unusual. But the fourth displays a familiar face.
"Oh, no," Jacob says, as the new picture fills his hiptop's screen. "Oh, shit."
Veronica sits up quickly, grabs his arm, looks, and gasps. The picture that has been taken is a somewhat warped view of Strick, viewed face-on from below.
"They got him," she whispers.
"Maybe they just got his phone. Let's see."
They wait anxiously. Seconds crawl by. The next picture is also of Strick, but this time a white-haired white man with a thin face is looking over Strick's shoulder. Jacob has never seen him before. Neither has Veronica.
Three similar pictures later, they finally get a partial shot of the phone's surroundings. It's on an angle, and blurry, the phone must have been in motion when the camera fired, maybe it was being put back on the table. Light streaming from an open window drowns out almost all the rest of the picture. But this light clearly illuminates, in one corner of the frame, a dark-skinned wrist handcuffed to a metal bedframe, and a few loose cables of dreadlocked hair.
"No," Veronica says. "Oh, no. That's him. That's Prester."
Jacob nods grimly. "And they think he knows where we are."
"Oh my God. What do you think they're -"
"I think I don't want to know what they're doing to him," Jacob says harshly. He shakes his head. "Sorry. Shit. We have to get to the embassy as soon as it opens. That's all we can do."
* * *
The darkness outside their car is almost perfect. There are no street lights on Ugandan highways, and almost no night-time traffic. Earlier they drove through a swarm of tiny flies as dense as fog, and then a hammering tropical downpour, lightning flickering around them two or three times a second, illuminating the ghostly silhouettes of roadside bandas and tin-roofed huts. Now the clouds have cleared and the pale skein of the Milky Way is visible in the moonless canopy of countless stars above. They pass through dusty villages so quiet by night that they look deserted, across tumbling rivers that glitter in the headlights. There are only a few roadblocks, and the police who man them seem tense and nervous, as if whoever drives by night carries the devil as a passenger. Jacob and Veronica are waved past without inspection.
They stop for Veronica to relinquish the wheel. Both she and Jacob are exhausted, but neither can sleep. As they resume their motion Veronica looks over her shoulder at Rukungu, lying sprawled across the Toyota's back seat, sleeping like a baby. She thinks of what she has read about the Rwandan genocide in which he participated.
There were eight million people in Rwanda, seven million Hutu and one million Tutsi, when the Hutu leaders decided to murder all the Tutsi. The weapons of choice were clubs and machetes. In the cities, interahamwe death squads hunted door-to-door, killed whole families in their homes, dragged them out to be executed in public, stopped carloads of Tutsis at roadblocks and slaughtered them on the spot. Children proudly told passing death squads where their neighbours were hidden. Doctors invited them into hospitals to murder their patients. As the weeks of genocide progressed, order Hutus increasingly eliminated the middleman, killed their Tutsi acquaintances themselves and moved into their houses. In rural areas Tutsi were hunted down like vermin, hunting parties went out every day to find the "cockroaches" hidden in fields and forests, slaughtered man and woman and child alike. Tutsi women, famous for their beauty, were usually gang-raped before they were slaughtered.
The survivors of the first few weeks congregated in caves, churches, schools, stadiums, with no food, no water, no hope. Some tried to flee to cities not yet affected, but genocidal bloodlust spread inexorably through the nation like a virus. The slaughter at some of the sanctuaries lasted for weeks. Massacring people by hand is hard work. Sometimes, too exhausted to actually murder those trying to escape, the killing mobs just severed their victims' Achilles tendons, then came back to finish the job in the morning. Dogs and crows multiplied, fed on the countless bodies that littered the nation's streets and fields.
Meanwhile, every government official, every radio host, called for the completion of the genocide. "Exterminate the cockroaches," they said. "Wipe them out. Every one of them. To your work, all of you. The graves are not yet full."
Athanase was one of those leaders, one of the chief architects of the genocide. Rukungu was a member of one of the interahamwe death squads who spearheaded