insufficient evidence to make a case and let them go. Douglas, however, did not follow the script. He did a remarkable and wholly unexpected thing—he confessed. Confessed to everything.
This created an awkward situation that no one wanted but that they could not avoid. The case had to be referred to the courts. Fitzhugh, relieved to hear his suspicions confirmed at last but also mystified as to what had moved a compulsive liar to speak a self-incriminating truth, attended the hearing. Before a robed magistrate, Douglas and Tony stood in the dock, wearing grimy jailbird dungarees. Tony’s lawyer stated that his client pled not guilty and asked that the charges be dropped. The sole evidence against him was Mr. Braithwaite’s statement that he had instructed Mr. Bollichek to sabotage the aircraft. The accused categorically denied that he had ever received any such instructions and would have refused to carry them out if he had. The only other evidence in the case, said the lawyer, was the air crash investigation report—he waved it at the magistrate—and blamed the crash on the crew’s sloppy preflight procedures. The magistrate turned to the prosecutor. Did he intend to produce any witnesses who had seen the accused tampering with the plane in question? No. Did he intend to produce any physical evidence to show the same? No. Then, said the Man of Justice from his bench, he saw no point in proceeding any further. The charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder against Mr. Bollichek are dismissed.
Douglas’s lawyer was next. He said that his client had endured a great deal in the Sudanese prison and had not been in full command of his senses when he made the confession. Does he wish to withdraw it? asked the magistrate. No. Does he wish to amend it? No. In other words, your client is not willing to say he had instructed someone other than Mr. Bollichek to sabotage the aircraft? Correct. And he is not willing to state that he had done the dirty work himself? Correct. The Man of Justice: In his statement, your client said that he and one Michael Goraende, an officer in the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, made a plan to shoot down the plane in the event the alleged sabotage failed to accomplish its purpose. Did any of these conversations take place in Kenya? No. The magistrate returned to the prosecutor. Any witnesses to be called, any evidence to be produced contradicting what was just said? None whatsoever. Then, declared the magistrate, he could see no point in proceeding in the case against Mr. Braithwaite, his confession notwithstanding. It was, ruled the magistrate, an invalid extra-judicial confession, unsupported by witnesses or evidence in the matter of the alleged sabotage of the Hawker-Siddley aircraft and in the alleged conspiracy between Mr. Braithwaite and Colonel Goraende. Moreover, any conversations the accused had with Colonel Goraende, if they took place at all, occurred in Sudan, as did the downing of the Cessna aircraft. Kenya had no jurisdiction.
It was over in thirty minutes. The two defendants were released from custody. CNN would howl “Whitewash!” Kenya would say it had done its duty. As he limped from the courtroom—he had been beaten on the soles of his feet during his incarceration in Sudan—Douglas noticed Fitzhugh sitting in the courtroom. The American’s face and body were testaments to what he’d been through: famine-thin, his shoulders slumped, his sockets bruised caverns for those pearlescent eyes with their gleam of an artificial sincerity. They fastened on Fitzhugh for an instant, an instant and no more, as if he were the only person in the room. He could not read what was in them. Douglas hobbled through the door. It was the last Fitzhugh ever saw of him. The next day the Ministry of Interior, taking note that he had smuggled arms from Kenyan soil, ordered him out of the country. Douglas Braithwaite left Africa with little more than the clothes he wore, the failure he had always dreaded becoming.
That and his torments in prison would have to do for justice, Fitzhugh thought. An African justice. He wondered if the arraignment had been a rigged game. If so, why the confession? What purpose could it have served? He knew only what he wanted to believe: that four months in a Khartoum “ghost house” had concentrated, not the American’s mind, but his soul. He wanted to believe that Douglas had been visited in his prison cell. The demon-deity of Africa had come