The Night Ranger jw-7

by Alex Berenson

  And finally found a tiny Samsung handset zippered into an inside compartment just above the waistband. No number taped to the back. Wells booted it up, but it demanded a four-digit password. Wells tried 1-1-1-1. No good. Hopefully, Moss would have some ideas. Wells pocketed the phone, turned Thompson on his side so that if he threw up he wouldn’t choke on his vomit.

  “Watch him,” Wells told Wilfred. “Call me if he wakes up.”

  “And if he stops breathing?”

  “Call me then, too.”

  Back in Moss’s office, Wells booted up Thompson’s laptop. It was password-protected and the obvious choices failed. The NSA could break it, but Wells couldn’t. He switched on the phone. It demanded a combination, four digits. Wells tried 1-2-3-4, then 4-3-2-1. No good.

  “What’s his social?”

  “His what?”

  “The last four digits of his Social Security number.”

  “How would I know?”

  “It’s got to be on a record somewhere,” Wells said. She reached for her laptop, but he put a hand on her shoulder. “Forget it. Let’s try his birthday first. Egomaniacs love to use their birthdays for passwords.”

  “That’s March 19, I think.” Moss flipped through an old-fashioned planner. “Yes.”

  Wells keyed in 0-3-1-9 and the phone unlocked. He scrolled through the menus until he found the phone’s number. It was almost the same as the number Thompson gave Wells, but two digits were transposed. If Wells asked, Thompson could say he’d made a legitimate mistake.

  The call registry showed that Thompson had used the phone sparingly, making just a handful of calls to three numbers in the last week, all with Kenyan prefixes. Most calls ran less than two minutes. In the hours after Wells demanded that Thompson come back to Dadaab, Thompson made several late-night calls, none of which were answered.

  “Recognize these? Suggs, anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s call them.”

  Moss reached for her phone.

  “Use Skype so they can’t trace the call,” Wells said.

  Moss pulled up Skype on her laptop. Her first call went to a voice mail without a greeting. So did the second. The third rang three times before it went to voice mail. A man offered a greeting in Swahili and then said in English, “Joka-joka-joka call back-back-back.”

  “Is Joka-joka-joka Kenyan slang?”

  “Not that I know of. What he says in the Swahili part of the greeting is standard, leave a message and I’ll call back.”

  “Is that Suggs?”

  “Not sure. Let me hear it again.” She redialed. This time the call went straight to voice mail. “I’m about ninety-five percent sure it’s not Suggs.” She redialed one more time. This time a man answered. He said something, laughed, hung up.

  “What’d he say?” Wells said.

  “I don’t know. He was speaking Somali. Not Swahili.”

  “But the voice mail message was Swahili?”

  “Yes.”

  “So either the greeting is intentionally misleading or the phone has been taken by someone who speaks Somali.”

  “Correct.”

  Wells tried to come up with a happy explanation for that particular fact pattern. He couldn’t. He called Shafer. “I got Thompson’s third phone.”

  “Want to tell me how?”

  “I roofied him and took it.”

  “You what-ted him?”

  “You heard me. I gave him a cup of coffee with some special sweetener.”

  “This is why I love you, John. You’re insane. You’re telling me you drugged James Thompson so you could steal his phone.”

  “We both know I’ve done worse.”

  “He’s going to want your head when he wakes up.”

  “That’s why I’d like you to run the number, Ellis. And three more. All Kenyan country codes, but they’re either in Kenya or Somalia.”

  “It’s almost midnight here, John. But I’ll try. Give them to me.”

  Wells did. “Names would be nice, but what I really need is an approximate location for the receiving handsets. Anything new on your end?”

  “The level of interest here is extreme.”

  “Because of the press conference.”

  “Because they’re oh so pretty. Because of the wall-to-wall coverage on every network. This thing’s picking up speed. We could wind up invading Somalia.”

  “Hard to imagine.”

  “Not really. The Kenyans want it. They think we can solve their problem with Shabaab once and for all. Then they’ll say Somalia’s been pacified, close the camps, send the refugees home. They’re talking to the White House.”

  Now Wells understood why the Kenyan police weren’t trying to find the volunteers. “But Duto—”

  “Would rather you find them yourself. Even better, tell me where they are so he can send in a SOG team, play the hero. A nice liftoff for his campaign. He’s watching. You want help from us or Fort Meade, I can’t hide it from him.”

  “Including these phone numbers I just passed along.”

  “If it turns out some Somali gang has your friends, you might be glad for the help.”

  “Doubtful.”

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I hear.” Shafer hung up.

  —

  “The United States government can track those phones?” Moss said. “Even if they were inside Kenya the whole time?”

  “In a country like this, one where we more or less don’t care about the diplomatic consequences if we get caught, we have tracking software on every mobile network. Manufacturers install it or we sneak it in later. Don’t ask me how it works, because I don’t know. But it does work. I can tell you firsthand. Hopefully, they’ll have something for us before Sleeping Beauty wakes up.”

  “But if Jimmy and Suggs faked this kidnapping, why did Jimmy make such a fuss that first day when the reporter from Houston said she was going to write? Wouldn’t he have wanted the media to know?”

  “I think he did. He knew she was going to write something even if he told her not to. He figures he holds a press conference, raises a few million bucks, and then in a couple weeks gives everyone the good news. The hostages escaped. Or WorldCares paid the ransom. Or, best of all, the kidnappers heard his appeal to their humanity and let these poor aid workers go. The publicity will be huge. He’ll sell a million copies of his book. The hostages will probably all get paid too, books and movies and who knows what else. Best part is that once the volunteers get home, it’s not like the Kenyan police will keep looking for the kidnappers. Everyone will be happy to drop it. Like you said yesterday, there’s not even an insurance company to care.”

  “But he didn’t understand how big this would get, and how soon,” Moss said.

  “I think that’s right. He figured he could control it, but now it’s running away from him. Maybe that’s why a Somali answered that phone call we just made. Maybe Suggs decided he wants more money, so he’s moving the hostages someplace where Thompson can’t get them so easily. Like Somalia.”

  Moss looked unconvinced. “Suggs is Kenyan, and Kenyans prefer this side of the border. So are you going to hit Jimmy with this theory that has absolutely no factual support?”

  “Not just yet. For now I’m leaving your boss to you. I decided after you told me to forget the camps that I should see the kidnapping site for myself. Meantime, NSA will run the numbers. With any luck between us we’ll come up with enough to put some heat on James by the time he wakes up.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it. Meantime, I do have one more favor.”

  “You never quit, do you?”

  “I don’t think Martin’s car can handle these roads. Can I borrow a Land Cruiser, preferably one without WorldCares’s name on the side? No offense.”

  “None taken. I might have another present for you, too—” Moss led Wells to a closet beside Thompson’s office. Inside, a padlocked case held a Glock .40-caliber pistol and a 12
-gauge Mossberg shotgun with a matte blue barrel, a mean-looking weapon. Boxes of ammunition were heaped on the floor.

  “Aid workers aren’t supposed to need guns. But Jimmy wanted them.”

  “Sure you don’t mind giving them up?”

  “I never liked them.”

  Wells didn’t like shotguns much either. They were overkill up close, useless at a distance. They were heavy, clumsy, and hard to hide. But for sheer intimidation, they couldn’t be matched. A Mossberg could stop a riot. Wells pulled it from the case, checked to be sure it wasn’t loaded, then put his nose to the barrel. It smelled of oil, not powder. It had been fired only a few times. The Glock was similarly new. Anne would be pleased. Wells tucked the pistol into his waistband and reached for the ammunition boxes.

  —

  Thirty minutes later, the WorldCares gates swung open. Wilfred was driving, Wells beside him. Wells had insisted Martin stay and watch Thompson. An excuse. Martin had a wife and three kids. Wells didn’t want to subject him to the risks they were about to take.

  The camp stretched for miles, with only an occasional acacia tree to break the monotony. Women wearing long black abbayas clustered around a pumping station, pails in hand. A group of kids waved. But after the Land Cruiser passed, one grabbed a clump of dirt and flung it at the SUV. It hit the rear window, leaving a red-brown smear.

  A GSU checkpoint marked the intersection of the camp track and the road that connected Dadaab with Ijara District. “To Dadaab?” an officer said.

  “No. South.” Following the path of Suggs and the volunteers.

  “I don’t advise anyone to go that way. The situation is unstable.”

  “Then we’ll fit in fine.”

  —

  Even with the Cruiser’s four-wheel drive and big tires, Wilfred rarely got out of second gear. The land seemed set on rewind, endless miles of scrub and red dirt. Twice they passed flocks of sheep and goats watched over by armed herders. About an hour out of Dadaab, Wilfred made his way around a caravan of five camels, the tall humped beasts loaded with sacks of grain and charcoal.

  After ninety bone-jarring minutes, the Cruiser reached Bakafi. Wells’s map showed it as the only village of any size on the road. Though size was relative. A handful of stores sold food and charcoal. A green-domed mosque marked the middle of town, followed by a police outpost and a school whose red paint had faded to a weak pink in the sun. Barefoot kids shouted as they passed.

  Near the south end of town, a sign in English and Arabic marked a plain white building as “King Fahad Muslim Infirmary. Gift from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Even in this flyspeck town, the Saudis spread charity and Islamist teachings. A hundred meters farther down, a tall concrete building stood alone. Four men stood outside, smoking. The place was painted a striking canary yellow. A torn plastic banner hanging from the roof proclaimed: “Broadway Hoteli/Best in the District/Live Premier League Football/Tusker TOO!”

  “A hotel? Here?”

  Wilfred pulled over. “‘Hoteli’ is our word for a restaurant. Serves fried potatoes, mutton, all those things. A whole meal one hundred fifty, two hundred shillings. Usually it’s okay, but when they use the grease too long—” He rubbed his stomach.

  “And this one serves beer? In a Muslim town?”

  “Bakafi must not be all Muslim. Kenyan and Somali, Christian and Muslim. So the alcohol is okay.”

  The place was the Kenyan equivalent of a Montana roadhouse, Wells thought, a way to keep drinking and trouble outside the middle of town, but close enough for the police to step in if a fight got out of control. Past the hoteli Wells saw a man on a motorbike. He fit the Somali stereotype, small head, coffee-colored skin. He held a cell phone at arm’s length, like he was taking a picture with it. A picture of the Toyota, maybe. The motorcycle between his legs was a dirt bike, stubby tires and thick shocks. As they moved closer, the guy tucked away the phone, kicked the bike into gear, rode south.

  Wells wondered if he should have Wilfred follow. But if they got close, the guy could go off road, find a patch of soft ground that would trap the SUV. Plus Wells couldn’t imagine that the volunteers were being kept in a town where the Kenyan cops had a presence. No. If they were still in Kenya, they’d be at Dadaab, or in a cluster of huts that wasn’t on a map. Probably close to the Somali border. If the police had cared, they could have made the same calculation, hit every settlement within fifty miles of the border. But either they truly believed Shabaab was behind the kidnapping, or they had received instructions from Nairobi not to look.

  “Let’s find where they were taken,” Wells said.

  Wilfred lowered his window, shouted to the men across the street. One walked over and had what seemed like an endless conversation with Wilfred before finally wandering back to his buddies.

  “It’s around twenty kilometers south,” Wilfred said. “The road takes a turn. A few kilometers before the intersection.”

  “That’s all he said.”

  “These men, it takes them an hour to answer a question. Country people. Not like Nairobi.”

  Wells understood. He’d grown up in the seventies in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, a little town called Hamilton, south of Missoula. Back then the houses on the edge of town still had shared phones—party lines, they were called. The ranchers could make a conversation about the weather last an hour. Why not? The cattle weren’t going anywhere.

  —

  South of Bakafi the land turned hilly, a blanket on an unmade bed. The road faded until it was little more than potholes in the scrub, and Wells’s legs ached as the Cruiser thumped along. They drove about forty minutes before the road came over a hill and swung hard left. Wilfred stopped and pointed at a mess of cigarettes and water bottles in the road ahead.

  The kidnappers had chosen wisely. Wells figured they’d blocked the road with one or two of their own SUVs. A driver coming over the hill would have only seconds of warning. If he tried to swerve past the roadblock, he would risk getting stuck in the hill’s soft dirt or flipping over. But once he stopped, he’d be trapped. Gunmen would have positioned themselves behind the WorldCares SUV, pinning it down.

  Wilfred eased past the kidnapping site, stopping a hundred feet away. Wells tucked the Glock into his waistband and walked back under the hammering noontime sun. On all sides, the land was surpassingly quiet. No railroad tracks or cell towers. To the west and southwest, he saw scattered huts, but nothing that qualified as a village, much less a town. East, toward Somalia, the land appeared entirely empty. Southeast, maybe five miles away, Wells saw a few black smudges coasting through the sky. Smoke, maybe. He checked through his binoculars. He couldn’t be sure, but they looked like birds. Big ones. A bunch of them, widely spaced, but all moving southeast.

  Rich tourists came to Africa under the illusion they would see the untouched world. But mostly they stuck to national parks or private game reserves as closely managed as zoos. They should have come here instead. Wells squatted down, pored over the road, the land around it. But the police had destroyed whatever evidence the kidnappers might have left. The soft red dirt held at least a half-dozen different tire tracks, dozens of footprints. Maybe the guys from CSI could tell the tracks left by the kidnappers from those left by the cops. Wells couldn’t. Pretending otherwise would only waste time.

  Still, this trip strengthened his certainty that Suggs was involved. First, the kidnappers must have known the route the volunteers were taking. Why else wait here, on a road used by only a few vehicles a day? On the flip side, Wells couldn’t imagine why the volunteers would have chosen this route unless Suggs had suggested it. The road barely appeared on the map, and it was terribly slow. They’d covered a little more than 150 kilometers—not even 100 miles—in three hours. Going to Garissa and then south on the gravel road to the coast would surely have been faster, even with roadblocks.

  “What do you think?” Wilfred said.

  “I think Kenyan cops smoke a lot. Any of these brands unusual? Somali?”


  “No, all Kenyan.”

  Then Wells realized what he hadn’t seen. No spent rounds, no brass casings. No evidence of a firefight. He double-checked to be sure. Yes. Another sign that the kidnapping had gone off without a hitch. He took one last look around, walked back toward the Cruiser.

  “That’s it?” Wilfred said. “We came all this way for that?”

  “Sometimes you have to see a place with your own eyes.”

  “Now we go back to Bakafi, see if anyone talks?”

  “No. South.” Wells felt strongly that the kidnappers had gone away from Dadaab. If they had planned to hide in the camps, they would have taken the volunteers much closer to Dadaab.

  “And you think these people around here want to talk to you?”

  “Never know unless you ask.”

  “I can tell you they aren’t much interested in talking to outsiders. Maybe you tell them you’re an Arab and you want to buy the girls for slaves. Like a vulture coming in after the kill.”

  Like a vulture . . .

  Wells raised his binoculars and looked at the black smudges on the horizon. They were still heading southeast. They’d shrunk to specks now. But even as he watched, another entered his field of view. This one was closer, close enough for him to see its wings, big and black and jagged, like they’d been sewn on the cheap and could unravel easy as tugging a string. The bird rode a thermal, rising hundreds of feet in seconds, then flicked its wings and circled southeast, same as the others.

  “That way.” Wells pointed toward the vulture.

  —

  The track south ended a half hour later at a T-junction with another, equally unimpressive road. Twenty or so huts lay a kilometer west. Wilfred turned left, east. Toward Somalia, which was no more than thirty barren kilometers away. Wells racked the slide on the Glock, making sure it was loaded. The pistol felt strange in his hand, heavier and bigger than the Makarov he had carried for so many years. But Anne was right. He should have retired the Mak long ago. Now he had an excuse, a new pistol that fate, in the form of a plug-ugly Irishwoman, had pressed on him.