What a fucking joke."
He calls out to the SUV behind them, speaking mostly in an African language, but Veronica hears the word "jammer." A moment later Jacob's hiptop, still sitting in the back seat, bleeps with approval. Prester digs out his phone and dials. Jacob freezes; and as Prester speaks, again in an African tongue, his own voice emerges from the hiptop, it's like listening to him on a surround sound system. Prester stops talking, lowers the phone, and stares at Jacob.
"We, um, we bugged your phone," Jacob says apologetically.
"No shit."
"Let me just get that." Jacob dives back into the Toyota just long enough to switch off the hiptop. Prester finishes speaking into his phone, hangs up, and examines Jacob and Veronica again, this time more carefully.
"Sorry," Veronica says. "I guess we were wrong."
After a moment Prester says, "Come on. Follow me. Let's go get a beer. We need to talk."
* * *
The bar he takes them to was once a house, and might still be used for accommodations, Veronica isn't sure. Men and women sit on rickety chairs and couches, stand in the kitchen, or loiter on the barren dirt outside the building, drinking and smoking. Dreadlocks and rasta caps are overrepresented among the crowd, and reggae music pumps through air thick with the sweet smell of marijuana. The chief distinction between this and a house party, from what Veronica can tell, is that the pretty, bare-bellied young woman who walks around distributing beers and joints collects money from their recipients. When they enter, Prester hugs the hostess familiarly, exchanges complicated handshakes with a half-dozen other men, purchases three beers and two joints, and then leads Veronica and Jacob to a small room upstairs.
The walls are of barren, splintered wood, the only furniture is a low table and a half-dozen torn cushions. The windows are empty of glass and a low babble of conversation filters up from the yard. Prester motions them to sit, cracks open the Nile beers with his teeth, and stations them around the table. Veronica doesn't like how close the walls are, but the open windows make the room tolerable.
"Your driver's going to sit it out?" he asks.
"He's not part of it. He's a Jehovah's Witness," Jacob says.
"Yeah. And he's just your driver, not a actual human being, right?"
Jacob blinks.
"You want to get yourselves in deep shit, go right ahead, but if he's not part of it, you should have left him out. He would have died just like you if you'd actually been right about me."
Jacob wordlessly acknowledges Prester's point. Prester lights up a joint, takes a drag, and offers it to them. Jacob declines. Veronica does not.
"Derek was investigating you," Veronica says, after she finally exhales. She ignores Jacob's glare. Prester has proven himself trustworthy. "We found his notes."
"Really? Where? How?"
Jacob explains his cell-phone wizardry and their expedition to the Hotel Sun City.
Prester nods slowly. "I'm impressed. Yeah. Somebody at the embassy is making millions off smuggling, and either Langley really thinks it's me, or whoever it is decided I was the perfect fall guy. Which is true. Criminal record, complicated history, nobody's going to believe I'm pure as the snows of Kilimanjaro, you know? Which I actually am, not that I expect even you to believe. It's like Saddam and the WMDs, the more they don't find anything, the more they assume I'm hiding something big." He shakes his head, half-appalled, half-amused. "I need to be corrupt in order to be less suspicious. It's so tragic it's almost hilarious. So they sent Derek to investigate me. I knew that. But instead he found out something else."
"What?"
"Don't know exactly. He never trusted me. Or anyone. I gathered, from what he let slip, probably to see how I'd react, he was looking for some guy named Zanzibar Sam, who he thought was the connection between the Arabs and the interahamwe. Sound familiar?"
Jacob hesitates, but Veronica has decided to tell Prester the whole truth. He had them at his mercy and let them go; that's good enough for her. "Yes. It's in his notes."
Prester takes a swig of his Nile and a puff from the joint. Then he says, ""The Arabs who come to the Congo, all the ones I've met, they come for gold. Locals pan gold from rivers up by Bunia, just like the Old West, complete with shitloads of bad guys with guns. Ever see Treasure of the Sierra Madre? Bogart. Great movie. Arabs come here, buy gold for a hundred bucks