Veronica disconnects her own IV. She knows when the drugs wear off she will start to hurt all over, but she wants to be able to think clearly again. She fights her way back to her feet and shuffles to her window. Her room is on the second floor of a walled and gated hotel complex screened by palm trees. A half-dozen military-drab Land Cruisers and Hummers are parked in its gravel parking lot. Two white soldiers in American uniforms guard the gate. She hears aircraft above, both airplanes and helicopters, a near-constant buzz of aerial traffic.

Irene comes in while she is on her feet.

"Just can't keep you down, can we, hon?" she asks. "Those poor feet of yours need a few more days off, you ask me."

"Later," Veronica says. "Do you have any clothes?"

Irene purses her lips. "Suppose we can track some down."

"Could you? I can't stand hospital robes."

"All right, will do." But she doesn't move. She just looks at Veronica.

"What is it?" Veronica asks.

Irene says, "Don't know if this is the right time. I'm not really trained for this kind of thing. But, listen, hon, we have specialists coming here to take care of you. We have a highly trained trauma counsellor, and another who specializes in counselling victims of sexual abuse. I'm sorry, hon, but I have to know, what did they do to you?"

"To me?" Veronica half-laughs. "Nothing."

Irene looks at her skeptically.

"No, really. They, I think, they raped Susan. The British girl. But me, I mean, they weren't exactly friendly, they put a fucking leash on me, and a machete to my throat, but physically, honest, I got out okay. Just what you see, cuts and bruises and blisters, and I was sick, I've probably lost a lot of weight, but I wasn't, nothing awful happened."

"Sounds pretty awful to me."

"It's over now. I don't want to see any counsellor. I'm fine."

"I'll ask you again when you're sober."

"I'm fine," Veronica repeats. "Could I just get some clothes?"

"I'm on it, hon." Irene leaves quickly.

Veronica ventures into the bathroom. She wants to shower, but the idea of climbing in and turning on the water seems horrendously difficult and complex right now. There are a pair of flower-patterned slippers inside. She decides to try to go for a walk before the drugs wear off.

* * *

The door opens to an exterior walkway that connects the rooms, like a motel. She's glad she's in a decent buttoned-up hospital gown, rather than a cheap backless one. There is a soldier at the end of the walkway, and she freezes in place, afraid she is violating some rule, but he just nods to her stiffly. He looks Latino and about nineteen. A small strip of tall ferns and palm trees grows just outside, and through them she can see some large body of water. It isn't the ocean, there are no waves.

She proceeds down the walkway until she reaches a covered patio full of tables and chairs. All are deserted except one table heaped with scrambled eggs, fresh fruit, French bread, and coffee. Jacob is sitting there, his tall, gaunt body folded into a small chair, dressed in a hospital robe and bandages like hers, eating like he is trying to win a contest. Veronica's stomach lurches with desire.

He waves her over without stopping eating. She joins him and the next several minutes are devoted to food. At one point a formally dressed waiter comes up the stairs that lead to the patio and refills their coffee and orange juice.

"Where are we?" Veronica asks, when the ravenous void in her gut has been sated, for the moment.

Jacob points northwards. "Pretty sure it's Goma, from the lake and those volcanoes."

Veronica looks and sees jagged mountains rising into the sky above a ramshackle city, the same mountains they saw from the helicopter, a few days ago. She remembers looking at the Michelin map of East Africa as they drove from Kampala to Bwindi, less than a week ago; remembers Derek pointing out the Congolese city of Goma, right on the Rwandan border, a hundred miles south of the Impenetrable Forest, nestled between vast Lake Kivu and the towering Virunga volcanos. It feels like a memory from long ago, from her childhood.

"Makes sense," Jacob says. "Goma's the headquarters of the UN peacekeeping mission. Probably the safest city in the whole Congo. Not that that's saying much."

"No." Veronica looks at the armed guards at the hotel gate. "I think we're pretty safe here though."

"Yeah. They can't let us get abducted twice. Just imagine the headlines."

"Have you seen any of the others?"

"No. I think they'll be in bed another day or two. They're older. Except Susan, and she… " His voice trails off.

Veronica nods. "Did they offer you a trauma counsellor too?"

He nods. "I told them no."

"Me too. I don't know."

"I read a study once they did of World Trade Center survivors. Those who went to analysis and counselling and joined survivors' groups and made cathartic art and so on were still totally screwed up three years later. The ones who just sealed it off and didn't talk about it and moved on were fine."

Veronica nods. "Yeah. It'd be like picking at a cut before it's even scabbed over."

"Right."

They sit in silence for a while.

Then Jacob says, "I'm going to find them. Whoever did it, whoever set him up. I'm going to find them."

Veronica looks at him. She doesn't know what to say. She would dismiss it as bluster, but Jacob doesn't seem like a blusterer, and he sounds serious. She settles on asking, "How?"

"There are ways."

She doubts it. But he has reminded her of one nagging question. "Did Derek ever tell you why he invited me along?"

"No. Why?"

"I don't know exactly. But -" She hesitates. Maybe she shouldn't tell Jacob, shouldn't add fuel to his already burning desire for vengeance.

"But what?"

Veronica decides she owes him the truth. He's a reasonable, logical man. Once he recovers from this period of shock he'll surely come to his senses, do the reasonable thing and go back to Canada. "On the helicopter, right after he saw Athanase - did Strick and Prester come to you too?"

"Yeah. They debriefed me. I knew Prester already, he was Derek's partner, I met him in Kampala. What happened on the helicopter?"

"Derek got all… weird… and asked me if it was me who set him up."

"If it was you?" Jacob asks incredulously.

"Yeah. And when I said it wasn't, he asked about my ex-husband. He said his name. Danton DeWitt. I'd never told him or any of you about Danton, not by name."

Jacob stares at her.

Veronica continues, "He must have known before he ever invited me to Bwindi. Probably before he ever met me. I think, I think maybe that's why he met me. We were at a party, he seemed to, like, single me out." She grimaces. "I thought he liked me. Now I think it was because he knew I was Danton's ex-wife."

"Danton DeWitt," Jacob repeats. "Tell me about him."

"There isn't much to tell. He's not interesting. He's rich, he was born rich. He's a commodities trader. He is involved in a lot of African charities, his mother was born here. That's kind of why I'm here, I got involved in them, and then after the divorce I sort of talked one of them into bringing me over. I'm sure they ran it by him first. He probably okayed it because he didn't want me around. Too embarrassing."

"Did you tell Strick and Prester?"

"Of course. But they don't believe me. They think it was my head injury, my memory got messed up. But it wasn't. He said Danton's name, I'm sure of it. But listen, I promise you there's no way Danton is involved with terrorists. There's just no way. Derek must have made some kind of mistake."

Jacob says, "We'll see."

Footsteps click up the stairs that lead to the patio, and Irene appears, holding a big bundle of clothing.

"What's this? Flying the coop?" she scolds them gently. " I brought you clothes, but I'm not giving them to you until you're back in bed where you belong."

Feeling a bit like a high-school student caught cutting class, Veronica shuffles guiltily back to her room. Jacob is two doors over. Pain is beginning to gnaw at her from a dozen places. She lowers herself wearily back to bed, turns on CNN, and lets sleep wash over her again.

* * *

When she wakes up Veronica doesn't know how long she has slept, whether it has been hours or days. The light and TV clock tell her it is late afternoon. She hurts almost everywhere, inside and out, but she feels a little stronger too, the food helped. She decides to get dressed. When she strips off her hospital grown she sees her body has shrunk amazingly, she has lost at least ten pounds in only a week.

The clothes Irene brought are ill-fitting but better than nothing. She dons the slippers and shuffles back outside. No one is in sight on the walkway or the deck. Stairs lead downwards, and she descends them with the banister's help. At their base, a leopard-skin rug awaits, complete with head and jaws. Beyond is the small, clean hotel lobby. The sign on the desk indicates that this is the Hotel VIP. The young and well-dressed woman behind the desk watches her with undisguised curiosity. Jacob sits on the couch near the main entrance, reading a thin, cheaply printed French-language newspaper.

"Hey," Veronica says. "What's news?"

"Hard to say. This is two months old, and my French isn't great. From what I can tell it's mostly complaints about how the elections aren't worth the paper the ballots are printed on." He puts down the newspaper. "Prester's going to take me to an Internet café to check mail and make some phone calls. The lines here aren't working, some technical glitch. Want to come?"

She nods and sits next to him. They don't speak, but their silence is companionable. After what they have been through together she feels closer to Jacob than to any of the friends back in America she has known for many years.

She wonders who she should call. Her parents, she supposes. She hasn't been spoken to them much for years now, since her marriage. Her aging ex-hippie parents hated Danton, took her wedding as a slap in their face. When the divorce hit she couldn't bring herself to go to them for support. It would have been too much like admitting they were right all along, and she had just crumpled up and flushed away the prime of her life. She tried to leave everything behind when she went to Africa, including her family, but they're still her parents, they must be deathly worried about her, and right now it feels like they're the only people in all the world who might care what happens to her.

Prester appears at the entrance, jangling keys in his hands. He doesn't look enthusiastic about Veronica's presence, but accedes to her company and leads them out into the parking lot. Two jeeps full of American soldiers are waiting for something, along with the two guards at the gate. Prester leads Jacob and Veronica to a green Mitsubishi Pajero. The American soldiers nod at Prester and swing open the hotel gate, and they advance into the streets of Goma. To Veronica's amazement, the two jeeps of soldiers roll out behind them. A military escort.

The Hotel VIP is an island of luxury in a sea of poverty. They turn onto a boulevard divided by a wide grassy meridian strewn with trash and plastic bags, occupied by vendors selling airtime cards, cigarettes, and avocados big as grapefruits. They share the potholed road with trickling streams of ragged pedestrians, hordes of cheap motorcycles, battered cars, less-battered SUVs, and a few angelically white UN jeeps. The high walls of the estates on either side are topped by barbed wire and broken glass. Curiously, Veronica doesn't feel overwhelmed by the in-your-face poverty, the way she always did in Kampala. It doesn't seem so bad compared to what she's seen in the last week.

She sees a helicopter pass above, heading south, towards the lake. The sun has disappeared behind the high bluffs to the west. The boulevard ends at a large roundabout surrounded by big colonial-era buildings that claim to be banks, a post office, and the Hotel du Grands Lacs, but whose shambolic, half-collapsed appearance make Veronica doubt they function at all. The roundabout also boasts a brightly coloured Vodacom store with glossy new ads and posters advertising new SIM cards for two US dollars.

"Dollars?" Jacob asks, pointing out Vodacom as they pass. "Not francs?"

Prester says, "It's a dollar economy. You only use francs for small change."

As Veronica stares out the window she begins to realize Goma is not quite the wretched wasteland it first seemed. Its buildings are low battered concrete, mostly unfinished, but some these drab shells contain flashy boutiques selling stuffed toys or designer clothes. The streets throng with pedestrians: gangs of skinny teenagers selling gasoline from yellow jerrycans, men in sharp suits, young women with basins full of goods on their heads and babies strapped to their backs, elegantly dressed women hiding from the sun beneath rainbow-coloured parasols. A man chatting on a brand-new Razr cell phone is surrounded by street urchins playing soccer with a ball made of rags. It is a surreal mélange of hypermodern and postapocalyptic, but it's not near as overwhelming as it would have been just a week ago. In fact the idea of going out and exploring this urban maelstrom would actually have some appeal, if she were stronger.

There is an Internet café next to the shuttered marble building that was once a post office, when the Congo was a nation-state in more than name. Shrivelled beggar women nursing malnourished infants hiss at Veronica, Jacob, and Prester as they enter. One jeepful of soldiers remains outside; the others enter and take up stations at the door. The other customers look up briefly, then go back to their work. Detachments of armed men are apparently not unusual here. The café's fifty computers are named after the US states, and CNN plays on TVs in the corners. Veronica is glad to see neither she or Jacob is onscreen.

The bored young woman at the counter wears Parasuco jeans, a Versace shirt, and diamond earrings. Her entire right eye is obscured by a milky cataract. Veronica writes down her parents' phone number and goes into a tiny phone booth. A minute later the phone rings, and when she picks it up, her mother is on the other end.

"Hello," Veronica says. "It's me. I'm fine, I'm safe."

"Veronica?" her mother gasps. "Oh, Veronica, oh thank God, oh thank God."

Their conversation is brief. Her mother's voice is difficult to decipher, partly because it is tinny and faraway, partly because she starts weeping almost immediately. When her father takes the phone he too is crying. Their voices are frail, and Veronica knows it isn't just the connection. Her parents have grown not just old but feeble, fragile. She hasn't talked to them much in the last seven years. Maybe it happened then and she didn't notice. Maybe it happened this week, and the catalyst was the very public kidnapping and presumed murder of their daughter. Veronica has to cut the conversation short, she can't bear it. She puts down the phone feeling like a miserable failure as a daughter and a human being.

When she emerges from the phone booth, Prester gives the one-eyed girl a five-dollar bill, and she returns four filthy hundred-franc notes. He offers to them to Veronica. "Keep 'em. Souvenir."

"Thanks."

They return to Jacob, who is sitting at the computer labelled IOWA.

"Have a seat, check your mail, but make it fast," Prester says quietly. "I want to be out of here in five minutes."

"What for? We just got here." Jacob looks upset.

"We need to talk. In private. Without them listening."

Veronica stares at Prester. "Them who?"

"Strick and his boys."

"Talk about what?"

"Five minutes," he repeats.