Wells was silent.
“John, I have to give Vinny a heads-up about the camp. Can’t leave that kid’s body rotting. And he’s going to have to tell the families and James Thompson. It’s going to leak, and the hysteria’s going to hit a whole new level.”
“You can’t tell Thompson. I’ve got proof he was in on it.” Wells told Shafer about the Joker’s mask he’d found, the corpse that had to be Suggs. “What must have happened, Thompson figured Suggs could hold the hostages a couple weeks while he got publicity and money for WorldCares. He didn’t count on it getting this big. Or these Somalis catching wind of it.”
“A mask? That’s your evidence?”
“What was James doing with that third cell phone? Why was he calling the kidnappers?”
“He had every reason to talk to the kidnappers, John. He’ll say he was trying to put together a back-channel deal to free the volunteers quietly.”
“But he knew Suggs—”
“Exactly. He knew Suggs. So Suggs set this up with some Somalis and then came to him and said, ‘I kidnapped your nephew and his friends, now pay me, and by the way, if you tell anyone anything, I’ll kill them all.’ And Thompson agreed. Who’s going to say he’s lying? Not Suggs. Suggs is dead. Which limits his ability to offer a contradictory narrative.”
“You can’t seriously believe that.”
“I’m just saying, don’t assume he’s going to go away quietly. He’s got cards to play, and remember the Kenyans want to pin this on Shabaab as much as Thompson does. They won’t be happy you’ve been playing vigilante.”
“I thought I was killing the Somali bandits they hated.”
“The beauty of life, John. All kinds of ways to look at things. So many different perspectives.”
“Like you think you’re witty and clever, and I think ninety percent of what comes out of your mouth is nonsense.”
“All I’m saying is, you want to be sure Thompson can’t get to you, find the hostages.”
“Noted. Has NSA gotten back to you on the numbers from Thompson’s third phone? Locations or anything?”
“Not yet.”
“Ellis—”
“Truly beyond my control. But give me those Somali numbers and I’ll put them on the list, too.”
Wells did.
“Any other good news?” Shafer said.
“Walk through one last set of what-ifs with me. Suppose I find the other three, and the White House and Duto already know that Scott Thompson was killed. We’d go in with a special ops team, yes? We’d have to assume their lives are at risk.”
“Sounds right.”
“And then it gets messy, the hostages get killed. What happens next?”
Shafer saw where Wells was headed. “The public pressure, we’d have to invade. Teach them a lesson.”
“Because from what I saw today, these guys, they’re young, but they’re real soldiers—”
“You took out four by yourself.”
“It was close. I’m not saying they could stop a commando team for long. But long enough to kill the hostages. Wasn’t there something like that in Nigeria?”
“Last year. The British sent in a team to rescue two hostages. They didn’t get there in time.”
“Let me chase this, Ellis.”
“I have to tell Duto what you found. You want this kid Wilfred choppered out, he’s going to insist on knowing what happened. And you know I’m right about that body. It needs to come home. Not fair to the family.”
“Give me the night. One night.”
“Best I can do, if the delay with the numbers from Thompson’s phone is my guide, NSA will need at least twenty-four hours to get anything on the Somali mobile numbers. So I’ll call over on those, and I’ll tell Duto what you found. But I forgot to ask you exactly where the camp is. Oops. He’ll make me call you back, but I can’t make you answer—”
“Thank you, Ellis.”
“Not finished. By the time Duto wakes up tomorrow, I won’t be able to put him off any longer. And he wakes up early. Which means within twenty hours, give or take, early afternoon tomorrow your time, dawn here, we’ll have a team on the way to the camp to pick up what’s left of Scott Thompson. And the families are going to know. After that, you better figure things will happen fast. Not to mention whatever James Thompson tells the Kenyan police.”
A long sigh from the other side of the world. “I get it. Can I go now?”
After all he’d done, Wells still acted every so often like the high school football star he’d once been. The coolest kid in town. Shafer relished those offhand moments. He hoped they revealed that Wells’s sunny Montana boyhood hadn’t entirely fled his soul.
“Try not to get in too much trouble.”
“Call me if NSA comes through.” Click.
—
Shafer returned his attention to the bowl on his desk. Unfortunately, the life expectancy of Frosted Flakes was measured in minutes. They sagged in the Lactaid like an overage starlet’s arms. Even so, Shafer shoveled them into his mouth, hoping the sugar rush would give him a kick start as he imagined how to spin this call to Duto.
He’d just finished when the phone on his desk trilled. This time the caller ID showed Duto’s office.
“I saw the press conference. You were right.”
“Not why I’m calling. Can you come up? There’s something you need to see.”
—
Duto’s personal assistant, a bright-eyed thirty-something who would surely join Duto in his quest for the Senate, led Shafer into the director’s giant seventh-floor office. Shafer had been introduced to the assistant at least twice but refused to remember his name. Duto raised a single finger, the universal Give me a minute sign, and went back to pecking at his keyboard.
Over the years, Duto’s office had filled with the gifts that men like him received for the work of their subordinates. The items ranged from kitschy to extraordinary. Tucked on a bookshelf, on a cream-colored card an eighth-inch thick, a personal note from Prince William. In tightly scrawled blue ink, the prince elliptically thanked Duto for disrupting a terrorist plot against Kate Middleton on a trip the princess had taken to Turkey. Hanging on the room’s far wall, a fifteenth-century Katana samurai sword, three feet of sleek and vicious steel. The sword arrived after the agency intercepted four North Korean operatives plotting to bomb Tokyo’s subways. On Duto’s desk, the depth gauge from a miniature submarine that a Mexican drug gang had used to move tons of cocaine. The Drug Enforcement Administration offered up the gauge to commemorate the agency’s help in disrupting the cartel.
The sheer number of tokens in the office testified both to Duto’s longevity as director and the CIA’s reach. The agency went wherever the United States had interests, and the United States had interests everywhere. Even eastern Kenya. Shafer wondered what trinket Duto would receive if the agency rescued the hostages. Probably nothing. He’d settle for a Senate seat.
Shafer grabbed the Katana off the wall. The sword’s blade was narrow and angled and polished so closely that it seemed to glow. Shafer took a practice swipe. Duto ignored him and kept typing. The assistant raised a hand.
“I don’t think you should be doing that.”
“Avast, Handy Smurf—”
“Handy Smurf?”
“Out!” Shafer sliced at him. The blade nearly sliced off the tip of the assistant’s tie. He fled. Shafer raised the Katana high in victory.
Duto stopped typing. “Unnecessary.”
“I get bored, I act out.”
“Put it back before you hurt yourself.”
Shafer sat, resting the blade on his lap. “Think they’ll let you keep it?”
“Sadly, no. I didn’t know when I got it, but it came straight out of the Tokyo Museum. Been appraised at six hundred thousand.”
“A little over the gift limit.”
Duto turned his laptop around so Shafer could see the screen. “Recognize her?”
The woman’s face filled nearly the
entire screen, with slivers of a mud wall visible behind her. She had circles under her eyes and a scared puckered mouth. But she was still beautiful. Still Gwen Murphy.
“This was emailed to Brandon Murphy’s personal account six hours ago.” Duto pulled up two more photos, Hailey and Owen. “These two went to the Barnes and Broder families.”
“Not Scott Thompson’s parents?” Shafer said. Though he knew that Thompson’s parents hadn’t gotten a photo and never would. A half-eaten corpse would be tough to ransom.
“Nothing yet. They’re freaking out, which is understandable.”
“Do we know where they came from?”
“Nairobi. NSA has tracked the IP address to a few square blocks of downtown. They claim they’ll have an exact location in the next two hours. But we’re all assuming it’s a public space, an Internet café or unlocked hotspot. They’ll look for surveillance, but Nairobi’s not DC. Very few cameras, even downtown.”
“Have we told the Kenyans?”
“Not yet. The feeling is this thing’s too hot already. You can imagine, the parents went crazy when they got these. The FBI is trying to talk them down, asking them to stay calm, not go public. The families emailed back, asked for proof of life. Nobody’s heard back yet, but we’re assuming the photos are real. Our experts say they look real.”
“They look real to me. Any guesses on location?”
“The background doesn’t give much to go on. The images are poor quality, like they were shot on a cell phone and then sent to another phone.”
“Can NSA—”
“Trace the number and location of the first phone? They say it’s unlikely. There’s some specific technical reason, data compression and whatnot, but don’t ask me to explain.”
“Was there a ransom demand? A note, anything?”
“Just the pictures. Put that big brain to work and tell me what it means, Ellis. Why now? Is all the noise we’re making about an invasion getting to them?”
Shafer busied himself putting the sword back on the wall, buying a few seconds before he had to answer Duto. He didn’t see any alternative to the truth, didn’t see how lying would help.
“Wells found a camp where they were being held, but they’re gone now. He thinks that James Thompson set them up and that last night some Somali bandits found them and hit the camp and took them.”
Duto grabbed the submarine depth gauge, a piece of steel the size of a soup bowl, and in one quick motion fired it at the oak door to his office. The glass face of the gauge shattered, scattering shards over the carpet. Shafer hadn’t seen Duto erupt this way in years. Though Shafer understood. Like all executives, Duto hated surprises. Surprises threatened the authority he’d spent his life cultivating.
“Is everything all right?” Handy Smurf said through the door.
“Go away,” Duto said. To Shafer: “When exactly were you planning to tell me?”
“I had just hung up with Wells when you called.”
“Waste my time, dance with that sword like a mushy-headed freak—”
“You want to hear what happened or you want to yell at me?”
Duto looked away from Shafer, out the window. Shafer could almost hear him reciting whatever mantra his life coach had taught him. When he looked back again, he was calm. “I want to hear.”
Shafer told him.
“So it was a fake kidnapping—”
“Not exactly. It probably felt real to the hostages. A setup by James Thompson and this fixer, this guy Suggs.”
“Thompson let his nephew get kidnapped and then the kid wound up getting killed?”
“That’s how it looks to Wells.”
“Muy frio.” Lousy Spanish, but Shafer understood.
“Ay, caramba.”
“Okay, so the volunteers wind up at this camp, then these Somalis hear about it, attack it, kill the nephew, snatch the others. Which explains the pictures landing today. These guys want money and they want it now.”
“That sounds about right.”
“And where was the first camp? Kenya or Somalia?”
“Kenya, but Wells didn’t tell me where exactly.”
“You two are so clever. Either of you consider he might need help?”
Shafer didn’t plan to confess to Duto that he’d told Wells exactly that. “He’s afraid that when the word about Scott Thompson gets out, the pressure for war will be unstoppable.”
Duto rose, picked up the depth gauge, carefully wound a thumb around its shattered face before plunking it back on his desk. “He might be right.”
“You ought to know by now, this is what you get with Wells. He’s never going to ask for help unless he has to have it. He wants control.” Shafer resisted the urge to add Just like you.
“So what’s his plan?”
“He didn’t tell me that either.” Probably because he doesn’t have one. “Yesterday you said you might bring in an ops team.”
“I gave the order soon as I saw the photos,” Duto said. “They’re coming from Dubai to Mombasa.” Mombasa was the second-largest city in Kenya, a run-down port in the country’s southeastern corner, closer to Somalia than Nairobi. “Unfortunately, they don’t arrive until around seven a.m. tomorrow local time. Best they could do even on a chartered jet.”
“So you can’t move on Thompson’s body until tomorrow morning anyway.”
Duto nodded.
“Then let’s give Wells the night, see what he finds. I promise that after the team lands, I’ll get the exact address of the camp and you can send them in.”
“I still have to handle the White House.”
“Tell them the truth. You have an unconfirmed report that Scott Thompson is dead, no location, and you’re following up. We don’t have to tell the families that Wells thinks he found the camp yet either. Same thing. Nothing confirmed, so why mention it.”
“You think your boy can solve this overnight.”
“If he can’t, by the morning I’ll bet he’ll link up with your team.” Especially since James Thompson will be screaming to the Kenyan cops for his head. But Shafer saw no reason to mention that particular complication. “And maybe Nairobi station finds out who sent those emails. Or NSA traces those Somali phones. Lot of shots on goal here.”
“Turning into an optimist in your old age, Ellis.”
“I’ve learned not to bet against John. Anything else, Vinny?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Then I’ll be leaving.”
Duto pointed at the door. “Don’t let it hit you on the ass, et cetera.”
“I’m glad we have the kind of frank, honest relationship where you don’t feel the need to be polite.”
13
BAKAFI, KENYA
The King Fahad Infirmary was better than nothing. But not by much.
It had six narrow beds draped with mosquito nets stretched thinner than a drag queen’s panty hose. It had three almost expired bottles of doxycycline. It had one patient, a woman, her cheeks sunken, belly swollen, breathing a slow unsteady rattle. And it had a doctor, or at least a man in a grimy white coat, napping in a chair when Wells carried Wilfred inside.
Wells laid Wilfred on the bed farthest from the dying woman as the doctor walked over with no great urgency. He extracted thick plastic glasses from his pocket and wiped them cleanish on the hem of his coat. He rustled in his pocket for latex gloves, pulled them on, laid a finger against the bloody gauze taped to Wilfred’s thigh.
“You have AIDS?”
“No.”
“Sure?”
“No HIV, no AIDS.”
The doctor pulled off the gauze. The ride had loosened the tourniquets and blood trickled from the bullet hole. “What happened?”
“Shot myself.”
“Shot yourself?”
“When bad things happen to good people,” Wells muttered.
“What time?”
“Three, four hours ago.”
The doctor laid two fingers against Wilfred’s neck to ta
ke his pulse. “You feel cold?”
“Little bit.”
The doctor looked at Wells. “How long did he bleed before you put these on?”
“A few minutes. His jeans were soaked.”
“I can try to take out the bullet, but I don’t recommend it. My best advice, I stabilize him tonight. Clean the wound, give him antibiotic so it doesn’t infect, fluid for the blood loss, elevate the leg, put pressure on. You take him to a hospital tomorrow.”
More or less what Wells had expected.
“But I have to stay here tonight to watch him. Stay up all night. It cost fifteen thousand shillings”—almost two hundred dollars.
“Supposed to be free,” Wilfred said.
“Can’t stay awake on this government salary. Can’t buy coffee.”
“Fifteen thousand’s fine.” Wells reached into his pocket, peeled off the shillings. The doctor opened his mouth like a frog after a fly as he stared at the roll of bills. Wells realized too late that he should have kept the money hidden.
“I give him medicine for the pain, five thousand shillings more.”
“No more for this hustler,” Wilfred said. “I take the pain.”
Wells peeled off five thousand more and then stuffed the rest of the money away. “What about her?” He nodded at the woman.
“She got cancer. Liver, kidney, who knows. She gets big like that because the fluid builds up in her, she can’t get rid of it. Tumors under her skin. Lumps like stones. Whole body shutting down. Even mzungu medicine can’t save her now. She have a better chance with the witches. I tell her family, take her back, but she crying all the time. Stinks. They don’t want her in the hut.”
Wells handed the doctor the shillings. “Give her what she needs.” If he couldn’t save this nameless woman’s life, at least he could ease her death. “You understand.”
The doctor nodded. Wells squeezed Wilfred’s hand. “I’m going over to the hoteli, see if anybody knows about our friends on the bikes.”
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