The Break Line

by James Brabazon

  * * *

  • • •

  ONE BY ONE they emerged from the yellow and white hull. Heads bowed, urgent, hats in hand, they scuttled down the steps and spilled off the flight line into the car park. Some looked disoriented. Others struck out with purpose and direction. Everyone switched their phones on. I watched, waited and dialed. Micky picked up. Six-one, two hundred pounds, black goatee, light blue jacket, tan briefcase. I killed the call before he spoke. He didn’t look alarmed: dropped calls were a fact of life on SierraTel. He was alone. He climbed into a Hilux double-cab in the parking lot; I climbed onto a motorcycle taxi I’d stolen from the hotel. We both headed into town.

  At first I thought he was heading to the CDC office, or the US embassy at Hill Station. Instead he kept going and wound his way up toward Regent, a mountainous little town five minutes farther on. The views were spectacular. And so was the villa the big Toyota drew up at. I pulled up around a bend in the road in front of another equally impressive mansion and walked back to the gates Micky had now vanished through. The security guard jumped at the sight of an unknown white man turning up unannounced on foot.

  “At ease,” I said as I saluted him, walking through the smaller security side entrance and straight past him, counting my steps toward the front door. The Hilux sat burning hot in the courtyard, all glass and reflected heat. “Tell the professor I’ll wait downstairs.”

  He worked his mouth, but no sound came out. First his hand moved up to return my salute, then to his radio, then to the Beretta on his hip, and back to his radio again. By the time he’d made up his mind, I was already inside.

  I met Micky on the stairs. His descent came to an abrupt halt, stopped by the silenced barrel of the SIG semiautomatic.

  * * *

  • • •

  “KNEEL DOWN, HANDS in the air.” He did as he was told. “OK, now bring the walkie-talkie slowly to your mouth. Tell the sentry everything is fine and that you don’t want to be disturbed. . . .” He spoke calmly. No obvious code words.

  “Roger that, Professor,” came the crackled reply.

  “Now throw the handset onto the bed. That’s good. Now lie down slowly, flat on your belly, facedown, arms and legs spread out like a starfish. OK, good. Do not move. If you move your arms or your legs, I will shoot you. Do you understand?”

  He said he did.

  We were in the villa’s master bedroom—the centerpiece of an air-conditioned palace of marble floors and half-finished wiring, all mirrors and ill-fitting hardwood joinery. There were no pictures, no personal effects and, except for the guard at the gate, no visible staff.

  “Who are you?” He spoke in a nondescript mid-Atlantic drawl, muffled by the cold stone floor pressing against his lips. “Colonel Smith, I guess. Huh?”

  I wasn’t going to get close enough to find out if he was armed. The house was quiet. I stood at four o’clock to his head, SIG trained on his back.

  “The very same,” I said. “But you can call me Max, Max McLean.” Slowly he craned his head up and round to look at me, his palms and insteps held fast to the floor. His face was blank. Not even a flicker of recognition. “Sonny Boy sends his regards.” His head sagged almost imperceptibly, eyes cast down to the floor. It was an uncomfortable position to hold, looking back at me like that, and purposefully so. “Sergeant Martin Mayne, to you,” I added in a thicker-than-usual Wicklow brogue. “He was my mate.”

  He kept his mouth shut, quite possibly making the same calculations I would in his position: deny everything or say enough to placate the man with the gun? In the end it nearly always comes down to this: Will he kill me anyway? Do I have a chance of killing him first?

  “I heard he wasn’t so well,” Micky said at last. “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s dead,” I answered.

  “How?” He looked back up at me. The bluff went out of his voice. He sounded genuinely concerned.

  “I killed him.”

  “You . . . what?” He seemed to relax then. He looked away and put his face back to the floor again. “I don’t understand.”

  “Me neither. Perhaps we can help each other out. We’ve both just come back from Makeni. Quite a coincidence. I hear there’s a nasty infection north of there. Spreading, too. And you, you work for the Centers for Disease Control, right? So you’d know all about infections, wouldn’t you?”

  All I could hear above the hum of the generator outside was the rasp of Micky’s breath on the floor. He exhaled hard.

  “You mean the cholera outbreak?”

  “Yeah, that one. The ‘cholera’ outbreak that turns soldiers inside out and rips the cunts out of nursing mothers.”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “The same cholera outbreak that drove Sonny Boy mad. Must be pretty scary, eh? Because Sonny Boy Mayne didn’t scare easy, did he?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “I think you do know, Micky. I’m not going to fuck with you. You either tell me what you know right now or I’ll kill you, right now.” I cocked the SIG’s hammer—which was unnecessary to fire a shot, but lent itself well to the theatrics of threat escalation.

  Intimidating someone with a gun is a bad idea. Either draw it and use it or leave it alone—because as soon as you point a pistol at someone, you give them the right to kill you. Or to try to. And if you point a gun too close at someone who knows what they’re doing, chances are you’re going to be looking down the wrong end of your own barrel before you can say “Hollywood bullshit.” It works only if you’re prepared to follow it through to the logical conclusion. If the person you’ve just drawn on counters with “What are you going to do, shoot me?” then you have only one option: where you shoot them, and how many times, depends on how much sense you need to get out of them afterward.

  “OK, OK.” He craned his head around again. His face was taut. He was either well trained and just playing along or genuinely scared. “They sent me with him, with Mayne. We went up north together. I have clearance, OK? The army weren’t letting anyone go further than Kabala. CDC always has clearance.” He looked at me plaintively. That much was true: agents from the US government’s Centers for Disease Control have an exceptional level of clearance—I’d met them operating alongside Navy SEAL teams deep inside Syria the year before, investigating a suspected biological-weapons attack. “That’s it,” he concluded.

  “That’s what? Where up north?”

  “Man, I don’t know—some fucking village.” He turned to look at me again. His eyes were focused. He was playing scared.

  “Think harder. Name.”

  “K . . . K something.”

  “Name. Right now, Micky,” I said. And then his phone rang. A loud, urgent buzzing resonated off the marble floor. It was trapped underneath him.

  “I have to answer. Security check-in from the embassy.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Left-hand pants pocket.”

  “OK, slowly. Turn over. Very slowly.”

  Getting a call made sense because being almost alone in a remote mansion in West Africa didn’t. Whoever he was, someone had to be keeping tabs on him. The gate guard was most likely on loan from Marine Corps embassy security, posing as a local. But one man isn’t enough to protect you when you’re being hunted.

  If I’d had more time, I’d have made him strip when we first came into the room—far safer than a weapons search, which I hadn’t done, either. The buzzing grew more impatient, reaching a crescendo as he raised his knee and dipped his left hand into his trouser pocket. I adjusted my grip on the SIG. He looked at me and saw I meant it. And to know I meant it, that meant he definitely wasn’t scared. He was a pro.

  And then the buzzing was blotted out by the flat report of a pistol shot. A hole opened up in the thigh of his trousers, and then with a skidding crack the mirror behind me shattered. The bullet had grazed my left temp
le. I fired a split second after him, my point of aim fractionally high and right of the hole in his trousers. The phutt of the silencer was followed by a sharp snap as my bullet slammed into the pistol hidden in his pocket. The force and shock of the impact spun him sideways and jerked his hand clear. His index finger was blown off at the knuckle, palm and wrist torn open. The phone stopped ringing. A thin line of high white noise hummed in my head. His gunshot would have been heard a hundred meters away or more.

  He lay there, staring at his wound, clutching his wrist with his good hand. A thick slick of bright red blood spread out from underneath him. His jacket was torn at the shoulder. The round had traveled up his arm and exited out of his left deltoid, shredding his radial and brachial arteries on the way to the ceiling. Fine white plaster dust fell on him from where the bullet had lodged above him. He had around three minutes to live. Five at the outside. Freak shots: they never happen when you want them to, and always happen when you don’t.

  Downstairs, a screen door slammed. I counted slowly under my breath. At eight I took one step back, turned toward the bedroom door and fired twice into the chest of the gate security guard as he entered the room. The Beretta clattered to the floor. I kept my eyes on Micky and walked over to the guard, who was sprawled on his back, and put the lip of the silencer onto his left eye. It twitched. I angled the barrel away from me and fired. Micky hadn’t moved.

  I walked back toward him, stopping six feet away, SIG aimed at his chest. Hand injuries are excruciating, up there with the worst of them. His face was racked with pain, but he didn’t scream. There was so much blood on the floor he must have known he was bleeding out.

  “Bad call, Micky—or whoever the fuck you are. CDC or CIA? DIA?” I knew he wouldn’t tell me, and it didn’t matter anyway.

  “Karabunda,” he gasped. “The village was called Karabunda.” He was still telling me what he thought I would already know. His teeth ground together. His face went gray. He would soon go into hypovolemic shock. And he wouldn’t come back from that.

  “Why you? Why CDC? There is no fucking cholera, Micky. Karabunda’s a rebel camp, not a fucking hot zone.” He didn’t answer. His hand was clamped hard around his bleeding wrist—but the damage ran all the way up.

  There are only two ways of extracting information from a professional suspect: either you buy it from them, or they buy back their life from you. I squatted down, unslung the day bag from my back and took out a tourniquet and a packet of hemostatic gauze.

  He twisted onto his side again, rocking back and forth on the floor. The marble was staining red in every direction.

  “Why? Why did you go to Karabunda?” His face was leaching color rapidly, fading from gray to white before my eyes. Beads of sweat hung below his hairline. I tossed him the tourniquet and coagulant and walked behind him. “You’ve got what, a couple more minutes?” Micky rolled over. He let go of his wrist and fumbled with the tourniquet. “So you want me to help you with that or what?” He tried to follow me with his eyes, but the pain got the better of him.

  “I went to negotiate. To talk.”

  “Talk to who, Micky?” I squatted down and cocked my head to one side. I was losing him.

  “The Russians. Talk to the Russians.”

  “About what, Micky? Talk to them about what?”

  “A deal.”

  I didn’t understand, and we were both running out of time.

  “Did you make it to the camp? Did you get to Karabunda?”

  “For God’s sake, help me. Please. I’ll tell you everything.” He was becoming incoherent with pain and loss of blood.

  “Sonny ditched you, didn’t he? He went north again without you. Why?” Micky’s breathing was shallow and fast. The pool of blood had stopped spreading and had begun to darken and set on the cool floor. “Why did he go it alone?”

  “To break the deal,” he hissed through gritted teeth. “Dumb bastard didn’t understand.”

  “How, Micky? Break it how? You need to start making sense. Now.”

  “A photograph. He took a photograph.”

  “Of what?”

  “The scientist. The fucking scientist.”

  “You mean the old white man? You saw him?”

  “Mayne saw him. Took a photo.”

  “By the car? You mean the photo by the car at the school in Kabala?”

  “No, at the camp. He got to the camp.”

  I asked him where the photograph was. He balled up and shook his head.

  “Couldn’t find it.”

  I looked at his arm. The exit wound was too high to get a tourniquet above it. Saving him wasn’t an option. It never had been.

  His jaw relaxed, and his eyes defocused. Spittle foamed at the corners of his mouth. Sweat and saliva pooled on the floor underneath his cheek. He smiled and then closed his eyes.

  “They’re perfect, just . . . perfect.” A long, deep death rattle ebbed and flowed in his lungs as if he was repeating his last words over and over again: perfect, perfect, perfect . . .

  I leaned over and shot him in the side of the head. Picking up my spent brass wasn’t necessary: London and Langley, Moscow—they’d know who’d done it anyway. I put the medical kit back in the day bag and went through his pockets: one Glock subcompact 9mm, still usable; one iPhone—locked; one old Nokia on a local SIM—unlocked; and one security pass in the name of Professor Michael Montague. I stowed them all in the bag, along with the sentry’s Beretta.

  Then as I turned to leave the room, it hit me. My father had been right. There are no misses, and no coincidences. Only consequences. Never mind the cosmic high five. Sonny Boy—that mad, bad bastard—just reached out and slapped me on the back.

  “Juliet,” the only person to place the white man in the camp at Karabunda, was classified as an “untested” source in the MI6 Intelligence Report for the same reason that the information could be neither evaluated nor disseminated: because the collecting officer had gone insane, and no one apart from the madman knew what or where the original evidence was.

  I’d never have guessed Sonny Boy was either a photographer or a Shakespeare fan. Goes to show you never can tell.

  A door creaked behind me. Emerging from the en suite was a young African woman, wrapped in a towel. She startled and started crying as I leveled the SIG at her. She slid down the doorframe to the floor.

  So that’s why he came here alone and not to the office.

  She looked at me through her tears and said simply: “Please.”

  13

  Roberts rubbed his eyes and peered at me through the morning shadows cooling the beach. The sun was not yet over the mountains, but the sea was already hard blue. I’d spent the night at a guesthouse across town as the news from the north began to break. Local radio stations buzzed with chatter about a rumored cholera outbreak. Were the authorities trying to cover up an Ebola outbreak? Why was Musala cut off? Sierra Leone’s shock jocks had questions; no one from the government had answers.

  “Where did he sleep?”

  “Who? Sleep where?”

  Roberts was wrapped in a bright orange kikoi, which he patted in vain looking for a packet of cigarettes. I offered him a Marlboro. He took it.

  “The engineer, the big Irish fella you were talking about the day I arrived. Where did he sleep?”

  “He . . .” Roberts dragged hard as I lit his cigarette. “. . . at the Barmoi, on the peninsula.” He exhaled a fog of blue smoke and jerked his thumb behind him, pointing up the beach. The beads on his wrist clicked. “What time is it?”

  “No, here. When he stayed here, where did he sleep?”

  “What? Max, man, I don’t . . .”

  “Juliet said he was supposed to stay here, with you, again, but you got a call to say he’d been casevaced.”

  “Cazzie-what?”

  “Come.” I pushed past him into the beach
house. Even though it was just getting light on the beach, the darkness inside was disorienting. The door opened onto a living space of rugs and furniture. A long mosquito net cordoned off a sleeping area, which made up a third of the room. A palm oil night-light burned on a dresser by a low, wide bed. It lit the shape of Juliet curled up like a baby under another circular net hanging from the ceiling. There were two doors ahead of me. I turned to look at Roberts.

  “What the fuck, man?” he hissed, and then, after reading my expression, “On the right. The door on the right.”

  I stepped in and found an old-fashioned round light switch—the sort you might have found in England in the 1950s. It clicked a sixty-watt bulb into life, suspended over a shiny poured-concrete floor. Against the far wall was the metal frame of a single bed, the mattress made up with simple white linen. The mosquito net suspended from a metal hoop above it was furled and tucked to one side. At the foot of the bed, there were a writing table and chair fashioned from reclaimed wood and next to those, on the left-hand wall, a brightly painted wardrobe. The center of the room was marked by a loosely woven red cotton mat. Roberts and Juliet were not rich, but they lived pleasantly enough—or at least, I supposed, she made sure they did.

  I stopped still.

  The sound of the ocean pulling on Lumley Beach filtered into the room. There was no movement from Juliet next door. Roberts stood beside me. He was breathing hard. He was, I suspected, in the process of realizing that he had no idea who I really was, what I was really doing—or what I could, or would, do. As much as he might not have liked that, he was wound into whatever was happening as much by our disquieting road trip north as by the money London paid him to be my tour guide.

  Right then there were only two possible outcomes for Roberts: submission or rebellion. I turned to him.

  “It’s cool. We’re cool,” I reassured him. “There’s something here. Something the engineer left behind. May have left behind.” Roberts’s shoulders relaxed. He smoothed his left palm over his ragged braids and down his neck. “I need it, need to find it.”