After the Flare

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  “I am guessing,” Ini said, “this is the bird-eating spider, poor thing. But it made me think that I should search through the code to find out how it was communicating. I found multiple logs with the same address buried in temporary memory. It normally communicates through an onion router, which would have disguised the destination, but I forced it to default to an unencrypted connection. The address leads directly to a particular house in Abuja owned by Senator Willie Kidibe of Cross Rivers State.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “I just sent you more information about him.”

  Bracket scanned through the articles on his G-fone as Ini continued examining the spider—or the code that had been embedded in the spider’s electronics. Willie Kidibe, he learned, was a former militant from the Niger delta who used to sabotage pipelines and kidnap oil executives for ransom. During peace settlements in the region, he and his bandits agreed to lay down their weapons for a hefty settlement from the government. He then used the money and his popularity as a rebel to run for public office, which he had held ever since, first in the House of Representatives and now in the Senate. According to one article, the politician had gained a reputation for being just as corrupt in office as he was as a rebel fighter.

  “Why would a senator be spying on the space program?” Bracket asked.

  “I don’t know. We should assume that he knows a significant amount of information about all of our activities here.”

  He ambled over to a small fish tank, where he saw a lizard with green skin flecked with orange spots resting on a bed of pebbles. The water was cloudy with algae. “Salamander?”

  “Yes,” Ini said, not looking up. “They insulated the electronics against the moisture. It can record an image but it has no wireless capability. You need to physically download it from the salamander through its anus.”

  “Amphibious,” Bracket found himself saying. “That’s impressive.” He was learning to see things from Ini’s point of view, where everything was curious.

  “That’s exactly right,” she agreed. “I think this salamander may have been built by Roland Ibe himself, the inventor of the Geckofone. He won’t return my messages, though. Wait. Here, the spider’s transmitting again. Some figures: 334-TY339.”

  “That’s not a hexadecimal code,” Bracket said. “I know that much.”

  “You’re right. I’ll run a search on it.”

  “Thanks, Ini,” he said, turning to leave. “Let me know if you find anything.”

  “Hold on—I’ve got a hit at the Federal Road Safety Commission. It’s a license plate number. Belongs to…no, it can’t be.”

  “Who?” Bracket said, suddenly interested.

  “Omotola Taiwo.”

  “The actress?”

  “I’m certain of it. It’s her personal car, a Mercedes Benz 500 SL. There’s more. The spider’s transmitting a message. ‘Northeast.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Yeah,” Bracket said. “Omotola Taiwo is Bello’s fiancée. Someone on my crew told me he was spotted leaving the city, and this must mean he’s heading northeast from Abuja. The senator knows exactly where they’re going. We should warn Bello.”

  “His Geckofone has been turned off for some time,” Ini confirmed. “I’ll see if I can reach him another way.”

  “Think we should scramble the spider’s messages, just in case? Send some false information?”

  “No,” Ini said. “We have to let the traffic continue or he’ll know we’re listening and switch to another channel. I’ll let you know if I learn anything more.”

  “Thanks, Ini. I’d better go tell Josephine.” He gave her a polite smile and left.

  Josephine was in the Nest analyzing telemetry data from the test launch when Bracket called. She answered, maybe on purpose, with her Caucasian identity, which narrowed her nose a bit, turned her eyes hazel, and squeezed in her lips. Her voice sounded slightly higher. So this would be their shared secret. It was fine. He knew it must have been difficult for her to admit her love for Kornokova.

  “What do you think we should do, Kwesi?”

  It was the first time she had ever asked him for advice.

  “We need to take the threat seriously. There’s a chance the senator might be preparing to kidnap Bello. Or do him harm. I’ve read his files—it’s in his history. He used to be a thug. I don’t know why he chose Bello, but there’s a real risk.”

  “I’m not trained to deal with someone like that, Kwesi.”

  “Neither am I,” he admitted. “I don’t trust Op-Sec with this either. We’ve got to bring this to the Kano police.”

  “No way. They’re imbeciles.”

  “Detective Idriss might be corrupt, but he’s no imbecile. I’ve double-checked everything at Naijapool, Josephine, and my crew is ready for any situation. The tank is operational and the filters are functioning properly.”

  “I’ve seen your reports,” she said impatiently.

  “What I’m saying is that Bello isn’t the only problem—I think there’s something else that might be threatening the mission, something that could ruin all the work we’ve done here. Whether it’s the Jarumi or someone else, I don’t know. I need to look into it. Let me go talk to the police. I know them—if anyone can help us, they can.”

  He could see Josephine thinking it over, which her Caucasian identity interpreted by making her cheeks blush. He felt he had finally caught her attention. Maybe she was listening to him now because she had bared her scars for him to see. “All right,” she decided, “you’ve got until the rescue launch. That’s forty-eight hours.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll make sure we complete the mission.”

  “We’ll complete the mission.”

  And like a newshound, he couldn’t tell if she had heard him or was merely repeating what he had said.

  CHAPTER 23

  The wind was gusting across the road as Max drove Bracket into downtown Kano, giving a taste of the Harmattan that would sweep across the Sahel in the coming weeks. The roadsides were eerily empty of market sellers and the normally crowded intersections were bare. The residents had closed their shutters, maybe against the wind, but more likely because the Jarumi were coming. Even the cowherds appeared to have moved their cattle away from the city. Bracket found himself peering down every alleyway expecting to see a gun-toting militant storming toward them. Max too was tense and hurtled through intersections without stopping for the signals. They passed through the industrial markets and found all the storefronts barred.

  Detective Idriss had asked Bracket to meet him in a poorer residential area, where the buildings were crammed closely together and the windows striped by iron security grates. An enormous, solitary kapok tree towered over the neighborhood. They stopped at a building where three Mitsubishi police trucks were parked out front with their lights flashing and a crowd had gathered nearby to see what was happening. The officers recognized Bracket this time and waved him into the home past the onlookers, who were craning their necks to peer into the building.

  Bracket stepped into a vestibule a few paces wide to find an officer beaming a flashlight beneath a couch. The cushions had been thrown to the floor.

  “Step straight through, Mr. Bracket!” Idriss shouted from the next room. “We don’t know if it’s booby-trapped.” A corridor branched into two adjoining rooms and a simple kitchen with a sink, gas stove, and breakfast nook. Detective Idriss was directing other officers inside the room on the left. One of them held a sledgehammer, and he brought it down on a machine gun, hitting it until the barrel crumpled.

  Idriss looked up calmly. “Give me a moment.” The detective pointed to another twenty guns lined up along one wall—“These too”—and the officer dutifully began crushing them with his sledgehammer.

  “Mr. Bracket, I appreciate you coming to see us here.”

  “We’re in trouble at the spaceport,” Bracket said. “I need your help.”

  “And I shall provide it. But first
I need your assistance.” He picked up a framed photo that was sealed in a clear Ziploc bag. “Do you recognize this man?”

  The photo showed a white man with a blond ponytail, with his arms around two children—a boy and a girl, maybe about ten and fourteen years old—and a smiling wife. Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch towered over them in the background. It looked like one of those stock photos that you take on a green screen at tourist sites, where they digitally add the monument later.

  “I’ve never seen him before,” Bracket said.

  “He’s American and here illegally, as you might have surmised. Do you recognize anything in the photo that could be useful to us?”

  “That was probably taken in St. Louis,” Bracket guessed, “before the Flare. The elevator to the top of the arch wouldn’t have been working afterward. Unlikely he’s from St. Louis or he wouldn’t have kept the photo, because people tend to take tourist sites for granted when they live near them. The ponytail means he didn’t hold a typical job. Either worked for a small business or held a backroom role of some kind. Maybe a coder.”

  “I’m impressed at your powers of observation. That might help us in our investigation, if we have time for it,” Idriss said. “Let me show you something else, Mr. Bracket.” He beckoned for Bracket to follow him into the adjacent room, which smelled of ozone. There, partitioned behind some mosquito netting, the floor was covered with thousands of writhing bugs. He reflexively itched at his neck, thinking of the zero day spider. In the middle of the room was a large computer server, and next to that was a glass-and-metal box about one meter square.

  “Malfly hatchery,” Idriss explained. “We were tipped off by a neighbor who saw him transporting in reels of polymer. We were very fortunate to find it.”

  Now Bracket peered closer at the ground to see that they weren’t insects at all, but the typical microdrones that hounded electronics, and their tiny wing-blades and servo motors had been fried. Malfly drones preyed on devices that didn’t connect regularly to the Internet, where it was more efficient to transmit malware through wireless spectrum. These would likely be shipped overseas and released to pester Americans desperate for basic goods. He felt his Geckofone rustling in his pocket, alert to the threat.

  “You killed them all,” he observed.

  “Local EMP. They won’t fly again. It’s a minor hatchery that releases at most a thousand malflies a day through that extruder. They’re shoddily made.”

  “You think this was run by the guy in the photo?”

  “Not all of you are lucky enough to work at the spaceport, Mr. Bracket. Anyway he’s not very good at it, judging from the quality of these malflies. He appears to have been warned that we were coming and fled some time ago.”

  Bracket bent closer to pick up a malfly, which hummed lightly at his fingertips as the propeller tried to spin up. He fed it to his Geckofone.

  “It seems like overkill,” Bracket said, thinking it through, “for him to have all those weapons for a small hatchery like this.”

  “I couldn’t agree more, Mr. Bracket. This hatchery can’t be worth more than a thousand cowries a month. Those weapons are meant for the Jarumi.”

  The Jarumi? He had known that Americans—and Europeans too, for that matter—ran illicit businesses in Nigeria. But helping Islamic militants seemed like too much. “You actually think that guy’s a member of Boko Haram?”

  Idriss chuckled. “I doubt he is a member of the Jarumi. This house is full of illicit material: pornography, stimulants, steroids, opioids, and so forth. I suspect he was merely dealing weapons to make money.”

  Bracket tried not to think about what the man might be doing with that money as they made their way back to the room where Idriss’s officers were busy destroying the guns. Sending money to his family? If so, where were they living? Or was the man blowing it all on sex, which he had seen plenty of expatriates do? Bracket had rarely encountered undocumented Americans in Kano, and when he did he usually regretted it. They’d offer him some shady deal or desperately ask him for a job he couldn’t provide, their eyes burning with resentment.

  “Nurudeen Bello has disappeared,” Bracket announced to Idriss.

  The detective lifted an eyebrow as Bracket explained to him what had happened, and how Digital Security had figured out the spider belonged to Senator Kidibe. “So you think he’s been kidnapped, do you?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a possibility.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. Mr. Bello makes a show of his money. In Kano, people think your rockets are made of gold.”

  “By weight, they’re not far off. Nitrogen tetroxide is hard to find in Kano.”

  “And you believe he was traveling this way, do you? That would seem to be a foolhardy thing to do.”

  “He was warned against it.”

  “The pigeon that feeds among the hawks doesn’t fear death. That was poor judgment on his part.”

  “What do you suggest we do, Detective?”

  Idriss leaned over to examine the twisted barrel of a shotgun, pushing his spectacles back up his nose as they slipped. “He could still be a victim of an ordinary car theft. The security systems in Mercedes cars are robust enough that they are difficult to hijack remotely, increasing the chance of a carjacking when the driver is still inside. That way the thieves can force the owner to bypass the security systems so they can repurpose the car and sell it. I can put out an all-points bulletin on the vehicle, but the thieves will have taken it off the road. On the other hand, if Bello has been kidnapped, as you suspect, they’ll be in touch soon enough.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “They would never expect you to send any money without proving to you that Bello was alive. No fool would do that. They’ll contact you if what you say is true. But I wouldn’t speak to Senator Kidibe, not until you have concrete evidence that he’s behind it.”

  Idriss was merely talking through these various strategies as if they were a thought exercise.

  “Can’t you do anything else?” Bracket insisted. “No one’s doing anything at the spaceport. This is what you wanted. It’s in your jurisdiction.”

  “Right now the Jarumi are headed toward Kano. They are well armed and have a certain degree of discipline. We will almost certainly be outgunned. We’re fortunate to have found their weapons first.”

  “They’re coming tonight? They’re already this close?”

  “You still have time, Mr. Bracket. They won’t be here for another three hours at least. I’ll make sure that my officers escort you to the edge of the city. If Bello was driving northeast from Abuja, as you say, he would not have met them that far to the south. But perhaps they’re better organized than we know.”

  Bracket looked at the detective, trying to fathom how he could resign himself to defeat so easily.

  “My job is to serve this city, Mr. Bracket. We will not abandon it. We’ve requested a Super Tucano plane from the air force. There is the chance that some of the younger fighters will be intimidated by it. Even if the Jarumi do come, maybe they’ll learn what it means to help people instead of enslave women, murder their neighbors, and make their own children ignorant. They’ll see there is another way.”

  Bracket recalled the young man whom the detective had been torturing when he had visited the police station, the screams of pain and anguish they had inflicted on the boy with the Coca-Cola.

  That way? That way won’t teach the Jarumi anything.

  “The other day I came by,” Bracket said, “you told me that you’d heard of albino sightings. Did you see the video of the killing on Naijaweb?”

  “We examined it, Mr. Bracket, and it’s a hoax.”

  “You think the video was doctored?”

  “It wasn’t doctored. That albino was actually killed. But it happened over two months ago in the city of Yola. Two of the vigilantes already confessed to the killing.”

  “But what about the other videos?” Bracket said. “The ones of the blue light shooting into the dis
tance.”

  “No one can explain those films,” Idriss acknowledged. “I suspect they’ve been faked too, but we haven’t been able to properly analyze them. They should never have been grouped together with the albino video. It shows you can never trust what you find on Naijaweb. Now, if you please, Mr. Bracket, we’ve got work to do.”

  Bracket was trying to make sense of what the detective had said. If the albino video wasn’t connected, then what was the blue light in those videos? The albino was supposed to be a magician, which went against Bracket’s own beliefs, but he had forced himself to consider it as a real possibility. Now that the albino video was a hoax, then what was that blue light? Was it the creature of the Nok, as he and Seeta had suspected? If so, he realized with a shudder, the creature might still be alive.

  Bracket exited the building into a darkening sky heavy with dust. Far up in the air, he could see a small reconnaissance drone hovering. It rose and fell in the tufts of wind as it soared.

  “Let’s get out of here, Max.”

  “What’s wrong, oyibo?”

  “Jarumi.”

  He felt a loud explosion in his chest. Glass shattered as he ducked beneath the dashboard and hopped into the pickup truck. The crowd scattered away, shrieking.

  “It came from above!” Max shouted.

  Bracket looked up to find that the corner of the home he’d just left had been torn off and the shingles had caught fire. Now he saw the drone was carrying something by small hooks as it rose again above the building. It dropped it down onto the roof. Shards of shingles exploded outward.

  Down the street, Bracket saw two children who hadn’t fled. They couldn’t have been more than ten years old.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Get out of here!”

  The two children began walking toward the truck as if they hadn’t heard him.

  “Hey!” Max joined in, switching to Pidgin. “Get out of here! It’s not safe!”

  But they continued walking along, ignoring him.

  “What’s wrong with them?” Bracket asked.

  Bracket recognized the red armbands just as the boys turned to face them. The boys were holding pistols.