He sat on the chair by her bed, and she walked to the glass door that led to the balcony and stared out the glass. "I didn't catch even half of what went on in there," he said. "What did he give you?"

She was still staring out at nothing. "Emily's death certificate."

Silence filled the room, and after a moment Munroe turned toward Bradford. His shoulders were slumped forward, and his head was in his hands. He ran his fingers through his hair and then straightened. "So she's really dead?" His face was tight and expressionless. "I never supposed that when we got the news it would come so unceremoniously."

Munroe turned again toward the balcony. "That paper is worthless. Trust me, if there was even a remote possibility that the document had value, I'd be out of here in a heartbeat-job over, mission accomplished-collecting a fat bonus for providing hard evidence of what happened to Emily." She turned to Bradford. "No, the search just got a little more dangerous and a lot more complicated."

"I'm not questioning your judgment," he said. "If you believe there's still a chance she's alive, I'll grasp at that straw, but I really have no idea where you're going with this."

Munroe walked to the bed, sat down, and opened the envelope. "We'll start with this," she said, "although there are so many things wrong with it, it's hard to know where where to begin." She bit on her lip and squinted at the document. "For starters, there's the paper itself." She held it up so he could see the designs printed around the border and the details of the heading. "See the number at the top? It's five-thousand-CFA paper-government paper. It has to be purchased from the Ministry of Finance." to begin." She bit on her lip and squinted at the document. "For starters, there's the paper itself." She held it up so he could see the designs printed around the border and the details of the heading. "See the number at the top? It's five-thousand-CFA paper-government paper. It has to be purchased from the Ministry of Finance."

His face was completely blank.

"Anytime people want an official document, they have to buy one of these and then take it to whatever government branch has the information they need. If you want goods processed through the port, the approvals are put on government tax paper. You want a birth certificate? Government tax paper. You want a license for your vehicle? Government tax paper." She handed it to him. "Someone had to pay for this at the Ministry of Finance and bring it to the police station. I doubt that the clerk who typed it out and is making fifty dollars a month was the one to do it."

"So what you're saying is that whoever requests an official document has to supply the tax paper in order to get it?"

"Exactly," she said. "And that brings us to the next glaring inaccuracy: A death certificate in this country is meaningless. Nobody has them or has use of them. When there's a death in a village, there's no autopsy or police report-certainly no 'cause of death' to be determined. There's a village ceremony, a burial if the person is lucky, and that's the end of it. You ask the government for a death certificate and the big question is going to be, what for?"

"But we've got one."

She nodded. "I'll get to that in a minute. This document is just a lot of misspelled wordiness that certifies that the person named died in the Republic of Equatorial Guinea." She pointed at the paper. "No details whatsoever. It doesn't even say where it happened or what nationality she was. For all the flaws of this country's government, let's not forget the ten years they spent under communism. They're real big on redundant paperwork and following procedures by whatever the day's formula may be. At the least we should expect an indication of whether she died on the mainland or the island."

"Look, Michael," he said, "I want to believe you more than you can possibly know, but why would they even have that document? Wouldn't it be so much easier for them to simply say that they have no idea what we're talking about?"

"I can think of several possible answers to that question," she said, "but here's what I think holds the most water: This piece of paper doesn't even prove that Emily was in the country. They got Emily's name from us-copied it off the bio we gave Mba at the ministry. What this piece of paper means is that someone who was educated abroad, who knows what a death certificate means to people like us, doesn't want us snooping around the mainland and hopes that this is enough to convince us to go home."

Munroe took the death certificate and sealed it inside the Ziploc bag that held her passport and that she kept in a security belt worn underneath her pants, around her waist.

"Miles, things are going to get dangerous from this point. We were issued a threat, and if we're not careful, someone's going to make good on it. Maybe you should call Burbank, see if he'll let you out of the assignment."

"I stay," he said. "So what's next?"

"We need to get out of the city as soon as possible, preferably in the direction of the mainland." She looked at her watch. "We've got time before the GEASA office closes."

Like most places of business in the city, the airline headquarters was located on the first floor of a three-story building. The office was small, dark, damp, and empty but for a desk on either side of the room. There were two people in the office, one a secretary or clerk, the other someone of importance who took their money and wrote out the ticket information by hand. The transaction was completed within fifteen minutes-they would be on the first flight leaving in the morning.

On the way out of the office, Munroe handed Miles his ticket. "Flying to Bata is a bit like playing Russian roulette," she said. "Literally. The machines are old Russian planes that get no maintenance. They're stuffed beyond capacity and flown until they go down-usually into the ocean. Hopefully tomorrow won't be the day."

Munroe stopped midstep and searched up and down the street through the pedestrians and a steady stream of vehicle traffic. Bradford followed her eyes.

"Did the Shadows follow us here?" he asked.

"I was certain of it," she said.

"So was I."

"Think they could've gotten good enough to avoid our spotting them?"

"I doubt it," he said.

"So do I."

Munroe and Bradford walked the return trip to the hotel hoping to spot a Shadow and find relief in the normalcy of being tailed, but instead they found that they were alone.

Over dinner they said little to each other, and for the first time since arriving in the city Munroe heard the wisps of threat. It came not in words but in the silences, in things unspoken and in the background banter among the hotel employees that was no longer there.

The waiter, previously friendly and good-humored, was tonight solemn and taciturn. He brought their drinks, and Munroe had them sent back, requesting unopened cans, and then in unspoken agreement neither she nor Bradford ordered anything to eat. Rather, they sat in silence nursing Coke out of the can, pretending to be amused by a rowdy party of drunken expats two tables down. And when they had sat long enough so as to keep up appearances, they left the patio to return to their rooms to wait for light and get out of the city.

They had decided that it would be best if they both slept in the same room. Bradford returned to his to retrieve some of the bedding as well as his belongings, and while she waited for him, Munroe kicked off her shoes. When she tossed them against the bed, the first signs of dizziness hit. She doubled over to steady herself, braced herself against the bed, and felt darkness closing in. She opened her mouth to yell for Bradford, but no sound came. She crumpled to the floor, and the last thought to go through her mind was to wonder how the hell it had happened.

chapter 10

West coast of Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea.

Awareness came slowly through a haze of confusion, and Munroe struggled toward lucidity, attempting to attach meaning to the stimuli hammering at her senses. First came the dank smell of oxidized metal and then the cold of steel through clothing. It was dark, and the air had a salty dampness to it. She lay on her side, gagged and hands secured behind her back. Her feet were bare and, as far as she could tell, bound to something heavy. Cigarette smoke hung in the air, and voices spoke hushed and rapidly in a language that had no meaning.

Where the hell was Bradford?

There was movement-the erratic regularity of a small boat rocking on the open ocean. From behind came the low whine of an engine that indicated slow forward speed. There was starlight, and a lamp on the prow highlighted the shadows of four men. The boat was no more than fifteen feet long and, but for a small cabin on the bow, open-aired. She could smell rain in the distance, knew they could smell it, too.

Three feet away one of the men lolled against the gunwale. Near his face was the soft glow of orange that brightened as he inhaled. On his belt he had a knife and, holstered close to it, a sidearm.

The mental fog continued to lift, and confusion segued to anger. The patio with Bradford, the hotel room, darkness. The images merged and collided. Internal pressure built steadily, was rising from her gut into her chest, a hammer percussing as a war drum whose beat would end when blood was spilled. Her vision blurred to gray, and she wrestled it back. Thought before action, knowledge before battle.

Her eyes followed the guard as he smoked, and she twisted so that her hands could reach her ankles. Wrapped around her feet was a chain that ran through a section of metal pipe. A weight. An anchor. Hauled off to be dumped like garbage. No questions, no accusations, no torture, and no chance for explanation or pleading-brought to the water to disappear, to be wiped off the face of the earth.

The fucking bastards.

The internal drumbeat pounded harder, faster, and the urge to strike became unbearable.

Breathe. Think.

In the distance the sky was tinged by the glow of natural gas burn-off. She turned to the stars and, as she had on so many occasions in the past, found the map written in the equatorial night sky. The flare worked as a marker to gauge the distance. They were close to the coast. Close enough to swim if she could survive the treacherous currents. How far out were they? A quarter of a mile? It had to be less.

The man at the gunwale straightened and turned. She froze. He came closer and reached his hand out, snapping his fingers in front of her face, and when he received no response, he kicked her in the ribs. She groaned. He turned his back, and the light on the prow framed his profile. In spite of his weapons, he wore civilian clothes. He dropped the cigarette and faced her again, squatted and fumbled with the buttons of her shirt.

The percussion rose higher, louder, drowning out the sounds of the boat. One movement, swift and soundless, a serpent's strike, was all that it would take to reach for the knife, slit his throat, and dump his body in the ocean. She tested the strength of the nylon that held her wrists. The guard's commander barked an order, and the man stopped, stood, threw a second kick to her gut, then lit another cigarette and walked back to join the others.

Take him, take them all. Pilot the boat to the shore and then ... and then what? Return to Malabo with no place to hide while attempting to smuggle herself off this prison of an island? Breathe. Think. Time. Time was necessary in order to gain information, to understand, to strategize.

Munroe glanced at the glow on the horizon. The oil companies used helicopters to airlift their sick employees to Cameroon. It was an option. She gritted her teeth, yanked her right thumb out of its socket, squeezed the hand free of the restraint, and then relocated the thumb with a silent, painful snap. She looped the nylon around both wrists to hold her arms in position and then tested the chains on her feet and found them loose. Careful so as not to let the metal grate on itself, she pulled her ankles out and, confident it would not be a problem to get free of the anchor, replaced them.

Luba. She could take the boat to Luba and refuel there.

And then the moment of opportunity was gone. From behind, the engine cut and the boat coasted, rising and falling with the rhythm of the water. Hands pulled her up by the scruff of the neck and then, positioned under her arms, dragged her to the hip-high gunwale and propped her up.

Another burst of rapid discussion in that indecipherable language. The hands slackened momentarily, and the dead weight of her body slumped forward. The hands picked her back up, and then there was silence. Through half-opened eyes, she saw the commander reach for his weapon, and in that instant she understood the argument.

He raised the gun, and she pushed with her legs, propelling herself backward, falling headfirst over the edge, into the ocean. Water churned around her with an audible hiss. Bullets. Heat like a knife blade caught her left arm below the shoulder. The anchor tightened, and the weight at her feet flipped her right side up and plunged her downward. Unable to loosen the chains, she kicked. With her hands she pried until her right foot came out. The plunge stopped ten yards below the boat, and still the anchor held tight around her left ankle. Her lungs ached for air, and in panic she clawed at the chain. No time. Think. She forced her fingers between her foot and the chain, bought an inch, and then was free. She kicked off from the ocean floor and swam toward the light, removing the gag as she went.

She broke water under the prow of the boat, only her face breaching the surface. She held her body protectively beneath its bulk as it rocked with the motion of the water, drank in the air one greedy gulp after another, then filled her lungs and sank. Under the boat she wrapped the gag around the wound in her arm and tied it as tightly as she could in an attempt to ward off the call to the deep-sea predators. She surfaced again, took another breath, and dove, this time putting as much distance as she could between herself and the boat.

The men paced about the sides, searching for movement on the water. They drew the light around the gunwales, firing shots occasionally. Their voices were angry, accusatory, and Munroe knew they could never report the incident. She was, as far as they were concerned, very dead.

She turned onto her back, gazed at the stars, righted herself, and pushed east.

The surface currents were fast-flowing, and it was nearly two hours before she felt the smooth-rough edges of worn lava rock beneath her feet, another ten minutes to stumble over the jet-black, odd-size boulders that made up the stretch of coast. Away from the waterline, she dropped to her knees and then collapsed, chest heaving, taking in air, arms and legs limp as rubber. In the far-off distance, barely more than a pinhead of light in the blackness, a boat buoyed on the water. Munroe dragged herself to where the boulders touched the jungle, a niche of shelter from both the air and the sea. There would be no hiding from the rain that would soon arrive, but that didn't matter.

Alone in the blackness, with the ocean to the front and the jungle at her back, she heard the sound of her own laughter splitting the silence.

It was the west side of the island. No matter where she had washed up, the road could not be more than a mile or two inland, but a mile or two of raw jungle. Without a path it would mean breaking a trail barefoot. Better to wait until dawn.

She felt for her belt. It was still there, tucked safely under her pants. It increased the options somewhat; the credit cards were worthless, but there were fifty thousand CFA and two hundred water-soaked euros to barter with.

She dozed occasionally and was glad for the first rays of sun that crept between the mountains, providing enough light for her to begin moving about. Finding potable water before the heat intensified was imperative in order to avoid dehydration. She had drunk during the night when the rain had filled the porous holes in the rocks, but that water was gone now. Not far away, the shadows of tall, lean palms jutted out over the water. Under the fronds they were thick with coconuts. She flexed her wounded arm, and ribbons of heat traced up and down it.

The bullet was lodged in muscle, and the arm was weak. The thirty-foot climb was possible, but not worth the risk.

She followed the coastline south until the boulders gave way to gritty sand, and there she found groups of coconut palms with recently fallen fruit at their base. She chose a green one with tinges of brown on the ends and, using rocks to cut through the fibrous husk, reached the seed and cracked it carefully to preserve the liquid. She drank and proceeded to the others until her thirst had been quenched, then filled herself on the rubbery meat of the young nuts.

She continued along the coastline, frequently scanning the water's horizon for boats. The soles of her feet blistered and bled from the sharp edges of the rock. When the heat of the sun became too strong, she sought shelter in the shade and slept until the late afternoon brought relief and she could set out again.

Another mile south and a faint trail led away from the coast into the green. She followed it, and after nearly a mile the undergrowth changed from thick jungle foliage to short, squat trees in uneven rows fighting for light between the giants, their stubby trunks spotted by fat pods ripe with bitter cocoa seeds. The footpath ended at a solid line of tarmac.

It was the Luba road, a two-lane highway that originated in Malabo and ran three-quarters of the island along the coast until it stopped at the second-largest city on the island-the city of its namesake-a deep-water port with a population of three thousand. It was the only road that ran along the west coast, and myriad small interior villages were joined to it by their own narrow dirt paths.

Across the road a swath of land had been cleared, and raw cement blocks stacked on top of each other formed a half-constructed home with iron-red rebar reaching to the open sky and thick carpets of green mildew creeping up from the base of it. Other than the sounds of birds and the buzzing of insects, the stretch was completely silent. Cars would pass along eventually, perhaps even as many as three or four an hour. All that was necessary was to sit and wait.

Munroe pulled the CFA from her belt and shoved it in her pocket-she might need it to pay for space in a share taxi if nothing better materialized. She sat against the trunk of a large tree, far enough away from the road to remain hidden, close enough to spot approaching vehicles. In the shade of the foliage, the air was wet with a mud-scented humidity and the soil rich and spongy and teeming with life.

There was perhaps another two hours before dusk, when the armed soldiers who set up checkpoints every few miles along the road would be out in force, drunk and trigger-happy, and only the bravest or the craziest of drivers would attempt to travel along it. Until then the range of vehicles passing would be anything from small share taxis with their springs busted from the weight they bore to the overworked trucks of the European construction crews on never-ending development projects. With any luck one of the trademark shiny air-conditioned Land Cruisers of the oil-company executives would pass. It was the safest bet when it came to getting around: blend in with their crowd to become instantly invisible.

In the silence, Munroe plowed a stick through the dirt, etching the ground absentmindedly while working through the options and the previous day's events. As in a football coach's game plan, circles and lines appeared in no apparent order-rapid strokes, jagged lines-and like the circles slashed into the ground, her thoughts ran around pell-mell but always returned to their place of origin: Emily Burbank.

One second. Six inches. The mental tape replayed itself, an endless recording: the gun moving up through the dark toward her face and then the plunge backward into the water. One second before the bullet. She gritted her teeth and drove the stick faster, harder. Dumped in the ocean because she hadn't taken the hint to leave the country. Emily Burbank.

Until last night the assignment had been business. Now it was personal: Someone had ordered her dead and had nearly succeeded in putting a bullet in her brain. Another circle, another strand of thought. If she followed the interdicted trail to Emily Burbank, the answers would come hunting, seeking her out. And when the answers presented themselves, she would take retribution, even if it turned out to be against the president of the goddamned country.

Bradford. Where the hell was he? Why wasn't he in the boat? He'd been with her the entire time they'd been in the city. He was booked to fly to the mainland just as she was. Had he already been tossed overboard?

She rubbed her hands over her eyes and pressed her fingers against the bridge of her nose. What a fucking liability he'd become. Instead of one missing person, the job now included two.

No.

Bradford was capable of taking care of himself. If they'd been hauled off in the boat together, there was nothing that could be done about it, and if he hadn't been-she stabbed the stick into the ground and it snapped in two-he sure as hell had better be looking for her right now.

She picked up another stick and dug it through the soil, gouging one rut after another. Emily Burbank. Mongomo.

Malabo was the only city on the island where reliable and not-so-reliable transport across the water could be had. Malabo: an enticing prison, the city so easily locked down, the airport, the port, the hotels, banks, and city exits carefully watched. There were the oil companies and their compounds-to get onto one of those meant a chance, however slight, of being airlifted off the island to Cameroon. Too many ifs, so much dependent on bureaucracy and the decisions of others. No. Not the oil companies. Not Malabo.

If the mainland was unreachable through the capital, then perhaps through Luba.

Time. Information. She rested her head back against the trunk of the tree. A conversation with someone who better understood the local political climate was now a necessity-and access to money, supplies, and modern communications equipment. Above loomed the green of the jungle, and there was only stillness.

Munroe examined the wounds on her feet. The skin was stripped away from portions of her heels, and dime-size blisters had formed and burst under the balls of her toes. Another couple of weeks and she'd have several millimeters' worth of nature's shoe leather to pad around on, but until then walking was going to be rough. She needed shoes, and they could be found a dozen or so miles to the north. The temptation was certainly there, but returning to Malabo was out of the question. Not for shoes, not for Bradford.

She sat and waited, and over time bright red spots formed on her uncovered neck, forearms, and feet, the telltale signs that near-microscopic insects were feasting on her blood. In the bush one could only sweat and itch and wait, and the numbing quiet of the emptiness explained why doing nothing was such a favorite pastime of the locals.

She would have checked her watch if she'd still had one.

The rumble of a large vehicle carried through the silence. Munroe crawled closer to the edge of the road and, seeing the flat nose and wide body of a construction truck approaching, stood and walked several feet onto the tarmac. The vehicle had green license plates, a variation reserved for companies with special status, and in the cab were the shadows of two.

The truck slowed and then stopped, sending a cloud of dust rolling behind it. The passenger window rolled down.

"Hello there!" Munroe called out. "Are you headed to Luba?"

The door on the passenger side opened, and a man stepped down. He wore faded jeans and a worn T-shirt, and his face and forearms were tanned to the point of being nearly brown. His work boots were dusty and spotted with cement, and Munroe couldn't help but wish they were on her feet.

"We go Luba," he replied, the words broken and thickly accented. He gestured with his head. "You come?"

Italians.

Munroe nodded and climbed up to the air-conditioned space between them, the blast of cold a welcome relief against her sun-dried skin.

The driver stared at her feet, her disheveled clothes, and the spots on her arms. "What happen to you?"

The vehicle lurched forward in a cloud of cement dust. The passenger handed her a liter bottle of water.

"Mi sono perso," she replied, and drank without stopping until the bottle was empty. "Separated from my friends and very, very lost." she replied, and drank without stopping until the bottle was empty. "Separated from my friends and very, very lost."

With the first words in their language, the gravity of her situation was apparently quickly forgotten. Both men broke into wide smiles. "Ma tu parli Italiano?" "Ma tu parli Italiano?"

She smiled back. "I speak some, enough to get by." There was something deeply affecting about language. If expected, it meant nothing. But if it came by surprise as a gesture of friendship, it was an instant opening, a form of flattery guaranteed to attain the objective for its master, and Munroe used it accordingly.

The driver was Luca, a fifty-two-year-old native of Bari who had been a construction foreman in Equatorial Guinea on and off for nearly eight years. Salvatore sat in the passenger seat, younger, but not by much.

He searched behind the seat and brought out a first-aid kit. Between bumps and jolts along the road, Munroe patched up her feet, and when the men asked about the stained cloth tied around her arm, she shrugged. "A scratch," she said, and changed the conversation through questions of her own. They entertained her with stories of life in Equatorial Guinea and about their families back home, whom they saw only a few months out of the year.

The pay they earned for working on the island more than made up for the difficult conditions, and the malaria didn't bother them as much as the tumbu flies whose larvae bored under the skin and used the host to feed and incubate.