by Diane Capri
Yano backed out into the hallway.
She stepped to the doorway, placed a hand on either side of the frame, and gulped air.
Yano looked at her with a sneer of disgust on his face. “You are going to be sick? Go outside.”
She took deep breaths. The oxygen dizzying her brain. She slowed her breathing and nodded. “I think… I’m going to be okay.” She exhaled long and slow. “Sorry. I’m not… I’m not used to seeing…” She waved her hand in the air toward the bed.
“Yes, but can you confirm it is Felipe Cantor?” Yano said.
“I think so.” She gazed at the floor. “I couldn’t look too closely.”
Hadlow came up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s him all right. No question.”
Jess moved into the corridor. “Where are his things?”
Yano shook his head. “Everything was taken. Clothes. Wallet. Passport.” He nodded to the room, “We found his body and nothing else.”
“Who killed him?”
Yano shook his head. “We have very little evidence to work with. Fingerprints all over the room, but this is a hotel. Many people have been here. It’s not likely we will find the killer unless something unexpected turns up.”
“You have no witnesses or security cameras here?” Hadlow asked.
Yano shook his head. “He arrives late in the evening, and that very night someone breaks in, kills him, and takes all his possessions.” He stared at Hadlow and Jess. “Almost no one knew he was here.”
“Except us,” Hadlow said. “But why would we want to kill and rob our friend? That makes no sense, does it?”
Yano grunted what sounded like agreement. “You will have to leave your passports and car keys with me for the time being.”
“You can’t seriously think we killed him?” Jess said. “Have you asked the clerk at our hotel? We didn’t leave all night.”
Yano held his hand out.
Jess raised her eyebrows and turned to Hadlow. In a tone she hoped resembled a very worried British wife, she said, “Shouldn’t we contact our embassy first, Gary? This doesn’t seem right to me at all.”
“I’m sure we don’t need to do that.” Hadlow patted her shoulder and handed the passports to Yano. “This is just routine, isn’t it, Inspector? We’ll get these back soon?”
Yano nodded. “They will be returned to you later today.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Jess leaned on the metal railing along the seafront. Waves rolled in, breaking on the dark sand beach. The sun crept higher above the horizon behind her, casting gold and silver streaks across the sand and glinting off the surf.
Hadlow looked up and down the deserted sidewalk. “Good move in there, keeping Yano out of the room. The second attempt did the trick.”
“Why didn’t we simply tell him who we are and what’s going on here? We don’t know that he’s corrupt, which is why you didn’t trust him, I assume.”
“I can’t tell you everything I know, Jess. You signed up to that compromise when you came along. I did warn you before we started out.”
She looked out to sea. “Yano came straight to us, which is weird.”
Hadlow turned to follow her gaze. “Not really. Cantor arrived last night. We arrived last night. It would be a coincidence worth checking out to any cop.”
“But how did he know we arrived last night?”
Hadlow sucked air between his teeth. “He probably knows everyone here. There’s only two hotels to check.”
She’d accept that answer. For now. “Cantor’s door wasn’t damaged. No sign of forced entry, and no sign of a struggle in the room. He was lying in bed. The sheets were knotted up, and all the blood was there, nowhere else. That’s where the fight happened. So, his attacker had a room key.”
“Possible. That place isn’t very secure.” Hadlow shrugged. “But did you see the lock? I could get through that without waking him up in a few seconds.”
“So, Grupo Lopez cleared out his desk. He gets shot at in Zorita, he runs here…” she paused to be sure Hadlow was listening. “And he gets knifed while he sleeps in Rooibank. A place neither of us had ever heard of before yesterday.”
“Someone really wanted to get rid of him. Or maybe he had more than one enemy. Who knows?”
“This was a close, brutal attack with a knife. In Zorita the sniper took shots from across the street. It’s not even close to the same MO.”
“If the radio report was right, the Zorita sniper is in custody. This was another professional with another style.”
Jess shrugged. “In which case, the killer’s gone. Not much reason to stick around after the deed has been done. Which brings us to the only new intel we have on Cantor.”
“Yep.” Hadlow grinned. “Cantor’s phone is unlocked thanks to your quick thinking with Yano back there.”
Down the street, in a single-story hut, a light came on, and the door opened. A rotund man with the last wisps of black hair on a bald head wrestled a sign onto the sidewalk and arranged the legs to keep it from toppling over. The sign had two pieces of paper fixed with thumbtacks, and the word Café painted in yellow.
Hadlow pointed. “Let’s have breakfast while we look at Cantor’s phone.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Jess and Hadlow were the cafe’s first patrons. On her first glance of the place, she noticed six mismatched tables arranged in two rows. The mismatched chairs were an array of local construction and plastic moldings from nameless factories, but somehow the contrast was appealing.
Nautical paintings adorned the walls. Lights hung from the rafters with blue and yellow glass cones for lampshades. A small counter with a cash register and a shelf full of bottles was near the entrance.
The rotund man stood behind the counter. “Welcome. You must be the British.” His French accent was pleasant enough.
Hadlow nodded. “Word travels fast.”
“Don’t be surprised. It’s been a while since we had our last murder.”
“We didn’t do it,” Jess said with a smile.
“I never said you did.” He laughed, and all three of his chins wobbled. He leaned forward and whispered. “In Africa, murderers don’t usually hang around waiting for the police to catch up.”
Hadlow said, “We’re hungry.”
The owner held up one finger. “Let me guess, the full English breakfast, yes?”
“Two. With tea,” Hadlow held up two fingers.
“And coffee,” Jess added.
He nodded. “Naturellement. I am François, the best chef in Rooibank. Normally I would never cook anything English,” he winked, “but for you, I shall make an exception. Please. Sit.”
Hadlow worked his way to the tables at the rear, chose the most stable one, and sat down. He pulled out Cantor’s phone and entered the unlock code. Jess sat next to him, and he held the phone angled so they could both see the screen.
Jess reached over and scrolled through the list of text messages, the greatest number of which were labeled DE and had a throbbing heart for an avatar.
The phone kept text messages for sixty days. The conversations showed a couple in love. There were moments that were sickly cute mixed in with notes to remember more liquid soap.
They had debated which movies to see on the basis of who chose the one they saw the previous week. He had extolled the virtues of a trip to the treasures of Barcelona, which Elden happened to notice coincided with Real Madrid playing the home team.
She leafed from oldest to newest, pressing the small gray Info button beside each message. The phone collected the date and time of the message, and a small arrow led to a page that showed the location on a tiny map.
It was a slow process, but Jess persisted, working all the way through to the last one.
Hadlow watched, grunting an occasional acknowledgment.
Jess stopped searching when she found a message sent to Cantor from Luanda. The date was two weeks earlier.
Hadlow tilted the phone to
ward him. “The flight plan for that trip said N’Djamena in Chad.”
“How do you know that?”
“I was following her. She was on the Grupo Lopez executive jet. I had to take a commercial flight to N’Djamena, and surprise, surprise, she wasn’t there.”
“How can you be sure? N’Djamena’s a big place.”
“Because the route they actually took meant the pilot had to acknowledge crossing Cameroon airspace. It got listed in official records. I found out after I landed in N’Djamena.”
“She could have stopped off?”
He shook his head. “Timeline doesn’t allow it. They went straight to Cameroon.”
“How nice to have an executive jet at your disposal, I guess.”
“Tell me about it.” He nodded to the phone. “Keep going.”
There were several messages from Luanda, an hour’s break, then one more message that said simply, almost there.
“He knew where she was going,” Jess said.
“Here,” Hadlow said.
She pressed the arrow to reveal the location. The small map showed a blue rectangle. The words underneath read Near Rooibank.
She zoomed in on the map. The rectangle stayed defiantly blue. She zoomed out. The Angolan coastline came into view on the right-hand edge of the rectangle. She dragged the map over to put Rooibank in the middle of the display.
“The GPS probably wasn’t accurate enough for pinpointing more specifically,” Hadlow said.
She dragged the map up and down the coast. Rooibank was the largest town until Kitande. Hell, it was the only town on this map.
“The location says it’s near Rooibank. Could be only a mile or two. We could get a jeep and go exploring.”
He said, “It could be five miles. Or ten. That’s a lot of ground to cover.”
She re-centered the map on Rooibank. “She has to be here. Cantor came here to find her.”
“Maybe,” Hadlow replied. “But if he knew where she was, wouldn’t he have driven there directly? Why stop off at that sleazy hotel?”
Jess tapped her fingers on the table. “Where are you? Where?” She stopped tapping. “He arrived in the evening. It was dark.”
Hadlow frowned. “So he couldn’t find her place in the dark?”
“There’s nothing over here but a small fishing port.” Jess shrugged. She scrolled the map westward. The African coast disappeared. The rectangular map showed nothing but blue ocean. She moved farther west. A small dot came into view, and she zoomed in.
The dot became an island in the shape of a pear. The map showed two roads that circled the landmass, a town, and a port. The word Gloriana was written in bold in the center of the island.
Jess tapped her finger on the map. “He knew perfectly well where she was. He just couldn’t get there last night. This was the end of the road.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Hadlow typed furiously with his thumbs on his satellite phone. Jess raised her eyes questioningly. He shrugged. “ET phone home.”
Before she could ask him more, François brought their full English breakfast. The thick oval plates were white with a thin blue line around the edge and piled with bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, toast, and tomatoes.
Hadlow’s tea was served in the cup, and he turned down the milk that was offered. Jess’s coffee was still brewing in a French coffee press. She assured François she could press the plunger herself.
Hadlow ate like he had never seen food before. He finished his meal a full five minutes before Jess finished everything on her plate.
Between bites, Jess checked her phone. She had better service here than she would in the wilds of Kitande.
She looked up Gloriana in Taboo’s files. She scanned the text and read the interesting parts aloud. “The island is eight miles by five and rises to three hundred feet above sea level in the center. Formerly a British colony, it was given to the Portuguese at the end of the 1800s, and finally became part of Angola during the long-running war of independence. It has a small port. The population is around two hundred fifty, mostly in the port town. It has landline access to the mainland, but no internet service. Main occupations are fishing, subsistence farming, and coffee harvesting. The island was largely protected from the civil war that gripped Angola through the early 2000s.”
Hadlow’s phone chimed. An image appeared. He studied it a few moments before holding it out for Jess to see. “Some of the residents are doing pretty well for subsistence farming.”
The image was a bird’s-eye view of the island. A direct overhead shot. There was a small cluster of urbanization around the port and two longer roads that looped around the island. Occasional light dots were probably the location of houses, but the picture was too small to distinguish much.
Hadlow put the phone on the table and zoomed in. The dots were small houses, a couple of them abandoned.
He tapped a button at the top right of the screen, and the color picture changed to one with a red hue.
Jess inched closer. What had seemed to be trees and vegetation was now a series of large ghostly outlines, squares, and rectangles. “Buildings? Under the canopies?”
“Looks like.” He panned the image. The unmistakable outline of a helipad appeared, complete with a central H.
“Can we go back to the first picture?”
Hadlow tapped the button, and the color picture returned. The squares and the helipad vanished under a rich layer of green foliage. Minuscule text in the corner of the picture indicated it was a week old.
He placed his finger on the screen and swept left and right. The image panned back and forth, slanting the camera’s angle to show a sideways view. Hadlow whistled. “Those are some tall trees.”
Jess zoomed in. “Big enough to fly a helicopter underneath.”
“They’re probably artificial. Russians used to do similar things.”
“I take it you’re not going to tell me how you got those pictures.”
Hadlow did not reply.
Jess said, “Cantor was trying to get there because he knew Elden was there. Nothing else would have drawn him all this way.”
“Possibly. He was worried about her. He should have gone to the police after someone tried to kill him. Any sane person would have, and he struck me as a very sane person.”
“You think he realized she was in danger only after he was attacked?” she asked.
“Possible. Maybe even likely. But why not just call her?”
She shrugged. “Maybe he figured he was under surveillance?”
He shook his head. “He slept in that hotel without barricading the door, so he wasn’t expecting anyone to attack him.”
“But Grupo Lopez security was looking for him, and his desk was cleared out.”
“We have his phone. Unless he talked to someone at Grupo Lopez, he might not have known that.”
Jess stared at Cantor’s phone. “He came all this way.” She turned the phone over in her hand. “More to the point, he came straight here. Straight for Elden. So he must have known something that he thought was so important that he had to reach her, don’t you think?”
Hadlow arched his eyebrows. “When someone is trying to kill you inside your own home, my guess is it’s pretty easy to figure out you’re a target.”
“Right. So Cantor knew he was a target and immediately ran to warn Elden, probably. Which means he knew the threat was also to her. But why did he come here?” Jess cocked her head. “Grupo Lopez has no facilities near here.”
Hadlow held up his phone. “Maybe, maybe not. And if I’m right, the very fact that Cantor knew where to find Elden is likely what got him killed.” Hadlow looked around the room and took a deep breath. “This is why I was watching Elden and Rafa Lopez.”
Jess frowned. “You want to elaborate?”
He looked around the empty room again and lowered his voice. “You know what sepsis is?”
“It’s a reaction to an infection. Can be fatal if not treated. With treatment, people
get over it, usually.”
“Well, three months ago, there was a significant increase in the number of cases reported in a small, remote region in northern Botswana, around a thousand miles from here.”
“I heard about that on the news.”
“Nearly two hundred people inexplicably went into septic shock. Before Doctors Across Africa could get there, half of them died.” He lowered his voice further. “A bunch of organizations, your CDC included, looked into the outbreak. They found nothing to explain it. No source, no common factor like bites or injuries or food. An entire area’s population mysteriously became extremely sensitive to infections, and their immune systems went into overdrive causing sepsis and death.”
She widened her eyes as the implications sunk in. “You think Grupo Lopez was responsible?”
“No one knows what happened, let alone who was responsible.” He shrugged. “After a month the number of new cases dropped back to normal. Even in the wilds of Africa, they can trace infections, the spread of diseases.”
She frowned. “And if they can’t? What does that mean?”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
He took a deep breath. “The collective belief is that a wide area reaction like that doesn’t happen naturally. Which leaves only one option. Someone did this deliberately. Probably testing something.”
“You mean a biological weapon?” She paused and then screwed up her face. “All those people died because someone wanted to test a weapon?”
He nodded. “That’s the general consensus.”
She exhaled. “What consensus? Who?”
He shook his head.
“Then who was behind the test?”
“There’s a crowd of suspects from a number of countries.”
“Including Grupo Lopez,” she said, dully.
“One of dozens of possibilities. There are plenty of other people out digging for answers, your lot included.”