White Bone Read online

  Guuleed shut his eyes. He saw his wife’s face, her bare breast suckling their firstborn. He saw all six of his children, gathered outside their modest farmhouse in fierce, slanting light, ready to visit the musalla. He saw charcoal pits and ladders rising up the rust-crusted hulls of vessels toward blue sky. Grieving women wailing over husbands stolen from their homes by government troops. All these things in a moment, all part of him and unshakable. He was who he was and only Allah would judge him. Not some Chinese prick. He expected divine providence. If he allowed his family to be wiped out, he would be looking at hell and eternal damnation.

  Nothing short of forever was now at stake.

  • • •

  The concrete block structure, one of four nearly identical buildings lining a small-business complex cul-de-sac off Jogoo Road, southeast of downtown Nairobi, reminded Guuleed of a school or a prison, the two not being terribly different in his mind. A few cars were parked in the dirt circle.

  Guuleed stood before the office building door, feet firmly planted. What to expect? The Chinese egomaniac could be in trouble, might need Guuleed’s muscle and be willing to negotiate down the sentence on his family. He clearly wanted to discuss something he considered too sensitive for even the satellite phones, which was stupid, Guuleed thought. No one could listen in on a scrambled satellite phone.

  Whatever the man’s motives, Guuleed would have preferred not to know them. He walked past a Chinese man nearly as large as himself in the lobby. Another two in the hallway outside the office door. It looked like a former doctor’s or dentist’s office. No furniture or artwork in the waiting area. The reception desk was manned by a guy holding an AK-47. Guuleed was frisked and lightened of a Glock semiauto 9mm, three ammo magazines, a U.S. Navy–issue knife and a garrote.

  Guuleed found their silence disturbing. He wanted to get on with it. He wanted this over.

  In the unremarkable office, Xin Ha moved out from behind a desk crowded with paperwork. He was thin and taut, his age difficult to judge. North of thirty, south of fifty. He wore his oily black hair too long, but his eyes were tough, black.

  The man had risen to great power in Mombasa. He controlled most of the port, had enough political leverage to remain untouchable, and an insatiable hunger for more. Poached horn and ivory went north into Somalia or south to Mombasa. Drugs and young women flowed in the other direction; no container, no truck ever ran empty.

  Now Xin had moved to Nairobi to appear more legitimate, but most knew he continued to run the port. He was said to refer to himself as the CEO of Kenya, his ego knowing no bounds.

  He walked up to Guuleed and appraised him like a man at the racetrack deciding how much to gamble on a horse. Nose in the air. Lips pursed.

  “I dislike rumors, don’t you?” he began. Guuleed hadn’t prepared for such inclusion. He’d felt a lecture coming, a berating was more like it. Why ask for face-to-face and take a collegial attitude? The man had promised—not threatened but promised—to slaughter his family! “I have taken on too much, perhaps. We lose patience when we’re pressured, don’t we?” He backed up two steps and took a wider view of Guuleed. “Tell me about the woman.”

  “It has been handled. It will look like an accident. A tourist abandoned in the bush. It’s over.”

  “That’s good. Better than I thought, at least. Well done.”

  Guuleed knew Xin Ha primarily by reputation. He didn’t offer compliments. There was threat and menace couched in every word.

  “You understand the shortfall she caused us?”

  “I had nothing to do with that.” He said it all wrong, regretted his words immediately. A man of action, talk had not been his forte.

  “Is that so? My mistake, not yours? It’s not your man who reports such people? She was inside my company’s computers. Do you understand the gravity of this?”

  “He’s not my man. He’s freelance. It’s true, he reports to me, but—”

  “My point, exactly.” Xin Ha sat casually on the edge of his desk. “And did he report to you?”

  “I get a dozen such reports a week. Twice that in tourist season.”

  “You ignored his report about the woman.”

  Guuleed searched for a way to deflect the accusation.

  “She caused my investors to panic. Do you understand the cost of closing the clinic? Hmm?” He smiled, the look prohibitively sweet. “I think not. A very dear cost to you if you don’t rectify the situation, to be sure. Please, do not think for a moment I enjoy any of this. A man’s family? It’s horrible! I detest even the thought of it. But examples must be made, hmm? I’m willing to bet you make such examples to your men as well. We each have a cross to bear.”

  He was staring in the area of Guuleed’s collarbone, as if unwilling to make eye contact. With a huge effort, Guuleed forced his body to stay still.

  “You’re thinking we could have done this by phone. Hmm? And you would be right, except for the rumor I referred to earlier. Do you know the rumor that is troubling me?”

  “No,” Guuleed admitted. He’d anticipated a different man, a different conversation altogether. A one-way conversation. “You know what’s troubling me? Your threatening my family.”

  Xin Ha failed to react; it was as if he hadn’t heard Guuleed. “First, this American!”

  “We are taking care of him. A visa problem. He is being deported. He’s not your concern.”

  The man might have nodded; he sucked through his teeth. “Second . . .” He began moving around the room in no particular pattern. Guuleed never took his eyes off him. “There is a rumor, a trustworthy source, that private drones have been deployed.”

  Guuleed’s bowels went to water.

  “That mess with the hunting of the lion last month. Bleeding hearts to the rescue! An American donated at least three drones! They can see through cloud, read your wristwatch. They carry photo and radio surveillance into formerly unreachable places. On top of the drones, surveillance may now include mobile phones, possibly satellite phones. Do you understand why you’re here in person?”

  “From the sky we look like any other safari base camp. We are registered as a business. We know what we’re doing.”

  “If a single automatic weapon is photographed . . . a grenade belt . . . a box of ammunition . . . a scope. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You will break camp. Relocate. Your existence depends upon it. Your family’s existence depends upon it.” His pallid skin turned a dismal pink when flushed. “You must make up for my losses. Do you see what you’ve done? How many you have put at risk?”

  Guuleed wondered if he killed the man right here—regardless of how quickly the man’s guards would kill him—might his family be saved?

  Xin Ha lunged toward him and Guuleed flinched, something he never did, something that left him feeling ashamed, humiliated. Xin Ha laughed in his face. Guuleed forced the lid down to contain his temper.

  “Out!” Xin Ha said, finally meeting eyes with him.

  13

  Mr. Knox, it’s the front desk. Just a reminder, sir, of your four P.M. departure to Kibera.”

  Knox checked the room’s clock radio: 16:05. Knox felt the floor shift beneath him. “I didn’t—” He caught himself. He hadn’t ordered a car to Kibera, wherever that was.

  “The tour of Kibera. You signed up with the concierge.”

  He knew the name now. Kibera, one of the world’s largest slums. He hadn’t signed up for anything. Had Winston signed him up? Dulwich?

  “Is there a problem?” asked the concierge.

  Or maybe the damn kid from the airport was trying to play tour guide.

  “Right. Sorry, I fell asleep. Give me a minute. I’ll be right down.” It didn’t escape him that an arranged trip, one he had not signed up for, could well be a trap. But staging an abduction while he was in the company of other hotel guests
had to be the lamest idea he’d ever heard. Knox checked for messages on both phone numbers he carried, switching out the SIM cards and restarting his phone. Nothing.

  Moving through the lobby, he made note of everyone he saw, including a husband and wife in the gift shop. Nothing out of the ordinary, not that he found that reassuring. He was unlikely to spot a true professional.

  Outside, flags hung, lifeless, in the painfully hot exhaust-filled air. Taxis waited in a queue, drivers sharing smokes. Hotel guests came and went on foot, some asking questions of the various bellmen. The traffic was as bad as the night before.

  Approaching a white high-top van bearing a tour company logo, Knox remained on high alert for a possible attempt to grab him. His gut wrenched at the thought of Grace, coming down these same steps, facing this same street.

  The van held a half-dozen anxious-looking hotel guests. Knox spoke his name for the sake of the driver and ducked inside. He apologized to the others, crammed his legs in behind the passenger seat. A bellman slid the van’s side door shut, his eyes expressionless, his smile practiced.

  “Please enjoy,” he said.

  Knox studied the faces of his fellow passengers. A woman riding shotgun was using the visor mirror, attempting to rub the white of her sun cream away. Knox used the mirror, too; watched for anyone overly interested in him, anyone reaching for a phone. He scratched off his list the retired couple from Ohio who’d been outfitted by Orvis. The African slacker and his Princeton-semester-abroad redhead were too small and self-absorbed.

  He assessed the remaining three: solo travelers; a buttoned-up middle-aged woman who showed little joy; and two black businessmen, one in his thirties, the other twice that. Nothing registered. He smelled body odor and suntan lotion, cologne and perfume. He saw camera bag straps and sunglasses and water bottles, jet lag and anticipation and a lot of sweating.

  The guide turned out to be the woman Knox had taken for the joyless middle-aged traveler. In guide mode, she snapped into an all-too-cheery robo-caller voice, nasal, with a thick South African accent. Kibera had been created as a land gift for Nubian soldiers returning from war in 1904, she told them. Over a century of use and expansion had left a sea of corrugated metal huts, open drains and overcrowding. The government estimated the population at a tenth of its nearly million souls. She rattled off some do’s and don’ts. Don’t pay anyone to take their photo; don’t buy bottled water from the children, it’s street water; negotiate every sale; be respectful; remember nearly everyone speaks English and can understand what you’re saying.

  Their arrival drew hordes of kids, trying to sell them souvenirs or the aforementioned bottled water. The guide cut a path through them and led her flock ahead. The smell of open sewers carried on a light breeze. Several tour guests clasped handkerchiefs over their noses, a practice the guide discouraged.

  The large number of roaming children, like flights of winter birds, followed in waves, adding to Knox’s sense of tragedy. He hated being associated with an “edutainment” tour, of curiously inspecting a place where a bottle cap was currency.

  The guide led them down narrow lanes between open-stall stands that sold everything from trinkets to Coke. Other Kibera residents had set up souvenir stands on inverted crates, displaying craftwork made from recycled plastic, aluminum cans and bottle caps. The people were clean, as were their colorful clothes. Their smiles genuine. Houseflies outnumbered people a thousand to one.

  Knox kept track of the guide as she took a moment with a woman at a souvenir stand. He witnessed an exchange, the passing of a note along with money. It went the wrong direction for Knox’s taste, saleswoman-to-guide. He could have taken it as a payoff for the guide steering the tourists in this direction, but the look the guide gave Knox told him it involved him. Another surge of adrenaline. Knox had three exit strategies at the ready.

  As the guide herded the rest of the group to a larger shop across the hard-packed dirt, she blocked Knox with an extended arm. Knox stopped, every nerve sparking.

  “You, Mr. Knox, are certain to find this other shop the more interesting.”

  He told her he was in no mood for a sales pitch.

  “These particular goods are special. They are important to you, Mr. Knox. This shop is just for you.”

  “I don’t think so.” Knox could see himself outnumbered and pushed through the shop’s black plastic wall, carried deeper into Kibera. Into a van. Into a pit.

  The guide rose to her toes. “You must trust me.”

  “But I don’t,” Knox said. He rummaged through some of the craftwork laid out on a board supported by inverted milk crates, ready to run. Dried pieces of eggshells, reinvented as decorations. Paper litter, now sculpture; leopards, gorillas and chess sets made of discarded computer parts.

  “Please, mister,” said the stall’s bone-thin proprietor. He had drooping eyes and a pencil neck. “More in back.” He motioned Knox toward the plastic wall at the back. Knox didn’t move.

  “This was arranged for you,” the guide whispered.

  “I’ll bet it was.” Knox reached inside the Scottevest, the Mary Poppins bag of windbreakers. Inside its seventeen zippered pockets he carried everything from money to a switchblade, which he now palmed and hid up his right sleeve.

  He couldn’t blame the tour guide or hope to get anything out of her. She’d been paid to deliver him. The people behind such arrangements created multiple layers of self-protection.

  “You go first,” Knox said.

  “I must see to the group,” she said.

  “And you can. Right after you go through and hold open that sheet.” To his surprise, she didn’t quibble.

  “Very well.” She stepped forward.

  Knox grabbed the back of her shorts. She caught her breath. He held tightly, cinched the shorts into her crotch to remind her who was in control. He nudged her forward, watching the bottom of her short-cropped hairline. The neck was the tell-all of danger. As she drew the plastic sheet aside, the static electricity lifted her fine hairs. But her neck did not incriminate her. Knox glanced over her head to see a fashionably dressed, blue-jeaned African woman in her early to mid-thirties. His first guess was journalist. His second, lawyer. No wedding ring. Hands empty, she carried a messenger bag purse, slung at her side.

  The shack had walls assembled of junkyard materials but was sturdily built. The crate the woman sat on was immediately adjacent to someone’s former screen door, now blockaded by an improvised metal crossbar. At first blush, it appeared that the woman was being cautious about their security.

  “Leave us,” she said to the guide. She spoke with confidence, the tone of one in charge.

  Knox released his grip and the guide slipped around and past him. “We will not leave,” she told Knox. “You will find me and join us after. She knows where.”

  Knox swallowed dryly as he looked back at the mud-rutted lane. He propped open the plastic sheet in order to see out.

  Before him was a cramped, sour space: a mattress made of three garbage bags filled with Styrofoam peanuts. A tattered piece of a former green-and-white awning apparently served as a blanket. A wall of stacked cardboard boxes held everything from food to toiletries.

  He moved closer. The woman had baker’s-chocolate skin, haunting brown eyes and a nearly shaved head.

  “I am called Maya Vladistok,” she said.

  “I left you a phone message.” She’d been on Winston’s list.

  “Indeed. And I am answering that message.”

  The two shook hands—hers were callused, with short nails. Knox angled a remaining plastic tub to allow him a view of the woman, the screen door and a sight line through the open plastic sheet.

  “Please pardon the theatrics. Necessary, I’m afraid. I am no friend of this current government, nor do I trust the hotels. As to my name, my father was Russian. My mother Kenyan. So that’s out of the way.” />
  “Understood.” It was the second time politics had been mentioned in the past few hours.

  Vladistok appraised him. “You will be better suited to take a room away from downtown. Something small, in the suburbs. Karen, perhaps. There are small inns. Fewer eyes and ears.”

  “You’re saying—”

  She cut him off with a finger held to her lips, and acted out a request for Knox to surrender his phone. Passing it reluctantly, the switchblade still warming in his palm, Knox watched as, to his horror, Vladistok stuck a piece of chewing gum over the microphone hole and, fishing a crumpled sheet of aluminum foil from her bag, wrapped the phone tightly before returning it to him.

  “Sorry. I’m a lawyer. Though I’m considered an activist—a label I detest.”

  Knox congratulated himself on his ability to read first impressions. “I run a small import/export company. I’m on a buying trip.”

  “Are you? Professionally, Mr. Knox, I am a legal consultant. Corporate security. But my life’s work is to get things right in the courts. To get the poachers tried. In five out of six cases, paperwork is lost; the case never comes to trial. Midlevel civil servants, paid small amounts to misfile, shred, divert. They are paid off by businessmen. Arab. Chinese. Somali. Elephant and rhino is big business. They use helicopters now. Automatic weapons. ATVs. It’s wholesale slaughter. Big business. And remember, the fewer animals, the higher the price for the tusk and horn. So with each kill, each harvest, they increase the value of the commodity.”

  “Crime syndicates?” Knox had seen automatic weapons in use on the battlefield; she’d put a picture into him he couldn’t stomach. Rhinos were bigger and slower than buffalo; elephants, ten times that.

  “That word is overused. Is there organized crime here? Of course. But it’s not like what you hear. It’s my belief that the influence of outside crime syndicates, not including the Chinese, is almost nonexistent in Kenya. There are certainly organized criminals in this country. The Chinese are the market makers for elephant tusk. Vietnamese for the rhino horn, though the Chinese export it. But overall, poaching is less connected to terrorism and outside influence than others would lead you to believe. This is what I told Ms. Chu.”