Zoe listened as Hartman recited an argument she knew by heart. She kept her eyes fixed on his face, willing herself not to meet her father’s eyes. She heard Trevor’s voice over breakfast that morning: “He loves you, Zoe. Do you really want to hurt him?” It was a question she didn’t know how to answer. Their estrangement was a knot that seemed impossible to untangle. For what he did, she had never forgiven him. But he had never asked.
At some point, she raised her eyes to the seal behind Hartman’s head, etched in relief upon the polished blond wood. “E Pluribus Unum,” her mother had been fond of saying. “A motto for the world, not a nation alone.” She thought of Kuyeya lying on the hospital table in Zambia, crying, and Dr. Chulu, at once grim and enraged, examining her. Suddenly Zoe’s suffering seemed small, even petty, in the shadow of an evil so much greater.
She decided then that Jack Fleming deserved to be defeated. Not because he had betrayed her or because he was unfit to be Chief Executive—in many ways he was born for the Oval Office—but because in the name of fiscal austerity he would abandon children like Kuyeya. That was why Senator Hartman wanted her father in the chair, why he had brought her in from Africa to tell her story. It wasn’t about partisanship or election-year politics. It was about conscience.
At last she looked at her father and touched the ring on her finger, the ring the Somalis had salvaged from the wreckage of her mother’s plane. You know what I’m thinking, don’t you? August 19, 2000. I know you remember.
He angled his head and she thought she saw a flash of fear in his eyes. At that moment Zoe did something she had never expected. She smiled.
The Rule of Achilles, Dad. You taught me.
No one is invincible.
PART ONE
The night comes with its breath of death.
—Anonymous
Chapter 1
Lusaka, Zambia
August, 2011
The music was raucous, but it was always that way in African clubs. The beat of the drum—the backbone of village song—had been replaced in the cities by the throbbing insistence of electronic bass, amplified until everything around the speakers picked up the rhythm—people, beer bottles, even the walls. On Zoe’s first trip to the continent—a brief jaunt to Nairobi when she was six years old—her mother told her that Africa is the keeper of humanity’s pulse. It was a truth she remembered every time she stepped foot in a Zambian bar.
The place was called Hot Tropic, the club de jour in a city constantly reinventing its nightlife. The decor was all fire and glitter, neon lights flashing red against the walls and dazzling disco balls turning everything to sparkle. The place was packed with bodies, most of them African twenty-somethings, bouncing to the beat.
Zoe was seated at a table in a corner of the bar where the decibel level was slightly buffered. She was dressed in jeans and a Hard Rock London T-shirt, her wavy blonde hair pulled back in a clip. At the table with her were three African friends from work—two men and a woman. Most Saturdays Zoe hosted a barbecue, or braai, at her flat, and afterward those who had not satisfied their appetite for beer and conversation went clubbing. Tonight, the subject on everyone’s minds was the September election, pitting Zambia’s President, Rupiah Banda, against the aging warhorse Michael Sata, and the energetic upstart Hakainde Hichilema, or “H.H.”
“Banda is finished,” Niza Moyo was saying, her dark eyes aglow with indignation. “As is his party. They’ve run the country for twenty years and what have they given us? Mobile hospitals that take doctors away from the real hospitals; police officers that have no vehicles to investigate a crime; roads that only the rich can drive on; and corruption at every level of government. It’s a disgrace.”
Like Zoe, Niza was a young attorney at the Coalition of International Legal Advocates, or CILA, a London-based non-profit that combatted human rights abuses around the world. She was feistier and more outspoken than most Zambian women, but she was Shona, from Zimbabwe, and her father was an exiled diplomat known for challenging authority.
“I sympathize with your position,” said Joseph Kabuta, an officer with the Zambia Police Victim Support Unit. Solidly built with close-cropped hair and wide perceptive eyes, he reminded Zoe of the young Nelson Mandela. “But Banda is still popular in the rural areas, and Michael Sata isn’t well. Zambians don’t want another president to die in office.”
“The press reports about Sata’s health are overblown,” Niza rejoined.
“What I can’t figure out,” Zoe interjected, “is why you don’t throw out the guys with one foot in the grave and elect the best candidate. Everybody loves H.H. He’s a born leader and he has no political baggage. But everybody says he can’t win. Where’s the logic?”
“It’s the way people think,” said Sergeant Zulu—who everyone called Sarge. Strategically brilliant and compulsively affable, he was the lead attorney at CILA and the mastermind behind the organization’s campaign against child sexual assault. “In Africa, presidents are like village chiefs. People vote for the gray heads.”