Cross Country ак-14

by James Patterson

  Finally she stood. “All right,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do for you. I’m in.” She picked up her pen again, a silver-topped onyx roller, the kind people give as gifts. “Where can I reach you? Alex?”

  At the Redeemed Church of Christ men’s shelter – that’s where I live now.

  I don’t know if she noticed my pause. Whether or not it was wise, I found that I wanted to impress Adanne Tansi.

  “I’ll call you,” I said. “First thing tomorrow. I promise.”

  She nodded, and then she smiled. “I believe you, Detective Cross. So far, anyway. Don’t disappoint me, please.”

  How could I even think of it, Adanne?

  Chapter 76

  A BUSINESSMAN WITH rumored connections named Mohammed Shol stood like an expensively framed portrait of himself in the open double doors of his enormous home. The main building was twenty thousand square feet, and the guesthouse was another eight thousand. He was among South Darfur’s wealthiest men and never missed an opportunity to show it off.

  The gated compound with its high walls and attached citrus greenhouse made its own statement: Who but the devil lives like a king in the middle of hell?

  Not that the Tiger minded dealing with devils; he did it all the time. This was his business, and if he had carried a card, a black devil might have been the logo.

  Shol smiled broadly as he shook hands to elbows with the large and quite handsome fixer and murderer. “Welcome, my friend! Your team will wait out here, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “They will be fed.”

  “They are always hungry.”

  The Tiger left Rocket in charge of the others and knew he would maintain discipline. The boys waited by the front gate, across the yard from Shol’s two plainclothes guards, who watched the younger ones with unconcealed amusement. The guards at the estate had come up from the streets themselves.

  Let them be cocky and sure of themselves, the Tiger thought as he eyed the older watchdogs. Underestimation had always worked in his favor.

  He followed Mohammed Shol through the estimable front hallway and across an interior courtyard. Cooking smells, cardamom and beef, came from one side of the house. Boys’ voices came from the other – reciting in Arabic, which further defined Shol’s politics.

  They came to a glass door at the far end of the courtyard.

  An enclosed grove of exotic fruit trees showed on the other side. Shol stopped.

  “We’ll meet in here. Can I offer you tea? Or perhaps grapefruit juice?” The latter was a boast, since such juice was a delicacy here.

  “Nothing,” the Tiger said. “Only what I came for. Then I will be gone.”

  Shol dismissed his houseboy with a quick flick of the wrist, then used a key from his jallabiya pocket to let them inside.

  It was pleasant in the greenhouse, temperature controlled with a waft of humidity lacing the air. The tiled floor was shaded under a low canopy of green. Above was the geometric pattern of a glass-and-steel ceiling.

  Shol gestured for the Tiger to enter a small dining area in the back.

  Four rattan chairs surrounded a luminescent bai wood table. Shol moved aside a potted sapling. Then he ran the combination on a floor safe hidden behind the tree.

  Inside the safe was a paper envelope, stuffed thick. Shol took it out and placed it on the table between them.

  “I think you’ll find it’s all there.”

  Once the Tiger had checked the contents, he set the package on the floor and sat back. Shol smiled.

  “You’ve done much here,” the Tiger said, gesturing around the room. “It’s impressive.”

  Shol smiled, puffed up by the compliment. “I’ve been blessed many times.”

  “Not just blessed. You’ve been busy. You are clever, I can tell.”

  “It’s true. Between the legislature and my businesses, there’s little time for other things.”

  “Travel,” the Tiger said. “Meetings day and night? And your family, of course.”

  Shol nodded, clearly enjoying that the subject was him, “Yes, yes. On most days.”

  “Saying things you shouldn’t. Putting your loved ones at risk.”

  The nodding stopped. Shol seemed to forget that he was afraid of looking the Tiger in the eye, and did it now. “No,” he said. “Truly. I’ve not talked about my business dealings with you, or anyone else.”

  “Yes,” said the Tiger, without moving. “Truly. You have. You know a reporter – a woman? Adanne Tansi?” He reached with one finger and tipped open his collar an inch. He spoke into a microphone.

  “Rock da house! Now, Rocket. Spare no one. Make an example of them.”

  Chapter 77

  A FEW SECONDS later, the entire greenhouse reverberated with a half dozen or more gun blasts coming from outside. And then bursts of machine-gun clatter.

  Mohammed Shol tried to get up, but the Tiger was fast and agile and already had his hands around the man’s throat and was choking him. He slammed Shol into the far wall and a spider web pattern blossomed in the glass.

  “Do you hear that?” the Tiger shouted at the top of his voice. “You hear it? All your fault!”

  There was more gunfire. Then screams – women first, followed quickly by boys, their voices high and pitiful.

  “That,” the Tiger told him, “is the sound of your mistakes, your greed, your stupidity.”

  Shol grappled with both hands at the Tiger’s huge and unmovable wrists. His eyes reddened and veins appeared ready to burst at his temples. The Tiger watched, fascinated.

  It was possible, he’d learned, to bring a man to the edge of death, and then keep him there for as long as he liked. He liked this because he despised Shol and his kind.

  The greenhouse door shattered as two bodyguards arrived to rescue their employer. “Come in!” shouted the Tiger. In one motion, he spun Mohammed Shol around and pulled a pistol from the paddle holster at his ankle. He charged forward, Shol in front as a shield, firing as he came!

  One bodyguard went down with a nine-millimeter hole in the throat. The other sent a bullet through his employer’s outstretched hand, then into his shoulder.

  Shol screamed, even as the Tiger launched him the last several feet across the floor, where he crashed into the guard. Both men went down. Then the Tiger shot the second bodyguard in the face.

  “Oga!” Rocket said as he appeared in the empty doorway. Oga meant “chief” in Lagos street parlance. The Tiger liked the designation, and it came naturally to his young soldiers.

  The screaming had all but stopped in the house, but there were still sounds of breakage and gunfire as his boys let off the last of their venom and steam.

  “There was a tutor. Children being taught.”

  “Taken care of,” said Rocket.

  “Good.” The Tiger watched as Shol struggled to stand. He fired once into his leg. “You’ll need a tourniquet or you’ll die,” he said to the businessman.

  Then he turned to Rocket. “Tie Mr. Shol up. Then put this in his mouth. Or up his ass, if you like.”

  “This” was an M67 – a grenade.

  “Pull the pin before you leave.”

  Chapter 78

  EVERYTHING CONTINUED TO feel unreal and fantasy-like to me.

  All the doors at the church shelter for men were locked after nine o’clock. No one could get in or out. With traffic being what it is in Lagos, I barely made it back there in time.

  My cot was at the far end of one of three lodges, long high-ceilinged dorms off the main corridor where breakfast would be served in the morning.

  Alex Cross, I thought. What have you come to? What have you done this time?

  The guy in the next bed was the same guy as the night before, a Jamaican man by the name of Oscar. He didn’t talk much, but the strained look in his eyes and half-healed track marks told his story.

  He lay on his side and watched me while I rooted around for a toothbrush.

  “Hey, mon,” he said in a whispe
r. “Dey is some shorty man o’ God lookin’ your way. He dere now.”

  Father Bombata was standing at the door. When I saw him, he beckoned with a finger, then walked back out of the dormitory.

  I followed him outside and into a hall packed with last-minute arrivals. I pushed upstream toward the front doors, until I caught up with the priest.

  “Father?”

  I saw then that he was dialing a cell phone and wondered who he was calling. Was it good news or bad that I was supposed to hear?

  “Ms. Tansi wishes to speak with you,” he said and handed over the phone to me.

  Adanne had news! An assassination in South Darfur had occurred that day. One of the representatives to the Sudanese Council of States was dead – and his family had been slaughtered.

  “Any connection to Basel Abboud in DC?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know yet, but I can tell you that the Tiger does frequent business in Sudan.”

  “Weapons? Heroin?” I asked her. “What kind of business, Adanne?”

  “Boys. His loyal soldiers. He recruits at the Darfur refugee camps.”

  I took a breath. “You might have told me about this earlier.”

  “I’ll make it up to you. I can have us on an air freighter to Nyala first thing in the morning.”

  I blinked.

  “You said ‘us’?”

  “I did. Or you can fly commercial to Al Fasher and see about ground transport from there. I leave it to you.”

  Any other time I never would have considered it. But then, I’d never been five thousand miles from home without a lead and sleeping in a men’s homeless shelter before.

  I put my hand over the phone. “Father, can I trust this woman?” With my life?

  “Yes, she is a good person,” he said without hesitation. “And I told you, she is my cousin. Tall and beautiful, just like me. You can trust her, Detective.”

  I was back on the line. “Nothing goes into print until we both say so? Do we have a deal on that?”

  “Agreed. I’ll meet you at the Ikeja Cantonment, at the main entrance by five. And Alex, you should prepare yourself emotionally. Darfur is truly a horrible place.”

  “I’ve seen a few horrors,” I said. “More than a few.”

  “Perhaps you have, but not like this. Nothing like this, believe me, Alex.”

  Part Three

  CAMP

  Chapter 79

  SO FAR, ADANNE’S connections were very good, and I was impressed by how quickly and efficiently she got things done.

  It took her only one brief conversation on the tarmac, and then one radio call, before the African Union sergeant in charge allowed us to board the C-130 freighter the following morning.

  We were in the air by six, the only civilian passengers on a plane carrying millet, sorghum, and cooking oil to Darfur.

  The murder investigation continued, and now it was airborne and seemed to have more purpose than ever.

  I borrowed a situation map from one of the flight crew and saw that Darfur was about the size of Texas. If I was going to get anywhere, I had to run with a few assumptions – one, that the Tiger had been in Nyala at the time of the massacre of the Shol family, and two, that Adanne’s information was correct, and he might still be culling boys from camps for displaced persons in the area.

  Given all of that, how far would he have gotten in the past eighteen hours? That was the next question that had to be answered.

  During the flight, Adanne patiently told me much about Darfur and Sudan, and though she spoke in a low-key manner, there was no disguising the horrors – especially against women and children, thousands of whom were raped, then branded to increase their humiliation.

  “Rape has become such a cruel weapon in this civil war. Americans have no idea, Alex. They couldn’t possibly.

  “Sometimes the Janjaweed will break a woman’s legs first so she can’t possibly escape and will be an invalid for the rest of her life. They like to flog victims; to break fingers one by one; to pull out fingernails,” Adanne said in a voice that barely got above a whisper.

  “Even some of the ‘peacekeepers’ are guilty of rape, and of using the refugees as prostitutes. What’s worse, the government of Sudan is behind much of it. You won’t believe what you will see here, Alex.”

  “I want to see it,” I told her. “I made a promise to a man in Sierra Leone that I would tell Americans what was happening here.”

  Chapter 80

  “THIS IS KALMA.” She pointed at a yellow triangle on the map. “It’s one of the largest camps in Darfur. I’d wager that the Tiger knows it well. Everyone around here does.”

  “What are the other colors?” I asked.

  There were more than a hundred camps in all, Adanne explained. Green meant inaccessible during rainy season, and blue was closed to nonmilitary aid organizations, based on current fighting conditions. Kalma’s yellow meant open.

  That’s where we would start our Tiger hunt.

  “And these?” I ran a finger over a line of red flame icons. There were dozens of them.

  Adanne sighed before answering my question.

  “Red is for villages that are confirmed destroyed. The Janjaweed burn everything they can – food stores, livestock. They put human and animal carcasses down the wells, too.

  Anything to ensure that no one comes back. In Arabic, Janjaweed means‘man with a gun on horseback!”

  These were the Arab militias, widely believed to be supported by the current government in a vicious campaign to make life as unsafe as possible for black Africans in the region. An unthinkable two million people had already fled their homes and more than two hundred thousand had died. Two hundred thousand that we knew of.

  It was Rwanda all over again. In fact, it was worse. This time the whole world was watching and doing almost nothing to help.

  I looked out my porthole window at the Sahel landscape twelve thousand feet below.

  It was actually quite beautiful from up here – no civil war, no genocide, no corruption. Just an endless, peaceful stretch of tan, sculpted earth.

  Which was a lie, of course.

  A beautiful, very diabolical lie.

  Because we were about to land in hell.

  Chapter 81

  AT THE BASE in Nyala, we secured a ride out to the Kalma Camp with a five-truck convoy carrying sacks of grain and crates of F75 and F100 baby formula. Adanne seemed to know everyone here, and I found it interesting to watch her work. Her gracious smile, not her attractiveness, seemed to be her secret. I saw it succeed again and again with people who were overworked and stressed to their limits.

  Camp seemed like the wrong word once I actually saw Kalma.

  Yes, there were tents and lean-tos and stick-straw huts, but they stretched for miles and miles. One hundred and fifty thousand people lived here. That’s a city. And one that was overflowing with unbearable suffering and heartbreak and death by everything from Janjaweed attacks, to dysentery, to childbirth without drugs, and usually without a doctor or midwife.

  Around the camp’s center were some signs of permanence, at least. A small open-air school was in session, and there were a few walled buildings with corrugated tin roofs, where limited food supplies were still available.

  Adanne knew exactly where we should go first. She took me to the United Nations’ Commission on Refugees tent, where a young soldier agreed to do some translating for us, although many of the refugees knew bits of English.

  The soldier’s name was Emmanuel, and he had the same kind of sinewy height, dark skin, and deep-set eyes I’d seen on many of the so-called Lost Boys who had emigrated to DC over the years. Emmanuel spoke English, Arabic, and Dinka.

  “Most of the people here are Fur,” he told us as we started down a long dirt avenue. “And eighty percent are abused women.

  “Most of their men are dead, or looking for work, or for resettlement,” added Adanne. “This is the most vulnerable city in the world, Alex. No exception. You will find out f
or yourself.”

  It was easy to see what Adanne and Emmanuel were talking about. Most of the people we found to speak with were women who were working outside their shelters. They reminded me of Moses and his friends, because of how eager they were to share their terrible stories with someone from the outside.

  One woman, Madina, cried as she wove a straw mat and told us about coming to Kalma. The Janjaweed had destroyed her village and killed and mutilated her husband, her mother, and father. Most of her neighbors and friends were burned alive in their huts.

  Madina had arrived with three children and literally nothing else. Tragically, all three of her children had died at the camp.

  The sleeping mats she made were in demand because of dooda worms, which came out of the ground at night and burrowed into the refugees’ skin. Whatever she earned went toward onions and grain, though she hoped to have enough to buy a patch of cloth one day. She’d been wearing the same toab since she’d gotten here.

  “When was that?” Adanne asked.

  “Three years ago” was Madina’s sad answer. “One for each of my children.”

  Chapter 82

  “I HAVEN’T LOST sight of your Tiger,” Adanne said as we trudged along. “He recruits boys here. It’s easy for him.”

  “You were right about the horror, Adanne,” I told her.

  I was eager to speak with people in as many sectors of the camp as possible, but when we came to one of the few medical tents, I had to stop again. I had never seen such a bewildering sight in my entire life.

  The tent was overflowing with sick and dying patients, two and more to a cot. Bodies were jigsaw-puzzled into every available space. To make matters worse, long lines extended outside, at least three hundred very sick women and children waiting for treatment, or for a better place to die.