“There must be some mistake,” she said.
“No mistake. Mr. Lai knows your son was a hero. He wanted you to have this. If you don’t want it, give it to your daughters. To whoever you want.”
“You don’t want it for yourself?”
“No. Mr. Lai was very generous with me as well. I don’t need your son’s money.”
“You could have mailed this. The post usually arrives.”
“I wanted to bring you this myself,” Mary admitted.
“To tell me my son was a hero?”
“To tell you your son was a good man.”
Mrs. Ramos sat silently, thinking. Then she held Mary’s gaze for a long, long moment before she said, “There’s something more.” Again, it wasn’t a question.
“Yes.” Now it was Mary’s turn to hesitate, to sit silently and wonder how to broach the subject. She couldn’t think of any way to circle around what she needed to say, so she decided not to try. “I’m carrying your son’s baby. I’m pregnant. We were together for a few days before he died.”
Mrs. Robles sat for another moment, then she got up and closed the distance between them. She knelt beside Mary and put a hand on her stomach.
“This is my grandson? My son’s son?”
“Yes. You can hardly tell, but he’s in there.”
The old lady laughed. “Oh, I could tell as soon as you arrived. The first thing I said to myself was it’s too hot to leave a pregnant woman standing outside.”
Mary nodded. It wasn’t the first time someone had seen it; even though even Mary herself could barely have told, one woman had gotten up in the airport and given her a seat in a crowded departure gate. Another woman had told her to skip the line at immigration.
It was always women who were able to tell, generally women over fifty.
Mary looked down into Mrs. Robles’ dark brown eyes. “I came here to ask for your blessing.”
“My blessing?” The ghost of a smile played on the thin, wrinkled lips. “It sounds like you already did what you wanted.”
Mary smiled in return. There had been more playfulness than malice in the words. “I want to keep his memory alive. I’d like to name my child Marco Robles in honor of your son.”
“Why do you need my blessing? You are the mother. You can do what you think is best.”
“Because he told me about you, and made me realize how much it would mean to him that you knew about this. I think, somewhere, Marco is watching over me from wherever he is, taking care of me, and that this will make him happy,” Mary said. Now the tears flowed freely. “One night, we were in terrible danger and I was scared, so he told me about the day he realized he wanted to go to sea. He told me you took him out to the beach to watch the fishermen, and that they had blue boats and green boats. He told me that he wanted to learn to be a sailor so that he could come back here and fish close to home. But he didn’t want a green boat or a blue boat. He said he would get—”
“A red boat,” Marco’s mother finished the sentence which the crying Mary was unable to complete.
Mary nodded. “You should have seen his face when he said it.”
Mrs. Robles smiled. “I saw his face when he said it as a child.” The old woman put her hand back on Mary’s womb. “You have my blessing. All of the blessing this poor woman can possibly bestow.”
And they fell into an embrace that seemed to last forever.
Chapter 25
The Antonov An-12 shuddered and shook, but as far as Sked could see, he was the only person on board who looked nervous. The five-man crew, African mercenaries that Cyrano had hired to fly him in, seemed bored. One of them was actually dozing on the long metal bench the Soviet Army must have used to carry soldiers from one place to another.
Well, when this old tin can went down, the joke would be on them: Sked was the only person aboard wearing a parachute.
The window showed him nothing. The Congolese jungle was not illuminated at night except for the occasional single light in the distance, probably a mine or a military outpost. There were people down there, but the route had been specifically selected to avoid major towns and villages.
He wished he could have slept, but that wasn’t in the cards, and hadn’t been since he landed in Tanzania, two days before. Just getting to South Sudan had been an adventure… and that was the legal part of the trip. Once in the new nation, a place where things were still quite unsettled after the conflict that had granted it independence, he’d been met by Cyrano’s contacts and whisked to an airfield where they’d waited in a hangar for night to fall.
Only after the sun went down did they wheel out the old airplane and fly south.
Though he was already tired of the whole thing and wanted to be on the ground, where the fear of discovery would banish the exhaustion he felt, there were still a couple of hours of flight time before they reached Kananga.
He leafed through an old girlie magazine stuck in the remains of the webbing behind one of the only four seats in the cabin. It was a German mag full of pale women with unlikely hairstyles that must have been at least twenty years old. A lot of it had been cut up, and several pages were missing.
“Damn this,” he said, and looked out the window again. Things were still black down there.
His phone vibrated and he smiled. After the experience on North Sentinel Island, he’d updated his tech. His satellite phone would keep him on the grid—even serving as a data bridge for hacking—no matter where he went. The guys who built it for him swore that he’d have bars on his phone in the middle of the Pacific or at the North Pole.
So he wasn’t surprised to be interrupted by a call on a plane over an African jungle, even though almost no one had this number.
“Cyrano,” he said. “Wasn’t expecting to hear from you until I got on the ground.”
“You’re going to be busy once you get down there, so I thought it better to tell you this before the jump. Just got a couple of pieces of the news you asked me to keep my ears open for.”
Sked’s blood froze. He’d asked Cyrano to find out all he could about Akane’s whereabouts… and he was terrified of what he might hear. “Tell me,” he said.
“The little lady is in South Korea. Seoul, to be precise.”
“What?”
“Holed up in a fleabag high-rise apartment building in Dondaemun, pretending to be a working girl from Estonia. She’s got another woman with her, a girl who isn’t on our radar calling herself Ania.” Cyrano chuckled. “Get this: she seems to be teaching the other chick to hack. Either that or Akane herself has forgotten even the basics. Some of the stuff they’re doing is really crappy.”
“And they’re all right? No one gunning for them?” Sked asked.
“Just a half dozen people, a handful of governments and every criminal organization on the planet. The usual suspects. But the good news is that no one’s really focused on her right now. If she takes care, she should be fine.”
“Good. What else have you got for me?”
“I think I know who the Buddha sold your data to.”
Sked had completed his assignment, turned over the stolen hard drive and told the Buddha not to call him until his anger subsided. That would take a while… they’d barely made it out alive, and knowing the Buddha had sent them in willingly made Sked see red.
But not red enough to burn bridges. The Buddha was a major player, and what he’d pulled wasn’t that unusual. Every time Sked went into the field, he worked under the assumption that the client wasn’t telling him everything he needed to know. The Buddha’s manipulations had been an extreme case, but not a deal-breaker.
“Tell me,” Sked said.
“Not that it means anything to me, but the buyer appears to be a guy named Park Sun Lee. He’s a North Korean defector and his last position was working for the Russians, but he seems to have left them in the lurch as well.”
“What line is he in?”
“The same line as ZooDef, apparently. He builds genetically
modified animal weapons. I wouldn’t swear to this, but the rumors say he’s teamed up with a guy named Philippe, some kind of mad genius. I think you might know him.”
Sked covered his shock. He did know the man. In fact, that guy was responsible for his new personality. But he wasn’t going to say that out loud. Cyrano’s job was to gather information and either sell it to the highest bidder or, as now, use it to get people to work for him. Sked’s business depended on people knowing as little about him as he could. So he ignored the question. “Any idea where Park is operating from?”
“I shouldn’t tell you that,” Cyrano retorted. “It’s valuable data.”
“I don’t need to know specifics. I have no interest in going after the guy. But I’d like to know which part of the world I should avoid. I’ve had enough genetically modified creatures to last me a lifetime. You’re sure there are no monsters where I’m going, right?”
“Completely sure. You’re on your way to a Finance Center built by the Chinese government. Those guys use tech, not biology.” Cyrano paused. “And to answer your question, the rumors place Sun Lee in Mali.”
Sked grunted. Even though the monster makers were more than a thousand miles away, he would really have preferred it if they weren’t in Africa. But it made sense. That kind of project required empty space and very little government interference to be able to function correctly, and there were few places available… especially if you couldn’t head for Russia. South American governments were much too nosy nowadays. And that left Africa, if you could find the right spot.
“Figures,” Sked replied. “You’re absolutely sure none of the monsters are going to suddenly appear out of nowhere while I’m on the ground?”
“Listen to me,” Cyrano replied. “You’re going to have enough problems keeping the Chinese off your ass without worrying about stuff that isn’t going to happen.”
“Yeah, you’re right. I’m just jittery because I have to parachute. I’m always like this before a jump. Just your bad luck to call me right before.”
Cyrano laughed. “Yeah. I think you’re a complete lunatic to throw yourself out of a perfectly good airplane into a jungle at night just for a few hundred thousand dollars. At least the fact that you’re nervous about it makes me believe you might be human after all. Is everything else okay?”
“Yeah, all good. We’re actually going to be early. Pilot said we had a tailwind all the way.”
“Great. Call me when you get down and have a feel for the lay of the land.”
“Yeah.” Sked cut off the connection.
Another one of Cyrano’s quirks was that he never gave out the name of the contact in the operating theater until the very last second. Sked assumed it was because he trusted no one, not even the people flying the plane, so he wanted to be sure Sked was out of their hands before giving anything up… but the truth was that if the flight crew was compromised, then the mission was fucked already, and the Chinese would be waiting as soon as he hit the ground.
If that happened, they wouldn’t dirty their hands with him, just foist him on the Congolese with instructions to let him rot in jail for a few years.
Sked didn’t think it likely. The crew went about their business in the gruffest way possible, pretty much treating him the same way they would have treated a large box: he would be taken to his destination, tossed out the door, and forgotten. No one had tried to make friends with him. No one had tried to get any information from him.
He would be okay.
Besides, he had no intention of wasting away in an African prison. Now that he’d located Akane again, he would do this job, get out of Congo by land and fly to South Korea. He knew she wasn’t hiding from him. When they’d parted, she’d pretty much said that she would let him know where he was… and that she expected him over as soon as she did.
Well, the fact that Cyrano knew her whereabouts meant that Akane had decided to let him follow her trail. And knowing her, she would raise an eyebrow and ask him what had taken him so long.
Sked grinned at that. After everything she’d put him through, it was only fair that she should have to wait on him for a change.
He leaned back in his chair and tried to relax.
It wouldn’t work this time, either.
Chapter 26
Jermaine Jakes leaned back on his chair, letting the smell of soft leather waft around him. He felt his mouth open in a huge grin and a sigh. He couldn’t have helped it if he wanted to; he’d earned the right to relax.
It was incredible. He actually felt the tension leaving his shoulders as he reread the email. The message was quite simple, really, and in normal conditions it would have been satisfying, but not so important. It was from the offshore department of LichtenBank and read simply:
Deposit received. $25MM. Holding for further instructions.
He’d send further instructions on Monday. But for now, he could crow. His vision had been vindicated. The Compsognathus were being well-received by potential buyers everywhere.
At a million dollars per half-dozen, they were going to be the company’s most profitable product line.
Jermaine had already typed up the email to the board of directors, and it had been waiting on his computer until the deposit cleared. He just gave it a final once over before hitting send and smiled.
After three months out in the wilderness, he’d be the company golden boy again.
Those three months had been hell. The disaster on the Stern Liberia and that goddamned island had caused an international stink, despite the millions he’d had to invest to have most of it covered up. By the way every do-gooding human rights organization had screamed, you’d think someone important had died. Hell, even the morons in the animal-rights movement had gotten in on the action.
And it had been Jermaine’s job to smooth things out. The official story was that the animals had gotten loose while being transported to a facility in Saudi Arabia. Getting people to corroborate that story had cost him. He owed the Saudis one of the Giant Mosasaurs and a hundred Compsognathus. They wanted to build a zoo or a theme park or something. It was cheap at the price, though. By “proving” that the deaths had been accidental, the company had been able to make the two analysts who’d discovered the truth and defected sound like crazy media-pandering attention seekers.
The company was going to be fined… but LichtenBank could deal with the Indian government. The fine would never be levied. The fine would never be paid. Other favors would be exchanged instead.
Of course, the board was pissed at having to exchange those favors, but they were even more pissed at seeing their company logo on the front page of every newspaper and on the top of every website.
Even so, if his only problem had been damage control, it would have been fine. He was used to doing damage control. One of his first jobs had been at Procter & Gamble where he’d been in charge of a huge detergent recall in Argentina which had nearly killed the brand he’d been working for.
Since then, as he moved up the corporate ladder, stress had been a constant companion. He could deal with a disaster if it had a management-driven solution. And since management simply meant getting results by way of other people, everything had a management solution.
Unfortunately, damage control was only half the problem, and the lesser half at that. The world wouldn’t really worry about a bunch of unknowns who became monster food somewhere no one had heard of. It had only been news for a day or two.
The real problem was Sabrina. That she’d managed to get herself killed was a huge setback. She’d been the undisputed master in her field, but better still, she hadn’t cared about anything else. Not money—despite the fact that she was being paid spectacularly well—not men, not friends, not family. Nothing but her work. He’d only ever seen her show positive emotions to the creatures in cages.
Jermaine’s past few weeks had been a scramble. He couldn’t hope to replace her with someone equally talented to continue her research, so he just tried to figure
out who on her team was actually capable of getting the stuff they’d already designed into production so they could sell the things to clients.
Unfortunately, they’d had to move their production facility out of Arizona because the US was investigating the incident in the Indian Ocean, but that wasn’t a problem. South Africa had welcomed the factory with open arms, but getting even one cloning vat up and running had proven challenging with the personnel on hand.
In the end, they’d had to bite the bullet and reach out to get one of the Russians from Yekaterinburg to sign on. Those guys had all lost their jobs when the nature of the lab’s research came into the light, but getting them out of Russia had been a nightmare. They were afraid to work for anyone else because they thought every branch of the secret police would come after them if they did.
It had required a boatload of dollars for one of the senior people to cross over, but it had been worth it. He’d beaten the soft, under-utilized team into a functional unit in weeks. So good, in fact, that Jermaine hadn’t hesitated to sign the contract with the Belgians.
Of course, he knew that the final buyers weren’t really Belgians but likely based in the Middle East, but it wasn’t polite to pry. And now that the money for the initial shipment had come in, who they represented was no longer his concern; all Jermaine had to do was to make certain the creatures arrived where they were supposed to go. And it was easy to ship stuff from South Africa to… well, basically everywhere.
He was back on his way. The endless study, the long hours working his way up the corporate ladder, the nights and weekends… they were worth it now. Running a company from the CEO’s seat was very different from getting that seat at a startup and then turning it into a viable company.
Jermaine thought about Shawna, and whether he could have done something different, if there had been some way to keep her from leaving him. But even a couple of years later, he didn’t know what that might have been. She had been adamant: she didn’t want to move overseas, she was content with a nice suburban house outside Cincinnati. Her dream growing up had been stability, the bourgeoise life her parents hadn’t been able to afford and the acceptance that society refused to give. She’d never understood that, for Jermaine, such things weren’t anywhere near enough. He’d known since day one that he had the talent and the drive to reach the very top.
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