The Watchers (37 page)

The van swiftly merged onto busy Aba Expressway and several miles later turned swiftly on Tombia Road, adjacent to the city's venerable Polo Club. Without even a touch of the brakes, the van swerved behind the white bulk of Le Meredien Hotel, admired by those in-the-know as the finest hotel in West Africa, and ducked into a basement-level entrance.

The doors were open before the van had stopped moving. No hotel personnel were in sight—the colonel and two Nigerian adjutants hopped out to help their slow-walking white passengers out of the vehicle and toward a nearly hidden service door.

For Abby, the sight of a polished marble hallway under elegantly recessed electric lights, after days of living in the jungle, proved overwhelming. She gasped and smiled, for she felt as if she had almost forgotten such places even existed. Her reaction was much the same when they reached a service elevator as its doors shut of their own accord and the motors whooshed them upward.

Colonel Shawkey had truly thought of everything. When the doors dinged and slid open, the two aides released her arm and quickly darted outside to make sure the hallway was unoccupied. Nodding the go-ahead, they resumed their places and escorted Abby to a door that opened into a luxury suite, which tore a sigh of relief from her bloodstained lips.

The rest of the day Abby spent in blissful recuperation. While Dylan conferred privately with the colonel in the sitting area, Abby stepped into the suite's spacious, white-tiled bathroom and bathed for nearly an hour. By the time she had dried off and retired to a king-sized bed nearby, a privately hired female doctor had arrived, carrying an IV saline kit in an oversized shopping bag.

Soon after that came food—so much gourmet room-service fare that it took two porters to wheel in the trays. Abby had been so preoccupied with the preservation of life and limb that she'd forgotten how little and how infrequently she and her friends had eaten over the last several days. Wheeling in an IV-stand improvised from a coat hanger and a rolling lamp stand, she walked in and moaned at the mere sight of it all.

The doctor had helped her sit down and was preparing to make her exit when Dylan, who had yet to even change out of his tattered and spotted clothing, held up his hand.

“Doctor, I wonder if you could perhaps help me as well.”

“Of course,” said the doctor, eyeing his obviously injured side.

“Oh, it's not that,” he said. “Well, at least for the moment. For right now, I wonder if you have a scalpel on you.”

Looking him over curiously, the doctor reached into her shopping bag and produced the same. When Dylan stood and peeled the remnant of his shirt from the dried blood on his wounded side, she shook her head. “You do not need a scalpel for that, sir. I will gladly disinfect and perhaps suture, if it is needed.”

“It's not the wound,” Dylan said. “Please, come closer.”

She approached him for a better look.

“Do you see the small teardrop tattooed there, just beside the wound?”

She nodded yes.

“I need you to make an incision right over it, exactly one half inch deep.”

She stared at him as if he was crazy.

“Please. It's very important. I will pay a bonus, if you like.”

“Could you tell me what we are doing?”

“Let's just say we're retrieving a buried artifact.”

CHAPTER
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51

The Nigerian doctor shrugged, sat down beside Dylan, and took out some alcohol swabs. After cleaning the area thoroughly, she brought her scalpel blade against the skin.

“Sir, you do know this is going to hurt quite badly?”

“I was here when the thing was inserted,” he replied. “Unfortunately, I remember it well.”

“Would you like some rum?” asked Colonel Shawkey from a corner of the hotel suite. Dylan declined. And so the doctor slowly sank the blade into the area where most men his age would have located their “love handles.” Dylan had none, although the blade did not penetrate muscle.

“Please, palpate the area,” he asked in a pained whisper when the incision was complete. With a grimace the doctor reached in and closed her fingers around first one, then two round objects. Each one she dropped carefully onto the room-service tablecloth. Then she swabbed the area again, sutured the incision, and tightly wrapped a bandage over everything.

No one spoke as Dylan carefully picked up the two round objects, which seemed smeared with some kind of wax or oil. He rinsed them in hot water from the waiting tea service, finally holding them up to the room's light for all to get a better look. The objects glinted before their eyes, bright and dazzling. Abby gasped.

Diamonds!
Big ones—easily twice the size of the huge rock her father had given Teresa.

“This is one of the oldest tricks in the game,” Dylan explained. “A last-resort cash infusion—for emergencies exactly like this, when a secret operative finds himself hard pressed to get cash from the usual sources.”

“Oh,” sighed Abby in mock disappointment. “And here I thought you were about to give me a whale of a belated birthday present.”

“Colonel Shawkey,” Dylan said, ignoring her, his eyes still fixed on the jewels, “I have trusted you with my life. Therefore, as I have no other currency with which to leave this country, let alone reimburse you for this room, I trust you to fetch the highest price for these beauties on the local market. I know we're not in Sierra Leone, but I imagine there is still a good trade in stones of this value.”

“Indeed there is,” said the colonel, who seemed to avoid looking at the jewels himself.

“I know in New York or London, they would fetch around seventy-five thousand dollars apiece.”

“They will not command that around here, sadly,” said the colonel. “However, I can easily get you half as much in American dollars.”

“That will be wonderful, my friend, thank you.” Dylan seemed finally able to relax. He allowed a deep breath to escape him. “And now, Doctor, would you be so kind as to bandage up this other little scrape of mine?”

Dylan was fully clean, both his wounds and his body, when the colonel returned later—bearing not only a sizable brick of familiar green currency, but a Polaroid camera. One of the aides, who had hovered against a wall the whole time, photographed them both and disappeared with the documents.

“You are now as famous and sought after as Princess Diana once was,” said the colonel. “Your name and likeness are on every television. Look . . .” He walked over and switched on a set. Without even changing it, he pointed with a smile, for right there loomed the faces of Abby, Sister Okoye, and a poorly drawn sketch of Dylan.

“Despite rumors of a recent close call near the Nigerian coast,” droned a tired female voice, “the three remain at large and, much to the world's dismay, unaccounted for.”

The next afternoon, two military vans pulled up alongside the terminal entrances to Virgin Airlines at the Port Harcourt Airport forty miles north of town. Soldiers emerging from both carried machine guns as they marched across the crowded sidewalk.

Twenty seconds later a gleaming white sedan pulled between the vans and stopped with a sudden chirp of brakes. The car disgorged three passengers: one tall African man in a military uniform, one slender and elegant man with hair whose gray color matched the pinstripes on his impeccable suit, and one woman in a full-length Muslim covering from head to toe.

The well-turned-out man and his cloaked companion turned and, quite surprisingly to the few bystanders who risked a look, embraced the Nigerian man with great fervor. The man, despite his air of panache, seemed to be teary-eyed when he released them. The woman, who impulsively tore down her veil in the process, embraced him far longer, and was clearly in tears when they finally separated.

The couple checked in their obviously light luggage at the curb, then shook hands with the Nigerian officer, also with great emotion, and strode resolutely into the terminal.

At the Virgin counter, Dr. Frederick Eggleston and his striking wife, Suleima, showed Nigerian passports, recently renewed, and Nigerian drivers' licenses indicating an address in a Port Harcourt executive compound. Their proffers aroused no suspicion, for sophisticated foreigners or employees of foreign companies, many escorting foreign-born wives, were the lifeblood of the Port Harcourt to London route.

They boarded the flight without incident.

One hour later, the jet landed at Lagos. Despite intense surveillance throughout the airport for the two Americans, Dr. and Mrs. Eggleston were effortlessly shuttled to the Virgin Nigeria international lounge.

Granted, a closely observant Muslim might have noticed with some dismay that Dr. Eggleston's wife did not walk behind him, as a fundamentalist Islamic woman would. Had that person followed the pair to the privacy of their expansive first-class booth aboard the jet, he or she might have also been surprised to see her sit down and sip eagerly from the complimentary glass of champagne. Sighing in obvious relief, she seemed unashamed in the least to remove her headpiece, in the privacy of the bulkhead window seat, and reveal a closely shorn head of bright auburn hair. Her face bore not a trace of either Arabic or African ethnicity.

A very recent, and perhaps recalcitrant, convert to the faith.

CHAPTER
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52

LONDON, HEATHROW AIRPORT

Nine hours later, the Boeing 747 landed at Heathrow, marking the terminus of the pair's return to the West. The oddly matched couple silently parted in the terminal's main corridor and, carry-on satchels in hand, quickly made their way to the genders' respective rest rooms.

Fifteen minutes later, two sharply dressed and utterly transformed Europeans walked out. The husband, who greeted his exiting wife with a grin of barely concealed surprise, was now brown-haired and wearing the shorts and tennis shoes of an American tourist. The wife, her hair still auburn, was also attired American style, wearing a tight T-shirt, clingy skirt, sandals, and a pair of oversized, very dark sunglasses.

The husband leaned over and appeared to give his wife a lingering kiss on the earlobe as they walked. Instead, he was talking very fast.

“We've got to pull this off perfectly,” he whispered. “London is the most heavily videoed city in the world. Cameras on every corner. They could follow us from this moment all the way to our hotel room. So don't let your guard down.”

The pair jumped into a taxi to central London, where they quickly disembarked at Notting Hill Gate and hopped on to one of the city's famous red double-deckers. Grinning and craning their necks like a couple of ecstatic tourists, they rode on the bus's upper level for half an hour through the cold and crowded streets, finally getting off at Trafalgar Square. There in a spritz of fine rain they blended into the crush of milling tourists and allowed themselves to be swept, almost invisible amidst the masses, down into the stairway entrance of London's Underground. They boarded the Bakerloo line and abruptly exited at the next stop north, Piccadilly Circus. They crossed to the opposite direction, boarded again, then exited back at their original station and rode the Northern line up to Leicester Square.

Here the husband promptly located a branch of the Credit Suisse bank and, with the help of a retinal scan and nary a peep at his identification papers, withdrew the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. Next, he made a hurried visit to the safe-deposit vault, where he removed an American passport and Michigan driver's license, both in the name of Marcus Bryce, and finally a blank passport form—a document which, by merely possessing it, could mean a punishment of fifteen years in a federal prison.

The well-traveled couple then hopped another taxi into the heart of West Soho, one of London's more bohemian quarters. They disappeared through a side door adjoining one of the neighborhood's largest Internet cafés. Two hours later, and ten thousand dollars poorer, they emerged smiling more broadly than ever.

They found a bench and leisurely withdrew their purchase for inspection. An ordinary-looking cell phone, but which in fact was an untraceable, prepaid, and unlocked cellular device, with international phone rates already purchased through a coded phone card.

The husband made his first call, while the lovely woman beside him sat patiently and appeared to indulge in Soho's world-class people watching. The call was to his apartment. After spending fifteen minutes furiously thumbing the keypad, he hung up.

“Time to start taking the fight to them,” the husband whispered to his spouse.

His next number was a classified number secretly assigned to a windowless room in Langley, Virginia.

FBI SERIAL CRIME UNIT, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

“Task force, special agent in charge,” answered the monotone voice of twenty-five-year bureau veteran Ken Grant.

“I have a breakthrough clue for you.”

“Whoa. Let's start at the beginning. Who are you? What's your name?”

“Look. Don't handle me.”

“
Handle
you? And who in the world are you to tell me that?”

“I'm a black-bag solo operator, veteran of Marines, Airbornes, Delta Force and beyond. Way beyond. So either let me tell you this, or so help me, you'll go down as the man who dropped the best clue this case ever had.”

“Sure, buddy. Only one problem. You can tell me you're James Bond himself, but if you don't give me cause to classify you higher than the two thousand other whack-jobs who tell me junk like that, this call is over.”

“How about, I know your withheld fact.”

“Our what?” asked Grant.

“Come on. Don't mess with me. The fact you guys always withhold from the public in order to ferret out bogus leads and confessions.”

“Oh, and what would that be, sir?”

“The scythe. Otherwise known as the sickle. They use it to slice their victims' throats. Sometimes they carve the symbol of it on their bodies. Am I right?”