The Night Ranger

6

From Nairobi to Garissa, the A3 was freshly paved and lightly traveled. Martin drove flat out, slaloming past tanker trucks and matatus—brightly colored minibuses packed with travelers. As the Toyota descended from the central highlands, the giant baobab trees gave way to sisal plantations and open grassland. The morning sun poured in through the windshield, and Wells was glad for his Ray-Bans. Every few miles, troops of baboons ran along the road, cackling over jokes only they understood.

“I see why the settlers thought it was such a beautiful country,” Wells said.

“The most,” Martin said.

“It was settled long before the settlers,” Wilfred said from the backseat. “Kikuyu and a dozen more tribes. Even after World War Two, the British didn’t get the joke. Even then they made us fight for our country. After they put us to work to win their own freedom from Hitler.”

Wells couldn’t handle a lecture about colonialism on two hours’ sleep. Besides, Wilfred was right. A pain in the ass, but right. “All I said was that it’s beautiful. The British colonized America, too, and we fought them just like you did.”

“We have so much in common.” Wilfred put a skinny hand between the front seats. “Fist pump, my brother.”

“I pay extra for the attitude, or is it included?”

“And on that couch yesterday you went digging for your roots.”

“You chicken, Wilfred? Hoping I toss you out of the car so you can hitch your way home? Not happening. You’re in it now. You want out, you quit. My brother.”

“How can I be scared with the great white hunter protecting me?”

Wells supposed he’d just have to put up with the guy. Wilfred was smart enough, anyway. He’d shown up at the Hilton at six a.m. with a permit from the Interior Ministry: two pages, three signatures, and four stamps. “With this you can go anywhere the police do. After that, you’re on your own.”

—

They ran into their first roadblock at Mwingi, halfway to Garissa. A chicane of crude metal spikes forced Martin to pump the brakes. An officer in cheap mirrored sunglasses and a powder blue uniform stood by the road, waving cars through with a scarred wooden baton. When he saw Wells, he chopped the baton at the Toyota like a conductor demanding a surge from his orchestra. Martin pulled over, wheels on gravel. The officer strode up, ignoring the cars still passing through the chicane. Wells lowered his window, handed over the permit. The officer examined it through his shades.

“Passport.”

The cop looked at that, too, shook his head in disgust. Wells expected questions, but the officer handed everything back, waved them on. Wells had questions of his own: Have you been told to look for any specific vehicle? Were you put here before the kidnapping or after? But the cop walked away before Wells could speak.

“If the papers are in order, why was he angry?”

“Because they are in order. And stamped by senior men. No bribe.”

East of Mwingi, the land grew hot and dry. The grass thinned and patches of thorn bush appeared. The hills didn’t disappear, but they shrank, as if the sun’s rays had pounded them down. To the south, sheep nosed through the brush, watched over by unsmiling men with pistols on their hips, protection from lions and rustlers both.

The highway turned to gravel. The villages shrank to rows of concrete shacks along the road selling drinks and fruit and all manner of junk: choking-hazard toys, used batteries, donated clothes. “Tuck Parts,” a sign above one shack proclaimed. Unrecognizable metal bits filled the shelves inside. At every village, the traffic pooled as truckers pulled over for food and less savory refreshment. Martin crept along as skinny men in mud-stained pants stood in the road holding mangoes. “Good, good, good,” one said to Wells, his voice fast, desperate.

“I told you Kenya was poor,” Wilfred said from the backseat.

“You should be a talk-show host. You never quit.”

They hit another roadblock west of Garissa. Again the cop appeared more angry than happy to see Wells’s papers. Garissa itself was a town of ten thousand or so with a slapped-together feel, new buildings with paint already peeling. Barbed wire and concrete barriers ringed the police headquarters. The stink of baked cow dung clotted the air. The place reminded Wells of the less attractive parts of the central Plains, right down to the name. Garissa, Nebraska. Class B football champs three years back.

“Big cattle market here,” Wilfred said. “The herders bring cows and sheep from all over the province. Somalis mostly. Garissa is filled with Somalis.”

“Refugees?”

“No. Kenyan Somalis. Even before the refugees, Kenya had Somalis. They live between here and the border. Also in Eastleigh. That’s in Nairobi, near downtown.”

“A slum?”

“Yes and no. Eastleigh’s crowded, but not cheap to live in. The Somalis in Nairobi have money. Nobody knows where it’s from. Probably they take the profits from kidnapping and smuggling and move it to the banks in Kenya. In the last few years, they bought up Eastleigh. You have an apartment worth one million shillings, they give you one million five hundred thousand for it. Then they move all their family in, twelve or fifteen or them. They stay together. They think they’re better than Kenyans.”

“They’re Kenyan citizens?”

“Some yes, some no. Doesn’t matter. They’re all Somali. You can tell because they have round heads, small ears.”

“Round heads and small ears?”

“Ugly little people.” Wilfred tilted his head at the men walking on the street. “See, he’s Somali, he’s Somali, that whole bunch is Somali—”

Somalis did look different from the Kenyans, though Wells wasn’t sure he’d call them ugly. Northern Somalia was a short boat ride from Yemen and the Arabian peninsula. The Arab influence was clear. Most obviously, Somalis had relatively light skin.

“You’re quite the racial scholar, Wilfred. The National Socialists would be proud.”

“National Socialists?”

“Nazis.” Wells found himself irrationally pleased to have gotten one past the guy.

“Say what you want. Everyone knows the Somalis look different. And Garissa is a Somali town.”

“I give you twenty bucks, will you stop talking until the next roadblock?”

“No.”

An hour past Garissa, they hit another barricade. This one was serious, a five-ton truck blocking the road, a squad of guys in camouflage unis and AKs peering into vehicles.

“The army?” Wells said. “Will they take the permit?”

“They’re General Services Unit. Specially trained police. In America, you would call them paramilitary. They watch the camps.”

“So they’re in charge of investigating the kidnapping?”

“I think so, yes.”

But paramilitary guys were usually door-kickers. Wells wondered if they’d have any interest in the detective work required to solve a kidnapping. Another reason why the Kenyan police investigation seemed to be moving so slowly.

Martin stopped near the pickup. Two officers walked over. Special training or no, their weapons discipline was unimpressive. One guy held his AK loosely by the barrel, like a hitter heading back to the dugout after a strikeout. Even Afghans took gun safety more seriously.

The first officer leaned into the car. “Turn around. No foreigners.”

Wells handed over both permits and his passport. The officer barely looked at the papers before handing them back. He pointed down the road the way they’d come: Go home. Wells reached for the door, but Wilfred moved first. He snatched the permits from Wells and nearly jumped out of the backseat. He stepped up to the officer, yelling in Swahili. The commotion attracted the rest of the squad. The officers fanned out around Wilfred.

Wells stepped out, grabbed Wilfred by the arm, pulled him away, around the back of the Toyota. “I’m telling him, the permits are good, you’re allowed—” Wilfred said.

“You’re blowing this up on purpose—”

“It’s my country. Let me.”

The police had circled the Toyota now, rifles at their sides, muttering to each other. “He sends us back to Nairobi, you’re riding in the trunk,” Wells said. He let go of Wilfred, who walked back to the officer. The shouting match started again. Wilfred reached into his pocket and Wells heard the distinct click of a safety being dropped—

Before Wells could move, Wilfred came out with a phone. “Call Nairobi if you want, you donkey,” Wilfred said in English to the officer. “Tell Commander Embu you’re rejecting us. That or let us go. Enough.”

—

The final miles to Dadaab passed quickly. The road was deserted aside from a slow-moving food convoy, a dozen trailers with a four-truck police escort. The land around them was inhospitable, arid plain patched with scrub. They reached the WorldCares compound around noon and found that James Thompson had kept his word. When Wells showed his passport, the guards waved the Toyota through. The compound immediately impressed Wells as simple and functional, not overly fancy. Residential trailers filled one corner, the food and supply warehouse another, the kitchen and headquarters a third, and parking and mechanicals like generators the fourth. A neatly tended rose garden outside the headquarters building provided the only color.

But the place seemed to be running at half-speed. Four Land Cruisers sat under a metal sunscreen, their windshields covered in red dust. A black cat with a white blaze emerged from the roses, meowed at Wells, strolled off. The place reminded Wells of a military base set to close: Why bother? was practically skywritten overhead. He imagined the kidnapping had stunned everyone. Still, he was surprised not to see Kenyan cops around.

“You and Martin go talk to the local staff and the guards,” Wells told Wilfred. “Anyone you can find. Ask them about this guy Suggs. Who he knew in the camps, his relationship with the volunteers, if he had money problems—”

“It’s Kenya. Everyone has money problems.”

“Just do it. You hear anything I should know, find me.”

“Yes, great white hunter.”

As Wells walked toward the headquarters, one of the homeliest women he’d ever seen emerged. “Mr. Wells. I’m Moss Laughton.” She led him to her office, a simple square room with white-painted concrete walls, their only decoration maps of Hagadera. She had short hair and black glasses and sat on her couch with her legs folded. She reached out a hand and offered Wells a snaggle-toothed smile.

“Thanks for having us.”

“Jimmy’s orders.”

“People call him Jimmy?” James Thompson didn’t strike Wells as a Jimmy.

“I call him Jimmy. Whenever possible. It irritates him, but he can’t fire me, because he sure doesn’t want to be in Dadaab eleven months a year. Anyway, I’m thinking about quitting, so I do what I like.”

Thirty seconds in and this conversation was shaping up to be as odd as his encounter at Castle House. Wells wondered if Moss was trying to say You’ll get the truth from me if you ask the right questions or if she was simply half crazy from the heat and dust.

“So what do you think happened?” Wells said.

“No idea. Gwen’s family hired you?”

“Yes. I used to work for the CIA.”

“Of course. I remembered your name, but it took me a bit of Googling to figure out why.”

“That’s me.”

“And now you’re here.”

“Now I’m here.”

“Any progress so far?”

Wells shook his head. “Do you remember when they planned the trip? James wasn’t sure.”

“I don’t know exactly, but Gwen mentioned Lamu to me maybe three days before they went. She was nervous, poor thing, but the others convinced her.”

“And off they went in a WorldCares Land Cruiser.”

“Correct.”

“Which had no sat phone.”

She smiled. He saw she was pleased, that he’d passed a test he hadn’t known he was taking. “We have seven Cruisers. Four have phones. Not this one. A coincidence, no doubt. Anyway, off they went. You know the rest.”

“When did you report the kidnapping?”

“To the police? Or the embassy?”

“Either.”

“I didn’t report anything. I think Jasper—”

“The head of security—”

“Yes. He made the call. But it might have been Jimmy himself. In any case, it wasn’t until the next morning. I wanted to do it right away, but Jimmy thought we should wait.”

“Why?”

“He said the Kenyan police were useless and corrupt. He’s right about that. He said that if the kids were okay, we’d hear in the morning and there was no need to panic everyone. If they weren’t, there was nothing anyone could do until the sun came up, and we might as well wait.”

“You didn’t agree.”

“I thought the risks were the other way. Let the cops throw up a roadblock, no harm. See if anybody in Nairobi would pay attention. I thought at the time he was worried about bad publicity. Although he’s turned out to be wrong about that. From what the staff in Houston tell me, this has been pure gold. Millions of dollars in donations. Biggest week in WorldCares history.”

“He didn’t mention that last night.”

“Of course, we’re taking every dime. We have to—”

“Because your insurance company won’t cover this. And the ransom could be several million dollars. That much he did tell me.” Wells realized something else, a connection he wished he’d made before. “No insurance company paying—”

“Means no hostage negotiators on site and no pesky insurance investigation into what happened.”

Moss Laughton was throwing out some big hints. “You don’t trust your boss much.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Does Jasper feel the same?”

“You ought to ask him. Too bad you can’t. He’s in Nairobi with Jimmy.”

“The head of security isn’t here?”

“‘Head of security’ is a fancy way to describe him. Basically he makes the schedules, makes sure we have guards out front. Nobody says it, but we like having one white guy with a gun around. So we call him head of security.”

“Whatever you call him, I’m surprised he’s not here.”

“He doesn’t speak Swahili, so I’m not sure what he’d do.”

“How about the police? They must have come by.”

“The GSU, sure. They poked through the trailer that Gwen and Hailey shared. I think they were more interested in Gwen’s underwear than anything else. If they found anything, they didn’t tell me.”

“Where’s the Land Cruiser?”

“They towed it to their headquarters in Garissa. I doubt there was any forensic evidence to find, but if there was, I can guarantee it’s gone. They’ve talked to everybody here, I wouldn’t call them interviews, more like, tell us what you know or we’ll take you out back, give you a working-over. Truncheon in hand.”

Truncheon. A good Irish word. “Anyone give them anything? Here or in the camps?”

“Not that I know of. They’re not good at sharing, the GSU.”

“Any Americans been here?”

“Four nice men with short haircuts showed up three days ago. Two had business cards saying they were from the embassy. The other two didn’t tell me their names. They wanted to take the laptops that the kids used. I said no, but I did let them do what they wanted to them here.”

So the agency and NSA were doing what they did best, chasing electronic intel. No doubt they had mirrored the hard drives. “What about phones?” Wells said.

“They asked about mobiles too, but I told them the truth, those kids couldn’t be separated from their handsets.”

“They look at anyone else’s computers?”

“Like mine or Jimmy’s? Now, why would they do a thing like that?” She pulled two water bottles from the minifridge beside the couch. “My one luxury. Have to have cold water.”

She passed him one. He drank gratefully. His thirst had come up quietly. The sun here baked out moisture in a way that was almost pleasant. Until it wasn’t.

“So, just to be clear. They didn’t look at your computer, or Jimmy’s.”

“No. Anyway, it wouldn’t have mattered. Jimmy practically chains his laptop to his wrist. Very concerned about computer security, my boss.”

“Any reason in particular?”

“Not that I’d know of.” Moss showed him her crooked teeth again. “I’m trying to stick to the facts here, you see. What I know firsthand.”

“That’s admirable. How about this, then? What did you think of the volunteers? Were they in the way?”

“The truth is that on a daily basis this isn’t rocket science. We provide food, water, basic medical care. The Kenyans police the camps. The refugees govern themselves. We’re not supposed to get involved with their politics. We can advocate for them, but our power is limited. That’s not just WorldCares, by the way. It’s everybody, even the big groups. What I’m saying is reading to the kids like Gwen did, working at the hospital like Hailey, it’s as useful as anything anybody here is doing once you get past the basic provision of services.”

A long not-quite-answer. Wells tried again. “You got along with them?”

“I had a funny moment with Gwen her first day. She came out of her trailer wearing a T-shirt that hardly covered her chest. I told her that wasn’t how we did things here. To her credit, she was more appropriate after that. Made the effort. Hailey and Owen worked hard, and even Scott. Though I didn’t like him much. Spent his time either insulting or screwing Gwen, from what I could see. Why she put up with it, I don’t know.”

“And how well did you know Suggs?”

“Suggs. Anybody ever tell you about the chairs?”

Wells shook his head.

“No reason they would have. A couple years back, the Kenyan members of parliament decided they needed new seats on which to rest their royal asses. They found these chairs that cost, I think, twenty-five hundred dollars each. The Kenyan parliament has more than two hundred members, so they’d be spending half a million dollars on these chairs. In a country where the average income is about two dollars a day. Naturally, the newspapers found out and made a stink.”

“And the MPs backed off.”

“They went right ahead. What I’m trying to say is that the Kenyans, they’re very friendly people. And they aren’t all crooks. Plenty of them are honest. But, blame it on poverty or loyalty to tribe or whatever you like, the me-first attitude runs deep. Suggs was one of those guys, we paid him well, he helped us, but I never trusted him. He looked like a gangster. That was intentional. He liked everybody to know he could work both sides. I don’t know if he set this up, but I wouldn’t be shocked.”

“But when you talk to staff—”

“If they know, they aren’t telling. And I’ve talked to them all.”

“Did Suggs suggest the Lamu trip to Scott Thompson?”

“Don’t know. But a couple weeks ago, Suggs and Scott Thompson drove off together. They said they were going to another camp to see if they could start deliveries there. It didn’t make sense then and it makes even less now.”

“You think Suggs set him up somehow?”

“I’m telling you what I saw. I can’t guess what it means.”

“Suggs was from Nairobi, right?”

“No, Mwingi, west of here. His family lived in Nairobi.”

“In Eastleigh.”

“No. He wasn’t Somali.”

“But he’d worked at Dadaab awhile.”

“That’s right. He was connected in the camps. But let me tell you something you might not want to hear, Mr. Wells. I don’t care what you’ve done over the years, how tough you think you are, you are not going to be able to go into Hagadera or any of these camps and crack skulls and get answers—” The last five words were delivered in a parody of a tough Mickey Spillane voice. “These people can see you coming a hundred kilometers away. And what will you threaten them with? You can’t send them back to Somalia, you can’t arrest them, you don’t know anything about them, you have no leverage. All you are is another mzungu poking at them.”

“Guess I’ll have to use my charm, then.”

“Good luck with that. And before you ask, I don’t have any great ideas for you. But I thought you should know.”

The warning didn’t come as a surprise, but it was depressing anyway. Wells took another glance around. No photos or personal items of any kind, just the desk, the fridge, and the battered furniture. “Tell me about yourself.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I’ve seen prison cells are better decorated than this.”

“Sentiment’s a luxury, as I suspect you understand.”

“How long have you worked for WorldCares?”

“Three years. I was at the Red Cross, but they stopped promoting me and Jimmy came looking, told me he wanted to professionalize WorldCares. He’d gotten dinged for spending too much money on fund-raising and overhead, not enough on projects on the ground. He said he wanted to do a better job.”

“And.”

“And he did. In Haiti and here. The year before I came, WorldCares raised five million dollars and only a million-two hit the ground. Last year it got up to sixteen, seventeen million dollars and maybe six million went to programs. About half in Dadaab. Do the math, we were spending twenty-four percent on programs. Now it’s thirty-seven percent.”

“So that’s good.”

“Yes, but if you look at it the other way, overhead’s gone from four million to ten million in three years. Jimmy makes eight hundred thousand a year, plus benefits. Which are big. He lives rent-free in a nice house in Houston, gets a new Lexus every year, flies first-class. Really, he’s paying himself over a million. Look at the way he lives, you’d think he worked for Exxon. Not a charity serving the poorest people in the world. I mean, he’s a right smart fund-raiser, you saw it in Nairobi. Puts a tear in your eye and a lump in your throat.”

“You’re reaching for your checkbook and your credit card at the same time,” Wells said.

“Exactly. But I always thought the idea was to raise money to do good work. I fear Jimmy has that equation reversed.”

Wells nodded.

“I’ve done all right, too. He started me at three hundred thousand. Now I’m at three-fifty and he’s offered to bump me to four ’cause he’s worried I’m serious about quitting. Which is a lot for these jobs, believe me. Truth is I just put it in the bank anyway. I don’t have kids, I spend eleven months a year here, and you see my fashion sense. But I’m starting to feel like he’s buying me. Which I can’t abide.”

“You’ve told him this.”

“And he tells me fund-raising is part of the game, it takes money to make money. And look, we spend three million dollars a year here, we do some good. My big project for next year, before this happened, was supposed to be getting glasses and dental work to the kids here. Those maybe sound like luxuries, but they’re not. You can’t see, you don’t have much chance in a place like this. Your teeth hurt all the time, it’s misery. That’s the upside of working with a guy like Jimmy. Places like the Red Cross, they’re in love with their own bureaucracies. Anything new takes years to approve. Jimmy lets me do what I want, long as I send back pictures he can use for fund-raising.”

“Were you surprised when he came over for so long?”

Moss sipped her water. “Smart boy. Yes. I thought it was for the reporter from Houston. His hometown paper and he wanted to look hands-on, and if that meant putting in a few weeks here, he would.”

“Now you’re not so sure.”

She shook her head. “I can’t figure it. I know I mentioned the insurance. But the fact is I can’t see Jimmy risking those kids. He may be greedy but I’ve never seen him as a psychopath. And I can’t believe the four of them, or five if you count Suggs, are hiding in a hut somewhere, watching the world go crazy. Maybe Scott would think it was a lark, but not the others. Gwen wouldn’t put her family through that worry for all the money in the world. I’m sure. Beyond that, anything’s possible.”

Anything’s possible. The world’s epitaph. “I come up with anything else—”

“I’m here. Not much to do right now. I wasn’t sure about you, thought you might be a cowboy, but now I see you’re serious, I’m happy to give you the run of the place. You can stay in Hailey and Gwen’s trailer. It’s empty. Not counting the beauty products Gwen left behind.”

“Further proof she was planning to come back.”

Moss laughed, the sound surprisingly sweet. “That is the truth.”

—

The trailer was cluttered with what Wells would always think of as girl stuff, nail files, shampoo bottles, and panties. He assumed the Kenyan police had left the mess. Still, he found himself glad to be in his forties, too old even to imagine being with women so certain that their looks would carry them through life. He poked around halfheartedly, but the search depressed him. He hoped he didn’t find anything too intimate, not just topless photos or love letters, but the private stumblings that everyone had at home, expired vitamins and half-finished doodles and unread Christmas cards.

After a few minutes he felt foolish for his modesty. The girls would trade loss of privacy for freedom in a heartbeat. So he stripped the beds and looked under the mattresses. He turned out Gwen’s backpack and the twin chests of drawers and even looked through her magazines, hoping for a scrawled phone number or email address.

By the time he finished, the sun was down and Wells could hear the compound’s electric lights droning outside. He straightened up the place and walked over to Owen and Scott’s trailer to repeat the search. Wilfred intercepted him.

“Bossman. Superbossman. Great mzungu. A guard, Ashon, he told me, two, three weeks ago, he saw Suggs with all these papers, brochures for houses in Johannesburg. Like he wanted to jet”—Wilfred raised his hand like a plane taking off—“out of Kenya.”

“People have fantasies.”

“Suggs hid the papers when Ashon saw them.”

“People don’t always want to share their fantasies. Did Ashon tell the GSU?”

“He tried, but they told him to shut up. Like you, man. They don’t listen. Ashon said Shabaab, Shabaab, Shabaab is all they talk about.”

The fact that Suggs had been checking out real estate didn’t interest Wells nearly as much as the fact that the police didn’t care. They seemed intent on ignoring any lead that didn’t point to Somalia.

“Nice job, Wilfred. You get anything else, you tell me.”

Wells spent the next couple hours searching Owen and Scott’s trailer, which was littered with brochures for safari camps in the Tsavo game parks. Those were two hundred miles southwest of Dadaab, nearly as close to Dadaab as Lamu. The parks would have been a natural choice for a vacation, one that Owen and Scott seemed to have considered. Then they’d decided to go to Lamu instead, with Suggs encouraging them. Suggs. Wells wondered if he shouldn’t have stayed in Nairobi, tried to find Suggs’s wife.

He was leaving the trailer when his phone buzzed. Shafer.

“How’s it going?”

“I’m in Dadaab.”

“Finding anything?”

“Bits. Suggs, the fixer, I think he was probably involved, but it’s just my gut so far. And the Kenyan police seem obsessed with proving Shabaab’s behind this. From what I can see, they’ve hardly looked at him. They’re not even here. You get anything from Fort Meade?”

“You think I’m calling just to hear your voice? They ran all three numbers. The international is clean. Incoming calls from the families, press, WorldCares in Houston. One of the locals is the same. Thompson used it for calls to other Kenyan numbers, and we’ve found almost all of them. The police, other aid agencies, other local WorldCares employees.”

“And the third number?”

“That one’s a problem. The problem is it doesn’t exist. It’s not a working number in Kenya or anywhere else. Never has been. You sure you wrote it down right?”

Wells eyed his phone like a baseball player checking out his glove after an error: I blame you. “Yes. He gave it to me twice.”

“Did you call it when you were in the room with him, hear it ring?”

“No.”

“You know, four years ago the Texas attorney general investigated the charities in the state that spent the most money on fund-raising and the least on programs. WorldCares was high on the list. Thompson wasn’t indicted or anything like that, but the report isn’t pretty.”

“The woman in charge here told me something similar.” Wells explained what Moss had said. “But she also said they’ve come back strong. Tripled fund-raising and spending more on programs. Why blow everything up?”

“Think like a grifter, John. When things are going good, that’s when you press your luck. Double down.”

“If you’re right, why would he let me come here and give me the run of the place? He didn’t have to. Could have said it was too dangerous for me.”

“Maybe he thinks you’re too dumb to find anything.”

“Thank you, Ellis.”

“Another fun fact. You know Thompson’s got that new book coming out. It’s not even being published for two months, but since that press conference it’s number one on Amazon.”

“You think he’d let his nephew get kidnapped for a book?”

“I think you better get that third phone of his so the smart boys can trace it.”

“Unfortunately, he’s in Nairobi.”

“Then get him to Dadaab.” Shafer hung up.

—

“Couldn’t stay away?” Moss said when he walked into her office.

“How many phones does James have?”

“Two, I think.” She scrolled through her own phone. “I have two numbers for him. One local, one U.S.”

“Could he have had a second local handset?”

“Don’t know why. We all use Safaricom here and it works fine.”

“Can you get him back here?”

“That’s up to him. He’s the boss, remember?”

“Okay, say I can convince him to come back. Can he charter a plane tonight?”

“Nobody sane will fly to Dadaab at night. Tomorrow morning is the best you can do. But you’ll need a good reason.”

“I’ll think of one.”

“He has another phone?”

“I saw it. Last night in the hotel. And he lied to me about it.”

“So what will you tell him?”

Wells paused. “What about, I think I’ve found the volunteers, that they’re here, and I want to saddle up tomorrow and go in and get them. I’ll tell him I’m gung-ho and locked and loaded. And if he asks you, you tell him that you think I’m dumb enough to do it.”

“But what if you’re right and he knows they’re not here?”

“Then he has to come. To stop me from causing a riot or worse. Whatever he’s got planned, that’s not part of the program.”

“Okay, say it works. You get him on a plane. But there’s one thing I don’t see. What are you going to do with him when he lands?”