It’s Our Turn to Eat. Michela Wrong

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ this was an event likely to damage relations between the Kenyan government and its new-found foreign friends. After only two years in his post, the living, breathing symbol of Kibaki's good intentions had thrown in the towel, the shining white knight had fallen off his horse. Who could remember a similar event in African, let alone Kenyan history? Permanent secretaries never surrendered their jobs, they were either ignominiously sacked or, if they were lucky, allowed to present token resignations. Had John resigned in Nairobi, it would already have been remarkable. The fact that he had chosen to do so from self-imposed exile – indicating he believed his life would be in danger if he stayed in Kenya – made it one of the hottest African stories of the year. In Britain's House of Commons, a Labour MP tabled a private member's motion expressing his ‘deep concern’, while the missions of the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Japan and Switzerland called in a joint statement for Kibaki to take swift action to restore his government's credibility.

      In the days that followed, the Kenyan government mounted a quiet manhunt. As Special Branch descended on John's house in Nairobi – ‘It was just like the old days,’ a friend who lives in the same district later told me, ‘with police cars drawing up in the night, neighbours woken, dogs barking’ – staff at the Kenyan High Commission in Portland Place scoured London. They checked the addresses of John's known friends, people he had grown up and gone to school with. Nothing. They canvassed the roads around Victoria Station, an area of cheap lodgings patronised by Africans who can't afford the top hotels. No luck. No one thought to check the home of Michela Wrong, former Africa correspondent of the Financial Times.

      But the pitfalls inherent in a life of deceit were swiftly becoming obvious to me. I'd had colleagues who had crossed the invisible line of journalistic neutrality and become part of their own story, giving succour to African asylum-seekers, paying their legal fees, sneaking money and papers across borders. But it had never happened to me. And, it turned out, I wasn't much good at this stuff. David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, a veteran of subterfuge, later told me that a cover story only works if prepared ahead of time, its structure and corroborative detail laid down well in advance. But I had had no time to prepare my ‘legend’. I was reacting on the hoof, and within hours, not days, I was tripping myself up.

      The main problem was that I didn't want to mention John's presence over the telephone. I had always vaguely assumed that, whatever the British authorities might say in public, any intelligence service worthy of its name routinely bugs its small resident community of journalists, particularly in the wake of 9/11. British intelligence, I knew, had an information-sharing arrangement with its Kenyan counterpart. If asked by Kenyan intelligence to help track down a missing anti-corruption chief in London, would the Brits refuse? I wasn't counting on it. So how to explain to the various girlfriends of mine who rang, expecting an intimate natter, that this wasn't a good time for our usual gossip, without explaining why? They immediately sensed the awkwardness in my voice, and the less I divulged, the more curious they became. ‘Do you have someone there? Why are you being so secretive? What's going on?’ If I'd been listening in on those conversations, my limp ‘I'll explain later’ would immediately have alerted me to the fact that something had changed in the Wrong household.

      I found myself in a similar predicament when John asked if I could book lodgings for a Kenyan contact passing through London who he needed to meet. Suspicious of everyone in these tense, early days, he preferred his visitor not to know where he was staying, which raised the awkward question of how to pay for the room. If the guest were to ask at reception who was covering his bill, my credit card details would give the game away. If I went to the bed and breakfast in person and paid cash, I risked making myself memorable by that very act. I rang my brother-in-law – same family, different name – and asked if he would mind charging a room in north London to his card. ‘Er, I could, but why can't you just pay for it yourself?’ ‘I can't explain why now, but there's a good reason,’ I muttered. ‘Well, if you're not going to tell me, I don't want to be any part of this,’ he said, turning unexpectedly priggish. The exchange made me scratch tentative plans to hand John's ‘hot’ computer to my in-laws for safekeeping. It was surprising how little you could get done, once frankness was ruled out.

      And then there was the outright lying. The Kenyan government wasn't the only organisation trying to track John down. Even Kenyan bloggers momentarily turned amateur sleuths, swapping notes on their websites as to which London hotels had confirmed he wasn't a guest. There were calls from the BBC World Service, emails from Kenyan journalists who had caught a whisper of something in the air; an ambassador left cryptic messages on my answerphone, sending his best wishes to ‘our mutual friend’. Did I happen to know, the journalists asked with deceptive casualness, where they might get hold of John Githongo? It really was most urgent that they talk to him. He might be in possession of some very interesting information. As John pottered around in the background, doing his laundry and preparing his lunch – no macho African nonsense about him – I'd breezily debate his possible whereabouts and motivations with hacks I'd known for decades, hoping he wouldn't blow his cover by saying anything in that distinctive baritone.

      In theory, I should have been pestering him for an interview myself. In fact, I held back. While I was clearly sitting on a fabulous story – Africa's Watergate, by the sound of it – sitting John down with a notebook and tape recorder would have felt like a cheap trick, his host joining the manhunt rather than offering the safe haven he clearly desperately needed. Perhaps a less noble instinct also lay behind my uncharacteristic discretion. In the world John had entered, it seemed, knowledge made you a marked man. Once I too knew whatever it was he'd learnt, maybe I would face the same predicament. I wasn't sure I was ready to catch that particular infection. So I mentally stored the nuggets of information that came my way, while allowing the overall picture to escape me. He talked of ministers, he mentioned a naval vessel, the words ‘Anglo Leasing’ came up repeatedly. But he never joined up the dots. I wondered, once or twice, what I would actually be able to say to the police if something sinister happened to him. I'd have no coherent tale to tell, and they would surely refuse to believe that an intelligent journalist, harbouring a political fugitive, had never bothered to fit the various pieces together.

      Out on the street, I scanned black faces with a paranoid new attentiveness, trying to spot the undercover Kenyan agent attempting to blend in. But Camden has an awful lot of Africans living in it. From my new and wary perspective, almost everyone looked suspicious. At night I lay in bed, pondering how far the Kenyans might go. I was aware that I was thinking exactly like a character in a thousand Hollywood thrillers, but this fear was surely rooted in cold logic. I ticked off the various factors on my personal risk assessment. Did the material on John's computer have the potential to bring down a government? From the little he'd sketched out, yes. Were the reputations and livelihoods of Kenya's most powerful men – possibly the president himself – at stake? It seemed so. Did Kenya have a history of ruthless political assassination? Absolutely – I could reel off the names: Pio Pinto, Tom Mboya, J.M. Kariuki, Robert Ouko, Father Kaiser – and those were only the most notorious cases. Kenya had always been a venue for the well-timed car crash, the fatal robbery in which both gangster and high-profile victim conveniently lose their lives, the inquiry that drags on for decades and then sputters out without shedding any light on what had really happened.

      Were the stakes this time high enough to be worth killing a man? Clearly, John believed so, otherwise he wouldn't have fled. So the only question that remained, from a selfish point of view, was whether the Kenyans would be foolhardy or desperate enough to try something on British soil. Which meant my flat. After triple-bolting my front door – I was glad now that I'd bought the most expensive lock on the market when I moved in – and slotting the chain into position, I'd fall asleep in the early hours, stressed and fraught. In my dreams, a huddle of burly figures in formless grey overcoats with blurred, dark, hatchet faces, battered their way in to shoot us both in our separate rooms.

      In the morning, after a restless night, I'd wake feeling embarrassed by my melodramatic thought processes. If I was finding John's stay a bit of a psychological ordeal after only a few days, what must it be like for him? How had he endured the last СКАЧАТЬ