Cross Country (8 page)

U
NREAL. UNPRECEDENTED. UNBELIEVABLE.

And then, Where is here? Where have I been taken?

My hand went up to my temple. I felt a sharp sting where I touched an open wound, and then I remembered the handcuffs. But they weren't on my wrists anymore.

I was on my back, on a hard floor, stone or cement maybe.

Someone was looking down at me. I couldn't make out his expression in the nearly lightless room. I could only tell that he was a dark-skinned man.

Not one man, I realized. Many. A dozen or more men were standing around me. Then I got it! They were prisoners — like me.

"White man is awake," someone said.

My clothes gave me away, I supposed. They had made me for an American. "White man" was meant to be an insult, one that I had heard already on the trip.

"Where am I?" It came out as a croak. "Water?" I asked.

The one who'd already spoken said, "Not until morning, my friend." He knelt down and helped me sit up, though. My rib cage felt like it was ready to explode, and I had a monster headache that wasn't going away by itself.

I saw that I was in a bleak, filthy holding cell of some kind. Even with my nose broken, the smell was unbelievably strong and foul, probably coming from a latrine in some unseen corner. I took shallow breaths through my mouth.

What little light there was came through a grated door on the far wall. The place looked big enough for maybe a dozen of us, but there were at least three times that number, all males.

Many of the prisoners were lying shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor. A relatively lucky few were snoring away on wall-mounted bunks.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"Midnight, maybe. Who knows? What's the difference to us? We're all dead men anyway."

A
S MY HEAD cleared some, I realized that my wallet was gone. And my belt.

Where had they taken me? How far was I from the airport? Was I still in Nigeria?

Why hadn't anyone tried to stop them from kidnapping me? Did it happen all the time?

I had no idea about any of these questions, or their answers.

"Are we in Lagos?" I finally asked.

"Yes. In Kirikiri. We are political prisoners. So we have been told. I am a journalist. And you are?"

A metal scrape came from the direction of the door as it was unlocked, then opened wide.

I saw two blue-uniformed guards pause in the light of a cement corridor before they stepped in and became shadows themselves. Seconds later, one of them played a flashlight over us.

It caught me in the eyes and hung there for several seconds.

I felt sure they were here for me, but they grabbed the man two down from me instead. The one who had said he was a journalist.

They pulled him roughly to his feet. Then one of the guards unholstered a pistol and pressed it to his temple.

"No one talks to the American. No one," the guard told the room. "You hear me?"

Then, as I watched in disbelief, the man was pistol-whipped until he was unconscious. Then he was dragged out of the holding cell.

The reaction of the other prisoners around me was mostly silent acceptance, but a couple of men moaned into their hands. No one moved; I could still hear snoring from a few of them.

I stayed where I was, holding it all in until the vicious guards were gone. Then I did the only thing I could, which was ease back down to the floor, where every shallow, rapid breath produced another slice of pain through my chest.

What kind of hell had I gotten myself into?

I
WISH I could say that my first night in the prison cell in Kirikiri was a blur and that I barely remember it.

The thirst was the worst, on that first night anyway. My throat felt like it was closing up. Dehydration ate at me from the inside. Meanwhile, oversize mosquitoes and rats tried to do the same from the outside.

My head and torso throbbed like a metronome all night, and a sense of hopelessness threatened to overwhelm me the minute I let my guard down, or, God forbid, slept for half an hour.

I'd read enough from Human Rights Watch to know something about the conditions in this kind of prison — but the gap between knowing it and living it was enormous. It was possibly the worst night of my life, and I'd had some bad ones before this. I had spent time with Kyle Craig, Gary Soneji, and Casanova.

As dawn finally came, I watched the single barred window like a television set. Seeing its slow change, from black, to gray, to blue, was as close as I could get to optimism.

Just when the prisoners around me began to stir, the cell door opened again.

A wiry guard stood at the threshold. He reminded me of a very tall grasshopper. "Cross! Alexander!" he yelled at the top of his voice. "Cross! Over here! Now!"

It was a struggle to look halfway able-bodied as I slowly rose to my feet. I focused on the pain of my chest hairs being pulled out where they had fused with the dried blood in my shirt. It was just instinct, but it got me up on rubbery legs and across the floor.

Then I followed the guard into the corridor. He turned right, and when I saw the dead end ahead of us, I let go of any thoughts I'd had about getting out of the prison.

Maybe ever.

"I am an American policeman," I said, starting up my story again. "I'm here investigating a murder."

And then it struck me — was that why I was in this prison?

T
HIS DEFINITELY WAS hell. We passed several foreboding, metal doors like the one to my cell. I wondered how many prisoners were kept here, and how many of them were Americans. Most of the guards spoke some English, which made me suspect that I wasn't the only American here.

"Inside," barked the guard. "Quickly now, go ahead, Detective."

When I went to move the chair out of the way, he shoved it into my hands. Just as well. It was something to sit on besides the floor, and I didn't feel much like standing right now.

Once I was in, he closed the door and, from the sound of it, walked away.

This room was similar to the holding cell — except that it was maybe half the size and empty. The cement floor and stone walls were streaked dark, which was probably where the putrefying smell came from.

There was no latrine here. Possibly because the whole area had been a latrine at one time.

I looked back at the gray metal door again. Given that there was no lock, was it more foolish to try to get out of here than to just sit and wait for whatever might come next?

Probably not, but I couldn't be sure about it, could I?

I was halfway to my feet when I heard footsteps again.

I sat back down. The door opened and two police officers came in — wearing black uniforms instead of prison-guard blue. My stomach told me it was a bad trade-off.

So did the hard, pissed-off look on the guards' faces.

"Cross? Alexander?" one barked.

"Could I have some water?" I asked. There was nothing on earth that I wanted more. I could barely speak now.

One officer, in mirror shades, glanced over at the other, who shook his head no.

"What am I charged with?" I asked.

"Stupid question," said Mirror Shades.

To demonstrate, the second cop walked up and drove his fist into my stomach. My wind was gone, even before I hit the floor like a dry sack.

"Get him up!"

Mirror Shades hoisted me easily, then put his powerful. arms around my shoulders from behind. When the next punch came, he kept me from falling over, and also made sure my body absorbed the full impact. I vomited immediately, a little surprised there was anything to bring up.

"I have money," I said, trying what had worked before in this country, back at Immigration.

The lead cop was huge — as tall as Sampson, with a flopping Idi Amin belly. He looked down the slope of his body right into my eyes. "Let's see what you have."

"Not here," I said. Flaherty, my CIA contact, had supposedly set up a money fund for me in a Lagos bank, which at this point was the equivalent of a million miles away. "But I can get it—"

The lead cop crashed his elbow into my jaw. Then came another wrecking ball of a punch to my chest. Suddenly I couldn't breathe.

He stepped back and waved Mirror Shades out of the way. With an agility I wouldn't have guessed at, the large, fat man kicked high with one boot and caught me square in the chest again. All the air remaining went out of me. I felt as if I'd just been crushed.

I heard, rather than saw, the two guards leave the room. That was it. They left me lying on the floor; no interrogation, no demands, no explanations.

No hope?

B
ACK IN THE holding cell, I was given a bowl of cassava and a cup of water, only a few ounces, though. I bolted the water but found I couldn't eat the cassava, which is an important vegetable throughout Africa. My throat closed when I tried to swallow solid food.

"We hail the cassava, the great cassava," he wheezed as he took the bowl. "It's from a famous poem we learn in school."

He scrabbled over and sat next to me, both of us watching the door for guards.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Sunday, sir."

He couldn't have been more than twenty, if that. His clothes were dirty but seemed middle-class to me, and he had a three-stripe tribal scar on each cheek.

"Here, Sunday. You'd better not be seen talking to me, though."

"Oh, fuck them," he said. "What can they do — throw me in a prison cell?"

He ate the cassava quickly, looking around like he expected someone to take it away from him. Or to rush in and beat him.

"How long have you been here?" I asked when he had finished eating.

"I come here ten days ago. Maybe it's eleven now. Everyone here is new prisoner, waiting for processing."

This was news.

"Processing? To where?"

"To the maximum-security unit. Somewhere in the country. Or maybe it will be worse. We don't know. Maybe we all goin' to a big ditch."

"How long does it take? The processing. Whatever happens here?"

He looked at the floor and shrugged. "Maybe ten days. Unless you have egunje."

"Egunje?"

"Cash. Money for the guards. Or maybe someone knows you're here?" I shook my head no on both counts. "Then you have big wahala, sir. Same as me. You don't exist. Shhhh. Guard is coming."

W
HEN THE GUARDS woke me on the third morning, they had to drag me to my feet. I wasn't going with them willingly. Not to my own execution. My chest still ached from the beating the day before. And my nose felt seriously infected.

I followed the human grasshopper down a steep, stone stairwell, through another corridor, and around several more turns that had me thinking I never would have gotten out of this place on my own.

We finally came outside into an enclosed quad. It was just a wide expanse of sunbleached earth with a few tufts of weeds and a ten-foot-high fence topped with ribbons of barbed wire. If this was the exercise yard, it was a sad excuse for one.

Anyway, I could barely see anything in the bright light. And it was hot, at least a hundred degrees, give or take ten or twenty.

The guard didn't stop until he got to the high razor-wire-topped gate on the far side.

A locked door was opened to a passage through a building, through another door, then a gate, and to what looked like a parking area in the distance.

I asked Grasshopper Man what was going on. He didn't answer. He just opened the door and let me through.

He closed it behind me, locking me into yet another passageway.

"It's been taken care of," he said.

"What has?"

"You have."

He was already walking back the way we'd come, leaving me there. My heart sped up and my body tensed hard. This sure felt like an ending, one way or the other.

Suddenly a door opened on my right. Another guard stuck his head out. He gestured at me impatiently.

"Get in, get in!"

When I hesitated, he reached out and pulled me by the arm. "Are you deaf? Or are you stupid? Get inside."

The room I entered was air-conditioned. It was like a shock to my skin, and I realized that all he'd wanted was to get the door closed again.

I was standing in a plain office that seemed quite ordinary. In it were two wooden desks and several filing cabinets. A second guard, bent over some paperwork, ignored me. Also present was the first white man I'd seen since arriving at the airport.

He was a civilian dressed in light trousers, a loose button-down shirt, and sunglasses. My guess was CIA.

"Flaherty?" I asked, since he didn't bother to volunteer any information.

He tossed me my empty wallet. Then finally he spoke. "Jesus, you look like hell. Ready to get out of here?"