The First Order

by Jeff Abbott

  Explain to the parents, like I was his messenger boy. I forgot to be scared, I was just so mad. SO MAD. Is it OK to be this mad? Not to my mom, I guess.

  He threw Sam into the back of the beat-up Citroen and turned back to me. “Go and tell your papa he gives me a thousand francs, he gets him back. Each day the payment goes up. Don’t bother to say you don’t have the money, the relief will…” and he didn’t finish the sentence because I felt that old red eye open in my brain so I picked up a rock and carefully threw it at him. It barely missed him and it bounced along the Citroen’s old roof.

  The man smiled. “You try to be the hero. Funny.”

  Hero? Ha ha ha.

  “Let him go!” I yelled, in French. Sam peered out the window. He looked scared.

  The man’s two friends hurried toward me and one hit me across the face. Blood filled my mouth and I fell to the ground. It hurt. The second one laughed and drew back his foot to kick me.

  “No, not too rough,” the leader said.

  “If he’s hurt, the parents will pay faster,” one suggested. Again they spoke in Kirundi, the other popular language in Burundi, and I still understood them, even after only eight weeks in the country. I’m not dumb. Be sure my parents tell you that, too.

  The leader shrugged. “Hurt him too much, they take him to a doctor, or the police, and there is a delay.”

  I got up from the dirt and spat blood at the man’s feet and I said, in Kirundi, “You let him go.” I was scared but I was madder than I was scared, does that make sense? The leader laughed at me. “Go tell your parents, bring the money to old Angelique Kobako’s house in the village.” He gestured east. “Leave it with her.” He stumbled over his words, he was drunk. Then he shook a finger at me. “If anything bad happens to your baby brother, it’s on you.”

  He turned and got back in the car. One of his two buddies got in the front seat and the last one got in the back with Sam.

  They started to drive away and I picked up a heavy rock and threw it and turned the back windshield into a giant star. Sam tried to make himself small in the backseat, I could see him, and later he said one of the men wanted to get out and cut me with a knife for messing up the car and the leader said no. Instead the leader rolled down the window and yelled at me, “Now, mzungu, to get your brat back, two thousand francs,” and then he roared off down the road, laughing.

  I got on Sam’s bike and pedaled hard. The road snaked through a lush landscape (as Dad called it when he took us out to take pictures after we got here) but those men were villagers and I knew back to their village they would go. There were two villages to the east, where they’d headed. A quarter-mile from where the car grabbed Sam, I came to a small clearing and a cluster of shacks. I knew the owner of one; Mom had treated the man’s granddaughter last week for a bad burn on her hand. I was scared for my little brother but I was calm, too, because I had a plan.

  Old Nicolas kept his prized moped inside the shack so it wouldn’t be stolen. I begged him and said, “You see a car go by, with its back windshield cracked?”

  Nicolas nodded and pointed toward the fork in the road past his house. “It went to the left.”

  I kicked the moped into life and roared it out the front door before Old Nicolas could stop me. I hollered back that I’d bring it back, with a full tank. I’m not a jerk.

  I drove for five kilometers, the bike coughed smoke but kept running and I was mad at myself if it broke down, it would leave Sam with these jerks even longer. I stopped kids walking along the side of the old, rutted road—“Did you see a blue car with a busted windshield?” and the kids would nod and in the fifth kilometer a tall, lean boy my own age said, “Yeah, that’s Pierre Nduwimana. He lives on the edge of Kisil town, in a house with a green roof.” Kisil was another kilometer down the winding, broken road.

  “Five dollars American to show me,” I said, pulling the money from my shoe, and the boy hopped on the back of the moped.

  What Sam told me (because Mom won’t let Sam write his part because she doesn’t want him to know what I did): They brought him to the house and laid him on a pallet with a dirty blanket in a room away from where they drank.

  “You be quiet,” the leader told Sam. “No crying. No trouble for me. We did this before, with Norwegian boy from relief group. No harm to him. We just get the money, you will be fine.”

  Sam nodded. He told me he didn’t really cry and I’m proud of him for that.

  “Now, if you try to escape,” he said and picked up Sam’s hand, “my friend here will show you a game with his knife and your fingers.” He pulled lightly on all Sam’s fingers, as if testing that they wouldn’t come off. “But you don’t want to play this game, yes?”

  Sam shook his head.

  “You’ll be home soon, little man. Be good.” The leader and the knife man left him alone in the windowless room and then Sam went to sleep, I guess his brain shut down cause he was scared and I’ll tell you the rest of it.

  The boy showed me the house and the car was parked next to it. I went and let the air out of all four tires. Not just one. Four. At the window I could hear the clink of beer bottles and I could smell the smoke of something thick in the air. They were waiting on their easy money. I picked up the biggest rock I could hold in one hand and I crawled in the window.

  Now my mother keeps asking me what I specifically did and I wish she would just calm down. The first guy was asleep on a couch. I smashed the rock into the back of his head three times, very hard but carefully. Three times. He made a noise but he was facedown in a pillow because I moved his head. There was a lot of blood by the third blow and he didn’t wake up. If they hadn’t been high they would have woken when I hit them I guess, but that didn’t happen. Then I took his knife, next to him on the pallet, and I cut his wrist, just one, and he started bleeding a bunch onto the floor. I read Mom’s anatomy books, I knew where to cut. When you learn things you better apply them to the problems in life else why learn anything?

  The second man was facedown on the table. He roused a bit when I came toward him and he blinked at me like a baby just waking up. He was really drunk, you could smell it on him. So I stuck the knife into his mouth, not cutting him, just telling him to be quiet. He vomited, yuck, but I put my hand over his mouth and his nostrils. I hit him twice with the rock and kept my hand over his mouth, closed off his nostrils. I’m a big kid for thirteen and he was a small guy for being whatever he was. He choked and bucked. He went still and I let go of his mouth. I hit him in the head with the stone, twice more, then I cut his wrist, too, just once. He looked dead but I don’t think he was.

  The leader heard the noise. He’d been lying down by the room smoking his weed. He got up and staggered toward me, and he couldn’t have looked more surprised so I stabbed him in the groin and I hope I got his balls. He folded and screamed and I went and hit him with the stone three times, then opened his wrist when he got quiet.

  I went in the room and Sam was asleep. Like I said he’s a baby in some ways and I think when bad things happen he shuts down and steps away from it. Then I got scared that maybe they hurt him or gave him something. I didn’t want him to see the knife or the stone with blood on it or the men because he wouldn’t understand, he’s like Mom and Dad. So I told him to keep his eyes closed and I put my hand over his eyes but I got blood on his cheek.

  “What happened?” he just kept saying and I knew I couldn’t tell him.

  I kissed the top of his head, I just told him it didn’t matter, they’d left to go drink and I’d followed him. I know he doesn’t believe me but I’m not going to tell him what I did. He would freak out. I did it for him.

  I led him past the men, he kept his eyes closed, we went outside. We walked past the Citroen with its broken windshield and its flat tires and to Old Nicolas’s moped, where the local kid waited. No one tried to stop us. No one knew.

  I told the Burundian boy urakoze (thank you), he could walk home because I needed to take Sam home and the moped would
only carry two. I gave him some more money, Burundian francs, from my shoe, all pretty colors. The boy looked at me like I was a ghost and took the money and ran.

  “What happened?” Sam asked again. His voice shook.

  “Hush,” I said. “Hush. I’ll explain later.” Sam climbed onto the moped and pressed his face into my back. He asked where were Mom and Dad and the security people for the relief compound? I didn’t answer and I kicked the engine to life and the wind in my face felt good as we shot along the crappy roads.

  We stopped at Old Nicolas’s house and left the moped. I tried to give him the last of my money, but the old man would not take it. He had pulled Sam’s bike out of the muddy road and we rode it home, Sam shivering on the handlebars.

  I told him we’d say we got lost. He just nodded and then when we rode through a patch of moonlight he looked back at me and said: “There’s blood on your shirt.”

  “We’ll say we saw someone beaten by the side of the road and helped them. You know how Mom and Dad will love that.” I didn’t look at him.

  “What did you do? Danny? What did you do?”

  “I followed you on the moped. I asked if people had seen a broken windshield. I found where they parked it. It’s not like I’m Sherlock Holmes.”

  “The men…”

  “They were all drunk and asleep,” I told him. “I watched them for ten minutes and then I came through a window.”

  “The blood…” Weird how Sam could sound like Mom and Dad.

  I stopped the bike. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You got me out,” he said, stuttering it out, and then he started to cry, which I hate, but OK, I let him cry. He was safe now, that was all that mattered. I held him and said into his hair that it was my fault, I shouldn’t have let them take him. But he didn’t need to worry about the men, they were OK, just asleep from the beer and the weed and he said “why is there blood?” and I knew Mom and Dad would find out. That he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. That if we heard about men hurt in a village nearby Sam would give it away. But that was a price I could pay. I wasn’t going to let them hurt Sam. Ever.

  I wiped Sam’s tears away with my thumb.

  “We got lost,” Sam said after a moment. “But we stayed together.”

  That was Sam, trying to lie. He sucks at it. “Yes,” I said. “The first order, remember, we don’t ever leave each other behind.” That is something Mom and Dad have said to us, the reason they don’t leave us behind in America when they’re out in the field. The first order.

  He half-hiccupped, half-laughed then. He stopped crying. I knew he quit for me.

  I hugged him and put him back on the bike and I thought maybe I would cry for a second out of relief that he was safe. But I didn’t. I love him. When Mom and Dad think there’s something broken inside me (like now) I want anyone who reads this to know I love my family, I love Sam. I’m not broken on the inside.

  We got home. Our parents were furious, then relieved we were home safe. Sam kept his mouth shut. Mom and Dad figured it out because Sam had a bad dream and yelled in his sleep and then they heard about three men hurt in the village the night we vanished and Mom found the knife under my bed. The men lived but one at least wasn’t going to be right again in the head I guess, well they weren’t right to start with. And then someone in Kisil who works at the compound heard about two foreign boys, two rotuku, who were seen leaving the men’s house and someone in the village said it was me and Sam. Rotuku means not just foreign but violent. I’m not violent…So Mom pressed Sam for three days of her badgering him and he kept his mouth shut, so proud of him, but I finally told her so she’d leave Sam alone. I made a deal with them: I tell them everything, they don’t ask Sam about this, they don’t tell him anything, he doesn’t know, he slept through all the stuff they’re upset about. So leave him alone. That’s why I have to write this stupid essay for some doctor to look at and judge me.

  Judge away. Judge, judge, judge. No one hurts my brother.

  The police didn’t come talk to me but Mom and Dad were reassigned to Thailand a week later and we packed in silence like I’ve never heard. It is weird my parents take us into dangerous areas then judge me for protecting Sam while she’s stitching up people and he’s making sure the money goes where it’s supposed to.

  They ought to just let me be what I am. I love my parents but I love Sam most of all. If that hurts them then maybe they should have to write an essay about their feelings on it, too.

  Mila put down the pages. She felt cold. “You never read this before?”

  “No. They decided not to show this confession to a psychiatrist. They decided they would keep it quiet and…manage him.”

  “Why didn’t he just go get help like a normal person when those men took you?”

  “Because he’s Danny.” He looked at the paper. “Judge, written three times, and Philip Judge is an alias that Jack Ming said that Danny might have used.”

  “And he never told you what he did to those men?” Her voice rose. “You never asked?”

  “What more was I supposed to ask? He still wouldn’t talk about it with me.” He looked at her. “He thought it was justified in saving me.”

  “Thirteen years old,” she muttered. “Were there any more incidents?”

  “Incidents?”

  “Him hurting people.”

  “No.”

  “Because, you know, you two were around disasters, suffering, and so on. People who are hurt or dying. People gone missing.” Her voice was strained. “If he wanted to hurt someone again, if he enjoyed it or got a satisfaction from it…then he would be in a target-rich environment.”

  Sam looked horrified. “He’s not…like that.”

  “At thirteen he bludgeoned three men and left them to bleed out. That’s…” She hesitated. “He sounds like a little psychopath.”

  “How many people did you hurt looking for your sister? Maybe you shouldn’t judge.”

  She took a calming breath. “I didn’t do that when I was a child,” she said. “He was thirteen and he thought this was a better choice than running to your parents and getting the police. I couldn’t go to the police, Sam, and he could have. Do you think this is normal?”

  “If you no longer care to help me because you think my brother’s a danger, there’s the door.”

  “Don’t be rude, Sam,” she said. “I’m just…This is upsetting. Of course I’ll help you.” Smooth this down, she thought. You cannot afford for Sam to reject your help right now.

  “I know the name of the woman who brought him to the US. Jack Ming got it for me. I’m a little tired of waiting on Jimmy’s hackers.”

  “We need to keep moving forward,” she said. “Never mind Jimmy. Where’s this woman?”

  21

  Manhattan

  THE BEST THING, Sam thought, about owning a bar was that you had regulars. And the regulars could often serve as an informal network of sources.

  “Do we have any customers who work in the art world among the bar regulars tonight?” he asked Bertrand, surveying the well-dressed, martini-gulping crowd.

  “Dominique Cross. The red-haired lady at the end of the bar, talking with the older woman. That’s her mother, in from Montreal. Dominique is an art consultant for wealthy people and for corporations. She likes Tito’s vodka in her martinis and she’s unattached.”

  “You’re like a bar version of an Internet search engine, Bertrand.”

  “I try.”

  “Please send Ms. Cross and her mother a round on me, with my compliments.” He went upstairs and put on the best suit he kept in New York. He had to play the genial host now, and see if Dominique Cross could get him next to Avril Claybourne.

  It took two rounds. Mrs. Cross—Dominique’s mother—was funny and charming, but the art buyer seemed to be annoyed by Sam inserting himself into a brief family reunion.

  “I’ve been thinking of buying some art for the bars,” he said.

  “And if you buy me drinks, you g
et some free advice?” Dominique said. There was no irritation in her tone but a bit of weariness.

  “Ah, everyone wants free advice from Dominique,” Mrs. Cross joked.

  “I’ll happily retain your professional services. But I was thinking, instead of paintings that could be expensive to insure inside a bar environment, perhaps digital art on screens that change. But sophisticated, you know. I don’t want it to look like something I just downloaded from the Internet.”

  “Well, with digital art…,” Dominique said, stopping to think. It was as if now that the idea was spurred she had to play with it a bit.

  “On that wall. Big, epic, a conversation starter for when people see it,” Sam prompted. “Of course, it might be best to commission work just for my bars.”

  The word “commission” got her attention. “There are some artists you might consider. Chang. Mbeka. Claybourne.” But he noticed that she hesitated before saying Claybourne’s name.

  “Avril Claybourne?” Sam said, leading. “I think I’ve heard the name.”

  Dominique made a face, sipped at her drink. “You’ve reminded me of an unpleasant chore. She’s not my favorite, but she’s hosting a showing tomorrow night, and Mother and I have to go.”

  “Why don’t you go, Sam?” Mrs. Cross said, clearly playing matchmaker.

  “Mother!” Dominique said. “I told Avril you’d be there.”

  “I’d rather go to a Broadway show, the kind you think are too sentimental. Take Sam.”

  Dominique Cross looked trapped, but then she shrugged. “Well, Sam, maybe we can find an installation for your bar.”

  “What time’s the party?” Sam asked.

  22

  Miami

  THIS WAS JUDGE’S order of business for this most difficult of kills, and it might have surprised an amateur.