Acts of faith (102 page)

“He founded IPA,” she said. “Interviewed him last week. He was in Nairobi on a visit. Thought you might have met him.”

“Our dealings have always been with John Barrett. You spoke to him?”

She nodded. “An interesting piece of work, but not as interesting as Bingham. A kind of mystic. He’s into gematria. It’s kind of the Christian kabala. The idea is, you can dig out hidden meanings in the New Testament with numbers and geometry. An odd philosophy for an oil tycoon.”

“So that’s what he is?” Fitzhugh asked, wondering if there was a point to this digression.

“CEO of Northwest Petroleum. Canada’s second-biggest oil company. A few years back Northwest was in the bidding to partner up with Sudan’s state oil company to develop the fields and build the pipeline, but they lost out to Amulet Energy. Kind of intriguing.”

“Actually, I don’t see what’s so intriguing,” Douglas said. “Are we still being interviewed?”

“Sure.” Frowning, she looked at her notes. “To follow up, has the SPLA ever asked you to run guns for them?”

“Are we back to that? Okay, sure they have. They ask just about every pilot and air operator who flies into Sudan.”

“And?”

“And what?” Douglas was getting a bit edgy, but he managed to forge a smile.

“Have any of them agreed to, if you know.”

“I don’t. You’d have to ask them, if you know who they are. Why are you obsessed with this gun-running stuff?”

“It’s persistence, not obsession,” she said. “A while ago rebels shot down an Amulet Energy plane with a missile and killed eight foreign workers. Someone got that missile into Sudan.” She shrugged, scrawny shoulders forming points, like folded bat wings. “That’s a story.”

“A story.” As was his habit when he was under tension, Douglas wove his fingers around a pencil and tried to snap it. “It’s a story to you, something else to us. Lives are at stake. Our pilots’ lives. You go broadcasting insinuations about gun-running, do you think Khartoum is going to make distinctions? They’ll shoot down any aid plane they feel like and then say it was carrying arms.”

“Nothing of mine that goes on the air is an insinuation, it’s a fact,” Phyllis retaliated. “I’m a pro, Mr. Braithwaite. You needn’t have any worries about your pilots’ lives, not from me.”

Dropping the pencil, Douglas counterfeited a relaxed pose, rolling his chair backward to rest his head against the window ledge. Through the dusty pane above, the African glare fell on his hands, spread on the desk, thumb joined to thumb. “I know you’ll be responsible,” he said. “Hey, you’re CNN! But you should think about something, ask yourself a question. Would it be illegal, would it be
wrong
for anyone to arm the rebels?”

“Right, wrong, legal, illegal, it would be a story.”

“What I mean is, Khartoum is hammering the southerners and the Nubans like the U.S. Cavalry hammered the Indians at Wounded Knee. If I’d been around back then, I would have sent rifles and Hotchkiss guns to the Sioux just to give them a fighting chance, and I wouldn’t have seen anything wrong about it.”

A look of excitement passed over Phyllis’s face as she glanced at her cameraman and soundman to make sure they’d caught the comment. Not content with her assurance that she would never air insinuations, Douglas had to try to convert her.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said. “We need to do some filming in the Nuba. Shooting exteriors. Any flights going up there soon?”

“I’ve got one tomorrow,” Douglas answered. “But I’m loaded to the max.”

“Couldn’t make it tomorrow anyway. I was thinking early next week.”

“Fitz, what have we got Monday or Tuesday?”

Fitzhugh checked the schedule. “Two on Tuesday.”

“They’re overloaded, too, aren’t they?”

He got the cue and said they were. Douglas wasn’t a complete fool. Whatever this woman’s reason for going to the Nuba mountains might be, it wasn’t to film landscapes.

“I’ll check back with you next week. Can’t do it, I’ll find someone else. Thanks for your time.”

“There goes a real cunt,” Douglas said after she and her crew left. “Oh, sorry, Rachel.”

The secretary acknowledged the apology.

Fitzhugh stepped outside, motioning to Douglas to join him. “You were an idiot for making that remark about sending rifles to the Indians,” he scolded. “You practically incriminated yourself.”

“Oh hell, what’s she going to do with it?”

“Use it to decorate the cake she’s baking.”

“That riff about the oil guy, what was his name? Bingham? What was that all about?”

“I don’t know,” Fitzhugh said, looking toward the southeast, where the weather was erecting thunderheads—white towers rising to flat black roofs in which lightning flashed, like a gigantic welder’s torch. “But it is obvious what this story is all about. We aren’t the first people she’s talked to. She’s had a word with Tara. I hate to say I told you so, Douglas, but I told you so.”

“Don’t go wet on me now.”

He thought Douglas was the one “going wet.” He was plainly anxious, if not scared.

“I had better tell Tony not to talk to her,” Douglas said further. “Better tell all our people not to give her the time of the day, and no one, but no one, gives her a lift anywhere. Then there’s Wes. He stands to lose as much as we do.”

“No, he doesn’t. He has nothing to lose.”

“Yeah, he does. He’s planning to leave soon. A story like this breaks, some people might ask him to stick around for a while for questioning. He won’t talk to me, but he’ll listen to you. He’s got to keep his mouth shut.”

Gangsters,
Fitzhugh thought.
We are talking like gangsters.
“I told you,” he said, “I want no part of this.”

“Fitz, what you want and what you are are two different things.”

T
HE MAKUTI SHELTER
had sprung a leak, and rain dripped onto the tent canvas with a steady, irritating
tap-tap-tap.

“One thing’s for sure, I’m not going to miss living like this,” Mary said, looking up from her camp chair. “A real roof over my head, not canvas and grass.”

Dare did a deep knee bend; then, both arms outstretched, he opened and closed his hands. “Y’all are gonna be in tall cotton.”

“You really think so?”

“Well, I don’t really
know.
Never picked cotton myself.”

“You-all know what I’m sayin’,” she mimicked. “You’re sure we can still do it?”

He repeated the knee bend and the flexing of his hands, trying to assure himself that the growing rigidity in them was not rheumatoid arthritis. Then he got his notebook, opened it to a page of figures, and stood over her. “We been over this before, but let’s do it again. Here’s what we netted from Yellowbird, here’s what we’ll get for the Hawker—”

“If the guy buys it,” she interrupted.

“If he doesn’t, someone else will. Here’s what you got saved from when you were flyin’ before Yellowbird, here’s what we’ll need to put down on a loan for a Gulfstream Two, and here’s what’s left over. Ain’t what I hoped for, but a pretty good stake.” He leaned forward and kissed the top of her head. “Thanks for stickin’ with me. I sure did screw up. Saw that scam with the company shores comin’ a long time ago, but that hustle with the airplane—I did not see that a’ tall.”

And the injury to his pride still stung, almost as deeply as the loss of the money. He hated to think of himself as an easy mark, but that’s what he had been. His one consolation, and it wasn’t much, was that he’d been swindled by a master like Adid. Had snot-nose Doug been the author instead of the accomplice, Dare could not have looked himself in the mirror.

“No one could have seen it coming,” Mary said. “Who would have thought Doug would do this to you?”

“Wasn’t much point to bustin’ his nose, but damn, it sure did feel good. Enough of this talk. How about a dancin’ lesson? If you’re gonna live in Texas, you’ve got to learn the Texas two-step.”

He put a tape in the cassette player, and out came the voice like no other, heartbreaking, clear, every note flawless and true. Poor Patsy Cline, another singer doomed to die in a plane crash. Holding Mary close, he led her around the small space in the front of the tent. “The woman goes backward, the man forward,” he said. “One-two back, one-two back, then turn, one-two . . . All there is to it.”

She laughed. “Except a two-step is out of step to this song. It’s too slow.”

“Don’t matter.” He drew her to him, his left hand in her right, his opposite arm around her waist, and sang along.

“Too slow and too damned sad,” Mary insisted. “Find something that doesn’t sound like an empty bar at three
A
.
M
.”

He ejected Patsy Cline. While he rummaged in his cassette organizer—an empty cooking-oil tin—he heard someone approaching the tent. Footsteps in the mud, the squeak of a wet shoe on the shelter’s cement floor. Mary looked at him, not alarmed but alert. Tony Bollichek, the man who forgot everything and learned nothing, including the lesson Dare imparted with a beer pitcher, had been harassing her. He had plenty of opportunity, now that he was operating out of Dogpatch for some outfit called Busy Beaver—Yellowbird’s successor, Dare and Mary surmised—and shared the same hangar with them. Whenever Dare wasn’t near, Tony whined and pleaded for her to come back to him, or whispered obscenities, or made threats—depending on the state of his brain chemistry at the moment. Dare had warned him that if he continued, he would suffer another skull fracture and if he ever laid a hand on her, more serious damage. “I’m going to take that seriously,” Tony had replied, “so watch your back, mate.”

“Who the hell is it?” Dare called to the person outside.

A female voice answered. “I’m looking for Captain Dare. Do I have the right address?”

He opened the flap. The woman, in a hooded slicker, was standing under the eave formed by the makuti roof. She extended a hand with chicken-claw fingers. “Hi. Phyllis Rappaport. Sorry for showing up at this hour, but I couldn’t find you earlier. I’m with CNN. May I come in?”

Without waiting for an answer, she stepped inside and removed the hood, releasing a mass of flame-colored hair.

“Another red-headed stepchild,” Dare said, rubbing his rusty curls. “Y’all been lookin’ for me for what?”

A flight to the Nuba mountains for her and her crew, she answered. When? Early next week preferably, but if he couldn’t make it then, later in the week would do. He glanced at Mary, who jerked her shoulders to say,
Why not?

“This here is my first officer, Mary English. Also my fiancée.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Phyllis said. “So you can do it?”

“If y’all can go the fare. Passengers only, it’ll be six grand to cover fuel costs and pay for our time. No checks, money orders, or credit cards. Six thousand cash.”

“We can do that.”

“Any particular place in the Nuba? There’s only two airstrips operational right now.”

“New Tourom.”

“That one’s in shape. They fixed it since it got bombed. But if it’s raining and the runway’s mud, we can’t land. One other hitch—our airplane’s being overhauled right now. Should be ready by Monday, but we’ve got a customer wants to buy it comin’ then. He decides to take it, it’s gone and so are we, and y’all will have to find another pilot.”

“All right,” Phyllis said. “Any suggestions for an alternative? I’ve already checked with the people at Knight, and they can’t do it.”

“Only one I can think of . . .” He paused, cocking his head toward the flap. “Did you hear somebody outside?” he asked Mary. She shook her head. “Must be that,” he said, pointing at the wet spot on the ceiling, where the rain dripped. “I was sayin’, only one I can think of is Tara Whitcomb. Is there some hot story that you’re so anxious to get there, or is that none of my business?”

The reporter looked momentarily at nothing in particular—the pensive stare of someone who had misplaced a set of keys or a pair of glasses and was trying to remember where she’d put them. “You used to be Braithwaite’s partner in Knight—”

“Used-to-be in capital letters, in italics, in goddamned neon,” he interrupted.

“Right. I heard you had a falling-out.”

“Done your homework.”

“More like picking up local scuttlebutt. Everybody talks about that fight you had. I also heard you’re planning to leave this fabulous part of the world.”

“Like I said, as soon as the plane is gone, we’re gone.”

“I’d like to talk to you. Now, if you’ve got a minute. Or tomorrow morning. After that I’ll be back in Nairobi till next week.”

“I ain’t runnin’ for office. I don’t give interviews.”

Phyllis mimed pulling out empty pockets. “No camera crew, not even a notebook. Strictly off the record. What we call deep background, meaning I tell no one I talked to you. But it’s a two-way street. You don’t tell anyone you talked to me, and if you fuck me, I’ll turn around and fuck you”—she gave him an ironic smile—“metaphorically speaking.”

“Glad to hear that,” Mary said, returning the smile. “Let’s hear what you’re fishing for first.”

The reporter helped herself to a chair—
like she owns the place,
Dare thought. “I’ve heard that Knight has been running guns to the SPLA, weapons disguised as humanitarian aid. There’s the fish. I don’t like to waste time, so what do you think? Keep fishing or cut bait?”