Lords of Corruption

by Kyle Mills

  He shook his head. "It's complicated. My family's not like yours, Annika. We're . . ." He fell silent. How could he explain to her something that he himself didn't completely understand?

  "You've told me how strong and smart Laura is. And you'll be home soon. She can take care of herself, right?"

  "I don't know," he said honestly. "She's only seventeen. And I left her. I left her when I went to prison, then I left her when I went to school. And now, for the thousandth time, I'm not there when she needs me."

  "You came here for her, Josh. NewAfrica was going to send her to university, to give her medical insurance. They were going to pay you enough money to take care of her."

  "But it didn't work out that way, did it?"

  "Sometimes things don't. But you did everything you could. That's important."

  When he didn't respond, she leaned forward and pressed her lips against his. He knew he should push her away, but instead he slid a hand along her bare thigh.

  Just for a little while. He could forget about NewAfrica and Ernie Bruce. About his past and JB Flannary. For a few minutes he could pretend to have something good in his life.

  Chapter 28.

  "Look at that," Annika said, pointing down at the rutted path they were walking along.

  It had been ten hours since they'd left the guesthouse, most of which had been spent lost, hammering the Land Cruiser over increasingly remote dirt roads. But now there was finally evidence that they were on the right track.

  The afternoon rains had left the story of the people they were trying to find etched unmistakably in the ground. Deep furrows made by the tires of overloaded trucks had been first, followed by indentations made by people jumping out of those trucks, and now the unmistakable pattern of a tractor tread crossing the carpet of footprints extending into the distance.

  Josh knelt and ran a hand over the impressions in the damp earth, allowing himself a rare flash of optimism. They were going to find a well-equipped agricultural project run by someone capable of helping the people he'd so badly let down.

  "I think we're finally gonna be able to prove that JB's nuts," he said, looking up at Annika. "Too much drinking in the sun."

  The uncertainty behind her smile was obvious, but he chose to ignore it.

  "Come on," she said holding out a hand and helping him to his feet. "We could have a long way to go."

  He'd never been particularly claustrophobic, but the way the jungle encroached on the narrow track and spread itself out above created a world of impenetrable shadows, unfamiliar sounds, and suffocating humidity that was starting to get to him.

  The Land Cruiser had made it a few miles past where the trucks had gotten bogged down, but they'd had to abandon it when the rock ledges became too steep to negotiate.

  "You look better," Annika observed.

  It was the first time that day either one of them had said anything even remotely personal. For the most part, their trip had consisted of long silences punctuated by brief comments about the map Annika had printed showing the location of Josh's sat phone and, presumably, the old woman whose bag he'd hidden it in.

  Neither one of them seemed to know how to deal with what had happened the night before. It was amazing how sex could change things. But kind of wonderful, too.

  "I feel better," Josh responded. "You know, when you think about it, there isn't a single thing that's happened that can't be explained by Africa's normal state of insanity: the abandoned project we went to, the way they carted my people off. Even Gideon getting those soldiers to chase me. And Laura? What you said is exactly right. She's smart, and she's strong. She can handle Ernie and Fawn until I get home. It's only a little while longer. Everything's going to be okay. It's going to work out."

  His newly improved attitude sounded a little forced, even to him. But why couldn't it all work out? Why couldn't things go his way for once? The way he saw it, he had a little good luck coming.

  "If you're so certain, maybe there's no reason for us to be here, Josh."

  He looked at her, unsure how to interpret the statement. The construction seemed vaguely sarcastic, but the delivery wasn't. The closer they got to finding what they'd been looking for, the more nervous she became. In fact, she was starting to look a little ill.

  "Are you okay?" he said, putting a hand on the back of her neck and squeezing gently.

  "Sure. Of course I am. It's just the heat." An obvious lie, but not one he wanted to think about.

  "I just need to be sure that my people are doing okay, Annika. That NewAfrica's just self serving and not --" He paused for a moment, trying to find the right word, but she beat him to it.

  "Evil?"

  "Yeah, I guess."

  "And then you can leave here with a clear conscience and never think anything about it again."

  He wasn't sure what to say. It seemed ridiculous to be feeling about her the way he was -- they hardly knew each other. Why had he spent most of the day fantasizing about a life together? A life lived all over the world, full of adventure, with never a moment behind a desk or worrying about keeping up with the Joneses.

  "I'm sorry," Josh said finally. "If you --" "I understand. You have a lot of responsibilities. And there are many things beyond your control. It's a hard thing for us." "Us?"

  "Whites. We think we have power over everything, and when we don't, we think it's a failure. But sometimes it doesn't have anything to do with us."

  Her words were oddly off subject and had the vague sound of a warning. He told himself it was just his imagination.

  The path they were on began to widen, finally opening into a large clearing hacked from the jungle. The dirt had been churned up, and there were downed trees pushed into piles at the edges. At its center was a single shovel, standing upright.

  He tried to continue forward, but Annika grabbed his arm.

  "There's nothing here, Josh. Let's go."

  He looked behind him at the thousands of footprints pressed into the ground and shrugged her off, walking to the shovel and taking hold of it. She followed but stopped a good ten feet away when he began to dig.

  It took less than a minute for him to strike something. Not rock or wood. He dropped to his knees, digging with his hands, feeling increasingly nauseated. The first thing he uncovered was a dirty piece of cloth. He recognized the pattern and dug faster, throwing the debris behind him and revealing the motionless form beneath.

  He rose and took a few stumbling steps back. It was the old woman he'd helped in the refugee camp. But now her open eyes and mouth were filled with dirt, as was the deep gash across her throat.

  He looked around him at the churned dirt covering an area half the size of the football field where he'd spent much of his youth.

  "Josh," Annika said. Her voice was steady, but the sun was reflecting off the tears on her cheeks. She approached and reached out to him, but he backed away.

  "You knew," he said. "You knew what we were going to find here."

  "I wasn't sure. I --"

  "Why didn't you say anything?"

  "Like what?"

  Josh had never been prone to panic, but now he could feel it creeping up on him. This wasn't a misunderstanding or an accident. He was standing over the rotting bodies of a hundred people who a few nights before had been living, breathing human beings. He looked into the dirt-covered eyes of the old woman and imagined that the rest were staring up at him, too. Blaming him. Thirsting for revenge.

  "Everything JB said was right," he stammered. "It's all bullshit. Stephen Trent, NewAfrica. They've never built anything or fed anyone. They're helping Mtiti get rid of the other tribes and keeping his image polished for the rest of the world. Why? Why would they do this?"

  "For money," Annika said. "You look at the poverty here and you think there is no money. But that's not true. It's everywhere."

  Money. For some reason the word cleared the fog from Josh's head. Everything he'd seen since he'd arrived in Africa was so complicated, it had never occurred t
o him that the answer to any question here could be as simple as that.

  It all made perfect sense. Dan had found out what was going on and started to investigate, so they'd gotten rid of him. But he had to be replaced, preferably by a very different kind of employee. Someone desperate, someone who didn't care one way or another about charity or Africa or breaking a law or two.

  He looked down again at the old woman. The handmade wooden jewelry she'd been wearing when he'd helped her was gone --stolen by the people who had killed her. Why would they leave a perfectly good shovel? And not only leave it but leave it right above that particular woman's grave? He dropped to his knees again and began pawing through the dirt. It took less than a minute to turn up his sat phone, no longer in her bag but buried beneath one of her stiff arms.

  Gideon stood in the shadow of the jungle watching the scene playing out in front of him: Josh Hagarty using the shovel to uncover the old hag, his shock, his weakness. And even more intently, he watched the woman. Annika Gritdal, his informants told him. She was a missionary working in a remote village to the north -- one Josh had visited a number of times. By all reports, her language skills were excellent, and it seemed almost certain that she was the one who had translated the threat to Tfmena.

  By European standards, she was quite beautiful. And here she was quite exotic. He knew people who would pay handsomely for a woman with pale skin and blond hair, though it was impossible. Trent would find out, and what he knew Mtiti knew. The president would tolerate nothing that could generate negative press in the West, and Gideon knew he was already on the verge of falling out of favor with his brother-in-law -- something that had proven fatal to many before him.

  But now he had turned things back to his advantage.

  His people had found the phone when they were divvying up the belongings of these Yvimbo dogs and brought it to him. His initial reaction had been to bury it far to the south, leading Hagarty deep into dangerous rebel country. But then he'd changed his mind. This arrogant American had caused him to shut down his store and with it much of his livelihood. Gideon had found himself belittled in the eyes of Mtiti and his position with NewAfrica threatened.

  So he'd left the phone and the shovel. And he'd waited.

  Now there could be no dissent from Stephen Trent. Hagarty and his woman knew too much and would have to die. But not quickly. No, this was something Gideon had looked forward to for some time. They would suffer greatly first. They'd beg for death.

  He pulled a pistol from his waistband and crept through the foliage, watching Hagarty dig through the dirt around the old woman's body. There was more than fifty meters between them, and before he showed himself, Gideon needed to be in a position to cut off their escape. He was in no mood for a chase.

  Hagarty found the phone and immediately began pushing buttons on it, though instead of putting it to his ear, he let it hang loosely from his hand while he scanned the edges of the clearing. A moment later, the phone in Gideon's pocket started to ring, cutting through the still air and causing the birds in the trees above him to take flight.

  By the time he managed to turn it off, Hagarty and his woman were sprinting back the way they had come.

  Chapter 29.

  JB Flannary stood huddled against the apartment building, using the stairs to block the wind but still shivering in his borrowed coat. It was one of the things he hated most about America -- the crushing cold and darkness that closed in so quickly in the winter.

  The NewAfrica plaque on the building across the street flashed in the headlights of passing cars, and Flannary tried without success to catch a glimpse of what was beyond the darkened windows. No one had gone in or out in the fifteen minutes he'd been standing there, but that wasn't surprising. Charities -- even twisted, evil ones --tended to be nine-to-five affairs.

  "Sorry I'm late!"

  For some reason the piercing cheerfulness of Tracy Collins's voice had an ability to startle him that the sound of machine-gun fire had lost. He looked into her smiling face as she approached, a backpack slung over her wool-clad shoulder.

  "Do you have everything?"

  "Of course, JB! Absolutely."

  He tried to work up a little cynicism -- or at least a little skepticism -- but it felt artificial. Over the last two days Tracy had demonstrated that youth and stupidity didn't always go hand in hand. While he'd been drinking himself into oblivion at his brother's increasingly inane prewedding festivities, she'd been channeling Woodward, Bernstein, and Steve Jobs in roughly equal amounts.

  Tracy pushed past him and buzzed one of the apartments, bouncing slightly on her heels. Whether it was from the cold or excitement, he wasn't certain.

  "So what made you want to be a reporter, JB?"

  "Huh?"

  "For me, it was seeing so much injustice that wasn't reported on, you know? The media's gotten so lazy. Not like your generation."

  A voice from the speaker saved him from having to answer.

  "Yes?"

  "Hi, it's Tracy Collins. We talked earlier?" The lock buzzed, and Flannary followed his young assistant as she headed for the stairs.

  "I know it sounds naive, JB, but I still believe the press can make a difference in people's lives. We've just gotten off track. Instead of challenging people, now we just reinforce their beliefs, you know? But I think that's going to change."

  "Really?"

  His hangover seemed to be getting worse, but that was biologically impossible, so it had to be his proximity to this untainted ball of positive energy. Hopefully they'd do what they needed to do fast enough for him to get a little hair of the dog on the way back to his hotel.

  Tracy's knock on the third-floor door was immediately answered by a woman in her midfifties.

  "Hi, I'm Tracy, and this is my boss, JB Flannary. JB, this is Ms. Jones."

  "Nice to meet you," he said, shaking her hand and examining her vaguely nervous expression with suspicion. He didn't trust people named Jones. Sounded too much like an alias.

  "So this is it, here?" Tracy said, pointing to a dark window.

  "Yes," the woman answered. "The fire escape is just outside. You said a hundred dollars a day, right?"

  "Yup. That's right."

  Flannary's jaw tightened, but Tracy was already pushing the window open and slipping through.

  "So, Paris Hilton, huh?" the woman said.

  "Crazy, isn't it?" Flannary responded, slipping a leg over the sill and feeling the cold outside air blow up his leg.

  Through Internet wizardry he didn't fully understand, Tracy had found the phone numbers and basic background on all the people with apartments facing the New-Africa building. After selecting Ms. Jones as the best candidate, she'd called and offered to pay her to let them put a camera on her fire escape. The cover story was that Paris Hilton was sleeping with someone who worked across the street.

  "This thing's super-cutting-edge," Tracy said as Flannary pulled himself out onto the fire escape. "It's got great optics, a huge zoom, and amazing resolution, and it automatically adjusts to ambient light. It even works in the dark. No one will be able to walk in or out of that building without us getting every detail."

  He nodded and wrapped his arms around himself, noticing for the first time that she was dressed entirely in black. An amiable, chubby cat burglar.

  The more they looked into NewAfrica, the stranger things became. The board members seemed to be generally on the upand-up -- mostly wealthy New York women of leisure who were involved in various charities around town. They didn't seem involved on a day-to-day basis, though, and as near as they could tell, none had ever been to Africa. Employees were similarly mundane and also rarely left the United States. Pure bureaucrats well-versed in the theory of aid, if not its unfortunate details.

  Stephen Trent, though, broke that mold. A cursory glance at his background suggested he came from the world of real estate development and venture capital. A little digging, though, turned up the fact that it had been mostly fraudulent real esta
te development and venture capital. He'd managed to stay out of jail, but that seemed to be more the result of fancy legal footwork than innocence. The bottom line was that a lot of people had lost a lot of money on his scams, and someone had gone to great lengths to bury that information.

  Another intriguing fact was that Trent had no history of charitable work or world travel. The idea that some Midwestern con artist would be able to suddenly ally himself with Umboto Mtiti and insinuate himself into the politics of Africa seemed far-fetched to the extreme. Flannary had met him on no less than three occasions and he was clearly a lightweight. Slick? For sure. But not a man with the knowledge or resolve that it would take to get an operation like NewAfrica off the ground.

  Flannary's gut told him someone else was pulling the strings. And that had inspired Tracy to come up with the camera idea.

  "So we just come and pick up the tape in a couple of days?" Flannary asked, trying not to think about how much all these fancy optics were costing him.

  She looked back and cocked her head. "What do you mean?"

  "To watch it."

  "Oh, right. Then we can put some ABBA on my eight-track and watch it on my blackand-white TV." A bemused grin spread across her face. "We're going to link to Ms. Jones's wireless, and then we can connect to it over the Web, JB. It'll download into files that we can fast-forward, rewind, enhance, or whatever. It'll all be right at our fingertips -- archived and date-stamped."

  One last turn of her screwdriver, and the camera was mounted. She grabbed her bag and ducked back through the window.

  "Come on, we'll pull this thing up on my laptop and see what we've got."

  "I'll be in in a second," Flannary said. "You sure? Kinda cold out here."

  He nodded and slid the window shut after her.

  He'd been trying to contact Josh for the last two days, and the best he'd gotten was a prompt to leave a message. Every time he couldn't get through, the knot in his stomach tightened more. Had something happened to the kid? Or worse, maybe his reporter's insight into people had misfired and Josh wasn't as innocent as he seemed. If that was the case, what had happened to Annika?