The Informationist: A Thriller (37 page)

The truck began to slow, and Munroe stood on the front table and with Beyard’s knife cut a hole in the canvas just above the metal frame. There was a checkpoint ahead, the soldiers a ragtag group of four. She signaled this to Beyard, and when the truck shuddered to a full stop, she positioned the weapon using the frame as a bipod and kept the unit leader in sight as he approached.

The conversation between the commander and Manuel began as light banter and shifted quickly in tone as the military man began to check the truck and Manuel offered pecuniary incentive to avoid it. Two of the commander’s men walked toward the back, and Munroe gestured this to the others. Beyard and Bradford shifted position along the rear. The voices at the front were raised, news out of Mongomo no doubt playing into the equation.

Munroe curled her index finger and rested it on the trigger; taking out the road patrol wasn’t ideal, but if that’s what was required to get to the coast, so be it. Manuel passed a wad of cash out the window, and she paused. The commander stared at it, hesitated, and took it. He called to his men, and moments later the truck started up.

Munroe remained on the table and watched the road and the stretches of landscape where the rain forest had long since been exploited and the terrain partially reclaimed by secondary forest. She sniffed the air, could smell the salt, and knew they were getting close. They turned off the road before entering the city proper, looped south toward the beach along a well-used track, and stopped in a hard-packed clearing two hundred yards from the shore, where a small collection of houses stood abutting the ocean. Rust-red rooftops were visible above the foliage, and from beyond the houses came the rumble of the water. If the boat was ready, as it should be, five minutes was all that it would take to be gone from this place.

The truck stopped. Munroe threw the strap of a duffel bag over her shoulder and climbed into the sunlight. Beyard circled to the front
of the truck. He spent a moment in hushed conversation with Manuel, and Munroe caught snippets of hurried instructions. Beyard handed the driver a thick pouch, and with a nod of assent Manuel slipped out of sight into the verdure.

With the driver gone, Beyard returned and placed the transponder and a key in Munroe’s palm. “I need five minutes to swap out the plates,” he said. He pointed to a footpath from the parking area to a house on the perimeter. “The extra fuel is inside. You’ll know the boat as soon as you see it. Can you ready her?”

“Leave it,” she said, and stood in his way, “It’s not worth it.”

“Essa,
my
life may be mine to gamble, but I won’t risk the lives of my people. I need to buy them time, and we need the boat readied—I can’t do both.” He scooted behind her and planted a kiss on the nape of her neck. “Go.”

She stood for a second’s deliberation and then slapped the side of the truck. “Let’s go,” she said to Bradford.

He pulled what he could carry from the truck, and together they followed the path that Beyard had pointed out.

On the shore were several boats, one of them a paint-worn skiff differentiated from the others by the powerful outboard. Munroe dumped the bag into the boat and looked back toward the trail.

From the shore she could see the top of the truck’s canvas and down the road the top of an antenna moving toward the truck. She stood on the boat’s prow to get an extra three feet of height and caught a streak of black moving with the antenna.

Time slowed, her heart raced. She reached for the nearest weapon and, as her fist closed around it, took off running for the truck. Each forward stride up the sand was an excruciating time-lapse drop into eternity.

Around a bend the clearing came into view. The internal war drum pounded, and the world faded to gray. Beyond the truck were three black vehicles and, standing beside the truck, blocking Francisco, were nine men, heavily armed. Francisco stood with his fingers laced behind his head, and to the right of him was the same commander who had nearly shot Munroe that night on the boat. His sidearm was pointed at Francisco’s head.

Francisco turned toward Munroe. Their eyes locked. He smiled. And in the half second it took her to raise the rifle to her shoulder and take aim, the commander fired.

Pressure tore through Munroe’s head, claws ripping her skull open from the inside out. The air was empty of all oxygen. She couldn’t breathe, and through eyes not her own she watched in slow motion as Francisco dropped to his knees and fell face-first into the dust.

And then the world went black.

Every muscle, every fiber shrieked the command to get to him. She lunged. Strong arms held her back. A hand was over her mouth. Someone was screaming, the agony of a person burned alive, surreal and horrible, the howls, all of them coming from inside her head. And then there was silence followed by words, calm words, reassuring, coming from her mouth. And a hand, her hand, pulling herself from Bradford’s grasp and the other hand reaching for the silenced rifle and slamming the butt of it across Bradford’s face, knocking him to the ground.

On the other side of the truck, a soldier reached for Francisco’s body. Through the scope, Munroe set the mark for the man’s forehead, let off a shot, and was gone from where she’d lain before the body crumpled on top of Francisco.

Touch him and die.

There was confusion now. Orders. Commands. The others dropped and found cover, searched out the direction of the shot. In the lapsed seconds of chaos, Munroe moved into the bush, silent, invisible, fast, the hunted now the hunter. Two more of the enemy moved toward Francisco’s body. She fired two rounds that pierced body armor, then for good measure two more, each accurately aimed.

Touch him and die.

They knew this now, and their confusion segued to structure. She searched the faces and uniforms for the commander; she would find him and take his life from him the way he had taken Francisco’s; nothing else mattered.

There was movement on the periphery. Shadows crept in the direction of where she’d left Bradford. The trail. The boat. Munroe paused. Concentration shifted from the commander to the path and back again until the decision to keep the way clear was forced. Each round let off
a spit, found its mark, silenced, but in the stillness audible. Gunfire returned in her direction; the bullets kicked dirt inches from where she lay. She moved again, circled around, stopped on the edge of the clearing behind the truck, and began again to search out the commander. There, only yards away, Francisco’s lifeless body watched with unseeing eyes, beckoned, and the world went silent.

Munroe crept toward him, oblivious to everything but the smile on his face and the power of his call. There was a staccato of gunfire from the direction of the shore and a rain of bullets over her head that took down two men behind her. She paused only to look back and then, feral and catlike, crouched again along the ground toward Francisco. She reached for him, could almost touch him, and then in the bush, there across the clearing in the line of sight beyond her hand, was a ghost of movement. She paused. Among those shadows was the commander, and he must die.

She drew away from Francisco and with patient relish cut off the commander’s escape by taking out the tires on each black vehicle. And then, out of ammunition, she pulled the knife from Francisco’s belt, left the rifle beside his body, and returned to the edge of the clearing to wait.

In the silence, adrenaline flowed, and with the focus of each passing minute, bloodlust heightened. Within the foliage across the clearing, shadows played against shadows until recognition formed: four of the enemy. One mattered, and she would have him.

She moved again, tracked them through the bush, closed her eyes and listened to the whispers of the landscape. Understood and smiled. They were circling, hunting for her. She would play the game of cat and mouse, eliminate the three, and take him down alone.

To hide, to hunt along the damp and dim of the rain-forest floor, was familiar, natural. The musk of living things permeated the air; it mixed with the inner cauldron of rage and fed the urge to strike, to kill. The knife was warm, an extended part of her body, and she stalked with patience, creating diversion to draw gunfire and deplete ammunition until their weapons were useless. And then, an apparition, she moved from the shadows long enough to kill before disappearing again.

Until there was only him.

He was there, waiting; she could feel his eyes and the figment of his breath along her spine. She was loud, careless, tempting as she moved through the bush, and then it came, the lunge from behind. She twisted to avoid the impact of his knife and in one drawn-out movement brought Francisco’s blade across his neck. She forced the commander to the ground and, with fingers clenched in his hair, held his head, pulled the knife from his hand, and plunged his own blade into his throat. She jerked it around through tendon and veins, and when the crunch of his severed spinal column vibrated in her hand, the rush of euphoria flowed. She continued until his head separated from his body, held it high in gratified triumph, rose to her feet, and, trailing blood and fluid, carried it out of the forest.

For a quiet moment, Munroe stood over Francisco, droplets staining the ground at her feet, and then she struck out at the bodies that lay on him and near him, kicking in blind fury until he was free of the defilement of their touch. She knelt over him, dripping a mixture of sweat and blood onto his body, and in a picture of sacrificial offering placed the commander’s head in front of open eyes that stared lifelessly into nothing. She reached for him, fingers shaking until they touched his forehead, pulled him close, cradled his shoulders, and closed his eyes. Then lifted her head to the sky and screamed.

It was primal, pain and rage, fury and pain again. Her body shook while tears that had not been shed for nearly a decade racked their way to the surface, and she buried her head in Francisco’s chest.

L
IGHT CAME SLOWLY
into the fog that was in her mind, awareness brought first by the sound of Bradford’s boots and then by his hand on her shoulder as he knelt beside her. Munroe raised her face to look at him, saw the carnage that surrounded them and the commander’s head on the ground, and realized then for the first time what it was that she had done.

“We need to go,” Bradford said.

Munroe cradled Francisco and said, “I’m not leaving him.”

“Together we can carry him.”

…

B
RADFORD STARED OVER
the ocean, hand to rudder, and glanced at the coordinates on the transponder. It had been three hours since they’d left the coast. They were running low on fuel, and as far as he could tell, there was nothing but ocean for miles to come.

He glanced at Munroe. She was seated between the benches, cross-legged, with Francisco in her arms and nothing but blankness on her face, the same as it had been since they’d shoved off from shore. She looked up for a half second, met his gaze, then returned to Francisco, and Bradford returned to the water, pushing back the crushing ache that came every time he stole a glance in her direction.

Nothing he’d read, none of the interviews he’d sat through in researching Munroe’s past, could have prepared him for what she’d done. He understood now the fear others had described. She had been brutally efficient, accurate, had wasted no movement, misspent no energy, and she was fast, terrifyingly fast.

Bradford checked the coordinates again and then the horizon and saw it there, very faint, a black blemish against the blue, and he understood what it meant. He looked again at Munroe and then at Francisco and what little remained of his skull and the brain that had driven the genius of the man. What a waste. What a goddamn fucking waste.

The vastness of the ocean was dizzying, and over time the ship loomed large on the horizon, until finally they reached its bulk and Bradford brought the boat alongside. From the deck a crane swung over the water. Cables and sling lowered. Munroe sat motionless and gave no indication that she was aware of being shipside. Bradford knelt beside her and touched her hand; she looked up with such hollowness that it took his breath away. And then the fog in her eyes cleared and she turned toward the trawler, then back to him and pointed and said, “Hooks go there.”

She bent over Francisco and kissed his forehead.
“When my enemies and foes came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell. Though wars should rise against me, in this will I be confident …”
Her voice trailed from a mumble to silence, then she stood and went up the ladder on the side of the ship.

Bradford fought back the lump forming in his throat, moved quickly to secure the sling, grabbed an AKM, and followed her, his foot touching the first rung of the ladder seconds after she went over the top. There was a whir of motor as the deck crane began to hoist, and when the small boat was about eight feet out of the water, it stopped. He moved faster, his feet finding a rhythm against the steel until he reached the deck and was hit by panic.

M
unroe was fifteen feet ahead and stood facing a large man whose face Bradford couldn’t see. Her mouth moved, and although Bradford couldn’t hear the words, her eyes held the same empty glaze that had swept in when Francisco’s body had dropped to the ground. Bradford watched her muscles tense and knew that if she went after the big guy, there would be another death, possibly two. He shouted her name, and her focus shifted slowly until she stared directly at him. Bradford maintained eye contact until the tension of the moment diffused, and then he turned toward the man, and when he did, a shock of recognition ran through him. He could see the same written on the other man’s face.

Bradford nodded. “George.”

Wheal said, “Miles.”

And Munroe said, “Fuck.”

And then she spoke again, the lucidity in the stream of words a stark contrast to her behavior of the past hours. “We’re taking the ship to Douala,” Munroe said to Wheal. “After that, you can have it back.” And then to Bradford, “I’m going to the control deck. Have Wheal get the boat into the hold and then keep him away from me and from the ship controls. If he even twitches in the wrong direction, shoot him.” And then she walked off.