treated his girlfriends particularly well. Actually he was kind of an asshole to women. Sorry."
She doesn't say anything.
"I knew him since I was eleven. We were the two biggest geeks in junior high. We used to spend every lunch hour playing Dungeons and Dragons. Just the two of us, because no one else would talk to us. We were best friends the whole way through high school. Even in university, even when he got into drugs and flipped out, we still hung out all the time. He even got me laid. Quite a feat back in those days."
"I can imagine," Veronica says without thinking.
Jacob laughs good-naturedly. "You have no idea."
"Then he went to Bosnia?" she asks, interested despite herself.
"Yeah. He must have barely passed the physicals. But when he came back he'd turned into, like, a Superman action figure. All muscle. Like you saw." Jacob pauses. "He was different when he came back. I don't know. Haunted. But we were still friends. I don't know if we would have been if we had met then for the first time, but we had momentum, you know? So we stayed pretty tight."
Veronica nods.
"And it was cool being friends with him. I'd brag on him all the time, my adventurer best friend working in all these crazy places. Haiti, Thailand, Iraq, then here. The last five years, we didn't see each other much, he didn't get along well with his folks, he'd come back to Canada maybe once a year. I was so looking forward to coming out here and hanging out with him. I was kind of sick of living vicariously, you know? This was supposed to be my big adventure. It was going to be so great. And now, bam, he's gone. If he'd gotten cancer or something there would at least have been some warning, you know? It feels like he's not supposed to be gone. I keep half-thinking like somehow he actually faked his death and he's going to pop up any moment with a big grin on his face and tell me the whole story."
Veronica can't think of anything to say.
The computer speakers come to life. Both of them twitch with surprise, lean towards Jacob's laptop and listen intently. The sound quality is claustrophobic and muffled, like that of an accidental pocket-call from a cell phone, and further blurred by engine noise from some kind of vehicle, so Prester's voice wavers between clear and indistinct:
"Just got back into … halfway from Entebbe … tomorrow night … Yeah … No shit. Well, I'm ready to bring in Zanzibar Sam. Tonight? Usual time and place, then. Cheers."
The computer goes silent.
"Zanzibar Sam," Jacob mutters. "Tonight."
"It sounded like he's on the phone."
"I think he was. But not his Mango phone. We would have heard it loud and clear. All his calls are now conferenced to and recorded on this computer. He's got another phone. Like Derek did."
"Half the people where I work have more than one Ugandan phone," Veronica points out.
"It's not uncommon," Jacob concedes. "Three different networks here, three different coverage maps, phones are cheap, if you travel a lot it makes sense to have one of each. That's true. But how does he know about Zanzibar Sam?"
"Maybe Derek told him."
"If Derek told Prester everything, why did Derek have a secret office?"
Veronica doesn't have an answer for that. Maybe Jacob is right and Prester is guilty of Derek's death. But it's still hard for her to reconcile that possibility with the way Prester talked in Goma.
"We should take all this to the embassy," she says. "Let them handle it."
"Take what?" Jacob sounds exasperated. "What do you want to do, go knock on their door and say, listen, we happen to think that two of your CIA agents are actually smugglers who had Derek killed, and are now being blackmailed by Al-Qaeda into helping them kill two hundred Western NGO workers. And by the way, Veronica here thinks her ex-husband is in on it too. Oh, but you know what, all we have for proof is a bunch of Derek's scribbled notes, a few cryptic phone records, and a whole lot of speculation. Can you just drop everything and arrest Prester and Strick right now, pretty please with a cherry on top?" He shakes his head. "I seriously doubt they'll listen. Even if they did, there's no way Prester and Strick wouldn't find out, we'd have shown our hand for nothing, they'd hide their tracks. I mean, if they actually are corrupt.