The Laughing Monsters Read Free Page A

swivel. “I might have known you were in Freetown.”
    I didn’t sit. “Why?”
    “Because Michael Adriko is here. I saw him. The deserter.”
    “You call Michael a deserter?”
    “Hah!”
    “If he’s a deserter, then call me a deserter too.”
    “Hah!”
    I felt irritated, ready to argue. Mohammed was still a good interrogator. “Listen,” I said, “Michael’s not from any of these Leonean clans, any of the chiefdoms. I think he’s originally from Uganda. So—if he left here suddenly back then, he didn’t desert.”
    “Can’t you sit down to talk?”
    “Bruno Horst is around.”
    “I do believe it. So are you.”
    “Is he working for one of the outfits?”
    “How would I know?”
    “I don’t know how you’d know. But you’d know.”
    “And who does Roland Nair work for?”
    “Just call me Nair. Nair is in Freetown strictly on personal business. And it really does stink in here.”
    “Who do you work for?”
    I shrugged.
    “Anyone. As usual,” he said.
    I wasn’t a torturer. I’d never stood ankle-deep in the fluids of my victims … “I can’t imagine how you ended up here,” I told him. “You’re all wrong for this.”
    “Holy cow! All wrong for what?”
    “You’re a dirty player.”
    Mohammed had lost his smile. “I hear the pot saying to the kettle, ‘You are black.’ Do you know that expression?”
    He had a point. “All right,” I said, “we’re both black,” and it struck me as funny.
    Mohammed found his smile again. “Nair, I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot after so long a time, honestly—because it’s almost the moment when you take me to lunch!”
    “Lunch isn’t out of the question,” I said. “But first give me a few minutes with your computers.”
    “None of them are working.”
    “The computers downstairs.”
    “There’s no downstairs.” He was a terrible liar. I stared until he understood. “Bloody hell!”
    “Let’s have a look inside your closet.”
    “Every day brings new surprises!” He looked as if he’d eaten something evil and delicious. “You’re with NIIA?”
    “Let’s follow the protocol.” The protocol called for his getting out of my way.
    He sat back down and busied himself with a pile of receipts, bursting with a silly, private glee, while I went across the space to his mop closet, which stood open and which also served as a toilet, with a slop-bucket covered by a wooden board and a roll of brownish paper on the floor beside it. That accounted for the stench in the place.
    I consulted the readout on my coder, a unit that fits on a key chain. The eight-digit code changes every ninety seconds. I entered the closet and shut the door behind me, and by the glow of my Nokia I moved aside a patch on the rear wall and keyed the digits into the interlock and pushed the wall open and went down the metal stairs as the panel clicked shut behind me without my assistance.
    Here the four lights were burning.
    I’d entered this sunken place more than once, long ago. It had been built to American standards, not in meters, but in feet: ten by sixteen in area, with concrete walls eight feet in height, and one dozen metal stair steps leading down. A battery bank in a wire cage bolted to the concrete floor, an electric bulb in another such cage in each of the concrete walls. A desk, a chair, both metal, both bolted down. On the desk, two machines—much smaller units than we’d used a dozen years before.
    I sat down and took from my carrier-kit an accessory disguised as a cigarette lighter, a NATO-issued device similar to a USB stick, with the algorithms built in. It actually makes a flame. I held it to my face and scanned my iris and stuck it into the side of the machine in front of me and powered up and logged on. Through the NATO Intel proxy I sent a Nothing To Report—but I sent it twice, which warned Tina to expect a message at her personal e-address. For this exchange Tina would know to shelve the military algorithms. We used