An Expensive Education

Nick McDonell

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781848870635
• eBook ISBN: 9781848873957
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

An army roadblock. An American intelligence agent. A jetlagged afternoon on the Somalian plain. Michael Teak is not afraid of mercenaries. Life here comes at a price and as a CIA operative, Teak is holding the money. On the back seat of his car is a suitcase stuffed with narcotics; in the front, a gun and an envelope of US dollars. And then a bomb explodes. Thirty innocent victims. An entire village of women and children - all dead. And just like that, Michael Teak does not know anything for sure. Was he the target, or the scapegoat for mass murder with an international fallout? Abandoned, perhaps betrayed, by his employer, Teak is in the wind with nowhere to turn. Even his old sources are caught up in the media bloodbath back at his alma mater. These events have to be connected. Someone, somewhere, has all the cards and for a man running right down to the wire, the rules of the game are becoming dangerously blurred.

PART I

Boston, Massachusetts, 200X

The large Victorian is dark and cool, silent in the autumn night. Professor Susan Lowell lets herself in and carefully closes the front door behind her. Upstairs to check on the children she catches her reflection in the mirror in the dark hall and almost nods to herself in the silence. She is frowning. Not even midnight and they are all asleep, daughter, son, even husband. She grows slowly angry with them for this, and lets the feeling wash over her and recede.

Downstairs she picks up the remote and finds a muted news channel on the wall-mounted television. Her hair is down but she is still in her suit and heels. She knows some of the players, and a smile turns the corners of her wide mouth when she sees her own image. She wonders if the pleasure she feels at this moment is finer than all the pleasures to come. She has won a Pulitzer Prize, and her husband doesn't know yet.

One thing at a time.

She walks to the kitchen, opens a bottle of red wine, and takes a delicate glass from the cupboard. Back in the living room, she lowers herself onto the cloth couch, watches the muted news, drinks. When the bottle is half empty she goes upstairs, strips, and has her husband inside of her before he is fully awake. She tells him about the prize after she comes, before he comes. They talk afterward, but not for long. And then, cooling and finally tired, before she drifts into sleep, she thinks, Why am I afraid?

1

Kenya-Somalia Border, 200X

That morning a young American named Michael Teak drove north through the rolling scrub on a mission for his government, which was at that time the most powerful in the world. A kite, hunting on well-traveled winds from the Indian Ocean, floated overhead as his Land Cruiser bumped slowly over the remote track. Teak was in no hurry to reach the village under the white sun of the afternoon. Evening would be cooler and, he hoped, calm.

It was a simple mission, really. Deliver some money and a cell phone to a rebel named Hatashil, take a look around. Too good to be true had been Teak's first thought when he finished reading the file on Hatashil. Hatashil was a freedom fighter. An autodidact orphan warrior. A humanitarian and a leader. Teak was trained to be wary of those words, as if promise too bright was never fulfilled, ultimately betrayed. Daylight on colonial brick.

But Teak had been comfortably in-country for a year and a half and also thought that maybe it didn't have to be that way. Or at least he didn't have to be that way. He wasn't sure. This was his problem and as he drove deeper into the green and brown landscape he felt disconnected from his surroundings, and then alienated too from his car, his gun. It occurred to him that finally on the right kind of mission, he might be the wrong kind of guy. He chalked this up to nerves and drove on, which was what, he understood at age twenty-five, a professional did.

There were five suitcases in the backseat. Cheap luggage for poor travelers, inelegant, plastic. They were Teak's second cover. He stopped the truck and consulted his phone, checking his position against the village coordinates. On track, on time.

As he shifted back into gear, Teak noticed movement on the horizon. Through a gap in a stand of acacias far down the track, a dust cloud. It was the first dust he had seen in over a hundred miles and he resumed his drive at a faster pace. He lost sight of the cloud, caught sight again as it rose over the trees. At best a lunatic safari, at worst—Teak briefly recalled the tortures that had befallen to one of his predecessors, his jellies scooped out, his abdomen cut to bits on rusty blades. Tied to a tree and left to die. No reason to waste a bullet.

Three vehicles. They stopped, lined up across the track. Teak stopped too, a mile out, and looked at them through his monocular. A white minivan, of the sort that usually safaried Japanese tourists, and two rusted pickups. Teak watched the men riding in the back of the trucks jump out and pull a metal gate off the roof of the van. All armed.

Shifta, Teak thought, tensing. In Amharic the word meant social bandits. A whole story distilled into a single word. Wrongdoer. He drove toward them.

* * *

The shifta, twenty-two of them by Teak's count, waited for him. They were younger than he expected and rich, with the van and that gate, which they had set up across the track. Might be a particularly shrewd crew, Teak thought.

Two men stood directly in front of the gate. One wore camouflage pants and a T-shirt with the D.A.R.E. antidrug logo. The other wore mesh shorts and a khaki safari shirt. Both carried Kalashnikovs. The man in shorts also wore a leather shoulder holster.

"Hello," said Teak, sticking his head out the window as he slowed. Best to use English, lingua idiota.

"Checkpoint," said the man in the antidrug shirt.

Teak stopped and let the Land Cruiser idle. He looked off to the sides of the track. He could drive around them but then they might chase him, shoot at his tires, probably miss, but maybe break his windows. Maybe worse. Better to talk. A boy holding a cleaver sat cross-legged on the side of the track, staring at Teak. Strange. Usually no children with the shifta. Teak winked at the child but the child just stared.

"Checkpoint?" said Teak, in his best baffled colonial, "on whose authority?"

The two men in front looked at each other. Mesh Shorts theatrically drew an old .38 from his shoulder holster. "Authority of General Hatashil," he said, tapping the rear door of the car with his pistol. "What's here?"

"Shit," Teak said for their benefit, putting his head in his hands.

They opened the doors, pulled the suitcases out onto the dirt, and ripped one open.

"You know, there's a zipper on that you could use," said Teak.

A cheer went up when they saw that grey-green khat filled the case.

Teak shook his head.

"You have a problem?" asked the shoulder holster boss.

"No," said Teak, suddenly brightening and extending a hand out the window. "I'm Teak."

"I am Commander Moalana," said the man in mesh shorts, surprised, briefly taking Teak's hand in a kind of half shake. Teak smiled at him and Moalana began to stroke his chin. He was almost gleeful, toying with Teak for his men, extremely grateful that this lone man with his bags full of drugs had crossed his path.

Moalana's men had been frustrated that morning. But then, Moalana reflected, they're frustrated all the time. He could take the car, too, but orders were orders. Restraint, Hatashil had said. After they had killed that last man as a spy, Hatashil had been angry. "We do not leave our allies tied to trees!" Hatashil had calmed down quickly, though, and delivered a lecture. "Misunderstandings happen," he had concluded, "but always restrain yourself." Moalana had been grateful for Hatashil's understanding in the face of so great a blunder.

Moalana offered Teak a bit of khat. Teak accepted and began to chew. He did not enjoy the bitter taste, like cabbage. "Can I keep one?" he asked.

"One bag," Moalana laughed for the benefit of his men, "how will you keep one?"

Before Teak could answer, Moalana cut him off. "Not one," he said, and his men began loading the cases into the trucks. The boy sitting cross-legged, Teak noticed, had become distracted from robbery and was drawing in the dry dirt with his cleaver. An older boy called to him as the rest of the shifta put the gate back on top of the van and lashed it in place.

Moalana waved his hand once from the window of his truck as it passed.

Teak spat the khat out and watched them disappear down the track. The whole encounter had taken less than five minutes. The khat cases had worked. He was still in no hurry.

Miles down, hours later, off a track off the track, the scrub dissipated into rocky plain, but first, a blessed stream. On the bank a crooked date palm, a dozen huts, goats, and naked children like miniature guardian angels. Teak liked the look of it. He parked a hundred yards from the village so as not to further disturb the corraled livestock. A few tattered goats bleated at the Land Cruiser.

From his pocket, a key, and Teak unlocked the glove box, took out a sealed FedEx envelope. He stepped out of the car and stretched his legs, reflecting on the temperature as he put on the wrinkled jacket of his khaki suit. He wore the same thing everywhere, and it was cooler now. Not that he minded the heat. His pale skin had a permanent burn but that was fine with him. A short lifetime of New England winters had been enough. He checked the SIG P220 in his waistband, tucked the FedEx envelope under his arm, and walked to meet the children approaching him through the dry crackle of the burnt grass. Behind them, leaning mothers, knowing disdain.

Then the most curious of the children was at his knee, looking up at him. Teak greeted the child in the local dialect, and the child was not old enough to find this strange.

"Riddle!" said Teak, grinning whiter teeth than the child had ever seen in a grown-up.

"Riddle me!" said the child.

"My house has no doors," said Teak. It was an easy and famous riddle about an egg, but the child was so young that Teak guessed it could be new to him, and he was right. The child ran back to commiserate with his fellows.

As Teak entered the village everyone stared. Two teenage boys waved antique Enfield rifles at him. One asked Teak his business, in English.

"Come to see Hatashil," said Teak cheerfully, surprising them with their own language.

The boys looked at each other and pretended to consider the situation. Puffing up, they told Teak to follow. They walked down to the stream. Under the date palm three men sat on a thick but worn rug, sipping from small bowls of fermented camel milk. Two in full camouflage, one, whom Teak immediately picked for Hatashil, in a white djellaba. They rose when Teak approached. Hatashil, also the shortest of the three, was heavyset, almost fat. He was also vaguely lighter skinned, Teak noted, and had sharper features. He carried a walking stick topped with some kind of skull, Teak couldn't tell what species. He looked at Teak with heavy, recessed eyes and dismissed his associates, who walked down the stream with the two rifle boys. When they were beyond hearing, Hatashil gestured Teak to the rug.

They exchanged greetings and sat down. Teak complimented Hatashil on the rifle boys' English capabilities.

"If only mine were better," responded Hatashil, "but thank you. They are good boys. At the camp, we have even better."

A smiling, grasshopper-thin woman brought a tray of dates, goat cheese, and two cans of Fanta. Cans instead of bottles, thought Teak. That's new. Bowing, the woman put the tray on the rug between Teak and Hatashil. Hatashil smiled at her and she might have blushed.

Out of politeness, Teak ate a piece of the cheese. After that, neither man touched the food. Hatashil described to him the number of men, weapons, horses, and vehicles he had in a nearby camp. He pointed across the stream to where his own truck was parked. It was a Toyota pickup with a 12.7 millimeter machine gun mo...

Table of contents

• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• Acknowledgments