Night Of Knives

Chapter 18

The it in question is an island of light in the sea of darkness; a large property illuminated brightly from within, surrounded by a wooden fence. Cars ranging from rusting matatus to gleaming black BMWs are parked on the streets and in vacant lots all around. Thatched roofs arranged in a U-shape sixty feet square are visible within the wall, and the open gate reveals a thronging crowd of Africans beneath those largely open-walled roofs. It's some kind of outdoor nightclub, half the people inside are dancing ecstatically, giving themselves totally to the music. Nearly everybody is holding a bottle or a cigarette or both. The babble of conversation is audible a hundred yards away, mixed with the thumping beats and lilting melodies of African music. Four burly men at the gate watch carelessly as people pass in and out. Others congregate at the nearby nyama choma grilled-meat stand.

Henry pulls to a stop about a hundred feet away and looks around to be sure all the doors are locked before he switches off the lights. "This is a place for bad people," he says, worried. "The men who come here are drinkers and fornicators. Ganja smokers. They have closed their eyes and ears to the Lord's message. They have no discipline, no restraint."

"Sounds like my kind of place," Jacob jokes.

Henry looks at him with sad disapproval. It is like being glared at by a priest. Jacob wants to apologize but decides to just shut up. Henry always makes Jacob a little uneasy. He's still not accustomed to having a servant, and being called "Mr. Rockel" by an older man.

"Can you hear anything from his phone?" Veronica asks.

Jacob frowns. "Doubt it. It should turn on by itself if it picks up any usable audio. The software's not perfect, but I'm guessing there's too much background noise in there… " He taps at his hiptop, and the car suddenly fills with loud, muddy music. Jacob quickly turns it off. "Nope. He could recite Kublai Khan at maximum volume and we wouldn't pick it up. We won't get anything from in there unless he actually uses his Razr. Maybe not even then."

"Shit."

"Yeah. We can't follow him in there. Not surreptitiously. We're probably the only white people within half a mile. Well, maybe we'll get lucky and he'll develop a hankering for nyama choma." Jacob produces his Canon Rebel camera and a long lens from his backpack, assembles them, lowers his window just enough to insert the lens, and peers through the viewfinder at the nighclub. It's hard to make out individuals amid the constant motion. He sees a few men with dreadlocks, but none are Prester. He's short for an African, next to invisible in a crowd like this.

"Is there enough light to take a picture?" Veronica asks.

"I don't know. The window works as a poor man's tripod, that helps. Let's see." He sets the camera to its maximum ISO level, takes a test shot, and examines the resulting image. "Hey, that's actually not bad. Good enough to recognize faces."

Jacob goes back to surveying the crowd through the telescopic lens. It feels like he is in a movie, but at the same time he feels coolly confident, ready for anything, as if he has been training his whole life for this pursuit of Al-Qaeda down dark African alleys. Maybe he has: maybe every movie, book and video game he's ever seen, read and played has honed his instincts and his strategies, maybe this is the triumphant advantage of having lived a Western pop-culture youth, that all the ten thousand made-up adventures he has seen and lived on screen and page have prepared him for this real one better than any formal training ever could.

"Can I see?" Veronica asks after a few minutes.

"Sure."

She has to lean over him and press her body against his to get a decent view, and when she does, Jacob goes still. She is amazingly warm. It feels like a long time passes before she withdraws from the camera and sits back in her seat.