Lords of Corruption

by Kyle Mills

  "Did you know, Aleksei, that JB Flannary has a brother?" Mtiti said, rising from his chair. "And that his brother is a reporter for the New York Times?"

  "I don't understand, Excellency. I -"

  Someone behind grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head back, forcing him to meet Mtiti's stare.

  "Answer my question, Aleksei. Did you know this?"

  "No, I "

  "No?" Mtiti said, his anger building in a way that was well-known in the country. "Why would you not know, Aleksei? You killed Flannary, didn't you? And you killed his assistant and the man he worked for. Is that not correct?" He was shouting now, the sweat on his face glistening in the sunlight streaming through the windows. "Why would you not know his brother was a reporter? Why wouldn't your people be watching him?"

  Fedorov tried to answer, but the words became trapped in his throat. He was completely alone here. Even the police and court system that he so despised weren't here to keep the situation from flying out of control. There was no law other than Mtiti.

  "I don't understand," he finally managed to get out. "Excellency, I have --"

  "Well, then, let me help you understand," Mtiti said, throwing a thin stack of paper on the floor in front of Fedorov.

  The grip on his hair eased, allowing him to examine the poorly copied newspaper article. It was from that morning's Times. The headline was "U. S. Charity Connected to Organized Crime."

  He shuffled through the pages, feeling the grip of panic tighten on his chest. It was all there. Pictures of both him and Mtiti, quotes from Josh Hagarty, including the exact location of the mass grave he'd found, background on Stephen Trent's criminal past, a list of bogus projects. Even estimates of the money siphoned from American taxpayers through USAID.

  "He smuggled the documents out of the country!" Mtiti said. "He sent them to the media!"

  "No. He wouldn't. . . . We have his sister." "Keep reading, Aleksei."

  He went to the next page, which implicated Fedorov in the deaths of JB Flannary and his colleagues as well as the disappearance of a Kentucky woman named Fawn Mardsen.

  "You don't have his sister, Aleksei. Your people took the daughter of a man his mother divorced years ago. You have the wrong woman!"

  "No," Fedorov stammered. "I . . . She was

  "I've already had calls this morning from the U. S. government and the United Nations," Mtiti said. "I have power shut down everywhere, but this article is still getting in. By tomorrow everyone in my country will know about it. The mining companies won't take my calls, and I have reports that they're starting to evacuate their people, Aleksei!"

  "No," Fedorov said. "We can fix this. We can."

  Mtiti pointed, and an arm slid around Fedorov's neck again. He was dragged to his feet and led outside with Mtiti close behind.

  "I understand that you've been inquiring about one of our methods of execution," Mtiti said, walking to the center of the courtyard as soldiers hurried to get out of his way. "I'm glad you're interested in learning about us and our culture."

  When Fedorov saw the tire lying in the dust, he began to fight, but the arm around his neck constricted, cutting off the blood flow to his brain. He had nearly lost consciousness by the time the man behind him released his neck and pinned his arms to his sides.

  The two soldiers lifting the tire in front of him gave him a burst of energy, but it wasn't the first time they'd done this, and they anticipated his every move. A moment later the tire was over his head and shoved down tightly over his arms. He desperately gulped the rubber-and-gasoline-scented air, managing to clear his mind and regain enough strength to pull free of the man holding him.

  He only made it a few feet before he fell, the weight of the tire throwing off his already impaired balance. The courtyard had gone silent, and everyone stopped to watch as he rolled back and forth, struggling to free himself.

  "You can't do this!" he shouted. "We've worked together for years! I've made you millions of dollars!"

  A soldier grabbed the tire and used it to pull him back to his feet as Mtiti retrieved a gold lighter from his pocket.

  "Excellency, I can fix this. I swear I can. Don't do this. I'm begging you --"

  "And just how would you fix this, Aleksei? How would you stop the investigations of the Americans and Europeans? How would you get back the support I need to keep the Yvimbo from rising up against me? How would you convince the mining companies to keep operating?"

  "We just need to talk. You need to give me a little time."

  Machine-gun fire erupted somewhere beyond the wall. It was getting closer.

  "But there is no more time, Aleksei." Mtiti flicked a thumb against the lighter, and a flame sprang to life.

  The soldier holding the tire suddenly released it, and Fedorov ran, careful to maintain his balance this time. He'd made it only ten feet before he realized he hadn't been fast enough. The ring of flame rose up around his head, blinding him and drowning out the sound of cheering. He screamed when his hair caught fire, the smell of it mingling with the black smoke blinding him and burning his lungs. He closed his eyes tightly against the heat, but they were burning, too, boiling inside their sockets as he fell to the ground.

  Chapter 51.

  Josh slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop as a vehicle-mounted machine gun swiveled in their direction. There was a short pause while he stared down the barrel of a weapon that could undoubtedly cut the Land Cruiser into pieces, and then the soldier turned his attention back to the crowd that had started throwing rocks.

  "Jesus," Josh said weakly. "How many lives do we have left?"

  "Don't worry. We're going to be okay," Annika said.

  "How do you know?"

  "I have a feeling."

  "Great," Josh muttered as he slammed the accelerator to the floor again, charging up the city street as people broke for the edges to avoid being run over. The glint of flame in a man's hand outshone the sun for a moment, and Josh jerked the wheel hard, nearly plowing into a storefront before realizing the Molotov cocktail wasn't meant for them.

  "This is crazy," he said. "Let me get you out of here, and then I'll come back --"

  "You'd have been dead twenty times over if it wasn't for me," she said indignantly. "What makes you think you'd do any better now?"

  Of course she was right. Just in the last few hours, her language skills had gotten them through two very hairy roadblocks, and it had been her idea to roll down the windows and break out the front windshield of Trent's Land Cruiser. Their white faces, which had been such a liability only a few days ago, now seemed to make them almost invisible in the chaos gripping the country.

  Word of the New York Times article had swept through the population at a velocity that he still couldn't comprehend. Despite a literacy rate barely in the double digits, an almost complete lack of English speakers, and a failed power grid, it seemed that everyone knew about it. And now the Yvimbo rebels were using the unrest it had created to escalate their guerrilla war into a civil one.

  Aid workers, mining employees, and representatives of foreign governments were fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, and the Africans knew it. Whites had once again become irrelevant, and that kept them from becoming a target. Unfortunately, it also stripped them of any protection they'd once enjoyed. So far that day, they owed their survival to the fact that no one wanted to waste a precious bullet on them.

  "Let me take to you the airstrip, Annika. Get you on a plane . . ."

  "Who would translate for you?"

  "I'll be the only white guy there. What else would I want?"

  She pointed through the hole where the windshield had been. "Turn left here."

  Despite everything that was happening, Annika seemed to have found her moral compass again. Or maybe she'd never lost it and was just happy he'd found his. Whatever it was, the darkness that had descended on her was gone. They were embarking on what was almost certainly a futile and probably fatal attempt to save someone else. She was once again in h
er element.

  The people thinned out, but he still wasn't able to maintain a speed much over thirty miles per hour. Smoke from the fires burning across the city blew through the open vehicle, burning his eyes and obscuring his vision.

  A burst of machine-gun fire became audible behind them, and he thought of the crowd they'd just passed through. This wasn't a world of empty threats and warning shots. He wondered how many people had just died. Ten? Fifteen?

  Annika twisted around in her seat, looking into the smoke behind them. "This was coming," she said, almost as though she were responding to his thoughts. "Without us, it wouldn't have been today. But it would have been tomorrow. Or next month, or next year."

  He wanted to believe that because it absolved him in the deaths of those people in the crowd. And of all the others who would die as the violence inevitably escalated.

  "Maybe something better will come out of it," she said. "Maybe they'll find a way to find some balance --"

  A pickup overflowing with soldiers appeared from a side street and skidded to a stop, blocking the road.

  "Keep going!" Annika said.

  He pulled the Land Cruiser as far left as he could, grinding its side against the shacks lining the road. Annika ducked, scooting away from the open window and throwing an arm up against the chunks of wood flying through it.

  The soldiers were piling out of the truck, hurrying to retrieve their rifles as Josh sped toward them.

  "We're not going to make it!" he said. "They're in the way!"

  "Keep going!"

  She hadn't been wrong yet, and he pressed the accelerator to the floor. Instead of trying to avoid the men in the road, he headed right for them, forcing them to forget their guns and dive out of the way.

  A few shots rang out after they'd passed, but none hit their mark. In the rearview mirror, all Josh could see was smoke.

  The prison was at the edge of town -- an old European factory that looked vaguely like the set of a horror movie. Through the rusting iron gate, Josh could see a mob of no fewer than a hundred men packed into the courtyard shouting at the soldiers looking down on them from perimeter towers. Apparently word of the Times article had found its way into the prison, too.

  Josh let his foot off the accelerator, and the vehicle began to coast. The image of the enraged crowd brought a reality to what he was doing that the roadblocks for some reason hadn't. It was something he had to do to be able to live with himself, but it had nothing to do with Annika. It wasn't her crime.

  She once again demonstrated her uncanny ability to read his mind. "It's going to be okay, Josh. I promise."

  She put a hand on the wheel and kept him steady as they eased to a stop in front of the prison's main gate. A soldier stepped in front of the Land Cruiser and aimed his gun at them, shouting at them to get out. Josh started to comply, but Annika grabbed his wrist and shouted back at the soldier in Xhis a .

  He moved forward, never taking his gun off them, but looking increasingly uncertain. Annika leaned out the broken windshield and held out twenty euros. A few more words between them and he took the money and opened the gate.

  "Go ahead," Annika said, and Josh crept forward, feeling the Land Cruiser bounce as the soldier jumped onto the rear bumper.

  Josh kept as far from the prisoners as possible, staying in the no-man's-land between them and the guards as the man on the bumper leaned in the broken rear window and offered incomprehensible directions.

  "He says to go to the building in the middle," Annika said. "Get as close as you can."

  Josh parked parallel to a heavy wooden door, leaving just enough room for him and Annika to slip out the passenger side. The guard pounded on the door with his rifle butt, and a moment later another guard opened it. Instead of letting them in, though, the two men started what seemed to be a serious and intricate conversation that was nearly drowned out by the prisoners as they whipped themselves into a frenzy that would soon make their captors' weapons useless.

  "What the hell's going on?"

  "They're negotiating," Annika said. "For what?"

  "I had to offer the guy who came in with us everything we had. Twenty euros to get us through the gate and the rest when we're safely out. Any expenses in between come out of his pocket."

  The man guarding the door pointed at Josh and Annika, the volume of his voice rising. The argument went on, with Annika quietly translating in his ear. The bottom line was that the soldiers were less concerned with the vagaries of political breakdown than with how they could turn a profit on it. After what seemed like an hour but was probably really only a few minutes, they came to an agreement, and Josh and Annika were led inside.

  At first all he could see was the guards' backs, but as his eyes adjusted, the cells lining the walls emerged. They were uniformly filthy, with dirt floors and bars fashioned from the same construction debris that the rest of the country had been built with.

  Most of the cells were empty, and the ones that weren't were occupied by what appeared to be corpses. The heat became overwhelming, and Annika slid an arm through his as they penetrated deeper into what seemed to be a good approximation of hell.

  They found Fawn Mardsen at the end of the corridor, pressed into the back corner of her tiny cell. The mud spattered across her ragged dress smelled of death and excrement, and her right hand was wrapped in a bloody rag. Her head rose, the matted hair falling from her face as she peered in their direction.

  "Josh?" she said, the single syllable nearly choked off in her throat. "Oh, my God. Is that really you?"

  The soldier unwound the rope holding the cell door shut, and Josh pulled away from Annika. "Stay out here."

  "Josh?" Fawn said again, taking an unsteady step in his direction. He'd expected her to scream at him, maybe even try to strangle him. God knew he deserved it. Instead she started to cry. "Please, Josh. Don't leave me here. Please help me."

  "It's okay," he said, lifting her arm over his shoulder and supporting her weight. "We're going home."

  EPILOGUE:

  The cold of the Kentucky air and the heatless sun above seemed strangely foreign to him. As though his many years there had been wiped away by his short time in Africa.

  "Laura!"

  Again there was no response, and he picked up his pace, breathing hard as he scrambled up a steep slope tangled with underbrush.

  They'd gotten on one of the last UN evacuation planes three sleepless nights ago. Fawn needed medical attention for her gangrenous hand, and he'd left Annika to look after her at a hospital in Belgium while he caught the first available flight home.

  Reports from Africa were sporadic and less than reliable at this point. Mtiti's forces were on the run in what was now a full-scale civil war, and the president was trying to escape his country by any means possible. So far every government he'd approached had turned down his request for asylum, and many of the assets he'd managed to expatriate were being frozen. The general consensus in the South African press was that he wouldn't survive the week.

  "Laura!"

  He'd phoned her from every plane and every airport he'd been in, with no luck. Of course that was to be expected -- there was no cell reception in the mountains behind his family's property, and she'd have no way to charge a battery even if there was. But that didn't prevent him from using the endless flights to create elaborate scenarios for her demise. He doubted he'd left a single possibility unexplored in the hours he'd spent staring at the back of the seat in front of him -- everything from Fedorov's people coming after her for revenge to Ernie Bruce attacking her when Fawn had disappeared to her falling out of the rickety tree house and dying a slow, lonely death in the woods.

  He couldn't shake the feeling that he'd used up a lifetime's worth of luck escaping Africa and that this was where it was going to run out.

  The tree house came into view, and he actually slowed, unsure if he could handle what he'd convinced himself he was going to find. What would he do? Walk back to town, get a job, get married, and ev
entually die of old age? How much blood could a person live with on his hands? How much should a person live with?

  He didn't recognize the figure that burst from the trees and charged him -- the heavy hunting jacket, the plaid hat, the rifle held in one hand. He raised his arms reflexively but was driven backward by the impact. The rifle hit the ground first, bouncing away as he landed on his back and felt the air go out of him.

  "Josh!"

  Laura threw her arms around him and squeezed harder than her thin frame would suggest she could. "The radio says there's a war going on! I thought you'd gotten trapped. I thought you were never coming back."

  The muscles that had been knotted for so long that he barely noticed anymore suddenly relaxed, and he found himself unable to do anything but stare up at the dirty, tear-streaked face hovering above him.

  Third chances didn't come along every day. This time he'd be grateful for everything he had. This time he'd do everything right.

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