by V. K. Powell
“I won’t,” Sara replied.
Zak pulled loose from Sara’s grasp and glared at her in disbelief. “Then you’re sure one hell of an actress. It looked like you could eat him with a spoon.”
“And you looked like you could kill him.”
“Trust me, I could and probably would’ve tried if—”
“If what? If I hadn’t been here? Is that why you agreed to continue with the job, so you could get a whack at Wachira?”
“What if it is?” Zak felt the exchange taking a dangerous turn but couldn’t stop. She had often imagined eliminating Wachira but, faced with the possibility, doubted herself capable of such cruelty. And involving Sara in any way had never been an option. “Do you have a problem with a little justice for the man who killed my father?”
“I have a problem with killing, period, and with being used for any reason.”
“Then maybe you do need another guide, because I can’t promise not to do either.” At this point she and Sara were standing almost nose to nose, their eyes locked in a staring battle. With her last statement, Sara reeled backward as if she’d been slapped.
The look on Sara’s face was akin to fear. Her usually warm brown eyes were wide and filled with pain. Her full lips were pulled thinly around a mouth that pursed with disapproval. She stared at Zak like she was a stranger, a stranger to be dreaded and avoided. She’d never had a woman regard her with such alarm, and that it was Sara made it more unbearable.
Ben stepped between them and placed his hand on Zak’s chest. His strong presence calmed her immediately. “Ebony, Miss Sara did a good thing.” He waited for his words to reach through her haze of emotion. “It gives us time to find the truth without drawing Wachira’s wrath.”
“If you want to play her little game, go ahead, but count me out. I learned years ago not to put my hand in the fire. There are other ways to handle this.” Zak turned and walked toward the river as the remnants of her rage seeped onto the parched African soil and the tenuous connection she’d experienced with Sara shattered into a million pieces.
*
Zak had been gone since their visit from Wachira, running alone in the desert for hours. Sara was glad she wasn’t around during breakfast so she could think without worrying about hiding her facial expressions. Her reality had suddenly taken a sinister shift. She knew Zak was intense and moody, but this morning she saw something else, a dark side capable of bloodshed. It surprised, frightened, and saddened her that Zak might intentionally hurt another human being. Sara was a consummate pacifist, and being involved in violence of any kind conflicted with her nature. The thought weighed heavily in her mind as she poked at her breakfast. Joey and the work crew pulled into camp as she and Ben finished cleaning the breakfast dishes.
“You had visitors?” Joey asked.
“How did you know?”
“Checkpoint just over the ridge, never there before. They stopped us.”
“Are you okay?”
“Sure, they search everyone and let us go. Now we work.”
“Actually, Joey, I was wondering if you’d take me into Talek. The other men can stay and work on the school. I’ll pay for your matatu services, of course.”
“Sure, miss.”
She found Ben and told him she needed to go into town and get more supplies, blaming the shortage on feeding lunch to a group of hungry workmen every day. He was reluctant to let her leave without telling Zak, but acquiesced when she told him Joey would drive her. The two men conferred briefly in Swahili before Sara and Joey left.
“What were you talking to Ben about?”
“Ben says you don’t need supplies, got enough for two weeks. So Ben says I must keep close eye on you. Don’t let you make trouble.” Joey smiled like he’d been entrusted with the family’s prize cow.
She wondered how Ben had gotten to know her so well. And even though she lied about her reason for leaving camp, he gave her the time and space she needed to work through her concerns. Friendship like that was hard-won in the world she lived in but seemed so effortless from this kind man. She suddenly envied Ben’s unassuming manner and his calming effect on Zak.
At the rise of the hill, Joey slowed the jeep as they approached the police checkpoint, and Sara recognized one of the men from their morning visit. He waved them through, staring intently at their license tag and speaking into his walkie-talkie.
While the lightweight van bumped along the washboard road, Sara wondered what had happened to Zak that morning. She had seemingly morphed into another person. Her entire body hummed with suppressed fury and the look in her eyes was pure hatred. Sara felt certain that if she hadn’t intervened, Zak would’ve gone after Wachira in spite of the overwhelming odds. Her own safety didn’t even appear to be a concern. The only thing that stopped her was Sara’s presence. Was she concerned about Sara being hurt, was she worried about another witness, or did she suddenly realize the lunacy of her actions?
Perhaps this was the reason for all the secrecy about her life and work. Maybe Zak Chambers was a professional assassin handling a very personal job and using her as a cover. She tried to reconcile this thought with her past interactions with Zak. Talking Sara through the thunderstorm on the plane, saving her from a crocodile attack, revealing such tenderness when she talked about her father’s death. Zak’s tears of pain didn’t mesh with the behavior Sara had observed that morning. She just didn’t want to believe Zak capable of something so distasteful.
“Joey, I need to go somewhere that has a land line and a fax machine.” She needed to redirect her thoughts for a while, and the land situation was a good distraction. Randall had resources all over the globe, and property searches were a specialty of his.
“Not Talek for supplies?” Joey gave her a teasing grin. “I know a place.”
Twenty more minutes of jaw-jarring travel brought them to a small strip of concrete buildings with tin roofs that looked like all the others she’d seen, only marginally habitable. “Here?”
“Yes, miss. This is library. Has phone and fax but you pay, right? I wait.”
It took almost half an hour to get a connection through to Randall Burke, her attorney in New York. She directed him to conduct a thorough check of international corporations with interests in property in the Narok District of Kenya and to locate a map showing existing owners in the area. His timetable was immediately if not sooner. Then she waited while he faxed the PI’s written report on Rikki’s activities. The more pages that spewed out of the machine, the more depressed she became. When the final page came through, she was close to tears.
She folded the sheets and tucked them into her purse on the way back to the van. Joey gave her one look and averted his gaze. He seemed to know she didn’t want to talk. “We make detour through the reserve. See animals, maybe.” He drove away from the library in the opposite direction they’d come.
“I’d like that,” she answered. Along the new route, Sara saw people planting in the right-of-way between the road and a large fenced farm. “What are they doing?”
“They plant gardens. These people have no land so they grow food here.”
“How do they water the vegetables?”
“Tote water from the river at Talek, many miles a day.”
Compared to these industrious people’s fight for survival, Sara’s girlfriend woes seemed petty and selfish. She tried to ignore the multipage report that screamed for her attention and focused on the sights around her. Ahead, Sara saw another checkpoint but this one looked different. The men who manned the station were dressed in camouflage uniforms instead of the police blue. Huge metal spikes crisscrossed the road in both directions, and warning signs indicated that all traffic must stop. They waved Joey over to the side with menacing-looking weapons. “Jeshi,” Joey said, and his tone implied that wasn’t good.
“What does that mean?”
“Military, worse than police.”
Joey pulled into the directed spot and cut the engine. Officers encircled
the vehicle. One read the license tag while another ordered them out and against the side of the van. The soldier closest to Sara grabbed her shoulders and slid his rough hands over her breasts, along her sides, between her thighs, and down her legs under the guise of searching her. His invasion felt personal and offensive.
She wanted to defend herself but decided it would only exacerbate the situation. What would Zak do? Strike that, she was better off handling it diplomatically. The combination of military, manhandling, and Zak would probably be deadly for someone.
“Is this really necessary? We haven’t done anything wrong. What is this about?” The officer shrugged as if he didn’t understand English and the groping continued. Next to her, Joey was being frisked by two men who shouted for silence each time he tried to address them in Swahili. “I’d like to talk with Commander Wachira.”
The men laughed at her. “Wachira is nothing. We are jeshi,” one of them answered.
“Mchuma, mchuma!” An officer yelled from inside the van and waved a handgun out the window.
Joey’s horrified expression confirmed the weapon wasn’t his. The panic on his face as he tried to explain was heart-wrenching. “It is not mine. I have no weapons.” His voice cracked. “This is wrong.”
The officer who was searching Sara jerked her arms behind her back and handcuffed her as she watched Joey being pushed to the ground. “Don’t hurt him, please.” The men hovering over Joey kicked his prone body, handcuffed him, and pulled him up by the cuffs.
“What are you doing? Where are we going?” Sara asked as they were led to a truck with a canvas-covered bed. She was shoved onto a long aluminum bench that ran the truck’s length. Shackles snapped together around her ankles with a loud clank, emphasizing the severity of her situation. The heavy metals were cold and their jagged surface cut into the flesh around her feet.
An officer secured the shackles to the floor and closed the flap, leaving them alone. The enclosure smelled of urine and vomit, and it took all Sara’s strength to control the churning in her stomach. When the truck started moving, Sara was unsure if her shaking was from the rough ride or her emotional state. She had to focus on something else.
“Are you okay, Joey? Did they hurt you?”
The young man forced a smile to replace the fear so clearly etched on his face. “I am good, miss. You?” His attempt to reassure her was touching.
“Fine, under the circumstances. What’s going to happen to us?”
“They take us to Nairobi. Weapons are forbidden.”
“That wasn’t your gun, was it?”
“No, miss, and not my father’s. Something bad is happening.”
The ride to Nairobi seemed interminable inside the dark, unventilated truck bed. Sara tried to keep her breathing calm and steady despite the poor air circulation and oppressive heat. The space was like a furnace. And without visual references, Sara was unsure which direction they were traveling or how long they’d been on the road. The officers had confiscated her cell phone along with her purse, so contact was impossible. Once again she regretted leaving camp without telling Zak.
“Will they let us make a phone call when we reach Nairobi?” Sara wasn’t sure who she would call first—Zak or her attorney. Since Randall was in New York, Zak seemed the most likely to get immediate results, though those results weren’t guaranteed to be positive. Had Zak also had run-ins with the military in Kenya as well as local police? The thought did little to settle her anxiety.
*
It was midafternoon when Zak and the crew stopped work for the day. There had been no word from Sara or Joey, and she was getting concerned. Ben stopped several times and looked toward the ridge, as if wishing would bring them back sooner. He apologized over and over for letting them leave without knowing their destination and possible return time. His repeated contrition gave Zak an uncomfortable feeling of foreboding.
Since Joey wasn’t back with the van, Zak talked the crew into staying for dinner, after which she would drive them all home. But her phone rang just as she stepped from a cold shower. “Yeah.”
“Zak?”
“Yeah.” She recognized one of her contacts from Nairobi Police Headquarters.
“Jeshi just logged in Ms. Sara Ambrosini and a driver named Joey for possession of a handgun. They haven’t been allowed a phone call yet.”
“Thanks, I’m on my way. If anything changes, let me know.”
Zak briefed Ben on the new plan as she threw a change of clothes in her rucksack for Sara. “I’ll drop the men off in Talek with enough cash to get home. Can you mind the camp until we return?” When he nodded, she continued. “Get a couple of men from your village to come help out with security. We’ll need them after I return as well. It’s a six-hour drive each way to Nairobi, so we’ll probably stay over, if I can even get her released tonight.” She tossed the bag over her shoulder and started toward the truck, but Ben stopped her.
“This is not her fault, Ebony.”
“A gun, Ben. Where in the hell did it come from?”
“Not Miss Sara, and I think not Joey. Be careful.”
The drive into Nairobi seemed to take forever, and aggravating the situation was the memory of the distressed look on Sara’s face earlier when she’d lashed out about Wachira. She’d grown closer to Sara as they’d worked and learned to respect each other’s strengths. Their styles even seemed to complement each other temperamentally and with the men. But Zak’s venomous outburst had obviously shocked Sara and left her at an uncharacteristic loss for words.
How could she have been so careless as to let Sara see her dark side? She’d kept it buried for three years while it festered and oozed around inside her, becoming angrier and uglier with each day. It never occurred to her that her desire for vengeance might hurt someone she cared for. The realization that she was beginning to care for Sara crept into her awareness. The adorably annoying redhead had effortlessly insinuated herself into her life. Her straightforward approach to life, her unabashed willingness to express her feelings, and the way she naturally interacted on a personal level with everyone she met whittled at Zak’s defenses. What did Sara think of her now, and what else was she facing while a prisoner in a foreign jail?
The same worries looped continuously in Zak’s head until she arrived at the Nairobi Police Department. She arranged for Joey’s release first and, after a discussion of whether he wanted to spend the night or return home, provided money for the retrieval of his van. Sara’s liberation was more complicated since she was not a resident of Africa, but Captain Stewart had made some calls on her behalf. Zak found the military surprisingly receptive to a large infusion of cash and a plausible excuse for the gun, with the assurance that no such problem would arise again.
When Sara walked outside the dingy walls of the station, Zak was waiting at the door. She looked scared and uncertain for the first time since they met. The desire to comfort and reassure her warred with her angry impulse to seek out her captors and exact retribution. But this morning’s events made her cautious. “Are you all right?”
Sara looked around as if disoriented. “Where am I? Where’s Joey?”
“Nairobi, and Joey is on his way back home.” She took Sara’s arm and led her toward the truck. “Did they hurt you?”
“No. What are you doing here? I didn’t even get a phone call.”
“I did. Let’s go. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve booked rooms at the Stanley for the night. It’s a six-hour drive back to camp and the roads are treacherous enough in daylight.”
Sara’s eyes were still wide and she looked around as Zak drove, taking in the city like she’d been incarcerated for years instead of hours. “I just want a hot shower and a change of clothes.” The small detail seemed to register. “Clothes.”
“I brought you something. I was in a hurry, so don’t be upset if it doesn’t match.” Zak tried to snap Sara out of her shocked state with humor. It was unsettling to see her so quiet and obviously affected by the ordeal.
Zak felt so inept in these delicate situations. If she was lucky, things would be ready at the hotel and Sara could relax and regain her composure.
When they arrived at the Stanley, Zak was relieved that Captain Stewart had fulfilled her request perfectly. In addition, the fax she’d been expecting was waiting at the desk in a sealed manila envelope. She signed them in and escorted Sara to her room.
“Why don’t you have a shower and relax. If you feel up to it, call me and we’ll order something to eat later. I’d like to know what happened today.” She placed the clothes she’d hurriedly gathered for Sara on the bed and waited, unsure if she should leave her alone just yet. “Will you be okay or should I stay for a while?”
“I’ll be fine once I’m clean again.”
“Let me know if you need anything. I’m right next door.”
Zak had a quick shower and scanned the fax Stewart sent. The land-development information was more convoluted than she’d expected, but she didn’t have time to digest it all right now. Her first priority was Sara and her rattled mental condition. She sensed more was going on than just her arrest. When the shower stopped next door, Zak listened to the subtle noises of habitation as she imagined Sara drying herself and getting dressed. Then the room adjoining hers was silent. The stillness made Zak uncomfortable. She moved closer to the adjacent wall and listened.
“You stupid bitch,” Sara screamed, then something slammed against the wall and shattered on the tile floor. She was pounding on Sara’s door in seconds.
When it opened Sara didn’t look like an angry woman but like an emotionally drained one. Her hair, still wet from the shower, hung down her back in loose amber ringlets, and her face was pale and drawn. The baggy pants and T-shirt made her look small and defenseless. Her bed and the floor were littered with sheets of paper that appeared to have been thrown in the air and left where they landed. Zak stepped lightly around shards of glass that used to be a drinking cup. “What happened?” Zak stopped at Sara’s raised hand.
“Can’t do this now.”