Doing Dangerously Well (44 page)

On entering Drop of Life, Barbara hooked her cloak on top of Brad’s grey overcoat and marched upstairs, past an abstract Indian tapestry of a waterfall in blues, turquoise and royal purple. As she looked at it, a tremendous calm overcame her. She examined the intricate stitching and the haphazard materials that had been woven into the fabric—beads, mirrors, glass. Underneath, the title:
See the Bigger Picture.

She stood before it, transfixed. Something within the image reminded her of her own life: haphazard, chaotic, seemingly irrational. What would emerge when this scatter was put together? What was her bigger picture?

And then the answer came. She had one quality above all: energy. She did not wear away hard rocks with soft water. No, she smashed into them and destroyed them. She was the waterfall. She represented not so much the flow of the universe as its rush, its force, its urgency. This must have been what Femi had seen in her on their first meeting, what her parents had never seen and what Mary must have always suspected.

She marched upstairs to Brad’s office, intent on using her prodigious energy, and found him hunched over some papers.

“Top of the mornin’ to ye,” she said in her best Irish accent, then a dramatic pause for the punchline, “and the rest of the day to meself.” She guffawed at her own joke.

Brad shot up and offered her a chair, his bland expression overlaid with—Barbara squinted to distinguish the emotion—yes, it seemed like excitement. She docked her body into the seat’s berth.

“… followed … accounts … found shares …”

“Pardon?” Barbara forced herself to focus.

“Kolo bought TransAqua shares before he arranged to sell the company the water rights.”

“Ah, now that’s interesting.” Barbara lounged back in the chair, interlaced her fingers and looked at the ceiling. “Very, very interesting …” Brad’s logic made no sense to her. “By the way, Brad, what’s the problem with Kolo buying TransAqua shares before the water sale?”

Only the greatest detective would have noticed the change in Brad’s features from excitement to shock. “It’s illegal!” Even when immersed in such a powerful emotion, his voice hardly carried. “It’s insider trading! Bad PR for TransAqua.” He would most definitely benefit from stage training of some sort, Barbara thought, and vowed to mention it to him at some juncture.

“But there can’t be anything wrong with that. My father used to do it all the time.”

“Yes, but it’s highly illegal. And there’s an issue of scale here. The number of shares Kolo bought clearly distinguishes the transaction as unethical and illegal. It’s in the millions of dollars.”

“Ah—I understand. Why didn’t you say so? You must realize, Brad, I’m an information junkie. I need details, facts, data.”

He waved an index finger above the numbers, not daring to touch them, as if they might pollute him. “Well, there’s also clear evidence of bribery—”

Barbara gazed at an army of figures laid out in confrontational columns and rows. “I am inductive rather than deductive.”

“—at all levels of government.”

“According to Jung’s categorization, I am sensing rather than intuitive—”

Brad’s dry fingernail traced a line down a column of numbers. “There’s evidence of financial mismanagement at the World Bank.”

“—which is probably why we have so little in common.” Once again, she attempted to reinforce the deeper significance
of her words, but he seemed quite literal-minded. A touch of Asperger’s?

“In
toto,
approximately 30 percent of funds have been siphoned off.”

She slouched in his chair. “I don’t really understand a word of what you’ve just said, Brad.”

“It’s bad, Barb.”

She perked up. “Why didn’t you say? We’d better send these off to Aminah!”

“Yes, I’ve already done—”

“Good work, Brad.” Barbara lay back, focused again on the ceiling and crossed her arms in contemplation. This new strategy of hers had taken less than a year to bear fruit. How ironic! But something still niggled. “I don’t understand—how did you do all this?”

Brad mumbled a few words that floated off to the vast space in the ether where all unimportant speech lodges.

“Pardon?”

“Well, for example, I’m a forensic accountant—”

“You’re in forensics?”

“No, no, no!” He uttered a nasal bleat that Barbara deduced was a laugh. “… forensic
accountant
… look for financial irregularities …”

She found it hard to concentrate on each word, so his conversation came to her in waves.

“And Krystal … retrieve information from any computer system … world.”

“She’s a hacker?”

“Oh, no, no, no!” More bleats from his nasal passages. “Well … yes, but she’s highly skilled.” The last two words did not emanate from the back of the throat, as is their usual provenance, but rather from the upper reaches of the nasal cavity.

“And Mimi?” Barbara picked up Brad’s stapler, remembering that she needed one.

“She’s, well … can secure confidential information from corporations …”

“An industrial spy?” Barbara yelped. She imagined Mimi acquiring information in tanning salons around the world, offering a peeling cleavage as enticement.

“No, no, no.” Brad peeped outside his office. “Well … yes, but we call it corporate liaison.”

Barbara could only guess what covert role the ancient effigy played, with her unmoving, tree bark face. “What about Jane?”

“She, uh, well, I guess she distributes information. Her contacts are unrivalled.”

“Contacts?” Barbara imagined a jewel-encrusted black book, locked within a bank vault. “I see.” Barbara stapled into thin air, the staples flicking onto Brad’s desk with little ticking sounds. “So, once we get the information, she makes sure it goes public, right?”

“… ight.”

Barbara turned Brad’s lamp off to prevent glare and adjusted the chair to a lounging position. She lay back and digested the new information, as Brad hovered at her side. She remembered the hand in the mud, its desperate signal to all who went past. She felt that somehow she was answering its call.

When she emerged from her meditations, Brad had disappeared. She double-checked the room. Yes, he had definitely disappeared.

With so much to do, she grabbed Brad’s stapler and sailed up to her office.

Priming herself to phone Femi, Barbara anticipated the venom he would spit at her. She gazed at the clock, queasy with trepidation,
urging herself to face his loathing. After all, she only had to survive for maybe ten minutes. She picked up the receiver gingerly, as if it were already infected with his hate.

“Femi, my friend!” A slight Nigerian twang crept into her voice. “And?”

The voice sounded tired. “Barbara. Long time. Worraps?”

“I have body.” Unaware of her mismanagement of Nigerian dictum, she continued. “And your own?”

“I have my own body too.”

She heard giggling in the background.

“But I was planning to lease it,” Femi continued.

“Lease your body? You need money?”

“For the body I occupy? Yes. It needs water and water is so expensive, we can barely afford to drink. I think TransAqua is considering charging dogs for drinking from puddles.”

“Well, we’re here to protect those puddles,” Barbara replied with some self-importance.

“But if you can’t, the dogs will have to deal with the militias in control of the illegal supply, just like us.”

The fact that he had not slammed down the phone gave her more confidence. She rushed on in a gust of enthusiasm. “I have it from a very reliable but dangerous source at TransAqua that someone hired the African Water Warriors to do the bombing.”

“What? Why?”

“To discredit you.”

“They’d kill their own people for that?”

“They’d kill for much less-oh! Drop of Life will get this information out. But you can also help yourself. I have a new plan.”

“Oh no.” Femi sighed.

“Not sabotage.” She cleared her throat, leaving a dramatic pause. “As a Taoist, I have always said, the man who throws shit—will his own hands not be dirty?”

She heard a groan over the line—perhaps a sufferer remembering the past, the good times. With a hand on her chest, she attempted to hold back her emotions. “You remember the chief we met? The one with the incredible aura?”

“You mean the one whose aura you noticed only when you were told he was a chief?” His antidepressants had obviously worked. “You mean that chief?” Barbara mentally noted to send a lower dosage next time.

“He knew something about Kolo’s past. Could you get it out of him?”

“You’ll just cause more wahala. It can’t be corroborated.”

“Neither was the bombing. Rumour is more powerful than truth. Kolo can be whispered off his throne.”

“Now I understand!” Femi exclaimed, as if stumbling out of a dream. “So that’s what he meant. You can’t prove a negative!” His words threw her into confusion. “I can see you’re now a proper Naija woman! Okay—later!”

“Later. By the way,” she added, “remember me to the chief.”

She could hear Femi breathing, so she knew he was still on the line, but she did not hear a response.

“Femi? Did you hear me?”

After a moment, the line went dead.

Strange,
she thought.
The connection to Nigeria is so erratic.

Barbara had sewn herself harem pants for winter. Unfortunately, the thick yellow tweed selected for its warmth also added volume to gathers that should have draped downwards. She looked like a balloon whose only countervailing effect was the balloon on her head—a turban in light blue she had made from sheets. A turban, she felt, would identify their group for generations to come, much like Che Guevara’s beret. She still awaited the swaths of authentic indigo ordered from
a Nigerian wholesaler on the Internet with her credit card.

She walked into the boardroom, the fabric around her thighs creating a swishing sound, her Black Power pendant rattling against two Celtic necklaces and a brooch in the form of a Nigerian flag. As she entered, she bowed a Namaste to all and sat down, her harem pants puffing up around her waist.

Krystal gummed a smile that glistened with encouragement.

The ancient monument was shrouded in a sari of light cerulean blue and a veil of moon white. “Welcome back.”

“Thanks.” Barbara closed one eye, picturing the tree bark in an indigo turban. The turban would work. She must be a winter. “I think I can get Nigeria sorted out now.”

The crimson dot on Jane’s forehead moved as an expression fought through its wrinkles and crevices. “This has been disastrous for us.”

“Disastrous for
you
? You sit here like colonial masters telling Nigerians how to become effective activists, yet you know nothing about us!”

“The sun and moon don’t orbit around you, hon,” said Mimi, her tanned breasts peeling. “Galileo proved that.”

Gums cut in, troubled by conflict. “Oh, Barbie, you’ve got so much energy and confidence …”

Barbara mentally converted from Canadian to American. Rough translation:
you’re arrogant.

“… but this is a real challenge for us.”

… entirely unacceptable.

“The internal audit …” Brad began, his voice carried away in trebles off the vocal register.

Barbara raised an admonitory hand. “Wise Water did not plant the bomb.” At the collective gasp, Barbara leaned back, placing an arm on the back of Brad’s chair, her breasts distorting the flowers on her shirt so they looked like coloured
sausages. “It was the African Water Warriors, funded by …” for some reason, she continued to protect her sister, “… corporate interests.”

“How do you know this?”

“I have managed to secure an informant at the highest level at TransAqua.”

Jane did not seem convinced. “So what exactly is your strategy?”

Brad uncharacteristically interrupted. “Easy. I’ll follow the financial trail, Krystal can access the electronic data—”

“No!” Barbara fairly jumped. “We don’t have that kind of time. Femi’s life is hanging by a thread. Just find out where AWW got their explosives from, how they planned the bombing. We’ve got no need to trace further back.”

Jane stirred again. “How do we do this?”

“You! No one else can do it. You know people in the right quarters. Maybe contact NGOs who’ll know local arms dealers and we can work back from there.”

The Easter Island effigy nodded assent. “Anything else?”

Barbara got up and went to the white board, where she listed their successes. “So we know—thanks to Brad—that Kolo has been involved in insider trading, the World Bank is mixed up in illicit practices, and there is corruption at all levels of government. Three points so far. From Krystal we’ve learned that TransAqua plans to push up fresh water prices, ban all collection of water, effectively own all water supply in the West through rights and licences. And rename the Niger River as a favour to Kolo. There we have four more points.” She excluded Mimi from all congratulations.

“Jane, we need your jewel-encrusted black book. After publicizing information about the AWW bombing, we’ll need to release these other reports in stages, rather than all at once.
We’re up against formidable enemies, so we’ll need a continuous battery of intelligence.”

Wrinkles plummeted over her boss’s eyes, implying strong consent.

“We have to think like journalists and, more importantly, like Nigerians.” Barbara flicked through her book until she located Astro’s notes. “We can use something much more subtle than sabotage. Just words. Whisperings, even. Something that floats through the air, so gentle, so delicate, is still strong enough to bring a government down. Now, Femi is getting a critical piece of information regarding a hidden event in Kolo’s past that could spell the end of his presidency.” She turned to Mimi. “However, there’s one last job we need done to tie this up. Could you infiltrate TransAqua and find out what they’re up to? My sister heads up the bid for Kainji.”

There was a collective gasp.

“Your sister?” Mimi almost dislodged her contacts.

“You won’t get any information from her, but she has a rival there—John Sinclair.”