Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (149 page)

Men with AK-47s stepped into the cone of light. One came to Kendall’s window and rapped on the glass. These were no bandits; they wore tan jackets and dark berets with a swooping black falcon embroidered on front. Blackwing contractors. Kendall rolled down the window.

“Do you have papers?” the man asked.

He had a French accent and a scar over his right eyebrow. It was Paul-Henri Dupont, formerly of French Special Forces.

He took their papers and studied them by flashlight before looking up with a nod. “Bill Jones and Dave Smith is it?” A snort, then a shrug. “Well, if recruitment was okay with those names, then so am I. You’re the African?” he looked at Kendall.

“No, that’s me,” Ian said.

“Afrikaner or English?”

“Father is Afrikaans, my mum is English.”

“White African, eh? We’ve got a few around here.” His voice was pleasant, reasonable. But Ian had read Dupont’s dossier and knew what the man was capable of.

Dupont looked back to Kendall. “That makes you the American, right? Let me call headquarters and then I’ll wave you through.”

Ian felt calm now, none of that strange, doubled-up feeling. It was just like football, that moment before the snap, when everything slowed and he could see every twitch of his offensive line, every shift of the defense on the other side of the ball. Kendall took out a stick of gum and put it casually—almost too casually—into his mouth.

When he spoke, his voice had slowed as well. “I can’t get over that you’re the African here and I’m just a black guy.”

“My dad wouldn’t even call you black. You’re just colored.”

“Remember the first time you called me that?” Kendall asked. “I almost gave you the beatdown of your life.”

“You almost
tried
to give me the beatdown of my life.”

As they spoke, men looked under the truck with lights. Another man opened the back doors and lifted up the tarps. Nothing but water and fuel under there, together with a tool box, spare tires, and emergency supplies like protein bars and solar blankets. Did the smell of gunmetal and ammo linger back there? At last, they shut the doors and retreated from the Land Rover.

“Wasn’t that the first day of football camp?” Ian added.

“Huh, what?”

“You know, when I said you were colored.”

“Right, you said your dad hated when you played sport with colored kids.”

“I thought your head was going to explode,” Ian said. “I had no idea that was offensive. Colored is just what we called people who looked like you, you know, black with lighter skin.”

“That wasn’t the only thing that pissed me off.”

“Was it when I asked if you knew Shaquille O’Neal?”

Kendall gave an exaggerated groan. “No, it was how you acted like we should be best friends because we were both, you know, African.”

“Hey, didn’t it work out that way in the end?”

Truth was, it had been a tough time for Ian and he was lucky to have found his way at all. After Apartheid ended, Ian’s father had been convinced that civil war would break out at any time. He still seemed disappointed that it hadn’t. It had been a year before Ian was to be conscripted at age 16, and the feeling that he had avoided the South African draft ate at Ian’s ego up to the time he joined the U.S. Army. Of course, he had other motives. The fastest path to U.S. citizenship was through military service.

It was a mostly white and Hispanic community in Fresno, but Ian, with his rugby and cricket background, gravitated at once to football, where he met Kendall and several other black kids. The move had the ironic side-effect of giving Ian far more contact with classmates his father would have called
kaffirs
than he ever would have had living in his segregated, gated community in Cape Town.

Dupont returned a minute later and opened the passenger door behind Ian. Ian tensed, eyeing Dupont’s right hand in his peripheral vision as Dupont climbed in the car and sat down with his arm on the back of the seat.

“Drive until you get to the water tanker. Park there.”

Along the way Dupont chatted about living quarters, about the crappy food in the mess, even the heat and scorpions. “Don’t know what the salary is these days for guys with your background—what, a hundred and fifty thousand?—but you’ll think you were back in boot camp.”

Kendall and Ian exchanged a look. They didn’t earn a hundred and fifty thousand dollars between them working for the CIA. No wonder so many ex-military gravitated to the private contractors that infested Africa and the Middle East. The U.S. Army had outsourced half its operations in Iraq, then wondered why all its captains refused the reenlistment bonuses. If you’re getting shot at anyway, may as well double or triple your salary.

They approached another checkpoint. “Here’s the camp,” Dupont said. “Welcome to Ondjamba. Means ‘elephant’ in a local dialect.”

“Local dialect?” Ian asked.

“Hey, we’re a cosmopolitan operation – respect the local customs and all that shit.”

He climbed down from the truck and spoke French in a low voice to one of the men. Kendall, still driving, rolled down the window, not that either of them could speak French or even would have been able to pick up the low voices. But someone might. Every brain impulse would be translated and parsed for useful information when they returned.

The camp was a hive of activity, no matter the late hour. A cement mixer poured a foundation to their left, while carpenters and roofers worked on another building. Most of the camp was still comprised of tents of all sizes, but this was no temporary outpost, at least not for long. Floodlights lit up the camp.

A cluster of workers in hard hats crossed the road in front of them and Ian caught a glimpse of their faces. East Asian, he thought.

“What is this, a Chinese operation?” Ian asked.

He figured the remark was safe enough and obvious from what he saw out the window. It better not have been something CIA already knew. Hard enough to pry out what he had learned about the camp. As Markov, his collections management officer would have told him, it was all NTK—need to know. Everything was NTK to Markov, even the location of the damn vending machine in the executive lounge. So while he had plenty of information about individual Blackwing contractors he knew next to nothing about the camp.

“Chinese owned and operated,” Dupont said, “but they’re outsourcing the hell out of the operation. Belgian engineers, Namibian laborers and us, of course. Blackwing is the only one in Namibia with the muscle they needed.”

“But why so much security?” he asked. “Is there a bandit problem around here?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“This the water tower?” Kendall asked. He gave Ian a sideways glance that Ian took as a warning not to press the questions.

“Park right there. Give plenty of clearance. This is a tanker route.”

It was a large tent with a diesel generator chugging to one side. Curiously, Ian noticed several satellite dishes positioned around the tent. A pair of armed guards stood watch out front.

“This isn’t our living quarters is it?” Kendall asked. Two trucks rumbled past.

“Nope, don’t worry, it’s away from all this noise. But I’ve got to take you through security first.”

“That wasn’t security back there?” Ian asked.

“That? No, that wasn’t security.” Dupont said. “That’s just to stop those…
bandits
you were talking about.” He cleared his throat and spat out the window. “I’m sure you guys won’t mind a polygraph,” he added casually.

“Figured you’d check us out,” Ian said. Any beginning operative could defeat a lie-detector test.

“And we’re going to strip your truck down, make sure you didn’t bring in any funny stuff. Cameras, recording devices, or anything like that. No big deal, just standard.”

“Sure, go ahead,” Ian said. “Just put it back together again when you’re done.”

“But first, we’ll do the same to you two.”

“You’re going to strip us down, huh?” Kendall asked. “Just clothes, or muscle and bone, too?”

A lie detector might not have been able to detect minute changes in heartbeat and perspiration levels, but Ian knew Kendall well enough to detect a tiny edge of stress.

“That would be something. But no, nothing like that. A full body scan, nothing to worry about. Assuming you’re clean.” Dupont spread the tent flaps with his hand. “Come on in.”

The two men followed. Ian resisted the urge to scratch the scar on his scalp. A trickle of sweat crept down the back of his neck. He felt again as though he was stepping out of his body.

CHAPTER FOUR

A woman in Blackwing uniform passed a security wand over Ian’s body while he stood shivering in his underwear. It wasn’t a cursory scan like at airport security when a belt buckle or cell phone triggered an alert. She passed it above every inch of his skin.

Ian focused on his breathing. He knew the equipment. High-sensitivity spectrum analyzer. She was sweeping for radiofrequency signals. And she wouldn’t find any. The implant would only broadcast a wireless RF signal when he gave it an explicit command to transmit.

The wand passed over his scalp, lingered over his forehead, above the implant. His eye darted to the oscilloscope watching for a subtle change in the power spectrum. A noisy baseline flickered on the logarithmic plot from 25 Hz to 12 GHz. No peaks.

Kendall had passed through already while Ian waited outside. He’d looked irritated as the two men passed, but now Ian envied his friend, no doubt in the mess, getting something hot to eat and maybe a beer to wash it down. Ian’s fun was just beginning. What else did she have? A conductance amplifier?

He’d asked Julia about that during training. “Can they pick up the…uhm, the little wire thingies in my neck?”

“The carbon nanotubes?” Julia asked. “No, they’re shielded by a lipid film that’ll look no different to a scan than your vagus nerve.”

He trusted she knew what she was talking about, but that was in the lab. This was as real as the mustache on the woman examining him. Ian swallowed and closed his eyes.

“Now drop your shorts,” the woman said. She set the wand on a table and pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves.

An armed guard waited at the entrance to the tent, but the man deliberately looked to one side as soon as the woman began her more intimate search. She started at Ian’s feet and worked her way up, patted each inch of his body. He clenched his teeth when she reached his crotch.

“Does this bother you?” Dupont asked. He stood to one side, most definitely not looking away. He lit a cigarette.

The pleasant veneer was still there, but a sadistic undercurrent rippled beneath the surface of his voice. According to the dossier, Dupont had leveled a school building in Somalia, directed extra-legal killings in Yemen, and was wanted by Bangladeshi authorities for accessory to rape, stemming from an overly enthusiastic interrogation by two Blackwing subsidiaries involving a broom handle. Even such a thing as a humiliating strip search seemed to give him pleasure.

“Or maybe you like it,” Dupont added.

“She has a nice touch, but too gentle for my taste.”

“Almost word for word what your American friend said. You must have rehearsed together.”

Ian forced a laugh, cut short by a latex gloved hand sliding between his butt cheeks.

“Your truck tested positive for explosives. So do your clothes.”

“Yeah, so what? We worked for CACI until three weeks ago. It’s just leftovers from our last job.”

“Again, that’s exactly what your friend said.”

“Of course he did. And I’m sure you checked with our last employers, so you knew that already.”

Ian felt more comfortable with the wand gone, if a man with someone else’s hand shoved up his butt could use the word comfortable. The scan had revealed nothing, and neither would the most unpleasant pat down ever. Dr. Nolan had done her work well.

The woman stepped back and stripped off her gloves. “He’s clean.”

“Well, then. I guess that’s that.” Dupont sounded vaguely disappointed. He no doubt had been thinking of that fun in Bangladesh with the broom handle. “Let me show you the mess tent.”