Abruptly he looked to Marita. “There’s no need for me to make things difficult for you. Why don’t you tell your driver to just pull over when we go around a bend in the road and let me off. They won’t see it happen, and that way I’m out of your hair and you won’t have to answer questions about me when they find out I wasn’t part of your group to begin with.”
“They know how many of us there are, Mr. Marten. If there were to be one less we would have to explain it and they would want to know why and then there would be more trouble all around. Even if we did stop and you got out, where would you go? Into the rain forest? How long would you be prepared to stay there? This is an island, Mr. Marten, and not terribly hospitable, as you already know. Whatever your private circumstances are, I would think it best that you settle them sooner rather than later.”
“You do,” Marten said flatly.
“Yes, I do.”
Marten looked off. He knew she was right and that the best thing he could do would be to face whoever interrogated him and hope he could bluff it through. The idea of calling the president, using the direct-dial twenty-four-hour-a-day number Harris had given him, or calling anyone else for that matter, was not an option. This was not the United States, not Britain, not Europe. Demands to make a phone call would, he knew, be met with laughter and more likely with physical punishment. Maybe worse. He turned back to her. “Alright. I’ll follow your suggestion.”
“That being the case”-Marita grinned a little, and the impishness returned-“please tell me your story again, and precisely as you did before. That way we will all have everything comfortably in mind before you and we and the soldiers meet.”
Marten smiled at her pluck. Here was a beautiful young doctor on some kind of mission of mercy or education or both in the middle of a poor-as-dirt jungle region who understood something of the underbelly of the world around her and could smile about it even as she determined how to deal with it. People like that didn’t come along very often.
12:42 P.M.
8
MALABO, CAPITAL OF EQUATORIAL GUINEA. 4:18 P.M.
Conor White stood alone under the arch of a public building, and out of a light rain, watching the street at the end of the block. Now and again people passed by. Mostly they were native women and children, their men seemingly elsewhere. The whites, Americans, Europeans, South Africans-mostly people in the oil business or in one way or another connected to it-were absent altogether, either still conducting the day’s business or already gathered in the bar of the Hotel Malabo, where most of them spent their free time. To them, neither Malabo nor the entire island of Bioko, the old Spanish Fernanado Po, nor even Rio Muni, the Equatorial Guinea mainland across the Bight of Biafra from Bioko, was a place for civilized man. If you weren’t in oil or somehow trying to profit from it, there was no reason in hell to be there at all.
4:22 P.M.
White pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, ran it over his neck, and then wiped his forehead. It was hot and humid as it always was, ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit when he’d left the air- conditioning of his motor home office/sleeping quarters ten minutes earlier.
The neighborhood here was a hodgepodge of old colonial buildings in varying stages of disrepair. Most had crumbling archways and tattered or broken window shutters and front doors that looked as if they had been repaired by crate makers. All were topped by slanted, grooved metal roofs, the majority of which were in danger of rusting through. The buildings themselves, made of white concrete and two or three stories high, were, he imagined, probably built in the 1930s or ’40s. No doubt once elegant and well kept, in all probability they’d remained that way until 1968, when Equatorial Guinea gained independence after one hundred and ninety years of Spanish rule and the series of brutal dictatorships began, slipping the country into a morass of untold riches for the few and deep poverty for the rest. The buildings now were inhabited by the latter and had not only fallen into sad disrepair but along the way had been painted a combination of colors that made no sense at all. One was faded yellow with an equally faded pink balcony, another a dreary white with one archway of light blue and another of muddy orange; still another was bright pink but had shutters that were salmon on one side and brilliant green on the other.
Conor White had been around the world more times than he could remember, and nothing he had seen quite matched the cheerless atmosphere of rust and decay and near all-invasive poverty that was Malabo, or at least the part of it where he stood now.
4:30 P.M.
Again his eyes went to the end of the block.
Still nothing.
They were to have arrived at four twenty-five. Where were they? What was the delay? He could radio, he knew, easily enough. Just reach into his jacket and click the piece on. Tell SimCo dispatch what he wanted, and in less than thirty seconds he would have location coordinates and a corrected, near exact time of arrival. But he didn’t. There was no point in revealing his impatience, even to his dispatcher.
4:33 P.M.
Ten feet away a rooster wandered along the sidewalk, clucking around a dead palm tree and then strutting boldly across the cracked asphalt street under a collection of weathered low-hanging wires that dangled hazardously between metal telephone poles.
4:34 P.M.
Again White looked down the street. An old man turned the corner on a bicycle and came toward him. Behind him the street was empty. Patience be damned. He started to reach for his radio. Then-
There they were, rounding the corner and coming toward him: a muddied Army of Equatorial Guinea machine-gun-mounted Humvee followed in close order by two mud-crusted Toyota Land Cruisers and then a second army Humvee, the one that would have picked them up as a tail car when they entered the city.
White stepped back under the arch and out of sight as they passed. Seconds later the caravan pulled beneath the overhang of a crumbling two-story building across the street. Armed soldiers jumped from the army vehicles and pulled open the doors of the Land Cruisers. In a heartbeat the occupants of both cars were brought out and led into the building. They were eight in all. Four were young Spanish medical students he knew about. He had their names and passport numbers and home addresses in Madrid. Two others were uniformed native guides. The seventh was a young female doctor, from Madrid, whose personal information he had as well. The last was the individual he wanted most to see and was the reason he had come there and waited as he had. At this point he had no information about him at all. What he knew was what he saw. A ruggedly handsome male Caucasian in his midthirties, about six feet tall, slim and dark-haired. He was the man the soldiers had seen with Father Willy Dorhn, the same man who had run from them in the rain forest. He was the real person of interest here. Someone who might well know about the photographs the priest had taken and the missing camera memory card that went with them.
White had wanted to see him in person, get a sense of him before the army
