by Matt Rogers
He pushed himself to an all-out sprint, racing over the damp carpet, ignoring the dinghy lighting and the cockroaches on the walls and the awful aroma in the air. The bar was only one of many establishments in this sprawling complex, and Xu imagined it was probably the most savoury. He didn’t want to know what unscrupulous activity was conducted on the other side of these closed doors.
It didn’t concern him.
Neak concerned him.
He snatched at the back of the man’s shirt and seized a handful of it, but it was awfully difficult to slow someone down when both parties were moving at full-speed. Neak twisted on the spot and threw another wild haymaker of a punch behind him as soon as he registered the hand on his back.
This time, Xu didn’t have the perfect positioning to batter it away.
It caught him on the side of the head, and he grimaced as he sensed the considerable weight behind the punch. Neak was deceptively strong — Xu found that out when he lost his footing and gouged a giant chunk out of the plaster wall with his shoulder. He righted himself, got his feet underneath him, and kept sprinting.
Neak made a sharp left at the end of the corridor, racing into the turn with as much intensity as Xu had showed earlier. Xu followed suit, taking the blunt force of the impact with the far wall and attempting another lunging snatch at the back of Neak’s collar.
This time, his fingers latched onto it with ease.
As if the air had paused around them, freezing them in that moment in time, Xu sensed an opportunity he wouldn’t get a second time.
He took full advantage of it.
He wrenched down on the back of Neak’s collar, taking the scrawny guy off his feet with the change in momentum. Jimmy Neak had the strength of a manual labourer, but he didn’t have fight strength. He could almost certainly hold his own in a brawl, but against someone like Xu, who had trained their entire lives to physically dominate and subdue violent opposition, he didn’t stand a chance.
Then again, he didn’t need to.
On the way down, he reached into his jeans pocket and came out with the handle of a switchblade. Before he hit the damp carpet, he thumbed the side of the device and a razor-sharp blade shot out.
Shit.
The entire situation changed. Xu hadn’t even considered a fight to the death — not in these circumstances. Sure, he knew Neak might have been disillusioned and radicalised in the wake of his brother’s death, and that was what he’d come to Nigeria to investigate, but he hadn’t imagined the civilian deckhand would be more than ready to kill to protect himself.
It hadn’t even crossed his mind.
So he was slower than usual to respond. He saw the knife, but he didn’t quite put two and two together. The thought crossed his mind — what if young Jimmy is actually going to use that?
No.
Preposterous.
And then he did.
Neak crashed into the floor on his back, wrenched around the neck from behind by Xu, and a giant burst of air exploded out from between his lips, knocked out of his lungs. He went pale — maybe the impact had broken a rib — but he was in no way out of the fight. He wasn’t unconscious, or dead. And therefore he could utilise the haze of adrenalin and use his hands.
He thrust the blade at Xu with lightning quickness, and the serrated edge whisked past his face. On the thrust back Neak corrected course and managed to slice a thin line across Xu’s cheek. He felt the skin parting, sensed the warm blood already starting to flow.
He saw red.
The mission forgotten, he focused every ounce of energy on staying alive. A single incision along an artery and he would bleed out in this disgusting, musty corridor, alone, losing consciousness as the man underneath him escaped.
Not today.
Before he could stop himself, autopilot took over. He clamped two massive hands around Neak’s wrist and shook the limb violently. The switchblade wriggled free. Neak made a lunge for it, but Xu caught it by the handle and rammed it to the hilt into the centre of the man’s throat, accompanied by a gruesome squelch.
Jimmy Neak died on the spot.
4
Xu let the cold silence settle over the corridor before he even considered planning his next move.
It didn’t look good. Not in the slightest.
He released a long exhale, flashing a precursory glance in either direction down the hallway to make sure no-one had seen the incident take place. The decrepit surroundings proved as deserted as he thought.
Get rid of this first.
He got straight to his feet, wincing as he noticed the expanding pool of blood turning the carpet around Neak’s face crimson in a rapidly widening circle. The closest door rested only a couple of feet away. Xu crossed straight to it and knocked once, not bothering to wait for a response. As soon as he saw the bolt hanging halfway off the door, its hinges rotting in place, he thundered the sole of his boot into the centre mass of the wood and broke the entire thing in two.
A scene ordinarily reserved for bad action movies, but Xu had long grown accustomed to the power of adrenalin. White hot energy ran through his veins. He could have burst straight through the plaster wall if he’d wanted.
The room was empty. He didn’t have time to assess the contents, but none of it painted the owners in an angelic light. All manner of paraphernalia — some of it previously used — was spread across the grimy countertops. Dim light filtered in through the half-drawn blinds along the opposite wall, shrouding the place in gloom and shadow.
Perfect.
Xu didn’t care what kind of makeshift drug lab he’d stumbled across. If he wanted to cripple the drug trade in Lagos, he would have to hunker down in the twenty-million strong city for decades. Xu had bigger fish to fry. He snatched two handfuls of Jimmy Neak’s recently deceased body and dragged it over the threshold to the room, dumping it unceremoniously on the tiled floor of the filthy kitchen.
Crude work, but he only needed a few minutes to distance himself from the scene.
Then the body would be discovered by a passerby who noticed the caved-in door, or one of the drug lab’s occupants returning to work. It didn’t matter. By then Xu would be long gone, and the unresolved murder would fade into the cesspool of homicides that had plagued Lagos for as long as it had existed.
Xu frisked the corpse, coming up with nothing but a threadbare wallet and a disposable flip phone. Neak thought he was being smart when he purchased the junk phone, but the government had found it without much difficulty. He hadn’t switched phones the entire time he’d been conversing with the mystery party across Africa. He’d made calls to six separate junk phones, all contacted one after the other.
Amateur.
But Xu couldn’t point fingers. He’d just killed his only lead, and now he was going to have to explain it to his handler.
Great.
He tucked the phone in his back pocket and the wallet in his front pocket. Then he left the room as quickly as he’d entered it. Already, a second dark crimson pool had formed on the cracked linoleum. Xu made it back out into the deserted corridor and set off in the direction of the exit, keeping his head down. The murder weapon was tucked into his waistband, sandwiched between his hip and his belt. It was wet with death.
As he made it out onto the street, vanishing into the crowds that ebbed and flowed through the seaside dirt roads, he slithered a satellite phone with military-grade encryption out of his other pocket and auto-dialled a familiar number.
His handler, Lars Crawford, answered in seconds.
‘I have an idea,’ Xu said before Lars could say a word.
‘Sounds like you caused trouble,’ Lars grumbled. ‘You’d never start with that otherwise.’
‘Remember New York?’
‘That was four months ago. Of course I remember New York.’
‘I need to do the same thing here.’
Silence. ‘James…’
‘Look, there was nothing I could do.’
‘He was all we had. Yo
u killed him, didn’t you? I can hear it in your voice. You did something and there’s no repairing it.’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Oh, for fu—’
‘Lars,’ Xu barked, heading in the general direction of the ocean. A sea of civilians passed him by on either side, most of them conversing loudly over the incessant drone of motor vehicles in the distance. An assault of smells hit Xu’s nostrils — all of them pleasant. He was entering a market, passing stalls crammed with fresh produce and sizzling hot plates. A large portion of the civilians around him wore high-visibility vests or scummy overalls. There was a general atmosphere of exhaustion — seamen and labourers gorging on food after a long day’s work.
Xu was getting close to the docks.
‘Listen,’ he said, having cut his handler off mid-insult. ‘There was nothing I could do. He came at me with a knife.’
‘And you had to murder him? You couldn’t employ just a shred of training and subdue a fucking deckhand, for Christ’s sakes? You had to slaughter a civilian?’
‘He’s not a civilian. He ran away as soon as I mentioned Randall.’
‘Oh, so now he was running? You stabbed him in the back, did you?’
‘You want me to see this through to the end, or not?’
‘I haven’t decided what I want yet. And when I do, you’ll be sure to do it. Or it’s your career over.’
‘I thought you’d be a little more appreciative after what I did for you in New York.’
‘You’ve done great work. You always do. Which is why this pisses me off so much. I was counting on Neak telling us everything.’
‘He told me enough.’
‘To do what? What do you mean by a repeat of New York?’
‘I showed up at that townhouse not knowing a thing about the man I was impersonating. And I managed. I can do the same here.’
‘Where…?’
‘The freighter. He’s a deckhand, isn’t he? He’ll have friends onboard. Crewmates. I can get more information.’
Lars didn’t respond for a long five count. ‘James, you’re not setting foot on that ship.’
5
Lagos Port Complex
Four and a half hours passed, and James Xu set foot on the ship.
Two minutes after commanding him to get on the first flight back to the States, Lars had been interrupted by an underling. Flustered and out of sorts, he’d mumbled something about receiving new information and ended the call, promising to get back in touch with Xu at the earliest available opportunity.
Telling him to stay put until further notice.
Xu had conveyed his understanding, and then gone through with exactly what he was going to do the entire time.
Now deep in the shadowy recesses of the Apapa Port, he ducked through a gap between two Twenty-Foot Equivalent Units — the rectangular containers that made up the majority of the cargo transferred onto the enormous freighters — and came out at the very edge of the dock, facing a gargantuan merchant vessel that Jimmy Neak was scheduled to serve on as it made its journey to South America.
He knew he had the right freighter. Trouble would present itself if the workers granting him access to the giant ship knew what Jimmy Neak looked like. In fact, trouble would present itself regardless. He couldn’t imagine boarding the ship without being asked for some kind of identification, at which point his plan would be ruined. But as he eyed the grey storm clouds swelling on the horizon, and soaked in the sight of the massive freighter bobbing and straining against its moorings, he gulped back apprehension and realised he probably didn’t want his plan to work in the first place.
But he had to try.
In truth, he didn’t quite know what he was doing. A sneaking suspicion in his gut told him that the journey hadn’t ended with Jimmy Neak’s death. Xu had been sent to Nigeria to interrogate a single individual, but intuition told him it was bigger than that. The constant calls to a number of different countries across Africa. The untimely nature of Randall’s demise. The panicked reaction to Xu’s questions, and the subsequent attempt to flee.
This wasn’t the radicalisation of one man.
This was something more.
Something that involved the ship. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but his gut instinct had never been wrong before. He wasn’t about to doubt it now.
Neak had been unnecessarily cagey about the departure time of the vessel.
Sometimes, that was all Xu needed to barrel onward.
Overshadowed by the darkening sky, he strode for the freighter without hesitation. The massive container ship was the size of a small island, and Xu had to guess where he was supposed to board. He made up his mind and aimed for a distant stream of workers moving along a narrow gangway, dispersing across one stretch of the deck, sweeping in every direction for almost as far as the eye could see. Two official-looking men stood guard by the entrance to the gangway, eyeing each approaching worker and nodding them through to the freighter’s deck.
Xu recognised the fact that he probably wouldn’t make it past the first hurdle.
But he’d come all this way.
He was in Lagos, of all places. There was nothing to do but try. He hurried up to the pair with his shoulders hunched and his head down — people liked holding power over others. If he could give them the upper hand early, perhaps they’d be less inclined to make an example out of him. Maybe they’d let him on the ship out of pity when his plan no doubt fell to pieces.
‘Boys,’ he said, nodding to each of them in turn as he approached.
Up close, he realised it might prove more difficult than he’d been anticipating. One of the men was a hulking brute, a giant slab of muscle well over six feet tall with fat snake tattoos working their way up both his forearms. He had his arms crossed over his chest in comical fashion, but Xu wasn’t about to make fun of him. The man had accepted his receding hairline and shaved himself bald, revealing a giant brick of a skull.
The other guy was shorter, less imposing. He held a clipboard between his thin fingers. Despite his smaller stature, he had an air of perceived confidence about him. He was the smarts. The big guy was the muscle.
‘Name?’ the thin guy said.
British, Xu noted.
Not that it mattered.
He wouldn’t make it past this.
‘Jimmy Neak,’ he said as casually as he could muster.
‘Jimmy?’
‘James Neak.’
A guess.
But what else would “Jimmy” be a nickname for?
The British guy nodded and trawled a finger down the faded paper attached to the clipboard. He paused at a name for a couple of seconds, shook his head, and continued trailing down.
The big man watched wordlessly.
But there hadn’t been a visceral reaction to the name. No recognition, no befuddlement over someone who clearly wasn’t Jimmy Neak.
Just silence.
So Xu’s confidence began to build again.
As if on cue, the British guy flipped the page, stared, and nodded once.
‘Deckhand. Right. Off you go.’
He jerked a thumb toward the gangway.
Xu made to move past the pair, and the giant man seized him by the arm.
‘You deckhand?’ he said, his accent impossibly thick.
Russian.
Of course he is.
‘Yes,’ Xu said. ‘I’m the deckhand.’
‘There are many deckhands.’
‘Okay, well, I’m one of them.’
‘Why have I never seen you before?’
‘I don’t know,’ Xu said.
Jimmy, why has this man never seen you before?
‘When did you get contract?’ the big Russian said.
‘A few days ago,’ Xu said.
The British guy wandered his gaze off the clipboard. ‘Oh, you’re that guy. Captain brought you over. You weren’t scheduled for this ship. Why the hell did he go and do something like that, mate? What are you hiding?’
‘Uh-huh,’ the British guy said, and made the same gesture toward the gangway. ‘Get moving.’
‘I watch you, deckhand,’ the Russian said. ‘I am chief engineer. If you did not know.’
‘I didn’t know,’ Xu said. ‘Hope that’s working out well for you.’
Before the big brute could respond, Xu brushed past both of them and stepped onto the gangway. It swayed underneath him, momentarily threatening to spill him into the swirling ocean far below, but he steadied himself and hurried along toward the gargantuan freighter ahead.
As soon as he’d put a couple of dozen feet between himself and the nearest living soul, the satellite phone in his pocket shrieked above the wind.
That could only mean one thing.
He wrenched the phone free and pressed it to his ear, ducking low to try and shield the speaker from the howling, biting wind.
‘Lars?’ he said.
Lars Crawford responded with something in his tone that Xu rarely ever heard.
Genuine panic.
‘James, get on that ship,’ Lars said. ‘Get on that ship right now.’
6
Way ahead of you,’ Xu said, hurrying toward the colossal structure. ‘I take it the news you got isn’t good.’
‘Not good at all.’
‘What happened?’
‘It’s about Randall Neak’s death. We got more information about the circumstances.’
‘It happened two weeks ago, didn’t it? I thought we already knew what happened.’
‘We knew what happened,’ Lars parroted. ‘We didn’t know what we lost in the ambush.’
‘Lars…’
‘I’m not exaggerating when I tell you this could tear Black Force — and a bunch of other divisions — to pieces.’
‘What the hell did you manage to lose?’
‘A laptop.’
‘And…?’
‘We thought we could wipe it remotely.’