Black Star Nairobi (25 page)

We didn’t eat. Sahara was too dangerous and we had come in blind—we didn’t want to risk getting caught off-guard. Then Peter left to drive some of the guests back to their hotel. Soon after the expensive engines roared off a tall white man with a crew cut called us to the sitting room to meet Sahara.

“He’s very happy with the job you’ve done—he would love it if this became a regular thing,” the man said to us in a booming voice.

“We try,” Muddy said, as we wound up a long passageway. At last we came to a massive sitting room.

“Where is our employer?” Muddy asked, sounding as African as I had ever heard her.

“Oh, he’s waiting to see you in the office,” the man boomed back. “Mr. Delaware would like to know how much he owes you.”

“Fifteen dollars per car,” O answered.

I was trying not to speak—it would have been hard to hide my American accent behind a fake Kenyan accent.

“Mr. Delaware will like the price. You know, he will be happy to see some Kenyans making something of themselves. If I was you, I would double the price—this is America,” the man advised as he reached for the double doors.

Without any warning, O kicked the man through the double doors so that they swung wide open and shot him in the back of the head. As I wondered what the fuck was going on, O rolled onto the floor into the office, got on one knee, and let out two shots in quick succession. Muddy took cover behind the wall, looked in once and then again, and let out a single shot. It had taken less than five seconds. I still hadn’t gone for my weapon. By the time I made it in, four men were lying on the floor. Three of them were dead. The man Muddy shot was one of the guards who’d been at the gate, and he was bleeding from a bullet to the stomach.

“Where is Delaware? Tell me where he is and we will call you an ambulance,” O said. Mary’s death seemed to have made O more reasonable, more willing to let motherfuckers live. But I knew differently—he was so determined to get Sahara and avenge Mary’s death that he was willing to make concessions that just a few weeks ago he wouldn’t have made. And for me,
who knew O, that made him all the more dangerous in the long term.

“He left, he is gone … I don’t know … please, I don’t want to die,” the man said, staring at the blood pooling on the floor.

Using a letter opener from the desk, Muddy tore off a sleeve from one of the dead men and gave it to the guard.

“Press hard,” she instructed him.

“Someone warned him—soon after the meeting—someone called him … told him who you were,” the guard said, now looking a little more convinced that we might let him live.

“Did he take anything with him?” I asked.

“A small suitcase and his laptop … you gotta call now,” he pleaded.

“How were you going to get in touch with him?”

He pointed to the man with the booming voice, dead on the floor.

“He was supposed to call,” the guard said.

I went over to the dead man and retrieved his phone. I didn’t have to go far through his contacts before getting to an entry with the name Big Chief. In the meantime, O and Muddy were rummaging through Sahara’s desk, looking for anything that might be useful.

“Call him—tell him we are all dead—you were the only one who survived. The faster you get off the phone, the sooner we call 911,” I told him.

“Mr. Delaware, they are all dead, all of them,” he shouted desperately into the phone. “The car washers—my friends, all of them are dead …”

“Calm down … they are all dead?” we heard Sahara ask in disbelief.

“Yes, I don’t want to die, help me,” the man said. Sahara hung
up without another word. The man dialed 911 and after he gave them the address, I took the phone back from him. We didn’t need him giving the cops more information over the phone before we were in the clear.

O and Muddy didn’t find anything. The wallets from the bodyguards contained no IDs. We didn’t have a forensics team, or unlimited time to go through the crime scene. We were nineteenth-century detectives operating in the twenty-first. It was time to go the Oakland offices of IDESC.

We couldn’t take the van. Now that things had heated up, Sahara most probably would have alerted his connections in Homeland Security, and they in turn would have alerted local cops. I took the car keys from one of Sahara’s men. Soon enough we were driving off in a massive Hummer.

We needed to do three things, and fast: get to the IDESC offices, find out if Peter had betrayed us and get him to tell us where Sahara was, and then get the hell out of the U.S. To do that we needed to get back to Michael’s, where, in the labyrinth of illegal immigrants, we would be safe. But first IDESC—there would be answers there. We were almost home, yet everything was still in the balance.

“How did you know?” I asked O.

“I didn’t,” O said from the backseat. “The thing was, Peter told Sahara we were from Ghana, and the food on the table was Ghanaian. But then the man said something about Kenyans. He was just making small talk, trying to make us comfortable. If he’d kept his mouth shut, they would have had us,” he explained, as if talking us through a game of chess.

“You saved our lives back there. We were walking into a fucking firing squad,” Muddy said, looking back at O.

“I’m sorry, guys, I was kinda slow—I didn’t see it coming,” I
said, feeling the weight of having done nothing. It occurred to me that my edge was gone since I’d come back home. I had to pick it up a notch. If Muddy hadn’t jumped in, O would have been shot by the third bodyguard.

At what point did Sahara know it was us? Did the men following us from the airport know who we were, or were they really after Julio? Or if we’d been betrayed, was it by Jason or Paul? The point was, we didn’t know—we had no ears listening through any walls anywhere. We could only react—and hope we reacted fast enough to finally take the initiative from Sahara.

I had to think and act like the under-resourced criminal that I was in real terms. I knew this system better than O and Muddy. I had to be more resourceful.

As soon as we hit Broadway Avenue, we heard a loud explosion—and right away we saw smoke billowing above the city lights. We knew it had to be the IDESC office going up in smoke. Muddy looked at me. A black Jaguar was coming toward us. It looked familiar, even in the shimmery near-dark.

Nearing the Hummer, it slowed down and the driver started to roll down the window. It was him: he had recognized the Hummer—but a second later, he realized that it wasn’t one of his bodyguards driving it.

“Sahara!” I shouted. There wasn’t enough time for me to reach my Glock and roll down the window, so I spun the unwieldy Hummer into the Jaguar. The Jaguar nimbly veered away, so that I could only nip its back, and it roared off. I turned around and sped after it. O and Muddy rolled down their windows and fired at the retreating Jaguar, shattering the rear window. It was much faster than the Hummer—the distance between us increased as
it tore through the streets, and the Hummer threatened to roll over with each sharp corner we took. Somewhere up ahead, the Jaguar turned into a side street and just like that, Sahara was gone.

And as soon as we slowed down, a black cop flagged us down. This much I knew—he was going to call the plates in before he approached us. Then he’d ask me for my driver’s license: a good fake that could pass most of the time, but not when we were driving an expensive car registered to someone else. There was no easy way out.

I put the Hummer in reverse and stepped on it. Through my rearview mirror, I could see shock all over the cop’s face as he fumbled and tried to get out of the way. The Hummer started to climb up the front of the cruiser and I stopped. O jumped out, Glock in hand, aimed at the cop. Muddy also jumped out, weapon drawn.

The cop raised his hands without us asking. I pulled his door open and secured his sidearm, then smashed in the surveillance camera and radio, and took his cell phone. I handcuffed him and led him to the Hummer. He was shaking with fear, but he was trying to be brave. I stuck him between O and Muddy, who keep their guns trained on him as we drove through the dark streets.

A few blocks away, I saw a closed car-wash station. We got him out of the car and half-dragged him into the car wash. I handcuffed him to one of the rails as he pleaded for his life.

“What are we going to do with him?” O asked. I didn’t answer. I took out my Glock and signaled for he and Muddy to leave us alone.

“I have three children …” the cop started to say.

“Listen, brother, things are not what they seem,” I said, pointing in the direction of Muddy and O. “I gotta make them believe.”

“You don’t have to do this, brother. Hey, man, I too get angry and want to bomb some shit—just walk, walk away, I won’t tell anybody,” he pleaded.

Now I knew. An APB was out on us. The cop had flagged us down because, at some point in the evening, Sahara had called in his last card.

“Brother, you have to trust me. I am undercover—I’m trying to bring down a terrorist cell,” I said.

He yelled in fear as I raised my gun to his head. I fired two shots into the wall.

“They’ll find you in the morning,” I said to his confused silence. It was probably going to be sooner, but by then we’d be harder to find.

I ran back to the Hummer and found O and Muddy looking surprised.

“I didn’t kill him—told him I was UC,” I said, managing a laugh that was more of a grunt. “The confusion will buy us time.”

The cop would believe me—and more important, he would appear convincing to those who were hunting us. He would believe that Muddy and O were the terrorists, and at worst, because he had encountered us and lived to write his report, that I had a conscience, or at best, that I was who I said I was: an undercover agent. Doubt that bought me that split second between “kill,” “wound,” or “handcuff” might come in handy.

Where was Sahara? He had taken a suitcase and laptop, and he was on his way somewhere—and I was sure that he was the one who’d firebombed the IDESC office. He didn’t have an office anymore, and he couldn’t go back home—not with one of his men in the hospital, probably telling the cops all he knew. It hit me then—he was going back to Kenya. He seemed like a man who had cut his losses. In the same way that, in the U.S., we
could emerge from and disappear into the immigrant community, in Kenya he had camouflage in the tourist hotels and networks. In any case, we could no longer, without significant risk, stay in the U.S. It was time for us to go back too.

We came to a dance club that was open, drove past it, and parked the Hummer a few blocks away. We wiped it down. We couldn’t fully cover our tracks, but we could put some time between the authorities and us. To get back into Mexico, we just needed to be an hour or so ahead of everyone else. We took a cab from the club to Peter’s.

The main door to Peter’s apartment complex was propped open. As we walked up the stairs, we heard loud Malian blues music. When we got to his door, we drew our weapons. It wasn’t locked and we could hear voices talking above the music. I pushed the door open slowly, and smoke from weed billowed out into the passageway. Peter was having a fucking party. When he saw us, he ran over and pulled us into the kitchen in excitement.

“Am I free? Tell me I’m free …” he said, looking from Muddy to O to me.

“He escaped. He knew—someone warned him,” I told him.

Peter sank slowly to the floor.

“Shit, then he knows I set him up … I am fucking dead,” he said, life literally draining out of him.

Sahara hadn’t killed Peter because Peter had sold us out—that was one possibility. The other was that once Sahara had figured out who we really were, then we became the principals. Only after killing us would he go after Peter, and then only if there was something he would gain from it. He was that pragmatic. His mission was more important than killing Peter.

Looking at Peter slunk to the floor, high and disappointed, I felt that there was no way he was the one who had betrayed us. If he was pretending, then, on the strength of such a convincing act alone, he deserved to live. That left Hassan, Jason, or someone working closely with Jason. Like Paul. It had to be Jason or Paul. That would have to wait until we got back to Kenya.

“Any idea where he might have gone?” I asked him.

“No, but one of the guests in the car talked about them going to Kenya,” Peter answered.

“We need to talk to them, maybe to one of the guests staying at the Hilton,” I told Peter.

“Two of them wanted to see some girls. Like I was a pimp,” he said.

But in Sahara’s eyes, Peter, whether deserving of death or not, was compromised. We couldn’t use him to get to the guests. We had to find another way of getting into the Hilton and grabbing one of them. We could call in a bomb threat. Or we could set off the fire alarm. But both plans meant that the place would be swarming with cops and firemen. There was only one way—we had to get into the Hilton quietly and talk to one of them there. It was the riskiest but the least expected move.

Close to midnight, three Africans—two men and a woman, dressed in business attire—walked into the Hilton. They were laughing like they’d been out having a good time, and the woman had her high heels in her right hand and her left hand linked through the elbow of one of the men.

“Packages for Room 312?” O asked at the desk. The clerk typed something into his computer.

“Sorry, Mr. Kimani. No package has come in yet, but a Mr. Henderson left you a message a few minutes ago, saying it’ll get here in the morning,” he informed us.

That message was from Peter. It was to establish an identity for O, and at the same time tell us whether Martin Kimani was still in town. We had bet that, at this late hour, the clerk would just take the message rather than wake up the guest.

“And they say things are slow in Africa,” Muddy said as we started to walk toward the elevators.

“Shit—excuse my language … hey, guys, wait a minute. I can’t seem to find my room key,” O said, as he rummaged through his wallet. The clerk looked at O’s wallet, and for a second, it looked like he was going to ask him for his ID.