Lords of Corruption (36 page)

"Kind of makes you think, doesn't it?" Annika said as Josh rolled onto his back and stared into the empty sky.

"What?"

"What do you mean, what? Mtiti shut down the country's entire power grid, and now he's sent the entire air force after us."

"Good thing we're not down there."

"This time. But what about next time? Or the time after that?"

"I don't know what to say, Annika. We talked about this, and it was the best thing we could come up with. If you have any other ideas, I'm listening."

She shook her head, her frustrated expression seeming foreign to her face. "I've spent my entire life doing things myself -- never counting on anyone else for anything. And now we've given the only things that can save us to a woman I barely know, so she can deliver them to someone I've never heard of, so that maybe he can do something that will stop Mtiti before he decides to set the entire southern half of his country on fire to kill us."

She was right. Their lives were hangin
g f
rom an extremely long chain made up entirely of weak links. "I know it's starting to seem hopeless, Annika. I'm sorry --"

She clamped a hand over his mouth, silencing him. "I'm not blaming you, Josh. I knew what I was getting into. Well, that's not entirely true. I was hoping it might go a little better than this."

He motioned around them at the empty knoll and pulled her hand from his mouth. "What do you want? A butler?"

That elicited a smile, and for some reason it made him feel better about their situation.

"My idea of luxury is running cold water," she said. "I used to think that made me a cheap date."

"Me, too."

She looked through the binoculars again and watched Mtiti's pilots continue their futile search. "So what now?"

He wanted to call Katie, to find out what was happening. To get some idea of how long they'd have to keep ducking Mtiti or if they should try to get over a border. But there was no way. Fedorov would be able to see what numbers had been called from Trent's phone, and Katie would be dead in an hour.

"I guess we set up another meeting."

"Now? Maybe you should wait until he's in a better mood."

"Nah," he said, dialing Fedorov's number. "Let's see if we can make it worse."

"Where the fuck are you, you little son of a bitch?"

"Somewhere you're not going to find me. Don't get me wrong, though. I applaud the effort. Annika and I have been wondering -- is that the whole air force?"

The tirade that followed was mostly in Russian, with a few choice English words for emphasis. Poking a wild animal with a stick was a dangerous game, but he and Annika had decided it made sense in this situation. The more they could keep Fedorov focused on homicidal fantasies, the less he'd be able to think straight. The problem was that the strategy had the potential to backfire badly if he ever got his hands on them.

"Aleksei! You're wasting my time again. We --"

"Wasting your time?" he shot back. "You want me to use your time better? How about you listening while I cut your sister's finger off?"

"Aleksei! Don't

The sound of Fedorov's phone dropping to the ground was followed quickly by
Fawn's screams. At first they were just fear, but then they became the gurgling screeches of pain and horror. And then, just as suddenly as they had started, they stopped.

"Aleksei!" Josh shouted. "Aleksei! What

"The little bitch passed out," Fedorov said when he returned to the phone. "Ruining all our fun, huh, kid? Tell you what. I'll just leave her finger here for you. You can come and pick it up later. A souvenir of your trip to Africa."

Josh's mouth went dry, and he had to make a concentrated effort to conjure enough spit to speak. Aleksei was trying to rattle him, and he couldn't let that happen. Not with the odds stacked so high against him.

"That's fine, Aleksei. If I'm not getting my whole sister back, you're not getting all your documents back. I just peeled ten pages right off the top."

"You little son of a bitch! If I don't get every page back, I'm going to --"

"Shut the fuck up!" Josh screamed into the phone. "You want the documents, and I want my sister. Now, if you quit fucking around, we can get this done. But every time something happens to my sister, some of these pages are going to disappear. And I
wouldn't want to be the one explaining why that happened to Umboto Mtiti."

"If you think you're going to --"

"Three days from now, Aleksei. Same place. And this time, leave the troops at home. I have spies everywhere. There are a lot of people in this country who hate Mtiti, and they're falling all over themselves to help me. If my people don't tell me that all those aircraft are sitting on the base outside the capital, I'm not coming."

"I wouldn't wait too long, Josh. You know where we're keeping her? The prison. Doesn't look like she's been gang-raped yet, but three days from now . . . Let's just say I can't make any guarantees."

"Another five pages of your documents just disappeared, Aleksei."

Fedorov exploded into another Russian diatribe, and Josh turned off the phone. When he did, though, it suddenly became hard to breathe.

"Josh? Are you all right? What happened?"

He walked toward the edge of the knoll, feeling increasingly dizzy despite the cool of the approaching darkness. Fawn Mardsen was an evil bitch. A white-trash con woman who took advantage of the goodwill of others. Maybe even a half-assed murderer. But she hadn't deserved that.

"Josh?" Annika said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

"He cut her finger off."

It was a few seconds before she responded. "It's not your fault, Josh. You had no way of knowing --"

"I had every way of knowing. I wrapped her up and delivered her right into the hands of a homicidal psychopath. What did I think was going to happen? The answer is, I didn't care. As long as it wasn't Laura, I didn't care."

Chapter
50.

Aleksei Fedorov rolled over in bed, awakened by the crack of gunfire outside. He'd become accustomed to the sound over the days he'd been confined in Mtiti's palace, but today it seemed closer. More urgent.

He went to his open window, squinting against the sun reflecting off the razor-wiretopped walls protecting the compound. The fortifications were better-manned than before, and there were two armored personnel carriers coming through the heavy steel gate. The soldiers crammed inside jumped out before the vehicles had come to a full stop, taking up positions on the wall with their machine guns at the ready.

The meeting with Hagarty was scheduled for that afternoon, and by that night Fedorov hoped to be on a plane out of this shithole. He'd managed to get Mtiti to agree to let him bring in another group of mercenaries, and they were already in positio
n n
ear the meeting sit
e d
ug in with snipe
r r
ifles that would finally put an end to Hagarty and the Norwegian bitch who was helping him. They deserved something so much slower than a bullet for the trouble they'd caused, but it was better to resolve the situation quickly. Before Mtiti's paranoia became any more dangerous.

The sound of men running in the hallway prompted him to start toward the robe hanging on the bathroom door. He was supposed to meet Mtiti in an hour to go over the plans for dealing with Hagarty. It was the fifth such meeting, and each time the man displayed an uncanny ability to ask the same questions over and over again.

Fedorov was just reaching for the robe when the door to his room burst open and armed soldiers flooded in.

"What the fuck --"

The lead man slammed a rifle butt into his stomach, driving him to his knees. Another kicked him in the side, knocking him to the floor and leaving him to try to protect his head from the blows that followed.

Were they Yvimbo rebels? Was this a coup? No. Mtiti's soldiers wouldn't have gone down without a fight. And he recognized some of the men from his time there.

The hard toe of a boot hit him in the small of his back and he grunted in pain as he tried to crawl away from the now laughing men.

"I'm here as Mtiti's guest!" Fedorov said. "I want to talk to him. Take me --"

An arm snaked around his throat, and he heard the thickly accented words of the man choking him. "You want to see Mtiti? Yes, we take you there."

He was dragged naked through the halls, passing soldiers, maids, and servants, all of whom stopped and stared dully. The door to Mtiti's office was partially ajar, and the men holding him slammed his head into it as they passed through. His vision blurred and the room rocked sickeningly as he was shoved to his knees in front of the president's desk.

"Did you know, Aleksei, that JB Flannary has a brother?" Mtiti said, rising from his chair. "And that his brother is a reporter for the New York Times?"

"I don't understand, Excellency. I -"

Someone behind grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head back, forcing him to meet Mtiti's stare.

"Answer my question, Aleksei. Did you know this?"

"No, I "

"No?" Mtiti said, his anger building in a way that was well-known in the country. "Why would you not know, Aleksei? You killed Flannary, didn't you? And you killed his assistant and the man he worked for. Is that not correct?" He was shouting now, the sweat on his face glistening in the sunlight streaming through the windows. "Why would you not know his brother was a reporter? Why wouldn't your people be watching him?"

Fedorov tried to answer, but the words became trapped in his throat. He was completely alone here. Even the police and court system that he so despised weren't here to keep the situation from flying out of control. There was no law other than Mtiti.

"I don't understand," he finally managed to get out. "Excellency, I have --"

"Well, then, let me help you understand," Mtiti said, throwing a thin stack of paper on the floor in front of Fedorov.

The grip on his hair eased, allowing him to examine the poorly copied newspaper article. It was from that morning's Times. The headline was "U
. S
. Charity Connected to Organized Crime."

He shuffled through the pages, feeling the grip of panic tighten on his chest. It was all there. Pictures of both him and Mtiti
,
quotes from Josh Hagarty, including the exact location of the mass grave he'd found, background on Stephen Trent's criminal past, a list of bogus projects. Even estimates of the money siphoned from American taxpayers through USAID.

"He smuggled the documents out of the country!" Mtiti said. "He sent them to the media!"

"No. He wouldn't. . . . We have his sister." "Keep reading, Aleksei."

He went to the next page, which implicated Fedorov in the deaths of JB Flannary and his colleagues as well as the disappearance of a Kentucky woman named Fawn Mardsen.

"You don't have his sister, Aleksei. Your people took the daughter of a man his mother divorced years ago. You have the wrong woman!"

"No," Fedorov stammered. "I . . . She was

"I've already had calls this morning from the U
. S
. government and the United Nations," Mtiti said. "I have power shut down everywhere, but this article is still getting in. By tomorrow everyone in my country will know about it. The mining companies won't take my calls, and I have reports that they're starting to evacuate their people
,
Aleksei!"

"No," Fedorov said. "We can fix this. We can."

Mtiti pointed, and an arm slid around Fedorov's neck again. He was dragged to his feet and led outside with Mtiti close behind.

"I understand that you've been inquiring about one of our methods of execution," Mtiti said, walking to the center of the courtyard as soldiers hurried to get out of his way. "I'm glad you're interested in learning about us and our culture."

When Fedorov saw the tire lying in the dust, he began to fight, but the arm around his neck constricted, cutting off the blood flow to his brain. He had nearly lost consciousness by the time the man behind him released his neck and pinned his arms to his sides.

The two soldiers lifting the tire in front of him gave him a burst of energy, but it wasn't the first time they'd done this, and they anticipated his every move. A moment later the tire was over his head and shoved down tightly over his arms. He desperately gulped the rubber-and-gasoline-scented air, managing to clear his mind and regain enough strength to pull free of the man holding him.

He only made it a few feet before he fell, the weight of the tire throwing off hi
s a
lready impaired balance. The courtyard had gone silent, and everyone stopped to watch as he rolled back and forth, struggling to free himself.

"You can't do this!" he shouted. "We've worked together for years! I've made you millions of dollars!"

A soldier grabbed the tire and used it to pull him back to his feet as Mtiti retrieved a gold lighter from his pocket.

"Excellency, I can fix this. I swear I can. Don't do this. I'm begging you --"