea in practice in the Norfolk bombing and the tea plantations of Limuru.

Sahara and IDESC had to be stopped, if only so that we could continue living on in our undemocratic and corrupt societies, hanging out with thieves at Broadway’s by night and tracking them down by day. If only so that we could elect a black president every now and then, buying time until someone came up with a better plan. I printed out the ten-page document to show to Mpande.

Hassan, as we had requested, had picked up Mpande but couldn’t officially take him into police custody. He also couldn’t hand him over to the Americans, because we didn’t know how deep his connections ran, or worse, now that Hassan was out of favor, how deep his enemies could reach. Therefore, after providing Mpande with a cover story so that his wife wouldn’t worry—the Kenyan government had asked him to help set up a truth-and-reconciliation program, South Africa–style—Hassan had stashed him in a safe house out in Runda Estate.

“Like the aristocrats in fucking England—holding other nobles as prisoners of war in castles, with servants and everything,” Muddy exclaimed as we wound through an island of wealth and calm—the violence hadn’t touched Runda.

Dandora slum, en route to Runda, was still smoking from the fires of a few days ago. The debris and trash along the road to Runda was much worse than it had ever been before, and hundreds of people now stood there despondently, looking at the passing cars. Runda was clean—clean security company cars parked by the gates manned by armed guards in clean blue uniforms. In Dandora there was no vegetation—Runda was like being in another climate, where manicured green hedges sprouted from the ground.

“This is the no-in-between country,” O said philosophically, making me suspect he had sneaked in a puff or two.

The cop at the gate let us in after we showed him our badges. We were led to the back of the house by a maid dressed in a blue-checkered uniform, where we found Mpande in a white T-shirt and shorts, drinking orange juice and reading the paper. There was an extra tennis racket on the table and it made me wonder with whom he was playing. He didn’t look surprised to see us—he offered us chairs like he’d been expecting us all along, and called to the house. Before we had even sat down, an old man dressed in a chef’s uniform shuffled over to us.

“Breakfast?” he asked.

We were okay—Joe Sherry had allowed O into the restaurant kitchen and he had stuffed us full with his yet-to-be-perfected omelette, but we asked for coffee. We sat around for a bit talking about the weather, the violence, how Kenya compared to South Africa, how his family was, and how he was coping with being Kenya’s most famous Norfolk survivor. We had the kind of bond that comes from having gone through an extreme situation together—like two soldiers from the same violent campaign who, years later, find themselves on opposing sides.

“Listen, guys. Even without Hassan’s kind intervention, I
would have contacted you,” he finally said, after the general conversation had petered out. He started to explain.

Two years ago, Amos Apara had come to him with some disturbing news. IDESC was planning to set off bombs in Kenya. The purpose: to destabilize the government by targeting leaders from all the political parties. In the absence of the leadership class, IDESC would take over stewardship of the country and cultivate a new leadership recruited from the youth who respected democracy—a second independence, Mpande explained.

“Like things in Afghanistan and Iraq have worked so well,” Muddy said.

“That’s not our work—it was a stupid and foolhardy move. In Iraq, Afghanistan, the policy is: invade, destroy the sitting government, then try to build an opposition, or a new government from the opposition and the leftovers. It is like trying to cure cancer with cancer. No, our goal was to eradicate all of them, the sitting government, the opposition—leave the country without leadership, scoop out the cancer, and then let a new leadership emerge from the people themselves … with a gentle guiding hand from IDESC.”

“Obviously things aren’t working out …” I started to say but he interrupted me.

“Ours was not to create the circumstances; it was to take advantage of them. At the right time, take out the opposition and the ruling party and then offer interim stewardship that comes with economic assistance, security, and nurturing of leadership by forward-looking youth … As you can see, we weren’t wrong about Kenya. All the signs were there—I don’t need to tell you that …” he said as he pointed in the direction of Dandora.

“Look, Bush was right about one thing, the principle of preemptive strikes—take them out hard and take them out
early—but he didn’t have the intelligence or vision. He didn’t have the heart for it—the conscience, the love for balance and democracy. We would have taken him out if we could,” Mpande said with conviction. It was hard to tell whether he was out of IDESC or still in it—a man waiting for an opening, waiting for us to eliminate his enemies in an organization whose goals he still believed in.

“What is Delaware’s next move?” I asked him.

“I don’t know where, or how—but Delaware is a believer. He will carry on. You can be sure he is after the political leadership now.”

Martin Kimani too had said that Sahara was a believer, and he hadn’t lied about the political wing not knowing what the armed wing was doing.

“What happened after Amos came to you?” O asked him.

“I agreed that we needed to rein in the armed wing and the radical elements. They were supposed to follow our lead and not us theirs. We wanted to call the whole thing off, but you don’t just call off something put in motion by the most powerful organization in the world,” he said, trying not to sound proud.

“I didn’t think Delaware suspected that Amos had come to me. It had been business as usual, when out of the blue Delaware called an emergency meeting in Nairobi. He said the political and armed wings needed to synchronize, because things were deteriorating fast in Nairobi and we needed to make a move. I thought the rest of IDESC was booked at the hotel. If I suspected anything, I wouldn’t have brought my family with me.”

“Do you know what ‘capture the king and kill the queen’ means? Some sort of code?” I asked Mpande.

“No, why?” he asked.

“Something Sahara … Delaware said,” I answered.

“Listen, O, I’m very sorry about your wife—and Amos, I was too late,” Mpande said. O didn’t respond. I produced the document and let Mpande peruse it. When he was done, he handed it back to me.

“That, we never saw—we didn’t know it existed. But I doubt it would have changed my mind—I am as guilty now as I was then. Last year there were over half a million deaths from malaria. Half a million! Do the math,” he said with a sigh. He leaned back in his chair and looked up to the sky as if searching for some sign. His disagreement was not with the principle, but how to implement it.

“Can I ask you something?” Muddy said, and he looked at her in surprise.

“Yes, of course,” he said.

“Why did you stay?”

“I wanted to bring them down quietly—from the inside,” he explained, sounding like he was trying to convince himself as well. Judging from the postcards we found in his room, Amos had been ready to bring down the organization from the outside and it had earned him a spot in Ngong Forest. And Mpande had barely escaped with his life. If they hadn’t made the mistake of coming after us, their plan would have been almost foolproof.

“The road to hell is paved with idiots like you,” Muddy said angrily. Mpande looked at her, then away, but he didn’t say anything.

Needed to make a move, move fast, business as usual
—ordinary language to explain the planning of terror and death, I thought to myself. I had a fuller picture now—imagine all you want to do in this world is some good. You go from trouble spot to trouble spot and do your best to make a difference. You start in the Peace Corps in some village somewhere, drilling wells and building
makeshift schools. When you leave, in spite of your efforts, the well dries up and the school decides to stop admitting girls because a local fat cat angling for political office has decided it is against African culture. You get another job where you have more power and you continue up the do-gooder ladder until you land in some of the most powerful offices in the world—of former U.S. presidents, world monetary organizations, the United Nations—and still nothing is changing.

You start dreaming of taking over one of these countries one day and showing the world how it can be done right. You realize that, with others like you, other people in the powerful offices who are in it not for money or glory, just to do some good, that you can in fact change the world, not one person at a time, but country by country.

Because you can, you decide to do it. If the cancer could be gutted out and replaced with Kenyans who really cared for their country, would that be so bad? It would be a revolution.

In my line of work you come across many things—murders committed for money, sex, drugs, and just as often for power—but to take out not just a single politician, not just the president but also the opposing candidate, to wipe out the leadership of all the political parties regardless of where they stood was something new.

The deadly and efficient Sahara was stalking Kenya’s corrupt leadership to create a vacuum. With the ethnic tensions still high, his move wouldn’t leave a Kenya open for reconstruction. It would only lead to a Somalia-like implosion. We had to find him.

It was close to midday when we left a deflated Mpande. As we drove back to Nairobi, debating about where to look for Sahara,
the news filtered in: a crazy old Vietnam vet, in what appeared to be a random shooting spree, had stormed two separate offices in Oakland, California, killing two mid-level managers. At a third office, armed guards had shot him down as he drew his weapon. He was also being blamed for the shooting of a Kenyan national at the Hilton—one Martin Kimani. It wasn’t difficult for us to surmise what had happened. The remaining members of IDESC knew the shootings weren’t random, and they took him out at the first opportunity. But the pundits had already diagnosed him as suffering from latent post-traumatic stress disorder.

“We should have taken care of Mpande—we really should have,” Muddy said, bringing me back to the journey into Nairobi.

“But we saved him,” I said, not sure how that made sense. But it did.

“These motherfuckers are like Jesus on steroids,” O said.

As we drove back into town, we kept trying to figure out what to do next. We hadn’t contacted Jason or Paul yet—one of them had sold us out back in Mexico and the U.S. But we were desperate, so in the end we decided that I should call Jason. In any case, Julio would have told him we had returned and he didn’t pretend otherwise.

“Have you found him?” he asked, on hearing my voice.

“No, that’s why I am calling,” I said.

“I’ve got nothing here. My hands have been tied—pressure, trying to find the next targets in Somalia,” he said, sounding frustrated.

We heard a news alert come on over the radio: the president and the prime minister, their ministers, and their key supporters had agreed to meet today at the Kenyatta International Conference Center to discuss forming a unity government.

“That’s Sahara’s target,” Muddy called it as I hung up on Jason.

The whole leadership, opposition and incumbents, were meeting there to build what the Kenyan media now dubbed a “road map to peace.” There would be no other opportunity like this to scoop out the cancerous cells and graft in what remained of IDESC. Sahara was going to go for it. And I wasn’t so sure I wanted to stop him. I remembered the letter from Amos to his parents—this was not abstract preemption. This meeting—it was a meeting of the worst of Kenya.