Fallout

28

Fisher tapped the driver on the shoulder, who turned and looked back over the seat. Bob Marley’s “Trenchtown Rock” blasted from the front seat’s speakers, vibrating the taxi’s doors. On the upside, the Peugeot’s air conditioner worked like an industrial freezer, chilling the interior to sixty-five degrees. Fisher, in a short-sleeve shirt and cargo shorts, had been wearing goose bumps on his forearms and thighs since leaving the airport.

“Pull over here.”

“Eh?”

Fisher pointed toward the curb. “Here!”

“Yeah, yeah, okay.”

The driver pulled over. Fisher counted out four hundred Kenyan shillings — about six dollars — and handed it to the driver, then grabbed his backpack and climbed out onto the sidewalk — what passed for a sidewalk here — a shelf of dirt about four inches higher than the dirt street. Fisher felt the heat enshroud him like a quilt straight from a dryer. With a wave of his arm, the driver pulled away in a geyser of oily blue smoke, Bob Marley shaking the windows.

Fisher looked around to get his bearings. If he was reading the map correctly — which was hand-drawn and blurred by a static-filled fax line — he was standing on Bukumbi Road. Despite a population of nearly two million and a cosmopolitan reputation, Nairobi off the main thoroughfares felt much smaller, with few buildings over five stories and little of the glitz and glitter that usually accompanies modern architecture. As Kenya’s capital, Nairobi was the country’s cultural, economic, and political hub.

A trio of giggling black children — two girls and a boy — ran down the sidewalk toward him, dodging and weaving as they tried to catch a chicken, then stopped suddenly. They stared up at him, wide-eyed, mouths agape.

Fisher smiled. “Jambo,” he said.

For a few seconds the children continued to ogle him, then one of the little girls offered a tentative smile; her teeth were perfect and white. “Jambo. Good day, sir.”

“Your English is very good,” Fisher said.

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’m looking for someone. Can you help me?” The little girl nodded, and Fisher said, “Her name is Alysyn Wallace—”

“Miss Aly?”

Fisher nodded.

Behind him Fisher heard a woman say, “You’ve found me, I’d say.”

Fisher turned around. The woman the kids had called Miss Aly wore khaki Capri pants and a blue T-shirt bearing the U.S. Air Force logo and the words, ALL AIR FORCE BILLIARDS CHAMPION. Her mouth seemed perpetually on the edge of a wry smile.

Fisher nodded. “Sam.”

She extended her hand, and Fisher shook it. “Aly,” she said. “Run along children, your chicken is getting away.” With waves and giggles, the children scampered away.

“Ahsante,” Fisher called.

“You are welcome, sir,” the little girl answered over her shoulder.

“Your Swahili’s not bad,” Aly said.

“Thanks. A few dozen phrases is all I know.”

“Come on. I’m not far from here.”

They walked to her home a few blocks away and sat on her back patio overlooking Lake Naivasha. The low stone wall was surrounded by sawback fronds that rattled in the breeze. Aly offered him a glass of iced tea, then leaned back in her wing-backed rattan chair.

“So tell me again,” she said, “how do you know Butch?”

In truth, Fisher wouldn’t know Butch if he passed him on the street. The man Aly had known as Butch Green, a Red Cross legal aid worker, was in fact Butch Mandt, a CIA case officer who had been assigned to Nairobi up until six months earlier.

Lambert’s request to Langley for a local contact in Nairobi had led to Mandt, who in turn gave them Aly’s name. Aly, herself a former relief worker with the Christian Children’s Fund, had come to Kenya in 1982 and just never left.

“Now,” she told him, “I teach English in St. Mary’s School during the week, and on weekends it’s billiards and paddleboat races on the Kisembe River.”

According to Mandt, Aly knew Kenya better than most blacks who’d lived there all their lives. As far as she knew, Fisher was a real estate developer who’d retired early and now globe-hopped in search of adventure.

“Met him at a fund-raiser in Baltimore a couple years ago,” Fisher replied. “I meant to ask you. What’s with the paddleboat racing?”

“It’s mostly for the kids. We get together, tool around the lake, have a picnic.”

“Not a bad way to spend a Sunday.”

“Join us.”

Fisher shrugged, took a sip of tea. “I’ll give it some thought.”

“So, you’re after the Sunstar, huh?”

“I am.”

“A lot of people have already looked, Sam. Sixty years’ worth of people.”

Fisher smiled. “I love a challenge.”

“You got a vehicle?”

Fisher dug into his shirt pocket and came up with a business card; he handed it over. “My travel agent set it up for me. A Range Rover.”

Aly nodded and handed it back. “I know this man. He’ll treat you right. You know where you’re going?”

“More or less.”

Less rather than more, Fisher thought. All he had were a pair of latitude and longitude coordinates, the first two hundred miles to the northwest, deep inside the Great Rift Valley in the Kenyan highlands; the second a hundred fifty miles to the east near Lake Victoria’s Winam Gulf. What he would find, if anything, at these spots he didn’t know, but he was trusting that Peter had known and that somehow, someway, these two spots were connected to Carmen Hayes’s disappearance, North Korea, Bolot Omurbai, and the PuH-19.

Fisher was ready for some answers. He, Lambert, Grimsdottir, and Redding had been staring at this seemingly unsolvable puzzle for too long, and Fisher’s instincts told him that whatever was happening, it wasn’t far off.

“Gear, rations, et cetera?” asked Aly.

Fisher nodded to his Granite Gear Stratus lying beside his chair.

“Gun?” she said.

“They confiscated my bazooka at the airport.”

She clucked her tongue. “We’ve got highway bandits in the backcountry. They’ll steal your skin if they think they can sell it,” she said solemnly, then gave him a wink. “No worries, I’ll fix you up. You know how to handle a gun?”

“Just point the end with the hole in it at the bad guy and pull the trigger.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, then decided he was kidding and laughed. “Right.” She checked her watch. “Go catch a nap. When you wake up, I’ll take you to supper. I know a place that serves a parrot fish that’ll knock your socks off.”

The parrot fish had in fact been fantastic. They returned to her home just as the sun was setting. As promised, the rental agent had delivered his Range Rover to the house, complete with extra jerricans of water and fuel.

Fisher went to his bedroom, turned on the bedside lamp, and stretched out. His satellite phone chimed, and he checked the screen: Grimsdottir. “Morning, Grim.”

“Evening, for you.”

“Feels like morning to me. What’s up?”

“I’ve got the colonel on the line, too.”

“Lamb.”

“When do you leave?” Lambert asked.

“Five in the morning.”

“Omurbai’s been on the air again doing his Hitler imitation. Remember he mentioned Manas? ‘The scourge of Manas’?”

“Yes.”

Grimsdottir said, “That’s a reference to something called the Epic of Manas. It’s a traditional Kyrgyz myth-slash-poem set in the ninth century. It’s a cornerstone to Kyrgyz national identity. It runs almost half a million verses, twenty times longer than Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad combined.”

“Should I put it on my reading list,” Fisher said, “or are there CliffsNotes?”

“Well, here’s the condensed version: Manas and descendants go on a variety of adventures, waging war, looking for a homeland, and just generally being heroic. Harvard’s got an electronic version, which I downloaded. I’ve scanned the thing from start to finish, and I can’t find any mention of the phrase ‘the scourge of Manas.’ ”

“So Omurbai’s taken some creative license,” Fisher replied.

Lambert said, “The shrinks at the CIA don’t think so. Omurbai’s used it seven more times in press conferences. They think it’s more than just a catchphrase he’s using to stir the masses. They think it has tangible meaning for him.”

Fisher was silent for a few moments. “Scourge,” he said. “Could have two meanings. Scourge, as in a tormentor, in which case he’s probably talking about himself. Or, he’s using it in the literal sense: scourge, as in a flail, or a whip.”

“In other words,” Lambert said, “a weapon.”

“Not just a weapon,” Fisher corrected him. “A weapon worthy of an epic, nation-saving hero.”