The Informationist: A Thriller (33 page)

“I’d have thought it would bother you, and instead you advocate for him.”

He reached out and touched her cheek. “It does bother me. I want him away from you, I want you to myself.” He sighed. “But I don’t own you, and that’s beyond my control.” He turned and faced front again. “All I’m saying is that I know the torment, and there’s no need for you to be deliberately cruel.”

She closed her eyes. It was so much more than that. Until the unknowns became clearer, it was difficult to discern how far Bradford could be trusted, and keeping him off balance was the easiest way to gauge him. Munroe put her feet up on the dashboard and drew a deep breath. “I don’t want to talk about him,” she said. Didn’t want to talk about anything, really, because as unplanned as it was, history was about to be repeated: A trio of two foreign men and a woman would be heading into Mongomo, and no matter what they found when they reached the city, the proverbial shit was going to hit the fan.

Though none of them would readily admit it, they all knew that getting back out was going to be dicey. Tonight was the calm before the storm.

Calm.

Munroe breathed again and felt the relaxation of assignment wash over her.

T
HEY ENTERED
M
ONGOMO
in the early morning while the streets were still in the beginning stages of bustle and activity. For a village on the edge of civilization, one completely surrounded by the wide, sweeping grandeur of lush vegetation and without direct access to any center of industry, Mongomo showed surprising modernity, testament to the windfall of oil money finding its way to the extended families of the clan that filled the presidential palace.

Shortly after eight they stopped in front of the city’s police station, and while Beyard waited with the vehicles and continued to scan the
local frequencies, Munroe and Bradford sought out the highest-ranking officer available. Once pleasantries had been dispensed, Bradford, acting as Munroe’s superior, spoke emphatically, a foreign-sounding nonsense that Munroe, very much the younger male subordinate, interpreted as a request for assistance. The officer obliged by providing an aide to direct them to the house of Timoteo Otoro Nchama, vice minister of mines and energy.

The dwelling was a single story, spaced widely from its neighbors and set ten meters off a quiet unpaved street whose outlet narrowed into a verdant footpath that led toward rough cinder-block houses and, beyond them, the jungle forest. Munroe drove by the house once and then, leaving Beyard stationed at the street entrance in the second vehicle, returned the guide to his workplace, a tactical gesture that had nothing to do with kindness.

On the second sweep, Munroe made the full length of the street to the narrowed outlet before looping back to park in front of the house. The lack of vehicles fronting the house pointed to the minister’s being away from home, and the ease of access to the property meant a smaller chance of being trapped should the encounter proceed in a less than favorable direction. It also meant being visible from the street, and by the pedestrians and neighbors who had already begun to take notice of their presence.

Munroe and Bradford walked the distance to the front door, and she stood to the side, out of sight. Bradford rapped a three-beat knock on the heavy wood, and in the silence they waited. There’d been shadows in the windows during the first pass, and Beyard had already confirmed that no one had left the house since. Another moment of silence, and at Munroe’s nod Bradford knocked again.

His hand was coming down on a third try when the door opened and an older woman with a worn dress and flat shoes looked out at him with disinterested annoyance. From her appearance Munroe assumed maid or nanny, but it was difficult to tell, she could just as easily be mother or sister. The woman spoke no English, and as Bradford could not converse in any of the local languages, he handed her his business card and motioned for her to carry it inside.

A few minutes later, the woman returned and gestured for Bradford to follow. Munroe joined him, and though the woman showed initial
surprise at Munroe’s emergence, she led them both to the interior of the house with apparent acceptance and without comment. They had gone only a few steps when a petite blond woman entered the foyer at a brisk pace and, seeing Bradford, stopped short, gaped, and then burst into tears. The cherubic teenager from the high-school photo had been replaced by a woman aged beyond her years.

There was a second of uneasy quiet filled by sobs, and then Bradford said, “Heya, kid,” and walked toward Emily and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. She buried her head in his chest, her shoulders quivering with each rapid inhale, and Bradford stroked her hair and in a half whisper said, “Hey, it’s all going to be okay.”

He looked toward Munroe with a distressed smile. From here they were winging it. Emily had disappeared four years ago, now she was found, and with the exception of Munroe having faced two attempted military executions, nothing more was certain.

Munroe felt a wave of disequilibrium; after everything that had come before, reaching the target now had been unsettlingly simple.

Emily straightened and sniffed, and through tearful laughter she said, “Come on in, let’s sit down.” Her words were strained, as if this were the first English she’d spoken for as long as she’d been missing. To the woman who had answered the door and now hovered in the shadows, she said,
“Nza ve belleng café.”

Munroe smiled in recognition of the Fang language and shifted so that the camera lens attached to her lapel faced Emily directly. It was the most straightforward and least intrusive way to document whatever would transpire, and there were two machines establishing a record of it: one was snuggled in her shirt pocket and the other was with Beyard, receiving the signal wirelessly.

Emily led them to the living room and sat on the oversize sofa. Bradford sat next to her, and she glanced at him repeatedly, each time a smile breaking through the etched lines of distress on her face. They were smiles of innocence, shock, nervousness, confusion, but most of all unadulterated happiness. Whatever Beyard’s suspicions, this girl wanted to be found, no doubt about it, which begged the question, why in the four years that she’d been missing had she not contacted her family?

Emily turned to Munroe and hesitated. Bradford said, “Emily, this is
Michael.” Munroe stuck out her hand, and Emily shook it, with another smile. “Your family has been trying to find you for the past four years,” Bradford said, “and Michael is the one responsible for finally tracking you down.”

Emily withdrew her hand, the smile fading as she tilted her head to the side, squinting as if processing what had just been said, and then she turned to Bradford and said, “What?”

Munroe said, “Emily, we’re here to assist you if you want it. We’ve come prepared to get you out of the country. Is this something you’re interested in?”

Emily nodded slowly. “It is,” she said, “but I don’t understand. Why now? I’ve been asking to go home since I got here.”

Bradford glanced at Munroe, and she gave him a look back that could only be interpreted one way: Either Emily had gone batty or they had a major fucking problem. Probably the latter. Munroe’s heart pounded, her mind drawing threads of thought into a partial tapestry, then she paused, knowing the answer to her next question before the words left her mouth. “Emily, who have you asked?”

Emily began to reply and stopped when the maid entered the room with a tray of cups. She set it on the coffee table, and Emily folded her hands in her lap and waited. The seconds passed, each one a painful breath, until at last the woman left the room.

“I don’t trust her,” Emily said. “I don’t think she speaks English, but I don’t know for sure. She’s my husband’s aunt, and she reports everything I do to him.”

Munroe stepped to the couch and knelt in front of Emily so that their eyes were almost level. “We came to get you out of here, to bring you home if that’s what you want. Is it what you want?”

Emily nodded.

“Then listen carefully,” Munroe said. “I’ve been nearly killed twice trying to get to you, and chances are whoever tried before is going to try again if they find out we’re here. The information we’ve been given and what you’re telling us contradict, and if we don’t get the facts sorted out soon, we might not make it out of the country alive—meaning that if you’re not killed along with us, you’ll be stuck here. Emily, we need to
know who you’ve asked about returning home, who is keeping you here, and who is trying to kill me. Can you help us with this?”

“I asked my dad,” Emily said. “It took me a long time, maybe a year, but I finally got through to him, and when I did, he was angry and refused to talk to me.” Emily’s words were starting to flow, her speech was less stilted, and the fluency—even the accent—was returning. “I was able to contact him only that once, and I’ve never been able to speak with my mom. I’ve also asked my husband so many times. I used to think that one day he’d let me go, but now he hits me if I bring it up, so I’ve stopped asking.” A tear dropped from her cheek onto her lap, and she sniffed and ran her fingers under her eyes. “He says that by keeping me here he’s doing me a favor, that without him I would be dead, and that I can never leave and I should be grateful.” She lowered her eyes. “So I really don’t understand why you’ve come now.”

“Where is your husband right now? Malabo?”

“I think so.”

“The people who tried to kill me are hired Angolan forces that normally take orders from the president. Does your husband have connections that would allow him to use them for other purposes?”

Emily shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know about his business or work. I know some of his family. He’s the president’s nephew, and his brothers are important.”

“Is he the only one keeping you? Are there others?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think he’s the main one.” She looked to Bradford. “I have no money, and people in town, they all know me. If I leave, someone will see me and tell my husband. I tried. He found me before I got out of the country, kept me locked in the house for a few months until I promised I wouldn’t leave again.”

“We’ll get you out,” he said. “You have my word on that.”

“I have two boys,” Emily said. “One is two and a half and the other almost a year old—what about them?”

Bradford nodded. “We have passports for you and the children.”

“I’ll go pack,” Emily said, and Munroe put a hand on hers to stop her. “We’re going to leave the house with you in the clothes you’re wearing. You’ll want to tell your husband’s aunt that we’re going out to eat,
and have her get the kids ready. She needs to believe you’re coming back in a few hours.”

Emily nodded and then called for the woman. When she had finished relaying the instructions and the woman had left the room, Munroe, puzzling over dots that had no apparent connections, said, “We don’t have a lot of time and don’t need every detail, but as best as you can, could you tell us why and how you ended up here? Start with Namibia.”

Emily gave a forced smile and brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. “There were three of us,” she said. “Me, Kristof, and Mel. We’d been traveling together since Kenya, had backpacked most of the east and south, wanted to go up the west coast, wanted to see if we could get as far as Nigeria and then fly back. We didn’t have a lot of time, because my mom wanted me to come home and Mel had some stuff he had to get to. We were in Windhoek and were trying to work out how to get to either Congo or Gabon, because Angola was too dangerous.

“We met this guy, his name was Hans something, and he and Kristof hit it off real well, because Kristof was German and Hans’s family had come from Germany. He was a bush pilot, and he said he flew into Angola all the time, and when he found out we were trying to get north, he said he was flying to Luanda that afternoon and offered to let us come along. He said that in Luanda we could probably catch a boat or another flight into Gabon, and so we decided to do it. I called home and spoke with my dad to let him know what we were planning and that I’d contact him as soon as we got to Libreville.”

Munroe caught Bradford’s eye. His brows were furrowed, and confusion was clearly written across his face. Any contact by Emily after Namibia would have been critical to finding her, and this conversation with its direct geographic reading had never been mentioned. Munroe was tempted to stop Emily and ask for clarification, but she didn’t.

“He said he was looking forward to me coming home,” Emily said, “and he asked if, since I was going to Gabon, I planned to visit Equatorial Guinea. We hadn’t been, because there wasn’t much information on the country and it seemed more hassle than it was worth.” She paused as if thinking through the last statement and then looked at Munroe again and said, “He told me it’s where he had his exploration projects and about
how wild and primitive it still was and those legends about the old president and how he buried the national treasury outside his village.

“We flew to Luanda, and I think it was that same night we caught a cargo ship to Gabon. We were in the capital for about three days and then decided to go overland into Cameroon. That’s when I told the guys the stories from my dad about Equatorial Guinea, and they thought it would be cool to travel to a country so few people went to, so we decided to go through Equatorial Guinea to Cameroon. We got visas, and then, since I couldn’t get either of my parents on the phone, I wrote my dad an e-mail and told him where we were headed.”

“Why your dad?” Munroe interrupted. “Why not your mom?”

“Well, when I’d spoken to my dad when I was in Luanda, he told me my mom was visiting some of our friends at their ranch in Wyoming and wouldn’t be back for a couple of weeks, so if I e-mailed, to e-mail him and not her.”

Munroe glanced at Bradford for confirmation on the detail about Elizabeth’s visit to Wyoming, and Bradford shook his head, and Emily, apparently oblivious to the exchange, continued.

“We were on the road to Mongomo from Oyem, outside the city, and at the checkpoint some of the military started harassing us. At the time it didn’t seem that big a deal—we’d been through this type of thing before in other places. But then Mel started to freak out. A few days earlier, maybe a week, he’d started acting kind of strange, jabbering to himself, acting kind of paranoid sometimes. But then he’d be normal, and we’d tell him what he’d done, and we’d all have a good laugh. But this time was different—he went completely crazy. He was screaming, and then he attacked one of the soldiers, and then after that everything kind of jumbled together.” Her voice went flat, and she stared into the middle of the room. “They killed him,” she said. “Right there, with machetes, while Kristof and I watched. And then Kristof started to run, and I didn’t know what to do, so I followed him. We were running for a long time, and I almost got away. I think Kristof got away. The last I saw him, he was running for the border, and then I got hit and passed out.