Louise Doughty - Black Water

Amber and Wahid would arrive not long after him and Amber would make them all coffee while Harper spread the papers across his desk and turned his computer on to this thing called email that he still didn’t like, messages that took forever to fill the screen, line by line. It was, in his opinion, a lot less efficient than picking up the phone.

The local client base still worked mostly by phone and every day Amber was fielding more and more calls from companies wanting to know what was going to happen, what should they do? In February, the government announced a twenty-five-day ban on all street protest. Such bans always led to an increase in whatever activity they were trying to prevent. Amsterdam started to get twitchy: well, the clients started getting twitchy and that communicated itself to Harper and his team via Amsterdam. Harper advised that the large-scale companies, the important international clients, should sit tight. This kind of instability had been going on and off for years — Soeharto would never allow chaos on his watch.

‘Are you sure?’ Jan in Amsterdam kept asking. ‘Our credibility is at stake here. If things are going to go belly up out there, our clients want to be warned, they don’t want to get caught out.’ Nobody knew what was going to happen in Jakarta well in advance, least of all people who lived in Jakarta.

Then in May, something did happen: a protest at Trisakti University, four students shot dead. Later, they would call it the Trisakti Incident — but it wasn’t an incident when it happened, it was the army shooters getting trigger-happy after months of unrest and, possibly, just the beginning. Jakarta exploded.

That was when Amsterdam sent in Henrikson.

When it all kicked off, Harper was in his apartment, watching the riots on a small TV sheltered by the doors of a walnut cabinet opposite the brown leather sofa. He had been at home writing a report all day and only turned on the television that evening. The commentary complained of forces conspiring against the people as the camera showed a street where young men were aiming sideways kicks at shop fronts, flying it seemed, their bodies at improbable horizontals, and then suddenly, at the front of the screen, two women were laughing and rushing toward the camera, carrying something heavy between them. Harper sat upright, thinking for a moment they were carrying a human torso, then realised that they were struggling with a huge, frozen joint of meat, heavy enough to bend them double and threatening to slip from their grasp as they ran. They passed behind the cameraman and beyond them was revealed a man who lifted something and shook it in the air triumphantly. It looked like a plastic mop handle. Beyond him, there were the hurrying figures of a crowd criss-crossing the street, each person carrying something, and, dimly, beyond them, black smoke pouring out of a shop. This was what happened when you made people’s lives harder and harder: eventually, things got so hard there was nothing to lose. Why fear retribution when your life is a punishment already?

He picked up the phone and tried to get through to Wahid: he tried the office line but there was no answer, then tried him at home but his line was engaged. All this was going to make a nervous client base very unhappy — there had been stories of people fleeing to the airport and getting carjacked by looters on the flyover. Failing to reach Wahid, he wondered if he should check in with Amsterdam. Then he had another beer and went to bed.

He knew, as he turned off his light, that that was not what he should be doing: but he told himself that what was going to happen would happen, and the best thing was to get a good night’s sleep, then call Wahid for an update as soon as he woke up.

His pager went off before dawn. As soon as he heard the beep, he knew he had made the wrong call the night before. He called the office back home, as the message demanded. Jan — solid, unflappable Jan — was not happy. He wanted to know what the hell Harper was doing in his apartment, why hadn’t he gone straight to the office as soon as word of the riots got out? Why hadn’t he spent the night at the office on the phone? There had been an emergency meeting of the Asia Department, he told him. They were sending in an extraction team for the clients. It would be led by an Extraction Specialist, Henrikson.

Harper sat on the side of his bed, the room very dark and stuffy and the sheet clinging to his thighs. He was still sweating from the sudden awakening. ‘If there’s an extraction plan, I can arrange it,’ he said firmly. ‘We’ve got the contacts.’ Perhaps if he was adamant enough he could convince his boss the clients were being melodramatic and he had it all under control.

‘It’s a long time since you’ve had to organise anything like that.’

Why not just say it, Harper thought. I’m old. I’m unreliable. You don’t trust me to manage an emergency. ‘I’m on the ground, and I have Wahid to help.’ He wasn’t going to lose this battle without arguing back.

‘Henrikson will be on the ground too, later today. Wahid has booked the car from the airport, he’s going to check into Le Méridien first and he’ll be at the office for a briefing early afternoon. We’ve told the clients to prepare their staff.’

‘We’re going to need SUVs, lots of them, there’s no point in trying to be discreet, people are getting carjacked, that’s why I haven’t. .’

Jan was in no mood to acknowledge Harper’s expertise. ‘Wahid is on the case with transport. Henrikson will do security. Your job is to liaise between them.’

‘But this. .’ Harper began.

‘Give him all the assistance he needs,’ his boss snarled then, dropping any pretence that this was a collaborative discussion. ‘Don’t get in his way. You’ve been telling us for weeks to sit tight, well the clients won’t sit tight any longer and now we’re having to extract them in an emergency situation. They’re not happy and neither am I.’

Henrikson showed up at the office later that day, in chinos and a polo shirt, fresh from his power shower at Le Méridien. He was medium-height and medium-build, white, brown-haired — everything about him was medium. He looked like a man designed by a committee whose specification was someone who would never, ever stand out in a crowd. The committee had got one thing wrong though: the directness in his grey-eyed gaze. When he greeted you, it was obvious he was just a little too well trained to be real.

‘Henrikson,’ Henrikson announced, to each staff member in turn, shaking their hand and looking them right in the eye.

‘Henrikson,’ Henrikson said to Harper, and when he shook his hand, he placed the other hand on top, to demonstrate a special affection — but only briefly. He didn’t want to come across as creepy. Harper imagined his boss telling Henrikson, ‘Harper might be a little funny about you taking over there, he’s old-school, so just go in slow and get him on side.’

‘Well,’ Henrikson said, after he had greeted them all, lifting his hands a little either side of his body in an expansive gesture and letting them drop, ‘it’s so good to meet you all. I hear you’ve all been doing terrific work out here.’ Harper was reassured by the certain knowledge that every other person in the room had taken an instant dislike to Henrikson as well.

In Harper’s office, Henrikson sat the other side of Harper’s desk and nodded very sincerely while Harper went through their client list, telling him which ones had already left. When it came to diplomatic staff, each government’s special forces had dealt with their own people, of course, immediately after Trisakti. The remaining clients were all commercial. Priority was getting families out. They debated whether spouses should be discouraged from giving press interviews when they arrived at their airports in London or Sydney or New York. Nothing made a better news item than an attractive and distressed wife clutching a child in her arms and talking about burning buildings. The media adored a white, articulate refugee.