Mission Liberty (24 page)

“I think maybe it’s time I packed my things and headed out,” Mohl told DeLuca. “Time to call it a job.”

“Why weren’t you on the bus?” DeLuca asked him.

“If they stopped the bus and found a CIA agent on it, they’d have killed everybody, I think,” Mohl said. “Best not.”

DeLuca noticed that the door to the parrot cage was open.

“I let them out,” Mohl said. “Unfortunately, I don’t know where else they’re going to find work. Perhaps I’m not the only
one in need of a career change.”

“We have a car,” DeLuca told him.

“That’s all right,” Mohl said. “I’ve made other arrangements. Maybe after this, they’ll start calling me an ‘old Africa hand.’
I always wanted to be an old hand somewhere.” He finished his beer with a swig and staggered to the door, straightening both
his tie and his posture as he made his exit.

Perhaps because of the Doctors Without Borders logo on the door, Evelyn Warner’s Land Rover had been left untouched, a small
miracle, she said. She told DeLuca she had to get to Camp Seven. He took her aside and showed her the map displayed on the
screen of his CIM. A large contingent of hostile troops had paused north of a line between Camp Seven and Sagoa. At the estimated
rate of advance, barring an encounter with unexpected resistance, enemy troops were anticipated to arrive at one or both places
by nightfall.

“How many people in Sagoa?” DeLuca asked.

“I’m not sure,” Warner said. “A few thousand. More than at Camp Seven. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to do what I can,” DeLuca said. “I need to find out what’s happening with my team. Once I know that, I’ll have
a better sense of what’s going on and what I can do.”

“If I see Ms. MacKenzie, I’ll tell her to call you,” Warner said. “Take care, David.”

DENNIS ZOULALIAN WOKE UP IN A HOSPITAL bed but had no idea where he was, or how he’d gotten there, or for that matter, that
his name was Dennis Zoulalian. Words swam in his head, but not all of them in the same language. The television in his room
was tuned to Al Jazeera, and he understood everything the announcers were saying, but he knew that Arabic was not his native
tongue. His neck hurt, and his vision was blurred. His head throbbed. A doctor shone a small light in his eyes and spoke to
him in French, which he also understood. He couldn’t respond.

He was tired, so he went back to sleep.

The next time he awoke, his vision was better but his neck still hurt. He recalled being in a car, but the details of the
rest of it simply weren’t there.

“Patient X. Je m’appelle Claude Chaline et je suis avec Docteurs Sans Frontières. Parlez-vous français?”

“Oui,”
Vasquez said.

“Vous étiez dans un accident. Vous avez souffrit d’une commotion cérébrade. Savez-vous où vous êtes?

The doctor said he’d been in an accident and was asking him if he knew where he was.

“Je ne suis pas sûr. Je suis dans un hôpital. A Liger.”

“Vous vous rappelez comment vous êtes arrivé ici?”

“Do I remember how I got here?” Zoulalian said in English. The doctor seemed surprised, then concerned.

“Parlez s’il vous plait en français.”

The doctor told him his dental work was American—had he lived in America?

“Oui.”

“Qui êtes-vous?”

Who was he?

Excellent question. Something told him not to speak English again. The same voice told him he was in danger, and to be careful.

“Je ne sais pas. Je voudrais savoir.”

I don’t know—I wish I did.

“They found these on you,”
the doctor said in French. He was holding a satellite telephone and a small hand-held computer.
“Unfortunately, both require some sort of password to access. I don’t suppose you remember what your passwords are? They might
help us learn who you are.”

“I don’t remember,”
Zoulalian said.

“You speak English without an accent. I also found a tattoo on your butt cheek when I examined you. A pair of green footprints.
Do you know how they got there?”

Zoulalian shook his head.

“Let me tell you what I think, then. It might help you remember. A few years ago I taught a course in how to provide emergency
medical treatment to undernourished and starving people. The course was at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.
My students were all members of the U.S. Air Force’s para-rescue service. When they graduate, to show that they are members
of the team, they get a pair of small green footprints tattooed on their asses. Your own physical fitness is probably what
saved you from the car accident, as much as the airbag. I think you are a PJ. Or you were, at one time. I have also never
met an Arab who has a tattoo.”

Zoulalian tried to remember. He recalled the training, running for what felt like hours beneath the hot Texas sun. He’d quit.
No, he’d finished the program, done the job, for a while, but then he’d transferred… changed jobs. To what?

“Your memory will come back to you,”
the doctor said.
“The condition is temporary and quite common to head injuries. I think you will be sore, but I find nothing broken. Can you
sit up?”

Zoulalian sat up. His vision spun and his head banged like a drum, and the doctor was right, he was sore in his chest and
neck, but beyond that, he felt relatively all right.

“So here is what happened. I was in a car. With some other people. You were in the car chasing us when you had the accident.
I came back to see if I could help. I sent my friends on ahead. Everyone in your vehicle was killed but you. They brought
you here, and they brought me here to treat you. There’s a man outside the door with a gun, but he’s not guarding you—he’s
guarding me. I’m a prisoner. They think you are one of them. I need to get back to my camp. There’s only one man outside the
door. I’ve prepared a syringe with a fast-acting barbiturate, but I need you to distract the guard. I don’t know what you’re
doing here, but my sense is that if you are an American, you need to escape as much as I do, so if you’ll help me, I’ll take
you with me. How does that sound to you?”

Zoulalian had to think? Was it a trick? No. He could tell from the doctor’s voice that he was someone he could trust.

“Très bon,”
Zoulalian said.

Zoulalian called out to the guard in Arabic and asked him to enter the room. When the guard entered, he gestured with a crooked
finger, inviting him to come close so that he could whisper something to him. When the guard leaned over, Zoulalian grabbed
the barrel of his Uzi, to make sure it wasn’t pointing at the doctor, then whispered, in English, “Nighty-night.”

The doctor stabbed the guard in the carotid artery with the syringe. The man dropped instantly.

Zoulalian got to his feet, still a bit woozy, and helped the doctor lift the guard into the bed, where they covered him with
a sheet. The doctor prepared an IV drip with enough sedative in it, he explained, to keep the guard unconscious until the
following day. They removed the guard’s identification papers and left him there. With any luck, it would be some time before
anyone realized a different man was now lying in the bed of patient X.

Zoulalian held the guard’s weapon on his lap, hidden beneath a blanket, while Dr. Chaline pushed him in a wheelchair to the
front door of the hospital. In the drive, they saw a black Mercedes belonging to some local tribal leader or warlord, the
driver leaning against the front fender. Chaline opened the back door and helped Zoulalian in, then snapped his fingers to
command the driver to get behind the wheel.

“Your employer said you are to take us,” Chaline said in English, getting in on the passenger side. “Quickly. There isn’t
much time. This man is not well.”

The driver sped away. Zoulalian looked out the rear window to make sure they weren’t followed. Once they were out of town,
Zoulalian pointed the Uzi at the driver’s head and told him he could get out now, and thanks for the lift. They left him standing
by the side of the road.

MacKenzie and Ackroyd tried to talk Dr. Chaline out of going back, telling him he’d be taken hostage if he did, but he insisted,
arguing that Docteurs Sans Frontières also meant doctors who didn’t take sides, and that if there were wounded people, he
could not walk away. He would be safe, once it was understood which NGO he worked for, he told them.

Mack and Stephen drove across an open, barren landscape, aware that the dust kicked up by the Land Rover made them visible
for miles, crossing a rickety trestle bridge that spanned a nearly empty river bed where three elephants wallowed in a water
hole. They’d left the main highway, certain that traveling on it wouldn’t be safe, and were quite lost, despite the map Stephen
found in the glove compartment that he was hoping might help them navigate (she’d left her CIM at Camp Seven). They drove
until they came to the Convent of St. Ann’s, a compound of red brick, squatting in the dust, where the abbess told them it
wouldn’t be safe for them to stay, because men with guns had come every night, looking for somebody to kill. She’d sent her
girls and her sisters in Christ to a convent in Ghana, across the River Liger, and she was the only one there, protected only
by her advanced age and by her faith in God, which, she said, was enough. She gave them food and drink and suggested they
drive another hour down the road to a village called Sagoa, where they might be safe. It would be dark soon, the abbess said,
and it would not be safe at all for them to travel at night.

The setting sun bled across the western sky and turned the clouds to tongues of flame, and then the cobalt dome turned black
overhead, the Milky Way glittering with an incandescence brighter than fireworks. MacKenzie was certain the abbess had given
them the wrong directions, because ahead of them they saw only blackness, thick and opaque, but then she saw a light flicker.
Foolishly, she’d expected to see a glow in the sky, the way the lights of a city might illuminate the horizon, but there were
no lights in Sagoa, no electricity, only people sitting around charcoal fires or kerosene lamps in front of their homes, round
earthen huts with roofs of thatch, each hut surrounded by massive clay storage jars and tin jerry cans. She saw children hiding
inside their houses, fearful of whoever was in the vehicle, peeking out through the portals. They were Da, Ackroyd told her,
identifiable by the distinct scars on their cheeks and by their humble, almost meek manner.

They stopped the car and parked beneath a large acacia tree at the center of the village, where they were met by a delegation
led by a man who introduced himself as Father Ayala, a Spanish priest who’d been working in the village as a missionary. Stephen
spoke some Spanish and conversed with the man for a few moments before telling MacKenzie what was going on.

“These people,” Ackroyd said, “are LPF. Ligerian People’s Front. They’ve come from up north, where, if I understand Father
Ayala correctly, they tried to stop the rebels by sitting on the road to block it, and the troops drove over them. They’re
trying to get to Port Ivory. I told them it might not be safe there either.”

Father Ayala spoke again for a few minutes. Ackroyd shook his head sadly.

“He’s asking us if we have any food,” Stephen told MacKenzie. “The people here are very hungry, he says.”

Ayala spoke further. Ackroyd listened.

“He says there’s food in a storage building owned by the government,” Ackroyd told her, “but a powerful witch put a curse
on the food so they can’t eat it.”

“Where?” MacKenzie asked.

Ackroyd asked the priest where, and the priest pointed to a tin warehouse, the size of a three- or four-car garage, at the
edge of the common beneath a smaller tree, with a five-hundred-gallon fuel tank next to it, mounted on poles.

“There’s food in that building, and nobody guarding it, but people are starving?” she asked. Stephen nodded.

“Juju,” he said. “I know it sounds silly, but to them, it’s totally real. A witch’s curse is nothing to mess with. You do
not want bad juju.”

MacKenzie thought for a moment.

“Would they eat the food if I removed the curse?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Stephen said. “Did you bring the curse- remover?”

“Ask him,” she told Stephen, who relayed her question to the priest, who in turn asked the village elders standing behind
him. The priest nodded to indicate that the people would indeed eat the food if the curse were lifted from it.

“What do you have in mind?” Stephen asked MacKenzie as she walked back to the vehicle. “This isn’t something these people
take lightly.”

“I’m counting on it,” she told him. “Don’t forget—I’m a witch, too. I didn’t get this red hair out of a bottle.”

She’d noticed, in the back of the Land Rover, a set of emergency supplies in case of car trouble, including a full tool kit
and a four-pack of emergency chemlites in an aluminum sleeve to protect them from exposure to sunlight. Some chemlites the
Army issued were designed to emit a variety of lumens for different lengths of time, and generally the longer a chemlite burned,
the dimmer it was. The chemlites she took from the car were formulated to glow very brightly for about thirty minutes. They
were orange, two feet long, and each about the thickness of her thumb. She took a machete from the back of the truck and walked
to the storage building, where she saw that the door was locked with a simple padlock. It seemed like half the village had
followed her to see what she was going to do.

She bent the four-pack of chemlites across her knee, hearing each one snap, then shook the pack to make sure the chemicals
mixed. A faint orange glow emanated through the foil wrapper. She held it up in the air in the darkness so that everyone could
see the faint orange glow—Evelyn Warner had told her that people believed witchery took the form of light rising from the
body—then she set the four-pack down on a wooden bench, raised the heavy machete blade high over her head, and brought it
down with as much force as she could bring to bear, slicing the aluminum foil sack and the chemlites inside open, whereupon
she quickly flung the liquid against the side of the building, daubing it on the door and on the padlock. Exposed to air,
the chemophosphorescence would last only a few minutes more. The result achieved was better than anticipated, a kind of psychedelic
Jackson Pollock/Peter Max effect.