career and most of her friends. The whole point of coming to Africa in the first place was to forge a whole new life for herself.
Eventually she gets up and goes for a walk, makes her way down the walkway to the patio, careless of the pains that stab through her feet. A warm breeze wafts through the night air. Occasional airplanes groan along the flight path directly above the hotel. To the north, a livid crimson glow hangs in the night sky, emanating from the summit of volcanic Mount Nyiragongo; red light burning from a sea of molten rock seething within an open crater. Prester was right when he called it Mount Doom.
She supposes she should feel miserable. She's gone through unspeakable horror, been wounded and traumatized, and now she's supposed to abandon her new life. But standing here, in this surreal, cinematic place, breathing the night air of Africa, Veronica feels strangely jubilant. She came so close to death that every breath now seems a precious gift. She feels as if some kind of shell has been burnt away from her, leaving her lighter and freer, even younger. The downward spiral of her life during the last year, the divorce, her return to relative poverty, her inability to cope with life in Africa – these things all seem so trivial now. She's young and healthy and alive. That's all that matters. Not a divorce from a man she never really loved.
Danton. Derek thought, and Prester thinks, that her ex-husband was somehow involved in her abduction; that he was the partner of a corrupt American intelligence agent in the Uganda embassy who knew that the interahamwe smugglers were harbouring Islamic terrorists, and who ordered the capture and murder of Derek, and anyone unlucky enough to be with him in Bwindi, before Derek discovered too much. But the more Veronica thinks about that theory, the more it sounds both crazy and wrong. There's just no way Danton would have been involved in anything like that. Either Derek was just plain wrong about Danton - or there's something else entirely going on here. But what could that possibly be?
She shakes her head angrily. It shouldn't matter what Danton is doing. He's not supposed to be part of her life any more. Seven years of her life wasted, and now these seven days of horror, and the awful death of a man she could have fallen in love with. Except it seems even Derek was only interested in her because she was Danton's ex-wife. It feels like that's all she will ever be for the rest of her life. Especially if she goes back to America.
Veronica can't think of any reason to go back to America. There's nothing waiting for her there. It would feel like surrender. She came to Africa to reinvent herself. Just because she went through one awful week of torment doesn't mean she has to abandon that dream and go home to whatever squalid life awaits her in America. She can stay here now, she's sure of it. Life in Kampala will be a breeze after this week. She's taken the worst Africa can throw at her, and she's still standing. She doesn't have to give up now just because everybody assumes she will. That's just another reason not to go.
* * *
The sun has not yet risen over Rwanda when Jacob and Veronica arrive at the helipad just outside peacekeeping headquarters. Strick shakes their hands goodbye while the bored-looking Indian UN soldier inspects their orders.
"Don't take this the wrong way," Strick says, "but I don't ever want to see either of you again. Go home and don't come back."
He turns and walks away before they can respond. The Indian officer hands them back their paperwork. Veronica was surprised to receive actual military orders, on an A4 sheet with her name and new passport numbers printed beneath official UN and MONUC logos, along an official UN boarding pass, a brand-new passport good for one year, a first-class British Airways ticket from Kampala to JFK via Heathrow, and five new twenty-dollar bills in an envelope labelled "per diem."
"Wait," the Indian soldier says, and directs them to a gaggle of troops, all of them Indian too, sitting crosslegged in the shade of the nearest big white helicopter. Jacob and Veronica join them. Strick drives away in his Jeep. Two soldiers in a blue beret appear with a plastic bag full of still-warm chapatis and a samovar full of sweet Indian