Infinite Kill

1. Aid International

1

Aid International

Another day, another memory that wasn’t my own.

Africa. Somewhere off the beaten track.

I sat in the passenger seat of a van, soft suspension bumping me up and down as we rolled along red, dusty roads lumpier than the custard Auntie Claire used to make. I mopped the sweat off my brow with a white handkerchief and looked out of either window. Nothing to see but tall grass.

“I think the air conditioning is f****d,” the man doing the driving said in a French accent. Like me, he was dressed in a white shirt and trousers. A red, cross-shaped logo on the left breast of the shirt. A stocky black guy with chunky long dreads and intense eyes that didn’t blink. With a thick, tattooed forearm, he worked the gear stick into third as we bump-a-lumped into a tiny village, the grass disappearing and the road widening, a smattering of broken-down buildings either side. Stores. Houses. A bar. A street-food place under a corrugated roof where chicken turned on a spit over an open flame. Not much else, other than stray dogs, live poultry and underfed children careering around. The children saw our van and began running in a pack behind, shouting and grinning, smiles wider than the potholes in the road.

I heard a voice behind me in the van. European.

“Nearly there,” she said. “Pull up here, Clarence.”

It was the woman from my Paris motel dreams. My personal dream cherry popper. Inge. She sat side-on behind the driver, who I now knew as Clarence. Wearing the same linen uniform we all were. She followed a GPS route on her phone, brown sandalled feet resting on top of a large, red plastic box. A bit like a tool box with a handle on top. Behind Inge, there was a flat grey panel blocking the view out of the back, with a blue curtain drawn in front for no apparent reason. Clarence pulled over by the side of the road and I climbed out into the searing heat. No better or worse than inside the van. I spun around three-sixty, getting the lay of the land. Most of the surrounding area was dense jungle, where things swam and flew and crawled and stung and bit and slithered. But we’d parked up across the road from a large dirt clearing where a clutch of a hundred shanty homes shoved up against one another. Up to the right, thick jungle rose steeply up a hill. Only the one house sat towards the top. A big one on stilts with a wood terrace and a watchtower either side. Each manned by a guard in army duds, standing lazily, cigarette in hand and an automatic rifle strapped over one shoulder. The fencing around the house was topped with rolls of barbed wire. Not the kind of place you’d recommend on TripAdvisor.

I mopped my forehead again and tucked my handkerchief in a trouser pocket. I took the red box from Inge as she climbed out of the van over the passenger seat. The side of the van bore the same red-cross logo we wore on our shirts, along with a name: Aid International. A clear rip-off of the actual Red Cross. Seriously, they could sue.

I placed the box on the ground and opened up the top. The residents from the main road and the nearby housing estate were already approaching, the children having skidded to a stop by the van and formed a circle around us. Clarence spoke to them in an African language I didn’t understand, which presumably meant neither did Philippe. I opened the box. Inside, alongside latex gloves, cotton pads, syringes, medicines and the like, were bags of fizzy lollipops and Haribo. Now I got it. One injection. One candy-shaped reward. No wonder the kids were happy. The locals queued up as me and Inge administered the shots. Sleeve up. Rub with a sterile cotton swab. Needle in. Rub with a clean swab. Throw said swabs in a bag. As we rubbed and jabbed, Clarence did the talking and the organising.

Of course, the super-glaringly-obvious question remained. What in Dickens were three stone-cold killers doing handing out medical shots? Clarence might have been a genuine aid worker, but, given the time-healed knife scar on the side of his neck, I doubted it. Had JPAC suddenly grown a conscience? Decided to do what it was originally set up for and actually protect people? I doubted that too. With the kids out of the way, happily sucking and chewing away on their sweets, we worked our way through the adults, stopping halfway through to take on a cool, tangy pineapple drink and a Jurassic-sized slice of watermelon. It helped to stave off the heat for all of a minute. I remember the temperatures from the desert dream being almost unbearable. This was a different kind of swelter. It was humid, with zero wind. And the flies! OMG, the flies. Was I made of actual s**t? You couldn’t keep them from buzzing around, getting up in your grill. I spat a couple out of my mouth and snorted another one out of my right nostril.

“Welcome to the Congo,” Clarence said, laughing at my attempts to bat them away.

With the locals all sporting a fresh needle mark near the top of their left arm, we packed up the stuff and removed our gloves, taking another water break. Clarence chatted to some of the local men sporting English and Spanish football shirts. Arsenal. Barcelona. Man United and Real Madrid. It occurred to me that JPAC might be sticking the locals with some kind of killer virus. Yeah, wipe out a few million Congolese. For no other reason than that they could.

“Here we go,” said Inge, putting a hand on my shoulder. “The welcome committee.”

Two vehicles came towards us from further up the road. A pair of military jeeps with soldiers dressed like the guards in the watchtowers, complete with cherry-red berets. They looked about as welcoming as a bed full of scorpions.

The locals drifted away quickly and quietly once the jeeps rumbled to a stop and killed their engines. The troops got out. Four in total. They stood in front of us, rifles strapped over shoulders, pistols tucked away in side holsters. One of the men, six-eight tall and three feet wide, had cut the sleeves off his shirt so everyone could see his gigantic guns. His front teeth were gold-plated and he wore wrap shades that I could see Philippe’s warped reflection in.

The whole lot looked like they were fed on a diet of raw meat and bullets. Gold Teeth stepped to the front. “General Mobutu asks what you are doing here,” he said, speaking English in a thick African accent. “Why you inject people here?”

“We’re from Aid International,” Inge said.

Gold Teeth and his men looked her up and down. Sweat made rings around her arms and her hair was scraped back tight. No makeup and a flush-red face, but she still managed to look attractive.

“We’re here to give out immunisation shots,” Clarence said.

The big man looked down his nose at Clarence. “I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the woman,” he said, staring at Inge.

Gold Teeth bumped past her, looking inside the medical kit and around the back of the van. I felt my right hand clench into a fist. Clarence looked anxiously at me.

“STI vaccines,” Inge said, drawing Gold Teeth away from the van and back to his men.

“STI?” the big man asked, as confused as the rest of the soldiers.

I pretended to scratch my crotch, screwing up my face.

“Ah,” the group of men chorused, nodding at each other.

“You mean scratchy-scratch,” one of the soldiers said.

“Exactly,” Inge said, smiling. “Bangy-bang without the scratchy-scratch.”

Gold Teeth laughed and turned to one of his men. He gave him a quiet order in his native tongue. The soldier returned to the jeep and spoke into a radio. The jeeps bore what I knew instinctively was the Democratic Republic of Congo flag. Yet they also featured faint white numbers and letters in Russian. The soldier came off the radio and jogged back into line. He spoke quietly into the ear of Gold Teeth, bending to his left to hear.

Gold Teeth nodded and stood up straight. “General Mobutu invites you to his residence,” he said, pointing to the house on the hill.

“Thank the general for his very kind invitation,” I said, “but we have another two villages—”

“The invitation is compulsory,” said Gold Teeth.

All four soldiers snapped their rifles off their shoulders and pointed them squarely at the three of us.

“Tell the general we’d be delighted,” said Inge.