White Bone

by Ridley Pearson

  “As to the ivory. It’s a mythical amount—several millions’ worth—recently disappeared from the government vaults.”

  “Forgive me, sir,” Knox said, feeling increasing respect for the man. “But we’re off-topic. Nadali,” he pressed, “ACC.”

  “You must listen more carefully. Money is currency. We are following the current. You said yourself Grace suspected some of the money from the vaccine switch ended up with Archie. Daniel then connected Archie to the robbery from the vaults. At least he thought he had.”

  Follow the money, Knox thought, realizing Grace would have been hanging on Radcliffe’s every word. In this room? he wondered. On the couch? On the stool where Radcliffe sat?

  “Every African nation has their treasure. The South Africans have their diamonds, don’t they? And gold. Others, gems. All keep ivory. It’s the same as your Fort Knox. Ah! How ironic! John Knox.” Knox had been plagued with that joke his entire life. “No need to explain national treasure to you.”

  “Someone robbed Kenya’s Fort Knox?”

  “Four million euros. That neighborhood. But that’s how rumors go, isn’t it? The vaults are spread around. Carefully guarded. The currency used to be supported in part by that ivory.”

  It didn’t make complete sense—Grace, following this lead. Knox could understand her interest in following the money trail, but she was tasked with recovering the money from the illegal sale of the vaccine. Beyond that, why bother?

  “The point being,” the man continued, “Archie takes a bribe. In short order, one hell of a lot of ivory goes missing. It is my life’s goal to bring down this government, and Daniel was no doubt perilously close to indicting at least Archie, if not others with him.”

  “Grace doesn’t care about Kenyan politics,” Knox blurted. “If she’d suspected some of the seventy-five thousand dollars had gone on to fund the theft of ivory from a government vault, that should have been enough for her. End of story.”

  “She said she was attempting to connect the profit from the vaccine switch to wherever it led,” Radcliffe said. “It led to the inner circle of the government and the likely theft of elephant tusk.”

  “Graham Winston’s million pounds ended up funding over four millions worth of tusks,” Knox said.

  “Grace’s expressed interest,” Radcliffe said, “at least to me, was getting to the source—the start of it all. That included the theft of the substitute vaccine, the cattle vaccine.” Radcliffe was waking up from the coffee. “Don’t you see, man? Whoever provided that cattle vaccine was either the source or was the closest to the source of this whole catastrophe.” Radcliffe appeared astonished to have heard himself speak these words.

  “Go on.”

  “There’d been a prior killing with a similar MO to Daniel’s. Also a reported poaching incident. Also done execution-style. And the timing—very significant. No one paid much attention because the man was African. Another dead black man. Not like Daniel. I had the original crime scene photos, didn’t I? And your Grace stopped in her tracks at the sight of the bloke’s tattoo. Got all hot and frothy. I printed a copy of it for her.”

  Knox resented the description. He resented Radcliffe expecting him to keep up. “May I see it?”

  Radcliffe climbed off the bar stool. He led Knox through the old house to a library and map room better suited to a museum. The home went back to the early twentieth century and was full of ornate woodwork, animal skins and oil paintings. Radcliffe rifled through some files and led Knox on to his study. Seemingly in his element now, he fired up a laptop computer and found the photo of a man’s black-skinned arm. Knox made out an India ink tattoo of Arabic symbols.

  “That’s the only photo she took away with her?”

  “The only one that interested her.”

  “Let me guess,” said Knox. “You mentioned the timing. It was just prior to when the vaccine would have been switched—the cattle vaccine for the measles vaccine.”

  Radcliffe froze. When he spoke, there was an air of reverence. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “And here I was taking you for the muscle.”

  “This dead guy was a witness? Maybe a co-conspirator to the purchase or theft of the cattle vaccine. He has second thoughts. He’s killed execution-style and made to look like a poacher. Why? They could have just buried him.”

  “Same reason as poor Daniel. To send a message. You don’t fuck with these people.”

  “Because they’re organized,” Knox said, “and they’re everywhere.”

  “Every-fucking-where,” Radcliffe said. “Your Grace asked me if I knew a policewoman, Kanika Alkinyi. If she could trust her. I’ve known Kanika for years, I told her. One of the few good cops left.”

  The bogus vaccine, Knox thought. Closest to the source of this catastrophe, Radcliffe had said.

  “I’m thinking Grace wanted to use this tattoo to link the dead man to a specific group. She has a mathematician’s mind. A equals B; B equals C; A equals C.” Knox held the printout tightly. “Wild guess: Kanika Alkinyi’s beat is counterterrorism.”

  27

  Knox hesitated only a moment before calling Bishoppe.

  He had no time to plan and scheme, to wait for things to be perfect. He’d often worked under such pressure—always for Dulwich—often with the same stakes: a human life in the balance. Hostage extraction. Ransom payment. Yet the Rutherford Risk ops paled in comparison, and he knew why, exactly why, even if he refused to acknowledge it fully. Searching for a friend and colleague was a wholly different experience from searching for a person he knew in name only—and for a paycheck.

  “You know who this is?”

  “Of course, Mr. John. You’re in trouble with the police. I don’t like the police. It will cost you more.”

  He could sound streetwise and boyish in the same breath, Knox thought. “One thousand shillings.” Ten American dollars. “I need you to contact a police officer. No phones. It must be done in person.”

  “Are you listening to me?”

  Knox smiled to himself. He liked this kid. Very much. They negotiated and settled on fifteen hundred. “Her name is Kanika Alkinyi. You will need to find the precinct she works from. You will tell her, only in person, face-to-face, that you’re speaking for a friend of Maya Vladistok.” Knox worked through his instructions. He had the boy repeat them twice. “If you sense it’s going wrong, run. Got it?”

  “I have no problem running away from police, Mr. John.”

  “You’re a good man. In terms of the place and time, she needs to give me at least an hour. You understand?”

  “Two thousand shillings.”

  “You can’t renegotiate. We have an agreement.”

  “I just did.”

  Knox wiped the smile off his face; composed himself so the boy wouldn’t hear the grin in his voice. “Done.”

  He disconnected, wondering how it was he’d entrusted his security to a fourteen-year-old.

  28

  The sound of the jackals scared her the most. In the dark, Grace heard the animals following closely, too skittish to attack—she hoped—but too hungry to ignore her.

  At times too terrified to continue, she would stop, turn and shout out. The jackals would scatter. She would move on, relieved, but not for long. Soon, the horrid panting would return. The dry, insistent reminder that she was prey.

  Beneath the skim of dried dung and dirt, gooseflesh rose on her chapped skin. In this fashion, she moved through the chill night for hours, tracking stars, disturbed by the mysterious sounds around her. She dared not stop.

  As the edges of a sky bruised purple, then royal blue, she began to sort out her immediate surroundings. She spotted what she believed to be some of the edibles Olé had shown her. She took extra care inspecting the leaves in the light of the graying dawn, measured the height of the plants and examined the berries closely. She gathered what she
thought to be jackalberry and black monkey orange and, following Olé’s rigorous routine to establish the safety of each, crushed and smelled the fruit, on alert for the scents of almonds or peaches or latex, any of which meant discard it.

  At last, she dabbed a tiny bit onto her lip and waited to see if the skin went numb, stung or burned. After the lip, she tested the corner of her mouth, then the tip of her tongue, then under her tongue. Finally, she chewed a small amount. She waited. No pain or numbness. She chewed and swallowed. Then she collected bunches of each and moved on.

  The rule was to wait five hours, but she didn’t think she could. The black monkey orange was distinctive enough that she gave in to her hunger and thirst and ate the insides of three.

  Locating a source of water—the most urgent necessity—presented a greater challenge. Forget the jackals, she thought. Dehydration was her most feared enemy.

  Navigating now by landscape, she continued in her ever-increasing spiral outward from the thick bushes where she’d staged her own mauling. Hours later, she neared a low escarpment that fronted a wide section of dry riverbed, fifty yards across, cut by spring runoff, the gravel interspersed with tall islands no more than a few yards wide. A vehicle lay on the far side of the wash, smashed, rolled up against a tree.

  Ducking and hiding behind the rocks, Grace ate half of the berries and monkey oranges and felt better for it. After a time, convinced it wasn’t occupied, she dared to approach the vehicle. She found the keys in the ignition, the battery dead. A smashed starburst in the windshield, she imagined, was meant to tell the story: the driver’s head, collided on impact, giving him the later excuse of forgetting where he’d lost her.

  Grace inventoried any and all materials available to her, not surprised to find the spare tire toolkit missing. She knew the engine would have oil in it, possibly petrol. The car had four good tires and a fifth mounted to the back; two windshield wipers in front, one in back; a radio antenna that would serve as a whip; under the hood, a sheet of flexible insulation backed by aluminum foil that could serve as a small blanket. The variety of mirrors could be detached and used for signaling. She tore loose an elastic net from the back of each front seat; they could be used for storage. The owner’s manual gave her hundreds of pieces of paper she might use to start a fire.

  Fire. The idea had barely occurred to her. She knew the wood-on-wood technique, but in the dark had found no wood thick enough. The escarpment plateau was heavily treed. She broke one of the mirrors and used its glass to slice the seat upholstery. She hit a layer of plastic and spent time delaminating it. She kept the plastic and fashioned a skirt out of the upholstery.

  Working fast, determined to set the vehicle on fire as a signal, she stripped out the plastic ceiling fabric. From beneath the listing vehicle she collected black grease that she smeared onto a few pages torn from the manual. By cutting rubber hoses in the engine compartment, she struck oil and captured it in the plastic sheeting. Digging a hole, she set the bowl of oil inside.

  Euphoria coursed through her. She’d made it through the night alive. The rising billow of black smoke would . . .

  . . . signal whoever had left her here.

  Before she burned the vehicle, she had to have a damn good plan for self-defense. What if they brought dogs to hunt her?

  Grace paused, reconsidered. No matter how tempted, she was not prepared for the possible consequences. “Victory in battle is as much about preparation as it is execution”—her army drill sergeant had told her that repeatedly. Her enemy was counting on her dying of exposure. By shredding her clothes, she’d begun a ruse. To attract attention now could easily backfire.

  Undaunted, she spent more time stripping the vehicle. She gleaned lengths of nylon thread from the seats, several meters of wire from under the hood, two long dipsticks, shards of glass from the lightbulbs. She gathered her take into a piece of seat upholstery, tied it off and threw the sack over her bare back.

  If her driver returned to confirm the kill, he would come here first. He would see that someone had salvaged the vehicle. Burning the car would prevent that, but would reveal her. She needed a plan—and quickly. The man wouldn’t allow much time to elapse before he checked for her. The longer it took, the more difficult it would be to find her remains.

  Grace prioritized. She would remain close to the vehicle, hopefully with a distant view of the kill site. If dogs were brought, the smear of mud and dung might keep them at bay.

  As she worked over the vehicle, she found herself wondering again where she’d gone wrong, who had betrayed her. She’d taken a circuitous route, to be sure. Nairobi. Then the Oloitokitok Clinic. Back to Nairobi. Up to Mount Kenya, in pursuit of the substitute vaccine. The breakthrough she’d needed. Again to Oloitokitok.

  Now, alone and abandoned. Discarded. The spider silk connecting and binding each piece to the next appeared as fragile and tenuous as the facts at the start of any investigation. This uncertainty was part of the thrill of what she did. Grace thought her exposure had likely come from whoever had tried to hack her. Either from that person directly, or from wherever he or she had managed to sell the information.

  Asian Container Consolidated or Archie Nadali came to mind. Had her investigation into Samuelson tipped the scales? Had she shared Radcliffe’s photo of the tattoo with one too many? And what of the embittered and embattled Radcliffe himself? To what lengths would he go to avenge the death of his wife and his fellow reporter?

  And then there was the country at large—the vast open sore of distaste over the Kikuyu government, hoarding public funds at great cost to the Kenyan people, the wildlife and the country’s future, all while allowing the Chinese to take over everything but the Parliament House.

  What did any of it, or all of it, have to do with the missing cache of elephant tusk? Ironically, Grace had believed she’d been close to uncovering the mystery of the missing cache.

  I’m the one person who knows how to find it, she thought grimly, and I’m stuck in a desert with no way to communicate.

  And what of Travis Brantingham, the head of Larger Than Life? He’d been her last interview before this. Someone in his ranks had switched drivers on her.

  The dry wash of the seasonal stream created a warren of erosion eight to ten feet deep. A desolate, barren pit, void of anything green or living. Grace felt something evil about it, but recognized it as a good place to hide. It was easy to move through without being seen.

  Beyond it, the escarpment rose, the ground of the savanna lifted by volcanic upheaval. Atop its plateau grew twisting shrubs and struggling trees. She would find more to eat there, and possibly water. The wash ran left to right, parallel with the face of the escarpment, which continued half a kilometer farther. The rock face drew a line that pointed toward the kill spot where she’d left her clothes.

  Grace made for the end of the outcropping, wanting the higher ground and wondering if it might afford her the ability to see both the vehicle and the kill site. As she walked, she mentally inventoried the items in her knapsack, deciding upon a use for each one. She struggled to better recall Olé’s teachings. And for the first time since the horror of undressing and slathering herself with animal shit, she felt a ray of hope.

  29

  As he entered Nairobi’s Uhuru Park, Knox took note of the woman sitting next to Bishoppe on the molded plastic bench. Wearing black pants secured by a wide black-leather belt with a bold silver buckle, and an army-green, loose-fitting boat-neck shirt that spilled off her right shoulder to reveal a strong collarbone and a sky-blue bra strap, she didn’t look much like any detective Knox had ever known.

  He saw her come off the bench, her strength masked by a controlled gracefulness. Thin face, small eyes. A strong neck and square shoulders. Not for the first time he wondered how smart it was to take a meeting with a policewoman when he was wanted for the murder of a cop.

  The woman joined Knox but kept an arm�
��s-length away. Bishoppe trailed behind. They remained on the park’s central path. The cop impressed Knox with her ability to match his long strides.

  “I am Inspector Kanika Alkinyi.”

  “John Knox.”

  “Yes. We have your face pinned to our board. You’ve got yourself in a bit of trouble, haven’t you, Mr. Knox?”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “I phoned Maya after the boy found me. She told me your story. I’m inclined to believe you both, or I wouldn’t be here.”

  Was the tone of concern normal for her? Knox didn’t know. He was out of his depth. Hell, the minute he’d entered baggage claim, he’d felt that way. And he wasn’t comfortable following on a dance floor. He liked to lead.

  Eyes trained forward, mouth dry, the smell of dirt and dust commingling with automobile emissions in his nostrils, he grew impatient.

  “Should we need to speak again, we will not use telephones,” she said.

  “Agreed.” He had no idea what she was proposing.

  “The boy can be our go-between, if needed. That was a wise choice. Why do you risk seeing me?”

  “Maya said you were trustworthy. If there’s a hotel video, which I assume there isn’t, it’ll show a pair of kids knocking that cop off the balcony with a baggage cart.”

  “There is no such video. I am under the impression that you are requesting transit to Mombasa, passage on a freighter.”

  “Not yet, I’m not. Maya and I don’t see eye-to-eye on that one.”

  The policewoman reversed direction, heading back toward the gate she’d come through. Ahead was burned-out grass and a few plastic benches, litter like fallen leaves.

  Knox caught up with her. “You’re counterterrorism!”

  “I don’t discuss assignments with anyone. Certainly not you, Mr. Knox.”