The Outlaw (8 page)

Kas was two horses behind Jake, pale and shaking.

"
Salaam aleykum,
" said the boy who had rescued him.

"
Bonjour,
" said Jake. "Do you speak French?"

"
Munya tan faa kooten tafon,
" said the boy. The language was not Arabic and it was certainly not French.

"What is your name?" asked Jake.

"
Mi faamaay,
" said the boy. It did not sound like a name. It was more likely to mean "I don't understand" or "shut up." Then again, he had to call the boy something.

"Farm Eye," said Jake. "Thank you for rescuing us."

Farm Eye took from his top pocket a wad of Jumbo chicken-stock-cube wrappers and waved them in front of Jake's nose.

Nice one, Kas,
thought Jake.
Your Hansel and Gretel breadcrumb trail worked.
But his relief at being rescued was tinged with deep uncertainty. Was this really a rescue? As Kas had pointed out, they did not know a single thing about this cowboy posse. For all they knew, the boys might be even worse than Sor and his lot. Jake had heard horrifying stories about Africa's brutal teenage gangs: the Bakassi Boys of Igbo, the Area Boys of Lagos, the West Side Junglers of Sierra Leone. A wave of fear and nausea passed over him. They had avoided being killed by Yakuuba Sor, it was true, but there were worse things than death.

"I'm thirsty," he said, cupping his hand in front of his mouth in what he imagined to be the international sign language for water.

"
Ndiyam walaa,
" muttered Farm Eye, shaking his head.

"Jake!" called Kas. "What's going on? Are they taking us back to Ouagadougou?"

"No. Sun's behind us and on the right, which means we're still going north."

"Have you got a signal on your phone?"

"The battery's dead."

The five horses climbed a dune in single file and began to trot along the crest. Far away on the eastern horizon was what Jake had been looking for: a jumble of mud-brick rooftops, a cluster of trees, the minaret of a mosque, the shimmer of a lake, and a cell phone tower.

"A town!" shouted Kas. "Do you think it's got a police station?"

Jake turned to Farm Eye and pointed east. "
Allons-y,
" he said. "Let's go there."

The boy nodded. "Kongoussi," he said, but he showed no sign of straying from his northerly course.

"We want to go to the police station in Kongoussi," repeated Jake. "Can you take us there, please?"

Farm Eye shook his head. "
Geddal wi'ii dey, sannaa min njaara on tomakko.
"

Jake suddenly shifted in the saddle and brought his left leg up as if to dismount, but Farm Eye was having none of it. In one quick movement he gathered up the slack in the reins, looped it twice around Jake's wrists, and pulled tight. Then he jabbed his heel against the bay's side, spurring her into a trot.

Jake stared at his bound wrists. The looped reins formed simple, painless handcuffs, but handcuffs all the same. If he tried to dismount now, he would end up getting dragged along, or worse.

They trotted down the side of the dune and onto the flat. Farm Eye gave the bay her head, and she broke once more into a swift rolling canter. Canter, trot, walk, canter, trot, walk— that was the cycle, repeated over and over during the course of the next three hours. The sun was high and blisteringly hot. Jake's mouth was parched, his lips were cracked, and his head ached. Once or twice he saw a herder in the distance, but his mouth was so dry that his attempted cries for help came out as little more than croaks.

Jake wanted to be brave for his sister's sake, but he was feeling a growing sense of desperation. They were still being held against their will. They had no idea who their new captors were, or what they might want, or where they were going. All they could be sure of were the twin torments of dehydration and sunburn. His ears, nose, and neck would be agony in the morning.

"
Accana kam hakke,
" said Farm Eye.

Jake turned in the saddle just in time to see his captor bring a long piece of blue cloth down over his head. It was an indigo turban, like the ones worn by camel herders. Farm Eye wound the turban around and around Jake's head, over his ears, nose, mouth, forehead, and chin.

At first he was grateful for the covering. Perhaps Farm Eye had noticed his sunburned skin and wanted to protect him. Only when Farm Eye began to wrap the turban around Jake's eyes did Jake realize that this was more than a sun hat. It was a blindfold.

"Kas," called Jake, and his tongue felt thick and swollen in his mouth. "What's going on?"

But the voice that came out of his mouth was inaudible to anyone but himself—a dust-dry whisper muffled in folds of indigo.

At
the British embassy in Ouagadougou, a meeting was taking place between Ambassador Quentin Knight and MI6 officer Roy Dexter. The spy had arrived at nine o'clock that morning on an emergency overnight flight from London. Dexter's eyes were blue, his jaw was square, and his long, sun-bleached hair was tied back in a ponytail.

"Thank you for coming," said Mr. Knight, shaking hands. "I trust that you have been fully briefed by the Foreign Office."

"Two missions," said Dexter briskly. "Rescue the children and disincentivize Yakuuba Sor."

"Disincentivize?"

"Kill."

The ambassador pursed his lips. He himself would have chosen a different word—terminate, perhaps—but now was no time to split hairs. "Be careful, Dexter," he said. "Yakuuba Sor is a slippery customer, by all accounts. He is a master of disguise and a ruthless killer."

"I know," said Dexter.

As a long-serving diplomat, Mr. Knight was highly experienced in the reading of body language and microexpressions. He could not help noticing the momentary emotion that flashed across the officer's face.

The ambassador came right out with it. "Are you frightened, Dexter?"

"What?"

"I mean to say, it would be perfectly natural if you were."

A muscle twitched in the man's jaw. "I have a healthy respect for terrorists, yes. I have had some unpleasant encounters in the past, one in particular. Turkmenistan. I was captured."

"I see."

"It was completely my own fault," continued Dexter. "I was naive. I gave a man the benefit of the doubt when I should have given him a bullet in the head. I will not repeat that mistake."

"Of course not."

Dexter turned away and fumbled with the latches on his briefcase. He opened it and removed a small round tin of hard candies. "As you know," he said, "the Burkina Faso police have requested help with counterterrorist surveillance. Since you have already signed the Official Secrets Act, I can trust you to tell no one about the contents of this tin." He lifted the lid.

Mr. Knight stood up and leaned across his desk to look. In the tin, gnawing on a leaf, was an insect. It was about four centimeters long, and its exoskeleton was reddish brown.

"HI-MEMS," said Dexter. "Hybrid Insect-Micro-ElectroMechanical System."

"Looks to me like a beetle."

"A rhinoceros beetle, to be precise," said the spy. "But this particular rhinoceros beetle is worth about eight grand. She has a one-megapixel camera on her head, twenty-eight solar cells on her thorax, and a miniature GPS on her abdomen. Sexy, huh?"

"Profoundly."

"Ever since the start of the Iraq war, the boffins at HQ have been attempting to make a surveillance droid that is tiny, controllable, and capable of relaying images from the harshest environments in the world. They tried all sorts of miniature flying vehicles, but nothing they could make was as stable or as powerful as a real live insect. So guess what they did! They started using real, live insects! They implanted microchips into beetle larvae in the early stages of metamorphosis, intertwining the nerves and muscles with electronic circuitry. In effect, they were creating the world's first bioelectrical surveillance droids."

"Cyborgs."

"Correct, Mr. Knight. And this particular cyborg is going to find your kids."

The ambassador watched the rhinoceros beetle shuffling in its leafy prison. He had heard of the HI-MEMS project some years ago but had not believed it would come to anything. "Capital," he murmured. "And how will the cyborg know where Jake and Kirsty are?"

"That's easy. As soon as Jake's phone starts getting reception again, we can use the tower ID to locate him to within a mile or two. I then get myself to the edge of that zone and re-lease Xena."

"Who?"

"The beetle. Xena has two neural stimulators implanted in her brain and two in her wings, to direct her flight. As she flies, she will relay signals to and from your son's phone, pinpointing his position with ever-increasing accuracy. At the same time, she will be relaying her video back to me. Positioning and surveillance in one pretty little package. Do you want to know the best bit?"

"Hit me."

"Xena is completely invisible."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Think about it, Mr. Knight. In every square mile of West Africa there are more than five billion insects. Xena could fly right past Yakuuba Sor's nose and he wouldn't see a thing."

Slumped
forward on the neck of the bay, Jake had no idea how long they had been traveling. His groin ached. His ribs ached. Most of all, his head ached. Only last night he had been ranting about how much he wanted to visit the deserts of the north. Now that he was here, he longed to be anywhere else. Commissioner Beogo's words about the desert throbbed in his memory:
It is beautiful, but dangerous. My people say that the deserts of the north are a battlefield for angels and demons.

Bound up inside his turban, he began to hallucinate. He saw ranks of translucent angels and shaggy-haired demons lining up against each other on a rocky plateau. The demons held heavy wooden quarterstaffs, which they thudded on the rock in rhythmic fury. The angels swayed in unison and clapped their slender hands.

THUD-THUD, clap-clap, THUD-THUD, clap-clap.

Farm Eye unwound Jake's turban and uncovered his eyes. The harsh glare of the sun skewered his retinas, and he cried out in pain. But what he saw when his eyes adjusted to the light sickened him even more—an acacia tree with a bloodied carcass hanging from its branches. The glazed eyes and drooping ears seemed to be those of a goat. Two teenage boys armed with machetes were busy skinning the body, and blood was dripping onto the sand beneath. Farther away Jake saw more carcasses lying on the ground, indistinct beneath clouds of flies. He dry retched and looked around for his sister. There she was, two horses back, still slumped over the neck of the chestnut stallion. She seemed to be asleep.

Lucky her. This was no time to be awake.

They had entered a large dust bowl surrounded by high dunes. On the right a camel with a harness around its neck was being made to draw water from a deep well. On the left was a cluster of domed huts that seemed to be made out of straw matting. On the sandy path ahead scrawny chickens fled the oncoming hooves, and still that eerie thudding sounded in Jake's ears.

THUD-THUD, clap-clap, THUD-THUD, clap-clap.

The horses walked on unperturbed. They passed by two enclosures, bounded by fences woven out of thorny branches. The first enclosure was full of goats. In the second three horses and their teenage riders were being put through their paces on an improvised target range. The boys were riding in wide circles, and as they reached the east end of the enclosure, they fired off slingshots at a selection of eight objects balanced on wooden stakes: three tin cans, two plastic bottles, a baobab fruit, a conical hat, and a rusty metal teapot. Each boy fired eight stones as he cantered past the targets, and there were far more hits than misses.

The bay got excited when she saw the cantering horses. She bucked and pranced and threw her head from side to side. Farm Eye reined her in with a firm hand, digging in his spurs to move her on.

They came now to the center of the settlement, where there stood a huge white canvas marquee with a red cross on each wall.
Free gift from the people of Norway
read the slogan above the doorway. Jake wondered how the people of Norway would feel to know that their gift to the Red Cross had ended up as the centerpiece of a terrorist training camp.

In the afternoon shade on the east side of the marquee stood three large wooden mortars, the source of all that thudding. Six teenage boys, each wielding a thick wooden pestle as tall as himself, were pounding the contents of the mortars with ferocious energy. Each boy threw his pounding stick into the air between downstrokes and clapped his hands before catching it again. Jake had seen women pounding grain on his previous visits to Burkina Faso, but he had never seen it done by a man or a boy.

As the hostage convoy passed by, the pounding sticks froze in mid-swing like the worn-out pistons of some giant engine. The boys' frank, appraising stares made Jake uneasy, and he thought again about the goat carcass hanging from the tree. His bound hands trembled in his lap.

The horses passed a line of shade shelters and two mud-brick huts before arriving at an enormous baobab tree whose bulbous stubby branches cast sinister shadows on the sand. Farm Eye clicked his tongue and brought the bay to a halt. He unbound Jake's wrists and helped him to dismount.

Jake's knees were so weak with fear and tension that he could hardly stand. He had to support himself with one hand on the horse's back. As for Kas, she was still asleep, slumped forward over the chestnut stallion's neck.

From all over the settlement, teenage boys approached. They came from the Red Cross tent, from the training ring, from shade shelters and grass huts. Jake looked around at the rows of upturned faces and bit his lip hard in an effort to suppress his fear.
Bakassi Boys, Area Boys, West Side Junglers. There are worse things than death.

Jake had visited African villages before, and what usually struck him were the hordes of small children shouting
Ça va? Ça va?
or demanding a
cadeau
in the form of a Bic or a balloon or a Matchbox car. This village was different. There was not a single child here under the age of ten.