Fury and the Power (2 page)

Before biting, however, Jimmy Nixon seized the evangelist's trachea with the strong fingers of his right hand, rupturing the larynx even as he was forcing Pledger Lee backward against the hip-high, carpeted edge of the stage. Onstage and close by, two of the evangelist's adult daughters, Penny Lee and Piper Lee, were singing the Christian Triumph Revival's signature hymn ("Praise Jesus, I'm Born Again"), in concert with two of Christian Gospel's most popular male personalities.

Piper Lee happened to be looking at her father as she paused before resuming harmony; she let out a scream that cut through the hush of the arena like the clang of a fallen bell. Smith Ballew attempted to get a grip on Jimmy Nixon and pull him away from the preacher. It was like trying to budge a steel pillar bolted to the arena floor. The boy reacted by striking Ballew with an elbow between his eyes. Ballew landed, unconscious, on the back of his neck.

Two more security men lunged through the crowd of seekers, most of whom were stark-still from terror. One of the men leaped on Nixon's broad back as he hunched over his victim. Penny Lee joined her sister in screaming into their open mikes. A prickling current of fear illuminated the body of the congregation. Nearly all of them had a good view of the scuffle below, although it was difficult to comprehend just what was happening.

Pledger Lee, the upper half of his body jammed against the lip of the stage, looked up through skewed glasses at the faces of his daughters. Stunned by the attack, he knew only that he couldn't breathe. If he'd had a coherent thought at this moment it might have been:
 
I am going to die like the others
.

Whatever his thoughts, recognition flickered in his mind like a will-o'-the-wisp as the boy's face moved to within a couple of inches of his.

If he was aware of the efforts exerted to pry him loose from Pledger Lee Skeldon, whose gristly windpipe was still locked in his right hand, Jimmy Nixon didn't show it.

"You know who I am," he said to the evangelist.

No one else, in the frenzy of the moment, recalled hearing Jimmy speak. Possibly Pledger Lee himself, so close to the eerie deadness of the boy's face, didn't hear him either.

But he already knew.

A member of the security detail was flailing at the attacker's shoulders with a telescoping baton. Another worked on Jimmy's waistline and the backs of his knees. It was as if the boy could feel no pain. Didn't know he was squirting urine from wrecked kidneys. Jimmy jerked his right fist sharply, like opening a stuck gate, uprooting the preacher's trachea and stems of bronchi from the lungs. At the same time Jimmy bit deeply into Pledger Lee's throat, severing the flimsy artery. Piper Lee, on her hands and knees a few feet away, fingernails in the carpet as she implored Jimmy to leave her father alone, was splashed by his lifeblood; it covered her face like a shroud.

Jimmy Nixon was still into Pledger Lee's neck when an arena rent-a-cop imprudently delivered a solid blow to the back of Jimmy's head, driving shards of skull into the hindbrain. Jimmy's body vibrated; he lost his grip on the preacher and was dragged away from him, handcuffed.

With no one to support him, Pledger Lee slumped to the floor, hands patting his body down as if he were trying to put out a fire; but it was the storm from his heart blowing unchecked through the rent throat that quickly did him in.

No one thought to dim the rainbow cross of lights still trained on the evangelist. Or turn off the cameras that were recording his death, the shrieks of those compelled to watch it.

"SHUNGWAYA"

LAKE NAIVASHA, KENYA

OCTOBER 10

0310 HOURS ZULU

E
den Waring awoke as darkness began to leave the sky, earth's purification ritual, brief quiet time of renewal before the storming of the birds. Hibiscus flowers outside her windows had not yet unfurled in huge crimson splashes against screens fogged by their golden pollen. The short rains from the south hadn't materialized in this autumn of a third drought year, adding to the woes of a nation whose prosperity and infrastructure had been steadily crumbling for two decades.

There was a morning chill at this altitude in the Great Rift Valley, gusts of wind across the valley floor and the dwindling freshwater lake. On the wind, the primary odors of what remained of primeval East Africa—of herds and their fresh scrape, of sage, resin, jasmine; of wood embers still containing heat from last night's cook fire in the pit outside the kitchen pavilion.

The estate, now a game reserve, had been established by Tom Sherard's grandfather after the First World War and named by him "Shungwaya," after an ancient, possibly mythical southern Somalian kingdom of great power and prestige.

Tom and Joseph Nkambe had left before moonrise to destroy a leopard that had killed the ten-year-old daughter of a Masai ranger in Hell's Gate Park. Although there were, as usual, houseguests to be entertained, Eden had been inclined to invite herself to the blind that the men had constructed at some distance from where the leopard was laying up in daylight, a
kopje
Tom had discovered after days of patient tracking. She was also curious to see the leopard's pug marks although Tom, after looking at one of her careful drawings, had told her the footprint of the leopard was not the mark that had been showing up in her dreams.

In Africa
, Tom's mother had written in one of her journals, treasures that he had generously shared with Eden,
there is always too much to see when you are awake. Dreams are the refreshments of the weary eye, as well as the actuality of other layers of existence—fantastic, subtle, strange—here in this valley where human life on earth began
.

His mother, dead at a time when he was barely old enough to remember her. In photographs she had a lanky frame, close-cropped copper-red hair, some cheekbone pitting from acne, a long face, a tentative smile, a gravely inquiring manner. Tom was almost a replica except for complexion and something more aggressive in the hard jaw line, his father's long gaze and weathered durability.

"What else have you been dreaming about?" Sherard had asked Eden, with a hint of caution—or fear of trespass—in his gray eyes. They'd had four months to get to know each other; still he was not altogether at ease with Eden, daughter of the woman he had loved. Or, more exactly, he was not comfortable with Eden's wild talent and the destiny it proposed.

You
, she might have responded, but she didn't want to attempt an explanation. Her feelings for him were complicated. He was almost her father, although they shared no blood. Under different circumstances—she was willing to acknowledge, but only to herself, this sensual irritant in the heart, like the grain of sand the oyster must make into a pearl—they easily could have been lovers. But it was enough, common sense demanded, that she owed him her life.

Also Tom belonged to Bertie Nkambe, and Bertie to Tom, as surely as if they were already married. And Bertie, another wild talent, had become Eden's best friend and advisor during Eden's period of recovery and reconciliation with herself at the Naivasha game reserve.

She still faithfully recorded every dream in her dream book, now volume number seven. A habit she'd imposed upon herself in childhood, now unbreakable. Hundreds of pages of dreams—mundane, perplexing, and (sometimes) prophetic. Only with Bertie was she willing to share their imagery and symbolism.

Bertie hadn't read much into the recurring dream of pug marks.

"Cheetahs, lions, even leopards—you see them almost every day. No wonder you dream about them. So do I, sometimes?"

"Yeah, but—this cat's different."

"What does it look like?"

"I don't know yet. I haven't seen it. I only know that when I do—it'll be different."

"Well—there's tigers. But there are no tigers in Africa, not in the wild. Maybe two thousand years ago, in an Emir's menagerie."

"This cat's not in a zoo or in the wild. It's—"

In my head
.

Sitting up in near-darkness in the four-poster bed draped in blowsy mosquito netting, Eden shuddered. She habitually slept in a man's extra-large flannel shirt, but with that and the down-filled comforter on the bed, still she was cold to the bone. The guest bungalow in which she lived was one of the oldest at Shungwaya, and it lacked central heating. There was in her bedroom an eighteenth-century Austrian ceramic stove, delivered long ago by ox wagon from the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa, but sleeping with a
mutamayo
fire going (from the wood of the wild olive tree) gave her a stuffy nose.

It wasn't only the chilly dawn that had her shivering. The pug marks that had appeared in her most recent dream had been in an unfamiliar place, not alongside an African streambed or by a salt lick. She had seen these marks very clearly; they glowed in dim light on the marble steps of a staircase. The steps ascended to a gold-toned portal of great age and narrow doors. All of it, the plain gray building, the wide stairs, seemed vaguely to have a religious significance.

Although in previous dreams Eden had been unable to get a true impression of size, it was obvious to her that the pug marks on the marble were very large.

And red.

Eden knew their maker had walked in blood, and for several minutes she could not control her trembling.

F
ull light, like darkness, comes quickly to Equatorial Africa. In the ten minutes that it took Eden to wash and dress in shorts and a light sweater, the waters of Lake Naivasha, now receded three hundred yards from the house and farm outbuildings of the wildlife reserve, glowed through drifts of mist. Alberta Nkambe had begun her daily half-mile swim in the infinity pool at the edge of the east lawn, overlooking a landscape of farms, bush, and extinct volcanoes, still a little scary in their gaunt passivity. Her best dog, Fernando, a mix of Labrador and mastiff, barked at her every stroke as he kept pace with Bertie on one side of the heated pool.

Around the farms and coffee-growing estates in the Naivasha region, eighty kilometers up-country from Nairobi and remote from the rest of the world by any reckoning, Eden was known as Eve. Bertie was a superstar model whose face had been appearing on the covers of fashion magazines since she was sixteen. If anyone Eden had been introduced to, at Shungwaya or on rare social occasions at the Naivasha Country Club, recalled her face from satellite TV news, they respected her need for anonymity. She was good-looking, obviously American-bred, and a beauty when she bothered. But at Shungwaya Eden didn't wear makeup and her hairstyle was strictly utilitarian, an expression of psychological isolation from the society she was half afraid to rejoin. She felt no further obligation to its madness.

She never discouraged the attention of guys near her age whom she'd met—in particular a Belgian graduate student in ethno botany from the University of Ghent, and a Canadian climatologist—but most of the time she made herself unavailable, feeling secure only in Tom Sherard's and Bertie's company. Harrowing times made steadfast companions. Eden badly missed the only mother she'd ever known; but Betts soon would be joining her, coming from California, with a brief stopover in England to visit a younger sister whom she rarely saw.

The climatologist, a Quebecois named Jean-Baptiste, was camped with several older colleagues on the reserve. They were engaged in extracting core samples of sediment from Naivasha's depths to study catastrophic drought cycles. Two or three times a week he appeared for breakfast and the opportunity to chat up Eden. Jean-Baptiste was one of those homely young men with a rump of a nose and a dark squeeze around the eyes, but he had a brisk mind and a sense of humor.

This morning Jean-Baptiste was in conversation with Pegeen, a model chum of Bertie's, and her husband, who had the bronzed look of the well-heeled, gadabout sportsman but who seemed serious about making "docs"—documentary films. They had dropped in a few days ago. There was seldom any such thing as an unwelcome guest in Kenya, where "close neighbors" were defined as being within fifty kilometers of one another.

Eden crossed the lawn to the main house through the drifting vapors of the pool, droplets gleaming like gold dust in the air. There was a flock of emerald-spotted wood doves in one of the old Albizias growing in the middle of the lawn, thick trunks as smooth as ivory. The lawn was about the size of a cricket pitch, which it once had been. There were a couple of reticulated giraffe at one end of the lawn, oxblood in color with a lacy overlay of white lines. Pretty, horned heads and elfin eyes. Just standing around politely, as if they wouldn't mind an invitation to breakfast. Two more of Shungwaya's 13 mixed-breed dog population caught up to Eden and she paused to rub behind their ears before joining the others.

It had been a dry dusty year, but the jacarandas and frangipani, green and healthy from water piped up from the lake, were in full bloom by the recently rebuilt, split-level veranda. The twin roofs that steeply overhung the veranda were thatched in woven papyrus and rested on elegantly twisted, polished cedar posts. The thatch was pink with fallen blossoms and a young member of the household staff—all Somali males—was sweeping petals from the steps.

"
Jambo, memsaab
," the boy said, giving Eden a shy glance.