Mortal Crimes 1

by Various Authors

  With all that training, he shouldn’t be having any trouble now.

  “But I’m not doing anything,” he told Kendall, “I’m not even in full record mode.”

  “Maybe it’s just nerves. I can give you something to settle you down.”

  “Nerves?” Ian scoffed. “After Tora Bora? I don’t feel nerves. Never have. Do you?”

  “Of course. Especially after Tora Bora.”

  They almost died on that mountain. Should have died. Friendly fire. That last JDAM had exploded and they’d have identified Ian and Kendall’s remains from bone fragments.

  “You were scared,” Ian said.

  “Damn right and I’m not afraid to admit it.”

  Kendall could talk all he wanted about being scared, or whatever emotion was on the surface. That wasn’t Ian’s style, so he surprised himself when he admitted, “Yeah, me too.”

  He regretted saying it almost at once. So they’d both been scared in Afghanistan, almost killed in air strikes by American jets, so what? It was not the time or place for a bonding moment.

  “Thing is,” Kendall said, “we haven’t been in combat since then and I don’t know, maybe something changed. Maybe you’re starting to think too hard.”

  “I’m not thinking too hard,” Ian said. “That’s you, not me. No problem. Just get in the truck.”

  “Fine, but I’m driving.”

  Back in the Land Rover, they continued along the road toward the camp. Five minutes later, they connected with the main road, and shortly after that two bright lights swung from the side of the road to blind them through the windshield.

  “Let’s go to full record,” Kendall said.

  Training kicked in at once and Ian twitched the fingers on his left hand in sequence—thumb, pinkie, pinkie, index finger, thumb, pinkie—to toggle the implant to its highest recording state. As Ian looked around, he tried to make the rest of his body as motionless as possible.

  Men with AK-47s stepped into the cone of light. One came to Kendall’s window and rapped on the glass. These were no bandits; they wore tan jackets and dark berets with a swooping black falcon embroidered on front. Blackwing contractors. Kendall rolled down the window.

  “Do you have papers?” the man asked.

  He had a French accent and a scar over his right eyebrow. It was Paul-Henri Dupont, formerly of French Special Forces.

  He took their papers and studied them by flashlight before looking up with a nod. “Bill Jones and Dave Smith is it?” A snort, then a shrug. “Well, if recruitment was okay with those names, then so am I. You’re the African?” he looked at Kendall.

  “No, that’s me,” Ian said.

  “Afrikaner or English?”

  “Father is Afrikaans, my mum is English.”

  “White African, eh? We’ve got a few around here.” His voice was pleasant, reasonable. But Ian had read Dupont’s dossier and knew what the man was capable of.

  Dupont looked back to Kendall. “That makes you the American, right? Let me call headquarters and then I’ll wave you through.”

  Ian felt calm now, none of that strange, doubled-up feeling. It was just like football, that moment before the snap, when everything slowed and he could see every twitch of his offensive line, every shift of the defense on the other side of the ball. Kendall took out a stick of gum and put it casually—almost too casually—into his mouth.

  When he spoke, his voice had slowed as well. “I can’t get over that you’re the African here and I’m just a black guy.”

  “My dad wouldn’t even call you black. You’re just colored.”

  “Remember the first time you called me that?” Kendall asked. “I almost gave you the beatdown of your life.”

  “You almost tried to give me the beatdown of my life.”

  As they spoke, men looked under the truck with lights. Another man opened the back doors and lifted up the tarps. Nothing but water and fuel under there, together with a tool box, spare tires, and emergency supplies like protein bars and solar blankets. Did the smell of gunmetal and ammo linger back there? At last, they shut the doors and retreated from the Land Rover.

  “Wasn’t that the first day of football camp?” Ian added.

  “Huh, what?”

  “You know, when I said you were colored.”

  “Right, you said your dad hated when you played sport with colored kids.”

  “I thought your head was going to explode,” Ian said. “I had no idea that was offensive. Colored is just what we called people who looked like you, you know, black with lighter skin.”

  “That wasn’t the only thing that pissed me off.”

  “Was it when I asked if you knew Shaquille O’Neal?”

  Kendall gave an exaggerated groan. “No, it was how you acted like we should be best friends because we were both, you know, African.”

  “Hey, didn’t it work out that way in the end?”

  Truth was, it had been a tough time for Ian and he was lucky to have found his way at all. After Apartheid ended, Ian’s father had been convinced that civil war would break out at any time. He still seemed disappointed that it hadn’t. It had been a year before Ian was to be conscripted at age 16, and the feeling that he had avoided the South African draft ate at Ian’s ego up to the time he joined the U.S. Army. Of course, he had other motives. The fastest path to U.S. citizenship was through military service.

  It was a mostly white and Hispanic community in Fresno, but Ian, with his rugby and cricket background, gravitated at once to football, where he met Kendall and several other black kids. The move had the ironic side-effect of giving Ian far more contact with classmates his father would have called kaffirs than he ever would have had living in his segregated, gated community in Cape Town.

  Dupont returned a minute later and opened the passenger door behind Ian. Ian tensed, eyeing Dupont’s right hand in his peripheral vision as Dupont climbed in the car and sat down with his arm on the back of the seat.

  “Drive until you get to the water tanker. Park there.”

  Along the way Dupont chatted about living quarters, about the crappy food in the mess, even the heat and scorpions. “Don’t know what the salary is these days for guys with your background—what, a hundred and fifty thousand?—but you’ll think you were back in boot camp.”

  Kendall and Ian exchanged a look. They didn’t earn a hundred and fifty thousand dollars between them working for the CIA. No wonder so many ex-military gravitated to the private contractors that infested Africa and the Middle East. The U.S. Army had outsourced half its operations in Iraq, then wondered why all its captains refused the reenlistment bonuses. If you’re getting shot at anyway, may as well double or triple your salary.

  They approached another checkpoint. “Here’s the camp,” Dupont said. “Welcome to Ondjamba. Means ‘elephant’ in a local dialect.”

  “Local dialect?” Ian asked.

  “Hey, we’re a cosmopolitan operation – respect the local customs and all that shit.”

  He climbed down from the truck and spoke French in a low voice to one of the men. Kendall, still driving, rolled down the window, not that either of them could speak French or even would have been able to pick up the low voices. But someone might. Every brain impulse would be translated and parsed for useful information when they returned.

  The camp was a hive of activity, no matter the late hour. A cement mixer poured a foundation to their left, while carpenters and roofers worked on another building. Most of the camp was still comprised of tents of all sizes, but this was no temporary outpost, at least not for long. Floodlights lit up the camp.

  A cluster of workers in hard hats crossed the road in front of them and Ian caught a glimpse of their faces. East Asian, he thought.

  “What is this, a Chinese operation?” Ian asked.

  He figured the remark was safe enough and obvious from what he saw out the window. It better not have been something CIA already knew. Hard enough to pry out what he had learned about the camp. As Mark
ov, his collections management officer would have told him, it was all NTK—need to know. Everything was NTK to Markov, even the location of the damn vending machine in the executive lounge. So while he had plenty of information about individual Blackwing contractors he knew next to nothing about the camp.

  “Chinese owned and operated,” Dupont said, “but they’re outsourcing the hell out of the operation. Belgian engineers, Namibian laborers and us, of course. Blackwing is the only one in Namibia with the muscle they needed.”

  “But why so much security?” he asked. “Is there a bandit problem around here?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “This the water tower?” Kendall asked. He gave Ian a sideways glance that Ian took as a warning not to press the questions.

  “Park right there. Give plenty of clearance. This is a tanker route.”

  It was a large tent with a diesel generator chugging to one side. Curiously, Ian noticed several satellite dishes positioned around the tent. A pair of armed guards stood watch out front.

  “This isn’t our living quarters is it?” Kendall asked. Two trucks rumbled past.

  “Nope, don’t worry, it’s away from all this noise. But I’ve got to take you through security first.”

  “That wasn’t security back there?” Ian asked.

  “That? No, that wasn’t security.” Dupont said. “That’s just to stop those…bandits you were talking about.” He cleared his throat and spat out the window. “I’m sure you guys won’t mind a polygraph,” he added casually.

  “Figured you’d check us out,” Ian said. Any beginning operative could defeat a lie-detector test.

  “And we’re going to strip your truck down, make sure you didn’t bring in any funny stuff. Cameras, recording devices, or anything like that. No big deal, just standard.”

  “Sure, go ahead,” Ian said. “Just put it back together again when you’re done.”

  “But first, we’ll do the same to you two.”

  “You’re going to strip us down, huh?” Kendall asked. “Just clothes, or muscle and bone, too?”

  A lie detector might not have been able to detect minute changes in heartbeat and perspiration levels, but Ian knew Kendall well enough to detect a tiny edge of stress.

  “That would be something. But no, nothing like that. A full body scan, nothing to worry about. Assuming you’re clean.” Dupont spread the tent flaps with his hand. “Come on in.”

  The two men followed. Ian resisted the urge to scratch the scar on his scalp. A trickle of sweat crept down the back of his neck. He felt again as though he was stepping out of his body.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A woman in Blackwing uniform passed a security wand over Ian’s body while he stood shivering in his underwear. It wasn’t a cursory scan like at airport security when a belt buckle or cell phone triggered an alert. She passed it above every inch of his skin.

  Ian focused on his breathing. He knew the equipment. High-sensitivity spectrum analyzer. She was sweeping for radiofrequency signals. And she wouldn’t find any. The implant would only broadcast a wireless RF signal when he gave it an explicit command to transmit.

  The wand passed over his scalp, lingered over his forehead, above the implant. His eye darted to the oscilloscope watching for a subtle change in the power spectrum. A noisy baseline flickered on the logarithmic plot from 25 Hz to 12 GHz. No peaks.

  Kendall had passed through already while Ian waited outside. He’d looked irritated as the two men passed, but now Ian envied his friend, no doubt in the mess, getting something hot to eat and maybe a beer to wash it down. Ian’s fun was just beginning. What else did she have? A conductance amplifier?

  He’d asked Julia about that during training. “Can they pick up the…uhm, the little wire thingies in my neck?”

  “The carbon nanotubes?” Julia asked. “No, they’re shielded by a lipid film that’ll look no different to a scan than your vagus nerve.”

  He trusted she knew what she was talking about, but that was in the lab. This was as real as the mustache on the woman examining him. Ian swallowed and closed his eyes.

  “Now drop your shorts,” the woman said. She set the wand on a table and pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves.

  An armed guard waited at the entrance to the tent, but the man deliberately looked to one side as soon as the woman began her more intimate search. She started at Ian’s feet and worked her way up, patted each inch of his body. He clenched his teeth when she reached his crotch.

  “Does this bother you?” Dupont asked. He stood to one side, most definitely not looking away. He lit a cigarette.

  The pleasant veneer was still there, but a sadistic undercurrent rippled beneath the surface of his voice. According to the dossier, Dupont had leveled a school building in Somalia, directed extra-legal killings in Yemen, and was wanted by Bangladeshi authorities for accessory to rape, stemming from an overly enthusiastic interrogation by two Blackwing subsidiaries involving a broom handle. Even such a thing as a humiliating strip search seemed to give him pleasure.

  “Or maybe you like it,” Dupont added.

  “She has a nice touch, but too gentle for my taste.”

  “Almost word for word what your American friend said. You must have rehearsed together.”

  Ian forced a laugh, cut short by a latex gloved hand sliding between his butt cheeks.

  “Your truck tested positive for explosives. So do your clothes.”

  “Yeah, so what? We worked for CACI until three weeks ago. It’s just leftovers from our last job.”

  “Again, that’s exactly what your friend said.”

  “Of course he did. And I’m sure you checked with our last employers, so you knew that already.”

  Ian felt more comfortable with the wand gone, if a man with someone else’s hand shoved up his butt could use the word comfortable. The scan had revealed nothing, and neither would the most unpleasant pat down ever. Dr. Nolan had done her work well.

  The woman stepped back and stripped off her gloves. “He’s clean.”

  “Well, then. I guess that’s that.” Dupont sounded vaguely disappointed. He no doubt had been thinking of that fun in Bangladesh with the broom handle. “Let me show you the mess tent.”

  Ian felt the glow of satisfaction, but then came the itching in his brain again, the sense that his head was following his body at a distance. Was the implant active?

  ________

  About twenty minutes after the two men bunked down for the night, Kendall sat up in bed. Ian was on the edge of sleep. He’d wrapped himself tightly into his army blankets. The tent was closed off from the wind, but that didn’t keep the desert chill from seeping in.

  Ian rolled over. “What is it?” he whispered.

  Kendall rustled with his clothes. “I’m going out.”

  “Are you crazy? We’re under curfew.”

  “Yeah, why? What’s going on out there that’s so important they don’t want us to see?” He was putting on his shoes now.

  “Brother, what the hell are you doing?” Ian asked. “They’ll clear us tomorrow, then we can see plenty. We’re passive, remember? We walk around, do what we’re told, then we get out.”

  “Then what’s up with the weapons? This isn’t just recon and you know it.” Kendall unzipped the tent.

  “It’s backup, you told me yourself. Hey, wait.”

  “I can’t,” Kendall said with almost a pleading tone. “I’m under orders.” And with that, he zipped the tent shut behind him and crunched away over the gravel, moving to the left.

  Ian sat up, stunned. Kendall was a rule follower—okay, a rule questioner, but the point is he didn’t set off on his own, not without good reason. And as far as Ian knew, his search and interrogation had gone exactly as had Ian’s.

  Get dressed, leave tent, take a right and walk one hundred meters.

  They didn’t come into Ian’s heads as words, not exactly. More like very strong impressions that his mind then converted to words, li
ke translation from a foreign language.

  “That’s crazy,” he whispered. “I’m not going out there.”

  Get dressed, leave tent, take a right and walk one hundred meters.

  It came more insistently now, but still he resisted. A command? That wasn’t on the menu.

  Markov, that bastard.

  There was nothing, Markov had assured him, that would allow an outside agent to give him commands, and certainly not to give him this feeling of urgency, like a bladder overfilled to bursting, that made him want to get out of bed and follow Kendall into the night.

  Get dressed, leave tent, take a right and walk one hundred meters.

  Ian could no longer resist the order. Like Kendall, a few minutes earlier, he got up, dressed and went to the tent flap, which he unzipped before stepping outside.

  He felt a moment of vertigo when he turned to rezip the tent. It felt as though his head were expanding and then he felt as though he was walking out of his body, floating above it, watching himself move. The implant must be firing like a machine gun down there, lighting up his nerve cells. His brain couldn’t keep up. At last, he made himself move forward.

  He felt dizzy, his identity fading, his brain struggling to make sense of the two people in his head. Which one was he?

  Slowly, he regained his balance. As he did, his thoughts came more clearly.

  Markov had supervised Ian’s training, and Markov, of course, was need to know. He’d known that Ian’s one fear was having someone take control of his body like some horrific parasite feeding on his brain. Naturally, Markov had lied. Need to know, buddy, need to know. Surely you understand. We didn’t want you to freak out.

  But what about Julia? She was the consummate professional, too sincere in her scientific interest to stand in front of Ian and tell him an absolute, bald-faced lie. She must not know.

  Second big question, where did the command come from? Was it embedded code, set to go off with some trigger? That made no sense. How would they have known where Ian and Kendall would have their tent, or anything else that would allow for such specific instructions?