by Ty Patterson
Three feet now.
His left leg shot out, his right leg followed, his left hand swung out just that little bit more, his right hand followed.
Two feet.
He could hear the minister’s wheezing, could see the small hairs on the back of his neck, the sweat coating the dark skin, making it shine under the lobby’s lights.
Another left hand swing. Press plunger. Thrust needle in bottom. Swing away in long steps. Out of hotel.
Left leg shot out.
Left hand swung in a lazy arc.
Only an eagle eye would have spotted the tip of something else between his fingers.
Up and forward.
Closer to the fabric on the behind.
A few centimeters away.
Palm depressing slowly.
He felt the brush of air first, and then a hand shot out and grasped his left wrist.
He didn’t think. He didn’t analyze. Training and reaction took over.
The assassin spun smoothly even before the grip around his wrist had tightened, grabbed a woman from the family behind him, and flung her toward the man who had accosted him.
The grip loosened, the woman exclaimed sharply, the grip fell away and then the assassin was striding, breaking into a run.
Dimly he thought he recognized the man who had stopped him, but now escape was all that mattered. The glass doors ahead were his universe.
He ran faster, closer to freedom.
The hand on his shoulder had barely settled when he ducked and twisted and aimed a punch at whoever was behind him.
The punch landed in thin air.
His hand was lazily clasped and a lock tightened.
He recognized the martial arts grip, applied a counter lock, got his hand free, turned to run, felt the seeking hands clasp his elbow, lose their grip, slide down his wrist and fall away.
Then he was away, sprinting this time, the doors opening magically.
Shouts rang out behind him, but no one was even close.
He leapt over a photographer, shoved past women with shopping bags, ran down the slanting driveway.
Footsteps pounded behind him but not close. On a glass front he saw a couple of people give chase from behind, but no guns appeared.
Why should they? He had done nothing wrong.
He reached the bottom of the drive, hurried through parked vehicles, ducked swiftly behind an SUV, removed the prosthetics on his face and threw them under the vehicle.
He ripped the long sleeves off his shirt; they came away easily. They were designed to transform the full sleeves shirt into half sleeves in a second.
The sleeves went beneath another car.
The assassin straightened.
One quick glance behind. The two men chasing were looking carefully between various parked vehicles.
The assassin crossed the road, opened his van casually and swung inside.
He waited for a truck to pass and fell behind it.
Now his lizard brain receded and thinking brain took over.
The man who grasped me the first time was the bodyguard. Maybe the second time too. Why didn’t he raise the alarm if he suspected something?
He looked in the mirrors, no car was in pursuit. He reached out in his backpack and turned on an instrument. It didn’t beep. His car was clean; no tracking devices.
He breathed easier. The minister had gotten away, but the first order was to hole up somewhere and then decide whether he should have another go. He reached a stop light, waited patiently, and when it changed, eased away smoothly.
He drove at a steady pace, eased into a lane that would take him to the Gwarimpa District, about twelve miles from where he was.
There he would check into--
The first heave hit him, almost doubled him over.
Chapter 20
He retched drily, straightened and controlled the vehicle’s wobble.
What was that? He had never been sick--
The second was worse and the vehicle careened over the pavement, came off it and continued rolling drunkenly. A third followed, a fourth.
The assassin lost count. His face was red, sweat ran down it like a flood, his hair was matted, and his breath came out in ragged gasps.
The one hand on the wheel fell off and the vehicle lurched to the right, climbed on the pavement and stalled. The assassin reached out blindly, pushed open the door and let the cool air bathe him. It didn’t help.
Another intense dry heave hit him and he fell out of the vehicle and landed on hard concrete. He reached out to hold something, anything, to raise himself, to escape, to heed the messages the lizard brain was pumping out furiously.
His body rejected the messages; the dry heaves had drowned out all stimuli. A particularly bad heave had the assassin gasping and he lay curled in a fetal position.
A shoe appeared in front of his eye. He stared at it blankly, and then another appeared.
He turned his head slowly, and the night sky swam into his vision, the side of the van, and then a figure appeared. The assassin blinked slowly as if in a drunken stupor and curled again as his body tightened in a spasm.
The figure waved in the air, moved and seemed to shrink and become leaner and narrower. Its face seemed to change, the cheeks seemed to hollow out.
His lizard brain screamed one last message before he lost consciousness.
The bodyguard.
Zeb had left for Nigeria the day of his call with Clare. He had worked the phones when in the air, and simultaneously, Clare and Broker had alerted the Nigerian authorities about a possible attack on the minister.
A plan was made, a trap, to get the assassin. It was surprisingly easy to execute once Zeb looked at the bodyguard and sized him up. Same height, same shoulder size, just broader.
The broader part had been easy to handle. Two Kevlar vests underneath his clothing did the trick. The slow gait was easy to mimic. Prosthetics changed his face and the old bodyguard went on vacation and Zeb took over.
He got the State Security Service to plaster all the hotels with tiny cameras and flood all their exits and their approaches with security cameras that fed into a central server. The server talked to Werner, in addition to the SSS’s own network. The cameras were a gift from the United States government to their close friends, the Nigerian government.
The gift was gratefully accepted and all help was extended.
Zeb posing as the bodyguard, spotted the assassin on the first Saturday, caught his image via a camera hidden into an epaulet sewn on his outerwear. Werner looked at the image, measured the distance between the eyes, between the ears – two parameter that could not be changed whatever surgery or disguise was undertaken – and also looked at the gait, posture, and hundreds of small parameters.
It compared those with the videos from Saudi Arabia and came back with, Yeah, that’s him.
Zeb didn’t want to capture the assassin in a public space; he didn’t know how the man would be armed, how he would react.
He had gone for the debilitating effect of the DHC. The Dry Heave Chemical, cunningly acronymed as the DHC, produced convulsions in the body within minutes of it being applied to the skin. It was harmless, but the convulsions lasted for twelve hours and brought down a man without the need to use force.
The glide of his grasping hand from the assassin’s elbow to his wrist had enabled him to apply the chemical to his hand.
DHC had then taken over and had done its job.
Zeb got caught in a battle of politics. The Nigerians wanted to interrogate the assassin and try him in their country. Zeb wanted to take him back to the States where, eventually, he would be handed over to the FBI.
The problem was, the Nigerian police had accompanied Zeb and had carted him off to a safe house. They tossed out no problem whenever Zeb spoke to them.
The assassin was lethal. They had to be careful. No problem. He had to be searched. No problem. Zeb would escort him to the U.S. No chance.
Zeb went in search of s
omeone in authority and came across an officious inspector who stood with his arms akimbo and watched his men pick the killer up and load him in the back of a van. The officer ignored Zeb for a while and finally turned a frosty stare on him. ‘You’re a guest, Sir, in our country, but this man is our prisoner.’
Zeb gave up, made calls that sparked off a series of heated discussions between the police officers and various authorities. A compromise was reached. The assassin would be in a safe house to lessen the possibility of leaks, and when he was conscious, the Nigerians would interrogate him in Zeb’s presence. Zeb would then take him back to the States.
Zeb made another request that made the Inspector General of Police, Jimmy Akinlade raise his eyebrows. ‘You want the media to broadcast that the minister was killed?’
‘Nope. Just that there was a major incident involving the minister and details are still unknown.’
Akinlade, the head of the police force in the country, twirled his handlebar moustache while he thought about the request. ‘Why?’
‘If the killer’s sponsors know he has been captured, they might go to ground.’
Akinlade turned around and issued an order to his aide. Zeb caught something about boiling the media bosses’ asses in oil if any news leaked out. ‘It’ll be done,’ Akinlade turned back and said heavily. ‘It’s not easy, what you ask, but we’ll do it.’
It’s as easy as making a call. Media independence is a very elastic concept here. Zeb kept a straight face and thanked Akinlade. He made a couple more requests to which the chief had no objections.
The assassin had several phones and a computer in a backpack in his getaway vehicle. Zeb cloned the phones, made a copy of the hard disk and handed back the rucksack to the police.
He watched them drive away the assassin with misgiving. They haven’t ever had someone like the killer.
The safe house was heavily patrolled when Zeb arrived the next day. It was in the Wuse District and from the outside, looked like any other residence on the dusty street. It was painted white to keep out the heat, had red tiles and a wrought iron gate separated street from drive. The gate had a couple of policemen standing guard who sprang to attention when Zeb’s vehicle rolled inside.
The outside of the house had more policemen, in plain clothes, one of whom knocked the door in a code and ushered Zeb inside.
The inside was not like any other residence.
The hallway led to a living room but there the similarity to any home stopped. A steel fence rose from floor to ceiling in the middle of the living room behind which a man sat at a desk and manned a series of monitors.
The house had four cells, each with a solid steel door with a thick glass window, and all four cells lay behind a wall that separated the man with the monitors.
‘We have no other prisoners,’ the man with the monitors, Jonathan Kajang, explained. He pointed to an imposing door painted in green. ‘That door, electronically controlled, is the only way in to the cells. There are two guards behind it who guard the four cells, but we don’t really need them. The cameras cover every inch of the cells and the central corridor. The house has two and a half feet concrete walls on the outside and only a tank’s shell can penetrate it.’
Zeb glanced at the monitors, saw the two guards behind the door, the assassin lying in his cell.
‘He’s awake, his retching stopped at night. He woke at six in the morning, but after freshening up; he lay on his cot and hasn’t moved since.’
‘These computers are connected to your network?’
Kajang beamed. ‘Yes Sir. We have the most secure network in the country. The images are stored in a central computer and the entire safe house can be monitored and controlled remotely.’
The assassin lay motionless on his bed and could have been sleeping but for the slow blink of his eyes and the thousand yard stare in his eyes.
‘I want to see him,’ Zeb said abruptly. Something’s up. Don’t know what.
Kajang demurred. The Inspector General would arrive shortly and Zeb could accompany him. He broke when Zeb kept looking at him and punched a couple of keys, swung the green door open and shut it behind Zeb. ‘Just look at the cameras when you’re done.’
Zeb looked left and then right. One guard was standing propped against the wall at the far end, looking into an empty cell, the other was similarly posed at the other end.
Zeb walked past the first empty cell; its door was wide open, and its inside was dark. He walked past the second cell, had just crossed the separating wall, when he felt it.
The faintest movement in the air.
He hurled himself back, his left hand dipped down and his Benchmade flashed and cut through the rudimentary garrote that was slipping down and around his neck. He twisted and ducked just in time to avoid the blur of the assassin’s fist.
The assassin rained a flurry of strikes, his hands scything through the air, reaching for Zeb’s vital organs. Zeb fell back, parrying, blocking, thrusting in return.
The killer applied a lock, Zeb broke it smoothly, countered, met air where the assassin had been. A low sweeping blow searched for his kidneys, Zeb turned just in time and caught it high on his chest. It struck like a piledriver, but Zeb absorbed it, let it ripple through him, spread through his body, lessening its impact.
A leg whirled, sought to kick his feet from under him, Zeb thrust it aside and went on the attack.
Eagle strike, parried. Hammer blow, countered. Elbow strike, grabbed and twisted and turned against him.
The two men fell back, breathing easily and then the killer launched himself, coming in low, his hand going for the abdomen.
Zeb blocked the strike, saw the feint too late, rocked back and fell to the floor when a wicked blow caught him on the temple. He slithered back rapidly, avoided the stamping feet, rose to his feet, thighed away a groin kick.
Reached out. There.
The killer’s right hand had swung out too wide, giving Zeb the tiniest opening. He caught the wrist in a lock, bent it back, throwing his weight. The left hand reached out in a punch, Zeb countered with a leg strike, but kept hold of the wrist. The assassin’s eyes opened wide for the first time, and he hammered a blow against Zeb’s ribs. Zeb rolled with the punch, bent back the wrist some more, twisted the arm around its shoulder, tightened the lock.
Now.
He turned the killer using the bent arm as lever, smashed his forehead against the wall, pulled him back for another crushing blow, when the green door opened.
Kajang entered first, followed by Akinlade, both gaping at the spectacle in front of them.
Zeb’s grip loosened momentarily at the disturbance. That was enough for the killer, who lashed out with his left elbow, caught Zeb in the chin. The killer slipped out like an eel, whirled around in a flying kick that Zeb evaded just in time.
By the time he had recovered, the killer had flown across the few feet separating him from the policemen, had punched Kajang in a killing blow. He bent swiftly, drew Kajang’s gun, its barrel rose, his finger tightened.
Zeb threw himself to the ground and the first bullet flew over him. His Glock appeared in his hand as if spring loaded, eye to sight, sight to killer, an invisible line on which death walked.
He squeezed before the killer could, and the assassin’s face disappeared in a red mist.
The aftermath took two days to clear up. Akinlade ordered a lockdown on the safe house and a thorough investigation into how the killer had breached it. Zeb could have told him; that the assassin had someone on the outside, a hacker probably, who had breached the network and had inserted images of the patrolling guards and the assassin in an endless loop.
Kajang would survive though it would be a long recovery. He was lucky that the killer’s blow had lacked power or else he would have been a very dead policeman.
Akinlade invited Zeb to his office the second day and under a lazily turning fan in a high ceiling room, he looked curiously at Zeb. ‘Mr. Carter, you’re not a policeman, are you
? Your government could have sent people from the FBI or other agencies, but instead they sent you. Just who are you?’
‘I am a liaison between the various agencies. I also do some policing, Sir,’ Zeb smiled. His cover as a security consultant wouldn’t work here.
Akinlade grunted in disbelief but didn’t pursue the matter. The calls he had received clearly indicated Zeb had clout and he didn’t wish to antagonize the man in front of him. ‘All those cameras? We can keep them?’
‘Of course. That was the deal we had.’
The Inspector General thawed for the first time. Resources were always in short supply and any largesse would help his department. He revealed what his investigation had found.
The garrote had come from a specially designed lining on the killer’s shirt. His combat trousers had been searched when he had been apprehended, but the policemen had overlooked the plastic lock picks sewn into the bottom. The picks were soft and pliable and bent under searching fingers and hence had escaped detection.
Computer experts were looking into the network for traces of intrusion, but they reluctantly agreed that the cameras and the database had been compromised.
‘How did you know, Mr. Carter?’
‘It was a hunch. The killer had similarly infiltrated a hotel’s system in Dallas and when Kajang told me that the safe house was linked to your central network…’ His voice trailed.
It was more than a hunch. The beast had stirred and the uneasy feeling that was his radar had grown the moment he had entered the safe house. He had kept his game face on, however, since he didn’t know whether any of Akinlade’s men had been bought off.
‘You could’ve asked the guards to go through. Why you?’
Zeb met his eyes. ‘Your men have never come across a killer like him. Even now, we don’t know his identity. Sending your men in would have killed them.’
‘Thank you,’ Inspector General Jimmy Akinlade told him simply and the ice melted.
Akinlade personally accompanied Zeb to see him off at the airport and after assisting him through the formalities – his presence had ensured there weren’t many – he stood in his full dress uniform and drew out his card and wrote his number on it. ‘Anything you need, anytime.’
