Vultures in the Playground Page 6

  Archie felt like a murderer. He had witnessed death before, but had never been so intimately responsible for one. It felt wrong to be ditching Liberia like this, yet he couldn’t help feeling relieved. The respite was likely temporary, though. Murders had a way of catching up on people.

  While in transit, it was likely that the authorities in Accra would be contacted. He was certain that someone would be waiting for him when he landed. This could very well be his final few hours of freedom.

  As the plane rolled onto the runway, he remembered James. He checked to make sure the stewardess wasn’t looking and slipped out his phone.

  “Hello?”

  “James, it’s me. Everything okay?”

  “Hello? Who is this?” He sounded all croaky, like he had swallowed a frog.

  “James. I made it onto a flight. Get your ass home, and get rid of that SIM card I gave you.”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  “James?”

  “Please … eh … who is this I am speaking to?” The voice was Liberian, but it didn’t belong to James.

  Archie hung up and switched off the phone. His heart raced like a marathoner’s. Sweat soaked his money vest. He shivered as the engines revved up and the air conditioning kicked in.

  As the plane maneuvered into takeoff position, a pickup truck with a yellow flashing light came screaming across the runway. Archie closed eyes. This was it. He was headed for a Liberian prison.

  The engines roared and the plane surged ahead. Within moments they were angling steeply over the informal settlements ringing the airport. The plane banked over golden beaches and mangrove islands and set a course straight down the coast to Accra.

  ***

  Archie wondered how different his life would have been had he changed careers when he had the chance. He would still be married, for one thing. It was all that time away that had ruined things with Trudy. He had averaged five months a year away from home during the first two years of their marriage. Given the chance at a mulligan he would have taken on more desk work and traveled a lot less. Maybe that would have rescued his marriage, or at least postponed its demise.

  And yet, he couldn’t imagine a life spent cycling endlessly between home and a fixed workplace, embedded in a landscape that never changed, always delivering the same vistas and horizons. He loved the unpredictability and variety of traveling, to a point. He could do without some of the drama of these failed states.

  He’d had several opportunities since his separation to become involved with interesting and attractive women, but he never followed through. He could not bring himself to admit defeat and give up any chance of reconciling with Trudy.

  They had been apart now for three years now with no signs of reconciliation. She was already living in Oregon with some guy she had met on a Caribbean vacation. Their once weekly phone conversations had dwindled to birthday greetings twice a year.

  But even the strongest relationships could crumble without warning. Archie knew that as well as anyone.

  The lone stewardess brought around a bag with a tiny bottle of Voltic water, a cardboard carton of orange juice and some white bread smeared with a pinkish paste that was apparently some sort of tuna spread.

  He napped a bit after his snack, but was jarred awake when his head smacked the window. Already, the small plane had swung around into a landing pattern. The steepness of the descent alarmed him. The ocean seemed to be coming up way too fast. But that was how these smaller planes flew. Their pilots just flung them around the sky.

  Archie braced himself for what awaited him in Accra. He almost wished the damned plane would simplify his life and crash.

  ***

  Archie stood at the baggage carousel, stunned at having breezed through immigration. The line had been short and the official had barely glanced at him before stamping his passport. He never expected to get this far.

  A sticker on his boarding pass indicated that the man from the washroom had checked one bag. He didn’t want to press his luck. Only one short customs queue lay between him and freedom. He would probably be more conspicuous, though, without a bag. What American ever traveled to Ghana without a suitcase?

  He went to the carousel and watched the luggage go round. He had no idea what the bag looked like. He let the other passengers claim theirs first, while sneaking glances at the tags of those that went unclaimed.

  It startled him to see his name on an unfamiliar tartan valise. The number matched the one on his ticket. It was heavy for such a small bag. He took it and rolled it through the ‘nothing to claim’ section of immigration. He tried to look nonchalant and calm. They waved him on.

  Coming down the ramp, he almost tripped over his feet when he spotted his name on a placard for Labadi Beach Resorts. Without thinking, he tipped his head to the Ghanaian bearing the placard. It would have been wiser to ignore it.

  “Welcome to Ghana, Mr. Parsons,” said the man. “Akwaaba, as we say. Please let me have your bag. Your van is waiting.”

  ***

  Thousands of fruit bats swarmed the sky as the car crept through the heavy traffic near the presidential palace. It had been a while since he had visited Accra. The place seemed to sprout huge hotels and sprawling shopping malls every time he came. All that shiny, new oil money was paying for lots of commercial development.

  Archie had some tough choices to make. The right thing to do would be to report the incidents in Liberia to the authorities. But which authority? The US Embassy? He still felt uneasy about that proposition, even now that he was in Ghana.

  He had no reason to fear the law. What had happened in the washroom was an accident. There were plenty of mitigating circumstances. For one thing, the man who had his stolen passport was obviously a criminal.

  But Archie had no confidence that he would ever receive a fair hearing. There were powers at large that had wanted his identity wrested away and used for nefarious purposes. How could he know in advance who or what was arrayed against him?

  Going home to Baltimore to sort things out seemed to make sense, but not if the American government was in on this plot. Taking his chances in an American court sure beat exposing himself to African court systems and jails, but he couldn’t be certain some agency didn’t want him taken out through extra-judicial means.

  All of this uncertainty and fear only made him want to keep running. But where? How could a white man melt into the crowd and remain anonymous in Africa? Not in Ghana, surely.

  Namibia, though, was a place that had always intrigued him. The sheer diversity of its landscape, culture and climate amazed him. It was like a distillation of all Africa into one, humid and tropical up north, arid and temperate along the coast and in the south. Warm, sunny days. Cool nights. A thriving middle class. And how many African capitals juxtaposed San Bushmen with German food and oompah bands? Windhoek did.

  Perhaps he could volunteer in some needy clinic somewhere, practice medicine again. It wasn’t like he had much to return to in Baltimore.

  Two cats? Melissa would make sure they found a good home. Heck, she might even adopt them herself.

  The van passed through Nkrumah Circle and then Danquah and Osu until they finally reached the oceanfront. They turned along the shore past dumping grounds that spilled over onto the beaches. Burning piles of trash sent acrid fumes into the air.

  He had heard of Labadi Beach but had never stayed there. It had always been way too rich for his per diem, not to mention his tastes. They passed the casino of the La-Palm Royal Resort and turned into a drive lined with manicured palms and gardens, pulling up under a canopied turnabout.

  An attendant opened his door. A porter already had his bag. Archie tipped the driver too generously. The smallest bills he had left were twenties.

  He entered a tall ceilinged lobby with exposed beams of dark-stained mahogany, wary of anyone who glanced at him. As he approached the reception, the woman at the counter flashed him a smile too bright to be earnest. “Goo
d afternoon Dr. Parsons, we’ve been expecting you.”

  “You have?”

  “Of course,” she said, as if she thought he was just being playful. “We have reserved for you one of our oceanfront suites. I hope that will be acceptable?”

  “Um, sure. That’ll be fine.”

  He reached instinctively for his wallet, forgetting he had been without it for days.

  “No worries. Your room is prepaid.” She handed him a pair of key cards.

  Archie went through the motions, following the porter up to his room. The door opened into a suite far cushier than any NGO drone in a developing country had a right to sleep in. There was a leather sofa and a loveseat, a separate bedroom with a king-sized bed. The pristine bathroom was larger than his kitchen at home. Floor to ceiling sliding doors opened onto a balcony overlooking a pool. Beyond a coconut grove, waves crested and broke in the sea.

  He stared blankly as the porter went through his ritual of turning on lights and demonstrating the remote before tipping him with one of his few remaining twenty dollar bills.

  A black briefcase sat atop a huge desk with an array of unmarked manila folders and Tyvek envelopes were fanned across the front. The closet door lay open with an array of shirts and slacks on hangers, outfits from tuxedos to camouflaged shorts with cargo pockets, all neatly pressed. Archie opened one of the drawers in the bureau. It contained underwear, socks and handkerchiefs.

  Archie stank. He needed a shower badly, but there was no way he could stay in this room. He couldn’t even bring himself to sit down. He would be a sitting duck for whoever had made these arrangements.

  He grabbed a cotton laundry bag from a drawer, inverted it to hide the Labadi Beach logo and stuffed it with some socks and underwear, along with a shirt and a pair of pants that looked like they might fit him. He tossed in some complimentary bottles of shampoo and a disposable tooth brush from the bathroom.

  He stared at the folders at the desk. On impulse he grabbed several and crammed them into the laundry bag, along with a banana from a basket of fruit on the coffee table. He had barely stayed in the room five minutes before he left it.

  A black man in a business suit startled him outside his door. The man’s jacket hung open, revealing the edges of a shoulder holster. “Good evening, sir.”

  Archie fumbled for words.

  “Security,” said the man. “At your service.”

  Archie nodded curtly and continued down the hall. He punched the elevator button, but took the stairs, exiting the rear of the hotel and circling around to the parking lot where he came upon a parked Jeep Cherokee bearing the Xtraktiv logo on its door. The sight jolted him and made him hesitate. He veered away, giving it a wide berth, and stepped up his pace down the hibiscus–lined walkway that exited the resort. A cab driver called after him, but he waved the man off as he hurried off the grounds onto the main street.

  He walked along the road straight into the sinking sun, passing the La-Palm resort and several fuming garbage heaps. He kept on walking as twilight consumed the city, feeling none of the panic that had plagued him in Liberia. He felt safe here. Darkness was his accomplice, shrouding his race, concealing his very existence in the voids between street lights and headlights.

  He hailed a taxi in a poorer neighborhood where no driver would suspect he was a guest of the Labadi Beach Resort. Two miles later, past Independence Square and its stadium-like presidential reviewing platforms, they turned left down a pitted, dirt road.

  At the far end, past the outbuildings of obscure ministries, they reached a modest but tidy hotel called the Afia. He checked in under a false name and passport number, promising to pay in cash. He made his way to his room—a tiny bungalow with a deck looking out onto a dirty beach. He turned on the air conditioner and collapsed onto his bed.

  Chapter 8: Afia

  Archie woke up shivering, hungry and confused. A faint aroma of burning trash permeated the room. Breakers crashed against a beach. The sun was down. The shades were drawn. The room was absolutely dark. He thought he was still in Liberia.

  He flailed at the nightstand, nearly knocking over the lamp, before finding the switch and flicking it on. He relaxed when he found himself in a familiar place—a bungalow room in the Afia Hotel. He had left Liberia for nice, stable Ghana, the place some guidebooks called: ‘Africa for beginners.’

  But then the whole chain of unsavory remembrances came flooding back, centering around that man lying dead on the washroom floor. A painful knot formed in his gut.

  Someone had wanted him dead, but he had survived a vicious mugging only to witness the death of a man who was attempting to impersonate him. And then some people in Ghana mistook Archie for the dead man.

  The situation posed a conundrum far beyond his ken. This was no mere logjam of African bureaucracy and logistics, the kind of problem he was adept at sorting out. There were too many unknowns, too many absurdities. Who would ever want to impersonate Archie Parsons, an anonymous and unremarkable drone for a Beltway Bandit operation?

  He turned off the air conditioner with the remote. Hobbled into the bathroom. Stripped off his clothes.

  The shower was blessedly warm. He stood under the trickle nearly half an hour, rinsing out his rancid money vest, shampooing gingerly around his scalp wound, still raw and painful and quite possibly infected.

  The clothes he had taken from the suite at Labadi were a tad long on him, but at least they were clean. He made do by rolling up the cuffs and sleeves. After a quick shave, he felt human again. He wandered out to the restaurant to see if could find someone to serve him breakfast.

  The restaurant wasn’t quite open yet, but he persuaded one of guys in the kitchen to let him have a bread roll from a basketful that had just been delivered from a bakery. He strolled back to his bungalow, munching on the crusts.

  Back inside, he sorted through the contents of his courier bag, finding it pretty much as he left it, including the Wired magazine he had read on the flight to Monrovia.

  He washed his dirty clothes in the sink, finding one of the Labadi Beach key cards in the pocket of his jeans. If he had a lighter he would have burned it right there and then, but for now he stuck it in his shirt pocket. He hung his clothes over a shower bar and went back to his bed and turned on CNN.

  His eyes kept wandering to the envelope he had taken from the suite. He slid it off the end table and opened the clasp. It contained a two page itinerary detailing stops in Malabo, São Tomé, Libreville and Luanda—all West African, all situated in and around the Gulf of Guinea, all pretty much run by despots, save for São Tomé.

  Oddly, the listing showed no specific dates, just days of the week, flight numbers and departure times. They had booked him, or his doppelganger, some open tickets perhaps. Too bad he hadn’t the slightest interest in visiting any of those places. None brought him closer to home. None offered a reasonable place to hide, especially since they were all linked to Xtraktiv. And unfortunately, that list included Ghana.

  Was it better to lay low or keep moving? And if he left the country, wouldn’t he be more likely to elude detection traveling over land than by air?

  Delta and United had direct flights to DC, but those were out of the question. Their flight manifests would be closely scrutinized by whoever was looking for him. Perhaps a series of short hops with obscure local airlines, each leg moving him closer to Europe—maybe that would be his best bet.

  These smaller operations, with their paper records and archaic computers, would be less easily tracked by the bad guys. But flying meant exposing his face at the airport. With all of those long, slow queues—it was the perfect trap. His pursuers could pick him off at their leisure. There were regional airports in places like Takoradi and Tamale, they were few and these people had the resources to cover them all.

  Clearly, he had to leave by land. Ghana managed dozens of border crossings into Togo, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast. The odds, especially at the more obscure checkpoints, would be in his favor.r />
  But he wasn’t going anywhere for the time being. The last two days had spooked him good and he still had his tail stuck between his legs. He didn’t even want to show his face at the reception desk, but if he was going to arrange anything, he needed a new chip for his phone and some scratch cards.

  He stepped out of the bungalow just as the first rays of sun were glinting off the waves. The morning sky was hazy, though not as thick as Monrovia had been. It was late in the season. The harmattan would soon leave. The brush fires would cease once the rains returned.

  He noticed some specks of blood on his shoes. It was probably his own blood, left over from the mugging, but just in case it was not, he scraped them clean with a crumpled leaf plucked from a shrub. He had to be more careful. Anything that invited attention or suspicion was a problem.

  Up in the lobby, there was no one manning the desk, so he stepped back outside. He didn’t want to leave the hotel compound but practically everyone and his brother sold mobile phone minutes in a country like this. He shouldn’t have to walk far to find some.

  But the neighborhood was devoid of merchants. It was mostly store rooms and warehouses for government operations. Every step farther from the safety of Afia left him feeling more nervous, particularly as he approached the main road. If anyone was out looking for him, he would be easy enough to spot. But he needed that SIM card. It was his life line. So he pressed on, beyond the gates of the hotel compound.

  He found a little drink shack just opening up and purchased two SIMs for Vodaphone and MTN, along with enough scratch cards to satisfy a telemarketer. He paid in dollars, keeping his eyes on the busy main road, only steps away. Cars rushed by and people certainly noticed him, but no one cared.

  As he headed back to the hotel, he replaced the SIM in his phone, tossing the LoneStar chip into an open sewer, and added five cedis worth of air time. He considered calling one of his many Ghanaian friends. They were scattered all over Ghana, in Navrongo, Kumasi, Ada. On second thought, maybe it wasn’t so wise. Why risk entangling them in this dangerous situation if he could avoid it? He would hold them in reserve, until they were really needed.