by Jack Mars
It had been their idea to start an Instagram account. They brought their father in as a co-conspirator early on, and they moved the whole thing forward in secrecy without telling their mother until it had a momentum all its own and it was basically too late for her to stop it. Terrific. Dad was fun. Mom was that killjoy person who lived in the White House.
Very soon, they would become young women, while Susan was here in Washington, doing what? Well, she was enjoying a late dinner with her friend the clock, while her new boyfriend tried very hard to get himself killed in Africa, and one or more members of her national security team plotted against her.
Was Frank Loomis the leaker? Clearly he resented Stone, and he seemed to think he knew something about their relationship. It had pleased her tonight—no, it delighted her—to find out that Stone was alive, and had somehow saved more than 100 kidnapped girls from Boko Haram. Stone was like that—he did exactly the opposite of what you asked him to do, disappeared, and then turned up with some unexpected gift in hand. It had put Loomis on his back foot for a little while. Now, if only Stone could turn up alive again, and this time with the missing weapon.
She shook her head. It was hard to sit here wondering about the next report from Luke Stone, or about him. One day it would be bad news.
The phone at her elbow rang. She glanced at the clock. He was four minutes late. She looked at the number and picked it up.
“Hi, Pierre.”
“Hi, sweetheart,” he said, and all the old feelings and memories came flooding back. This was their weekly call. It was a New Year’s resolution, one they were still clinging to less than a month into the year.
“How’s the view from the top?”
Susan shook her head. “Terrible.”
“Oh? How so?”
“Same as ever. Innocent people getting killed, and there’s no way to stop it. Existential threats emerging out of the ether every five minutes. Leaks. Close advisors with the knives out. Lobbyists pushing cockamamie ideas that will benefit their clients and give everyone else the shaft.”
“So just another day at the office?” Pierre said.
“Pretty much.” Susan decided to change the subject. “Listen, how are the girls?”
“Great. Beautiful. Wonderful. Same as ever. Did you look at the latest pics?”
Susan nodded. “Yes, I did. They’re really great.”
“I know it,” Pierre said. “I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. The views are through the roof. We’ve already got a couple of small contracts from clothing companies on offer, and I’m walking them through the details of what it all means.”
It sounded like he was having more fun than they were.
“They’re smart girls,” he said. “They’ve got good business sense, right off the bat. I wonder where they get it from.”
“Probably their mom,” Susan said. “She was in the modeling business, making grown-up decisions, at a tender age.”
“Exactly!” Pierre said. “That’s what I would have guessed, too.”
Susan smiled. “Where are they?”
“They went to dinner and then shopping. Well, browsing I should say. Themselves, their driver, two friends, three Secret Service agents, and a couple of our security people. You know, just a small group of ten. A couple of high-end places are going to give them by-appointment-only walk-throughs, and the girls are going to try to barter for product placements. You let us wear it, and we’ll give you a plug.”
He paused. “Harry Winston’s Diamonds is one of the places.”
“Pierre!”
“I know. It’s amazing.”
Susan didn’t say anything. They had agreed that he would make sure the fashion choices were young and tasteful. Already, it was getting out of control. Already, it was veering toward tasteless. She sighed.
“Listen, how are you really?” he said.
“Bad,” Susan said. “I’m bad. I’m tired.”
“Stone is gone again?”
Pierre was the only person on Earth she had told about Stone. He was totally supportive.
“Yep.”
“In danger?”
“As far as we know.”
“You can’t talk about it,” Pierre said.
“That’s right.”
“And you’ve got people breathing down your neck here at home. Maybe questioning what he’s doing, wherever he is.”
She nodded to herself. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. So am I.”
“Susan,” he said. “If this helps any, I want to tell you something. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. You are the toughest person, man or woman, that I’ve ever known. No one comes close. You brought this country back from the brink. You did something no one else could have done. And you don’t need anyone to validate your decisions for you. Let the haters hate. You keep being you.”
She smiled. “It does help.”
“When your man comes back, you can decide then what to do about all this separation and danger, and whether you want to keep putting up with it.”
“If he comes back,” Susan said.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
January 30
6:15 a.m. West Africa Time (12:15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)
Sambisa Forest
Borno State, Nigeria
Border with Chad
“I guess you’d call this a clue,” Ed Newsam said.
To the east, a sliver of early sunshine rose above the horizon.
Luke, Ed, and Paul Dunn stepped out of the dense forest and down a sloping grassy hillside, the grass nearly waist high. Their weapons were out, loaded, safeties off. Luke was tired. All night, he had trouble getting the images of the hacked-apart dead girls out of his mind. If he had gone faster somehow… if they had planned their attack differently… maybe it wouldn’t have happened.
Everything about Boko Haram had surprised him. When he and his team attacked, Boko had barely tried to fight. Most of the survivors had run into the forest. The ones who remained had immediately set about killing their own prisoners. Meeting Boko Haram in person gave him insight as to why Dunn had stayed here so long, and was so obsessed with killing them.
Luke shook his head to clear it. He could not afford to daydream. A delay of several seconds when he was hyper-alert had cost seven girls their lives. Now, when he was tired, what would a delay or a slip-up cost?
He looked around, surveying their environment. To their left was the parallel, rutted wheel tracks of what passed for a road. The air was alive with the sound of bird calls.
A vast field opened before them. On the far side of it, half a mile away, Luke could make out the deep red of Blood Marsh—so-called because of the distinctive color the tannins in the plants gave the standing water.
Nearer was a different red—the red of actual blood. The field was the site of a massacre. An old truck—a military troop transport from probably twenty years before—sat demolished by large-caliber gunfire. It looked like the broken toy of a particularly destructive child. Bodies were strewn all around it, most of them cut to pieces.
A riot of vultures flew overhead, circling in a swarm. Dozens more were on the ground, feasting on the dead. Beyond that macabre scene, maybe fifty yards further on, a large metal box sat all by itself, like a talisman left by a vanished civilization. The box was at least ten feet tall.
Luke and his team passed through the slaughter, stepping over the remains of bodies, kicking at the vultures, who bounced a few feet away, then stopped and waited. This close, the air was thick with buzzing flies. The smell was bad, soon to get worse—the hot sun was going to bake this place all day.
Luke glanced at the corpses, but not too closely. He didn’t need to conduct an investigation to see what had happened here. The men had been cut to ribbons by automatic fire. Legs, heads, and arms had been separated from torsos. Splattered flesh and guts were all over the ground.
The bodies had been looted, for weapons at leas
t, but maybe other things as well. These men had probably been carrying rifles; in all likelihood, AK-47s. There were only a few in evidence—the good ones had been taken. Some of the feet were bare—their boots were gone. The pockets of shredded pants had been turned inside out.
The tires of the truck were all flat. The front axle had collapsed, giving the truck an odd appearance of being prostrate in prayer. The body was pockmarked with thousands of holes. The windshield was shattered. The torso of what had been the driver sat behind the steering wheel. The man’s head was gone.
“They lit these guys up pretty good,” Dunn said.
Ed made a sound almost like a laugh. “To put it mildly.”
“Looks like the sales meeting didn’t go too well,” Luke said.
They left the carnage behind and approached the box. They came at it from an angle, and now Luke could see that the box was open in the front, and empty. It loomed in front of them, alone against the pale blue sky.
The box was made of thick gray steel. It was cut open, the edges of the opening ragged and sharp. The cutaway panel still lay in the grass. Tire tracks made by heavy machinery led to the box, and away again, to the east.
Luke stared over there. The earth was beaten down. The ground was littered with junk—empty food and drink containers, multicolored shreds of tarp, clothes, various cardboard, wooden and metal ammunition boxes, lots more stuff. A large group of people had camped out there for a bit, and neglected to clean up after themselves.
“There are markings on here,” Ed said.
Luke looked at where Ed was standing. The steel box was etched with tall white Cyrillic lettering—the CCCP of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Beneath that was a longer and smaller unpainted etching.
“You read Russian, Dunn?”
Dunn nodded, his sunglasses already on, his face impassive. “Mmmm-hmmm. Had to read what my contract said, didn’t I?”
“What’s this say?”
“It says National Academy of Geosciences. Kursk, USSR, 1987.”
Luke nodded. He pulled out his satellite phone. It took a few moments for the phone to find a signal, shake hands with the satellite, and make the call. Then, given Swann and his methods for obscuring where communications came from and where they were going, the call would bounce around the globe, from black satellites to relay stations on Earth, and back to outer space. The call would likely travel thousands of miles before reaching its final destination some 400 miles from where it was originally placed.
Eventually, a ringing sound came through.
“Yes?” the voice said.
“Hi, Swann.”
“Luke. Still alive, I see.”
“For now.”
“Where are you?”
Luke looked around at the field, the wrecked truck, the disassembled corpses, the giant box, and the littered campsite. “We’re at the rendezvous point. We’re going to need an extraction, with the Chinook I asked for last night. I also need you to compile all of the available satellite and drone data for these coordinates for the past twenty-four hours. I want to see everyone and everything that came in here, and everything that left. I also need Trudy to find out what sort of weapons the Soviet Union’s National Academy of Geosciences was making in the late 1980s.”
“Geosciences?” Swann said. He paused. “Did you find the, uh… present?” It was an awkward way to phrase the question, given the encryption on this call and the Byzantine route it took to get from one phone to the other.
“No,” Luke said. “But we found the package it came wrapped in.”
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
6:35 a.m. West Africa Time (12:35 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)
Lake Chad
North of N’Djamena, Chad
The lake was black with birds.
Rajan Muhammad gazed at them with wonder as the small helicopter passed overhead, moving south in the dim light of morning.
He had frequented this region for nearly two decades. During that time, the weather patterns had changed, rain had become less plentiful, and Lake Chad had grown smaller and shallower. Meanwhile, the grassy wetlands surrounding it had become larger, gradually eating into and taking over the lake itself. Most of the gigantic lake could now more accurately be called a swamp.
The management of the lake was a disaster, of course, as the management of everything in Chad was a disaster. It was a country of illiterate subsistence farmers and herders, a country rich in petroleum deposits but without a functioning electrical grid, a country run by a tiny group of kleptocrats in the capital, a country open to the highest bidder. This benefited people like Rajan, but didn’t do much for Mother Nature.
The lake was thought to be less than ten percent of the size it had been in 1960, and less than one percent of its size when the Romans first reached it. One day soon, what had once been among the great lakes in the world would simply be gone.
But one thing hadn’t changed. The migratory birds still came in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. Ducks, ruff, geese, larks, even seabirds and long-legged cranes. Many, many breeds for which Rajan had no name. They came to rest, to feed, and in some cases to stay, even though the lake was dying. As Rajan watched, a group of hippopotamuses wallowed in the muddy water near a small floating island. The hippos, in drastic decline like the lake itself, were a frequent sight here.
“A pity,” Rajan said.
The pilot ignored him. A member of the Chadian Air Force, the young man did what he was paid to do—fly the helicopter—and nothing more.
Rajan shrugged.
His chest was bare. He was fifty-four years old and very, very fit for his age—a lifetime on the move, of constant physical exertion, would do that to you. He had changed into a pair of light linen dress pants and Italian leather shoes, and would put his dress shirt on in a moment. But first, he would finish shaving.
He held a battery-powered electric shaver in one hand and slowly and carefully took off great swaths of his beard, the hair dropping into a wicker bucket held between his legs. In the other hand, he held a small mirror of polished steel. He was changing, shedding his skin like a snake, or more accurately, shape-shifting. Rajan Muhammad was not his name. He had many personas. Rajan was useful to him much of the time.
Clipped to the sun visor in front of him was a Spanish passport, open to the photo page. It was a real passport, not a forgery, and it belonged to Gregorio Fuentes, a career criminal and smuggler from Malaga, who had grown rich off the African ivory trade. Fuentes was real, in a sense, though he had not been born in Spain. He was simply Rajan Muhammad with a clean-shaven, smiling face, dressed in the expensive clothes of a wealthy Westerner.
The last of the heavy beard fell into the bucket, and Rajan took a moment to run the shaver all over his face, getting his skin as smooth as possible. Later in the day, perhaps at the Casablanca airport, he would shave it to the surface with a straight razor and water.
The chopper was dropping altitude. Up ahead, Rajan could see the line of a remote airstrip scratched into the vast Sahel scrublands. An old DC-9 cargo plane was parked on the runway, its rear cargo door open, the ramp down.
Sahara Carriers said the red and blue writing across the plane’s white fuselage. It was a good plane, the best they could get on such short notice. It would have to land in Timbuktu to refuel, but that was no matter. Management of the airport in Timbuktu was currently in the sure hands of some very good friends.
The chopper touched down on a cleared patch of sandy earth fifty yards from the plane. Rajan was out the door before the turbines were turned off. He moved across the airstrip, shrugging into his newly pressed striped shirt.
Two Berber men waited in the shadows beneath the plane, blue headscarves nearly obscuring their faces.
“Rajan!” one of them said. “Or should I call you Gregorio now?”
Rajan didn’t like loose talk. He didn’t like people who thought they knew something about him. His various identities were not a joke. They were
what allowed him to move undetected through different worlds. They were what kept him alive. A name on the wrong set of lips—this was enough to kill a man. But he decided to let it go this time.
He gestured at the cargo door with his head. “How is it?”
The man shrugged. “See for yourself.”
Rajan walked up the steep ramp, the two men just behind him. The cargo hold was empty except for two large wooden crates, both secured with straps to the floor, the walls and the ceiling just out of reach above Rajan’s head.
The first wooden crate was open in the front. The black metal device sat upright in the box. Piled all around it, so that the device was nearly obscured, were the ivory tusks of elephants. Another pity—yet another victim of Chad’s woeful lack of management. The great elephant tribes of this region had been slaughtered for their ivory, from a count of about 150,000 individuals in 1980 to perhaps 1,500 or fewer remaining in the present day. Most of the ivory went eastward to China and Japan, but some went westward, first to the Atlantic coast, then on to the palaces of drug lords in South America, and the grand homes of respectable captains of industry in North America.
In Chad, there was no government money available for game wardens, or guns for the game wardens, or any kind of police presence in the national parks. Meanwhile, there was a lot of money available to everyone in the form of payoffs from the poachers. Such was the state of this miserable land. The cause Rajan fought for had profited handsomely from the ivory trade over the years, as had Rajan himself, but even he could acknowledge that what was happening was a disgrace.
The elephants were noble and intelligent beasts. They were enduring a holocaust. And yet, even this must be Allah’s will.
“What I do, I do for God,” he said under his breath.
“What?” one of the men said.
“Is it secure in there?” Rajan said, gesturing at the weapon.
The man nodded. “Very secure.”
Rajan glanced at the further crate. Its front panel was already closed. “What’s in the other one?”