ten-thousand-CFA-franc note, the currency of Equatorial Guinea, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty U.S. dollars. “Now you do.”
“Of course, senor. If the airport closes you will have a room.”
“Good.”
Marten walked off and shuddered as he did. The last thing he wanted was to spend another hour, let alone a night or a week, here.
12
7:15 P.M.
Noise and tobacco smoke hit Marten like a wall as he walked into the riot that was the Hotel Malabo’s bar, a big, broad room furnished with rattan and packed to the walls with Westerners, most of them SimCo mercenaries and AG Striker employees. Both groups looked like they were straight out of central casting. The SimCo people were your classic badass tough guys, hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, black-T- shirt-and-camouflage-pants-wearing, shaved-headed combat veterans from probably a dozen different countries and as many wars. The Striker crew looked like field people-drillers, riggers, technicians, and the like. Most of them still wore their grease-and sweat-stained work clothes, lightweight jumpsuits with a big AG STRIKER company logo stenciled on the back, and unlike the SimCo people, not all were men.
Four women who looked like office staffers, folded umbrellas still wet from the rain hung over the backs of their chairs, sat at a nearby table drinking and talking among themselves, and once in a while looking off toward a hunky mercenary or oil driller. Here and there were unkempt-looking women. They wore low-cut, slit-to-the-thigh dresses like uniforms and took up space at the long mahogany bar or sat at cheap rattan cocktail tables working any man who would pay for their attention.
Then there were the rest. Mostly they were men, ranging in age from middle twenties to late sixties. The majority of them wore tropical suits with dress shirts open at the neck. Some of the younger ones wore jeans or khakis with golf shirts under wrinkled, lightweight sport coats. Judging from their languages they seemed to be European or South African. Within a circle of twenty feet Marten heard smatterings of English, German, Afrikaans, Spanish, and Italian. His experience in his not-so-many-years-removed life as a homicide detective on the Los Angeles Police Department told him most were quick-buck artists-gamblers, manipulators, and hangers-on, whores of all trades-drawn to anywhere there was fast money to be made. And his sense of things during the few days he had been there told him there was plenty to be made in Equatorial Guinea. The dealings would be in drugs, guns, human beings, information-by the bundle or in snippets-anything at all they could sell for profit.
Marten pushed around a large man in a sweat-stained white suit and was trying to find the most direct way to the bar when he saw Marita and her medical students squeezed around a small corner table. She smiled and waved when she saw him. He grinned and nodded in return. He hadn’t seen any of them since they had been separated and the soldiers had taken him off for interrogation, and he was happy to see they had been released and were safe. He stepped around two arguing AG Striker oil workers and went to their table.
“We were concerned about you, Mr. Marten,” Marita said as he reached the table. “Please sit down.”
“I’m alright, thanks.” They made room, and he sat down gingerly. “What about you? Everybody okay?”
“We’re fine,” Marita said, then looked at her young companions. “?Si?”
“Si,” they nodded in agreement.
The four were people he knew only by their first names: the slim, ever-smiling Luis; baby-faced Rosa, a little overweight and looking like a wannabe executive secretary in oversized glasses and olive-colored sack dress; the quiet, chubby, seemingly overly serious Gilberto; and Ernesto, tall and gangly with an unruly mop of bright red hair and red Converse sneakers to match. Here, in this crowded, boisterous, smoke-filled room, surrounded by a crowd of hardscrabble players from a wholly different world, they looked a lot less like people who would soon be doctors than kids who should still be living at home and going to high school.
“They collected our things from the hostel where we were staying,” Marita added, “and then brought us here, saying they would pick us up at nine and take us to the airport. We were told to leave the island tonight. From what they said we will be on the same flight you are taking.”
“To Paris.”
“Yes.”
Marten smiled. “It’s a pleasant coincidence.” Some coincidence, he thought. From what he’d learned at the front desk, it was the only flight out for the next two days, and the army clearly wanted them all off the island as quickly as possible. He looked around the table. None of them seemed to have been ill treated. Still, they had been questioned, and he wanted to know what they had told whoever had done it. He wondered if the subject of the photographs had come up, or if they even knew about them. He turned to Marita. “What did they ask you?”
“They searched us and then wanted information. Mostly about you. How we came to be traveling together. What we knew about you. The things you said to us.”
“What did you tell them?”
“The truth, of course. That we saw you walking on the beach and you collapsed and we went to help you. After that all the things you told us,” Marita smiled conspiratorially, the impishness in her rising up, then she repeated almost verbatim what he had told them on the beach and what they had gone over in the Land Cruiser on the drive to Malabo. “Afterward they asked what we were doing in Bioko, but we had already documented our purpose with the proper authorities when we first arrived. So we were okay.”
“That’s all they wanted, nothing else?”
“No.”
“Nothing about a priest?”
“No. Why?”
Marten shook his head. “Nothing.” Apparently the matter of the photographs had not come up. Perhaps because the authorities were satisfied with what he had told them and believed that the distance between Father Willy’s village and the beach where he had been found was too great to have involved a conspiracy to smuggle the pictures out. If that were the case, then the pictures would not have been mentioned. No reason to alert others to their existence if there was no need; that could only serve to complicate things later if some unforeseen problem arose, say, with the media and inquisitive reporters.
Suddenly Ernesto ran a hand through his pasture of red hair. “There was one other thing,” he said in English. “When we collected our luggage we realized everything had been gone through, even our medical supplies. But nothing was missing. Why they did it none of us knows.”
Marten half-smiled. “Don’t feel bad, they went through mine, too. Looking for what, I don’t know any more than you do.” So they had been looking for the pictures. They weren’t that incompetent. “I guess they have a revolution on their hands and aren’t taking any chances.”
At that moment a sudden gust of wind sent an avalanche of rain across a large window behind them. Seconds later a stronger gust rattled the entire building. Again the lights flickered, almost went out, then came back on.
“We’ll be lucky if we get out tonight at all,” Marita said with not well hidden apprehension. She didn’t like being stuck here any more than Marten did. Too many things could still go wrong.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Marten said.
Immediately something off to one side caught Marita’s eye, and she turned to look. Marten followed her gaze to see a tall, attractive woman coming toward them through the crowd. She was probably in her late thirties or early forties, had stylishly cut, shoulder-length dark hair, and wore expensive white
