Shadows at Midnight (31 page)

“Can you have them all tested?” Dan asked.

She shook her head angrily. “Absolutely not. It’s out of the question. The tests cost about a thousand dollars. I paid for them myself because I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I was getting incredibly erratic results from the drugs. Testing all our medicine would cost millions of dollars. And if I were crazy enough to come out into the open about this, you can rest assured that only the real drugs would be tested. I would immediately lose my job and I would be arrested for slander. Not to mention earning the enmity of my countrymen. Doubting the New Day Foundation, which gave us all this.” She waved her hand at her modern office, encompassing the efficient hospital outside. “It doesn’t bear thinking about. I would be put in an insane asylum. Or, considering the way Mbutu is going, taken out to the river and shot, my body left for the crocodiles.” Her lips pressed together and a lone tear ran down an ebony cheekbone. “My husband was almost ready to write an article about it when he disappeared. They found his body ten days later. I identified it only by his wedding band.”

“These are perfectly identical.” Claire held the two packages side by side and could detect no difference at all, not even a minute one.

“Yes, they are. The Foundation shipped about a hundred million dollars’ worth of medicine last year. If two-thirds are fakes, that’s almost seventy million dollars in profit. Tax free. I’m sure some of it goes to Mbutu, but you can bet a good chunk would go to the man who is the great benefactor of Makongo.” She leaned forward to Claire and Dan. “To the man Marie went back to the embassy to warn you about. And the man who probably killed her.”

“Bowen McKenzie,” Claire breathed and Aba nodded grimly.

Dan checked their surroundings, then honed in on her face. “How do you know that, honey?”

She took a deep breath and watched his eyes. “When I came out of the coma, I couldn’t move very well. It took me another month to sit up and many more weeks to start walking down the hospital corridor. And at first I was really confused. I had trouble”—here she mimicked Dr. Fallows, her neurologist—“ ‘orienting myself in space and time.’ I’d lose track of the time completely. Sometimes I forgot whether it was day or night. And I forgot I was in the hospital, I thought I was back in Laka. A few times I thought I was in Durban and a couple of times I thought I was a student again, in Georgetown.” She huffed out a breath. “Did any of that happen to you?”

“No,” he answered. “But I didn’t sustain any head injuries at all. I lost my spleen and my knee and blew an eardrum, that’s it. But I’ve seen plenty of cases of head injuries and PTSD and they’re not fun.”

“No, they’re not,” she agreed. She looked down at the ground, at the weeds growing out of a crack in the pavement and tried to flatten them with her toe.

“Claire?”

She drew in a deep breath, blew it back out again in a controlled stream.

“I had nightmares. Like the one you saw. Every night. Sometimes several times a night. It got so bad I was terrified to fall asleep. I think I was half crazy for a while there. The only thing that would work was sedation so strong I lost my REM sleep and that was even worse.”

“Jesus,” Dan breathed. “That must have been hell.”

She nodded jerkily. “Oh yeah.” Hell was almost a mild term for it. “And though I didn’t remember during the day what had happened, I think there was information in my subconscious that just kept geysering up, horribly. It’s as if the images simply wouldn’t let me alone. The nightmares varied but a lot was the same. In the most frequent one, I am crouching in some bushes and things are going on. Things I don’t understand. There are flashlights, men—Africans—moving around, shifting things. And then a big truck drives out and another big truck, looking exactly the same, drives in. And then—” Her throat went dry and she licked her lips. “And then a woman beckons to me. And in doing that, she has to stand up a little and a man sees her. A white man. And this is when it gets truly horrible. The sky is always red and the men are more devils than men. Red-skinned, scampering, like some scene out of Hieronymus Bosch. And the white man is the head devil. I can’t see his face, but somehow I know him. I know I know him but I don’t know how. He points to the woman and turns to one of the other devils, who grins and brings a rifle to his shoulder and fires. There’s like this red mist around the woman’s head and she crumbles. Then the white man turns to me and opens his mouth. It’s bloodred inside and he cocks his finger at me and . . . I wake up.” She couldn’t suppress a shudder and Dan put his arm around her shoulders. “That’s the one I had nightly, for months.”

That terrible chill had come over her again, though the temperature was in the mid-eighties, hot and humid. The cold penetrated to her core

“There was a shrink in the neurology ward. We had a lot of sessions, while he was assessing my neurological responses. He’d listen to me, then ask me totally unrelated questions. I told him about the dream and that I had it over and over again. That had never happened to me before, either with dreams or nightmares, not that I’d had that many nightmares before the bombing. The doctor said it was an anxiety dream and a guilt dream. I felt guilty that I had survived and Marie hadn’t. And that I was anxious that I was never going to recover fully. The white man represented weakness, loss.” She shook her head. “He never really convinced me, but in those days, I didn’t have the energy to argue.”

Claire looked at Dan. His face was tight, eyes hard.

“Dan, I think I witnessed a murder,” she whispered. “I think that’s what it’s about.”

His jaw muscles clenched. “I think you did, too. And maybe someone isn’t too hot on you getting your memory back. Where are your medical records?”

“My what?”

“Your medical records. Do you know what they say?”

“I guess. Traumatic amnesia, functional loss, hallucinations. Or at least the Latinate terms for those. I hacked into my records one afternoon. It wasn’t in any way hard to do. There were reams of documents and a lot of assessments but the bottom line was that I was crazy from the trauma. That scared me. And I think I understood that day that I was never going to get my job back. DIA could never afford to have an analyst who’d had that kind of psych evaluation.”

Dan looked around sharply at the sound of a car coming up behind them. It was a taxi, one of the few cruising the streets. He hailed it, bundled her inside and gave the name of the hotel.

In the backseat, he rested his arm along the back of the seat and brought his mouth to her ear.

“I think those records saved your life. I think you saw that mysterious white man kill your friend and if he had had any inkling that you were a witness he’d have had you killed down in Florida. And you would never have seen it coming.”

God no, she’d never have seen it coming. She’d barely escaped with Dan by her side. For most of this spring and summer, she’d have been as vulnerable as a newborn kitten.

It had to be said. Horrible as it was to think, it had to be said.

“It all boils down to Bowen, doesn’t it?” she said slowly. “My troubles started when I did a search for his name. And he was in Laka that day, instead of in Algiers. And the deputy prime minister isn’t around anymore to give him an alibi.” She swallowed against a dry throat. “If Aba is right, the Red Army didn’t invade that day. And if my dreams are right, then Bowen McKenzie is—”

“A murderer,” Dan said harshly. “And guilty of high treason.”

Well, he was heading for Africa, doing God’s work, wasn’t he? He would be back on US soil just as the frenzy reached its apogee, having overseen the distribution of lifesaving drugs and having gotten rid of that bitch Claire Day, who was a danger at exactly the wrong moment.

He relaxed in the soft, buttery ergonomic chair in the luxurious aft section of the cabin and poured himself a celebratory finger of cognac. Hennessy, 1974, an excellent year. By the time the plane landed in Laka, it would have worked its way through his system and out again. He could afford it.

He pressed a button. “Heston.”

A moment later, the door at the end of the cabin opened. The back of the plane was outfitted with ten regular coach seats and a roomy area for weaponry.

Heston stood at attention. “Sir.”

Bowen looked up lazily at his soldier. His war-dog. Who lately had not been a good dog at all. He got one more chance. If he fucked this up, he’d have to go.

The next stage of his life was going to be high-stakes, with no margin for error. He couldn’t afford having a fuckup in his life.

“Men all squared away, Heston?”

They were traveling with three other soldiers, Heston’s men. Heston hadn’t wanted any more, because in the new Makongo, four white men traveling in a group already attracted enough attention. Heston had insisted on the men, though. Which was absurd. Four trained soldiers against an untrained woman. Overkill.

So if anything went wrong this time, he’d shoot Heston himself.

He speared Heston with a hard look. “This time we do it right. As soon as we find her, I want a snatch and grab, I need to know what she’s got. We’ll pump her for any information she might have. See if she’s passed anything on. I don’t care if you get the info the hard way. She’s costing me time and money so she has to pay before we get rid of her.” He gave a wintry smile. “She’s a looker. You’ll like that part, won’t you, Heston?”

“Yessir.” Heston tried to keep a soldierly demeanor, but his cheekbones turned red. This was what turned Heston on. Violence made him horny and it was the reason Heston had been kicked out of the army on a dishonorable discharge. One rape charge too many.

It was massively stupid. Heston had sacrificed a military career because he couldn’t keep it in his pants.

Once again, he questioned his reliance on Heston, who was proving to be an inadequate and inefficient tool.

Sooner or later dull tools got discarded.

Jesus.

In frustration he thrust his hands in his hair and pulled.

Last night he’d somehow sensed that this was coming. He’d made love for hours to Claire, as if joining his body to hers could create a magical aura of protection, as if the more time he spent inside her, the safer she’d be. If he could have, he’d have tucked her right into his own body and kept her there.

He’d felt danger approaching and he’d been right. Claire had just proposed setting herself up as bait.

“Yes, way,” Claire said calmly. She turned in her chair. “Jesse, you tell him.”

Dan rounded on Jesse, willing him to be the rational one here and tell Claire it was a crazy plan. Jesse scratched his head because he didn’t have enough hair to pull and sighed.

“Well, I’ve looked at it upside down and right-side up, Dan. It makes a lot of sense. Right guys?”

Frank Rizzo and Dave Lee looked up from checking their weapons and nodded. But they wouldn’t look him in the eyes. They wouldn’t look him in the eyes because the whole fucking plan was
insane
.

The Etoile was mostly empty of guests. On the off chance that someone was checking, and somehow knew his fake name, Dan had relocated them to an empty room that he’d slipped fifty bucks to the clerk to keep empty. If the guy at the front desk thought it was strange to pay for a room and then pay to use another room instead, he kept it to himself.

The Makongans thought all white men were crazy anyway.

Jesse, Frank and Dave had arrived last night at nine on the seven p.m. flight, which had only been two hours late. Dan didn’t know Frank and Dave well but he knew
of
them and knew they were good men to have at your back. Right now, together with Jesse, they were his absolute new best friends, because they’d come to protect Claire.

And now Claire was planning on throwing herself straight into the line of fire.

No. No way.

She wasn’t trying to wheedle, either. That was what had Dan so scared. She wasn’t asking permission or sounding him out. She was planning this, full speed ahead.

Five minutes after arriving, Frank and Dave had already fallen half in love with her, so there was no use turning to them. He’d hoped Jesse would at least see his point of view, but no. He was just as infatuated as the other two.

All three were sitting on the edge of the bed like idiots, watching her pace back and forth, eyes glued to her, their heads swiveling as if at some championship tennis match.

“We don’t have proof, that’s the thing,” Claire said, her beautiful face scrunched in ferocious concentration. “The best thing—the
only
thing—we can do is trick out a confession. And the only way Bowen would do that is if he is convinced I’m alone. I know him, he’d love for a chance to gloat, to show me how smart he is.”

“And he’ll do it knowing he’s going to have you killed!” Dan was gritting his teeth so hard the grinding sound filled the room. “Of course he’ll gloat. Because you’ll never live to tell anyone and he knows that.”

Claire turned to him, looking surprised. She waved at her little fan club sitting on the edge of the bed. “Well, what do I have you guys for? You’re there as backup. Bowen will think I’m alone and he’ll have his guard down. It’s a classic ambush.”

Dan tried to sound reasonable even though his head was ready to explode. “We’re fast and we’re good, honey. But what if he comes armed? We’re not Superman. We can’t outrun a bullet.”

She was shaking her head before he finished. “No. The one thing about Bowen everyone knows is that he was all intel, he wasn’t an operative at all. I know for a fact he doesn’t know how to use a gun. He used to boast about it, and the security types used to snigger behind his back. He’s not going to be carrying a gun, trust me.”

“He’ll have backup,” Dan warned.

“Yes, he will. And that’s where you come in. I expect you four to neutralize the backup and be ready. Now—I need to check equipment. I know you guys have checked your weapons. Jesse—did you bring what I asked?”

“Oh yeah.” Jesse stood up and pulled a tiny piece of plastic from his jeans pocket. It was shaped like a comma and he fit it behind Claire’s ear. When he pulled a lock of hair over her ear it was invisible. “Perfect. A bud is always visible but this conducts through bone. No one could possibly know it’s there. One of my buddies in the detachment command is a nut for this stuff. He’s going to want it back.”

Dan ground his teeth even harder. It was going to be hard to give the jarhead back his earpiece if a sniper put a round through Claire’s head. It would be all covered with blood.

He opened his mouth to say something when Claire held up a hand.

“Let’s test this. Talk to me.”

Jesse went into the bathroom. Dan could barely hear a low male murmur.

When Jesse came out, Claire’s eyes were shining. “Wow. It was like you were talking directly into my ear. What about video, now? What did your friend have that we can use?”

Jesse brought out a small, thin panel of plastic with a circle on top. “Top of the line miniaturization,” he said, tapping the button. “This turns it on. It’s very lightweight. You slide this button through a buttonhole of a shirt. I brought you a size small shirt in case you didn’t have one. One of Dan’s would never fit you.” He held up a plain white cotton shirt that was too big for Claire but not outrageously so. Most people wore loose clothing in the tropical heat. He held the shirt up, with the button threaded through it. Then he placed a small video screen on the table and switched it on. The screen showed Jesse, and Dan behind him wearing a ferocious scowl.

“See how it works?” Jesse said, and the speakers on the video screen repeated
See how it works?

The sound was excellent, the image was sharp.

“Good to go,” Claire murmured.

“Let me talk to Bowen,” Dan pleaded. “And you stay out of it.” Let Bowen come after
him
, not Claire.

Claire put her hand against his face and smiled at him. “No,” she said gently. “It wouldn’t work. You know that, Dan. It has to be me and he has to think I’m working alone. That I’m this idiot who will just walk unaware into a trap. He’d never believe you don’t have backup and he’d never talk to you.” She sighed. “I’m not entirely sure even I can trip him up but I’m the only one who can try.”

“Claire—” Dan began in a reasonable tone, though he felt anything but reasonable. He felt like beating his head against the hotel room’s stuccoed wall.

“No, Dan. You listen to me.” Claire’s voice was sharper now. “Did you hear what Aba said? People are dying. Bowen’s going to continue these criminal acts unless someone stops him. It has to be done.”

“You want to avenge Marie, that’s what you want,” Dan grumbled.

“Absolutely. That, too. But this is bigger than us. And you know that.” She didn’t even wait for him to respond, just went to her computer. “Now that that’s settled I’m going to send a clear message to Mr. Bowen McKenzie, wherever he is.”

She went into Computer Mode, hunched over the keyboard, nose an inch from the monitor, hands flying.

Jesse looked at him.
What’s she doing?

Dan shrugged. How should he know? Claire was a law unto herself.

She was mumbling to herself under her breath. “Come on, Bowen,” she whispered, “where are you?”

Jesse, Frank and Dave simply sat on the bed, unmoving, letting Claire do her thing.

Finally, Dan couldn’t stand it anymore. He put a hand on her shoulder, controlling the wince at the feel of her fragile bones. Right now, Claire looked capable of taking on the world. She was infused with fury and righteousness, a woman on a mission of revenge.

But she was small and not back to full strength. Dan had seen big strong men, trained to kill, tough as nails, fall. All it took was one bullet. With Claire, it was entirely possible that Bowen could fell her with one strong blow, if it was true he wouldn’t draw a weapon.

Dan was terrified of losing her. The line between life and death was so very fine and could be crossed at any moment . . .

“What are you doing, honey?”

Claire blew out a big breath and sat back, frowning.

“Looking for Bowen. I figured he’d have someone tracking me and that they’d have found out by now that I’d flown to Laka. I thought Bowen would be the kind of man to come after me, damn it. But there are no reservations from the continental United States in the name of Bowen McKenzie. His face has been plastered all over the newspapers lately. He wouldn’t dare fly under an assumed name. But I simply can’t find . . .”

She stopped suddenly.

“What? What, honey?”

But she was lost to him again, back communing with the computer. Another five minutes went by. The only sound in the hotel room was the clacking of the keyboard at twice the speed he’d ever heard.

Claire smiled and narrowed her eyes. “Gotcha,” she said softly. “Look.”

She angled the netbook so he could see the monitor better. A flight manifest.

“He’s flying on a private plane, the Foundation corporate jet. The pilot filed a flight plan to Laka. And he’s flying with four men.” Dan’s hand tightened on her shoulder. “We’ve got him now, oh yeah.”

Claire pounded the keyboard for another minute. “The plane is scheduled to land in Laka at two thirty p.m. this afternoon. I need to send him a message. I’ll text him.”

“You have his cell phone number?” Dan asked, startled.

She smiled again and for a moment looked positively wicked. “Darling Dan, the day I can’t find a cell phone number is the day I hang up my computer.”