by Joshua Hood
“And you have inspected the plane?” she asked, stepping closer.
“Yes, madam.”
“Can you fix it?”
“The damage to the fuselage is mostly cosmetic. I have my men patching it now . . .”
Mallory advanced on the mechanic, the ice in her eyes dropping the temperature in the room by ten degrees.
“That is not what I asked you!” she snapped.
Like most of Africa, Ivory Coast was deeply patriarchal, a male-centered society where women were to be seen but not heard. Mallory’s sudden aggressiveness caught the mechanic off guard.
He stepped back, recoiling like a man who’d reached into a basket for a piece of wood only to find a snake. “O-of course, madam, m-my mistake,” Zadi stammered, pulling an oil-stained shop rag from his coveralls and wiping it across his glistening brow.
Mallory moved to the bench next to the window, where the pilot’s passport was laid out next to her bag. “I need that plane ready to fly to Grand-Bassam in four hours,” she said, taking out a stack of cash and holding it up for Zadi to see, “and I am willing to make whoever does this for me a very rich man.”
The mechanic’s eyes widened at the sight of the money. He licked his lips, his earlier fear forgotten.
“Now, what I need to know is if you are that man, Drissa Zadi,” she said, placing the cash on the bench before retrieving the suppressed Walther, “or do I need to keep looking?”
The mechanic looked from the cash to the pistol and then back to the cash, his tongue flicking across his lips.
“Think carefully before you answer,” she warned.
“I am that man,” he said.
“Then I suggest you get to work.”
“Of course,” he said, edging toward the door.
Once the mechanic was gone, Mallory scooped the pilot’s passport from the table and reclaimed her spot at the mirror. She thumbed through the booklet, the feel of the paper against her fingers and the dull shine of the optically variable ink under the light telling her everything she needed to know.
It’s fake.
The ability to spot a forged note or government document was not a skill set possessed by many of the white-collar types who worked for Cabot. And even if it was, an employee would never find himself in a position to offer it, because when the boss called it wasn’t to converse. He ran his company like the military that had molded him, and direct communication was a one-way street—Cabot giving the orders and the underling listening.
But thanks to years of hard work and her unprecedented winning streak, Mallory had set herself apart from the pack and moved through the hierarchy to become one of his chief advisers, which was why she’d been surprised when Cabot called and told her that he needed her in Korhogo.
She’d been in Paris, on the second day of a much-needed vacation, when her phone rang.
“There is a plane waiting to fly you to Crete, where you will meet up with a team and fly to Côte d’Ivoire.”
“I wasn’t aware we had any interests in Ivory Coast,” she’d said, grabbing her suitcase from the closest.
“It’s a special project,” Cabot had said, “one that requires a woman with your delicate touch.”
By the time he hung up, Mallory had packed up and was heading out the door.
She’d spent the four-and-a-half-hour flight to Heraklion wondering what in the hell was going on, hoping the answers were waiting for her on the ground. But when she landed and met up with Wikus and the rest of the team, all Mallory found were more questions.
Back in Korhogo, she brushed the thoughts from her mind and adjusted the volume knob on the speaker mounted to the wall. Then she turned her full attention to the man sitting at the table.
Who are you, Mr. Hayes?
“Looks like you got yourself into a bit of a spot, mate,” Wikus said, crossing to the table. “I’m going to ask you a few questions”—leaning into Hayes’s face—“and you damn well better answer them.”
The South African was an imposing man, with thick arms and the barest hint of a neck. A bruiser. The kind of man who got off on inflicting pain, but instead of the fearful looks Mallory was used to seeing when the burly merc went to work on a man, Hayes appeared almost bored.
“What are you doing in the Ivory Coast?”
“I’m a reporter.”
“I dated a journo once,” Wikus said, unzipping the assault pack.
“What was he like?”
Getting a person to do your bidding was a subtle art, one that Mallory had mastered well before she came to work for Cabot. Which is why she had given Wikus clear instructions on how she wanted the interview handled.
“You can yell, scream, and be as menacing as you like, but do not hit him, understood?”
She’d felt confident that she’d made herself clear, but when Wikus looked up from the pack, his face red and his hand curling into a fist, she wasn’t so sure.
But instead of flattening Hayes’s nose he upended the assault pack and dumped the contents on the table.
“What’s this, your recorder?” he asked, picking up a pair of night-vision goggles.
“What do you want?” Hayes asked.
“Well, that’s simple,” Wikus answered, lowering himself into the chair across from the American. “I want to know how a nice-looking lad like yourself ended up landing here with a dead man in the cockpit and a plane filled with more lead than a number two pencil.”
25
KORHOGO, IVORY COAST
While Hayes was fully enjoying watching the South African fight to control his temper, the man was starting to get on his nerves.
“Listen, man, we both know you ain’t running shit, so why don’t you do me a favor?”
“What’s that?” Wikus said, leaning forward.
“Shut the fuck up and go get your boss.”
The fact that Wikus didn’t immediately flatten his nose confirmed his earlier suspicion, that whoever was on the other side of the glass had the South African on a tight leash. But Hayes was tired of screwing around and the man’s incessant questions were giving him a headache.
“Look, fuckface, I’m not telling you shit, so stop wasting my time and the world’s oxygen and go get your mommy.”
Wikus came out of the chair like he was strapped to a rocket. “That’s it, you smart-mouthed cunt,” he said, firing a meaty fist toward Hayes’s face.
Even with his hand cuffed to the table, he knew he could take Wikus to the ground without breaking a sweat. Hayes also knew that while it might feel good for a few minutes, it was the fastest possible way to blow whatever cover he had left.
But there were ways to hurt a man without making it look intentional.
Hayes waited until the last second, and then, flexing his neck and bringing his shoulders up to his ears, dropped his forehead into the path of the man’s punch.
He’d taken some hard hits, but Wikus punched like a mule and the blow snapped his head back, the force pushing the chair onto its back leg, and if it hadn’t been for the cuff securing him to the table, Hayes knew that it would have sent him to the floor. He tried to shake it off and right his chair, but the simple task left him feeling like a drunk trying to pass a field sobriety test.
He’d untangled the cuff from the chair and had just gotten all four legs on the floor when Wikus came charging around the table. His face blood red. Eyes brimming with the promise of violence.
Hayes jumped to his feet and kicked the chair into the enraged South African’s path. It was a weak counter, one he fully expected the man to avoid. But at the last instant one of the wheels hit a crack and the chair tipped onto its side, driving one of the arms into Wikus’s groin.
The blow stopped him like a .357 to the skull and he dropped to his knees, mouth stretched in a silent O.
Before Hayes could press h
is advantage, someone in the hall booted the door and a rush of Ivorian soldiers came flooding into the room. They rushed toward the table and Hayes was preparing himself for a beatdown, but the soldiers ignored him, grabbed the sobbing South African from the floor, and dragged him out.
Leaving Hayes and the woman from the tarmac alone in the room.
“I, uh . . .”
“You wanted the one in charge,” she said. “Well, here I am, Mr. Hayes.”
He studied the woman as she walked toward the table, wondering why she was here, what she wanted with him. Usually he found all the answers he needed in the eyes, but this woman’s were blank and, behind a perfect coat of makeup, her face was unreadable.
“Lady, who are you and why are you people so interested in who I am and what I’m doing here?”
“My name is Theresa Mallory,” she said.
“You’re not a cop and you obviously don’t work for the government, so what do you want?”
“I’m a lawyer,” she answered, taking his passport from her bag and opening the front cover.
“You going to get me out of here?”
“Considering the body we found in your plane, it’s not a lawyer you need, but a priest.”
“Is that why you’re here? To offer absolution?” Hayes asked.
“Mr. Hayes, do you know the penalty for traveling under forged papers in Ivory Coast?”
“Who says they’re fake?” he asked, slipping back into the good ol’ boy routine.
“I do,” she answered, the tone of her voice cold as ice.
Back in the day, when Hayes had to operate overseas, he and the rest of the Treadstone operatives traveled under false papers—or non-official cover, as it was known in the State Department—but Hayes didn’t have that option now because his passport had been confiscated before he was booted from the States.
While the loss of his papers was a pain in the ass, it wasn’t a game changer and Hayes knew that all he needed to do to get new papers was visit one of the many cache sites he’d set up during his time at Treadstone.
On paper it seemed like an easy enough solution, but it wasn’t until he made the first attempt at a bus station in Berlin that Hayes realized he was being watched. Once he suspected that he was being followed, he backed off the drop and set about to identify the surveillance team.
He spent ten minutes cruising the street for a car, found a sedan that was beat up enough not to need an alarm. He stopped at the driver’s-side door and fished around in his pocket like he was searching for the keys, while checking the street.
Clear.
Using the flat-head screwdriver he carried for just these occasions, Hayes punched the door lock, climbed inside, and after snapping the steering column used the screwdriver again to bypass the ignition.
Hayes found a map in the glove box and searched for an area that would give him the advantage. He chose the Schönhauser Allee Arcaden, the three-story mall located in Pankow, a large residential center northeast of the airport.
A minute later, he pulled out onto the street and drove north, eyes glued to the mirrors anytime he made a turn, and by the time he arrived at his destination had clocked the trail car—a navy-blue BMW 550i.
He parked on the street, got out, and headed toward the mall, using the storefront windows to check the progress of his pursuers.
There were two of them—a man and a woman—and to anyone else they might have escaped notice. But not Hayes; he immediately pegged them for what they were: a pair of desk jockeys pretending to be operatives.
On the one hand he was relieved that Shaw didn’t consider him a serious enough threat to send the best, but on the other hand, it was kind of insulting to think the director had seriously thought he wouldn’t immediately see them for what they were.
Shaking the pair had been comically easy, but Berlin was blown, and worse than that, Hayes still didn’t have his papers. He wasn’t sure how long it would take them to phone in, let someone know that they had lost their target, but one thing was for certain: Shaw was going to take his dumping a surveillance team as a personal affront. And would send a more qualified team to make sure it didn’t happen again.
With that thought at the forefront of his mind, Hayes boosted a second car and headed west. He drove to Frankfurt, took a train to the border, and crossed into France on foot.
In France he put on a counterintelligence clinic: He stuck close to the border, finally ending up in Strasbourg, where he made sure that the CCTV picked him up boarding a train for Zurich.
Hayes ducked into the bathroom to change clothes and used a pair of scissors and a bottle of dye to cut and color his hair. When he stepped off the train at the next stop, he was a different person.
He’d thought that he’d gotten away clean, until he went for the second drop in Marseilles, but this time Shaw had sent in the pros. While Hayes felt the heat, he never got anything close to a positive identification.
In the end, his only choice had been to buy a set of papers from a half-blind forger in Marseilles, so he wasn’t surprised that Mallory was calling bullshit on his passport.
But while he still didn’t know what she wanted, Hayes had no problem identifying her angle. Her approach was crystal clear. She was defining the stakes, trying to rattle him with implied threats of Vlad’s body on the plane and the penalty for traveling on a bogus passport.
But why? She’s not a cop, and from the looks of those knuckle draggers she’s rolling with she sure as hell ain’t Mother Teresa, so what does she want?
He realized the only way he was going to find out was to give her what she wanted—a story.
“Look, I got into some trouble a few months back,” he began.
“What kind of trouble?” she asked, pressing a cigarette between her crimson lips.
There were a multitude of acceptable answers, but something about the way Mallory was staring at him over the unlit cigarette, studying him like he was some kind of science experiment, told him that she was looking for something.
Leverage.
“Smuggling,” he said.
Mallory nodded and sparked the lighter and leaned in, keeping her eyes on him, waiting until the tip of the cigarette was an inch from the flame, before dropping her eyes and stretching the cigarette out toward it.
The move was done in silence, but to a man versed in the nuances of the game, it spoke volumes.
She was in control and not afraid to show it.
The paper caught fire, the smell of the burning tobacco muting her perfume. It wasn’t until the cigarette was lit that she looked up.
“I’ve got a proposition for you,” she said.
26
KORHOGO, IVORY COAST
Hayes stood on the scaffolding in front of the Provider’s engine, sweat pouring down the front of his coveralls as he pushed himself up on his toes. He angled the flashlight to get a better look inside.
Outside the hangar, the day had begun to mellow, the thunderstorm that had blown through two hours before took the teeth out of the heat but added to the humidity. Satisfied with what he found inside the engine, Hayes clicked off the flashlight, stuck it in his pocket, and took a long pull from the liter of bottled water the mechanics had given him.
The water was warm, but it was wet and that was all he cared about.
He screwed the cap on the bottle and took another long, hard look at the plane. Four hours ago, the Provider had more holes in the fuselage than a slice of Swiss cheese, but not only had the team of Ivorian mechanics patched them, they’d come damn close to matching the original paint.
But what really had him stumped was how they’d managed to get the engine back online. But they had.
Hayes cast a quick glance across the hangar, saw Mallory and the general standing on the far side—well out of earshot—and turned to the lead mechanic.
&
nbsp; “How?” he asked the man in French.
“Well, we used Bondo to patch the—”
“Yeah, I got that, I mean how did you fix the engine?”
“Magic,” he said.
“Well, I don’t fly on magic, so I guess it’s either you tell me how you pulled it off or I tell General Dábo to find another pilot.”
The smile fell from the mechanic’s face and he raised his hands in defeat. “Fine, fine, no problem,” he said. “The fuel pump took a bullet and some of the fuel lines were nicked by the fragmentation, so I replaced them. Easy, see.”
“You just happened to have spare parts for an engine that was discontinued before you were even born just lying around?”
“Easier if I show you,” the mechanic said.
They climbed down the scaffolding, ducked beneath the prop, and started toward the back of the hangar.
“It hasn’t always been like this,” the mechanic said.
“Like what?” Hayes asked, pulling a rag from his pocket and using it to wipe the sweat from his brow.
“You know, the war, the killing,” he answered, opening the door and stepping outside. “It’s hard to see it now, but there was a time when this was a fully functional airport. A place people actually wanted to come to. But . . .”
“But TIA,” Hayes said, finishing the man’s thought.
“Yep, TIA,” the mechanic nodded.
TIA—This Is Africa.
It was a common expression, one used by Africans and non-Africans alike. A statement that was equal parts endearment and resignation—one that perfectly summed up his current condition and the agreement he’d made with Mallory back in the interrogation room.
From the tone of the conversation, the dispassionate way she’d laid out the facts, it had almost seemed like Hayes had had a choice in the matter. But if there was any confusion about his situation, the cold bite of the handcuff securing him to the table had been quick to make his position clear.
“It was a simple proposition, between my employer and your copilot,” she’d said.
“Which he had no right to make,” Hayes had reminded her.