Aftershocks

by Mark Parragh

  Romy stopped and looked around for a way out as the driver’s door flew open and a man dove out. It was a white man with a close-cropped shock of blonde hair.

  Georges shouted, “Romy!” He sprinted down the street, arms pumping. But he knew he was too late. Romy tried to dodge away, but the man caught her arm and swung her around. She slammed hard into the side of the car with a gasp, and the man punched her once, twice. Then he opened the rear door and threw her into the back seat.

  The man looked up at him as he got back into the car and their eyes met for a moment. Then the car reversed into the street, nearly hitting a man on a bicycle as it went. Its momentum swung the rear door shut. Georges's fingertips just brushed the fender as it accelerated away. Through the window he caught a glimpse of Romy’s terrified eyes looking back at him.

  Then the car sped away, and the tires screamed as it took a corner and was gone.

  Georges stood in the street, breathing hard, and a terrible realization swept over him. He knew that man. He would never forget that face. He felt his whole world falling in on him. This was his fault now. One after another he’d drawn the attention of evil forces, and now they were piling up around him, deeper than he could see over, too deep to climb out of. They would overwhelm him and everyone he cared about.

  Another car lurched to a stop beside him. The Toyota. Crane looked at him from the driver’s seat with obvious concern.

  “Georges! What happened? Where’s Romy?”

  “She ran. He took her.”

  Crane got out of the car and turned Georges to face him. “Who took her? Kamkuma?”

  “No,” Georges said, and his voice sounded very weak and far away. “It was the man from Iceland. From the boat.”

  Crane stopped and looked at him. “You’re sure?”

  Georges nodded. “I’m sure.”

  Crane thought for a moment. “All right,” he said at last. “Let’s get back to the room and wait for his call.”

  Chapter 48

  Patrice Kamkuma owned a home in the Bastos neighborhood, an upscale part of town surrounded by European expatriates and foreign embassies. Patrice seldom came to the capital anymore, and the place had become Yanis’s home base.

  Of course, his father still kept an eye on the place, and on him.

  Yanis paced the living room like a caged tiger. He was alone. The others knew better than to be around him right now. He’d put the phone on speaker and left it on the coffee table. His father’s angry tones slid off him. He’d long since stopped saying anything new and simply repeated old points. Yes, Yanis understood he’d had to pull strings to keep the police out of it. Yes, he understood that cost them in terms of favors owed and general clout. Yes, he understood that two more of his men were dead, and two in hospital.

  “Who were they?” Patrice barked over the phone.

  “I told you already,” Yanis called from across the room. “It was the brother. And there was a white man with him.”

  “What did he look like? The white man?”

  Yanis sighed. “A white man. With a gun. I told you, I didn’t see him. I was in the back getting Bili out. She drugged him with something.” That was how she’d overcome the others, he understood now. It wouldn’t have been hard at the wake with the alcohol flowing. And she probably picked up Sam at a bar and slipped whatever it was into his drink.

  His father was still yelling at him. “I’m sending some more men down. My men! They know what to do.”

  He wished his father would stop explaining things that he understood perfectly well. Of course this was bad! He was short of men, and their reputation had taken another big hit. That was done. It was what it was. The only thing left to do was stop the bleeding. Then they could rebuild. The last thing he needed was his father sending down a bunch of ignorant country oafs to stir things up. They didn’t know the city at all, and they owed their loyalty to his father so they wouldn’t take orders from him. But there was no telling his father that. His father always did the shouting. He never listened.

  “They all have to die!” Patrice was saying. “The girl, the brother, this white man. All of them. You have to make an example, Yanis. Or the rest of your men will lose respect. They’ll drift away one by one until you don’t have shit!”

  “I know, father, I know. We’re out looking for them now.”

  “Well stop screwing around and find them!” Patrice snapped. “And when you do, make it showy. People have to see what happens when they cross the Kamkumas.”

  “I know,” he said, placating. “They’ll all see.” He calmed his father down as best he could, and when his father finally hung up, he settled back on the couch and took several deep breaths.

  The frenzy at the club had stayed with him. He could still hear the frightened voices, almost feel the crush of pushing bodies. He remembered the sound of light bulbs exploding as one of the effects bars was knocked over. And the gunshots.

  He pieced it together in his mind. She’d managed to drug Bili and left him unconscious on the stairs. Then she’d taken his gun and shot Simon as he came after her. That set off the panic. Yanis had been on the mezzanine when it happened, trying to spot her on the floor. Then she came upstairs and charged Diboue when he opened the door to see what was going on.

  He wasn’t sure what had happened in the room, but somehow the girl and Martin had gone out the window together. She’d caused a lot of damage, but she’d been out of the fight at that point. They could have finished her. But then the stranger appeared on the street outside. He’d shot Diboue dead as he looked down from the window.

  And it could have been him.

  Yanis had no idea what instinct had kept him from going into the room after her. Coco and Henri had gone in. With five men and the girl in the cramped room, they’d have been in each other’s way, falling all over themselves. So he stayed out and hurried down the back stairs to check on Bili and the others. Would he be dead now if he’d chosen differently? Diboue was. Martin was in the hospital with a cracked skull, and Coco had a couple nasty knife wounds. Anything could have happened to him. Yanis took a deep breath. It didn’t bear thinking about. They just needed to get this over with. End it and get back to the way it was.

  The door opened, and Manu came in. He must have heard the lack of shouting and realized the phone call was over.

  “You okay, boss?”

  “No, Manu. I’m way far from okay. Tell me something new.”

  Manu nodded. “Stephane says one of the girl’s friends saw the white man. Him and the brother been asking around town after her. They say the father’s sick, and they need her to come home. The white man’s a detective from America.”

  “So what?”

  “They gave a phone number,” said Manu. He handed over a slip of paper. “To call if they see the girl. And we know their car now. White Toyota.”

  Yanis sighed. As if there weren’t a thousand white Toyotas running around Yaoundé. But it was something at least.

  “Got a plate on the car?”

  “The friend didn’t pay attention.”

  Yanis nodded. Why would she? He looked at the scrawled phone number on the torn piece of paper. He didn’t know what good it would do. There was nothing to gain from calling them. They had what they came for. The girl would be scared half to death, and the brother and his detective would get her back to America so fast she’d think it was still yesterday. But he had to do something. Just as important, his crew had to see him doing something. Even if it didn’t accomplish anything.

  “Get a couple boys to the airport,” he said at last. “Look for them there. Call me the second they see anything.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  Manu left, and Yanis started pacing again. That wouldn’t be a bad thing, actually, if they just left Cameroon and never looked back. It would solve the immediate problem. But there would still be his father, and the damage to their reputation if someone killed a bunch of his men and got away clean. No, he had to kill…someone. Someo
ne had to die badly, and it had to be seen as the Kamkumas’ terrible vengeance. But nobody really knew who it was that attacked his crew. Nobody would question it when they took their revenge.

  It would be best if he could actually kill the Akemas and their detective. But if it came to it, anyone would do.

  Einar parked the car in a secluded alley behind a street cafe and hauled the girl out. She’d put up more fight than he’d anticipated when he threw her into the car, but the stun gun had settled her. He patted her down, but she had nothing but a phone in her pocket, not even any identification. The clothes she wore looked like they belonged to the brother. She was barefoot. He didn’t know what had happened since they’d found her, but it looked like it had ended badly. She’d left in a hurry, with no preparation and her brother chasing her down the street.

  He opened the trunk and dumped her in, then bound her wrists and ankles with a roll of duct tape. Now that he had her, he could get to the bottom of this. She’d tell him what was going on, and she would bring John Crane and her brother to him. He just needed a place to set it up, somewhere outside the teeming city where they could have a little privacy.

  She was starting to groan and struggle as he slammed the trunk shut. Einar got back in the car and picked up the smartphone they’d given him. Now was the time to contact his mysterious patrons. He tapped the single contact number, and the call connected. It was answered immediately.

  “Good morning, Mr. Persson,” said a woman’s voice in an accent he didn’t recognize. “Have you made progress?”

  “I have something they want,” he said. “They’ll come to me now. I just need a place to set the trap. Somewhere remote and quiet. Can you recommend a place?”

  As it turned out, they could.

  Chapter 49

  “Anything yet?”

  Across the room, Georges sat with his face buried in his laptop screen. He shook his head. “No.”

  “Keep looking.”

  Crane stood at the window letting the morning sun bathe him in warmth. But inside he still felt cold. Einar Persson was here. There was only one reason for the former Datafall security chief to turn up here. Him. And now he had Georges's sister. As if it weren’t enough to have the police and this Yanis Kamkuma and his gang looking for her, he’d brought yet another enemy, the most dangerous of the lot. Georges had looked to him for help but involving him had just put his sister in much greater danger.

  None of this would be happening if he’d just killed the man in Iceland when he had the chance. He certainly deserved it, for killing the innocent trucker who’d picked Crane up on the highway if nothing else. But he’d needed Einar alive to go back to his employers and convince them they were safe, that the incriminating data Crane had stolen from them was destroyed. Even if that weren’t part of the plan, Crane knew he wouldn’t have killed him that day. He didn’t need to, and he didn’t want to kill if he didn’t have to. He’d wanted to keep his conscience clean.

  But there was a price for that, and right now it was being paid by someone else.

  “He won’t hurt her, right?” said Georges for what seemed the fiftieth time.

  Crane turned from the window. Georges was looking up at him from the laptop. Data streamed past on the screen representing every cellphone in Yaoundé, each call, each location ping. None of them were Romy’s phone. It had gone dark on the network somewhere in the same cell that covered the hotel. Einar had found it and turned it off almost immediately.

  They couldn’t find her that way. Not until Einar decided he was ready to be found.

  “It’s us he wants, right?” said Georges. “So he’ll keep her safe. And he’ll get in touch with us.”

  “That’s right.”

  Of course, what happened after that was very much in question. He wasn’t going to demand a sincere apology and then return Romy safely to her family. Einar would want him dead, probably Georges as well. And after that, there was little reason to keep Romy alive as a witness. So Crane found little reassurance in the knowledge that Romy was safe for now. But Georges needed something to hold onto.

  And Georges probably believed Romy would be okay once they found her because Crane would be there to save her. He was Georges's hero who could do anything. There was a lot of past trauma to unpack around that. It all went back to the attack on Georges's mother, right here in Yaoundé. Without that, he probably never would have met Georges. Romy wouldn’t be on her own destructive quest for vengeance. All their lives would be very different. Now they’d come full circle, back to where it all began. But Georges had picked him up along the way, and he’d brought a deadly new player into the mix.

  That much of it was on him.

  Crane didn’t really care what happened to Yanis Kamkuma. He was here to extract Romy and get her to safety. If that meant taking Kamkuma down, so be it. If it didn’t, Crane was perfectly content to let him go on extorting protection money from shopkeepers or whatever he did when he wasn’t being hunted by vengeful young women. He was a problem for the local police.

  But Einar Persson was another story. Einar’s vengeance was personal. It would follow him to the next mission after this, and the next, until Crane dealt with it. This time there was no reason to keep Einar alive. When he found Einar this time, they would end it.

  Then, Crane thought, he would have to find out how Einar was able to track him to Yaoundé.

  Georges watched the handset pings scroll past on his screen. He didn’t really need to watch them. The program he’d inserted into Camtel’s system would spot Romy’s phone as soon as it logged onto the network and alert him. But he found something soothing in the steady flow of numbers.

  And Georges needed calm. He needed to push down the storm of emotions and think. His sister was in danger. Crane was in danger. And it was all his fault.

  He’d failed in Iceland. The communication system he’d designed wasn’t good enough. It had been detected, and he’d turned what was meant to be a stealth insertion into a desperate manhunt. He’d been the one to unleash Einar Persson on Crane. He’d taken on a karmic debt in Iceland. And now the bill had come due.

  “Anything yet?” Crane asked from across the room.

  “No.”

  “Keep looking.”

  Of course he would keep looking. What else could he do? He felt powerless in a way he hadn’t felt since the day his mother was attacked. Then he’d raged uselessly against the men who hurt her. He’d fantasized about finding and killing them. It was the policeman who’d set him on the right track. Officer Makoun. “Don’t try to fight your enemy on his ground, with his weapons,” he’d said that day in the hospital waiting room. “If you want to help your mother, do something smart.”

  He thought he’d done that when Josh hired him and introduced him to John Crane. He’d turned his talents to equipping Crane for the field. Crane had become his champion, fighting the darkness in the world, doing the things Georges himself couldn’t do. But over time his failures kept building up like a slow poison. And now he’d caught Crane between them. Einar Persson on one side, representing his failure in Iceland. And on the other side, Yanis Kamkuma and his gang, representing his weakness, his inability to protect his family.

  John Crane was about to be crushed between them, and it would all be his doing.

  On his screen, a line of data popped up from the stream and flashed at him. Romy’s phone had just registered with the network. It had been turned on and connected to a tower. He looked up the cell site identifier. The tower was southeast of Yaoundé, at the very edge of the city’s coverage area. It covered a lot of ground, but he could pin her down more precisely.

  He told the carrier’s system to request a GPS fix from the phone. Within moments, it came back, a series of coordinates that he transferred into a mapping program. The phone was near Mfou, a small farming town. The area was sparsely populated, with scattered farms and cocoa orchards. Georges switched his map to satellite view and zoomed in on the coordinates. Orchard, he de
cided. There were long rows of trees set amid high grass. A single red clay road wound through them to a cleared area with a low building. That was where the phone was signaling from.

  As he watched, the locator disappeared. The phone had been turned off again. Its message had been sent clearly enough. Romy was being held at an orchard near Mfou. If they wanted her, they could come there and try to take her back.

  Georges sat quietly for a long moment. He had no doubt that Crane would go there and take on Persson to save his sister. He would go without hesitation. It was who John Crane was. But what if he got killed? What if Romy was killed? The blame would land on his shoulders.

  No, it was time for him to stop asking Crane to solve his problems. It was time to take responsibility himself. He was no warrior, but he had strengths of his own. He heard Officer Makoun’s voice in the back of his mind.

  “Do something smart.”

  But what was that? On one side, Kamkuma and his gang of vicious thugs. On the other, Einar Persson on his quest for blood. Both closing in on them.

  And suddenly Georges knew what the smart play was.

  He closed the laptop. “I’ve got her.”

  Crane turned from the window. “Her phone checked in?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay,” said Crane. “He wants us to come and get her. Where are they?”

  “I assume you’re going on your own?”

  Crane nodded. “Right. I needed you at the club because Romy wouldn’t trust me. I think we’re past that point now. I need you safe here. I’ll bring her back.”

  Georges took a deep breath. He was afraid, but he knew it was the right thing to do.

  “Okay,” he said, taking a pen and notepad from the desk drawer. “I’ll write it down for you.”

  Chapter 50