Acts of Faith

LOKI WAS A tight little world, and the news that he had quit spread with the swiftness of a flash-flood. He was happy to discover that he was still employable. Several NGOs offered him jobs; the UN flight coordinator—this was the man who had replaced Timmerman—asked if he would accept a position as his deputy. Fitzhugh did, the UN forgave him his past sins, and he moved into the UN compound.

He’d ended up where he’d begun, once more a soldier in the army of international beneficence, and what he felt was a first cousin to despair. When he looked back on the past three years of work and risk, he couldn’t see what difference he had made. Tara had been so right: Sudan was a land of illusions. He was reminded of the warning on side-view mirrors—CAUTION: OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. It was just the opposite in the mirror of Sudan. Whatever one’s object was—to end a famine, to bring peace, to heal the sick—it was farther away than it appeared, seemingly within one’s grasp but always beyond it.

Now he was the one who faxed Khartoum asking its approval for planes to land here or there. Not long ago he would have considered such work as tantamount to trafficking with the enemy; but he could no longer say with certainty who the enemy was. Knight flights on UN missions appeared on the daily list; he knew by the identification numbers who was flying the aircraft, and he would picture Douglas at high altitude, an unclouded conscience in unclouded air.

They bumped into each other now and then. Douglas was always pleasant. “Hey, Fitz, how are you doing,” he would say, as if nothing had passed between them. The man was amazing. He was like an actor who had become the role he was playing, but with this difference: The self-deception was not artful but as natural and unconscious as the feathers on the birds he observed. It was the absence of craft that granted him the power to deceive others. In his attractive costumes—the successful entrepreneur of aviation, the man of compassion, the crusading idealist—the murderer was invisible. So were the naked appetites and ambition that had driven him. And this was hidden, too: the derangement wrought by his faith in the rightness of his actions. He must have been persuaded that Wesley and Mary and Phyllis had betrayed the sacred cause—and him—and were therefore deserving of betrayal in turn. Deserving even of death. He had broken faith with the best that was in him and with the humanity he professed to serve. A malevolent voice had whispered a summons; he’d answered. Anyone who does not acknowledge the darkness in his nature will succumb to it. He will not take precautions against its prompting, nor recognize it when it calls.

The very sight of Douglas inspired in Fitzhugh a hunger to bring about a change in perceptions, to strip him bare so all could see him for what he was and Douglas could see himself in a clear light. Sometimes at night, gazing at the posters of his patron saints, Mandela, Malcolm, and Marley, he heard the souls of the dead crying out for justice. Tara haunted him most of all. Her cries were the loudest, as if the others had appointed that incorruptible woman to speak for them. You haven’t done enough, she admonished. It wasn’t enough merely to have refused his bribe and quit his side. If you were an accomplice before, you are now an accessory after the fact, harboring a fugitive in your silence and inaction.

Her appeals grew more frequent and strident. Once, over the conversations in the flight coordinator’s office, over the hum of fax machines and printers and the click of keyboards, he heard her in the middle of the day, her voice so clear it was almost an auditory hallucination. And that night, as he lay alone in his blue and white bungalow, she visited him again and he answered her aloud. “What do you expect me to do? This is Africa, Tara, where justice is as rare as ice.” He didn’t expect an answer and was shocked when he heard one: And where God and the Devil are one and the same.

A CNN correspondent named Peacock approached him one day at lunch. He said he had replaced Phyllis Rappaport and that the network had decided to pay tribute to their fallen correspondent by completing the story she’d been working on. That was proving difficult. She hadn’t informed the foreign news editor what it was about. Apparently she’d been waiting till she had it wrapped up. Most of her notes had been on the plane with her, but she had left some other background material in the office, and it was from these fragments that he was trying to piece the story together.

“That is where you got my name?” Fitzhugh asked.

It was, replied Peacock, a fortyish man with thick, dark hair and the complexion of a nightclub singer. Among the items Phyllis had kept in her office were four videotapes and some photographs. He needed someone to identify the people in them and answer some questions. Fitzhugh suggested he speak to Douglas Braithwaite. The reporter said he had, but Mr. Braithwaite did not want to cooperate.

Here was a difference he could make. He could bring it all out into the disinfecting sunlight. But would the possible outcome—Douglas’s ruination—quiet Tara’s voice? Would it satisfy her? He didn’t think so. Where God and the Devil are one and the same. Suddenly, there in the UN mess, his course of action was made plain to him. It would require him to make another compromise. If he could presume to call obtaining justice for those six souls God’s work, he would have to ask the Devil’s help.

“Give me your card,” he said to the reporter. “I can’t help you right now. Possibly later.”

The next day he asked his boss if he could take a few “personal days” to go to Nairobi to attend to some personal business.

 

SILENT AS A shadow, the Somali servant came in with a tray of tea and scones. Diana occupied one of the green leather armchairs, beneath the Masai spears and shield, her legs crossed and her hands locked over the knee.

“So what brings you here? Visiting us parasites?” she said.

“I cannot tell you how sorry I am I ever said that. I hope someday you can forgive me.”

“I forgave you some time ago. It’s the forgetting part that’s hard.” He watched her hands, with the testimony of bluish veins that her face and hair and body belied, pick up a scone, slice it in two, and methodically spread jam on each half. Leaning forward, she passed one to him. “But I have to say it is nice to see you. Please, please don’t make too much of that.”

“I won’t,” he said, although he was happy to hear it, happy, indeed amazed, that she had even let him in.

“You seem a bit tense. It must be awkward, your coming here.”

“Awkward? No, it isn’t for me if it isn’t for you. There is something I’ve been keeping to myself and I can’t stand it anymore. It’s driving me crazy. I’m”—he laughed nervously—“I’m hearing voices. Not with these”—touching an ear—“but in here, inside my head.”

She looked down contemplatively and rubbed a stain in the knees of her jodhpurs. “Voices?”

“Tara’s most of all. You see, I believe . . . no, I am virtually certain . . . how hard it is to actually say this to someone else . . . she was murdered.”

She made no reply and reached into the magazine rack beside her chair for a stack of old newspapers, which she placed on the tea table. The topmost was a copy of the Nation, the headlines decked.

LEGENDARY PILOT BELIEVED DEAD IN SUDAN

ONE AMERICAN, TWO KENYANS ALSO ABOARD

AIRCRAFT DOWN IN NUBA MOUNTAINS

SEARCH PLANE WITH TWO CREW MEMBERS MISSING

“Of course she was murdered. The Sudanese army pulled the triggers, but that isn’t what killed her, and you know what I’m saying.”

“Yes. I’ve been through that with Pamela. I’ve been through it with myself.”

“Khartoum has been making threats for years. They finally made good on it, and I’m just so sorry, so damned sorry it had to be her,” Diana said. He wanted to draw closer to her but was restrained by the stiffness of her posture, a certain frigidity in her manner. “Four kids, two still at university. Maybe she shouldn’t have gone on with such a risky way of making a living, but then, she didn’t have much choice.”

“Diana, I am not talking figuratively. I mean that she was really murdered. She wasn’t the intended victim, that reporter was. Phyllis was murdered, her camera crew were murdered. Wesley and Mary were murdered. By Douglas and another man you don’t know, Tony Bollichek.”

She tilted her chin and jerked her head back, as if from a foul smell. “That bears some explaining.”

That is what he did for the next half hour, interrupted once by a phone call—Diana was invited to a party—and by her questions. When he was finished, he asked what she thought, and she replied that she thought he sounded like a lawyer on closing arguments.

“Does it hold together? Does it make sense?”

“It does—to me. But all there is in it is proof that Doug is a pathological liar. If you brought it to a prosecutor, he would laugh you out of his office.”

“I have no intention of bringing it to a prosecutor. I never did. But I am going to do something.”

“Shouldn’t you wait till that crash investigation is over? You would have something more solid then.”

“That could take weeks, possibly months.”

She glanced outside, at bougainvillea spilling its red and purple over the garden wall, at the late light spilling over the Ngong hills. “I am so glad you’re quit of that man. That you confronted him and stood up to him, for once. And I admire your self-control. If it had been me, I believe I would have clawed his eyes out. How does one come to the point he did?”

“Greed, believing in something too deeply, but in the end . . . there is something missing in him. He lacks a moral imagination when it comes to himself. He’s so certain of his inner virtue that he believes anything he does, even something this terrible, is the right thing. Am I making myself clear? The man cannot imagine himself doing anything wrong. It’s a blindness. He can’t see his own demons because he doesn’t think they exist, and so he’s fallen prey to them.”

“I don’t think he knows how to love,” she said. “People who can’t love are capable of most anything.”

“People have been known to do terrible things for love,” he said. “To kill for it.”

“That isn’t love. It’s obsession.”

She gave him a searching look and asked if he would like to stay to dinner. Of course he would. He was not to take that as an invitation to anything more. He would not. She went into the kitchen to give instructions to the cook and returned with two scotches.

“What are you going to do, then?” she asked.

“I am going to see Adid.”

“Adid? What can he possibly do?”

“We’ll see. I think he can . . .” He paused as the servant made another of his infiltrations, picked up the tray with the tea things, and drifted out. “I think he can help me to stop the voices.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand you.”

“I prefer to keep it to myself for now. He is in Tsavo at the moment, at the Tsavo West safari lodge. Some Chinese firm has got a contract to improve the highway between the park and Mombasa. Hassan is involved in the project—he’s meeting with the Chinese and the minister of tourism down there. I’m going to see him tomorrow.”

“How are you getting there?”

“I’ve hired a car. A damned long drive, but cheaper than chartering a plane.”

“I could loan you my Land Rover and the driver. That would make it cheaper still. On condition though—that I go with you.”

This was startling. He wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“I would like to be part of whatever it is you’re going to do,” she said “For Tara’s sake.”

“This has to be between me and Hassan alone.”

“I understand that. I would be happy to hang about the pool or whatever till you’re done.” She paused to set her drink down with a firm tap, then came to the sofa and stood over him. “Damn you, I love seeing you again, in spite of myself.” She flipped her hair, bent down, and gave him a brief kiss. “I want to go for my sake, too.”



 

God and the Devil

IN WESTERN TSAVO, in the shadow of the Chyulu hills, lie vast lava beds that in the supremacy of their ugliness attain a kind of beauty: lakes and fjords of black igneous rock, overlooked by flinty ridges in which a few trees or shrubs have taken root, spread over hundreds of acres. The eruption that created this lava landscape occurred a mere two hundred years ago, but the Taita people who inhabited the region experienced the awe and suffered the terrors that mankind’s primitive ancestors did when the world was in its boisterous, violent adolescence: an entire mountain exploding, the molten guts of the earth rushing in torrents to incinerate villages, farms, livestock, wild beasts, and human beings, and then, as the blazing rivers cooled and congealed, to entomb the victims under tons of rock edged as sharp as arrows. The survivors, touched by the hand that makes the earth tremble and the hills to breathe fire, gave a Swahili name to this place, and it persists among their descendants: Shetani, which is derived from Al-Shaitan, the Arabic mother of the English word Satan.

This was Fitzhugh’s destination when he picked up Hassan Adid in the afternoon, after Adid had finished his meetings. During the drive to the lava fields, Fitzhugh stated that Douglas was embezzling from the company, at times skimming as much as $36,000 in a single week. He wasn’t careful to cover his tracks, but had left a trail a child could follow in the form of wire transfers to a numbered account in Switzerland.

Adid was silent. Fitzhugh said, “I thought you should know.”

“I am aware of Douglas’s activities,” Adid grumbled.

Fitzhugh had suspected as much—and more—but pretended to be surprised.

“So these—may I call them withdrawals?—are authorized? They have your approval?”

“My friend, you should watch the questions you ask,” Adid remarked, or threatened, then fell into another silence.

A few minutes later, he let out a laugh and admitted that he’d known about “Douglas’s activities” for quite some time. He’d uncovered them months ago, before the meeting in Lokichokio, the one at which he’d suggested that the company hire Timmerman as marketing manager. To prepare for the meeting, he’d examined Knight Air’s bank records, having persuaded the manager that, as the airline’s principal investor, he was entitled to review them. At the time, Douglas had raked off almost a hundred thousand dollars and had been even less cautious than he was now, transferring the money to an account in his name in a Channel Islands bank. Adid kept his discovery to himself. His instincts told him it was like a cash reserve, to be held until the time was right to put it to use. That time came when he decided to make his move and bring the airline into the fold of his conglomerate. He confronted Douglas with what he’d found.

“He was most nervous, terrified as a matter of fact,” Adid continued. “I reminded him that embezzlement was a crime even in Kenya.” Another laugh. “One phone call to my friends in the Justice Ministry and he would be in very deep trouble. My friend—” he was addressing Fitzhugh directly—“do you recall what I said at our cordial dinner? I don’t care who a man lies to as long as it is not to me. Embezzlement is a form of lying. Douglas assured me the money was not for his personal gain, oh my, no. He had some idea about opening a chain of coffee shops, and was going to consult me about it when he thought he had sufficient capital.”

“Yes, the coffee shops,” Fitzhugh interjected. “He told me about that notion a long time ago. Everyone would benefit.”

“Of course. Our American friend is concerned about bringing the greatest benefits to the greatest number. I was not interested in selling coffee. I told him I wished to acquire Knight Air and with it take one hundred percent of the aid market in Sudan and as much of the market elsewhere as we could get.” Adid was so absorbed in his reverie that he gave not one glance to the magnificent scenery, or to the herds of elephant and zebra in the distance, to the pride of lions lazing in the yellow grass a hundred meters from the road. “But I had no intention of paying full price, and presented my plan. Douglas could help me implement it or he could refuse, which would have certain consequences.”

“So you blackmailed him into staging that charade,” Fitzhugh said.

“I convinced him, my friend. I also convinced him to take his name off the account in the Channel Islands and move his money to a numbered account in Switzerland.”

“Which I would think has become a joint account, yes?”

Adid laughed again. “I have no comment.”

No one but the Somali would have confessed so freely to being a swindler and a blackmailer—he was bulletproof. His revelations were the product of his vanity; he was proud of his jujitsu, flipping Douglas’s greed to satisfy his own. But Fitzhugh saw how he could do a little jujitsu himself and use Adid’s admissions to further his plan.

“The money that’s going to Switzerland—do you know where it comes from?”

“Of course I do,” Adid replied.

“I don’t think so.”

Now it was time for Fitzhugh to make a confession, the confession he had wanted Douglas to make. Yellowbird, Busy Beaver, the real story that Phyllis Rappaport had been pursuing—he told him everything, omitting only his belief that Douglas had murdered her and the others. He assumed Adid would draw that conclusion on his own, which he did.

“You don’t care who a man lies to as long as it’s not to you? Our American friend has been lying to you for months, and he still is.”

“You were a part of it as well,” Adid remarked with a sour expression. It wasn’t only the fact that he’d been lied to for so long; it was that he’d been deceived by people he regarded as rank amateurs. His pride was hurt. “And now that you are no longer employed by Knight, you feel safe in informing.”

“I don’t think of it as informing.”

“However you may think of it, that is what it is, although I appreciate it. Very much appreciate it. As soon as I am back in Nairobi—and that will be day after tomorrow—I will tell that fool that he is through. Halas, finished.”

“Yes, you will do that,” Fitzhugh said, “but not the day after tomorrow.”

The Shetani beds came into view. Stopping the Land Rover, Fitzhugh stood on the running board and, in the tones of an enthusiastic tour guide, described the event that had brought them into being. Adid, baffled by the digression, grimaced at the desolation and asked, “Does this bear on what we were talking about?”

“It does in a way.” Fitzhugh got back behind the wheel and drove on, past jagged escarpments honeycombed with caves. “If you listen to my proposal, you will be rid of that fool and spare yourself a lot of trouble.”

“What trouble?”

“The trouble I will cause if you don’t listen to it.”

“You have a great deal of nerve speaking to me in that manner. You sound like an extortionist.”

“I admit it, that is what I am,” Fitzhugh said, stopping again. “Hassan, you are the president of a company that is profiting from gunrunning. Money from gunrunning is being funneled to a Swiss bank account that I am sure has your name on it.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Yes, I would. I was visited by a CNN correspondent not long ago, Phyllis’s replacement. He has seen the videotapes, the photographs, the notes she left behind. It’s only a matter of time before he adds things up and comes to the same conclusion you and I have. Do I need to tell you the trouble that will cause you? And what if he finds out about that Swiss account and the source of its funds? What if he finds out—I know this, Hassan—that you and your father once were suspected of sabotaging Richard Leakey’s plane? Yes, I can accelerate things by going to him with everything I know, and that I will do unless you listen to me.”

The twin black holes in Adid’s head turned toward Fitzhugh.

“Hassan, I am aware how easy it would be for you to see that I meet with an accident. You had better make the arrangements immediately, because I will be there tomorrow.”

“What is in this for you? Who is paying you?”

“What is in it for me?” Fitzhugh pointed to a crude ladder, leaning against an outcrop under the mouth of a shallow cave. “Do you see that? The Taita who live here climb it to leave food offerings for those who were buried under all that lava. It is said that their souls cry out on certain nights, and that they must be appeased or they will bring down on the living the evil that befell them. What made this? A wrathful god or a destructive demon? Both. This Shetani is a place of evil, yet it is sacred also. It is feared and revered. It is a kind of church where the God who is Devil and the Devil who is God is worshipped.”

“I have no patience for this nonsense,” Adid muttered.

“Souls cry out to me,” Fitzhugh said. “The souls of those six dead people. They won’t let me sleep at night until they are appeased. That is what’s in it for me—nothing more than a decent night’s sleep.”

“I am not going to listen to this anymore. Turn around.”

Fitzhugh released the parking brake but did not turn around; he continued on, climbing the road to the crest of a pass from which they could see, far across the oceanic sweep of the Serengeti plains, the stupendous mass of Kilimanjaro. The clouds that normally veiled its peak had lifted, and the snow and ice mantling the great mountain glared in the sun.

“Look!” Fitzhugh said, braking to another stop. “Ice on the equator! Ice in the heart of Africa! A rare thing—like justice.”

Adid looked as if he were about to jump out and go back on foot. A Cape Buffalo bull, staring balefully from under its massive horns, gave him second thoughts.

“The souls cry out to me for justice,” Fitzhugh carried on. “That’s how I can appease them. Not a perfect justice, which would be to see Douglas hang. A partial justice. An African justice. They will settle for half a loaf, and so will I.”

“You have gone mad, have you not?” Adid said. “But I will humor the madman.”

“Yes! You are something of a devil, Hassan, but a minor devil compared with our American friend. And I seek your help in delivering justice. Do your old friend the Ambler a service. Help him to sleep at night.”

“But I cannot humor the madman for much longer.”

“You said you do business in Khartoum. Do you know people in the government?”

“You cannot do business in Khartoum without knowing people in the government,” Adid said, speaking as he would to a child.

“And these are highly placed people?”

“I have had dinner with the president. I call the first vice-president by his first name.”

“Then you must go to Khartoum as soon as you can, and you will tell your acquaintances that you and I are going to give them a big propaganda victory, one they have been looking for. You will ask them for one concession, that there be no bloodshed. In fact, they will see that it is to their advantage not to shed any blood.”

Adid squeezed his eyes half shut. “What are you proposing?”

And there, far out in a wilderness, while looking at the grasslands reaching away and away toward the high white fire of Kilimanjaro, Fitzhugh presented his plan. When he was finished, Adid looked stunned.

“That is going to spare me trouble?” he asked with incredulous laughter. “It will cause me nothing but trouble.”

“But not near so much trouble as a story on CNN will cause. Think of the attention that will focus on you. But this—can we call it the lesser of two evils? By the time Douglas and Tony are in safe hands, you will have already done the preliminary work for dissolving Knight Relief Services and forming a new company. Let’s call it SkyTrain Relief Services. You will announce that you discovered that your managing director was engaged in gunrunning and had pulled the mask over your eyes and that you were about to dismiss him when, how amazing, he and his copilot were caught in the act. I don’t doubt that CNN will move very quickly to say that their reporter was working on just such a story when she met her untimely death. They will raise the question, Was she murdered? But by that time you and the company will be in the clear.”

Adid rubbed his forehead and said nothing.

“For someone who made millions selling poached ivory, this should not be a big problem.”

“I regret that day the three of you appeared in my office, you, Wesley Dare, and that fool,” Adid said.

“I am trying to make it less regretful.”

Adid presented a faint, rueful smile. “I am going to require you to teach my son to play soccer. I wish him to be the star of his club.”

“It would be a pleasure, Hassan.”

“Back to the lodge, please. I would like a swim before dinner.”

 

FITZHUGH BELIEVED HIS threat wasn’t all that had moved Adid to join in his plot. He wanted his own justice as well: to show Douglas that the cost of deceiving him could be very high indeed.

“My friends await your news,” read Adid’s fax from Khartoum. For the next several days Fitzhugh checked the flight plans filed with Loki tower—as assistant flight coordinator, he was authorized to see them. Finally he spotted the one he was looking for. The name BUSY BEAVER was written in the block where the air operator was identified. That and the crew’s names—D. Braithwaite, T. Bollichek—were the only accurate information on the form.

Returning to the flight office, he sent a fax to the same number in Khartoum to which he transmitted the UN’s daily flight plans. If Adid’s “friends” had done their job, the people at the other end of the line would be on the lookout for a special message from Fitzhugh. Suffering a bout of anxiousness and guilt—for all practical purposes, he was now an agent of the government of Sudan—he sent the identification numbers of Douglas’s plane, the type of aircraft, and what he knew would be its true destination—New Tourom—then tore up his copy of the fax.

Someone somewhere in Khartoum slipped up—Douglas and Tony returned safely that afternoon. A week later they took off at eight in the morning on another mission. Fitzhugh again alerted Khartoum, and this time succeeded. By noon, the news had been flashed all over Loki: The control tower had received an emergency call from Busy Beaver flight number such and such. It had been intercepted by Sudanese MIGs and was being escorted to an air force base. How desperate Douglas must have been to send the Mayday. Fitzhugh could only imagine what had gone through his mind when he saw the fighter planes appear outside his cockpit window.

The official announcement came within forty-eight hours. SUNA, the government news agency, reported that a plane carrying mortars and shoulder-fired missiles had been captured after it violated Sudanese airspace over the Nuba mountains. The two-man crew, one American and one Australian, had been taken prisoner and admitted to authorities they were delivering the weapons to the SPLA. Furthermore, they confessed they had been shipping arms to the rebels for several months, using the delivery of humanitarian aid to conceal their “criminal activities.” Khartoum distributed films and photographs of the aircraft as it landed at the air force base, of the cargo as it was off-loaded by Sudanese security men, and of Douglas and Tony being led away at gunpoint to a waiting police van. With a throng of aid workers and pilots, Fitzhugh watched the footage on satellite TV. A mob of emotions rioted inside him, but he didn’t feel the vindication he’d expected.

Khartoum did its utmost to exploit its propaganda coup. The seizure of the plane and its contraband proved that the United Nations relief operation was merely a front to channel aid to the rebels, et cetera, et cetera. The government summoned the UN’s assistant secretary of humanitarian affairs and demanded that the UN move its operations into Sudan from Lokichokio. He refused. Khartoum retaliated by expanding its aid embargo, forbidding UN planes to land at previously authorized airfields. After a month of difficult negotiations, the government relented, but Fitzhugh wondered how many innocent people had suffered during that month. Another unintended consequence in the Land of Unintended Consequences. In Sudan, no matter what you did in the name of right, wrong inevitably resulted.

The Sudanese turned their criticisms toward Kenya, for allowing “criminals and bandits” to operate from its territory. In the interests of maintaining good relations with its neighbor, Kenya ordered the Department of Civil Aviation to revoke Knight Relief Services’ air operator’s certificate. This was a purely cosmetic gesture. Adid, after calling a press conference to express his profound shock upon discovering that his managing director was smuggling arms, had already dissolved the company. SkyTrain Relief Services had come into being.

Nothing was heard of Douglas and Tony until, four months after their capture, SUNA announced that they had been tried by an Islamic court and sentenced to death. The American State Department and the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had little sympathy for the plight of their reckless citizens, made pro forma appeals for clemency. These were answered. Sharia, the Islamic legal code, was not incapable of mercy. The death sentence was commuted to ten years’ imprisonment, and the prison sentence suspended. Douglas and Tony were set free and expelled from the country.

That, however, was not the end of their ordeal, for while they were locked up, Phyllis Rappaport’s successor, the man named Peacock, had been pursuing his investigation into the circumstances surrounding her death. Having learned from Pamela Smyth that Wesley was supposed to have been Phyllis’s pilot, he paid Fitzhugh another call. Things were looking curiouser and curiouser, he said. Fitzhugh agreed and, released from his pledge to Adid not to speak to the press, filled in the blanks—with facts, not his suppositions. The story that aired on CNN, complete with excerpts from the videotapes, made no accusations, but it raised the question of whether Phyllis’s death was accidental.

The network called on the U.S. Embassy to pressure the “proper authorities” to look into the matter. Thus the story was kept alive—KENYA TO INVESTIGATE U.S. JOURNALIST’S DEATH, read the headline in the Nation. It wasn’t a case that CID was eager to get involved in, but the media and the Americans had to be mollified. Two CID men visited Fitzhugh in Loki. As in his interview with Peacock, he told them all he knew but nothing of what he believed. What he knew was sufficient. When Sudan announced that Douglas and Tony were being thrown out of the country, Kenya requested their extradition to Nairobi for questioning in a possible case of multiple homicide.

Accordingly, CID met them at Jomo Kenyatta, along with the American and Australian consuls, and brought them to Central Police Headquarters. In the meantime, however, the air crash investigators issued their report. It contained a number of findings and opinions, but only two mattered. Finding: analysis of fuel samples had disclosed the presence of water, but how it had gotten into the fuel system had not been ascertained. Opinion: the crew had performed their preflight checks improperly, failing to drain the tanks before takeoff. In so many words, the crash could be blamed on pilot error. Douglas and Tony were home free. To Fitzhugh, who had been following the case in the papers and on TV, the rest of the script was obvious. The two men would be put through a casual interrogation; the police would conclude that there was insufficient evidence to make a case and let them go. Douglas, however, did not follow the script. He did a remarkable and wholly unexpected thing—he confessed. Confessed to everything.

This created an awkward situation that no one wanted but that they could not avoid. The case had to be referred to the courts. Fitzhugh, relieved to hear his suspicions confirmed at last but also mystified as to what had moved a compulsive liar to speak a self-incriminating truth, attended the hearing. Before a robed magistrate, Douglas and Tony stood in the dock, wearing grimy jailbird dungarees. Tony’s lawyer stated that his client pled not guilty and asked that the charges be dropped. The sole evidence against him was Mr. Braithwaite’s statement that he had instructed Mr. Bollichek to sabotage the aircraft. The accused categorically denied that he had ever received any such instructions and would have refused to carry them out if he had. The only other evidence in the case, said the lawyer, was the air crash investigation report—he waved it at the magistrate—and blamed the crash on the crew’s sloppy preflight procedures. The magistrate turned to the prosecutor. Did he intend to produce any witnesses who had seen the accused tampering with the plane in question? No. Did he intend to produce any physical evidence to show the same? No. Then, said the Man of Justice from his bench, he saw no point in proceeding any further. The charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder against Mr. Bollichek are dismissed.

Douglas’s lawyer was next. He said that his client had endured a great deal in the Sudanese prison and had not been in full command of his senses when he made the confession. Does he wish to withdraw it? asked the magistrate. No. Does he wish to amend it? No. In other words, your client is not willing to say he had instructed someone other than Mr. Bollichek to sabotage the aircraft? Correct. And he is not willing to state that he had done the dirty work himself? Correct. The Man of Justice: In his statement, your client said that he and one Michael Goraende, an officer in the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, made a plan to shoot down the plane in the event the alleged sabotage failed to accomplish its purpose. Did any of these conversations take place in Kenya? No. The magistrate returned to the prosecutor. Any witnesses to be called, any evidence to be produced contradicting what was just said? None whatsoever. Then, declared the magistrate, he could see no point in proceeding in the case against Mr. Braithwaite, his confession notwithstanding. It was, ruled the magistrate, an invalid extra-judicial confession, unsupported by witnesses or evidence in the matter of the alleged sabotage of the Hawker-Siddley aircraft and in the alleged conspiracy between Mr. Braithwaite and Colonel Goraende. Moreover, any conversations the accused had with Colonel Goraende, if they took place at all, occurred in Sudan, as did the downing of the Cessna aircraft. Kenya had no jurisdiction.

It was over in thirty minutes. The two defendants were released from custody. CNN would howl “Whitewash!” Kenya would say it had done its duty. As he limped from the courtroom—he had been beaten on the soles of his feet during his incarceration in Sudan—Douglas noticed Fitzhugh sitting in the courtroom. The American’s face and body were testaments to what he’d been through: famine-thin, his shoulders slumped, his sockets bruised caverns for those pearlescent eyes with their gleam of an artificial sincerity. They fastened on Fitzhugh for an instant, an instant and no more, as if he were the only person in the room. He could not read what was in them. Douglas hobbled through the door. It was the last Fitzhugh ever saw of him. The next day the Ministry of Interior, taking note that he had smuggled arms from Kenyan soil, ordered him out of the country. Douglas Braithwaite left Africa with little more than the clothes he wore, the failure he had always dreaded becoming.

That and his torments in prison would have to do for justice, Fitzhugh thought. An African justice. He wondered if the arraignment had been a rigged game. If so, why the confession? What purpose could it have served? He knew only what he wanted to believe: that four months in a Khartoum “ghost house” had concentrated, not the American’s mind, but his soul. He wanted to believe that Douglas had been visited in his prison cell. The demon-deity of Africa had come to him, shredded the costumes he wore, held a mirror to his naked self, and said, “Behold! This is what you are!” The image appalled him, and he’d acknowledged his crime; and in that lay a redemption of sorts.