The Laughing Monsters Read Free Page B

PGP encryption. As the name promised, it’s pretty good protection.
    I logged off of NIIA and attached my own keyboard to the console and went through the moves and established a Virtual Private Network and sent:
    Get file 3TimothyA for me. Your NEMCO password will work.
    Nothing now but the sound of my breath and the prayers of three small cooling fans. The fans cooled the units, not the user. I wiped my face and neck with my kerchief. It came away drenched. My breath came faster and faster. My Nokia’s clock showed a bit after 1300—noon in Amsterdam. I hadn’t allowed time for getting lost. Tina might have gone to lunch. It irked me that I couldn’t slow my breath.
    But Tina was at her desk, and she was ready. I sent: “I’m ready for those dirty pictures.”
    Within two minutes it was done.
    I believe that by making this transaction the two of us risked life sentences. But only one of us knew it. Like anyone in the field of intelligence, Tina asked no questions. Besides, she loved me.
    I came up the stairs and into Elvis Documents with my kit clutched against my chest, as if it held the goods, but it didn’t. A Cruzer device snugged in the waistline seam of my trousers held the goods.
    Mohammed waited in his broken chair, his gaze fixed studiously in another direction.
    “Let’s eat,” I said.
    *   *   *
    We ate down the street at the Paradi. Decent Indian fare.
    During the late nineties and for a few years after, when this place had drawn the interest of the media, Kallon had worked as a stringer for the AP and as a CIA informant, and then the CIA had levered him into the Leonean secret service to inform from down in the nasty heart of things, and he had hurt a lot of people. And now he’d got himself a job with NATO.
    That the CIA once ran Mohammed Kallon was, I acknowledge, my own supposition, prompted merely by my sharp nose for a certain perfume. Snitches stink.
    I let Kallon order for both of us while I went to the men’s lavatory. I slipped shut the lock and took my passport from my shirt pocket and the Cruzer from the seam in my trousers. I felt desperate to be rid of it. Cowardly—but the situation felt all too new.
    Normally I carry my passport in a ziplock plastic bag. I removed the passport from the bag and replaced it with the Cruzer, wound the Cruzer tightly in the plastic, and looked for a hiding place.
    The toilets, two of them, were set into the floor, each with a foot pedal for flushing. I examined the tiles on all four walls, fiddled with the mirror, ran my fingers around the windowsill. I tried lifting the posts of the divider between the two toilets—one came loose from the floor. With my finger I scratched a delve at the bottom of its hole, dropped the tiny package in, and replaced the post to cover it.
    For the sake of realism, I pressed the pedal on one of the toilets. It didn’t flush. The other one sprayed my shoe. I washed my hands at the sink and rejoined Mohammed Kallon.
    Over lunch we talked about nothing really, except when I asked him outright, “What’s going on?” and he said, “Michael Adriko is going on.”
    *   *   *
    Having nowhere else to be, I arrived an hour early at the Scanlon, a hotel more central to Freetown than the better ones. When the region had drawn journalists, this was where many of them had lodged, a four-story place sunk in the diesel fumes and, when the weather was dry, in the hovering dust.
    Inside the doors it was mute and dim—no power at the moment please sir—but crowded with souls. In the middle of the lobby stood a figure in a two-piece jogging suit of royal purple velour, a large man with a bald, chocolate, bullet-shaped head, which he wagged from side to side as he blew his nose loudly and violently into a white hand towel. People were either staring or making sure they didn’t. This was Michael Adriko.
    Michael folded his towel and draped it over his shoulder as I came to him. Though we had an appointment in an hour, he