“All right, but you have to watch over him. Don’t let anything happen to him . . . when it can be helped. He’s well liked here and connected. We don’t want a mess over there.”
“Too late for that,” Flaherty said and snickered a nasty, cynical laugh.
He went back to comfort the family whose children were probably already dead.
But they would pay anyway.
Chapter 32
WELL, THE INVESTIGATION had definitely taken a turn now. But was it for better or for worse?
The plane from Washington to Frankfurt, Germany, was nearly full, and it was incredibly noisy for the first hour anyway. I spent some idle time guessing who might be continuing on to Africa, but it wasn’t too long before I fell back into my own dark reveries.
Everything that had led to this trip ran through my head like extended case notes, going all the way back to my Georgetown days with Ellie, and then up to Nana’s grudging consent that morning.
Nana’s going-away gift, such as it was, sat open on my lap. It was a copy of Wole Soyinka’s memoir, You Must Set Forth at Dawn.
She’d bookmarked it with a family photo—Jannie, Damon, and Ali, cheesing with Donald Duck at Disneyland a year or so back—and she had underlined a quotation on the page.
T’agba ba nde, a a ye ogun ja.
As one approaches an elder’s status, one ceases to indulge in battles.
It was her version of getting the last word, I suppose. Except that it had the opposite effect on me. I was more determined than ever to make this trip count for something.
Whatever the odds against me, I was going to find the killers of Ellie’s family. I had to; I was the Dragon Slayer.
Chapter 33
“AH, SOYINKA. AN illuminating writer. Have you read him before?”
I didn’t realize that someone had stopped in the aisle alongside my seat. I looked up, though just barely, at the shortest priest I’d ever seen. Not the shortest man, but definitely the shortest priest. His white collar came just to my eye level.
“No, this is my first,” I said. “It was a going-away gift from my grandmother.”
His smile got even brighter, his eyes wider. “Is she a Nigerian?”
“Just a well-read American.”
“Ah, well, nobody’s perfect,” he said and then laughed before there could be any suggestion of an insult. “T’agba ba nde, a a ye ogun ja. It’s a Yoruban proverb, you know.”
“Are you Yoruban?” I asked. His accent sounded Nigerian to me, but I didn’t have the ear to tell Yoruban from Igbo from Hausa, or any of the other tongues.
“Yoruban Christian,” he said and then, with a wink, added, “Christian Yoruban, if you ask the bishop. But don’t tell on me. Do I have your word on it?”
“I won’t tell anyone. Your secret is safe.”
He extended a hand as if to shake, and then sandwiched mine between both of his when I reached out toward him. The priest’s hands were tiny, yet they communicated friendship, and maybe something else.
“Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your savior, Detective Cross?”
I pulled my hand back. “How do you know my name?”
“Because if not, considering the trip you’re about to take, now might be a good time to do so. Accept Jesus Christ, that is.”
The priest made the sign of the cross over me. “I am Father Bombata. May God be with you, Detective Cross. You will need His help in Africa, I promise you. This is a very bad time for us. Maybe even a time of civil war.”
He invited me to come sit in the empty seat next to him, and we didn’t stop talking for hours, but he never did tell me how he knew my name.
Chapter 34
EIGHTEEN HOURS—WHICH seemed more like a couple of days—after I left Washington, the flight from Frankfurt finally landed at Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos, Nigeria.
I had watched the unbelievable, and somewhat hypnotic, sweep of the Sahara from the plane; the savannas that buffered it from the coast; and the equally vast Gulf of Guinea just beyond the city.
Then, as I deplaned onto the tarmac, I suddenly felt like I was in Anytown, USA. It might have been Fort Lauderdale, for all I could tell.
“I’m sorry I can’t help you here, brother.” Father Bombata came up and shook my hand again before we separated. He had told me he had an escort meeting him to speed up his arrival. “Put two hundred naira in an empty pocket, my friend,” he told me.
“What for?” I asked.
“Sometimes God is the answer. Other times it’s cash.”
Smiling as ever, the diminutive priest gave me his card, then turned and walked away with a final, friendly wave.
I found out what he meant around three hours later, which was the amount of time I had spent sweating on the immigration line. There were just two slow-moving officers at the counter for something like four hundred people.
Some passengers sailed through, while others were detained at the head of the line for as long as thirty minutes. Twice I saw someone taken away by an armed guard through a side door rather than being allowed to go out to the main terminal.
When it was finally my turn, I handed my landing card and passport to the officer.
“Yes, and your passport?” he asked.
I was momentarily confused, but then I remembered what Father Bombata had said and understood. I held a scowl in check. The official wanted his bribe.
I slid two hundred naira across the counter. He took it, stamped me through, and called out for the next person without ever looking at me again.
Chapter 35
THE LOW HUBBUB and frustration of clearing immigration was nothing compared with the instantaneous onslaught of noise and hurrying people that met me when I passed through the hand- and fingerprint-smudged glass doors and into the main terminal at Murtala Muhammed.
There’s where I got my first real indication that I was in a metropolitan area of thirteen million people. I think at least half of them were there at the airport that day.
So this is Africa, I thought. And somewhere out there is my killer, or rather killers.
No fewer than five Nigerian “officials” stopped me on my way to the luggage carousels. Each of them asked for verification of my identity. They all basically said the same thing. “Visa, American Express, any card will do.” Each of them clearly knew I was American. They all required a small bribe, or maybe they thought of it as a gratuity.
By the time I reached the baggage carousel, got my duffel, and pushed back out through the twenty-deep wall of people pressing in, I was tempted to fork over a few more naira to a raggedy-looking kid in an old skycap hat who asked where I wanted my bags taken.
I thought better of it, however, and pushed on, hauling my own luggage, keeping everything close to the chest. Stranger in a strange land, I thought, though I was also strangely pleased to be here. This promised to be quite an adventure, didn’t it? It was completely new territory for me. I didn’t know any of the rules.
Chapter 36
THERE WAS NO relief outside, where the air smelled of diesel, and no wonder: There was a raft of old cars, trucks, and bright yellow buses everywhere that I looked. Locals of all ages walked alongside the traffic, selling everything from newspapers to fruit to children’s clothing and used shoes.
“Alexander Cross?”
I turned around, expecting to see and meet Ian Flaherty, my CIA contact here in Nigeria. The CIA was good at sneaking up on you, right?
Instead, I came face-to-face with two armed officers. These were regular police, I noticed, not immigration. They had all-black uniforms, including berets, with insignia chevrons on the epaulets of their shirts. Both of them carried semiautomatics.
“I’m Alex Cross, yes,” I told them.
What happened next defied all logic. My duffel bag was ripped from my arm. Then my small suitcase. One of the officers spun me around and I felt cuffs on my wrists. Then a hard pinch as they snapped down too tightly.
“What’s going on???
? I struggled to turn to look at the policemen. “What is this? Tell me what’s happening.”
The officer with my luggage raised a hand in the air as if he were hailing a cab. A white four-door Toyota truck immediately pulled up to the curb.
The cops yanked open a rear door, ducked my head, and pushed me in, throwing my travel bag after me. One officer stayed on the sidewalk while the other jumped in next to the driver, and we took off.
I suddenly realized—I was being kidnapped!
Chapter 37
THIS WAS SURREAL. It was insane.
“Where are you taking me? What is this about? I’m an American police officer,” I protested from the back of the truck. No one seemed to be listening to a word I said.
I leaned forward in my seat and got a baton hard in the chest, then twice across the face.
I felt, and heard, my nose break!
Blood immediately gushed down my face onto my shirt. I couldn’t believe this was happening—not any of it.
The cop in the front passenger seat looked back at me, wild-eyed and ready to swing the baton again. “You like to keep quiet, white man. Fucking American, fucking terrorist, fucking policeman.”
I had heard that some people here didn’t like American blacks referring to themselves as African American. Now I was feeling it firsthand. I breathed hard through my mouth, coughing up blood and trying to focus though my head was spinning. Humidity and diesel fumes washed over me as the truck weaved through airport traffic, the driver repeatedly sitting on the horn.
I saw a blur of cars, white, red, and green, and several more bright yellow buses. Women were walking on the side of the road with swaddled babies held low on their backs, some of them with baskets balanced on top of their geles. There were a great number of huts in view, but also modern buildings, plus more cars, buses, trucks, and animal-driven carts.
All around me, business as usual.
And business as usual inside this truck, I feared.
Suddenly the cop was on me again. He stretched over the seat and pushed me onto my side. I braced for another strike of his billy club. Instead, I felt his hands patting me down.
Then my wallet was sliding out of my pocket.
“Hey!” I yelled.
He pulled out the wad of cash I had—three hundred American, and another five hundred in naira—then threw the empty wallet back in my face. It sent a shudder of pain deep into my skull.
I coughed out another spray of blood, which hit the seat and earned me another baton strike across the shoulder.
The dark blue nylon sheet covering the backseat suddenly made sense to me. It was there for bloodstains, wasn’t it?
I had no bearings, no idea why this was happening, no idea what to do about it either.
In spite of my own better judgment, I asked again, “Where are you taking me? I’m an American policeman! I’m here on a murder case.”
The officer barked out something in dialect to the driver. We swerved, and I fell against the car door as we came to a fast stop on the shoulder of the road.
They both got out! One of them tore open the door on my side and I dropped to the ground, cuffed and unable to break my fall.
A world of dust and heat and pain swam around me. I started to cough up dirt.
Powerful hands were under my arms now, lifting. The cop, or whoever he was, brought me up to my knees. I saw a little boy staring from the back of a packed Audi station wagon as it passed.
“You are a brave man. Just as brave as you are stupid, fucking white man.”
It was the driver talking now, stepping in for his turn. He slapped me hard, once across the left side of my face and then back across the right. I struggled to stay upright.
“You two are doing an excellent job—” I was definitely punchy. Already I didn’t care what came next.
It was a hard overhand fist to my temple. I heard a strange crunching sound inside my head, then another.
I don’t know how many closed-fist blows came after that.
I think I passed out at four.
Chapter 38
UNREAL. UNPRECEDENTED. UNBELIEVABLE.
It was dark when I woke up, and I hurt all over, but especially around my nose. At first my mind was blank. I had no idea where I was; not Africa, not anywhere. I just thought How the hell did I get here?
And then, Where is here? Where have I been taken?
My hand went up to my temple. I felt a sharp sting where I touched an open wound, and then I remembered the handcuffs. But they weren’t on my wrists anymore.
I was on my back, on a hard floor, stone or cement maybe.
Someone was looking down at me. I couldn’t make out his expression in the nearly lightless room. I could only tell that he was a dark-skinned man.
Not one man, I realized. Many. A dozen or more men were standing around me. Then I got it! They were prisoners—like me.
“White man is awake,” someone said.
My clothes gave me away, I supposed. They had made me for an American. “White man” was meant to be an insult, one that I had heard already on the trip.
“Where am I?” It came out as a croak. “Water?” I asked.
The one who’d already spoken said, “Not until morning, my friend.” He knelt down and helped me sit up, though. My rib cage felt like it was ready to explode, and I had a monster headache that wasn’t going away by itself.
I saw that I was in a bleak, filthy holding cell of some kind. Even with my nose broken, the smell was unbelievably strong and foul, probably coming from a latrine in some unseen corner. I took shallow breaths through my mouth.
What little light there was came through a grated door on the far wall. The place looked big enough for maybe a dozen of us, but there were at least three times that number, all males.
Many of the prisoners were lying shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor. A relatively lucky few were snoring away on wall-mounted bunks.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Midnight, maybe. Who knows? What’s the difference to us? We’re all dead men anyway.”
Chapter 39
AS MY HEAD cleared some, I realized that my wallet was gone. And my belt.
And, I realized as I felt around some more, the earring from my left ear. The lobe was scabbed over where a small silver hoop had been, a birthday present from Jannie.
Where had they taken me? How far was I from the airport? Was I still in Nigeria?
Why hadn’t anyone tried to stop them from kidnapping me? Did it happen all the time?
I had no idea about any of these questions, or their answers.
“Are we in Lagos?” I finally asked.
“Yes. In Kirikiri. We are political prisoners. So we have been told. I am a journalist. And you are?”
A metal scrape came from the direction of the door as it was unlocked, then opened wide.
I saw two blue-uniformed guards pause in the light of a cement corridor before they stepped in and became shadows themselves. Seconds later, one of them played a flashlight over us.
It caught me in the eyes and hung there for several seconds.
I felt sure they were here for me, but they grabbed the man two down from me instead. The one who had said he was a journalist.
They pulled him roughly to his feet. Then one of the guards unholstered a pistol and pressed it to his temple.
“No one talks to the American. No one,” the guard told the room. “You hear me?”
Then, as I watched in disbelief, the man was pistol-whipped until he was unconscious. Then he was dragged out of the holding cell.
The reaction of the other prisoners around me was mostly silent acceptance, but a couple of men moaned into their hands. No one moved; I could still hear snoring from a few of them.
I stayed where I was, holding it all in until the vicious guards were gone. Then I did the only thing I could, which was ease back down to the floor, where every shallow, rapid breath produced another slice of pain through my chest.
/> What kind of hell had I gotten myself into?
Chapter 40
I WISH I could say that my first night in the prison cell in Kirikiri was a blur and that I barely remember it.
It’s just the opposite, though. I will never forget any of it, not one second.
The thirst was the worst, on that first night anyway. My throat felt like it was closing up. Dehydration ate at me from the inside. Meanwhile, oversize mosquitoes and rats tried to do the same from the outside.
My head and torso throbbed like a metronome all night, and a sense of hopelessness threatened to overwhelm me the minute I let my guard down, or, God forbid, slept for half an hour.
I’d read enough from Human Rights Watch to know something about the conditions in this kind of prison—but the gap between knowing it and living it was enormous. It was possibly the worst night of my life, and I’d had some bad ones before this. I had spent time with Kyle Craig, Gary Soneji, and Casanova.
As dawn finally came, I watched the single barred window like a television set. Seeing its slow change, from black, to gray, to blue, was as close as I could get to optimism.
Just when the prisoners around me began to stir, the cell door opened again.
A wiry guard stood at the threshold. He reminded me of a very tall grasshopper. “Cross! Alexander!” he yelled at the top of his voice. “Cross! Over here! Now!”
It was a struggle to look halfway able-bodied as I slowly rose to my feet. I focused on the pain of my chest hairs being pulled out where they had fused with the dried blood in my shirt. It was just instinct, but it got me up on rubbery legs and across the floor.
Then I followed the guard into the corridor. He turned right, and when I saw the dead end ahead of us, I let go of any thoughts I’d had about getting out of the prison.
Maybe ever.
“I am an American policeman,” I said, starting up my story again. “I’m here investigating a murder.”