I found myself in a similar predicament when John asked if I could book lodgings for a Kenyan contact passing through London who he needed to meet. Suspicious of everyone in these tense, early days, he preferred his visitor not to know where he was staying, which raised the awkward question of how to pay for the room. If the guest were to ask at reception who was covering his bill, my credit card details would give the game away. If I went to the bed and breakfast in person and paid cash, I risked making myself memorable by that very act. I rang my brother-in-law – same family, different name – and asked if he would mind charging a room in north London to his card. ‘Er, I could, but why can't you just pay for it yourself?’ ‘I can't explain why now, but there's a good reason,’ I muttered. ‘Well, if you're not going to tell me, I don't want to be any part of this,’ he said, turning unexpectedly priggish. The exchange made me scratch tentative plans to hand John's ‘hot’ computer to my in-laws for safekeeping. It was surprising how little you could get done, once frankness was ruled out.
And then there was the outright lying. The Kenyan government wasn't the only organisation trying to track John down. Even Kenyan bloggers momentarily turned amateur sleuths, swapping notes on their websites as to which London hotels had confirmed he wasn't a guest. There were calls from the BBC World Service, emails from Kenyan journalists who had caught a whisper of something in the air; an ambassador left cryptic messages on my answerphone, sending his best wishes to ‘our mutual friend’. Did I happen to know, the journalists asked with deceptive casualness, where they might get hold of John Githongo? It really was most urgent that they talk to him. He might be in possession of some very interesting information. As John pottered around in the background, doing his laundry and preparing his lunch – no macho African nonsense about him – I'd breezily debate his possible whereabouts and motivations with hacks I'd known for decades, hoping he wouldn't blow his cover by saying anything in that distinctive baritone.
In theory, I should have been pestering him for an interview myself. In fact, I held back. While I was clearly sitting on a fabulous story – Africa's Watergate, by the sound of it – sitting John down with a notebook and tape recorder would have felt like a cheap trick, his host joining the manhunt rather than offering the safe haven he clearly desperately needed. Perhaps a less noble instinct also lay behind my uncharacteristic discretion. In the world John had entered, it seemed, knowledge made you a marked man. Once I too knew whatever it was he'd learnt, maybe I would face the same predicament. I wasn't sure I was ready to catch that particular infection. So I mentally stored the nuggets of information that came my way, while allowing the overall picture to escape me. He talked of ministers, he mentioned a naval vessel, the words ‘Anglo Leasing’ came up repeatedly. But he never joined up the dots. I wondered, once or twice, what I would actually be able to say to the police if something sinister happened to him. I'd have no coherent tale to tell, and they would surely refuse to believe that an intelligent journalist, harbouring a political fugitive, had never bothered to fit the various pieces together.
Out on the street, I scanned black faces with a paranoid new attentiveness, trying to spot the undercover Kenyan agent attempting to blend in. But Camden has an awful lot of Africans living in it. From my new and wary perspective, almost everyone looked suspicious. At night I lay in bed, pondering how far the Kenyans might go. I was aware that I was thinking exactly like a character in a thousand Hollywood thrillers, but this fear was surely rooted in cold logic. I ticked off the various factors on my personal risk assessment. Did the material on John's computer have the potential to bring down a government? From the little he'd sketched out, yes. Were the reputations and livelihoods of Kenya's most powerful men – possibly the president himself – at stake? It seemed so. Did Kenya have a history of ruthless political assassination? Absolutely – I could reel off the names: Pio Pinto, Tom Mboya, J.M. Kariuki, Robert Ouko, Father Kaiser – and those were only the most notorious cases. Kenya had always been a venue for the well-timed car crash, the fatal robbery in which both gangster and high-profile victim conveniently lose their lives, the inquiry that drags on for decades and then sputters out without shedding any light on what had really happened.
Were the stakes this time high enough to be worth killing a man? Clearly, John believed so, otherwise he wouldn't have fled. So the only question that remained, from a selfish point of view, was whether the Kenyans would be foolhardy or desperate enough to try something on British soil. Which meant my flat. After triple-bolting my front door – I was glad now that I'd bought the most expensive lock on the market when I moved in – and slotting the chain into position, I'd fall asleep in the early hours, stressed and fraught. In my dreams, a huddle of burly figures in formless grey overcoats with blurred, dark, hatchet faces, battered their way in to shoot us both in our separate rooms.
In the morning, after a restless night, I'd wake feeling embarrassed by my melodramatic thought processes. If I was finding John's stay a bit of a psychological ordeal after only a few days, what must it be like for him? How had he endured the last few years, living with that anxiety day by day? Yet he seemed astonishingly cool. For the most part he ignored his collection of mobile phones as they constantly vibrated and shrilled. Occasionally he'd pick one up, disappearing into his room to hold a quiet, intense conversation in Gikuyu or Kiswahili. But usually he would just look at the display, check who was trying to make contact, then put the handset down. The one that rang with most persistence was his line to State House.
‘It's very interesting,’ he mused. ‘They haven't cut off my State House mobile phone. My safe in the office hasn't even been opened. And my secretary is still at her post.’
‘It's their way of telling you that you can still go back,’ I suggested. ‘They're saying,“It's not too late, the lines are still open.”’
Yet even by that stage, I had begun to recognise what constituted signs of stress in the Big Man. His booming, seemingly carefree laugh was the equivalent of most people's titter – a sign of tension, not relaxation. The more nervous he became, the more heartily he laughed. He wasn't sleeping well either – I gave him some of my sleeping pills when he mentioned the problem – and his mental fatigue was evident in his tendency to tell me the same things over and over again. His sentences were like ripples on the surface of a pool – they gave a hint of the thoughts churning obsessively in the depths below. I could guess what those might be: How on earth had it ever come to this? Was this the right path? Where did he go from here?
The best way of relieving the stress was exercise. John was the kind of dedicated workout enthusiast who knew which machine targeted exactly which muscle group. One of the first sorties we made from my flat was to tour the local area scouting out which gym had the best weight-training facilities. Working out – a three-hour process – was not just a hobby, he needed it, needed to feel the adrenalin coursing round his body if he was to stay focused and sane. Other men might have started working their way through my drinks cabinet, but my fridge filled up with cartons of fruit juice. John, iron-disciplined in this as in so many things, had turned teetotal during his time in State House, when he had noticed that winding down from a stressful week with a bottle of whisky had become a habit, and that the habit was becoming increasingly hard to break. It was typical of him that he wouldn't let himself slip back, not even now, when he had the best of excuses for needing the odd stiff drink.
His other recourse was religion. Having spent so much time in Britain, John had registered the scepticism, if not downright antagonism, of his European acquaintances when it came to matters religious. His Catholic faith was something he never talked about with his mzungu