open.
'You sell monkeys,' John said.
'Yes, I deal in them. For zoos, for private collectors, and for medical laboratories. Come, I will show you.' He led them toward a three-sided building made of corrugated iron, it looked like. Two trucks were there, and five workers were loading cages onto it, their hands in thick leather gloves.
'We just had an order from your CDC in Atlanta,' the dealer explained, 'for a hundred greens. They are pretty animals, but very unpleasant. The local farmers hate them.'
'Why?' Ding asked, looking at the cages. They were made of steel wire, with handles at the top. From a distance they appeared to be of the size used to transport chickens to market… viewed closer, they were a little large for that, but…
'They ravage crops. They are a pest, like rats, but more clever, and people from America think they are gods or something, the way they complain on how they are used in medical experiments.' The dealer laughed. 'As though we would run out of them. There are millions. We raid a place, take thirty, and a month later we can come back and take thirty more. The farmers beg us to come and trap them.'
'You had a shipment ready for Atlanta earlier this year, but you sold them to someone else, didn't you?' Clark asked. He looked over to his partner, who didn't approach the building. Rather, he separated from Clark and the dealer, and walked on a line away from it. He seemed to be staring at the empty cages. Maybe the smell bothered him. It was pretty thick.
'They did not pay me on time, and another customer came along, and he had his money all ready,' the dealer pointed out. 'This is a business, Colonel Clark.'
John grinned. 'Hey, I'm not here from the Better Business Bureau. I just want to know who you sold them to.'
'A buyer,' the dealer said. 'What else do I need to know?'
'Where was he from?' Clark persisted.
'I do not know. He paid me in dollars, but he was probably not an American. He was a quiet fellow,' the dealer remembered, 'not very friendly. Yes, I know I was late getting the new shipment to Atlanta, but they were late in paying me,' he reminded his guest. 'You, fortunately, were not.'
'They went out by air?'
'Yes, it was an old 707. It was full. They were not just my monkeys. They had gotten them elsewhere, too. You see, the green is so common. It lives all over Africa. Your animal worshippers need not worry about extinction for the green. The gorilla, now, I admit that is something else.' Besides, they mainly lived in Uganda and Rwanda, and more was the pity. People paid real money for them.
'Do you have records? The name of the buyer, the manifest, the registration of the airplane?'
'Customs records, you mean.' He shook his head. 'Sadly, I do not. Perhaps they were lost.'
'You have an arrangement with the airport officials,' John said with a smile that he didn't feel.
'I have many friends in the government, yes.' Another smile, the sly sort that confirmed his arrangement. Well, it wasn't as though there was no such thing as official corruption in America, was it? Clark thought.
'And you don't know where they went, then?'
'No, there I cannot help you. If I could, I would gladly do so,' the dealer replied, patting his pocket. Where the envelope was. 'I regret to say that my records are incomplete for some of my transactions.'
Clark wondered if he could press the man further on this issue. He suspected not. He'd never worked Kenya, though he had worked Angola, briefly, in the 1970s, and Africa was a very informal continent, and cash was the lubricant. He looked over to where the Defense attache was talking to the chief constable—the title was a holdover from British rule, which he'd read about in one of Ruark's books, and so were the shorts and kneesocks. He was probably confirming that, no, the dealer wasn't a criminal, just creative in his relationships with local authorities who, for a modest fee, looked the other way when asked. And monkeys were hardly a vital national commodity, assuming the dealer was truthful about the numbers of the things. And he probably was. It sounded true. The farmers would probably be just as happy to be rid of the damned things just to make the noise stop. It sounded like a riot in the biggest bar in town on a Friday night. And they were nasty little bastards, reaching and snapping at the gloved hands transferring the cages. What the hell, they were having a bad day. And on getting to CDC Atlanta, it wouldn't get much better, would it? Were they smart enough to know? Damned sure Clark knew. You didn't ship this many to pet stores. But he didn't have enough solicitude to waste on monkeys at the moment.
'Thank you for your help. Perhaps someone will be back to speak with you.'
'I regret that I could not tell you more.' He was sincere enough about it. For five thousand dollars in cash, he thought he should do more. Not that he'd return any, of course.
The two men walked back toward the car. Chavez joined up, looking pensive, but not saying anything. As they approached, the cop and the attache shook hands. Then it was time for the Americans to leave. As the car pulled off, John looked back to see the dealer take the envelope from his pocket and extract a few bills to hand over to the friendly chief constable. That made sense, too.
'What did you learn?' the real colonel asked.
'No records,' John replied.
'It's the way they do business here. There's an export fee for those things, but the cops and the customs people usually have an—'
'Arrangement,' John interrupted with a frown.
'That's the word. Hey, my father came from Mississippi. They used to say down there that one term as county sheriff fixed a guy up for life, y'know?'
'Cages,' Ding said suddenly.
'Huh?' Clark asked.
'Didn't you see, John, the cages! We seen 'em before, just like those—in Tehran, in the air force hangar.' He'd kept his distance in order to duplicate what he'd seen at Mehrabad. The relative size and proportions were the same. 'Chicken coops or cages or whatever in a hangar with fighter planes, remember?'
'Shit!'
'One more indicator, Mr. C. Them coincidences are piling up, 'mano. Where we goin' next?'
'Khartoum.'
'I saw the movie.'
NEWS COVERAGE CONTINUED, but little else. Every network affiliate became more important as the «name» correspondents were trapped in their base offices of New York, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and the news devoted a great deal of time to visuals of National Guardsmen on the major interstate highways, blocking the roads physically with Hummers or medium trucks. No one really tried to run the blockades there. Food and medical supply trucks were allowed through, after each was inspected, and in a day or two, the drivers would be tested for Ebola antibodies, and given picture passes to make their way more efficiently. The truckers were playing ball.
It was different for other vehicles and other roads. Though most interstate highway traffic went on the major highways, there was not a state in the Union that didn't have an extensive network of side roads that interconnected with those of neighboring states, and all of these had to be blocked, too. That took time to accomplish, and there were interviews of people who'd gotten across and thought it something of a joke, followed by learned commentary that this proved that the President's order was impossible to implement completely, in addition to being wrong, stupid, and unconstitutional.
'It just isn't possible,' one transportation expert said on the morning news.
But that hadn't accounted for the fact that National Guardsmen lived in the country they guarded, and could read maps. They were also offended by the implied statement that they were fools. By noon on Wednesday there was a vehicle on every country road, crewed by men with rifles and wearing the chemical-protective suits that made them look like men (and women, though that was almost impossible to tell) from Mars.
On the side roads, if not the main ones, there were clashes. Some were mere words—my family is right over there, give a guy a break, okay? Sometimes the rule was enforced with a little common sense, after an identification check and a radio call. In other cases, the enforcement was literal, and here and there words were exchanged, some of them heated, and some of those escalated, and in two cases shots were fired, and in one of them a man was killed. Reported rapidly up the line, it was national news in two hours, and again commentators wondered at the wisdom of the President's order. One of them laid the death on the front steps of the White House.
