The Flame Tree (10 page)

Graham was silent for a moment. “What’s going on here?” he said. “I don’t think I have the full picture.”

Sheldon said, “I must say you look as ragged as an Arizona arroyo. Do you ever take any vacations?”

Graham said, “Vacations? I’m a permanent part of the Wonobo landscape, as ragged as I may be.”

“You may be taking a vacation sooner than you think,” Sheldon said. He glanced at the slim watch on his wrist. “Frankly, it strikes me as ironic that if you had stuck to your vaunted family tradition, you’d probably be way up the chain of command by now and bossing my bosses around. Instead, you’re an overworked and underpaid missionary doctor in some hick Javanese town. You and Mary could at least be doing some greater good in
a medical institution that has a more global impact. You’re a Yalie, for God’s sake. The Big Picture—Nobels, Pulitzers—that’s the sort of thing the Yale admissions committee has in mind when it deigns to accept freshmen.”

“Mary and I are in the hick town of Wonobo precisely for God’s sake,” Graham said. “Ever heard of William Borden of Yale? No? Famous missionary. Famous in missionary circles, that is. He heard the call of Christ. Just like Mary and me. And the call of Christ,” Graham added wryly, “is a more consequential thing than the siren song of, say, the diplomatic corps. My father could never figure that one out. I don’t expect you to.”

“Your pop still hasn’t figured it out,” Sheldon said. “My old man attended one of those A.F.S.O. luncheons in Georgetown and saw his old partner in crime, your pop. Asked about you, and Bully Williams growled that since you would be getting your just rewards in heaven, there was no need to have you in his earthly will.” He added, somewhat apologetically, “The sort of bon mot that my old man loves to pass around, you know him.”

Bully Williams. Another name for Isaac’s grandfather, that aloof and imperious old man who autocratically reigned from a palatial three-story brownstone as though he were the Last Emperor of Manhattan.

Joe was inspecting a motorbike, the only vehicle in the school’s small parking lot just outside the unlocked gates. He bent over and peered at the engine, his hands on his knees. He poked the seat. Isaac couldn’t figure it out. A Honda Tiger was a pretty neat motorbike, but it wasn’t a Harley Hog or anything.

Graham said, “Sheldon, let’s cut to the chase. If you’re not going to fill me in here, fair enough. Okay? But I have a more than full schedule this morning.”

Sheldon glanced at his watch again. He patted the laptop on the table. “This is a secure transmission unit. Encrypts and decodes messages, using a built-in antenna for direct satellite uplink. Part of my job description is, quote, ‘the protection and welfare of U.S. citizens living in Indonesia,’ unquote. And right now the protection and welfare of U.S. citizens in Wonobo is a very big blip on the Foggy Bottom radar. And I’m point man on the spot, so to speak.”

“Why is it that I don’t like the sound of that?”

Sheldon looked at his watch again. “In half an hour I am to cable an update to Washington about the Wonobo Situation. It already has an official title. The ‘Wonobo Situation.’ Do you know who termed it the Wonobo Situation?”

“You?”

“Nope. Not Atkins, either—he’s the Jakarta DCM—nor the ambassador, nor any of the directors, the bureau chiefs, the nineteen assistant secretaries of state, the five undersecretaries. Nope, it was the secretary of state himself who named this the Wonobo Situation. All the clamor for his attention after Tuesday’s terrorist attack, and he still finds time to cast his gaze halfway around the world to a small town in Java.”

“A little raid on a church in a third-world town gets the secretary’s attention? I find that hard to believe.”

“Graham, a lot of back-road third-world places are getting his
attention. Haven’t you heard of Osama bin Laden?”

“Anybody who didn’t know before certainly knows now.”

“Osama bin Laden has operatives in over twenty-five countries. Including—perhaps especially including—Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, its borders porous as a sieve, its law agencies…well, in this country you can hide an elephant in a haystack. Bin Laden’s fellows are in Aceh, Irian, Maluku, Sulawesi. In Java, too. More specifically, right here in Wonobo, where we have not only an American mission hospital with a big sign out in public view that announces the Immanuel Hospital of the Union of American Baptists, but more than that, even better than a hospital or a church or even an embassy, we have a whole bunch of beautiful young American schoolkids in a lovely American-style schoolhouse, an absolutely gorgeous target for a truck bomb. The secretary and the president are keen to prevent the Wonobo Situation from turning into the ‘Wonobo Tragedy.’”

A long, thoughtful silence followed, one that included Isaac’s thoughts forty feet overhead. Joe hadn’t been admiring the motorbike, he’d been inspecting it for a bike bomb. Isaac scanned the street again with more urgency, craned his head to scan the vehicles parked around the hospital. He did not see any that should not be there.

“Is there any hard intelligence to go along with these, uh, grandiose suspicions?” Graham asked.

Sheldon tilted his head sideways, as if deciding whether to say something. “I’ll tell you this. Need to know, eyes only, all that, so you hear this and then forget it, forget that you forgot it. Tuan
Guru Haji Abdullah Abubakar, chief of the Nahdlatul Umat Islam. The CIA’s been keeping a quiet eye on him.”

Sheldon opened the secure transmission unit, clicked some buttons. “There’s also additional intelligence that some of bin Laden’s heavies are in the area. Affiliated with the Nahdlatul Umat Islam. I mean truly nasty people. We got old file photos of a couple. Let me download them. It’ll take only a minute. Now, regarding your staff, double check all IDs and bona fides immediately. Every one of them, even your most trusted employee.”

A silence. Then, “That would cause a lot of unnecessary hurt. Loss of face.”

“Graham, look yonder. A school full of innocent children.” Graham did not reply. Sheldon said, “By the way, Joe is truly from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, but he is not your ordinary security officer. Last night he was in Pakistan. Today he is in Wonobo. Figure it out.”

Over at the school Joe was on his stomach, in a push-up pose, peering at the crawl space underneath the auditorium floorboards. His tie lapped the brown grass. The auditorium window above him flung open. Miss Augusta stuck out her head. Her shiny gray hair was luminescent against her ebony skin. She said in her teacher’s voice, “Who are you? Why are you skulking around the school?”

Joe cranked his neck until he was looking upward at her from his horizontal position. After a second of eye contact he pushed himself up into a standing position with the abrupt speed of a jack-in-the-box.

“It’s all right, Augusta,” Graham yelled from across the yard. “I’ll explain later. Let him continue poking around.”

“Graham!” Miss Augusta exclaimed. “What are you—what is going on? Is this the architect for the elementary addition? I thought we were going to use a local firm instead of—”

“I’ll explain later,” Graham repeated. “Not to worry.”

Miss Augusta considered this. “All right, then,” she said. She looked down at Joe. “Remember that the volume of space schoolchildren require is inversely proportional to their age. Think big and then double the size.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Joe said.

Miss Augusta withdrew and shut the window.

Graham Williams ran both his hands through his hair. He said to Sheldon, “What you have told me sounds—I mean, if we are a terrorist target, why haven’t they attacked before now?”

“Jesus, Graham. What sort of logic is that? People in Pearl Harbor could have said the same thing on December sixth. Listen carefully now: A certain United States naval asset is steaming straight toward Java, with certain flexible mission capabilities, a full complement of marines on board. Its helicopters will be in round-trip reach of here within twenty-four hours. Our little Javanese town of Wonobo is a big bright coordinate on all sorts of situation maps and navigational computers.”

Graham said, “Why marines and helicopters? If we need to evacuate, why not a couple big buses and a police escort to the Surabaya airport? Doesn’t make sense.”

Sheldon drummed his fingers on the table. “All right, more
hear-and-forget information. We also have intelligence reports that the Nahdlatul Umat Islam and other militant groups have been pouring into the area since the WTC attacks. I told you we were assaulted on the way in. Stupid of me to use a car with diplomatic plates. This could turn into a major crisis.”

The two men fell silent, each one wrapped up in his own troubled thoughts as they watched Joe disappear around the corner of the boardinghouse.

Sheldon spoke up and said, “If the secretary orders an evacuation, I trust there will be no argument.”

“Of course not. The safety of those kids is one of my major concerns too. I happen to have one of my own in that building.”

Well, actually, not quite
, Isaac thought. He was getting tired up there in the tree. The branch underneath his buttocks dug into his flesh. His headache had returned.

More worshippers arrived at the mosque. Someone began reading from the Qur’an in a singsong voice—a woman, reciting into a microphone from her side of the curtain. Isaac squinted through the side window at the thin face, framed by a stern white jilbab. It was Ruth. The recognition was a punch to Isaac’s brain.

Joe appeared on the other side of the building and strode up to the table. “I need to check the resident side of the compound, but what we have here is lousy perimeter security, especially that school gate. But nothing at the moment seems to be suspicious. Except there is a blond-headed boy up in the tree above you.” He said this without looking up.

Isaac closed his eyes, as though that would make him invisible.

His father shouted, “Isaac! What are you doing up there?”

Isaac glanced down, composing surprise on his face and in his words. “Oh, hi, Dad. There’s this pretty neat nest up here.”

“Let the nest be and get down,” his father ordered.

Isaac started to move, but a wave of dizziness froze his muscles. He was high up. How had he managed to get up this high? He still didn’t see an easy route back down to the thicker, safer branches.

“Isaac!” his father shouted again.

“I can’t, I’m stuck!”

Joe began climbing the tree with the surefootedness of a cat. “Hold on, don’t panic, we’ll get you down.” A moment later he was standing on the branch five feet below Isaac with the aplomb of an acrobat. He held out his left hand. “Can you grab this?”

Isaac took a deep breath and stretched out his right hand. It came to within a foot of Joe’s. Those twelve inches were to Isaac as wide a chasm as the Grand Canyon gorge.

Joe moved to a higher part of the branch and closed some of the gap but not enough.

“All right, then, this is what we’ll do,” Joe said. “See how you’re sitting there? If you turn and lean out in one motion, I can get hold of your hand.”

“I’ll fall.” He was whimpering. He sounded like a coward. He was ashamed of that, but he couldn’t help it.

“No, you won’t fall. Lean out and turn, and I can get your hand and swing you down here next to me. I promise. Don’t even think about, just do it. Come on, just do it.”

That voice held such competent authority that Isaac acted
without thinking, doing what Joe said. Joe’s fingers closed around his wrist. He did not give Isaac a chance to freeze up but tugged hard. Isaac had a giddying sensation of falling, a microsecond of gravity’s pull, and then he was safe on the larger branch, tucked up against Joe’s body. A hard object pressed against his back. Joe’s gun.

A minute later they were on the ground. Isaac’s legs were shaky. His dad, standing beside him, said, “You’re as white as a sheet. What were you doing up there?”

“Just climbing. I kept going up to see that nest; I didn’t mean to get that high.” Sheldon Summerton stared at him with a hard look. “Hey, Mr. Summerton. What are you doing here?”

Sheldon laughed. His teeth flashed between his square jaw and his chiseled cheekbones. “Perfect,” he said. “Absolutely outstanding. You’d be right at home in Washington, Isaac, a master of the three rules of success there. You know what they are? Admit nothing, deny everything, make counteraccusations. You’re Bully Williams’s grandson, all right.” He chuckled again, but his humor melted as quickly as an ice cube in a Wonobo drink.

Isaac let his gaze drift down to Sheldon’s odd laptop. Its screen pixelating away with the downloaded old file photograph of the bin Laden heavy.
Bam
. Another blow to his head. His knees sagged for a moment before he caught himself. He pointed to the screen, at the image of a smiling man with bright black eyes standing in a dusty, mountainous land, carrying an AK-47, and said in a voice that he initially had a hard time finding, “Mr. Suherman. That’s Mr. Suherman.”

T
HE BLOOD DRAINED FROM
Graham Williams’s face. He sprinted for the school’s emergency bell on the entrance portico, shouting, “Everybody out!” In his panic he forgot that the cover flipped upward instead of sideways. He pounded futilely with his fist.

Joe calmly asked Isaac, “Who’s Mr. Suherman?”

“One of the teachers,” Isaac said, and told him where his classroom was.

Joe loped to the double doors, pausing to raise the alarm’s cover and pull the handle.

Bells clanged, sirens whooped.

Joe stuck his right hand inside his jacket and withdrew his gun. Holding it discreetly against the back of his thigh, he slipped into the building as the first group of kids marched through the double doors, their calm, rapid response a result of Miss Augusta’s rigorous fire drills. Isaac glided in right behind Joe, keeping a careful distance from the man but moving with him against the outward stream of students. No one noticed Isaac. Joe went straight to Mr. Suherman’s classroom. Its door was closed, as the fire drill protocol said it should be. Joe pressed himself against the wall and reached for the door handle.

Just like in the movies
, Isaac thought.

As if on cue, the alarms cut off. Isaac, refusing to believe that Mr. Suherman was a terrorist, wanted to shout out a warning. He might have done so if his mouth hadn’t been so dry.

Joe swung into and through the door’s widening gap, extending the gun as he did so. No shots rang out. Isaac stuck his head around the doorjamb. Except for Joe, the room was empty. The window to the west garden was open. Joe holstered his gun, spotting Isaac in the process. He showed neither surprise nor anger. He pointed to the window. “Get out and join the others. There might be a bomb somewhere.”

Isaac obeyed. The usual gathering spot for fire drills was underneath the flame tree, but no one was anywhere in sight. Where was everybody?

Mary Williams, still in green operating scrubs, blood splattered on the blouse, raced through the gate in the hedge. “Isaac, run! There could be a bomb!”

I
know
that, silly
—then Isaac abruptly realized he was the silly one. Bombs meant shrapnel. Isaac ran. When he reached her, she put her left arm around his shoulder, running with him, keeping herself between him and the school building.

Nothing blew up.

The other students had gathered on the large front lawn of the residence portion of the compound, standing in their appointed rows, the teachers flanking them on the sides. Some of the kids spotted Isaac and yelled, “There he is!” Several of the students broke rank.

“Back into place!” Miss Augusta snapped. “This is
not
a drill. Everybody sit down.”

Isaac sat down in his place behind Slobert, while his mother entered their house. Mr. Theophilus paced on the lawn with a walkie-talkie plastered to the side of his face, giving orders and listening to reports, directing a search of the residences and gardens around them.

Dave Duizen said to Sairah Strang, loud enough for everyone to hear, “There must have been a bomb threat.” A minor tumult swept through the seated children. Miss Augusta told everyone to calm down, there was no need to panic, although it seemed to Isaac that it was excitement rather than fear that was causing all the bright eyes and animated whispering.

Yesterday Mr. Suherman had prayed for Isaac in Esperanto, a language of global unity. Now he was a terrorist. It didn’t make sense.

Slobert swung his big rear end around on the grass and said to Isaac, chomping on chewing gum, “Where were you? Having a yakkity-yak with Suey Herman about how great Islam is and how Mussies are kind, peaceful, loving people?”

Isaac smiled at him and said in highly impolite Javanese, “You look like a big fat cow chewing its cud, and you stink like one too.”

Slobert’s mouth stilled. “What’d you say?”

Isaac gave him a pressed-lip smile and looked away.

Slobert grabbed his forearm. “You talk to me, you talk in English, you Mussie-loving Judas. What did you say?”

Isaac tried to jerk his arm away. Slobert tightened his grip, his fingernails digging into Isaac’s skin. “Let go,” Isaac said.

“Tell me what you said.”

Isaac said, in the rudest gutter Javanese he knew, “If your fondest dreams came true, you’d be wallowing in dogshit.”

Slobert’s jaw stopped in mid-chew. His big nostrils flared. He lunged at Isaac, getting him in a vicious headlock. Isaac had learned from experience that the best way to minimize the pain was to abjectly surrender. This time he didn’t. This time he fought back. An anger as red and unnatural as the flame tree’s flowers blossomed within him. His last coherent thought was one of minor amazement:
So this is what it’s like when a polite Javanese can’t take it anymore and goes amok
. Then fury swamped that thought, and he punched and kicked and bit without restraint, not realizing that Slobert had let go and was trying to get away from him, screaming at him to stop. Isaac was dimly aware of fingers grasping his ear and twisting. The pain finally brought him back to his senses.

Miss Augusta stood over him, her good eye and her glass eye both angry and shocked. “What on earth’s gotten into you?”

The other kids were frozen in place, staring. The only noise was Slobert’s whimpering as he held a hand to his left eye.

“He started it,” Isaac said, getting to his feet, breathing hard, the red fury still in him.

Slobert stood as well, shaking his head. “I did not. No way. He started it.” His muffled voice quavered. “He called me names, he cursed me in Javanese.” Slobert began to cry. He said to Isaac,
the words catching on his sobs, “You’re not a real American. You shouldn’t be in this school. You should be going to some Javanese Mussie school, you love them so much.”

“That’s enough, Robert,” Miss Augusta said.

From behind them, Mary Williams said, “I’ll take care of Isaac. He needs to come with me for a blood test.”

Slobert spat, “I hope you really do get malaria and
die
.”

Mary stepped forward and slapped Slobert hard enough to leave a red print on his cheek. “That’s a wicked thing to say, Robert Higgenbotham.” She said to Miss Augusta, “Have one of the ER doctors take a look at Robert’s eye. Isaac, you come with me.” She took Isaac’s hand and pulled him along after her. He nearly lost his balance and had to trot to keep up. She swept across the alley and crashed through the clinic’s outer doors. She let go of him only when they reached the air-conditioned White Room, equipped with a dozen examining stations, now empty. She sat him on one of the beds, the brown plastic pad crackling underneath him. She assessed him first with her mother’s eye, not saying a word as she searched deep into his own eyes, checking his inner well-being and not looking too happy about what she saw, and then she scanned his body with her doctor’s eye.

“We’ll have a talk about what happened later,” she said. “Nurse Retno will take the blood sample. Malarial symptoms would present around now if the meds didn’t take, so I’d like to be sure. When she’s done, you go straight to your bed and stay there, you hear me?”

Isaac nodded dumbly.

She strode away, the heels of her sandals slapping against the tile floor. Isaac waited for Nurse Retno, minutes passing in a rubbery manner.

He’d never been in a fight before. The adrenaline surge had inflated everything inside of him, and now that his anger was gone, he felt hollow, lost and small within himself.

Nurse Retno finally appeared. She made him undress and put on a green gown. Isaac protested that he was only here to get some blood taken. “Full checkup,” she said, “your mother’s orders.” She first tended to his battle wounds; both elbows were bloodily scraped, and a scratch on his arm was oozing blood. She clucked, but not over him. “That nice Mr. Suherman,” she said. “Who could have ever thought he was a terrorist?”

I can’t believe it either
. But he realized he hadn’t known much at all about Mr. Suherman, nothing about his family, where he was from, even where he lived in town. Isaac had told Mr. Suherman everything about Ismail, had cried freely in front of him without embarrassment. But now the embarrassment roared in at double strength.
He was probably laughing at me
. Isaac recalled the way the teacher had leaned forward to ask what Isaac had thought of the terrorist attacks. What Isaac had taken to be sympathetic curiosity had no doubt been glittering exultation. For the first time in his life Isaac felt like a true fool.

Nurse Retno left, saying she’d be back in a moment.

What about the hospital?
Isaac wondered.
Is anyone checking the hospital for bombs?
He got off the pad and crossed the room to the door. He craned his head and looked out the door’s inset window
to the hospital’s main hall. Everything looked normal to him—if anything, the few people he saw seemed more lethargic than usual, except for Mas Gatot’s nephew, who was trotting to the main exit doors.

Other memories slipped into his mind. The legless beggar. The male nurse saying that Mas Gatot was not working. That was ridiculous, for Mas Gatot practically lived in the morgue. Isaac pushed open the door to run after Mas Gatot’s nephew to ask about his uncle when another memory clanged into place: the nasty fruit shop owner’s odd solicitousness toward the dead beggar whom he’d earlier mocked. And then another memory: Sheldon telling his dad to do complete ID checks on everybody. Gatot’s nephew hadn’t been hired by the hospital, had he? Yet another memory presented itself as crisply as a dynamite stick’s crackling fuse: Mas Gatot probing a death wound with a pair of forceps and commenting that corpses were known to be booby-trapped.

Isaac ran as fast as he could, the tails of his hospital gown flapping behind him, exposing his naked rear end to the bemused nurses and patients he left in his wake. He skidded around a left-turn corner and then a right-hand one and raced down a short ramp by the cargo elevator into a bright corridor.

The portcullis gate at the far end was open, but he didn’t see Mas Gatot. He banged through the morgue’s double doors. The sole occupant within was the legless beggar’s corpse, lying upon a gurney placed directly underneath the overhead fan that spun with the roar of a mini-tornado, sucking air out of the room. Two
dark green glass bottles, corked shut and bound together with surgical tape, had been laid on the beggar’s abdomen. One held a granular substance and the other a liquid. Isaac’s mind flipped through chemical equations: Acid plus potassium cyanide equals cyanide gas, ready to be sucked up through the ventilation duct. Or maybe the bottles held a mix for a gas even more deadly. All that was needed was something to simultaneously break them—a small bomb in the beggar’s stomach would do.

Isaac hit the switch on the wall by the doors, and the fan grumbled to a stop. He held his breath and picked up the bottles. He carefully gripped them with both hands as he walked across the room and gingerly placed them underneath the stainless-steel autopsy table. He grabbed the gurney’s foot bar and shoved the gurney through the double doors. The beggar’s corpse quivered and bounced as Isaac ran the gurney down the corridor, through the portcullis, and out onto the empty lot. The shaking popped the corpse’s eyelids open, and it seemed to Isaac as though the dead beggar were staring at him. With a cry, he gave the gurney one last shove. Its wheels rattled over the empty lot’s hard dirt. He raced back into the building. He’d just cleared the portcullis when the air behind him whomped and a huge blow smacked him from behind, throwing him forward onto the corridor floor.

After a vacant stretch of time he got to his knees and looked behind him. Through a clearing cloud of smoke and dust emerged a twisted, mangled gurney, two of its wheeled legs splayed high into the air. The cloud parted some more, revealing on the ground all that was left of the beggar: his head, a bloody hole for one eye,
the other half-lidded eye staring off into the distance. Isaac shrieked and scrabbled backward. The heel of his hand flicked something soft and round. He glanced down at several rose petals. In their midst was the beggar’s missing eye, big as a golf ball, the yellow, red-streaked cornea with its black iris staring right up at Isaac. His vision shrink-wrapped around the gruesome object and then blinked out altogether as he fainted.