White Bone

by Ridley Pearson

  “You were expecting me?”

  “Sit down, please,” Winston said, having stood to shake hands.

  “How? Dulwich?” The only connection Knox had to Winston was through his Rutherford Risk “control,” David Dulwich—aka Sarge—certainly had the means to track his international movement.

  “How may I help you? No, no! First, let’s get some food in you. How’s that sound?”

  A footman approached and pulled back a chair. Knox sat. A place setting was air-dropped around him by two others.

  “Coffee?”

  “Please.” It was poured for him, along with orange juice and a glass of ice water. Sugar and cream appeared. All this in fifteen seconds. Knox studied the dignified man at the head of the table in silence and sipped his coffee. He had an appetite brewing.

  “I tried to reach Sar—Dulwich—but ended up speaking to Brian Primer, who, in typical chief executive fashion, left things fuzzy around the edges. I don’t like fuzzy. I need a couple of answers.”

  “Long way to travel for a few questions.”

  “Important questions. You wouldn’t take my call, as you’ll remember.” Winston showed nothing. “Straight answers would be appreciated.”

  Again, no reaction.

  “Grace and I—Grace Chu, Rutherford Risk—stay in touch. We didn’t used to, but you know . . . things change.” He was experiencing the uncomfortable mix of jet lag and coffee. “I guess you could say we’ve become friends. So anyway, maybe three or four weeks ago, I caught up to her on a video call. She was on her phone, Heathrow in the background. Said she was visiting a friend of ours. That’s all she said. Well, you’re the only person she and I share in England, so I understood the context. An operation. Solo. Important, because you’re an important client of Rutherford Risk. I wasn’t involved. No harm, no foul. End of discussion. But then her texts stopped. Not that I get that many anyway. But one a week. Maybe two. You know? Contact. Of course they would stop when she was on an op. I’ve got no problem with that. I knew she’d make contact when she resurfaced.”

  “If you have come to ask me for specifics . . . I don’t mind sharing, if the proper paperwork’s taken care of.”

  “I finally got a text,” Knox said. “Yesterday.” He paused, taking note. Winston hadn’t expected to hear that. “Yesterday,” he repeated. “London time, at any rate. There are a couple things you need to know. One, when we’re in the field we don’t send casual texts, unless the op isn’t classified or an at-risk. Texts leave contrails, meaning you can be sourced. Two, if you do text or call, you take a number of precautions, including using pre-paid SIM cards, ghost protocols, VPNs. You know most of this. So, here’s the situation. Grace texted me from her number. Now, that’s intentional. That’s telling me something. Her text was an emoji and a question mark. That’s all. The emoji was a bomb. A tiny little bomb followed by a question mark. Any guesses, sir?”

  “Terrorism? A drone strike?” Winston lifted his cleft chin in consideration. “Not sure what you’re playing at.”

  “Blown,” Knox said. “She’s worried she might have been blown. Discovered.”

  “I am aware of the expression, John.”

  “Yeah, well, so the thing is, the only reason she would involve me is because she doesn’t trust her communication lines with you. She knows what kind of events a text like that sets into motion. She will send me an abort the moment she’s in the clear. She hasn’t done that, meaning she’s not in the clear.”

  Winston looked as if he’d been sucker-punched.

  “You’re paying attention,” Knox said.

  “No reason to be rude, John. Hungry yet?”

  Knox reached to refill his coffee but was beaten to it by a pair of arms leaning over his shoulder. This could become habit-forming, he thought. He addressed the man connected to the coffee urn, requested four eggs, sunny-side up, dry wheat toast, lean ham and smoked salmon.

  “I can’t trace calls. Rutherford Risk can, so I called Sarge, but no joy. I wanted access to the company’s Digital Services department. There’s a tech there, Vinay Kamat. Vinay will do anything for me. But not this time. He stonewalled me.”

  “No one likes being stonewalled.”

  “You see? I knew I should come here, straightaway. If it’s your op, Mr. Winston, then you can request whatever you want from tech services, including putting a source on the text sent to me to confirm beyond a doubt it was from Grace.”

  “She’s fine.” The deep voice came from behind Knox. It belonged to David Dulwich. Prior to joining Brian Primer’s security firm, he’d been Knox’s supervisor for contractor work based out of Kuwait. In recent years, Dulwich had hired Knox on a freelance basis to perform dead drops or kidnapping extractions. Most recently, Dulwich had betrayed Knox and Grace during the Istanbul op, something nearly but not entirely forgiven by Knox.

  “What the hell?” Knox barked at Dulwich. “You’re tracking my reservations now?”

  “I look out for my friends,” Dulwich said. He sat down and waited to be served. “Don’t read too much into it.”

  “Where is she? Did you hear what I told him about her text? A bomb and a question mark.” He closed his eyes to calculate. “Ten, maybe eleven hours ago.” Knox paused. “You got the same text, didn’t you?”

  In the silence, though, Knox reconsidered. Among Dulwich’s many skills, he was completely unreadable, even by a close friend and associate like Knox. “No, you didn’t. And why would that be, one might ask.” He directed this to Winston.

  “I’m merely an observer at this point,” Winston said. “Carry on.”

  “You want to tell him?” Knox asked Dulwich.

  “John’s implying Grace wouldn’t contact me if she feared she’d been blown because it might compromise the op if traced to me or, God forbid, you, sir.”

  “Ah!” Winston said.

  “Loyal to a fault,” Knox said. “That’s our Grace. Contacts me because I have nothing to do with anything you two are up to. Me, because if her text is traced, the trouble stays away from you, and she knows I can handle it.”

  “If you say so,” Dulwich said.

  “So? What now? You call Vinay. We get her twenty and you or I, or both of us for that matter, hunt her down and get her out of whatever hellhole you have her in. Why? Because that’s what she’ll expect.”

  Dulwich sat stoically. The kind of stoicism Knox had no room for. Not when this tired, this concerned.

  “Kenya,” Dulwich said. “The op is in Kenya.”

  “She wouldn’t leave me hanging like that. I should have gotten a second text. Something. Anything.”

  “It is disturbing,” Dulwich said. “Not alarming. Not yet, but disturbing. We both know there are a hundred reasons for it—dead phone battery, loss of reception, loss of phone—none of which are worth getting too worked up over.”

  “Ten, eleven hours.”

  “Understood. But, John, it’s the first I’ve heard of it. Give me a moment, would you?”

  “You wouldn’t take my call! You’d have heard of it sooner if—”

  “Easy!”

  “Primer wouldn’t give me the time of day. Kenya? What the fuck?”

  Dulwich had a gnarly, road-rash kind of face. It looked as if some of his medals for heroism might have been pinned to his right cheek at one point. The scars were, in fact, the result of field sutures and subsequent skin grafts to repair fourth-degree burns over 60 percent of his body. Knox had dragged the man from a burning truck cab in the middle of a desert; that act of selflessness hung between them always, like something ready to detonate.

  “It’s a solo op,” Knox said. “That’s fine. It’s Grace, so it’s mostly forensic accounting. Help me out here.”

  “You’re doing fine on your own. No reason to panic, John,” Dulwich said. “I should have taken your call. Mea culpa.”

&nb
sp; “I can’t take another Istanbul, Sarge. We put that behind us. You fuck with me now and we’ve got problems, you and me. Big problems.”

  “The two of you need a moment? I can leave the room.”

  The eggs were delivered.

  “Well, maybe not.” Winston stabbed a piece of sausage and stacked on a slice of tomato. He lifted it to his lips but did not take a bite.

  “I have many resources within the government,” he said, “including Number Ten, if I must play that card. I’d rather not. My contacts are not without substantial resources in Nairobi.”

  “Is that a double negative?” Knox asked. Some egg yolk leaked from his lips. He wiped it with a starched and ironed piece of cloth. “Are you talking about British Intelligence? Bring ’em on. Let’s trace that text.”

  Winston gave no acknowledgment. He might not have heard.

  “We’ll await this evening’s contact,” Dulwich said. “She’ll post on one of two websites. Nothing coded or tricky, just a post to let us know she’s still going good.”

  “Every night? Did she post last night?”

  Dulwich wasn’t pleased. “Solar flares or something. Murphy’s Law, right? We’ll give it the rest of the day.”

  “Not I. No way. A bomb with a question mark. What was she into?”

  “Is,” Dulwich emphasized.

  “You don’t know that. We don’t know that. Is, if we’re lucky. If we’re fast. Was, if we’re slow to respond. You know the drill, Sarge.”

  “Hello?” Winston said. “I do not know the drill. Please.”

  “John believes she’s been abducted, which would explain, to his way of thinking, both the text sent to him and our not hearing from her last night.”

  “But we were told—”

  “Yes. Tanzania, all the way up to Israel. A satellite failure or something.”

  “I’m listening through Grace’s ears and I’m not hearing what I want.” Knox drank more of the coffee. Who could make a cup of coffee this good in their home? he wondered, envying Winston’s wealth. Odd, that wasn’t his way. “If she’s blown, then by whom? Cops? Spooks? Mob? The original job was . . . ?”

  Knox worked on the smoked salmon while keeping his eyes on Dulwich.

  5

  Last year I made a donation,” Winston said, “of over a million pounds to fund measles vaccinations at the Oloitokitok Clinic in southern Kenya. The clinic is privately funded. It services a sizable geographical area, including northern Tanzania. There’s a long version if you want. But you strike me as an impatient man, John. So. About two months ago, data started coming in showing we had made one hell of a lot of people extremely ill with our vaccine. We now suspect the original measles vaccine was stolen in shipment and replaced with one to prevent leptospirosis in cattle. We caused meningitis, lung infections and quite possibly worse. We were told that in all probability the original vaccine was resold out of country at a high price, and that the cash funded terrorism. I sent Grace to find out where my money went, who took it and, if possible, to undermine whoever stole it. If the clinic is directly or indirectly involved with terrorism, then it’s also connected to the poaching of elephant tusk and rhino horn, another pet peeve of mine. I want that made public.”

  “Follow the money,” Knox said. “Her specialty. By ‘undermine,’ you mean get it back.”

  “Yes.”

  “You asked her to steal money from terrorists.” Knox grimaced. “Nothing risky about that. You know her,” he said accusingly to Dulwich. “Shit!”

  Silence.

  Knox addressed Dulwich. “Her daily reports?”

  “Not reports. Just confirmation she was on the right track. Two sites to check for posts. If one, things were moving. The other, a setback. Two weeks ago, the clinic shut its doors unexpectedly and without explanation. It was empty, all equipment gone, within days.”

  “She scared someone,” Knox said.

  “Indeed,” Winston said.

  “And you honestly believe she hasn’t been kidnapped or killed? Jesus, Sarge.”

  Dulwich twitched. “It could be coincidence. However unlikely.”

  “She turned over a rock and the bugs ran for cover,” Knox said. “I don’t buy you had her working in a vacuum. Why no calls? Grace can encrypt anything.”

  “Metadata,” Dulwich said. “The call, sure. But not the origin or destination tagged onto that call.”

  “Kenya is a place of corruption by degrees, John,” Winston said. “Phone lines. Airwaves. The Internet.” He shook his head. “We all agreed up front: it wasn’t worth the risk.”

  “The first forty-eight,” Knox said, referring to the critical hours after a kidnapping.

  “Not there yet. It’s not a kidnapping,” Dulwich said. “It’s not anything. It’s a fucking solar flare knocking out the Internet.”

  “Because you’re prescient.”

  “Because I only heard of this text ten minutes ago. The Internet being down, that’s for real, John.”

  “She’s been blown.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “We’re going after her, you and I, Sarge. That’s what we do. If we’re wrong, we get a round-trip on our host here. But we’re not wrong.”

  “I’m out,” Dulwich said. “We—Rutherford—did a thing there, not even a year ago. Pissed off the Chinese—those guys are so in bed in Kenya that they’ve got monogrammed pillows. I’m tagged—no good. They have facial recognition at Jomo Kenyatta. Lots of terrorism they’re dealing with. I might make it into the country from the Ugandan side, but that’ll take days. A week, maybe. It’s overland shit.”

  “How convenient! When I just happen to be available.”

  “You don’t put an operative in jeopardy by running after him or her. If Grace is nearly blown, the worst thing we can do is show up looking for her.”

  Knox knew it was true, but was loath to admit it. How could Sarge sit there so calmly? he wondered. How could these two not see the obvious? She’d thrown up a smoke signal and they were turning a blind eye. Her letter warmed in his pocket.

  “Fuck,” he said. “I’m going down there. Today. Now. If you hear from her tonight, fine. I’ll ride a giraffe or whatever one does in Nairobi, and return in a day or two. Agreed?”

  “Our people can look into it, John. No need for that,” Winston said.

  “British Intelligence? And you don’t want me giving her away? Tell him, Sarge.”

  Dulwich looked trapped. He wasn’t one to play lapdog. He’d pop a nun in the nose if she held out on him. But a client as important, as wealthy and powerful, as Graham Winston kept Sarge on a short leash.

  “You know the sign in the petrol station window?” Winston said in his buttery accent. “Ten bob an hour. Twelve, if you watch—”

  “Fifteen if you help,” Knox said. “Yeah. Ha-ha. So, I’m paying twelve. I’ll take a look, and then I’ll turn tail. No spooks. Don’t do that to her.”

  “What exactly would you need?” Winston asked.

  “A full download.” He addressed Dulwich. “I’m assuming tech services is tracking her mobile, her movement. If not her mobile, then her log-ins. Expenses? Credit cards?”

  “Cash,” Dulwich said.

  Winston took a neat bite of toast. “It’s toxic there, John. Corrupt police. The military, government, wildlife service, health care . . . there are degrees of corruption in every institution.”

  “You sent her in alone,” Knox said to Dulwich.

  “For computer work, John. Follow the money, like you said.”

  “And you thought, what, she’d just sit around her hotel room?” Indignant, Knox spat out pieces of food unintentionally as he spoke. “You know her! She’s been sucking up to you for two years! She wants to run the company someday! So, one or both of you provided her with local contacts and connections. I’ll need that same inf
ormation, exactly what she got.”

  Knox looked down at his plate; he was eating off china, with actual silverware, and where was Grace? Tied up in some Kenyan warehouse? “I need to get down there.” He pushed back his chair and stood. “I’ll stay away from her, contact only the people you trusted, but I need that list. Hotels you may have recommended, restaurants. Bars. Coffee shops. I don’t care. Anything. Everything.”

  Now Knox spoke directly to Dulwich. “My flight shouldn’t originate from here, just in case she’s already talked. Route me through Frankfurt. A puddle jumper to Berlin. Berlin to Nairobi. All separate tickets, no code sharing. Paid for on my company card. I go in on business. Same as always: I’m on a buying trip.”

  Dulwich nodded. He spoke to Winston. “As you know, John’s business is . . . world arts and crafts. Import/export. It gives him good cover in situations like this.”

  Sarge was coming around to Knox’s way of thinking. Knox kept the smile off his face.

  “If and when I track her down, I will stay away from her and whatever she’s chasing. I get a visual and I’m back on the plane. She’ll never know I was there. To everyone else, I’ll be my usual annoying self, a two-bit hack looking for some Maasai necklaces. If they run a background check, I’ll pass with flying colors.”

  Dulwich glanced at Winston, who nodded. “I’m counting on her making contact tonight, but I don’t disagree with you.”

  Another double negative, Knox thought.

  “I’ll make every effort to enter from the west,” Dulwich said. “We’ll set up a web code.”

  “Every name you gave her, and in the same order,” Knox said, repeating himself. “All I’ve got is her footsteps.”

  6

  The smells hit her first. Dust. Sticks. Dry grass. A bitter taste, staining her mouth.