The car was a plain grey sedan with government plates, and the man in the driver's seat did not look at him once during the twenty-minute drive.
Kin sat in the back and watched the city go past. He had seen it only at night, in pursuit and in flame. In daylight it was ordinary. Women carried baskets on their heads. Boys sold phone cards from wooden stands. A goat wandered along the shoulder of the road and nobody hurried it along. He wondered how many of these people would be at the stadium tomorrow, and how many would still be alive the day after.
The compound wall rose out of the traffic without warning. Grey concrete, three meters high, topped with wire and cameras on rotating mounts. The gate was steel and flanked by two soldiers with rifles held across their chests.
The sedan slowed.
Kin felt the mask settle over his face. It had been applied in the hospital, a cool tightening across the jaw and cheekbones that lasted a few minutes and then became nothing. His papers said his name was Adeyemi Okoro. The System had built the face to match the photograph on the second sheet of the folder.
The car stopped. He opened the door and stepped out, and something slipped.
He felt it before he understood it. A small wrongness across the left side of his face, like a seam opening. He lifted his hand as if to scratch his cheek and pressed two fingers against the skin. There was a ridge there, thin and hot, where the mask had separated from his real jaw. It lasted a second, no more, and then the skin sealed itself and the ridge was gone.
The soldier on the left had seen it.
He was young, maybe twenty-two, with a thin moustache and eyes that had learned to watch for small things. He tilted his head and said something in the mixed tongue, half Fransia and half the local language, the way everyone here spoke when they were working.
Kin caught the shape of it. Something wrong with your face, corporal?
The tongue was not his. The System had loaded the words into him weeks ago, along with the city maps and the traffic patterns, but loaded words were not the same as a tongue that had grown up in them. He understood what was said. He could not answer quickly, because the answer had to be assembled in his head first, and the assembly took a beat longer than it should have.
The soldier's hand moved to the strap of his rifle.
Kin forced the words out. "Razor cut. This morning. Nothing."
The soldier looked at him. The other soldier, older, had already turned to look at the car and the driver, who was staring straight ahead and giving nothing.
Then the young soldier shrugged and stepped aside.
Kin walked through the gate and did not breathe until he was twenty paces past it.
***
The compound was bigger than the folder had suggested.
Two main buildings, one administrative and one residential, connected by a covered walkway. A motor pool on the left. A parade square in the middle with a flagpole and no flag. Men everywhere, most of them in the same uniform Kin was wearing, most of them going somewhere with a purpose he did not share.
The clerk who processed him was a woman in her fifties with reading glasses hanging on a cord. She took his papers, stamped them twice, and handed them back without looking up.
"Third floor, east corridor. You relieve Corporal Bassey at thirteen hundred. He will brief you."
"Understood."
She glanced up at that, briefly, and something moved behind her glasses.
Kin did not wait to see what it was. He took the papers and walked.
***
The third floor was quieter than the ground.
The corridor ran the length of the building, tiled and lit by fixtures that hummed. There were doors on both sides, most of them closed, most of them unmarked. At the far end, where the corridor turned, two men stood outside a door that had a brass plate on it.
One of them was tall and broad, with a shaved head and a scar that ran from his ear down to his collar. The other was smaller and wiry, with the restless hands of a man who had spent years checking things that did not need checking.
The tall one looked at Kin's papers. Then at his face. Then at his papers again.
"You're early."
"Traffic was light."
The wiry one laughed at something that had not been said. The tall one did not.
"Bassey is inside. He will not leave until you have signed the log. Do you understand me? He will not leave."
"I understand."
The tall one stepped aside. The wiry one opened the door.
The room beyond was small and windowless, with a desk, two chairs, and a wall of monitors showing every corridor on the floor. Bassey was sitting in one of the chairs with his boots on the desk.
He was younger than Kin had expected. Twenty-five, maybe, with a wide face and a lazy way of holding himself that did not match the eyes. He looked up when Kin came in, and then he stood, and then he said something in the mixed tongue that Kin did not catch.
The words came fast. Something about the shift, something about a radio channel, something about a man on the second floor who had been asking questions. Kin stood and let the sounds go past him and assembled what he could.
Bassey stopped.
"You heard me?"
"Yes."
"Then what did I say."
The room was very quiet. The monitors hummed. Kin could feel the tall one and the wiry one standing outside the door, close enough to hear.
"Second floor," Kin said. "Someone asking questions. You want me to check before I take the desk."
Bassey looked at him for a long moment.
"That is not what I said."
The cocking of guns happens in two parts. There is the sound the weapon makes, and there is the sound the men make when they hear it. Outside the door, two weapons made their sound at almost the same time, and the corridor, which had been quiet, was no longer quiet.
Kin did not turn around.
"I am tired," he said, in the mixed tongue, slowly, the way a man speaks when he has been up all night and cannot find his words. "I came from the hospital this morning. My mother. I have not slept. Say it again and I will hear it this time."
The silence went on for three seconds.
Then Bassey laughed, and the guns outside went quiet, and the tall one said something under his breath that might have been hospital and might have been something else.
Bassey sat back down and put his boots on the desk.
"Sign the log," he said. "And next time, sleep before you come to work."
Kin signed the log.
***
He stood the shift.
Four hours, then six. He watched the monitors and watched the men who came and went. He listened to the language around him and let it settle into his ears until he could follow it without assembling it first. He learned which of the two guards outside the door was the talker and which was the watcher. He learned that the general took lunch at one and dinner at seven and that he did not leave the residence building between those hours.
At six forty, the general came down the corridor.
Kin had seen photographs. Photographs had not prepared him. General Tchoumi was a small man, no taller than Kin's shoulder, with grey hair cut close to the scalp and a face that gave nothing away. He wore a plain uniform with no medals. He walked with his hands behind his back, and he did not look at the guards as he passed them, and there advance was something about the way he moved that made Kin understand, immediately and without needing to be told, that the folder had been right about him. The warlord was the voice. This was the mind.
The general stopped at the door of his office and looked at Kin.
"You are new."
"Yes, sir."
"Bassey's replacement."
"Yes, sir."
The general looked at him for a moment longer than was necessary. Then he opened the door and went inside, and the tall guard closed it behind him.
Kin stood at his post and listened to his own heartbeat.
***
At eight fifteen the shift changed, and Kin did not leave.
He had arranged it in, in the folder, in a paragraph he had read twice and memorized once. The night guard was a man named Osei, who had a wife in the eastern quarter and a habit of taking the long way to the car park. Osei did not arrive. There was a message waiting for him at the gate, something about his wife, something that would keep him away for three hours. Kin had not written the message. Baros's assistant had.
At eight twenty, the corridor was empty.
Kin walked to the general's door.
He did not knock. He opened it and went in and closed it behind him, and the room was warm and low-lit and smelled of paper and old tobacco. The walls were thicker than they looked. The floor was stone, not tile, and there was a drain set into the corner of it, the kind of drain that belongs in a room where things are washed down. Kin had seen rooms like this before. Not in this country. In a documentary he had watched years ago, about a place where people were brought to be questioned and were not always brought back out. The sound did not leave these walls. The men who built the compound had made sure of it, and the men who used it had made sure of it again.
The general was sitting at his desk with a pen in his hand and a stack of papers in front of him. He looked up when the door closed, and he did not look surprised.
He looked at Kin. He looked at the uniform Kin was wearing. He looked at the face that was not the face on the papers in the file.
"What is happening," he said.
Kin did not answer.
He reached over his shoulder and took the katana off his back.
The general moved before the blade was clear of the sheath. The pen left his hand in a short, flat arc, the way a man throws when he has thrown before. It hit Kin in the chest, above the heart, and drove through the suit and into the muscle beneath.
Kin felt it go in. He felt his heel catch on the edge of the rug and he stumbled back a half step, one hand still on the hilt, the other coming up by reflex to the wound. The pen stood out of his chest, tilted upward, and he looked down at it for a moment and then back at the general.
The general was already rising from the chair. He reached for the drawer.
Kin pulled the blade free of the sheath.
The general's left hand came up out of the drawer with the pistol, and the katana swept down, and the general pulled the hand back a fraction too late. The blade caught it across the fingers and took two of them off at the middle joint. The general did not make a sound. He pulled the hand back and used the right to grab the telephone on the desk, and Kin cut the cord with a short backhand, and the general dropped the phone and went for the drawer again.
The pager was on the desk, next to the inkwell. Kin shot it. The .50 round tore through the small plastic body and the wood beneath it and buried itself in the wall, and the pager came apart in pieces and did not beep.
No one came.
The walls held the sound the way they had been built to hold it, and the corridor beyond stayed quiet, and the tall guard and the wiry guard and the four hundred men in the building went on with their evening without knowing anything had changed.
The general abandoned the drawer. He went over the desk, fast for a man of his age, and took the table with him as cover, tipping it onto its side and crouching behind it. Kin heard the drawer open from behind the wood. He heard the click of a slide.
"Back away," the general said. His voice was steady. He was not afraid.
Kin did not back away. He stood where he was, in the middle of the room, with the pen still in his chest and the blood running down the front of the suit, and looked at the small man behind the table with the pistol in his right hand and two fingers missing from his left.
"Who sent you," the general said.
Kin did not answer.
"I have four hundred men in this building. You will not leave it."
Kin did not answer that either.
The general aimed the pistol over the edge of the table and steadied it, and Kin watched the barrel and the finger on the trigger and did not move, because the room was small and the table was low and the math was not in the general's favor, and both of them knew it.
The general knew it too.
He fired.