“Okay.” Gaffney stepped into the mix. “Think of it as... an exploratory conversation so that we know how best to direct our questions.”
“Absolutely not,” Kaahin said. He despised the thought of sitting here for a second longer than necessary, and tensed now that these cocaine cowboys were stalling for time. “I know the details you want,” he added. “You will have more honesty than your American audience can handle.”
“Oh, no, no, no. We don’t want any of that, big guy.” Hudson tapped his chest. “Where the hell are my cigarettes?”
Alzir appeared tableside and opened the briefcase to reveal a remote deposit device. It looked like a laptop with an oversized keypad on the screen, but spoke only in savings account numbers and dollar amounts.
“As soon as payment clears,” Kaahin said. “We can get on with it. The questions only.”
“We... really need that pre-interview,” Hudson said. “Standard stuff and believe me, it’s mutually beneficial.”
“Explain.”
“We need to know what’s off-limits. Things you’d rather we not discuss. This piece... well, it’s important to us that both parties are equally happy with it.”
“I think it is maybe a good idea,” Kaahin said. Right up front he told them some things were forbidden. They were to know nothing of his wife and children (he referred to them as “details”). They could not ask him to implicate anyone else by name. Not the politicians he greased, or the local law enforcement officers who secretly worked for him.
On the other hand, he was comfortable speaking at length about his upbringing. Time on the police force, and how he started out hunting pirates before realizing he was on the wrong side of business. And that law enforcement was an illusory construct designed to keep people controlled.
“One thing we really want to know more about,” Hudson said, trading nervous eyes with Gaffney, “is what happened to the Blue Planet?”
The producers watched him then, desperate to know if he knew.
Kaahin did know.
Blue Planet was a tourist ship out of Fort Lauderdale that had made its way into international waters in order to shoot an amateur orgy. An entire ship of westerners. Kaahin and his men were glad to take it. Sailed it to the Port of Jebel Ali and cashed in.
Fourteen girls.
Millions of dollars.
Six years later and no one was wiser. He’d been bankrolling his operation off that bounty ever since. And nobody outside his skeleton crew had known for sure what really happened to that ship.
But these guys seemed to know.
Gaffney perhaps thought they shouldn’t have asked. It was too late, though. The room was forever tense. “We just wanted to ask,” he said. “You can search fifty different websites and there’s fifty different theories on the fate of the Blue Planet.”
“It is not my problem.” It was Kaahin’s turn to watch the men. They shifted. Cleared their throats. The tip off was Hudson. The longer Kaahin watched him the more he realized the man’s eyes were not remotely dilated. And that he suddenly stopped sniffing entirely.
Gaffney told them the popular theory was that the Pirate King had done it, and so they just had to ask.
Sure, Kaahin thought. But that wasn’t it. He’d been careful to pin that job on the Somalis because he knew the abduction of fourteen western girls would be the kind of thing that the United States would initiate nuclear war over. So it was him and four men, the ones he’d known since boyhood, chasing down the party boat on rafts, shooting rifles into the air to startle them into submission.
It hadn’t taken much.
But if these men were curious about that, then they were not who they claimed to be. And that evidence was mounting.
“Seriously, brother,” Hudson said, his coke gaze all but evaporated. “Tell us what happened to those girls.”
“If you want an answer to that question, you’d better fly three thousand miles east. Because you’re looking at the Somalis for it.”
“Somalia’s where we started,” Gaffney told him, surfacing from deep cover in order to reveal blazing eyes. “They like you for it.”
The rest happened in a matter of seconds.
Hudson’s hand blurred and his gun lifted high. Alzir was faster, his Desert Eagle already pointed at the man’s head.
Alzir never hesitated. He squeezed the trigger. The shot drilled through Hudson’s eye and sent him spiraling to the floor.
Gaffney tried screaming, but Cardiff’s men, the hotel employees, kept neutral. And kept out.
But then the sound of machine gun fire erupted in the hallway. Kaahin realized these men were CIA spooks and their pals had just engaged the hotel guard.
Gaffney gave the table a shove. It slammed against Kaahin’s ribs as he tried to stand. Bottles toppled, some of them breaking, as Alzir and Gaffney traded rounds.
CIA’s thoughts splattered the window in jelly red. Alzir put a hand to his side and grunted. “We must go.”
They waited by the door for a break in the gunfire. They swapped expressions of doubt, knowing that Alzir was about to stick his neck into the hall and risk getting his head shot off.
But the bullets never came. Cardiff’s men were gut shot and crawling around in puddles of their own blood. One man was barely upright, crouching behind a service cart and huffing adrenaline.
In front of the elevator, four CIA spooks were dead, sprawled and bleeding into the carpet. Two others hugged the walls, screaming for backup.
“The stairs,” Alzir grumbled. “But they will be waiting there as well.”
They moved as fast as Alzir could, trundling down ten flights and into the lobby. Three CIA spooks stood around the front desk and lifted their guns as soon as their targets spilled into the public square.
No time to worry about them. There were far too many tourists between them to give it any thought.
Kaahin dragged Alzir straight for the revolving doors, where they squeezed into the same compact space and wound their way through.
The sedan was still idling, but the windshield had been punctured with frantic bullet holes and the boy’s arm dangled dead against the driver’s door, fingertips dripping with fresh blood.
“The beach,” Alzir said, breathless and frail. He gave a forceful nudge that must’ve cost the last of his energy, because he nearly fell, and would’ve had Kaahin not draped an arm around him to keep him moving forward.
They rounded the curved side of the building toward the mounded sand beyond. Kaahin broke into a run while Alzir steadied himself against the wall and squeezed off a few rounds meant to discourage pursuit.
That was all it took to get the public screaming. Panicked bodies rushing in all directions, seemingly everywhere at once. Chaos as Kaahin rushed straight for the water.
Speedboats on the horizon. One began moving inland. For a moment, Kaahin thought the CIA wasn’t taking any chances and was determined to cut him off by land, sea, and perhaps even air. He turned back and saw Alzir stumbling for the shallows, blood spilling into the sand around him.
And behind Alzir, the CIA lobby spooks struggled to take aim in between the rushing bodies.
Alzir fired off a few shots. His bullets struck passersby and sent them down into red sand. The spooks, now provoked, returned fire with equal recklessness, sending even more tourists crashing to the ground. Some of them flailing, crying in fear and disbelief, but many more of them permanently stiff.
Adding to the commotion was two uniformed men who came sprinting onto the scene from the other side of the street. Local law enforcement, clearly ignorant of the shadow op in their backyard, no idea who was who.
They trained their guns on the men firing into the crowd, dropping the Langley spooks with surprising precision.
Kaahin waded into the warm Mediterranean right up to his knees and kept going. Behind him, Alzir screamed, “Get to the boat!”
A gunshot cracked the sky and Alzir’s next order was severed mid-sentence. This as the boat c
ame slicing through the chop, swerving to its side.
“Poppa!” the driver cried. “To me!”
Kaahin had won the name Poppa from islanders who recognized his work. He didn’t particularly like the authority or responsibility it carried, but had learned to live with it. He launched into a full-blown breaststroke as he pushed hard to close the distance to the boat.
Hands reached down and helped him aboard. Kaahin caught a glimpse of Alzir floating face down in red water.
The boat zipped away from the chaos. Kaahin sat with his head in his hands in case any more bullets found him. What he really wondered was how he could’ve been so stupid. Was it hubris or sheer desperation that made him trust westerners?
“We are taking you home, Poppa,” one of the men said.
Kaahin did not recognize them in the slightest, but men did not call him Poppa unless they were islanders eager to be employed.
He tried to relax as he watched Algeria shrink into a line on the horizon. He did not like feeling this way, knowing he had barely escaped with his life. The hunters would never stop. Tomorrow there would be two more to take the place of the fallen.
He turned his attention back the other way, watching the distance through a squint. How eager he was to see Madagascar grow before him.
Two
At the start of the second full day of her honeymoon, Sara Mosby knew there was a problem with her husband.
He was missing.
Missing, at least, in that he had left this morning without telling her where he was going. Only that he “had to take care of a few things.”
On the first day, Sara had suspected Blake might have a few more surprises in store and would be skipping out for an hour or two. He’d hinted as much during the flight. But it was after sunset when he returned, drenched and filthy and refusing to say anything more about it. Only that she was going to love it, just wait and see.
Sara stretched across the plastic pool chair, marinating beneath the scorching African sun. On the small table beside her stood a plastic cup stained with the sticky remnants of whatever tropical drink she was on today. Her stomach had begun to reject the infusion of sugar and liquor.
In college, she took Jack Daniels straight. That was in the years before Blake. Blake couldn’t handle anything that wasn’t served with an umbrella. She might’ve adapted but those old habits... they were screaming to be set free.
Pools of sweat slid down her stomach like melted ice. She thought about going back to the room in order to get out of this heat, but she’d just come from there. All-inclusive resorts had ways of blurring time like that. Minutes bled into hours. Hours bled into days.
And the last couple of those were an absolute mystery. Blake’s uncharacteristic behavior twisted her guts into knots as she came to realize one simple truth.
I messed up.
Two white guys floated down the pool’s lazy river, double-fisting whiskey shots each time they glided past the bar. Sara ignored them during their first few passes, but was having a hard time overlooking their admiring eyes now.
Not that she would ever admit that. Four days ago, she stood at the altar at St. Balthazar’s, rambling off hand-written vows while the priest kept having to remind her, “Louder, louder for the grannies in the cheap seats.”
And now she was suddenly open to the idea of flirting with other men...
This was the first time since landing on Madagascar that her heart drummed with any excitement at all.
Blake had grown distant in a relatively short amount of time. They had eaten dinner last night at a faux Mexican restaurant, then stayed up late to catch a black Elvis impersonator before going back to their room where she expected to screw so loudly that the couple in the next suite would have no choice but to listen.
Only that didn’t happen. Blake climbed beneath the sheets and was snoring by the time she stepped from the bathroom in her lacy white lingerie.
A terrible start to their honeymoon, made worse today by Blake’s second disappearance. Sara had pressed him for information before he left, but he would only say that he was trying to surprise her.
It worked. She was surprised.
Sara clammed up while eyeing the newly minted rock on her finger.
Splashes as the guys lifted their torsos up and out of the pool, leaning heavy on contoured forearms. They were tanned and cut and every bit of their flesh glistened beneath shimmering water.
They gave her body a leering once-over.
Sara smiled and glanced away before her attention could be interpreted as interest. A twinge of mischief tickled her stomach. Her ring finger was suddenly heavier than a boulder. She looked again and caught their gazes. “Aw crap,” she sighed.
The potential suitors hoisted themselves in unison. Their arms bulged and glistened like their bodies had been oiled. The poolside’s sandstone got drenched as they strode over. They flashed hungry smiles and wore eager eyes that gave careful admiration to Sara’s dark brown skin.
Sara slid her Ray Bans down to the bulb of her nose and made no bones about admiring her view, especially the way their soaked bathing suits molded around certain shapes.
She was fine with being shameless about it since this was all a game. One she feared she wasn’t nearly drunk enough to play.
“My friend says that you have a man hiding around here somewhere.” The accent was thick French, and the way it rendered English made Sara’s eyes flutter to the back of her head. A sound like pure sex.
“Oui,” she giggled.
The other man’s English wasn’t as refined. Not that Sara would judge when she couldn’t speak a syllable of anything beyond her native tongue.
“I see him,” he said. “He is, how you say, a ghost.” He made a point of looking around the pool area, as if Blake was hanging back somewhere, just out of view.
“Maybe he likes to stay in his room,” Sara said. “Keep to himself.”
“Impossible,” the first man fired back. He wore the perfect amount of stubble on his face and Sara didn’t think she could tire of looking into his brown eyes that were mixed with swirls of frozen gray. Good bodies were nice, really nice, but faces, the eyes and smiles, were everything. “A beauty such as yourself should never be alone.”
“Who comes to a couple’s resort without their significant others?” Sara challenged.
“We are a couple,” the first man told her. He pointed to the man standing on the other side of her. “He is Jean-Philippe. I am Guillaume. And we would very much like to spend the afternoon with you.”
“Shit,” Sara said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to insult—”
“Is fine.” Jean-Philippe waved his hand dismissively.
“Okay,” Sara said, repeating, “Sorry. But... why would you want to spend time with me?”
Guillaume ran a hand through his hair, nearly posing as he enjoyed Sara’s gaze. “We like interesting company. And I do not see your man anywhere. That in and of itself is interesting.”
These guys were cut from marble, but Sara wasn’t so eager to explain herself to a couple of shower time fantasies. The sharpest glistening abs in the world couldn’t make up for their invasiveness. So she shuffled her body and sighed and turned her head away from their hungry eyes before answering, “I’m flattered. But tired.”
“We just think it’s a shame that someone brings a goddess to paradise and abandons her for wild zebras.”
Goddess? Sara laughed. Oh damn, nothing good would come from this. “Nice meeting you both,” she said and rose, gathering her things as they stepped away to afford her space. There was no real threat here.
Just persistence.
Guillaume and Jean-Philippe were not done thirsting. They gave gentle chase in the form of a hasty walk as Sara hurried down one of the twirling stone paths toward the building. They caught up to her just inside the lobby.
“Mademoiselle, please,” Jean Philippe said.
Sara shifted from one leg to the next. Cool air dried her suntan
lotion-lathered skin, making it feel like crusted, used sandpaper.
“We are sorry if we offended you,” Guillaume said.
“Takes a little more than that,” Sara sighed. This was getting lame.
“We only wish to buy you a drink.”
“And talk,” Jean-Philippe added.
“Drinks are free,” Sara said. “Sort of an empty gesture at a resort.”
“Don’t you tip?” Guillaume grinned. “I keep a handful of USD in my pocket at all times. Goes a long way here. Assuages my white guilt.”
“Right,” Sara said. “Don’t have much of that.” They laughed but she knew what he’d meant.
“Just a drink,” Guillaume said.
“Here’s why I’m thinking nah,” Sara said. “You just told me y’all a couple. I’m married too, so this isn’t going to be any kind of a hook up.”
“Of course not,” Guillaume said.
“Oh, of course not.” Sara crossed her arms and smirked when he appeared to be stumped.
“We would like to know you,” Guillaume said. “A memento of our trip, and yours. Friendly faces who would never have come into each other’s lives otherwise.”
“And you look bored,” Jean-Philippe said with a shrug. “Almost as much as I am.”
Guillaume perked up over this, but decided to leave his husband’s comment unchallenged.
“What if I like being bored?” Sara asked.
“Then we’ll talk about the weather,” Guillaume said.
Sara chewed her lip to prevent the smile.
“So... drinks all around?” Guillaume was confident that Sara was on the hook. His eyes told her there was never any doubt.
She didn’t like arrogance in men. But since she didn’t have to like Guillaume, she nodded. Said, “Okay, but not until I shower.” She wouldn’t keep any of this from Blake. If anything, this was a warning shot across his bow. Her husband was up to something, but he wasn’t talking. That enraged her.
“Let me get changed,” Sara told them.
“We could go with you, have bottles sent right up and—”
Sara pointed to the bar. “Meet me in there in an hour.”
The men smiled like the wolves they were.
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