Mission Liberty (19 page)

Dari was silent.

“We don’t really have time to bullshit each other. Only idiots see things in black and white,” DeLuca said at length. “You’re
not an idiot, and neither am I, Mr. Dari. If you tell me what you want, I’ll tell you what I can do, personally, and what
my country can do. I can only guarantee what I can do personally, but I keep my promises. If I didn’t, in my line of work,
I would have been dead a long time ago. I am your access to the United States government. That’s not a small thing, and you
know it.”

“You ask me to tell you what I want,” Dari said. “Did you know my grandfather was a scout for the United States Army during
World War II? He helped them fight Rommel. My mother was Acholi but my father was Somalian Arab. He provided intelligence
to the United States Army when they went into Mogadishu. The Army told him they would protect him. After the U.S. pulled out,
my father was killed, and my mother after that. The U.S. Army said they would take care of them. Do you really think I will
believe that you keep your promises?”

“I can understand how you wouldn’t,” DeLuca said.

“This man,” Paul Asabo said, “is not like the others, John. This man doesn’t want war. I came back for my own reasons, but
I also came back to help you. And to help the country where I’ve lived. I am Ligerian and I am American. I am both. I respect
the choices you’ve made, but you can respect mine as well.”

“So this is how you pay me back?” Dari said. “Is this your atonement? Did he tell you about Mill River, Mr. DeLuca?”

DeLuca looked at Asabo, who lowered his eyes.

“I was briefed about the incident,” DeLuca said.

“Oh, you were briefed then,” Dari said. “And what did they tell you?”

“That the people who sponsored you, the church, turned their backs on you. And that you had reason to be bitter toward Christians.”

“Bitter toward Christians?” Dari said. “Well now. That would be thinking in black and white again, wouldn’t it? And in case
you’re wondering about my language skills, yes, Mr. DeLuca, I intend the pun. I am not bitter about Christians. Or whites,
even though I was the only one they wanted to try for rape, because they thought I was older than sixteen. They only dropped
the case because I had no birth certificate, so there was no proof of my age. I am bitter about the First Unification Pentecostal
Baptist Church of Enid, Oklahoma, but even there, there were people who sympathized with me. Why don’t you tell him, Paul?
Tell him what happened at Mill River? I’d like to hear how you explain it. Tell him about Roxanne.”

DeLuca looked at Asabo. Vasquez shifted in his chair. Somewhere in the distance, a bird cried out.

“Who was Roxanne, Paul?” DeLuca asked. “Was that the girl?”

Asabo nodded.

“We had heard that she did things, at parties. To boys. That she liked to do things. Nobody made her do them. I mean, the
boys used their persuasive powers, but nobody forced her. She’d done it twice before, with groups of boys. So we heard there
was going to be another party…”

“You were there?” DeLuca asked. Asabo nodded. “You weren’t in the library studying, like you said?”

Asabo shook his head.

“So we went and we waited our turns. I was still new in America. I didn’t know what was customary or expected of me, but I
wanted to fit in,” he said.

“Is that the royal ‘we’ you’re using, Paul?” Dari asked.

“I waited my turn. John did not. He left. But afterward, when we were caught, I was ashamed, for myself and for my father.
I was the heir to the Fasori stool. I thought that I could not have it come out that I had participated in such a thing.”

DeLuca added it all up.

“How much did he pay you to take the blame?” he asked Dari.

“A thousand dollars,” Dari said. “I thought that was a lot of money. So I said it was me, and what did Roxanne know, one black
dick from another? I thought, what of it— I was innocent, so why should I feel shame? But I felt shame, not that I touched
the girl, but that I took the money.”

The two Africans looked at each other. DeLuca wondered what exactly passed between them in the glance.

“When I was fifteen,” DeLuca said, “I went to a party where there was a girl who let boys put their hands up her shirt. I
was one of them. We never got caught. It didn’t even occur to me that what I’d done was wrong until years later. I thought
it was one of those moronic things kids do to experiment. That doesn’t make it right, but when all is said and done, there’s
nothing anywhere near as stupid as a fourteen-year-old boy with a boner. Expecting them to act like adults is like expecting
chickens to dance the tarantella.”

Dari was expressionless. Asabo spun his beer bottle between his fingers.

“It’s the biggest mistakes that we learn the most from,” DeLuca said. “I suspect it factored significantly into the reasons
why you returned to Islam.”

Dari looked at him.

“What happened in Mbusi?” he asked softly. In an instant, DeLuca knew by the look on Dari’s face that the question was genuine.
Dari didn’t know. He wasn’t involved. “How many people?”

“Maybe eight hundred,” DeLuca said. “We’re not sure.”

“And Angasa, and Dasai? Pomogoso?”

“Same story,” DeLuca said. “They’re finding playing cards in the villages, the ace of spades.”

“That is Samuel Adu,” Dari said.

“That’s what I thought,” DeLuca said. “He’s trying to make it look like you.”

“He will go to trial,” Dari said. “In The Hague. Sooner or later, for what he did in Sierra Leone. And here. So now he thinks
he’s become clever.”

“We’re looking for him, too,” Vasquez added.

“I agree with what you say about black and white,” Dari said, “but when I think of Samuel Adu, I see only a black so dark
and impenetrable it kills the light that touches it. Will you kill him?”

“Do you want me to?” DeLuca asked.

“I would kill him myself, if I could find him,” Dari said. His face was grim, but then he smiled, turning to his old friend.
“I am glad to see you, Paul. I had thought that one day I would, but I didn’t know you’d come home to this. It was always
a sad country, but now there aren’t enough tears.”

“Tell me what you want,” DeLuca said. “I can promise that I’ll pass it along and fight to make sure you’re heard. It probably
goes without saying that my government is concerned about the influence of IPAB.”

Dari shook his head in mock disbelief.

“Somebody should write a book about the relationship between monotheism and monolithism,” he said. “Your president thinks
a Muslim from Mauritania and a Muslim from Egypt and a Muslim from Iraq and a Muslim from Malaysia are all the same person.
Do you see these boys? They are mostly Da. That big man, he is Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Ashanti, Da, and maybe something
else. He is a polytheist, and he is polylithic in his religious philosophy. If you put him in one category, you miss the other
five. Yes, IPAB gives us guns, because we need guns to do our work, and who else will give them to us? IPAB gives medicine
because people are sick and the medicine makes them well again. Yes, I deal with IPAB. But some of the Islamic brothers I’ve
met are as evil as anybody else. Some have taken the most beautiful religion in the world and corrupted it utterly and twisted
it into something I can’t recognize. What do I want? What do you think I want? I want food for the people who are starving
to death in the camps. President Bo has starved more people to death than Saddam Hussein ever killed in his prisons or torture
chambers, but now your soldiers and airplanes and missiles are waiting offshore to defend Bo, because he serves your interests.
I want President Bo to leave. I want a government that feeds its people. I would like an autonomous Islamic government in
the north, with control over its own resources, including oil. But that won’t happen, so I want to see Liger become a true
democracy, and that won’t happen either, because the U.S. says it wants democracy and freedom and majority rule, but since
the beginning of the Cold War, you would never allow democracy in a country where the majority would vote for communism, or
for
sharia,
so you don’t
really
want democracy now, do you? You said we should talk of practical matters. So I’ll just say we want food. We want food and
a safe place to eat it. We want medicine. And we want peace, so that people can go home.”

DeLuca could see now. Dari was not the killer or the terrorist DIA was making him out to be. His instincts told him, now that
he’d met the man face to face, that Dari was sincere, intelligent, honest, and somebody who could not be bought but who could
be negotiated with, in short, the sort of person a wise administration would include and support. He wasn’t sure the current
administration fit the definition, but he was paid to make his recommendations and to use his own judgment. It was why he
said, to his team and when he was a counterintelligence instructor at Ft. Huachuca, that counterintelligence was a state of
mind. That intuitive sense, the first impression, the innate ability to read a man’s character by his mien and body language
and deportment, the tone of his voice, his posture, the space within his silences—it was all something they’d never be able
to program a computer to do. It wasn’t something image or signal intelligence could ever reveal. Human intelligence was not
quantifiable, not digitizable, not given to easy explication, and anathematic to the usual military mind, which was why the
Pentagon bureaucratic shitheels and the rear echelon motherfuckers had such a hard time trusting it, but in the end, it was
what produced the best results. Dari’s charisma was palpable, but DeLuca wasn’t factoring it in—Hitler had charisma, if the
history books were correct. Dari was, for lack of a better word, spiritual. DeLuca knew he’d have to find another way to put
it when he made out his report.

“If you want peace,” he said, “would you sit at a table and negotiate for it?” He knew this was a loaded question. In Iraq,
hundreds of people had been killed as the various elements within the country vied for positions at the peace tables and within
the provisional government. It wasn’t anywhere as simple as saying, “Come here, sit down, let’s discuss how to govern in peace.”
Dari had developed a constituency and a following. Only he knew what he wanted to do with it.

“With whom?” he asked.

“Who would you want to sit with?” DeLuca asked. “Negotiation begins with speaking truth to power. You’ve made your opinions
about the people in power clear. Would you sit down with President Bo? Or General Ngwema? Would IPAB sit down with them, or
the LPLF?”

Dari considered.

“Under the supervision of ECOMAS and the AU, I would sit,” Dari said. “With the United States at my side, I would not.”

“I understand,” DeLuca said. “United Nations?”

Dari nodded.

“How will we contact you?”

“I’ll contact you,” Dari said. “If the Marines don’t come. If they do, then I won’t.”

“It’s not up to me to make that decision,” DeLuca said, writing down the number to his SATphone and handing it to Dari.

“I understand,” Dari said, taking the number. “And you understand my position.”

He turned to Asabo and spoke to him in their native dialect for another minute, then stood and crossed to the bar, where he
shook the hand of the motel’s proprietor, who was waiting there, conversing with him pleasantly.

“What did you say?” DeLuca asked.

“He asked me if you’d drink
zuzu,
” Asabo said. “Truth tea.
Zuzu
is a native plant. When there’s a dispute in a village, where one man claims a cow is his, for instance, and another man
says he stole it, they’ll go to the shaman and he’ll make a tea from the
zuzu
plant, from the roots. The tea will kill you if you drink it and you are lying, but it won’t harm you if you drink it and
you’re telling the truth. So he asked me if you would drink it. I said I thought you would.”

Dari returned to the table and spoke to DeLuca.

“Do you know where Samuel Adu is right now?” he asked.

“If you could wait a moment, I can try to find out,” DeLuca said. He turned on his CIM and sent Scottie an e-mail asking for
the information. Within seconds, a map of Liger appeared on the illuminated screen, with an icon indicating Adu’s estimated
position, fifty kilometers north of a point halfway between Camp Seven and the village of Sagoa.

“This is what we believe. There is a margin for error,” DeLuca added.

Dari looked at the screen before leaving, then tapped it with a finger in both locations.

“These places,” Dari said softly, referring to Sagoa and to Camp Seven. “They are in grave danger. Good-bye Agent DeLuca.
Good-bye Paul.”

He joined his men at the bridge.

They’d just set foot on land when the night was split by a horrendous explosion that rocked the bar and took out a large section
of the bridge where Dari and his men had stood, moments before.

DeLuca was thrown to the floor.

A hail of gunfire rained down on them as dozens of automatic weapons opened up from a hillside opposite the road on the north
end of the pond. Dari’s men took positions behind the cottages and returned the fire, catching DeLuca and the others in the
middle and pinning them down.

Men shouted.

Men screamed.

“Hoolie! Paul,” DeLuca called out, drawing his weapon. “Are you hurt?”

“Paul’s been hit,” Hoolie said

“I’m okay,” Asabo said. “It’s nothing.”

They scrambled across the floor until their backs were against the bar itself.

“Can you move?” he asked Asabo. “Where are you hit?”

“My arm,” Asabo said. “I’m fine. It’s nothing.”

“Hoolie, what’s your guess?” DeLuca asked, dialing his SATphone.

“Twenty or thirty men on the hill,” he said. “I doubt that’s the whole picture.”

“We gotta get out of here,” DeLuca said. “Predator, can you target the hill at the northern end of the pond?” he asked, once
Scottie answered. “Taking heavy fire.”

“We gotcha,” Scott said. “Coming around now—hang on.”