Crocodile Tears

know that the Kikuyus once fought against the British with a ferocity that made them a source of great terror. One of their tricks was to impale their victims with a spear up their backside, then leave them to die slowly on the side of a hill. I mention this only as a warning not to annoy them.”
    “ Nice to meet you, Njenga,” Alex said.
    Njenga’s scowl deepened.
    “ Where’s McCain?” Alex demanded.

    “ The Reverend McCain won’t be here until later today. It is very likely that your friends in MI6 are watching him, so he had to take a more roundabout route. But he’s hoping to have dinner with you this evening. In the meantime, I thought you might like to come with me.”
    “ Where are we going?”
    “ Oh—nowhere in particular.” Beckett smiled, her lips barely moving. “A short flight to nowhere.” She lifted the piece of leather and Alex saw that it was a flying cap. “You don’t mind another plane?”
    “ Do I have any choice?”
    “ Not really. This way …”
    She led him out of the tent.
    He was in a safari camp. The tent where he had spent the night was one of a dozen, each one surrounded by a wooden veranda and built into the embrace of a wide river that swept around them.
    Alex looked at the silver water rippling past, with a tangled wall of green rising in a steep bank on the other side. This really was a beautiful spot. He heard chattering above him and looked up to see a family of gray monkeys leaping from the branches of a juniper tree, using their hands and tails. Some of the mothers had tiny babies clinging to their chests.
    “ The monkeys are a nuisance,” Beckett muttered. She snapped out an order in another language and one of the guards standing beside the path lifted his rifle and fired. A dead monkey plunged out of the tree and crashed to the ground. The others scattered. “The guards are equally accurate with guns and spears,” she went on. “They keep the population down.”

    “ What is this place?” Alex asked. He was careful not to react to what he had just seen. He knew it had been done for his benefit.
    “ This is the Simba River Camp, a business that belongs to Mr. McCain. I take it you know which country you’re in?”
    “ Kenya.”
    “ That’s right.” Another hint of a smile. It was as if she had forgotten how to do the real thing. “We’re on the edge of the Rift Valley. Simba River Camp was once a world-class safari lodge with visitors from America, Europe, and Japan. Brad Pitt once stayed here. Unfortunately, it became a victim of the global recession. The visitors stopped coming and the business went bust.”
    Looking around, Alex could see it for himself. His was the only tent that had been occupied. The others were empty and falling into disrepair. The path that they were following had been neglected, with weeds and wild grass breaking through. They passed a swimming pool, but it had no water and the cement was cracked. All around, the vegetation was tumbling over itself, out of control. If the camp was left to itself for much longer, it would be swallowed up, disappearing into the bush, and nobody would know that it had ever existed.
    They came to a beaten-up Land Rover with dirty windows and wires tumbling out of the dashboard.
    Njenga climbed into the driving seat with Beckett next to him. Alex went in the back. He was moving completely normally now and he was glad of it. Even on this short journey, he might get a chance to break away.

    “ It’s seventy miles to the next camp, and I doubt that you’d ever find it,” Beckett said. She must have seen what he was thinking. “So please don’t entertain any foolish ideas. The Kikuyus are also excellent trackers. They would be able to follow your trail in the darkness, even in the pouring rain. I’m afraid Njenga would enjoy hacking you to pieces. That’s the sort of person he is. If I were you, I wouldn’t give him the opportunity.”
    They rumbled along a dirt track for a couple of minutes, passing through a wire fence with a rusting gateway and leaving the camp behind them. Almost at once they came to an airstrip—a dusty orange runway that had somehow been cut through the long grass. A dilapidated wooden hut stood to one side, with a wind sock hanging limply from a pole. This must have been where Alex landed when he was brought to Simba River Camp, although he had no memory of it.
    There was a plane parked on the grass next to a line of about thirty oil drums. Alex had never