Recoil - Andy McNab [25]
I got Étienne’s voice, but it was only on answerphone. My French wasn’t great. In fact, it was virtually non-existent, but I got the drift. The office wouldn’t be open again until nine a.m.
Fuck that. Maybe she really was working; maybe they’d turned the phones to voicemail. Étienne often did when he was busy. I grabbed my bomber jacket and headed downstairs.
It was cold on the moped as I weaved in and out of the evening traffic, but I felt a whole lot warmer when I swung intoVia Zurigo and saw that the lights were still on in Do Good Land.
I rang the doorbell. Nothing happened. I rangagain, longer this time, until Étienne appeared behind the glass door. He looked tired, but more than that – surprised.
‘Silke still here?’
His brow furrowed even more. ‘She left three or four hours ago.’
‘Where to?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Course I fucking don’t. I wouldn’t be here, would I?’
He started to look really worried. I didn’t want that: he was one of the good guys.
‘I’m sorry, mate. I’m a bit confused. Where’s she gone?’
Maybe Étienne had seen this before. Did I know anything about her?
‘Come on through. Let me get you some coffee.’
We walked past the battered sofa and coffee-table they called Reception and along a corridor into an open-plan area. One corner was piled with boxes. I perched on the edge of a desk. Appeal posters were pinned to the wall in front of me. The photographs and shoutlines gave me the same uncomfortable feeling I’d had earlier, by the lake, every time I saw them.
Over a close-up of a young girl’s face, her eyes staring and empty:
Ester is 8 years old. Yesterday she walked 30 kms
to our clinic. For water? For food? For medicine?
No, for rape counselling.
Over a similarly bleak shot of a young boy staring into the camera:
Byron is 9 years old. Yesterday he had to kill two
people in his own home. Burglars? Kidnappers?
Armed intruders? No, his parents.
There were another couple of desks with telephones, and that was about it.
‘We run on a shoestring. We get the cash towhere it’s needed.’ Étienne lifted a jug from a coffee machine. ‘But the coffee’s pretty good. Well, usually. I mean, it’s late, and—’
‘Where is she, Étienne?’
He nodded at one of the posters. A medic was bandaging a stump where a small African boy’s hand should have been. ‘Tim runs the camp in DRC, near the Rwanda border. Silke’s been working on his aid campaign. She organized everything, even wrote the posters.’ He smiled. ‘You must be proud of her.’
‘Yes. Very.’ Fuck, she’d probably told me all this stuff and it had gone in one ear and straight out the other.
Étienne stared at the posters, lost in another world. ‘Tim’s operating in impossible conditions. I expect she told you – in the last twelve months alone there’ve been two thousand cases of rape, mutilation and summary execution, just in Ituri province. That’s where our camp is.’
His hand shook as he poured the coffee. It might be outrageous stuff but these guys had to be conditioned to get past that shit to operate. Things must be grim out there if they’d got to him like this.
‘I was out there myself a month ago. When we took our mobile clinic to places where there were roads, we passed burned-out houses, one village after another completely destroyed and abandoned. It was terrible.’
His hand shook more as he thought about what he had seen. ‘She talks about you a lot, Nick.’
‘That’s nice. But where is she?’ I’d already got there, but I needed to hear it confirmed.
‘She’s on our relief plane to Kinshasa.’ He shifted his gaze from the posters at last. ‘Today was the tipping point. On top of everything else, there was an earthquake, just a minor one but it’s devastated the village we’re based in. Tim’s overrun. We’ve never heard him sound so desperate.’ He put down his cup. ‘She felt she couldn’t stand by while—’
‘Where did they fly from?’
‘Geneva. A charter,