“Air One, what’s happening down there?”
“Copy, this is Air One… I can’t see any movement inside the vehicle, but it doesn’t look like the officers on the ground can hold these people back for much longer.” There was a brief crackle of static, followed by an unintelligible exchange. “Uh…Greenwald is asking for permission to engage, over.”
“Negative,” Kealey snapped. Bruce Greenwald was the shooter on board the helicopter, a graduate of the U.S. Army’s famed Sniper School and a former marksman with the Los Angeles Police Department. He’d retired from the LAPD two years earlier with the rank of sergeant. He was a good man and a true professional, but Kealey could easily see things getting out of hand if he gave the sniper a green light. Besides, shooting into the crowd would only work to further enrage the protesters, placing the stranded Blackwater men at greater risk. “There’s nothing to engage. Are those people even armed?”
A brief silence. Kealey could picture Greenwald scanning the crowd through his gun scope, searching for any sign of a lethal weapon and probably hoping to find one.
“Negative,” came the reluctant response.
“Okay, Air One, tell him to hold his fire. Let me know if the crowd gets to the truck, over.”
“Will do. Air One, out.”
Kealey immediately tried to raise the stranded vehicle again, but there was still no response. They were now moving south through the business district, towering skyscrapers on either side of the busy street. The congestion had forced them to slow down, but Flores was skilled at finding holes in the traffic, and they were rapidly approaching the M2. As a blue sign flashed by, Kealey caught sight of the white lettering, realized they had missed their turn, and instantly turned to face the driver.
“What are you doing?” he demanded. “I told you to head for Marshalltown. You’re going the wrong way.”
The Gauteng Provincial Government Building was on Simmonds Street in Marshalltown and located less than two kilometers west of the Johannesburg High Court. After a quick check of the map in the glove compartment, Kealey had decided it was the best place to get Zuma and his aide secured before going back for Stiles and Whysall. Normally, he would have dropped the South African leader at the nearest police station, but some inner instinct warned him against that idea. According to the pilot of Air One, the SAPS units in front of the courthouse had yet to use nonlethal deterrents on the rioting crowd, which gave Kealey reason to think that at least some of the officers-and possibly even the captain in charge-were loyal to the man Zuma’s testimony had essentially buried in the high court.
Flores was shaking his head. His mouth was set in a tight line, and beads of perspiration were running down his dark, weathered face as he skillfully navigated the busy midtown traffic. “We’re not going back there.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You know the rules. If something goes down, we get the principal clear. That’s what we’re doing. Stiles and Whysall are on their own. There’s no sense in risking four to save two.”
“Fuck that,” Kealey snapped. He knew the Honduran was referring to what he had learned at the training facility in Moyock. Blackwater policy was “to get off the X,” or move out of the target area as fast as possible when a vehicle was hit in an ambush. In other words, it was every man for himself. But Kealey had no intention of adhering to that particular policy. “I don’t know or care how they ran things in your army, Flores. There is no way I’m leaving those guys behind. Turn this truck around right now.”
Flores swerved hard to avoid a red Opel that had braked to a sudden halt in front of them. He gunned the engine as they shot through an intersection, horns blaring behind them. The entrance ramp to the M2 was just a few hundred meters away, and from there, Kealey knew, it was a fast, straight run to Pretoria. There was just one more intersection between them and the highway, and once they hit the ramp, there was no turning back. The 2 men stranded outside the courthouse-the two men he was responsible for-would be as good as dead.
“No,” Flores repeated. His heavily accented voice was hard, and it seemed to leave no room for argument. “No way. We’re getting out of here, and that’s final. Who the hell do you think you are, anyway? I don’t give a shit about the things you did with the CIA, Kealey. This isn’t the Agency, and you don’t have any real authority here. You can’t make me-”
The words died in his throat, and he reflexively took his foot off the gas. The three lead vehicles jumped ahead immediately, as though the invisible chain that linked them had suddenly been cut. Kealey had drawn his Beretta 92FS and was now holding the weapon to Flores’s left temple.
“Turn around,” he said evenly. He was oblivious to the stunned silence in the backseat; his steady, uncompromising gaze was fixed entirely on the man sitting next to him. “We’re going to Marshalltown, and then we’re going back for our guys. Turn around right now, or I’ll shoot you, kick you out of this fucking truck, and do it myself. Do you understand?”
Flores hesitated, his mouth working silently. His eyes were still fixed on the road ahead, but it was clear that he was thinking about just one thing: the gun currently pressed to his head. Both men were lost in their own private standoff, oblivious to the traffic around them, the delayed shouts of fear and confusion in the backseat, and the fact that the three lead vehicles had already hit the M2 and were essentially out of the picture.
Although Flores had taken his foot off the gas, they were still rolling forward. When they were halfway through the intersection, a blur to the left caused Flores to turn his head instinctively. Before Kealey could react, another vehicle plowed into theirs, crushing the truck’s left front fender and knocking them out of their lane. The armored Land Cruiser lurched to the right and traveled another 20 feet before slamming into the rear end of a minibus. Kealey snapped forward in his seat, the belt tightening over his chest, forcing the air from his lungs. His right hand banged against the dashboard, and the Beretta slipped out of his grasp. Everything seemed to go black for an instant, a strange silence settling in the aftermath of the accident.
Shaking it off, Kealey groaned and reached under his seat, searching for the weapon he’d dropped at the moment of impact. Almost simultaneously a man shouted an order in Xhosa, one of the few local dialects Kealey recognized. Then gunfire erupted, rounds pounding into the armored exterior of the vehicle.
The instant the bullets hit, Kealey folded at the waist, twisting his body below the level of the windows. With a cold sense of fear, he realized that the crash had not been an accident at all. It was an ambush, and it had worked to perfection. The rear escort had been taken out with consummate skill, the helicopter was still back at the courthouse, along with Whysall’s disabled Land Cruiser, and the other vehicles were already on the M2, moving fast for Pretoria.
They were alone, outnumbered, and completely exposed.
And no one was coming to back them up.
CHAPTER 8
KHARTOUM
“Before we begin,” the consultant said as he sank into the comfortable armchair across from his host, “I’d like to thank you for seeing me on such short notice. I know things are pretty hectic around here, sir, and you must have a lot on your plate. I just want you to know that I appreciate your time. Not to mention your hospitality.” He smiled agreeably and lifted his cup of coffee, which had just been provided by his host’s secretary, Joyce, in the adjoining room, in a casual toast of sorts.
Walter Reynolds, who had spent most of the morning reading the Washington Post online and washing his gut with coffee, almost winced at the gratitude. Now more than ever he felt like a complete fraud in his neat two-piece suit, strangling tie, and polished wing tips. But shaking it off, he raised his cup to return the toast. It was an unusual gesture, he thought. In all his life he couldn’t remember carrying out the ritual with anything other than alcohol, which was notoriously hard to procure in Sudan, God-fearing and genocidal republic that it was, much to his lasting annoyance
.
Reynolds sighed as they both sipped at the hot liquid, his gaze never shifting from the man seated across from him.
The consultant, he had to admit, was not what he had been expecting. Reynolds wasn’t sure why, exactly, but a few things stood out, including his age. For a man with such remarkable connections, he was young…no more than thirty-six or seven, and that was a conservative estimate. His dark hair, which could have been black or a very dark shade of brown, was lightly oiled and cut short to reveal a receding hairline, which, strangely enough, didn’t seem to detract from his youthful appearance. His face was on the narrow side, but open and friendly, particularly around the eyes and mouth, and he wore steel-rimmed spectacles that pinched the bridge of his long nose, contributing to the overall air of subdued intelligence.
And that was what had thrown him, Reynolds realized. The consultant didn’t seem to fit the mold. He wasn’t loud, domineering, and demanding, like most people would be in his position, but quiet and unassuming. He did not have the fleshy, arrogant face of the stereotypical kingmaker, but that of an earnest scholar. He could have been a congressman on the rise, or a surgical resident in one of the country’s better hospitals. In his youth he might have been the captain of the chess club or debate team at an Ivy League school, of which he was no doubt a graduate.
Reynolds idly wondered which one he had gone to. Had it been Harvard, the first choice for America’s moneyed youth? Princeton, maybe? Yale? Perhaps he was wrong, Reynolds thought. Perhaps this youngster had come up the hard way. Perhaps he had gone to Brown.
Setting down his cup, the senior diplomat returned his attention to the document on his desk. It was a letter of introduction, delivered by diplomatic pouch several minutes earlier. The timing was extraordinary, and by no means a coincidence-it had arrived less than a minute before his guest had appeared in the anteroom. Reynolds lifted the top half of the single page and slowly scanned the twelve lines of concise text, even though he had already read the letter several times. A moment later he reached the signatures at the bottom. It was here that his eyes lingered. There were four signatures in all, and they represented some of the most powerful people in the U.S. government, among them the woman who’d called him the previous day.
Reynolds couldn’t help but shake his head in admiration. It was a remarkable document in a number of ways, primarily for the powers it bestowed upon the young man sitting across from him. At first glance, they appeared to be nearly unlimited, though Reynolds reminded himself that the wording in the letter was hardly specific and could be interpreted any number of ways. In his thirty years with the Foreign Service, he had seen some incredibly vague terminology appear in official government documents, and this one was no exception. But still, to see all those signatures, and on one piece of paper…
He looked up and offered a smile, then flicked the fine linen paper with the tip of his finger. “Your credentials are very impressive, Mr. Landis. Beyond reproach, actually.”
The young man couldn’t help but smile at the name. There was no harm in doing so. To the senior diplomat, it would look like he was merely returning the gesture. It had not been easy at first, and he had nearly slipped up a number of times, but he was now accustomed to hearing it.
James Landis. He had held that identity for exactly thirty days, and it was getting easier with each passing week. The chief of mission believed that he had arrived in-country that very day, mainly because that was what he was meant to believe. In reality, Landis had landed in the Republic of Sudan a month before, entering the country through Khartoum International Airport as Harold Traylor…yet another disposable name he’d jettisoned, along with his forged passport, after its purpose had been served.
Just getting into Sudan had been almost as dangerous as the things he’d been doing since. While he would have preferred to enter via a remote border crossing, preferably in the western territories edging up against Chad, most had been closed due to the escalating clashes over the oil fields and pumping stations in West Darfur. The few checkpoints that remained open were so volatile that for any Westerner to attempt a crossing-even a man of his unique and considerable talents-would have amounted to suicide. As a result, he’d been forced to take a direct flight into Khartoum, where alert officials and CCTV cameras were in far greater abundance. There had been some degree of risk in doing so, but he’d made it through customs unscathed, and forty minutes later he’d destroyed any evidence that Harold Traylor ever existed. That passport, along with a New York driver’s license, a well-worn membership card to a video store in Albany, and several credit cards in the same name, had been burned in a back garden at the home of his sole contact in the capital.
Another stop along the road, another shed skin left behind.
Since those first precarious days, his network had expanded with astonishing speed, thanks largely to his contact’s connections in Khartoum and the surrounding areas. The planning itself had involved weeks spent clustered around a table in the Harry S. Truman Building in Washington, D.C., home to the U.S. Department of State. In a soundproofed room on the ground floor, he and a rotating staff of ten had studied everything from the strength of the republic’s dissident groups to the command structure of the Sudanese army. The lengthy strategy sessions had been hard to endure, even though he’d known just how important that information would eventually be to his own welfare. Now Landis was well into the operational part of his plan, but up until this point, he had only been setting the stage. Moving the pieces into place. The next stage was crucial. Fittingly, it would also be far more dangerous. The risks had been mulled over at length-not only by him, but by the men and women who had tasked him with his current assignment, the most challenging and important of his career. After much debate, they had been deemed acceptable.
One of those risks was the man seated across from him now. The problem, Landis knew, stemmed from an incident twenty-five years in the past. Walter Reynolds, then a junior economics officer stationed at the U.S. embassy in Asuncion, Paraguay, had misplaced a stack of sealed bids submitted by various American contractors. The contractors, five in all, were competing for the right to build a four-lane vehicular bridge over the Parana River, a project valued in excess of ten million dollars. One week after the bids went missing, a Japanese company swept in out of nowhere and won the contract, out-bidding the closest U.S. competitor by a mere twenty thousand dollars.
It was never proven that the missing paperwork had fallen into the wrong hands, but that didn’t matter. The damage was already done, and someone had to take the blame. The incident had done much to derail Reynolds’s career in the Foreign Service. It had also marked him as a man who could not be trusted with important information. The trick in this case, Landis knew, would lie in telling him exactly what he needed to know and not a word more. Eventually, Reynolds would be allowed to see the entire picture, but certainly not now, and maybe not until it was all said and done.
The chief of mission was droning on, saying something about the necessity of maintaining clear lines of communication between the various diplomatic outposts. It wasn’t what Landis wanted to hear.
Leaning forward in his seat, he cut the older man off with a genial smile and a wave of his hand.
“Sir, I understand exactly what you mean, but I’m afraid I don’t have time to get into it now.” It was partially true; he had several meetings lined up in the city, and they would take up the better part of the afternoon. For the most part, though, he just didn’t want to be in the embassy any longer than necessary. “There is one thing I need to hear from you, and then I can brief you a little more thoroughly. If you’re satisfied with that arrangement, we can proceed.”
The man looked suspicious. Landis couldn’t blame him; had the roles been reversed, he would have felt the same way.
“I suppose that depends,” Reynolds said slowly, “on what you need to hear.”
Landis pointed toward the document on the desk, which was facing away from him. “Sir, d
o you believe that this is a legitimate document? More specifically, are you comfortable with the terms stated in the letter, and are you willing to abide by them?”
The senior diplomat leaned back in his chair and smiled tightly. “Well, that all depends, doesn’t it? I’m sure you’re comfortable with the terms, Mr. Landis. This document seems to give you a good deal of authority. Essentially, it makes you my superior.”
“That it does,” Landis replied neutrally. He would have preferred to demur, but Reynolds was right, and it would be better if he understood the hierarchy right from the start. That way, they could avoid the argument later. “But again, are you willing to abide by the terms? Because if you are not, I need to know now so I can leave this building and make some calls.”
The older man’s smile faded away. “That sounds like a threat.”
Landis knew Reynolds was thinking about the four names at the bottom of the introductory letter and what those people could do to his career.
“Not at all, sir,” he replied calmly. “Far from it. I’m merely pointing out that by seeing this document, you already know a great deal, and that could endanger my work here. If you are not willing to cooperate, I’m going to have to leave the country and make alternate arrangements. Surely you can see the logic in that.”
Reynolds mused over this for a moment. Then he nodded once, conceding the point. “If I agree to your terms,” he said slowly, “will you tell me what this is about?”
“No, sir,” Landis said. He strived to sound genuinely regretful, as though it wasn’t his decision to make. “I can’t and I won’t. In time you’ll know everything. I promise you. But for now, I just need to know that we’re on the same page. And in case you were wondering, calling those people”-he pointed to the signatures at the bottom of the letter-“will get you nowhere. As the document states, I have full control on the ground for the duration of this operation. They will tell you exactly the same thing, only they’ll probably be less polite about it.”
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