The Zoo Job

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  But before the reverend could say anything, Amalia poked her head through the open doorway and spoke in a tight, annoyed voice. “Michael, the shipment has arrived.”

  “Excellent.” The reverend stood up. “Come, Dr. Onslow, you may help me inspect this shipment of insulin, yes? It’s a new supplier, and I’m not sure what to expect. Your expertise would be most useful.”

  “Of course,” Sophie said enthusiastically, masking her disappointment. Still, based on the conversation Amalia had had a few minutes ago, the filing wasn’t likely to get done anytime soon—worst case, she could volunteer to do it later on.

  The reverend led the way back down the corridor, accompanied by Amalia. The three of them were soon exiting the clinic. Several roads converged in front of the clinic, though calling them roads was perhaps giving them too much credit. They were very well-worn dirt paths, rendered somewhat flat by the constant pressing down of tires. The clinic had been built on top of a hill, and each road that moved away from it went down into jungle growth.

  Like much of this region of Africa, Malani basically had two seasons: rain and summer. The former kept the trees alive, and the latter was doing its best to kill Sophie as she stepped outside and felt the bright midday sun pound down on her. She was regretting bothering with the linen jacket that she was wearing over her sundress. Reaching into that jacket’s pocket, she pulled out a large pair of sunglasses.

  Two vehicles were parked outside the clinic. One was a lorry—it looked like an old army surplus vehicle—the entire lower half of which was covered in dirt, as were the bottom quarter of the side windows and the parts of the windshield that weren’t covered by the wipers. The lorry was surrounded by ten men. Six were in various types of civilian clothes—most of them looking like hand-me-downs—and each carried the same type of rifle. The other four wore black T-shirts and black cargo pants and were carrying different types of rifles. Behind the lorry was parked a black Escalade with tinted windows that looked like it was fresh off the lot. It, too, had dirt all over the tires, but only there and on bits of the rims.

  Eliot’s voice sounded in Sophie’s ear. “I don’t like this. Insulin shipments shouldn’t come with two sets of armed guards. One set makes sense, but there’s two separate groups here. The guys in black are carrying H&K MP5s. That’s standard issue for the Malani Army. The others are carrying AK-47 knockoffs that are all over the black market. I’m guessing the AKs are the ones guarding the insulin and the MP5s are here to take their cut.”

  Sophie nodded to herself. Eliot had confirmed what she suspected from looking at them. She regarded her companions. “Why is the military here to guard a shipment?”

  “An excellent question,” the reverend said sullenly.

  One of the men in black walked over to them. “Reverend, we are here to inspect the shipment, and make sure that this medicine meets government standards. Once we are satisfied, you may take custody of it.”

  Sophie watched as the soldiers removed the boxes of insulin from the lorry and placed them on the ground. The boxes were insulated to keep the insulin cold.

  She noticed that one box was noticeably heavier than the others. The soldier who unloaded it was not a small man, but had a bit of trouble with it, and needed assistance to carry it.

  Without even inspecting the box further, the first soldier came over to the reverend and pointed at that box. “We will need to confiscate that box. The others pass inspection.”

  The two soldiers carried the box to the Escalade and placed it in the boot. It was done with less care than you would expect for a box that was supposed to be filled with glass vials containing insulin. The men in black all piled into the car, then, and drove off.

  “That was—odd,” Sophie said to both the reverend and Eliot.

  The latter replied first. “I’m on it.” Sophie could hear him starting their rental car through her earbud. Her initial annoyance at his departing with their only vehicle was tamped down by the fact that she wanted to stick around the clinic anyhow.

  As for Maimona, he simply stared after the Escalade as it drove off.

  But Amalia did reply to what Sophie said: “We’ll be happy to explain what just happened, Dr. Onslow—as soon as you tell us what, precisely, you and Mr. Smith are up to.”

  Placing a hand on Amalia’s shoulder, the reverend gently said, “Enough, Amalia. Dr. Onslow, if you’d be so kind as to check the vials, please.” Then he attempted a smile, though it didn’t make it to his eyes. “Then perhaps I could interest you in doing some filing.”

  Sophie returned the smile. “I’d be delighted.”

  SEVEN

  Reverend Maimona’s clinic was located outside Malani City, at the intersection of several roads. It was a hub, truly, that interconnected Malani City with four other small towns, with the clinic servicing people from all five municipalities.

  Driving the Focus that he and Sophie had rented—and Eliot had made yet another mental note to strangle Hardison, this time for sticking them with so low performance and low clearance a car to drive through the uneven roads of Malani—Eliot followed the Escalade down the long road that went through the jungle, circling around Malani City toward Pequeño Lago. The road that had been cut through the jungle changed widths on a regular basis, though it had yet to be significantly wider than the Escalade.

  Eliot wondered which fat cat was getting the contraband in the insulin case. Malani certainly had no shortage of them; the diamond mines had been very profitable for a very long time.

  Not wanting to look like he was following the Escalade, he tailgated the vehicle for a while, performing a bit of what his old buddy Shelley used to call “vehicular sodomy.” When the road finally widened enough to allow him to pass, he shifted to the left and went around the large SUV.

  Gunning the accelerator—for whatever small increase in speed that “gunning” a Focus could accomplish—Eliot zoomed ahead until he was out of sight of the Escalade and on a particularly narrow stretch. Then he slammed on the brakes, skidding the car into position so it was completely blocking the road. Then he popped the hood, got out of the car, and lifted it, putting the bar in place to keep it open.

  Screwing a look of confusion on his face, Eliot stared at the engine block intently.

  The Escalade pulled into view a minute later, and slowed to a halt about four feet from the Focus.

  The lead soldier—the same one who’d told Maimona that he was confiscating one of the boxes—stepped out of the shotgun side of the Escalade. The MP5 was strapped to his shoulder.

  “You need to move that vehicle now.”

  Eliot turned to the man and spoke in a higher-pitched tone than normal. “Would if I could. Why you think I spent so much time trying to get past your slow ass?” He pointed at the perfectly functioning engine block. “The damn thing just seized up on me. I don’t suppose you know anything about cars?”

  The man snarled and turned toward the Escalade. Eliot’s Portuguese was a bit rusty, but he was pretty sure that he instructed one of the two soldiers in the backseat to come out.

  Thug One came out of the back, with Thug Two getting out the other side, pulling a cigarette out of a pack that was tucked into the sleeve of his T-shirt. The driver stayed behind the wheel.

  Giving Eliot a derisive look, Thug One stepped up to the hood. Eliot moved out of his way, putting himself between Thug One and the leader.

  Four guys, Eliot figured he could take them in half a minute.

  As soon as Thug One peered in to look at the engine, Eliot knocked the metal stand aside. The hood came crashing down on the back of the man’s neck while Eliot simultaneously delivered a spear hand to the leader’s throat, just below the Adam’s apple.

  Five seconds, and one was already down, with another in bad shape.

  The leader made a hkkkkk! noise and stumbled backward. Thug Two
was in the middle of lighting up, and he dropped both Zippo and cigarette while fumbling for his MP5. In the two seconds required for him to do both of these things, Eliot took one step and delivered a roundhouse kick to his face, his polished shoe colliding with Thug Two’s nose. Blood spurted from the proboscis, and Thug Two screamed and put his hands to his face.

  Eliot allowed himself a brief smile. No matter how much training you had, if a sensitive part of your anatomy got hurt, you put your hands to it. This left Thug Two’s belly free and clear for Eliot to deliver an uppercut to his solar plexus, which doubled the man over, adding an inability to breathe to his broken nose.

  Nine seconds, two down.

  Eliot Spencer had first studied martial arts as a boy, and he remembered the first teacher he ever had—a second-degree black belt named Senpai Clifford—who was explaining how you said different parts of the body in Japanese. The solar plexus, he’d said, was called suigetu, which he said literally translated into English as “the moon in the water.” And then Senpai Clifford told the story of a monkey who went up to a lake and saw the reflection of the moon in that lake. He grabbed for the moon, but his paw in the water ruined the reflection and made the moon disappear. After the water calmed, the moon returned, and he grabbed for it again—only for it to disappear again.

  That, Senpai Clifford explained, was why suigetu was the word for solar plexus—because if you’re hit there, you can no more catch your breath than the monkey can catch the moon on the water.

  Eliot suspected that Thug Two felt very much like that monkey right about now.

  The driver, seeing what was happening, fumbled with the door to get out, but Eliot was right there and he slammed it shut right on the man’s head.

  By this time, the leader had regained his professionalism, but he’d also stumbled back a few steps, which put him on the other side of the Escalade from Eliot. He raised his MP5 and came around, but Eliot was ready for him, grabbing the muzzle and pushing it aside just as the leader squeezed the trigger.

  A dozen or so rounds flew into the jungle as Eliot palm-heeled the leader in the left temple.

  The driver tried to open the door again, and this time Eliot back-kicked the door shut, knocking the driver back into the passenger seat.

  Before the leader could recover from his disorientation, Eliot elbowed his face, grabbed him by the back of his T-shirt, and slammed his head down onto the hood of the Escalade.

  Sixteen seconds. Three down.

  The driver tried once again to get out of the Escalade, and Eliot once again slammed the door, this time with his hands. Opening the door, he then reached in, grabbed the driver, and pulled him out of the SUV, turned him around, wrapped his arm around the man’s entire head, and waited for him to fall unconscious.

  Twenty-three seconds. Thug Two was still on the ground trying to breathe and keep all his blood from pouring out of his nose. Thug One was lying still under the hood of the Focus, and the driver was doing likewise on the ground in front of the Escalade.

  Eliot felt no pride in accomplishing his task. The thirty-second time frame was merely a goal, something to test his efficiency. He never felt any kind of pride in performing an act of violence. While he was the first to admit that it was sometimes fun—like when he coldcocked that self-centered jackass Andrechuk back in Boston—it was never pleasurable. Violence was a last resort, not a first one, and the number of times he’d had to use it was an incredibly depressing commentary on the world in general and the work he did with Nate Ford and the rest of the team in particular.

  Reaching into the still-open driver’s-side door of the Escalade, he unlocked the back door and then walked around to inspect the mystery box. It had a fairly simple, if secure, latch to keep it shut. Eliot unhooked it and raised the lid, feeling the cool air of the refrigerated box on his hands and face. Condensation burst out of the box and dissipated. Inside was a row of vials with a clear liquid in each, but the vials were less than half the height of the box, so there had to be another layer of them below it. There were handholds on either side of the container, so Eliot grabbed them and gently lifted the container out of the box.

  Setting it next to the box, he looked down to see, not another layer of insulin, but the pieces of what looked suspiciously like a Russian-built rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

  Putting a hand to his ear, he said, “Sophie, these guys are running weapons through the clinic.” He hesitated. “Well, a weapon, anyhow. This looks like the pieces of an RPG-32 buried under a pile of insulin.”

  Sophie just said a quiet, “Mhm,” which meant she couldn’t talk safely.

  “Not sure why they’re just moving one RPG—unless it’s a test run, seeing if the clinic’s a safe way to run them under the radar.” He put the insulin back in the box and relatched it. “But then, we can just ask Maimona when I bring this box back to the clinic.”

  Hefting the box, he brought it around to the back of the Focus and placed it in front of the trunk. Removing the key chain from his pants pocket, he clicked the trunk open and placed the box inside.

  After closing the trunk, he went over to the Escalade—kicking Thug Two in the solar plexus just to be on the safe side—and popped the hood. Lifting it up—it had a hinge that allowed it to stay up without a metal rod—he reached for the fuse box on the driver’s side, popped the lid, and yanked out the large brown fuse.

  Replacing the lid of the fuse box, he then closed the hood and pocketed the fuse. The Escalade was now the world’s most expensive roadblock.

  Moving to the front of the Focus, Eliot yanked Thug One out by his legs. The man fell to the road with a fwump while the hood clicked back into the locked position.

  With the Escalade blocking the road, Eliot had to continue straight to Pequeño Lago. But taking the scenic route would give Sophie more time to check the files and learn more about Maimona’s clinic.

  “I’ll be back in about two hours, Sophie. Good luck.”

  EIGHT

  NOW

  Nate Ford sat in the dingy bar in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, nursing a drink.

  He did not nurse it because he was attempting to remain sober at ten in the morning; he nursed it because it was a particularly dreadful brand of Canadian whiskey that Nate had never heard of—and just yesterday, he would have claimed to have known all of them. The notion of actually partaking of more than the one sip he’d managed to choke down filled him with a nameless dread.

  Nate had come to this southwestern New Hampshire town because it was the home of Belinda Morgan, one of the Brillinger Zoo’s board members. This bar on U.S. Route 202 seemed to be where she spent the lion’s share of her time.

  After spending a quarter of an hour in the place, Nate had to confess to having no clue why Morgan liked meeting people here. It was dark and dank, had an awful selection of liquor, and had an open floor plan that led to the worst kind of acoustics for having discreet meetings. If the place was full, it wouldn’t matter, but it was ten in the morning, and Morgan and the two people she was meeting with were half the bar’s current occupancy. Nate didn’t even need to plant a bug to hear what the three of them were saying.

  Not that they were saying anything of great interest. Morgan was active in her church, the two people she was meeting with were trustees of same, and they were discussing the upcoming calendar. The conversation was lively and wholesome, and escaped being the dullest thing in the world only by virtue of Parker having already found that with Steven Fischer.

  It would have driven Nate to drink if this bar served anything drinkable.

  “Nate, are you there?” It was Sophie.

  Touching his ear, Nate subvocalized so the rest of the bar wouldn’t hear him. “I’m here.”

  She and Eliot had filled him in before and during his journey to Jaffrey. Nate had told Eliot to hold off on returning to the clinic awhile longer, u
ntil Sophie could get more intel from the files.

  “I’m taking a break from filing. The system is—unique?”

  Nate chuckled. “In what way?”

  “I’ve had to guess where to file half these folders. However, I have managed to establish a few things. Reverend Maimona did sell the black rhinos to the Brillinger Zoo. I took photos with my phone of the letters they sent back and forth.”

  Hardison barged in on the conversation. “Wait, what? Letters? As in on paper?”

  “Typed on a manual typewriter, no less.” Sophie’s voice was dripping with mischievousness.

  “Don’t burst a blood vessel, Hardison,” Nate said with a small smile.

  “I can’t work under these conditions, Nate. How do I hack a manual typewriter?”

  “The point is,” Sophie said quickly, back to business, “that the black rhinos were a gift from a grateful client who had received an emergency appendectomy at the clinic. He offered two black rhinos for the clinic to use as they would, in a letter dated six months ago. The reverend sent a letter back asking if the gift was entirely legal.” Sophie’s tone changed a bit to what Nate recognized as her dry-wit voice. “The client’s reply was less than specific in that regard, but said that the reverend’s saving his life was worth any price.”

  Before Nate could reply, Hardison said, “An appendectomy saved his life?”

  “Medical care in Malani is abysmal under the best of circumstances,” Sophie said.

  “The best,” Nate added, “would’ve probably been under the Portuguese or King Lionel. I doubt General Polonia gives much of a damn about the health care of anyone past his ministers and his soldiers. So if someone lets a bad appendix get too far, it could burst and kill them.”

  “Damn,” Hardison muttered. “So Appendix Guy gave them the rhinos?”