White Bone (8 page)

“You can give me specifics,” he said.

“Grace implied—she did not state, I must emphasize this!—that she had reason to suspect a connection between the failed vaccine and a company based here in Nairobi.”

“Asian Container Consolidated,” Knox said.

Shocked, possibly impressed, Vladistok took measure of him before speaking. “She did not name the company as you just have. It is an interesting choice.”

“Why?”

“Asian Container Consolidated is run by a Chinese man named Xin Ha. He’s powerful. He has privileged access at all levels of government. No one’s going to touch him. He imports containers of Chinese goods, and more than likely either exports ivory and rhino horn or looks away when others do. His men are butchers. Allegedly, he has ties to the Somalis, and therefore the al-Shabaab terrorists. There’s no way the government doesn’t suspect this, yet they never act. He conducts business with impunity.”

Knox nodded, trying to swallow spit to moisten his throat.

“If Xin Ha was behind the vaccine switch, if he discovered Grace was investigating this fraud . . . But that’s entirely too much speculation. If Grace is in trouble, she needs you to stay away from Xin Ha, John, believe me.”

“What do you know of Bertram Radcliffe?”

Her face tightened. “He was a remarkable reporter in his time. That time has passed. Have you met him?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know he drinks excessively.”

“Professionally. Yes.”

“He lost his wife under questionable circumstances. This followed several columns he wrote excoriating the current government. After, Radcliffe outright blamed the government. His paper distanced itself. Things with him became all the worse recently: a colleague of his was shot up north. They said he was a poacher—as unlikely a truth as there’s ever been. He’s very near a broken man, John. I would be wary.”

“His articles are online? The ones that got his wife killed?”

“You and Grace are not so very different.”

“You might be surprised.”

Knox saw her eyes track something or someone behind him. He turned abruptly in defense. No one.

“We must go. Both of us. Now!” she whispered. “There’s going to be trouble.” Taking him by the hand, she unwrapped his phone and slipped it to him. Then she unbarred the screen door and led Knox out to a muddy lane no wider than his shoulders, through an adjacent dwelling, and out into a different lane.

“We part company here,” she said, pointing Knox deeper into the settlement. “Take your first right. Cross three lanes like this. You will find your group there.”

“What’s going on?” Knox asked. “What kind of trouble? I don’t need my group.”

“Yes, you do,” she said, her eyes frightened. She’d been spooked by something Knox had missed.

“What is it? You saw someone.”

“Your group will provide you with cover. The police will ignore you if you are with them.”

“The police? Here?”

“They will be soon enough. We must go, now! There is going to be bloodshed.”

Vladistok headed off in the opposite direction, deep into the squalor.

L
oose tarps serving as stop-gap roofs snapped in the breeze like flags. They rattled Koigi. A bushman through and through, he had an aversion to all things urban. He viewed Nairobi as a blight, the slums of Kibera as an infestation.

As a matter of pride, he refused to shed his ranger uniform in favor of civilian clothing when he was in the city. Given that he was wanted for questioning by police and the KGA, it was a bold and premeditated statement. Today, the KGA could shoot poachers and ask questions later. But Koigi had started out in another era, another epoch. Back then, he’d been tagged for murder for his slaughter of five poachers caught in the act of attempting to hack an elephant’s tusks from its head with machetes as it lay—alive—paralyzed by a poacher’s dart. Six months later: two more poachers. A year after that, a band of eight in a pickup truck with automatic weapons.

Today, a tip had overcome his reservations and brought him to Kibera. He led three of his best men. Like him, they wore protective
vests. This was what the city did to you: You left your tribe and your village for the promise of money and material goods, only to find it an empty promise. The work was infrequent, the housing absent. You joined a million souls squatting in the dirt only kilometers from Range Rovers, exotic fountains and excess.

Koigi knew this all too well; knew Kibera as a place of boredom, disease, childhood and work. God, how he resented its existence. He had been raised here, by an aunt who sewed scraps of tarps into grain bags and an uncle who’d had a corner on the recycling market. He knew the lanes, could navigate their wandering inconsistencies blindfolded. Knew the place he would find Guuleed if the tip was accurate.

He and his men moved quickly, assuming the police would soon arrive. Those in the lanes moved aside. Uniforms of any kind meant trouble, even the wrinkled and soiled khaki ones worn by this quartet of determined fighters. To them, the leader, the one with his arm in a sling, looked as mean as a water buffalo. He could see the fear in their eyes. Reveled in it. The weapons slung across their necks but held in hand were well used. Children dodged out of the way, then turned and followed at a distance. Women pulled their handiwork back into their stalls. Grown men scattered.

Koigi hand-signaled one of his men down a lane to the right. Moments later, another to his left. Behind him, another spun fully around every ten paces and walked briefly backward, taking responsibility for defending their backs. The same man tried to discourage the children from following, but failed. In Kibera, a raid was considered entertainment.

A moment earlier, Koigi had spotted a familiar face through a parted plastic sheet. Maya Vladistok was important to the cause. An ally. Her presence confused matters. He wondered if she’d been
behind the tip. Perhaps that explained the white man he’d seen her speaking with.

The string of shanties stretched in every direction. Masses of people. Koigi identified the dwelling in question not by the flaking marine-blue corrugated tin that formed its outside wall, but by the bootprints in the mud heading inside. It was sandals, bare feet and trainers in Kibera, not bush boots.

He allowed time for his two unseen men to gain position. Held his finger to his lips and motioned civilians away. He tightened the vest, more a nervous tick than a necessity. Then he eased forward, and gently tried the door. Blocked from the inside. Motioning his man behind him down to his knees to reduce his profile, Koigi kneeled as well. He hoped they would shoot high.

He had nothing to live for but the elephants. No family. His childhood sweetheart long dead.
Take the fear of dying out of a soldier,
he thought,
and you have a monster.

From somewhere behind them, a person whistled. A lookout. Their cover blown, Koigi kicked open the door, his weapon at the ready. The clean
pop! pop!
came at a distance. Gunfire, one lane over. His man there returned fire.

Koigi and his backup stormed the empty shanty, moving room to room. He felt the claustrophobia of the tiny space. He nearly fired on two women, huddled on a soiled mattress. In an instant, he exited into a lane. His man lay in the mud to his left. His backup turned toward the injured; Koigi headed to the right, running now, his weapon raised. People scattered.

He saw three men twenty yards ahead. One was Guuleed, he felt certain. The Somali had poisoned villages, recruiting young men who would have never poached elephants and rhinos without him. Koigi raised his weapon.

“Down!”
He shouted, and watched two dozen human beings collapse like marionettes with their strings cut. The three men remained standing. He fired. The man to the right spun in a cloud of pink mist and fell. The remaining two darted left into a dwelling.

One down . . .

Koigi took no precautions as he charged into the structure. No pause-and-clear, no police procedure. He would shoot anyone standing. He spotted and avoided a woman and her two children lying on the floor, hands over their heads. He kicked aside a piece of tin, cut through and into the back of a conjoined shack. A mosquito net hung in the corner. He saw the weapon a fraction of a second too late. Took a slug in his vest. Pushed back and off balance, screaming in pain, Koigi fired twice. The second shot found its mark.

Two down . . .

Crashing into crates, tumbling into a tangle of pots and pans, Koigi worked hard to breathe. On top of his painful shoulder, he’d cracked some ribs. Up on his knees, to his feet, he pushed out into yet another lane. Guuleed was running back in the direction they’d come from. Koigi lifted his weapon, but couldn’t get it to eye height. He couldn’t manage to shout out a warning to those in his line of sight.

He limped ahead. By the time he discovered a tunnel dug into the black dirt floor of a shack fifty meters down the lane, Guuleed was long gone. Koigi’s man, also protected by his vest, was helped to his feet, made to walk as the sirens drew closer. The team hurried toward where they’d left the vehicle. It was a footrace now.

G
unfire sounded in the Kibera township. screams rang out. Knox heard the percussive slap of sandals and bare feet moments before the flowing horde of terrified, would-be victims reached him.

The mass moved far more quickly than he’d estimated. It hit him and knocked him down. Knees and elbows pummeled him as he struggled to stay on his hands and knees. To succumb and lie flat was to drown. The gunfire continued. Hundreds, maybe a thousand people surged down the narrowest of paths between the shanties. Alongside him, a girl of fifteen went down hard into the packed dirt, her shirt torn off, an earring ripped from her right ear, which bled profusely. Knox moved toward her and took a series of knees in his side. Thought he felt a rib go. Rolled. Managed to get back to all fours, but now downstream of the girl.

Swinging both arms powerfully, he stood, his height providing a view over the heads of the human stampede. He fought upstream,
pivoted right and left by ferocious blows. He couldn’t locate the fallen girl. He fought and battled against the flow. His feet hit something. He bent to retrieve her. Gathered the girl into his arms, cradled her. He knew better than to go against the flow. Instead, he turned with it and, allowing himself to be driven ahead, shoved his way to the side, where the walls of several shanties had collapsed. Without pause, he moved into a connecting alley, saw up ahead the same insanity on a parallel lane. The gunfire was sporadic now, but the population didn’t slow for an instant.

A woman who looked barely older than the girl he carried spotted Knox, broke from the stampede and fought her way into the same alley. She was limping; she burst into tears when she recognized the girl he carried. The girl was alive, her arm possibly broken, her eyes open in shock.

The mother—it had to be her mother, not an older sister—accepted her, tears streaming, spouting a million thanks to God and Knox in no particular order. Knox helped to get them settled.

When he looked down the lane a second time, there was the boy Bishoppe. He was smiling as he waved Knox to him.

A
t that moment, without fully understanding why, Knox felt Grace’s presence. The stampede was something they would have survived together. He guessed that was it. But there was more to it. She was alive. He knew this fundamentally. And she had not simply gone to ground; she was in trouble, the kind of unthinkable trouble one didn’t like to consider.

John Knox didn’t believe in premonition, didn’t ascribe any particular significance to this feeling. At the same time, it was a
feeling
, not some flicker of his imagination.

“Where the hell did you come from?” Knox asked, breathing hard.

“Not hell, Mr. John. I was at the hotel when you joined the van. I came straightaway. Kibera is not a place for you. I can show you much better.”

“Can you get us out of here?”

“Please, Mr. John, you insult me with such questions. Five minutes. All will return to normal. I’ll take you to your driver.”

“My driver.”

“Correct.”