He kept frowning, standing just inside the door, and then he seemed all at once to understand and to be made strangely embarrassed by it. He spread his hands, palms down. “You’re all right here,” he said. “You’re safe here. Do you want something to eat?”
She shook her head again. Her fear was beginning to fade, not so much because of his assurances as his embarrassment, but there was still nothing to say to him.
He looked around, apparently at a loss, wanting to establish contact and not knowing how. “If you need anything,” he said, “just knock on the door. I’ll come by.”
“I need to go home,” she said. “Back to the hotel.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Not yet.”
“When?”
“Pretty soon. You sure you’re not hungry?”
She surprised herself by asking, “Do you have any aspirin?”
He smiled happily. “Sure,” he said. “Be right back.” He left, and she noticed he took the time to lock the door behind him.
Now she was angry at herself for having asked. It had given him the contact he wanted; it had given him her acceptance of the situation. She felt as though she had allowed him a victory he didn’t deserve, and she considered refusing the aspirin when he brought it, but realized that would be an empty gesture and wouldn’t reclaim the loss.
What a stupid way to be thinking. She looked around the room, cold and bare and minimal.
She needed Parker.
2
Jock Daask liked his women with meat on their bones and brains in their heads, and this girl Claire had both. He sat across the kitchen table from her, watching her eat the corn flakes and milk that was the only food they had for her, and he reflected that he would have liked to have met her some other way. He reflected also on the sexual implications of their current roles in relation to one another kidnapper and victim but the possibilities for rape didn’t really interest him. Jock Daask wasn’t that sort of man.
He wasn’t all that sure what sort of man he was, in fact. His current roles could only be described in negatives he had kidnapped but was not a kidnapper, he would steal but was not a thief and it seemed to him his whole life was expressed only in the same terms of contradiction. He had been born in Africa, but was not an African. His parents were Europeans, but he was not a European. He had done well at the university in England, but he was not an intellectual. He had been a mercenary soldier in various parts of Africa, but he was not a rootless adventurer. There was nothing about him, it seemed, that did not include its own negative.
Jock Daask was the son of a wealthy plantation owner in Africa, and he had grown up always knowing that everything and everybody he saw belonged to his father and would one day belong to him. His friends in his youth were the children of other white landowners, and even then they had all seemed to be aware of their essential dislocation, at once the ruling class and exiles. Still, it was worth exile to be a member of the ruling class.
Until independence. The nation of Dhaba was spared the more gruesome birth pains of many of the new African states, but even in a land of peaceful turnover one fact could not be gotten around: the white ruling class had to go.
Daask had been in London at the time, doing postgraduate work at the university, and he hadn’t known anything was wrong until his father phoned him from London Airport to come out and pick him up. Their land had been taken from them, not by spear-waving cannibals but by paper-waving bureaucrats, bland men with empty smiles.
The number of ex-colonists in London and in other parts of Europe continued to grow. And the idea of counterattack grew, from men like Aaron Marten, whom Daask had known since childhood, who were determined to get their own back one way or another no matter what. And from men like General Enfehr Goma, the unsuccessful first candidate for president of Dhaba, who would be willing to live the life of a comfortable figurehead if the Aaron Martens could put them on the throne.
They could do it. There was nothing strategic about Dhaba, not in minerals or geographic location or rivers or anything else, and so no European power would intervene. The neighboring African states all had sufficient internal problems to keep them from doing anything more than complain at the UN. All they needed was the money to mount the offensive. The current president, Colonel Joseph Lubudi, was so patently corrupt that the masses of the nation might even welcome General Goma, or at least wouldn’t be violently opposed to him.
But it couldn’t be done without money. And from where would the money come? The ex-landowners had lost practically everything. General Goma had no money of his own and couldn’t attract the support of anyone with money. So where would they get the money?
From Dhaba. From Colonel Lubudi. From the Colonel’s brother-in-law, Patrick Kasempa.
Daask again looked at the woman Claire eating a third bowl of cereal. If he were Parker, and this Claire were his woman, he would trade Gonor and the diamonds for her in a minute. Parker would cooperate; Daask was sure of it.
She became aware of his eyes on her and abruptly stopped eating. “That’s all I want,” she said sullenly, pushing the bowl away.
“You must still be hungry,” he said, trying to sound gentle and friendly. He knew it was absurd, but he wanted her not to dislike him.
And it was true that she had to still be hungry. She hadn’t eaten since the drugged dinner at the hotel in Boston last night at around seven o’clock, and here it was nearly midnight. Twenty-nine hours without food. Bob had insisted they not offer her anything to eat until she asked for it, so all she had had at first was the aspirin and water he’d brought her this afternoon. When she’d finally knocked on the door and asked for something to eat it was clear she hadn’t wanted to ask for anything at all but had been driven to it by hunger.
And something in his expression when she’d met his eyes just now had driven her away from hunger again. “I don’t want any more,” she said and folded her arms as though she were chilly, though it was warm here in the kitchen.
