The Pajero, followed by the two Jeeps, drives along a crowded road, past vegetable and cigarette stalls, until the street commerce suddenly ends and is replaced by – nothing. The road opens into a vast blasted field of jet-black rubble. A few shattered, burnt, half-buried skeletons of houses emerge from the dark landscape, as do, unexpectedly, a few bright new half-constructed buildings. Men with picks chip languidly away at ridges and shoulders of the black rock. The field is littered with neat piles of shadow-coloured stones the size of watermelons; the walls going up around the new houses are made of those stones, mortared thickly together. In the pinkish sunset light the whole scene seems eerily unreal.

"What is this?" Jacob asks, astonished.

Prester halts his vehicle in the middle of this strip of wasteland that runs through the heart of Goma like an inky river, all the way to Lake Kivu, severing the city into two halves. It is wider than a football field. To the left, the waterfront is dominated by a massive, black-walled complex surrounded by a rickety collection of crude huts where women sit mending fishing nets. Further inland, the rusted remains of several dozen vehicles lie jumbled like children's toys. The wide strip of jagged black continues inland towards the nearest mountain: a huge, looming, flat-topped presence maybe fifteen miles north. A plume of cloud rises from the edge of its summit.

"Mount Nyiragongo," Prester says, pointing at the mountain. "You've read your Tolkien? Four years ago Mount Doom went boom."

Veronica understands. That isn't cloud above the mountain. It is smoke rising from a live volcano. Four years ago it erupted, disgorged a red river of lava that cut this city in two and cooled into the field of black rock around them.

"Let's go for a walk," Prester says. "But first, do me a favour, go through the pockets and seams of your new clothes, check your slippers, everything, see if you find anything hard and metal."

Jacob stares at him. "What is this?"

"Humour me."

Jacob begins to feel along the seams of his clothes. Veronica does the same. Neither of them find anything.

"Maybe I'm just being paranoid," Prester says. "Maybe not. Bet there's something in the car." He chuckles. "Which totally makes my day, it'll piss Strick off no end to know we talked but not know about what. Come on. Walk with me."

First he goes over to the Jeeps that have stopped behind them, and explains that they're going for a short walk; then he leads Veronica and Jacob over the uneven, night-dark terrain. Veronica has to walk slowly and carefully in her thin slippers. Jacob at least has sandals. The vast field of black lava with the blue lake beyond, all limned in crimson sunset light, is beautiful in a stark and inhuman way. The workers are packing up their picks and departing. They walk about two hundred feet inland, to the piled mound of rusting vehicle carcasses that emerge like dinosaur bones from the solid lava.

"Goma's one tourist attraction," Prester says. "The car graveyard. Lava came spilling down, ran right through and blew up all the gas stations, picked up all these cars and for some reason dumped them all here. There's probably dozens more underneath."

"What's that big compound by the water?" Jacob asks.

"MONUC headquarters. The UN peacekeeping mission."

As if to underscore his words, the gates to the complex open, and three huge white UN vehicles, an armoured personnel carrier followed by two oil tankers, begin to climb towards them along the road carved into the lava field.

Prester offers them cigarettes. Veronica accepts. Prester lights up and looks around as if he is staring into a parallel dimension. Veronica shudders minutely as the smoke abrades the back of her throat, and again as the nicotine hits.

"So why did you drag us out here?" Jacob sounds a little exasperated.

Prester takes a long drag from his cigarette and says, distantly, "Sometimes I think this whole country is cursed. First the Belgians, then Mobutu, now sheer fucking anarchy. Even nature. You see the lake? Pretty, ain't it? That's Rwanda across the bay there. See that hotel? That's where they planned the genocide. Well, that pretty lake builds up volcanic gases inside, and every thousand or so years they blow, suffocate everything within a hundred miles, then wipe it all clean with a tidal wave. Could happen any moment if there's an eruption beneath the lake. Would kill two million people in ten minutes." He shakes his head. "Some ultra-badass witch doctor must have cast the spell to end all spells on the whole Congo watershed. We had one hope, Lumumba, fifty years ago. But the CIA took care of him in a hurry."

"We?" Veronica asks curiously. "I thought you were American."

"Kinda. I was born here. Kinshasa anyways, the capital, not that it's really the same country, that's a thousand miles west, there aren't even any roads there from here. But we moved to New York when I was eleven."

"What brought you back?"

Prester sighs. "I used to deal on the Lower East Side. Had to do it to pay my way through Columbia. Just little stuff at first. Then more and bigger. Then one day I had to get out, and all America was too fucking small. Came back here, never even got my degree. That's me in a nutshell. I'll spend my whole life two credits short of the Ivy League. Ain't life a joke?"

"Hilarious," Jacob says curtly. "Why are we here?"

Prester favours him with a dark look. "You got somewhere else to be?"

"I'm just wondering if you have a point."

"I'll get there when I get there. I'm doing you a fucking favour, man. I shouldn't be talking to you at all."

Jacob looks unconvinced.

"Prester," Veronica says the name slowly, remembering something. "Prester John was a king, wasn't he?"

Prester blows a smoke ring. "That he was. The legendary king of a fabulous Christian nation hidden deep in the dark continent. A kingdom of peace and love where the roads were paved with ivory and gold. Never existed, of course. But a whole shitload of crazy motherfuckers came here to look for him. And just look what they found instead." He waves his arm to take in all of the country around them. "Found and founded. Genocide and civil war. About four million dead untimely in the last twelve years, between Congo and Rwanda."

For a little while he and Veronica smoke in silence.

Jacob asks, "And now you work for the US government?"

"No no no. Bite your tongue, wash out your mouth. Not for. With. Independent contractor. Professional go-between. Protocol man. Human bridge between the Congo and America, providing that invaluable extra edge of local knowledge, cultural understanding, and most important of all, connections to everyone who's anyone. Least that's what it says on my business cards. Azania was a two-man shop. Me the protocol guy, Derek the security expert." Prester hesitates, and his voice drops. "We had real clients. Mining companies. But mostly, in practice, for real? Me and Derek were a deniable front for the CIA."

The three letters seem to echo.

"You wouldn't believe all the shit going down out here nowadays," Prester says. "The new race for Africa is on. America, Britain, France, China, Russia, the Saudis, the South Africans, there's a whole new twenty-first century Great Game going on, and everybody wants to win. That's the thirty-thousand foot view. Sounds romantic, don't it? But zoom in close enough and what you see on the ground is a whole lot of people getting very fucking dirty." He smiles sardonically. "The funny thing is, Strick thinks I'm one of them. He will be so pissed that I'm talking to you in camera. But Derek said you were his best friend." He turns from Jacob to Veronica. "And if you were faking it when they put that panga to your neck, then you deserve all the Academy Awards ever made. So what the hell. Let's spread a little home truth around for once."

"What truth?" Veronica asks.

"Ay, well, there's the fucking rub." Prester drops his cigarette and grinds it out beneath his heel. "Derek was set up. You know that. He knew too much. But what did he know? Not that terrorists were working with interahamwe. They went out of their way to make that very public themselves, didn't they? Told the whole fucking Internet. No, what Derek knew was that one of our bosses, one of our real bosses, in Charlie Indigo Alpha, was covering up a small mountain of smuggling money. Just imagine. An American intelligence officer raking in profits from illegal cross-border trading by genocidaires. Working hand in hand with Athanase Ntingizawa, Captain Interahamwe himself. Definite first-ballot member of the all-time bad-guy hall of fame, even before he jumped into bed with Al-Qaeda. Bit of a resume stain if that comes out, you know? The kind of thing that might drive the officer in question to some seriously extreme extremes, in order to sweep all the blood back under the carpet. Like cutting a deal with Athanase to murder the guy investigating the smuggling."

Veronica opens her mouth and shuts it again. She can't believe she's hearing this, especially not here in this surreal place. She feels like she's in a movie, like some director is about to shout Cut!

Jacob says, "You mean Strick?"

"No. Strick is many shitty things, but on the take is not one of them. He's an asshole but a clean one. All God and country and ramrod up his ass. No, it's gotta be some shark in a suit further up the food chain. Someone in Kampala, in the embassy. That's all I can tell you, I don't have any names." He looks at Veronica. "But you had one for me, didn't you? Danton DeWitt."

"Danton's not in the CIA," she says shrilly. "This is ridiculous."

"No. He'd be the outside partner. I looked him up today. Commodities trader, right? Legal smuggler, in other words. With lots of holier-than-thou charitable interests in this here dark continent, right? And an Old Rhodey mother? Makes sense to me."

"No," she insists. "Danton's not … he's a selfish prick, but he's not evil. He wouldn't have worked with monsters like that. No. It's not possible."

"I bet he didn't know," Prester says softly. "That's how it works around here. You don't ask where the diamonds and the gold and the coltan and the timber came from. You don't ask where your good buddy got all those dollars, or why he needs all those guns and pangas and whips. You don't ask how many slaves died and how many women got raped and how many children got press-ganged. You don't want to know."

Veronica shakes her head. "No. I still don't believe it. Danton wouldn't get involved with this."

"Yeah? You think he's too goody two shoes? That surprises me. His daddy made all the money, didn't he? I've met lots of spoiled rich kids, and none of them ever struck me as particularly lawful good."

"No. You don't understand. Danton wouldn't do it because he'd think it was beneath him. He already has money. What he wants is to be a big shot. Smuggling gold or whatever in Africa would be too small-time for him. Too pathetic."

A moment of silence hangs over the apocalyptic wasteland.

Then Jacob says to Prester, intently, "What else do you know?"

Prester shrugs. "That's all I got. The good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Derek. He kept his whole life close to his vest."

"So what do you expect us to do now?" Veronica demands.

"Do? Nothing. Quite the opposite. The whole reason I'm telling you this is to keep you out of trouble. I heard you talking earlier, on the patio. I'm warning you. Don't do it. Don't go poking around wondering what happened to him, or what your ex-husband was up to. Not even when you get back home, and definitely not here. This cover-up added up to at least six corpses already. Once you've gone that far it's real easy to add two more. And you ask me, our terrorist friends are far from finished. You know what was in the phone that British girl picked up in their camp? Cell-phone numbers for two hundred Western NGO workers in Congo and west Uganda."

Jacob sucks in breath sharply.

"Yeah. We figure they were going to try to lure them into ambushes, capture more hostages. We should be able to stop that, but I expect they've still got plenty up those long sleeves. So you go home. Leave the intelligence to the professionals, be glad you've still got your heads on your shoulders, and don't go asking anyone any awkward questions. You are way out of your league here. Clear?"

Neither Jacob nor Veronica answers.

"I'm sorry. He was a good man. He loved Africa. And not in that let's-fix-it way most white folks get when they come here. He loved it for what it is. More than I can say." He takes one last look around the lava field. "Come on, let's head back. Be dark soon. Strick's made arrangements for you both to fly out tomorrow, collect your shit in Kampala, then fly back to New York. First class, on the government dime. Enjoy the ride. I figure you've earned it."

* * *

Veronica can't sleep. Partly because she can't find any position that doesn't aggravate one or more of her blisters and bruises and wounds. Mostly because she can't stop thinking.

Veronica knows she should go home. It is the right thing to do, the safe thing. The idea of staying is crazy. She can be on an airplane out of Africa tomorrow. But an airplane to where? She has no idea where home is any more. The black hole that was her marriage consumed her career and most of her friends. The whole point of coming to Africa in the first place was to forge a whole new life for herself.

Eventually she gets up and goes for a walk, makes her way down the walkway to the patio, careless of the pains that stab through her feet. A warm breeze wafts through the night air. Occasional airplanes groan along the flight path directly above the hotel. To the north, a livid crimson glow hangs in the night sky, emanating from the summit of volcanic Mount Nyiragongo; red light burning from a sea of molten rock seething within an open crater. Prester was right when he called it Mount Doom.

She supposes she should feel miserable. She's gone through unspeakable horror, been wounded and traumatized, and now she's supposed to abandon her new life. But standing here, in this surreal, cinematic place, breathing the night air of Africa, Veronica feels strangely jubilant. She came so close to death that every breath now seems a precious gift. She feels as if some kind of shell has been burnt away from her, leaving her lighter and freer, even younger. The downward spiral of her life during the last year, the divorce, her return to relative poverty, her inability to cope with life in Africa – these things all seem so trivial now. She's young and healthy and alive. That's all that matters. Not a divorce from a man she never really loved.

Danton. Derek thought, and Prester thinks, that her ex-husband was somehow involved in her abduction; that he was the partner of a corrupt American intelligence agent in the Uganda embassy who knew that the interahamwe smugglers were harbouring Islamic terrorists, and who ordered the capture and murder of Derek, and anyone unlucky enough to be with him in Bwindi, before Derek discovered too much. But the more Veronica thinks about that theory, the more it sounds both crazy and wrong. There's just no way Danton would have been involved in anything like that. Either Derek was just plain wrong about Danton - or there's something else entirely going on here. But what could that possibly be?

She shakes her head angrily. It shouldn't matter what Danton is doing. He's not supposed to be part of her life any more. Seven years of her life wasted, and now these seven days of horror, and the awful death of a man she could have fallen in love with. Except it seems even Derek was only interested in her because she was Danton's ex-wife. It feels like that's all she will ever be for the rest of her life. Especially if she goes back to America.

Veronica can't think of any reason to go back to America. There's nothing waiting for her there. It would feel like surrender. She came to Africa to reinvent herself. Just because she went through one awful week of torment doesn't mean she has to abandon that dream and go home to whatever squalid life awaits her in America. She can stay here now, she's sure of it. Life in Kampala will be a breeze after this week. She's taken the worst Africa can throw at her, and she's still standing. She doesn't have to give up now just because everybody assumes she will. That's just another reason not to go.

* * *

The sun has not yet risen over Rwanda when Jacob and Veronica arrive at the helipad just outside peacekeeping headquarters. Strick shakes their hands goodbye while the bored-looking Indian UN soldier inspects their orders.

"Don't take this the wrong way," Strick says, "but I don't ever want to see either of you again. Go home and don't come back."

He turns and walks away before they can respond. The Indian officer hands them back their paperwork. Veronica was surprised to receive actual military orders, on an A4 sheet with her name and new passport numbers printed beneath official UN and MONUC logos, along an official UN boarding pass, a brand-new passport good for one year, a first-class British Airways ticket from Kampala to JFK via Heathrow, and five new twenty-dollar bills in an envelope labelled "per diem."

"Wait," the Indian soldier says, and directs them to a gaggle of troops, all of them Indian too, sitting crosslegged in the shade of the nearest big white helicopter. Jacob and Veronica join them. Strick drives away in his Jeep. Two soldiers in a blue beret appear with a plastic bag full of still-warm chapatis and a samovar full of sweet Indian chai. They eat and drink gratefully. The soldiers look at them sidelong but do not otherwise interact with them. Veronica supposes she and Jacob must look somewhat grotesque; her head is still bandaged, and they are both moving stiffly and covered by scabbed-over cuts and scrapes.

Eventually an officer stands and begins to bark loud orders in Hindi. The Indian peacekeepers climb in and begin to strap themselves into the fold-down seats around its cargo area. After a few confused moments Veronica and Jacob join them. The seats are surprisingly comfortable. The cargo space is full of all manner of boxes, crates, and bags, enough for a small truck, all tied down with netting. There are about forty passengers. Only a few seats are left folded up and unoccupied.

"I wish we could have said goodbye," Veronica says. They tried, but Tom, Judy and Susan were still under sedation.

Jacob nods.

"Are you going back to Canada?"

"No."

"I'm not going back either."

He looks at her, surprised. "Why not?"

"Because I don't want to."

Jacob doesn't say anything.

"Are you still going to try to find out who did it? After what Prester said?"

He says, simply, "Yes."

The pilots are the last to board. Doors are closed, interior lights come on, the engine shudders into life, and the big chopper's two rotors begin to spin. A peacekeeper gives Veronica and Jacob earplugs. Even with them it is soon too loud to think. The rotor above them becomes a translucent blur.

The world wobbles for a moment, and then the ground falls away. Veronica's stomach lurches, but after the first few dizzying moments, the flight is surprisingly stable. The sides of the helicopter are open and she can see Goma to the north, divided by the jet-black lava field that snakes in an unbroken line up to smoldering Mount Nyiragongo. On the other side lies placid Lake Kivu. Veronica thinks of what Prester said about the tons of lethal gases trapped in that lake, how it too is a killer. She is glad to be leaving. She reaches out and takes Jacob's hand, and he squeezes hers comfortingly.

They fly north, between two of the spectacularly jagged Virunga peaks, and over a sea of rolling hills. At one point they pass right over a particularly deep and dense patch of green, and Veronica sucks in breath sharply. Beyond the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest a red lacework of roads begins. The helicopter continues east above the roads and emerald hills of Southern Uganda, and then across the huge blue expanse of Lake Victoria, so vast that water is all they can see in every direction for some time. It takes them about an hour to reach Entebbe.

Kampala's airport is an enormous field of tarmac dotted by buildings, airplanes, and vehicles. They land on the military side of the airfield, and the helicopter powers down. The soldiers allow Veronica and Jacob to disembark first. Strick told them that a Jeep would take them to customs and then Kampala, but nobody seems to be waiting for them.

"Military efficiency," Jacob mutters. "Hurry up and wait."

They sit in the shadow of the huge helicopter and watch their fellow-passengers file across the tarmac to one of the long, low buildings on the periphery. Peacekeepers walk and drive up to and around the helicopter, load and unload cargo. They hear the white-noise scream of a jet taking off on the other side of a huge hangar. Veronica feels like an ant who has found her way into the innards of some vast and incomprehensible machine.

At length she says to Jacob, "Listen. I don't think you should get any more involved in this." She knows he doesn't want to hear it, but feels like she has to try. "Prester was right. It's too dangerous. You're not, you're not trained for this. Think about it. I mean, rationally. You're an engineer. All this crazy stuff, spies, Al-Qaeda, smugglers, war criminals, genocidal killers - I mean, no offense, but honestly, Jacob, what do you think you can really do except get yourself in more trouble?"

He smiles darkly. "More than you might expect."

It sounds like empty bravado. Veronica shakes her head and looks away.

"More than anyone expects, now that Derek's gone."

She blinks and turns back. "What do you mean?"

Jacob says, "I mean there's a reason Derek asked me to come to Uganda. Just like there was a reason he invited you to Bwindi. I'm not here just because he wanted my smiling face around. I'm here because he knew what I can do."

"What can you do?" Veronica asks, curious despite herself.

A Humvee pulls up beside them, driven by an Asian man, maybe Filipino, in a military uniform.

"Tell you what," Jacob says. "Come by my place sometime and I'll show you."