Curds and Whey Box Set

by G M Eppers

  “You’ll tell her yourself,” he said. I could tell he didn’t believe it, and I saw his lower lip tremble.

  I spoke very low, breathlessly, trying to ignore the headache I’d developed. “After…it’ll be up to you to get everyone out of here. When stuff goes down, there’s going to be confusion. Use it.” We spoke like two spies in a movie, without eye contact or recognition. The guerrillas would think we were both talking to ourselves.

  Gold Tooth still looked suspicious, but he pointed to me, then stood back while three guerrillas entered the cage to get me. It was hard to resist resisting. One grabbed each of my upper arms and lifted while the third observed. Outside, at least thirty of them had rifles pointed at the cage. I went as limp as I could until I cleared the cage, then pretended to find my strength and dignity along with my footing. I was hoping they would let go of my arms if they saw I was cooperative. Their grips loosened, but they didn’t let go.

  I walked with them toward the far end of the table, where I deliberately tripped on my own feet, ramming my hip into the edge of the table as violently as I could. There would be a bruise, if I lived long enough for it to form. The end of the table teetered enough to send the field kit to the ground behind it and the disruption caused the two holding me to let go. I heard the clicks of rifles being cocked and help up my hands in surrender. Pointing to the fallen kit, I said, “Let me pick that up for you, okay?” I mimed picking it up and putting it back on the table.

  Yes, it seemed like an odd request and they didn’t really know what to do with it. Without making any sudden moves, I bent down to get the field kit. I was lucky. It had upended and items had fallen out, among them the syringe in a little plastic bag. Quickly, I pocketed the syringe in the bag and tossed everything else back into the kit, the tabletop blocking their view of my activity. It only took a few seconds, then I straightened up, placing the hastily packed kit back on the table. Using the table to support myself, I mostly feigned a dizzy spell and more exhaustion just to make sure they didn’t change their minds about their choice of victim. It wasn’t hard. I knew I was beginning to feel the effects of heat exhaustion. The two guerrillas grabbed my arms again, holding them tight, and up away from my body, while the third berated them for their ineptitude. He pointed into the jungle and clapped his hands twice. Hurry up. Let’s get this death on the road. And they took me into the jungle.

  Chapter Three

  We were barely into the jungle when the weather finally broke. I still had a headache, but the fatigue and other effects of heat exhaustion were alleviated by first the shade provided by the canopy, and then the wonderful rush of water coming down in sheets. The guerrillas didn’t even hesitate. They were used to the sudden rain showers of life in the jungle. They did tighten their grips on my arms even more, avoiding the slippery when wet that I’d been hoping for. They kept my arms horizontal to the ground, almost carrying me rather than guiding me through the jungle. Only the very tips of my toes touched ground, but not enough to get traction for a surprise assault. At the moment, I didn’t mind. The rain was glorious. But I had no chance to reach for the syringe.

  We walked for about ten minutes. Even with the guerrillas, progress through the jungle was slow, impeded by uneven ground and tightly packed trees. We went maybe a mile when another clearing appeared, just as the rain slowed. It was smaller than the compound. Wooden benches formed most of a circle, with the last part of the arc formed by a table with a chair on each end, bordered on the outside by a line of tall trees. Not a long table like in the compound. This one was pretty much square, but still built crudely out of tree parts. The legs of the crude furniture still had bark on them. On the far side of the table sat a woman, blonde, and now very drenched, her hair slicked against her cheeks. She seemed unperturbed by the rain, but only because her mind appeared to be elsewhere. There was terror in her eyes. Her hands, on top of the table, trembled.

  The guerrillas took me to the near end and sat me in the chair. Other guerrillas took up seats on the benches, and I saw money changing hands as they spoke to each other in a jumble of grunts and guttural sounds, making gestures and spreading various numbers of fingers.

  As the rain finished in dribs and drabs, I looked down at the table in front of me. Puddles of water were tinged pink and there were small pieces of something white in them.

  The blonde didn’t look at me. “Hello,” I said.

  My greeting earned a spattering of applause, more indistinguishable comments, and another round of betting.

  “I’m Helena. What’s your name?”

  “Her name is The Luckiest Son of a Bitch on the Planet.” Emerging from the jungle behind her was a black man I hadn’t seen in the compound. His hair and beard were longer than any of the others, ragged, and far more salt than pepper.

  “You speak English.” He looked familiar to me, but as if I’d seen him much younger. Mentally, I tried to take the years off, but it wasn’t coming.

  “Oh, yes. Very good English.”

  In a flash, it came to me. I’d seen his picture for years on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Ima Badassi, pronounced EEMA BUDAHZEE, he was suspected of being the mastermind behind any number of terrorist attacks around the world. His beard dripped from the rain into the puddles on the ground, but it would all dry soon. The sun was coming back out already. I wondered if I would be alive to see it dry again. “Ima Badassi,” I said.

  He bowed low, grinning. “I see my reputation precedes me.” His reputation preceded CURDS, it preceded the OOPS. He’d had a long and illustrious career. “Her name is Susan, if you must. She was only the third picked, and has won four matches in a row. I can’t take her away. My men are all excited,” he waved to indicate the guerrillas sitting on the perimeter benches. Wagering was still going on.

  Matches? I thought. I looked at the setup, and though I didn’t see a gun, we had heard a gunshot. This was a game of Russian roulette. I was sure he would supply the weapon in good time. I decided to take a stand. Without waiting for approval, I rose and went over to Susan, squeezing between the edge of the table and the trees. I heard rifles being raised and bolts being pulled, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Badassi raise a hand to halt them. My move was unusual and had sparked his curiosity. I knelt next to her, keeping the table between me and the guerrilla audience. Susan was still shaking, in the midst of a nervous breakdown, possibly heading into shock. With my left hand, I stroked her hair gently, shushing her, trying to soothe her. There didn’t seem to be any real response. With my right hand, I fumbled in my pocket to remove the syringe from the bag without jabbing myself. The needle did catch in the denim briefly, but I got it into position.

  I looked over at Badassi, who was watching me. He was almost insulted by my compassion. “You are too sensitive…” He hesitated, not knowing my name.

  “Helena,” I said, the syringe still in my hand, held low, hidden by my palm.

  “Helena,” he repeated. “I like to learn the names. You just missed Edward. Before that was Robin, and before that, Prajenko. Would you like the whole list?”

  “No.”

  “Return to your seat, now. We must begin.”

  “No.”

  He raised a bushy silver eyebrow. “You don’t wish to play?”

  “I give you my word. I will play your goddamned game. But not with her. She’s been through enough.” Such a statement created a nice little stir. “Take her back to the cage. Take anyone else, but let her go back. Please!” As I spoke, I stuck the needle into Susan’s thigh. She was too traumatized to notice. I pushed the plunger, dropped the syringe, and used my knee and the process of getting up to grind it into the moist dirt. With one hand on the back of her chair, I repeated. “Take. Her. Back.” I had wanted to get assurances from Badassi before doing the injection, but I was worried they would act too quickly and I wouldn’t have a chance. Now I worried that their response would be to simply kill her outright. The signal was delivered, but I didn’t want it to cost Susan her life.
Someone returning would also boost morale in the cage. I wanted that for them. They were going to need it.

  The men on the benches started arguing. I wasn’t sure they really got my meaning, but they knew something was different.

  Badassi, speaking to the open air, explained the situation to his colleagues. Some of them threw money at the ground, one of the benches was overturned. The idea was clearly objectionable.

  “Look at her! She couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn anymore. What’s the sport in that?” I knew I needed more. “She’ll recover enough, in time. You could bring her back later. An encore performance.” Suggesting it even hypothetically seemed cruel, but I had to convince him to acquiesce. “The Return of Susan. Too bad you don’t have a marquee.”

  There was a moment of quiet, broken only by a few birdcalls.

  “You will play? Willingly?”

  “Yes. I gave my word. Tell me. Is your word as good as mine?”

  Another moment of quiet, but I had him. He raised a hand in a wordless command.

  I turned to help Susan get to her feet. I wasn’t sure if she could hear me, if she could understand me, but I said quietly, “Tell them help is on the way.” By the time I’d finished the sentence, two guerrillas stepped up and grabbed her by the arms. A third followed them out of the clearing. I couldn’t avoid glancing at the pink puddles on the table as I returned to my chair, trying to appear calm, wondering who they would pick to replace Susan. Probably Iris, but it didn’t really matter. I didn’t care who they brought back. When I got my turn with the gun, I was going to point it at Badassi.

  At the moment, Badassi was busy trying to squelch an insurrection. There were loud objections shouted from the benches, some standing up for emphasis, and although all of them wore firearms no one would dare draw them against Badassi. He shouted back at them, there was a bit more of back and forth before they grudgingly settled back to their seats.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve caused a problem between you and your men,” I said.

  Badassi paced slowly, patiently. “A mere disagreement. They’d grown quite fond of Susan. I explained that it would be a new game with a willing participant.” While he spoke, I noticed more wagering and negotiating going on as some money was returned and new bets were made. But their disappointment still showed. It was not as thrilling as betting on a proven champion, even if the title involved no skill whatsoever.

  I tried not to see them. Tried not to be aware of what was happening. I needed to engage Badassi. “So is this where you tell me everything because I’m about to die and I deserve to know why?”

  His pacing turned him away from me. “You watch too many movies, Helena.”

  “Then maybe I should tell you everything.” I sat sideways in the chair so that not even my peripheral vision would show me the pink puddles. “Some years ago, at least ten, maybe fifteen, long before your beard even thought of turning gray, you stumbled on a chemical we now call The Additive. And, probably by accident, you discovered that adding it to cheese and letting it ferment created something that would rival the highest priced methamphetamine on the market. When the American president at the time blatantly announced that food safety regulations would be slashed to pay for yet another tax cut for billionaires, you saw an opening. With American trade came pathways into nearly every other country on Earth.”

  He stopped pacing and faced me.

  “It was too good to pass up. You contacted your investors, and started producing New Cheese, creating shell companies to make it look like individual start-ups and telling the Congressmen you owned to promote it as the next big dairy innovation. It took hold quickly because it was designed to take hold quickly. Anything slower and your customers would die before they had a chance to spread the addiction. In the meantime, you raked in hundreds of millions of dollars. You were on Easy Street. And then the unthinkable happened.”

  He took a step toward me, as if he were going to stop me, but the audience here didn’t understand me anyway. For all intents and purposes, it was just the two of us. “Unthinkable?”

  I took a breath, making him wait. “Your candidate lost the election. Despite all the money you no doubt spent on negative campaigns, all your bots invading social media, all your paid-for politicians rigging their local voting booths, Richard Dacto won the election. He had campaigned on world peace, which was bad enough, but he also promised to act aggressively to combat the Offensive Obstruction pandemic, and because it was worldwide by then dozens of other countries supported that agenda. It was exactly what you didn’t need. Too much digging and your tainted cheese would be discovered. So you sent one of your men, Amadi Obeseki, to kill President Dacto before he could do any of that. You counted on the confusion resulting from the assassination to buy you time to hide. You probably shredded some files, deleted emails, and slid into the woodwork so that when New Cheese was identified as the cause it couldn’t be traced to you anymore.”

  “That is all speculation.”

  “True. I’ll admit that I…we have no proof. In fact, I’m not sure anyone else has reasoned this out. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, though. Once Uber was identified, you found a way to use that, too. I’m not sure if Cheese Club was your idea or if you stole that from someone else, but it made for the perfect setup. You and your guerrillas can easily gather all the cheese you want in Africa. There isn’t enough oversight. Everyone knows that. So you supply clean cheese to the retail outlets and surrender some of the Uber like good little boys to keep law off your back, and make a literal killing with unidentified cheese for thrill seekers, the kind of people who swim with sharks, jump off cliffs, and put Snuggle in their Downy Balls. You hid the main operation in the Congo, where no one ever looks. This must have gone on for several years, growing a little at a time.

  “Then one of your suppliers got cold feet. Patrick O’Shea at Begorah Farms didn’t want to deal with you anymore. He wanted to go legit and took the commission from President Glenarrow for the Big Block of Cheese. He probably was threatening to expose you if you caused any trouble with it, so you had him killed. Probably one of these goons here went to Ireland and did it for you. Then his wife tried to contact authorities, so you killed her and your operative burned the farm down to destroy the evidence. Trevaughn Dunleavy was just a thrill seeker, a member of Cheese Club, a perfectly good red herring to keep us busy while you covered your tracks and high-tailed it out of Ireland. It was probably your guys who shot up that car to scare us, and one of your guys who stuck the notes under our doors that led us to the Smoky Flue. You thought we’d get Dunleavy and then leave.

  “How am I doing?”

  He shrugged, openly confident of his safety. “Does any of it matter? You can’t contact anyone. You and all your friends will take turns in our little game and die here. If your CURDS people send more, it will be the same for them. The cost is too great. They won’t keep it up, then we can go back to being entertained by the pygmies. The operation goes on and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Who sabotaged the plane?” It was a big move taking down the CURDS3. A big payoff, true, but still very risky. A plane in a fleet of three is going to be missed. Had they known about the Caravane or did they just get lucky?

  “You don’t know him.”

  Well, there was a confession. I wish I’d been wearing a wire. Did I have room in my HEP belt for another pocket? A recording device might come in handy, but then there’s batteries, and they aren’t as durable as the Glock and the other tools. Such a device would get damaged in a real fight. I could look into it, though, assuming I got out of this alive, which I wasn’t really expecting to. At least I knew the truth. There was a chance that one of the others had figured it out, too. Billings, perhaps, or maybe Sylvia if she stopped worrying about the artificial eye. But they didn’t have the last piece of the puzzle. They didn’t know Badassi was here in the jungle, and I couldn’t be sure Susan would be able to tell them.

  I didn’t have any more ti
me to go over the possibilities. There was some rustling of leaves as the guerrillas returned with their next victim.

  They carried her by the arms, like they had me, forming an iron cross that barely touched the ground. When they got well into the clearing, they put her down and faded into the jungle, but we knew they were watching. Just because we didn’t see any little red dots didn’t mean there wasn’t anything aimed at us.

  “Hello,” said Badassi. “What is your name?”

  I answered for her. “Diane.” The name Dinny wasn’t for this guy. That was just for us. He would not know her by that name.

  Dinny gulped visibly. She got a good look at him and I saw the light bulb turn on, but she said nothing. Her eyes took in the scene, me, sitting at the table, an empty chair on the other side, the men on the benches. New shouts and more money getting passed around. I gave her credit for not vomiting in fear.

  “Now we can get on with this. We’ll be losing the light soon, and my men like to see.”

  From a holster hidden under his loose pant leg, he pulled out a Ruger, with a polished chrome barrel and a handle wrapped in black leather. I sucked in air. That thing looks small, but fires a .357 cartridge. It holds five bullets, each with the capacity to remove most of your head. While I watched from my chair and Dinny watched standing inches away, he made a show out of demonstrating the empty cylinder. He even let Dinny look inside it, spinning it slowly so she could see all five chambers. Well, “let” isn’t the right word. He pulled out a single bullet, lifting it in the air so we could both see it before he dropped it into the cylinder and spun it around.

  Dinny got the idea.

  He spun it again, motioning with his head that she should take her seat across from me. I wondered idly how he would determine who went first.