“I wasn’t always like this. When I was, oh, fourteen, I used to play video games all day after I got home from school.” His eyes grew distant. “Hardly any friends, maybe none if I’m really honest with myself. I would justify it by telling myself I was doing what I wanted.”
“Then what happened?”
“I saw a bird die. I know, stupid, right? He hit a window as I was walking home from school one day and fell to the ground, right in front of me. He twitched for a few minutes and then stopped moving. I watched the whole time. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything but keep watching, for minutes and minutes after he was dead.
“It could have been nothing. I didn’t believe in signs. It wasn’t even the first bird I’d seen die. But something just clicked. I was fifteen, and already all I did was kill time. Eat, sleep, video games, zone out at school. That was it. No real hope for something better, no real will to do anything with my life.”
“And so you changed?” Lily asked.
“I sold my video game console and all the games the very next day. Made me a cool two hundred. Put it toward some running shoes, free weights, and a couple of books on programming. The books turned out to be mostly useless, but I got into a couple Internet forums for people like me who were learning to code.”
She squeezed his hand. “Strange that such a small thing could change your life like that.”
“I think it had been building for a long time. One of the hardest things is admitting it. Once I did, things just kind of fell into place.”
She leaned into him, head against his shoulders. He enveloped her with his arm.
“What about you?” he asked. “What makes Lily Harper tick?”
Her fake name in his voice caused her a pang of sadness, reminding her of the gulf that separated them that she couldn’t cross. It made her want to be open with him.
“I’m an orphan,” she said. “Raised by my gram. Kind of a lonely kid. By the time I realized I was pretty, it was too late, and I already wanted to do something with my life.”
She trailed off.
“You know what? Why don’t we just look at the tank for a while?”
A puffer fish stared at them from behind the glass, wide-eyed and distended. She rested her head against his shoulder, feeling close to him. At least that much she could do.
Chapter 33
Morgan and Yolande waited for hours after nightfall, after the mine guards huddled all the slaves into a warehouse surrounded by barbed wire. They drank around a bonfire, now and then firing bullets into the air just because, and then went to sleep. Only four of them kept a lookout, carrying rifles, walking around the edge of the camp, which was illuminated by lightbulbs hung up on posts, connected to a generator.
Insects were screaming, and the night sky was darker than it could be in any city. The moon lit up the forest, and millions of stars were visible against the smear of glimmering points that was the Milky Way.
Once most of the men had either passed out or gone off to sleep, Morgan and Yolande got down from the rock and began their careful descent. The ground was treacherous, and a false step could mean falling to their death.
They reached the camp within the hour. The jungle extended right up to the edge, where an armed guard was standing. They stopped fifty feet short of his position.
“Go around,” Yolande whispered to Morgan. “I’ll provide the distraction.”
He crept to the right while she went left. One step at a time, he came closer, careful not to make a sound. To draw the guard’s attention now would mean putting the whole camp on high alert and there would go their one chance at this.
When Morgan was within thirty feet of the man, he heard a rustle.
The man raised his Kalashnikov. “Qui est là?”
Yolande came out of the bush and stepped into the light. She had removed her shirt, breasts bare for the guard to see. Her scar, Morgan now saw, went from her shoulder all the way down to her belly.
This was his cue to move in.
“Qui es-tu?” The harshness had melted from the man’s speech. His eyes were locked on Yolande.
“Je suis perdu,” she said. “I am lost.”
The man lowered his rifle. “Vous êtes au bon endroit.” Morgan could imagine the eyebrow wag that went with that statement. He bent down to pick up a rock, smooth and heavy. Yolande was flashing the guard a coquettish smile. Poor bastard. Must think it’s his lucky night.
With a nod from Yolande, Morgan raised the stone and brought it hard against the man’s head, caving in his skull. He grunted and toppled to his knees, falling at his side. His AK-47 clattered to the ground.
Morgan grabbed the rifle, and Yolande led the way through the wooden shacks. The nearest was a sort of warehouse where Morgan figured the gold was stored. Next was a kennel, where the dogs were kept tied up. Then, the building where the guards slept, from which they heard a choir of snoring. They skulked around it, keeping to the shadows and taking their time.
Morgan looked around the corner at the makeshift parking lot. “I’m going to check the cars for keys,” he whispered to Yolande. He crept forward out into the open, taking cover behind a VW pickup truck. He pulled the handle, slowly, making no sound. Locked.
He went for the next one, a Toyota with a door of a different color. He tried this one. It was locked, too. Keeping low, he moved toward the front of the car, looking for the next—
Footsteps. Right on the other side of the car. He bent down to look. Male feet, in sandals. Shit. How had Morgan not heard him coming?
The man was moving toward Yolande. She would come into view within seconds. He motioned for her to move, but she was looking away at another guard on the far end of the camp.
Only one thing to do.
Morgan stood up and opened fire. Several bullets burrowed into the man’s back and he fell forward, dead.
Yolande looked at him as if to say, What the hell are you doing?
“Grab his gun!” Morgan yelled. He ran to the next car, an old Ford Mondeo. He tried the door. Locked.
Gunfire. Yolande, rifle in hand, shooting at the men coming out of the dormitory. Another guard was running toward them from the direction of the mine. Morgan took careful aim. He pulled the trigger. The single bullet found its target, and the man stumbled to the dusty ground.
Guards were pouring out of the dormitory now, each armed, each shooting. Morgan and Yolande took cover behind the Mondeo and fired, trying to hold them back. Yolande, less thrifty with her bullets, ran out in seconds. Morgan kept them away with spaced bursts of the Kalashnikov, but there were too many. As the guards circled them, he dropped his gun and raised his hands, nudging Yolande to do the same. She spat at the ground but complied.
They were surrounded by twenty men, carrying their mismatched weapons, shouting at them and each other. Morgan did his best to appear nonthreatening.
“What are they saying?”
“Well,” said Yolande, with her characteristic irrational calm, “they’re going to shoot us. They’re trying to decide if they will do it now or torture us first.”
More discussion. “Bouge ton cul!” a man shouted at them.
“What’s happening?”
“They decided to shoot us. But they don’t want to damage the car. I believe the expression he used translates to move your ass.”
The man who’d shouted, who appeared to be their leader, motioned with his rifle for them to move away from the car. Morgan looked for a way out. He was unarmed and surrounded by rifle-wielding men who wanted to kill him. Even he had to admit this one looked bad for him.
“Yolande?”
“Yes?”
“Sorry I got you into this.”
“Screw your apology. Die like a man.”
The woman had a way with words.
Morgan stared at the barrel of the leader’s AK. Would that be the one that killed him?
He relaxed. Nothing else to do. Nothing, except to die. There was some peace in that.
Then he heard gunfire—not from the men surrounding them, but coming from the edge of camp, and not automatic fire, but pistols. Everyone’s attention turned. Men were coming in from the darkness, dressed in civilian clothing. There was maybe one automatic rifle among them. The rest carried revolvers, or hunting rifles, with the odd semiautomatic. Some, lacking firearms altogether, were wielding machetes or axes.
Morgan pulled Yolande to the ground as the place became a war zone. They retreated behind the VW truck and watched the carnage.
The camp guards were better armed, but the raiders had the numbers, and were mowing down their enemies.
Yolande tugged at his shoulder. “Let’s go.”
They moved back the way they came, around the barracks, hoping to disappear into the forest. But raiders came out of the woods there, too, cutting off their escape route, yelling for them to move back toward the killing field.
Morgan put his hands up as the gunmen closed around them. Most of the guards were dead, and those that weren’t had surrendered. There were around two hundred raiders all told, by Morgan’s estimation. A group of them ran off to the slaves’ quarters. One man was hitting the lock on the door with an ax.
The raiders were dressed in civilian clothes, much like the mine guards, but they were not all men in their teens or twenties, as the guards were. There were older men among them, even some whose hair was gray or white, and even some women. These were not regular bandits.
“Tell them we’re not one of them,” said Morgan.
Yolande spoke to one of them men in French. They had a brief exchange.
“They know,” said Yolande. “They saw what happened before they arrived.”
“Good news then?”
The door to the slaves’ quarters opened. The first were scared to cross the threshold, but once the first group had emerged to freedom, the rest poured out, whooping with joy. The raiders collected the guns, and someone found the keys to the cars, which they started loading up with everything they could find. Morgan took a step back as he saw a man carrying a box of dynamite.
One of the raiders motioned for them to move. The group was retreating back toward the road. They were starting the cars, too, filled with supplies and the slaves that were least able to walk.
“Where are they taking us?” Morgan asked Yolande as they moved along at gunpoint.
“I don’t know. But at least we are alive. For now.”
Chapter 34
“I don’t know,” said the subchief of security, who was the ranking manager in the office that day. “That’s a lot of entries to go through.”
Lisa Frieze could tell from the moment she laid eyes on him that he wasn’t going to be helpful. He struck her right away as the kind of person who was just running out the clock on his workday—almost over, at five-thirty—and, in a broader sense, his life. She would bet that he made it into this job on seniority alone. And any extra work, no matter how important, just got in the way of doing nothing.
“Plus, you don’t have a warrant.”
“I was hoping,” Frieze said, rubbing her temple, “that you might cooperate with our investigation. That you’d be interested to know whether there’s a vulnerability in campus security.”
“That’s really more of an internal matter.”
“Maybe I should come back tomorrow and talk to the chief then? He might like to know how helpful you’ve been.”
He exhaled, signaling that he was not at all happy with the situation. “Fine. I’ll sign off on it for you.”
She waited half an hour, which she guessed was at least fifteen minutes longer than necessary, until he came back to her with a printed packet of more than a hundred pages.
“Here,” he said, dropping it on the counter. “The door access logs for three days leading to the incident. Here you got your door codes, the date and time stamp, and the key code. I’m going to need you to sign this.” He handed her a pen and a clipboard with a form attached, and she scrawled her name on the bottom.
She then looked at the packet, at the rows upon rows of numbers and alphanumeric codes, all blending together.
Today was not the day for this.
“Thanks,” she said, leaving with the packet in hand.
She checked her phone as she left the building. No sign from Conley.
She scoffed at herself. Pathetic, waiting for him to call. She could really use a drink. And there was someone who actually wanted to have that drink with her.
She searched for a name in her phone’s address book and made the call. It rang.
“Hello?”
“Bryce? I think I’ll take you up on your offer after all.”
Chapter 35
It was morning by the time the ragtag group of raiders arrived at their destination, with Morgan and Yolande in tow. The end of their trek was at a camp in the jungle, a mile off the road. It was all tents and makeshift shelters, populated by women, children, and men too old or crippled to fight, who greeted those returning with whoops of joy. Some of them came to greet the freed slaves, too, embracing them with tears in their eyes. Families reunited. Morgan felt a twinge for Alex.
The raiders weren’t bothering to keep guns on Morgan and Yolande anymore. It was clear to their captors that the two were enemies of their enemies.
Whether that meant they were friends remained to be seen.
People turned to look as Morgan walked into the camp. The children followed them, staring without any sign of embarrassment. He figured white people weren’t too common around these parts. He and Yolande were instructed to sit down on a damp log in front of a fire, where a young woman gave them wooden bowls filled with some kind of corn porridge. Bland as it was, to Morgan, who hadn’t had a proper meal in days, it was as good as any steak Jenny had ever grilled.
“I think feeding us is a sign they don’t plan on killing us,” Morgan said.
“I wish they would give me a damn cigarette.”
After they ate, they were taken to a man Yolande identified as their leader, sitting on a rock near the middle of the camp. He was nearing forty, hard and sinewy, with a fresh wound on his face that had been washed but not dressed. They sat down in front of him, a group of young armed guards. Two older men seemed to be there in a more advisory capacity. He exchanged a few words with Yolande, among which Morgan caught Américain and Anglais. Then the man spoke in English, accented but passable.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
Morgan opted for the truth, more or less. “I’m here looking for a man. Goes by the name of Mr. White.” Yolande remained quiet—Morgan intuited she didn’t want them to know of her connection with General Jakande.
The two men turned to the leader and huddled in to speak. The leader held his hand up for silence. “Are you friends of this Mr. White?”
The correct answer was clear from his tone. It happened to also be the true one. “No. I’m here to make him answer for his crimes. To stop the flow of guns.”
“The guns going to Madaki?”
“Yes. I’m here to stop them from reaching him.”
“The guns have already reached him. I think you are not doing a very good job.” His face erupted into a broad grin and then into laughter. With that, Morgan knew he was in. “I am Etienne Dimka. Leader of this group. We are a resistance army. Our country’s military will not rid us of Madaki, so we will do it ourselves.”
“I am Anthony Bevelacqua,” Morgan said. “I was sent here by my country to capture the arms dealer known as Mr. White.”
Dimka grimaced in response. “The great and powerful United States sends one man?”
“This is not strictly official. Still, I have some support in the country. I may be able to get some help. But I need to get in touch with my people, and I don’t have any way to contact them.”
Dimka rubbed his chin. “I have something that may work.” He spoke a few words in French to one of the younger men present. The man ran off with a purposeful gait. Dimka turned his atte
ntion back to Morgan. “I know where this White is, and his weapons. We hurt one of the men from the mine until he told us. He is with Madaki. He made his base in an old mansion, twenty miles from here. His army is camped on the land around it.”
Not good.
“We are planning an attack in the morning,” he said. “We have numbers. There are three hundred here in the camp, plus the slaves we freed last night, but there are more spread throughout the countryside. Madaki has about four hundred men with him. We number more than one thousand.” Dimka puffed up his chest with pride.
Poorly armed and poorly trained, thought Morgan. They needed some serious tactics to pull this off.
“Do you know the land where you’re engaging the enemy?” Morgan asked. “Do you know if there are sentries posted?”
“They have lookouts,” said Dimka. “But we will approach in the dark, like in the mine. We will move silently.”
Morgan remembered how many losses they sustained in the mine—two for every man they took down, and that was with overwhelming force on their side. They wouldn’t have that at Madaki’s camp.
“With your permission,” said Morgan, “I’d like to go, along with my guide, ahead of the group. I’d like to take a look at this place. I might be able to advise you about how to use your forces to gain an advantage.”
Dimka frowned. He was about to speak when the young man who had run off came back with a familiar handheld device. Dimka took it and handed it to Morgan. “Here you go, Mr. Bevelacqua.” It was the sat phone that had been stolen from him on the road two days before. It had been Dimka’s men, then, who ambushed them. Morgan hoped he wouldn’t be recognized. “Will this work?”
Morgan turned it on. The electronic display lit up. Batteries charged, strong signal. “That’ll do it.”
“About your request,” he said. “I am still not certain you are not a spy. I do not know you will not betray me if I let you move ahead. But perhaps I will send you with an advance team that will keep an eye on you. Is this acceptable?”
“It’s fine,” Morgan replied.
“Good. Go on. Contact your people. Get what help you can.”
Arch Enemy Page 14
