by Leye Adenle
Ojo looked around the room as if he expected to find Shehu sitting or standing amongst the women. ‘He said he has some personal things to deal with at home,’ he said.
‘He said so?’ Otunba looked into Ojo’s eyes as if he expected a better answer; as if there was something wrong with the one Ojo had given.
71
Shehu answered the call from the driver’s seat of his wife’s Toyota Prius parked up the road from Malik’s house. ‘Ol’ boy,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’
‘Where are you?’ Ojo said.
‘Waiting for you know who. Why?’
‘Otunba was asking after you. He wanted to know where you were.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I said you went home to deal with something.’
‘Did he ask what?’
‘No.’
‘If he does, just tell him I didn’t say.’
‘Have you spoken to him?’
‘Yeah. He’s not going to give up the girl.’
‘So they’re really working together?’
‘It’s possible. If she’s alive.’
‘What about Amaka?’
‘I’m getting close.’
‘How close?’
‘Very close.’
‘OK. Shehu, I’m really very grateful that you’re doing this for me. I mean it. Thank you, my brother.’
‘No problem, brother. Just stay calm and let me handle things. And one more thing.’
‘What?’
‘Malik said you also asked him to take care of Amaka. You really have to let me handle this.’
‘I’m sorry, Shehu.’
‘You’ve got to trust me, man. I’m the only person you can trust. Always remember that.’
72
In the dark, damp cell that smelt of urine, Elizabeth stood by the rusting iron bars clutching her handbag to her chest. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she shook with terror. In the far corner, on the floor that was too dirty and too wet to sit upon, a woman was curled up in the foetal position, her body against the wall and her clothes torn around her. She hadn’t moved or made any sound since two police officers led Elizabeth down the corridor past other cells full of men and shoved her into the cell. An hour had passed since then. Elizabeth’s voice had become sore from shouting her pleas of innocence through the bars. Only other detainees responded, declaring their own innocence or warning her to stop before they broke into her cell to fuck her until she shut up. The police didn’t come. She stood by the bars, clutching her bag to her chest, shaking with fear, afraid of the male detainees in the other cell, and of the officers when they returned for her.
An unopened bottle of schnapps in his hand, Ibrahim stood in front of his officers in a room in the back of Bar Beach police station – officers who had gone with him to the operation at Fiki Marina; desk officers who never left the police station; battle-trained officers of the special task force, Operation Fire-for-Fire; and officers who were off duty but had heard the news and returned to the station. Sergeant Hot-Temper was among them, still in his undercover gear, his eyes red from crying. A few of his Operation Fire-for-Fire colleagues patted his back. Some of them also needed consoling.
‘My friends,’ Ibrahim said. ‘My brothers, my sisters, my family. We have lost one of our own today. Fati is no longer with us. She has fallen in the line of duty. The bagas that took her from us have fled like the cowards they are, and they have gone into hiding. But if they enter water…’
The officers answered, each in their own emotion-laden voice, ‘We will swim and fish them out.’
‘If they enter rock…’
‘We will break inside and bring them out.’
‘If they grow wings and hide on trees, nko?’
‘We will turn into winch and chase them down.’
‘And if they die so that they can hide in hell?’
‘We will follow them and tell Satan to hand them over to us.’
Ibrahim twisted off the cap of the bottle in his hands, poured some onto the ground, then took a swig and handed it to the female officer standing next to him. He sang the first line of a requiem in broken English and before he was done, the other officers had joined in. Their voices echoed through the corridors of the police station. The detainees listened in silence in their cells. The officers passed the bottle of schnapps from one to another, each giving Fatima her share before sipping theirs.
Two police officers walked between cells while suspects hurtled to the bars from where they watched the officers passing. The officers stopped at the last cell. Elizabeth’s face was streaked with tears. She shook her head, pleaded with them to help her even as she backed away to the cold wall. An officer unlocked the door and pushed it open.
‘Are you ready?’ he said.
Elizabeth shook her head. Tears rolled down her cheeks and her belly felt weak. She couldn’t walk. The woman who was curled up on the ground raised her head and looked at the officers. They entered the cell and lifted her to her feet.
From behind his desk, dressed in the same combat gear as the men from Operation Fire-for-Fire, Ibrahim stood strapping on a bulletproof vest. He holstered his pistol then picked up the first of six Uzi magazines lined up on his desk next to the sub-machine gun. Combat-ready officers stood in silence around the room, and out along the corridor. The ragged woman the officers had collected from the cell pushed past the men and entered the office. She saluted.
‘Anything?’ Ibrahim said. He picked up another magazine. Files were piled high on his table. On one end was an empty beer carton containing a framed picture of Ibrahim in ceremonial dress, a miniature Nigerian flag and another of the Nigerian police force.
‘She called someone called Felix. I think it was her brother. She asked him to come to the station. She told him a woman and some men in a Lexus stopped to talk to her at Yaba. The woman said her husband had arranged to meet his girlfriend in VI and she wanted to catch him. The woman gave her twenty thousand to take an okada to Fiki Marina. The woman was sending her text messages telling her where to go.’
‘So she’s innocent.’
‘I think so. But we must still check her phone. We will get the woman’s number.’
‘Good. And when her brother comes, arrest him too. Keep him here till we return.’
‘Yes, sir. Sir?’
‘Yes?’
‘Why are you packing your things, sir?’
Ibrahim had just rolled up the cable of his laptop’s charger. He held it in his hands as he stopped to look at the officer dressed in rags, then he placed the cable in a box.
‘You understand that this is an illegal operation we are about to carry out?’ He turned and addressed the rest of the officers. ‘You all understand this is an illegal operation? Including the operation that took Fatima’s life. I did not get clearance for it. You are all safe, you were taking orders from me, so you are protected, but when this is over, maybe even before it is over, I will stop being your boss. Fatima’s death is my fault. We are going to avenge her now, but that won’t bring her back. I asked her to follow me on an illegal mission and she trusted me. Now she is dead. I am asking you also to follow me on another illegal operation. I hope none of us dies, but you must all understand what this is. Please, brothers, sisters, if any one of you doesn’t want to come, I will not think less of you.’
‘All this talk is too much,’ Hot-Temper said from where he stood leaning against the wall, next to the door. ‘Let us go and get the bastards.’
The officers followed Ibrahim out of the station and up the dirt road to Ahmadu Bello Way. Two officers stood in the middle of each lane and held out their hands to stop traffic as the others crossed the road. Pedestrians and motorists watched the throng of men in body armour and armed with an assortment of weapons, cross the road and walk along the sandy path where there was meant to be a pavement. The officers passed the entrance to the Navy Senior Staff Quarters to reach the blue and white gates of Wilmot Point where Navy ratings waiting
for them held open the gates.
73
Sisi unlocked Malik’s office at The Harem and stepped inside. She pulled her hair back, gathered it into a bun, and with a rubber band she’d held between her lips, she tied her Peruvian attachment in place.
She went over to Malik’s desk, sat on his chair, and felt underneath the tabletop. Her fingers touched a key taped to the underside. She pushed the chair back and opened the first drawer: inside was a silver Smith and Wesson revolver with a long barrel and black handle. Next to it, a transparent box of cartridges. She gripped the handle of the weapon and lifted it out of the drawer. The pistol was heavier than she had anticipated. It made a loud clank as she half placed, half dropped it on the table.
Twigs snapped and dead leaves crunched beneath boots as armed men crept through the forest towards the building surrounded by a twelve-foot-high concrete fence topped with loops of barbed wire. The men spread out, communicating only with hand signals. They extended long telescopic poles with tiny cameras on the ends up to the barbed wire and transmitted the images they captured to the officers beneath who used laptops in thick, black, shockproof cases.
Ibrahim shifted on the thin cushion of his seat in the back of the armoured vehicle parked in the middle of a narrow road in the forest. Two other officers sat either side of him. Facing them were Amaka, wearing a large grey bulletproof vest, Alex, and Mshelia.
Amaka’s phone began to vibrate. ‘Eyitayo, not now.’
‘Switch that off,’ Ibrahim said. He checked his watch. ‘They should be in position now.’ His radio crackled. ‘Tell me.’
It was Hot-Temper. He whispered over the radio: ‘No movement detected. Awaiting your signal.’
Ibrahim looked at Mshelia. Mshelia nodded.
‘Go,’ Ibrahim said.
Mshelia banged on the metal plate separating the rear of the van from the driver’s cab. The engine roared, the tyres spun in sand, and the two-tonne vehicle lurched forward, throwing everybody back in their seats.
74
Ibrahim’s officers lobbed stun grenades over the fence and tore away sections of barbed wire. Men, eager for vengeance, scaled the fence with practiced efficiency, landing in the compound with their guns drawn and their eyes seeking their targets.
Explosions going off, thick smoke spreading, and the pop pop pop of gunfire everywhere, they surrounded the building. They smashed windows and threw stun grenades through them, and ducked. Two men opened the gate and took up positions outside. Sergeant Hot-Temper led a group to the front door. He pelted the lock with lead, then kicked the door and stood in the open frame. The smoke lifted. In front of him, on the marble floor, in the middle of the large foyer, midway between the door and the staircase, lay a blue trunk, five feet long and three feet high, with shiny aluminium edges and locks.
Hot-Temper stepped into the building and glanced up the staircase. Behind him, officers ran into the house in pairs and four peeled off, past the trunk and up the stairs.
Hot-Temper walked to the box, inspecting it from every angle. Soon, the men returned to the foyer having found that the house was empty. Hot-Temper relaxed his grip on the rifle, removed his helmet and scratched his head. ‘Wetin fit dey inside this thing?’ he said.
75
Traffic built up at the Lagos end of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway as vehicles heading into the city were funnelled into the last police checkpoint. Street-food hawkers and beggars darted between cars to beat rivals to anyone who looked at them from the windows of cramped buses. Impatient drivers held down car horns and revved engines, spurting smoke, amid a cacophony of voices.
An Innoson 23-seater bus was in the long queue of cars. The made-in-Nigeria vehicle had been retro-fitted with tinted windows, and inside, the driver, a rotund man in knee-length trousers and a white singlet, had beads of sweat along his hairline despite the air conditioning. He moved his head from side to side like an anxious chicken, and reacted with a jolt, followed by cursing, any time another motorist in the holdup felt the need to use their horn near his bus.
Two police officers in riot-gear had strayed from their checkpoint and were making their way between the immobile vehicles. They kept their eyes on the bus. The driver scanned ahead and looked nervously in his mirrors. The sight of police officers had never worried him before when his bus was filled with girls, all dressed up, all made up, and the cab would be scented with a heady mix of their perfumes. It would be dark and he would be delivering his cargo to a party thrown for a senator, or a governor, or a general, or just some wealthy man somewhere, and an escort would ride in front with him – a police officer, a soldier, an SSS man, even an Army Colonel once.
It would be the job of the escort to turn inquisitive police officers away. But today he had no escort, and when he rushed to the house as his boss had instructed him to, the girls had run into the van, many of them undressed and clutching their clothes, as if pursued by ghosts that had finally descended upon the house in the middle of the forest. The building always made him uneasy; a mansion in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by forest and the spirits that live in forests.
Most of girls that hurried into his bus were white, and they were the ones who had on the least clothes, or no clothes at all. He had watched in the mirror as the girls shared pieces of surplus clothing with those who had nothing to cover their nakedness, but still the clothes were not enough to go around. Now, stuck in traffic in daylight on the express, two police officers were approaching his vehicle.
The girls looked scared. He was scared. It had to be the tinted windows that had attracted the officers. Even if he was not the original focus of the police officers’ attention, the windows had given them an excuse to shake him down for a bribe. And when they looked inside, they would see all the girls looking scared like he was going to use them for rituals, white girls among them, and they would ask him who the girls were and where he was taking them, and he would not be able to answer because he was more afraid of his boss than he was of the police.
The two police officers got closer. The driver kept staring at them. The officer in front looked up and locked eyes with him through the windscreen. The driver switched off the engine, left the key in the ignition, unclasped his seatbelt, and opened his door. Then, he jumped onto the road and ran.
For a moment the girls sat still in their seats, then one of them stood, opened the door, and disappeared as fast as she could in the same direction as the driver. The other girls hurried to the door, rushed out onto the road and ran in different directions between idling cars, beggars, and hawkers.
76
The Nigerian Navy armoured personnel carrier rolled through the open gates. The men got out and Ibrahim held his hand out to Amaka, but she got out by herself and the heels of her shoes sank into the gravel. The compound was large, just as the girls had described it. The building stood in the middle, as big and elegant as any mansion in Ikoyi, but this one was in the middle of the forest, closer to Ibadan than to Lagos.
Armed men were everywhere; gravel crunching beneath their heavy boots. There was no threat in the building. The front door of the house, framed by two large columns, was open and more officers stood inside, just beyond the door.
A naval officer who had waited for the vehicle to park walked up to Mshelia and presented him with a silver revolver. He took the weapon and checked it wasn’t loaded. Then he wrapped his hand around the handle, held out the gun in front of him and closed one eye to look down the barrel as if aiming into the ground. He handed the gun to Ibrahim.
‘The house is empty,’ the naval officer said. ‘We found the firearm on a desk upstairs. It looks as if everybody left in a hurry. We also found fresh tracks here; a large vehicle. They must have been tipped off.’
‘So this is it,’ Ibrahim said. He shielded his eyes with his palm to look up at the building.
‘Naomi,’ Amaka muttered. She walked towards the door. Mshelia, Ibrahim, and Alex followed, and behind them two officers from the armoured car, the onl
y ones still holding their weapons battle-ready.
Hot-Temper stepped aside. Ibrahim looked at the blue trunk. ‘What’s inside?’ he asked.
‘We never open am,’ Hot-Temper said. Other men were standing around in the foyer, all facing the trunk from several feet away.
‘Good call,’ Mshelia said.
Amaka looked up the stairwell. She walked round the trunk and climbed the stairs. On the first floor she looked down the corridor. Doors on either side were open. She walked into the first room. There was a white poster bed in the middle; its rumpled white sheets lay half on the floor. She switched on her phone, and as she did she saw that she had missed several calls. She opened the camera app and held it up to take a picture of the bed.
Amaka walked along the white, deep pile rug to the end of the room where another door was open. It was a bathroom; three toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste sat in a glass cup on the sink. She looked inside a wicker basket by the toilet bowl: wet condoms and their torn packets lay on top of a pile of crumpled tissues. She pointed her phone’s camera lens at the dustbin and clicked, then checked the pictures she had taken. Three of the missed calls were from Eyitayo; one from a withheld number. The phone began to vibrate. Eyitayo again, Amaka assumed, calling at Chioma’s behest. But she couldn’t deal with the Chioma situation right now. She rejected the call and scrolled through the call log; there was yet another from a withheld number. The entry showed a talk time of five seconds.
