know, whatever fucking conspiracy theory he wants to believe. You know what I think? I think when we found that out, he decided right then, that day, that moment, he would divorce me when I turned thirty. I'm pretty sure he hired a personal trainer to try to seduce me. He was worried the pre-nup wouldn't hold up in court. He definitely hired a private investigator to take pictures of me taking drugs. They were in the divorce papers I got served with two weeks after my thirtieth birthday."
After a moment Jacob says, angrily, "Well, you're almost lucky."
"Lucky?" She half-laughs. "How you figure?"
"You deserve a lot better than him."
They drive on in silence for a while through the breathtaking Ugandan countryside. Rolling hills drift past, thick green vegetation laced with red-dirt roads, maybe half of it occupied and farmed. All colours are brilliant under the searing equatorial sun. Everything seems airbrushed, too vivid to be real. Even the cultivated areas are beautiful, geometrically patterned fields cut by shining irrigation ditches, dun-coloured zebu cattle with scimitar-shaped horns thick as elephant tusks, little clusters of round bamboo-and-mud bandas in the shadows of tall trees. The ugly towns they pass through are like scars on a supermodel's face; brutal concrete shells and wooden huts in fields of filth-strewn dirt, as furrowed and uneven as a frozen ocean, littered with piles of bricks and clumps of filth.
The road is good, but there isn't much traffic. A few private cars; a few of what Derek called NGO Assault Vehicles, white 4WDs with logos painted on their doors and six-foot radio antennae attached to their front bumpers; one bright red EMS Postbus; and dozens of sixteen-seat minibus matatus hurtling past in both directions, with toppling mounds of baggage roped precariously to their roofs, stopping without warning anywhere and everywhere to absorb and disgorge passengers. Spike belts and yellow metal barrels indicate the police roadblocks that are ubiquitous on all African highways. To Jacob's relief, all the police wave them on without inventing some traffic transgression and demanding a "fine."
Jacob remembers what he wanted to tell Veronica. "Derek's phone rang this morning. His other phone. The one from the Sun City."
She blinks, looks at him. "Who was it?"
"That number in Zimbabwe."
"Did you answer?"
"No. They didn't leave a message."
Veronica shakes her head. "This doesn't make any sense. Zimbabwe, Danton, Strick, Al-Qaeda, interahamwe, Zanzibar Sams that are actually Igloos, it's like something out of Lewis Carroll, none of it makes any sense."
"It does to someone."
"Why are we even going to this camp? What are we possibly hoping to achieve?"
"Understanding," Jacob says sourly.
"You really think we'll find something?"
"Susan works at this refugee camp. That's why Derek brought her to Bwindi. He visited this camp, and made phone calls to someone else there. Whoever shot Prester is going to this camp. Whatever's going on, it's all going on there."
"And we're driving straight into it. And we know from that phone Susan picked up that they were already planning some kind of attack in western Uganda."
Jacob shrugs, annoyed. He's not going to back out now. He's already made that perfectly clear. "You want to get out and take a matatu back to Kampala, go ahead."
He waits tensely while Veronica thinks.
At length she says, "No. I want to know. But first thing we do is go to Susan, make sure someone knows we're there. And we don't do anything crazy. We definitely don't go back over the border. I'm not going back into the Congo."
Jacob half-smiles, relieved. "Yeah. Been there, done that, got the bloodstained T-shirt. No more Congo. It's a deal."
* * *
They stop for lunch in Fort Portal, a small collection of low, dusty buildings in the foothills of the cloud-wreathed Ruwenzori mountains. The town's two significant buildings were the local tribal chief's hilltop castle, which looked like a modern Western university building, and the town mosque. Veronica sees that mosque and thinks of the Arab man who held a panga to her throat. She, Derek, Susan and Jacob stopped in Fort Portal for lunch on the way to Bwindi, at the same hotel where he parks now, the Ruwenzori Travellers' Inn. She opens her mouth but leaves her protest unspoken. No sense running away from memories. And they know the food here is good.
They eat beef stew with rice and chapatis. Outside, peasant farmers walk rusting bicycles used for cargo; each supports four or five beer-keg-sized bundles of bananas fresh off the tree. A group of women obviously from Kampala,