Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (153 page)

Ian lay motionless while the fire rolled over the hilltop. A moment later, more firing on the road to his left and he crawled out on hands and knees across the top of the knoll, shouting Kendall’s name. When he got there, he could see nothing. The ledge had disintegrated and covered Kendall’s hiding place with tons of rock and rubble. He saw Kendall at the edge of the crevice hidden in a clump of brush. He was still moving, but his leg was unnaturally bent, his foot under a huge boulder.

Ian stared in horror and disbelief. Everything, all the battles they had fought together, and it had ended like this, killed by friendly fire in the middle of Namibia. It was not even a war zone, for God’s sake, the mission was supposed to be for recon only.

“Bastards!” Ian moaned. “Idiots. You told us to put our stuff here. You knew this was our position. What the hell kind of stupid mistake?”

And then Ian had an even more chilling thought. What if it hadn’t been a mistake? What if even now, the gunship was circling around, searching for a hot spot on the ground to incinerate? What if their goal was not to rescue Ian and Kendall—how could they do that, with so many enemies around?—but to eliminate evidence of the failed CIA mission?

He yelled to Kendall, “Get rid of the phone!” No response. The vertigo came again and he fell on his knees, his head spinning. Had to… Get Kendall… Out… Phone… Implant... Ian pulled the KA-BAR knife from his side and stumbled toward Kendall. The sound of exploding rock and dirt came again from behind him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Julia passed through customs alone and was overwhelmed by the crowd on the other side of the security gate.

Hotel representatives held signs that read, “Carlos Perez” and “Karl Klingman.” A Japanese woman with white gloves held a fan over her head around which gathered a group of Japanese tourists. Julia heard German spoken by a large cluster of people as she passed.. Men tried to get Julia’s attention as she stepped through. “Windhoek? Do you need a hotel? Taxi?”

She shook her head and looked around, dismayed to find herself alone. She scanned over the crowd as she took stock of her position. She had no Namibian dollars, no hotel room, no local connections.

Her previous international experience had been a conference in Toronto four years earlier. How quaint and foreign, with the pink and blue money, the coins with ducks and beavers, and the way everyone said, “aboot” when they meant “about.”

Namibia, it would seem, was another planet. She tightened her grip on her rolling suitcase and held up her garment bag to shield her face from the touts.

“Julia,” a voice called and she felt a flood of relief.

A man in a suit pushed his way through the crowd. It was Anton Markov, the collections management officer for the implant program. He was about three inches shorter than her, no taller than 5’5” at best, balding, but buffed up like he spent every spare minute compensating at the gym.

“I thought you forgot about me,” she said.

“Your plane was early. How was the flight?”

“Fine. But I feel like I haven’t slept for a week.” Her watch said 8:45 AM. She’d reset it carefully during a hellacious eleven-hour layover in London and again before the plane took off to Namibia. She strategized most of the flight about how to alternate sleep and coffee so she could quickly adapt to the time change. That was great, until it came time to sleep and all she could do was sit and watch a harried mother try and calm an overtired baby while her toddler ran windsprints in the aisle before crashing in a fit of tears. Markov, she knew, had not flown commercial. He looked rather more refreshed than she felt.

He looked around. “Let’s find Chang and get out of here.”

“Chang?”

“Yeah, he went to change some money, but that was twenty minutes ago.”

Julia stared at him in dismay. “But why is Chang here?”

“Who do you think called for you? He got here first, figured out that we’d need you along. I’ll tell you what you need to know as soon as we get in the car.”

The phone had rung at four in the morning—was that yesterday? No, two days ago. Terrance had answered with a mumble, then passed over the phone and rolled back onto his stomach. A moment later, he was sitting up, listening, as Julia made arrangements with Markov to fly to Namibia.

Her flight left in two hours, which gave her just enough time to throw together a suitcase, snatch up her passport and take the waiting car to Dulles. Even so, she’d done an admirable job. She’d been to enough academic conferences in her career that she knew exactly what went into every pocket in her single travel bag.

Chang emerged from the crowd a moment later, holding a greasy sausage wrapped in bread with one hand and stuffing a wad of bills into his pocket with the other. “Hey, Nolan,” he said. “You going on safari or something?”

Julia looked down at herself and felt foolish. Markov told her to dress casually, which apparently meant a suit for himself and a t-shirt, jeans, and sunglasses propped atop the head for Chang. While packing, Julia tried to think of how she could blend in—this was covert CIA stuff, after all—and thought she could go for the tourist look. She found some khaki shorts and a button-down khaki shirt with a big, over-the-shoulder camera.

“Hope you brought some sunblock,” Chang added. “Those are the whitest looking legs I’ve ever seen.”

“You’ll both need to change first thing,” Markov said. “I know what I said before, but our visit has become more official than I’d hoped. You do have business clothes, don’t you?”

“Of course,” Julia said. She held up her garment bag, relieved that she’d second-guessed herself enough to bring at least one nicer change of clothes.

“Uhm, well, no,” Chang said. “I don’t. Not really, I mean.”

Markov looked him over with a scowl. “Well, do you at least have a shirt without any corporate advertising on it?”

“I’ve got my ‘zombie apocalypse’ shirt. There’s this guy on the front with—”

“No, stop. I don’t even want to know.” Markov gave a disgusted shake of the head. “Well, we’ll have to stop and get you something.”

Julia suddenly didn’t feel so bad about her safari get-up.

________

Windhoek looked vaguely European to Julia’s eyes, with outdoor cafés and two and three story buildings with a lot of foot traffic, but most of the people were black and every other corner held an open-air market or a cluster of street vendors.

Coming west from the airport, Markov had stopped the car at a street market halfway to Windhoek and come back with a gray button-down shirt which he ordered Chang to put on. The sleeves were too long and Chang had to roll them.

Julia had changed at the airport, spent a few minutes to freshen her makeup and brush back her hair. She could use a hot bath and good night of sleep, but compared to Chang, she looked professional and put together. And what was jetlag after ten years of neurosurgery call?

After putting on the shirt, Chang grumbled a bit, flipped open his laptop, and pointedly ignored Julia and Markov. His screen was shielded, so she had no idea if he was working on classified documentation or simply playing tetris.

“Sorry about the commercial flight,” Markov said, “but we’ve got certain rules for civilian contractors.”

“Hey, at least the international flights still serve meals.” She peeled her attention from gaping out the window. “So. The whole mission was a screw-up. Is that it?”

“Sorry, the operational details are NTK.”

“I know, I get it. But reading between the lines it sounds like Ian and Kendall are in trouble with the Namibian authorities.”

Markov frowned. “Who told you that?”

“Either they’re both so badly injured that you can’t bring them back to Langley, or they’re in the custody of the Namibian government. Otherwise, why would you have flown me to Namibia?”

“Yes, good observation.”

Chang looked up briefly from his laptop. “Obvious, you mean.”

“Was there a problem with the implant?” she asked.

“We don’t know. That’s why I brought you and Chang.”

“Okay, back up then,” she said. “Start at the first and tell me what you can.”

“It was a recon mission, nothing serious. The two operatives were to have infiltrated a potential Al-Qaeda camp and observe.”

“Al-Qaeda?” she interrupted. “In Namibia? I mean, I don’t know much about the country, but I spent my layover in Heathrow online, trying to read as much as I could. It’s not even Muslim.”

“Try not to think literally. By Al-Qaeda, I mean extremists that might be harmful to American interests in the region.”

“So that could be shorthand for any manner of bandits, smugglers, or...” she widened her eyes and lowered her voice to a stage whisper, “bad guys?”

“Maybe a bit more serious than that,” Markov said. “Anyway, don’t interrupt. It’s annoying and pointless. Your knowledge of Namibian religious structures is irrelevant to the problem at hand.”

“Sorry.”

“The plan was to send in the operatives, have them record data that our specialists could analyze, see what we could learn about who was running this camp. If we ran into any… difficulties…we had the resources to extract them with a minimal amount of fuss.”

Already they had passed to the outskirts of Windhoek and now the driver turned down a side street, past a station manned with armed guards who waved them through. Markov tapped the glass for the driver to open the partition, then ordered the man to pull up to their destination and keep the engine idling.

“In short,” he continued after the glass closed again, “the junior agent had a psychotic breakdown roughly four hours after entering the camp.”

“The junior agent?” she asked in disbelief. “You mean Ian?”

“Yes, I mean Agent Westhelle.”

She remembered his self-effacing comment about needles and the joking, rough exterior during the subsequent two weeks of training, where she had taught him how to activate and control the cortical implant. He had seemed in perfect mental and physical condition to be the first to receive one of the new implants.

“But there was nothing in his psychological profile that would indicate such an outcome,” she said. “And as for the implant itself—”

“Again, Dr. Nolan, who is briefing whom here?” He didn’t sound angry, more like a teacher telling one of his students to either stop passing notes or come up and read the note to the entire class.

“Before the operation had a chance to yield any information,” Markov continued, “the junior operative blew his cover, forcing engagement with the Al-Qaeda camp for his rescue. Worst of all, when his colleague was defenseless and calling for help, the junior operative eliminated his superior as well.”

“Wait a minute, are you saying that Ian killed Kendall?”

Markov gave her a look that was exceptionally grim. “Yes, Dr. Nolan, that is exactly what I am saying. Ian Westhelle, in his psychotic state, attempted to remove Kendall Rose’s implant with a military standard KA-BAR knife, documented by a photograph shot from a military support plane engaged in the battle.”

The news rocked her. “Oh my God. They were friends. They were best friends from when they were just kids, and they fought in Afghanistan together and Kendall once told me…I can’t believe that Ian would…”

“The battle drew the attention of Namibian authorities, who took our resource into custody and are more than a little put out by the whole incident. Of course they don’t know or need to know the details of the operation, only that we need to recover our resource.”

Chang looked up from his laptop. “We’re stopped,” he said in a cheerful voice. “Does this mean we’re here?”

They stepped out of the car and approached the uniformed men who stood guard at the door. Markov flashed his credentials and the two men admitted Julia and the CIA agents into the building.

Markov took Julia’s arm. “Given your unfortunate predilection for blurting unnecessary information, may I suggest keeping your mouth shut in front of the Namibian officials? In particular, the Central Intelligence Service Director. He is especially prickly about our so-called violations of Namibian sovereignty.”