The Shadow List

by Todd Moss

  And Judd hadn’t asked Bola how he could be so close to a criminal boss like the Coyote. Judd also assumed that Bola was being helpful because Mariana Leibowitz had asked him. Or, Judd wondered, perhaps Judge Bola Akinola knew he’d soon need help of his own. They were both playing a game, trying to assist each other without giving too much away.

  But now Judd and Isabella were standing in a tiny café, deep in the heart of Lagos, seeking the ringleader. And a rotund Nigerian grandmother was standing in their way.

  “The oyinbo, the foreigners, the white people, like you, they love jollof rice,” Mama Oyafemi added helpfully.

  “No,” Isabella said. “We aren’t hungry.”

  “Yes we are,” Judd corrected. “We are very hungry. We will have two big plates of jollof. And do you have soup today?”

  “I have a fresh pot of egusi soup. And roasted goat, eh.”

  “Yes,” Judd nodded. “We’ll have two plates of jollof rice and two bowls of egusi soup. No goat for us today.”

  “Yes, you must eat,” Mama Oyafemi declared, looking pleased as she returned to the kitchen.

  Judd patted Isabella’s arm lightly, trying to reassure his partner. “We have time to eat,” he said with raised eyebrows.

  A few moments later Mama Oyafemi appeared with large plates of red rice cooked with peppers, tomatoes, and spices. Then she brought steaming bowls of yellow-and-green soup made with melon seeds, dried fish, and spinach.

  As Judd and Isabella dug in, Mama Oyafemi stood over them proudly.

  “Delicious,” Isabella said.

  “This jollof is much better than what they cook in Ghana or Senegal,” Judd offered.

  “Only Nigerian jollof, eh,” Mama Oyafemi vigorously agreed.

  “Thank you,” Judd said, pushing his plate forward and patting his stomach. “We are looking for someone. We were told to meet him here. At the Innocent Chop House.”

  Mama Oyafemi’s smile disappeared.

  “We are looking for the Coyote,” Judd said.

  “No.”

  “We were told to find Coyote here.”

  “No Coyote here,” Mama Oyafemi insisted.

  “We’re not here to make trouble,” Judd said, holding up his palms. “We were sent”—he lowered his voice to a whisper—“by Judge Bola Akinola.”

  Mama Oyafemi looked them both up and down. “You wait, eh,” she said, before disappearing back into the kitchen.

  A few moments later she returned with a young man wearing skinny jeans and an oversized orange hoodie. The man, who appeared to have been woken up from a nap, checked the alley outside, then faced Judd with angry yellow eyes. “Who is looking for the Coyote?”

  Judd suddenly wondered if this was all a big mistake.

  “We are. We were sent by—”

  “Who are you?” he demanded. “What do you want here?”

  “We’re from—” Judd began.

  “What for?” interrupted the man.

  “We are searching for a friend,” Judd tried to explain.

  “Judge Akinola sent us,” Isabella interrupted. “He sent us to meet the Coyote.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Judd added. “The judge said we could find the Coyote here and he would show us the Yahooze Boys. How it all works. To help us find our missing friend,” she said.

  “You American police, eh?”

  “No police,” Judd said, holding up his hands. “I work for the State Department. We’re not here to cause trouble. Just to find the Coyote. Just to learn.”

  “And you?” He jabbed a finger toward Isabella.

  “I’m with him,” she said, nodding toward Judd.

  The boy traded glances with the older woman, then relaxed. “Yes, the judge, he called me. The big judge is a great man.”

  “Yes, he is,” Isabella agreed.

  “We go,” the man said.

  They followed him through the kitchen, pushing past hanging laundry, then again through another door, down a smoky hallway, past several boys standing guard.

  Judd’s pulse accelerated and his stomach ached as the doubts returned. This is crazy. They arrived at a steel door and the man flipped open the barricade bar with a loud clang. Jessica would have a fit if she knew. . . .

  The man gestured for them to pass. Is this a dungeon? Is it a trap?

  Isabella froze. “Are you sure about this?” she asked, grabbing Judd’s arm. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea.”

  Judd was thinking the same thing. What am I doing, just walking into a dangerous criminal’s den? What do I really even know about this Bola Akinola? He knew Mariana Leibowitz had never let him down before. Jessica would . . . he thought about this for a second . . . Jessica would walk right through that door.

  Judd took a deep breath and Isabella’s hand. “Let’s go,” he said, and pulled them through.

  The tension vaporized the moment they were inside. It wasn’t a dark cell but a long, brightly lit air-conditioned room filled with computer terminals along both sides. Young, smartly dressed African teens typed away on keyboards.

  The man revealed a wide, toothy smile. “I am Kayode. The Coyote.” He led Judd and Isabella down the center aisle like a tour guide.

  “This is where we work,” he said, opening his arms wide like a proud farmer showing off a bumper crop.

  Up on the wall, above one of the workstations, a simple sign was tacked up:

  Teach a man to fish?

  I don’t want to fish.

  I work in IT.

  When they reached the far end of the room, Judd noticed a high-end printer alongside stacks of official letterhead. Judd elbowed Isabella, gesturing toward the stationery bearing the logos of JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Microsoft, Gazprombank, the Bank of England, and the Central Bank of Nigeria.

  The Coyote beamed, “Welcome to Wall Street.”

  “Wall Street?” Judd winced. “I don’t understand.”

  “You are American, eh,” the Coyote smiled. “You must know Billy Ray Valentine?”

  39

  CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  THURSDAY, 4:35 A.M. EST

  Sunday couldn’t sleep. So he’d surrendered to his insomnia, showered, dressed, and trudged back into the office. He’d always had difficulty sleeping through the night. He wanted to count sheep, but his mind had other ideas, churning over whatever problem he was trying to solve. It had been this way as a child in southern California, as a graduate student in Wisconsin, and especially as an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. The trouble of work consuming all his mental space had only worsened after he joined Purple Cell.

  Jessica Ryker was now somewhere in Russia. She’d been off-line and unreachable for the past—he checked the time—forty-five hours. That wasn’t unusual. That was part of their business. Part of the deal. The MO for Purple Cell was usually the same: accept an impossible puzzle, dig deep until you solved it, and . . . then wait.

  Sunday didn’t know when Jessica would resurface. Maybe it was the lack of sleep or the stress or the nagging knowledge that it could all end without warning. But he couldn’t help but wonder, sitting alone in a dark cubicle on the third floor of the old CIA headquarters building, if this was precisely how Purple Cell might end. Would Jessica Ryker just . . . not come back one day? Would everything she’d done, everything they’d done together, just finish . . . with a long silence?

  Just do your part. His mind returned to digging. Not the statistical analysis of attacks on oil facilities that he was doing for Purple Cell. He’d hit a dead end with that. He’d found a correlation in the data but no story, no evidence, to back it up. A statistical anomaly, he decided. Too small a sample size. Or just bad luck. So instead Sunday had concentrated on another project at the request of Jessica’s husband, to comb through intelligence on Judge Bola Akinola.

  It w
asn’t the first time Sunday had pulled an all-nighter working on a problem for Judd Ryker. Jessica had never said so explicitly, but Sunday knew she would have wanted him to help Judd. And this time Sunday felt a strong desire to get it right. Because he wanted to help Judd Ryker. Because it was Nigeria, the land of his parents. Because of his cousins back in Kano and Zamfara. Working on Nigeria was, he admitted, a guilty pleasure.

  But investigating Bola Akinola also made him queasy. The judge was a hero in many ways. A brave hunter trying to kill the beasts of corruption in a country where beasts were everywhere. At great personal risk, Bola Akinola had taken on some of the most crooked politicians, the most notorious criminals in the country. He was staring into the eyes of the monsters and not blinking.

  But now Sunday had doubts. There were always accusations against prominent people, of secret bank accounts, of petty vices, of the eventual victory of hidden weaknesses that exist deep in the souls of all men and women. Sunday had thought Akinola was an exception, that he could resist the urges of normal men. But there it was, in the British press in black-and-white: Judge Bola Akinola, chairman of the Nigerian Crime and Corruption Task Force, had failed to accurately account on his asset disclosures for luxury properties held in Monaco, London’s posh Mayfair neighborhood, and a villa in the Cayman Islands.

  Sunday hoped the story was a false plant. Mere propaganda that slipped through the usual journalism filter. The British papers, keen to scoop their competitors and prone to believe the worst about subjects from one of their former colonies, were especially loose with such accusations. And once one paper had the story, surely more would come.

  Had Judge Bola Akinola become dirty? Sunday wanted to know the truth. For Judd Ryker. And for himself.

  Sunday finished reading through all the open-source reporting on Akinola. Diplomatic cables from Abuja and Lagos hadn’t provided any new insights, either. He was about to pull up top secret signals intelligence to seek out any potential clues, when his office phone rang.

  Sunday glanced at the clock. Four thirty-eight a.m.? Who’s calling me at this hour? The incoming ID was a jumble of numbers he didn’t recognize.

  “Aaay?” he said hesitantly.

  “There you are,” Jessica said with a huff. “I’ve been trying to get you on your cell.”

  “My phone’s in the glove box of my car in the parking lot.”

  “Couldn’t sleep again?” she asked, softening her tone.

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “Are you safe?”

  “I’m fine. I can’t say where. I’m on a burner phone that I’ll flush right after I hang up.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I need your help. I’ve got something urgent.”

  Sunday looked at his computer screen listing news articles about Bola Akinola with a slight pang of guilt. Was he being dutiful by surreptitiously helping her husband? Or disloyal?

  “Go,” he said, wondering how he had wound up, again, stuck in the middle of the two Rykers.

  “Target acquired,” Jessica said. “I need everything you can find on him.”

  “Roger that. What’s the name, ma’am?”

  “It’s a judge in Nigeria supposedly working with someone in the U.S. government,” she said. “We’ve got to find out what we can about the judge and a way to warn the Americans without blowing my cover.”

  Sunday’s stomach jumped into his throat. “No,” he blurted.

  “No what?”

  “Don’t tell me the target is Bola Akinola.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Ma’am”—Sunday paused to swallow—“I’m already investigating him. That’s why I’m in the office.”

  “How’s that possible? How do you know my target?”

  Sunday closed his eyes. “I was helping a friend. On another problem.”

  “What friend?” Jessica snapped.

  “On what I thought was another problem.”

  “Who is it, Sunday? Who’s been asking you about Bola Akinola? Tell me right fucking now.”

  40

  LAGOS, NIGERIA

  THURSDAY, 10:05 A.M. WEST AFRICA TIME (5:05 A.M. EST )

  The driver from the U.S. Consulate Lagos weaved the Nissan Patrol expertly through the chaos of the city’s traffic.

  In the backseat, Judd and Isabella sat in silence watching the bustle go by. Swarms of yellow minibuses honked and belched gray smoke. The roadside was packed tight with makeshift shops, the brightly dressed women selling everything from chili peppers to flat-screen high-definition televisions. Rickety pushcarts were piled impossibly high with bottled water, greasy diesel fuel jugs, and mounds of rotting trash. And the crowds, a buzzing river of people just making their way through Africa’s biggest metropolis.

  But Judd wasn’t really seeing the life of the city. His mind was churning with questions about what he had just witnessed. The Coyote had shown them his operation. He’d explained how they worked, how the advance fee scams had evolved from crude letters into sophisticated online campaigns using the latest in technology and marketing. The bait—the pleas, the promises, even the typos—were all deliberately designed to lure just the right targets among all those masses. The art of the scam in the age of free email, the Coyote had explained, was shaping the pitch to catch your perfect marks. The most gullible, the most susceptible, the most corrupt, who would take the bait and run. That’s when the scammers knew the hook was set.

  There was no shortage of people falling for it, he’d told them. A response rate of 0.01 percent provided plenty of opportunities. The Coyote even tracked hit rates by each of his team members and ran sophisticated data analytics giving him real-time feedback on the productivity of all his operations.

  And, despite a crackdown by Nigerian investigators, by the FBI, by British police, by Interpol, the Coyote’s team was getting better every day. Better at targeting, better at deceiving, better at avoiding the authorities. Criminal creativity was, as it has always been through the history of civilization, at least one step ahead of law enforcement.

  Judd was surprised by how unguarded the Coyote had been about his business secrets. He hadn’t seemed the least hesitant to share the inner workings of his operation with American government officials. Judd guessed it was Bola’s introduction that had made such candor possible. But that, too, raised new uncomfortable questions.

  The Coyote was cagey about one question: Who did he work for?

  “Wall Street is mine. I built it,” he said.

  “You don’t have a boss, a big boss?” Judd asked.

  “Of course I work for the Oga, the big Oga,” he replied.

  But when Judd pressed and the Coyote seemed suddenly nervous, Isabella waved him off.

  Sitting in the back of the SUV, thinking through everything he had seen that morning, Judd was, he had to admit, more than a little impressed. The Coyote’s operation was run like a real business: inventive, resourceful, efficient. Unsettlingly professional.

  Yet it was all exactly as Isabella had told him back in Washington three days earlier. So what had he really learned?

  Isabella was the first to break the silence. “What are you thinking, partner?”

  “Why would the Coyote share so much about his operation? Why would he let us in?” Judd asked.

  “Judge Akinola carries a lot of weight. Even among criminals,” she said.

  “It’s awfully suspicious, don’t you think? Doesn’t that make you nervous about Bola, too?”

  “This is Nigeria,” Isabella said. “Bola’s the man. Everything is connected. Isn’t that what Mariana told you?”

  “More or less.”

  “Then what did you expect, Judd?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The world is full of surprises.”

  “That Coyote is running quite a little business,” Judd said.

&nb
sp; She shrugged and gave him a look of friendly annoyance.

  “I know,” Judd admitted. “It’s just like you told me.”

  “Imagine if these guys applied their talents to something honest. Something more productive. Imagine what the Coyote and his team could do in the real New York. Or in Silicon Valley.”

  “Wall Street.” Judd flashed his teeth. “They’ve got a sense of humor, too. You have to give them that.”

  “Trading Places.” She smiled back. “I haven’t thought of that movie in years.”

  “What bothers me is that we didn’t get anywhere. We’re still no closer to finding Jason Saunders.”

  “What did you expect, Judd? That seeing how one scam operation works in Nigeria would give you a magical clue to your missing person in London?”

  “Maybe the Coyote knew more than he was saying,” Judd offered.

  “That would be one hell of a coincidence, Judd.”

  “What if his big boss knows something? It’s not impossible. Maybe we should have pressed him harder on this Oga character?”

  “Judd, I know criminal investigation isn’t your expertise—”

  “But he had the letterhead,” Judd said. “The Bank of England letterhead. The very same stationery from the letter sent to Jason Saunders before he disappeared.”

  “So?”

  “Isn’t that enough to—oh, I don’t know, Isabella . . . ask more questions?”

  “I think he made it pretty clear he wasn’t going to tell us anything about his boss. And he seems smart enough not to incriminate himself. I didn’t want you scaring him off.”

  “So let’s raid his office. Come back with an FBI tactical team or one of Bola’s task force units and kick some doors in. Squeeze him. Threaten him. Maybe you can use the letterhead connection as leverage. Maybe he knows something and would bargain. Maybe you can get him to give up the Oga.”