White Bone (17 page)

T
he envelope Ava’s housekeeper had retrieved from Grace’s room had contained a second thumb drive. Now, once again, the screen presented Knox with a question.

Pulled from the fire (nickname):

He entered:
Sarge
. He didn’t like being asked to remember that day.

The screen refreshed.

The bottle opener:

Knox had gotten stuck on this second question. He’d sat there for ten minutes, wondering what Grace was asking, if he was the right one to try to answer the question. Fearing the program would only allow a finite number of tries—three?—he’d withheld from wild guesses.

The small drive was currently zipped into his Scottevest. Until he could solve the second clue, there were better uses of his time.

Olé wore ceremonial Maasai dress, a colorful waist skirt and a sleeveless scarlet tunic decorated with beads, bone, carved wood and gems. He wore neck bangles, too, which set off his fierce but handsome face, all chiseled, aristocratic bone structure and blank dark eyes. He carried a small, menacing machete in his waist belt.

Another guide, so far nameless, rode standing in the far back of the truck, also dressed in a tribal costume. He carried a bludgeoning weapon, a lump of metal attached to a strong handle. The two spoke intermittently in Swahili.

Heeding Ava’s advice and insistence, Knox was on his way to vacate his Nanyuki hotel room—false passport or not—and take a guest room at Solio, where he would be an unregistered guest. The interview with Benson, arranged for later, following the man’s afternoon rounds, necessitated the quick trip into town.

“Everything okay, John?” Olé asked.

“Not exactly okay, no,” Knox answered honestly. “I’m on a bit of a schedule. Behind schedule.”

“This is just the place to forget such things.”

“I appreciate that.” Knox looked over again at the man, wondering how transparent he could be with him. No; why was he hesitating? Grace didn’t have time for subtlety. “A Chinese woman visited, last week. Do you remember her? Grace Chu?”

“Miss Grace. Of course, sir.”

“You drove her then?”

“I did, yes. My pleasure.”

“She’s a close friend of mine. You two talked.”

“Of course, sir. A most interesting woman. Very curious.”

“She is, isn’t she?” Knox’s stomach knotted. He didn’t trust the
tense he was using. He appreciated being reminded of her endearing qualities and how easily likable she was. Painful at the same time. Knox took in the surrounding landscape, all grass and mountains, sky and clouds. No structures. A few fences. A hawk, its wings set, gliding low over the swale.

“What’d you two talk about, if I’m not being rude?”

“Not at all! She asked questions”—Olé gave him a wide smile—“but not like the other guests. Miss Grace is a special woman.”

In spite of himself, Knox wanted to snap at the man, tell him to shut up. “In what way did her questions differ?”

“Guests usually ask only about the animals. Similar questions, all the time. We are happy to answer these. This is the joy of Solio Ranch, so many animals, so beautiful.”

“But not Grace.”

“She was more interested in . . . me, sir. As a man. A Maasai.”
No great surprise there,
Knox thought. Grace always turned the conversation away from herself, always made Knox feel interesting, even as he was also the target of her condescending humor.

“Your costume.”

“My dress. Absolutely! Right you are! That is where we started. She was much less interested in the Big Five,” he said. “She was curious about my life. How it was I found my way to this position at Solio Ranch.”

Knox felt her sitting in the same seat as him. Heard her voice. Saw her wearing a hat to hold her whipping hair at bay, one hand constantly on her head.

“She inquired about living off the land, as my people do. What it was like, how we go about it. How it has changed. Most curious.”

“She grew up in a small farming village in China. Did she tell you that?”

“She did not, John. She asked about the Maasai. We have
survived well for quite some time. This intrigued her. She wondered what we ate, how we treated disease and birthed our children. She expressed a genuine interest in our way of life.”

“Comparing her upbringing to yours,” Knox said.

“I suppose. We didn’t talk of her. She asked all the questions.”

Knox found himself smiling at the thought.

“She asked about Charcoal as well,” Olé said, gesturing into the back, toward his silent passenger. “You work together long enough, you grow a fondness. It is true.”

“Charcoal? You call him that?” Knox asked, horrified.

“Yes. His skin is gray. You see? His tribal name—it is far too difficult for the guests to pronounce.”

The man smiled at Knox from the back.

“He is working on his English,” Olé said. “He understands some of what we are saying. But he can speak very little. I am training him. Another five years, he’ll be a guide himself.”

“She wanted to see plants,” Knox said, drawing the conversation back to Grace.

“Just so! Instead of the lion, we stopped to look at trees and plants we Maasai use. I would tell her stories from my boyhood. Miss Grace is most enjoyable.”

“Poachers use these same plants and trees?” Knox asked.

“If they are to spend any time in the bush, then of course.”

“Or hiding in a reserve.”

“Hiding. Waiting. Setting traps. We live off the land. We all know its uses.”

“She wanted to know about poachers, what might be found in a poacher’s stomach.” Knox was thinking autopsy, wondering what other documents Radcliffe might have supplied her.

Olé sounded excited. “You could be right about that, sir! Her concern, to be sure, was medicine and health care, how Maasai,
Kikuyu and other tribes find the medical care when needed. I explained we have medicine men and traditional medicines. That over one hundred African plants are used as the basis for important European drugs. Many are simply synthetics of the original plant-derived chemical. This interested her, I think. She wanted any examples I could give, and so I showed her. We talked much about vaccinations and how villagers didn’t trust them.”

“Vaccines,” Knox said, thinking of the work Winston had assigned her.

“Yes.”

“And they aren’t trusted because . . . ?” Knox asked.

“So many times these injections make our children sick. Some have died. Others, adult and child alike, never improve. For decades, Africa has been used for clinical human trials. Our villages were paid—not well. We have come to associate free medicine with disease. This, while our own medicines cure dozens of illnesses.”

The talk of Grace had put her in the vehicle with them. Knox could imagine her in the seat where he now sat, having the conversation he was having. Being awed by the landscape just as he was.
Alive,
Knox thought. Olé had brought her alive.

G
race had yet to tighten the wire tourniquet. A raised red welt surrounded the two holes in her skin. The size of a large coin, it was not expanding. Warm to the touch and intensely painful, the snakebite reminded her of a twinned wasp sting—horrible, but nothing fatal.

She struggled to remember Olé’s lessons, the Maasai treatment for pain, but couldn’t. The symptoms of her increasing delirium were familiar to her: light-headedness, sensitivity to light, daydream hallucinations that mixed with memory. Adrenaline had kept her going for the first twenty-four hours—or had it been longer?

Again, while she still had strength, she scampered down the rocks favoring her rolled ankle. She reached the three holes she’d dug. Two remained lined and covered with plastic; the third had been disassembled. The heat inside the hole increased by day; by night, the cool air in contact with the top piece of plastic caused condensation. The condensed water dripped and fell to the bottom
of the hole, collected on the plastic lining. She, or perhaps an animal, had clearly sampled the first hole.

Two days, at least,
Grace thought. Time was blurring, slipping away from her. But she believed she had retrieved this water herself. She saw no tracks or signs of animals to convince her otherwise. Carefully, she reset the first hole, sipped the few drops from the second and third, so that the day’s hot sun didn’t evaporate her winnings. From the second, she captured enough to wet her mouth and throat; the third, better sealed, offered her a small sip that actually ran down her throat. She reset all three more carefully, trying to duplicate the third.

Next, she checked her trap lines. The first, closest to her perch, had not been tripped. But the wire set at the intersection of two small game trails was no longer in place: the ground coverage disturbed; dried blood on the pikes. She followed the irregular track of what she thought might be a small hare, dragging one leg. Drops of blood had spilled with every step, in increasing volume. Fifty meters down the thin trail, Grace cursed: she’d killed a rat. Worse still, it was warm to the touch. Though she knew what had to be done, it was hard to contain her disgust. Shuddering, she cut through the animal’s skin with a shard of broken mirror and eviscerated it. Finding its tiny liver, she cut it loose of the entrails, dropped it into the back of her throat and swallowed. She kneeled for several minutes, expecting to vomit, but nothing came up.

On her way back to her lookout, she eyed the rocky plateau, covered in the inviting gray-green of bush and trees. She knew she might find nuts, roots and fruits to eat within—or that poison arrow tree—but could not summon up the courage to try. Imagination, or fairy tales, or the piles of white bone in the wash, held her back.

Sitting again on her perch, she resigned herself to fatigue. Shuddering, she forced her body through the small slit at the bottom of the boulders and crawled inside. It was cooler there, almost entirely in shade. She closed her eyes and within seconds was swallowed into deep, dreamless sleep.

K
nox asked to be dropped off two blocks from the small hotel. Hyperaware of his color and height, he kept his head low and his face tucked beneath a Tigers cap. He found his way to the back of the hotel and entered through an open door to the kitchen. He passed a distrusting dishwasher who averted his eyes when challenged.

“You can’t be in here, sir.” The man was a Kenyan his age. He wore a stained blue bandana tied around his sweating brow and carried a two-foot-long spoon in his right hand. “Not for guests.”

“Oh, come on,” Knox said, seamlessly picking up the conversation as if longtime friends. “How am I supposed to catch her cheating on me if I enter through the lobby? She paid off one of the bellmen; I know she did.”

The man seemed tempted to capitulate but wasn’t fully buying it. “Health laws.”

“I’m sure.” The kitchen was in fact surprisingly clean.

“You can’t be in here.”

“So throw me out, just throw me out through that door.” He pointed.

“You try this again, it won’t happen.” The man stepped aside.

“You must not be married,” Knox said, charging through.

He took the stairs, forgoing an elevator he didn’t trust anyway. At the top of the stairs, he paused and listened. The talk of Grace and pharmaceuticals, the discovery of the thumb drive left him jumpy. He heard a TV, some water running. He moved slowly ahead.

Upon entering his room, he immediately backed up to the door, his heart racing. He swiftly secured the door with a travel rod, never taking his eyes off the room’s interior. No one could enter now without Knox removing the rod.

Someone had been in his room, possibly still was. Not a maid, not unless her job description included searching his carry-on. He’d left the bag’s twin zipper pulls drawn all the way to the left rivet, as he always did.

They were currently centered.

The only decent place to hide was between the bed and the wall. The roll of quarters gripped in his right fist, Knox crossed the room in two strides.

Empty. A bead of sweat streamed from his sideburns across his unintentional beard. Burning with tension, he opened his bag. No bomb. No body parts. No ransom note. He wanted badly to attribute the search to a bellman or maid on the take but, except for the zippers, it had been a pro job; he’d have been hard-pressed to know anything had been touched.

He reached for his phone, driven automatically to warn Grace. The reflex startled him.

He’d been away from the hotel for two hours, had unpacked only his toiletries. It took no time at all to collect them.

What might a person learn about him from the contents of his bag? The unusual first aid supplies and medications he carried would be a tip-off. The needle and suture weren’t on everyone’s vacation list. Hotel staff were known to steal prescription drugs. But his meds were all there, he realized. Cipro, Ativan, surgical scrub, lidocaine cream, Pennsaid, aspirin, Advil, Tylenol. Don’t leave home without them. Nothing had been pinched.

The person might have noticed his preference for dark clothing, for Scottevest garments with hidden pockets. The very few dress clothes he carried. That he shaved with a razor, avoided any deodorant with alcohol, carried a dozen protein bars and a go-bag containing vital necessities for seventy-two hours on the run—canned tuna, freeze-dried meals, water purifying straw, Maglite, face black, Leatherman, fire-starting tool, space blanket, duct tape, and nearly two dozen other items, including batteries, maps, a compass and more meds.

Upon inspection, he would come off not as a tourist but as ex-military or paramilitary, or someone on The Circuit—mercenaries who moved between conflicts. He took extra care checking out the window. No uniformed police at the front of the hotel, though that didn’t mean much. The lobby desk would be on alert for him if the police were involved. His passing through the kitchen had been a mistake.

Leaving his room, he moved from the stairs to the end of the long hallway, where an alarmed door gave way to a metal lattice fire escape. Power to the panic bar’s alarm was supplied through an aluminum flex conduit. Digging into his duffel, he insulated his hand with a neoprene knee brace and sawed through the conduit. He averted his eyes from the blinding spark as he cut the live wire
inside. Then he opened the door and was out, scurrying down the fire escape, dropping his bag off the side and hanging before falling the remaining ten feet.

He ran down the alley, feeling like a fugitive and wondering who the hell had searched his room—and why.