—
A few minutes later, Sunglasses returned with the Joker, who wore a loose white gown that looked like something her grandmother might wear. Gwen hoped they lived through this just so she could tell her family about this moment, about their captor, a three-hundred-pound man in a nightie and a Halloween mask. He knelt beside Gwen, squeezed her arm. His hand circled her skinny biceps easily. “Do you know why we don’t feed you?”
Gwen shook her head.
“Answer me.”
“To punish us, I guess.”
“No.”
“So we know what it’s like to be hungry.”
“Wrong again. Because if you’re hungry and weak, you won’t make trouble. If you fight, try to escape, I may have to hurt you. I don’t want to do that. You’re worth more undamaged. Understand?”
She nodded.
“I would have given you a decent meal tomorrow. Another day or two, I might have let you talk. You’ve spoiled that. You’ve broken the only rule I gave you. Woken me in the middle of the night.” He shouted something in Swahili and Sunglasses walked in, holding the hoods.
He turned to Gwen. “Meshack here says that you spoke the most by far. So you must have a hood.” He looked away from her, at the others. “But as for you three, you have a choice. Wear the hood. Or sit without one and watch her suffer.”
Gwen held herself silent. She was sure that any objection would only anger him. He had chosen the penalty perfectly. The other three already blamed her for getting them in trouble. Now the Joker was forcing them to choose between their sight and their honor.
Hailey raised her hand first. After that, the other two had to follow. Gwen watched as the Joker pulled the black bags over their heads. Then her turn came. She bent her neck forward. The Joker pushed up her chin and stroked her face with his hand, and she bit her lip to keep from screaming. He grabbed her long blond hair and pulled it back. She closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, the world was dark.
4
NAIROBI, KENYA
The Airbus 340 set down onto the tarmac and stopped so smoothly that it hardly seemed to have been moving at all. “On behalf of your Virgin Atlantic flight crew, I welcome you to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Local time is 9:30 a.m., three hours ahead of GMT.” Nothing more. As if they’d flown four hundred miles instead of four thousand. English understatement hadn’t entirely disappeared.
The layover at Heathrow had proved a blessing of sorts, giving Wells time to catch up on the kidnappings, the Kenyan response, and the broader refugee crisis. The Kenyan Interior Ministry was blocking Western journalists from Dadaab. Wells wondered whether the government in Nairobi wanted to hide how much it was doing to find the hostages—or how little.
Either way, the police had placed checkpoints around the camps and the roads that led to Dadaab. According to the media reports, the police were detaining any white person who didn’t have permits from national police headquarters and the Kenyan Department of Refugee Affairs. As far as Wells could tell, the lockdown had succeeded. He’d seen no articles written directly from Dadaab.
Years before, Wells might have found a driver willing to hide him and race to Dadaab straight from the airport. But these days he made the police his enemy only if he had no other choice. Especially here, where he had no on-the-ground knowledge and couldn’t blend in. Getting caught at a roadblock and returned to Nairobi for deportation would be anything but heroic. So Wells planned to spend the day persuading government officials to give him the permits he needed. By persuading, he meant bribing.
Wells looked out the jet’s narrow window, shielding his eyes from the equatorial sun. He felt an unexpected anticipation. For all his years living outside the United States, he’d seen little of Africa. The closest he’d come was Cairo, which was two thousand miles north, and more Arab than African. And the simplicity of this mission pleased him. Get them out.
If getting them out meant making a deal . . . Wells would decide when the moment arrived. The United States government claimed it never negotiated with hostage-takers, that payoffs only led to more kidnappings in the future. But Wells wasn’t working for the government. If he felt a ransom was the only way to save the lives of the hostages, he’d probably agree. Even so, he wasn’t planning a payoff. The offer he expected to make went more along the lines of
His diplomatic passport carried him quickly through immigration. He slipped on his Ray-Bans and stepped outside the terminal to find a sunny day, cooler and more pleasant than he’d expected. Nairobi was about a mile above sea level, a fact that had proved crucial to its fortunes. The city hadn’t even existed before the late 1800s, when the British settled it as a depot for the railroad they were building from the Indian Ocean to Uganda. Its mild weather and lack of malaria-carrying mosquitoes appealed to Europeans and local tribesmen alike. Now Nairobi had four million residents and was the most important city in East Africa. But its deep poverty had made it one of the most violent and dangerous cities anywhere. Expatriates called it Nai-robbery.
Still, the taxi line belied the city’s fierce reputation. Cabs queued neatly at the curb. Wells slid into the front seat of the first. The driver was a skinny man who wore fingerless leather racing gloves, as if he were driving a Ferrari and not a gray four-cylinder Toyota.
“Where may I take you?” Because of the British occupation, Kenya’s public schools taught English. Nearly everyone in the country spoke some. A break for Wells.
“Anywhere I can buy a local cell.” Wells didn’t think the agency had a problem with him being here. But if Duto or someone else at Langley decided otherwise, Wells wanted the option of disappearing. Prepaid local phones were tougher for NSA to track than American numbers. Though not impossible, as more than one al-Qaeda operative had realized too late.
“A cell?”
Wells had forgotten. Only Americans called them cells. “A mobile phone. Then downtown.”
“To your hotel?”
“The Intercontinental,” Wells said, picking a name at random. “Let’s go.”
“Very good. Be sure to look to your left in a minute, sir. The giraffes are visiting.”
So even before the Toyota left the airport grounds, Wells saw his first African wildlife, a herd of giraffes munching contentedly on the open plains to the west. If he hadn’t known better, he would have wondered if they were animatronic props for tourists:
“How can they live so close to the city?”
“We have a national park that extends almost to the airport.”
As Wells watched, one of the giraffes loped away. Its first steps were uncertain, but stride by stride it gained speed until it galloped over the plain. The others followed. Wells wondered if the animals had sensed a threat or were taking flight preemptively.
Fifteen minutes later, Wells was the proud owner of two new handsets. Basic models with inch-square screens and twelve-button keypads. Nothing fancy, nothing with a GPS locator for the boys at Fort Meade to trace. Plus four different SIM cards, two each from Safaricom and Airtel, the main Kenyan carriers. The driver glanced at Wells as he clicked cards into handsets. “You collect phones?”
“What’s your name?” Wells liked the guy. The gloves hadn’t lied. He drove with an edge.
“Martin.”
“How much to hire you for the day, Martin?”
“Ten thousand shillings, sir. Plus petrol.” About $120, in a country where most people lived on a few dollars a day. Martin sounded like he couldn’t believe he was asking for it.
“Okay, ten thousand, good. Long as you drive fast. Get me where I’m going.”
“I can do that, sir. Thank you.”
