Lords of Corruption (25 page)

"Seriously," Tracy said, "we need to talk."

He finally got the lid off his coffee and peered down at the dark fluid. "No cream. There are a hundred different coffee drinks on the menu, and you can't get cream. Tracy, would you mind --"

"I'm not getting you any damn cream!" she shouted.

He jerked back in surprise, snagging the wheels of his chair in the carpet and nearly tipping over backward. The entire office went silent.

"Now, you're going to just sit there and listen to me, JB."

He opened his mouth to protest but didn't manage to get any sound out before she jabbed a finger in his face. "Shut it!"

He did, and she slapped an eight-by-ten photo on the desk in front of him. It depicted a man in a long wool coat glancing back over hunched shoulders. The background had been erased, so there was no context. Just the man.

Flannary leaned in a little closer, examining the slightly blurry features of the face. The eyes had a subtle slope that suggested Eastern Europe to him. The skin was pale and the expression angry, but not at anything specific as much as life in general.

"This came in from the camera we set up," Tracy said. "He went into the New-Africa building last night."

"So?"

"He's not an employee --"

"Maybe he's a donor. Or a delivery man.

Or he was lost and needed directions."

"It was after hours, and he was in ther
e f
or quite a while."

"Can't say I know him."

"Me either. So I posted his picture to some of the Internet crime forums."

"You did what?"

"Don't worry, I did it in a way that no one can trace the post back to us. And I took out the background so there's no way to locate it."

"I'm not sure that was a great idea, Tracy.

We --"

"It was a great idea," she protested. "I
n f
act, it was a fantastic idea. If two heads are better than one, then a thousand heads are better than two, right?"

It depended on how hard they were pounding. "And what did your thousand heads tell you?"

She grinned and slapped a copy of a newspaper article on top of the picture. The accompanying photo was a grainy copy of a bad original, but there was no doubt it was the same man. A little younger, perhaps, but the same tilted eyes and pissed-off expression. Flannary squinted at the text but couldn't make anything of it.

"It's in Czech," Tracy said. "The translation's on the back."

It was in her handwriting, with numerous scratch-outs and notes written in the margins. Obviously, she'd done the work herself.

"His name is Aleksei Fedorov," she said, saving him from having to decipher her writing. "He's a Russian businessman who everyone thinks was heavily connected to international drug and weapons trafficking. The Czech government thought they had him on a tax-evasion charge, but he managed to get out of it. After that the Europeans really turned the heat up on him. One prosecutor basically said he was going t
o m
ake it his life's work to see Fedorov behind bars."

"This article is over ten years old. How'd it go?"

"Not so well. They found the prosecutor hanging from a tree."

"Suicide?" Flannary said hopefully.

"Only if he also managed to set himself on fire before he died."

"Great."

"After that Fedorov pretty much disappeared."

"But now you've found him."

She nodded. "I think you'll find this interesting: There was a lot of speculation that he was routing cocaine through African countries with corrupt governments. The idea was that law enforcement and the military would work for him instead of against him, and most of the people in those countries wouldn't know a bag of cocaine from a hole in the ground."

"So we have our connection to Africa," he said, feeling his hangover subside a bit.

"It gets better. Can you guess when NewAfrica was first chartered?"

"Right around when Fedorov disappeared?"

"Exactly. He lost his anonymity, and the government was starting to close in on hi
m i
n Europe. So he relocates to the U
. S
. and uses his contacts in Africa to start a bogus charity."

"But he needed a slick front man," Flan-nary said. "So he found Stephen Trent."

She grinned widely and lowered her voice. "Congratulations, JB. This is an incredible story -- a known criminal causing incredible human suffering. And now you have the chance to blow it wide open. To make a real difference to the people this guy's victimizing."

" We have the chance, Tracy. We."

Chapter
32.

"What do you think?" Annika said.

They were parked on top of a hill that gave them an unobstructed view of her village. The rising sun had turned the eastern sky into an orange ribbon that cast an ethereal glow over the tiny dwellings and whitewashed church below.

A few stovepipe chimneys had smoke rising from them, and a lone woman was walking toward the river for water, but everything else was still and silent.

"There could be an entire army waiting for us in those huts," Josh said. "We're about to bet our lives that Gideon's too stupid to have figured out who you are."

"Or that he thinks we wouldn't be crazy enough to come back here."

"Thin. Very, very thin."

The ascent of the sun dissipated the shadows, but, for the first time since he'd arrived, he took no comfort in seeing the
m g
o. "I'm sorry I got you into this, Annika."

"It's what I came here for, isn't it? To try to help people?" She smiled but wasn't able to completely mask her fear. "Besides, this is JB's fault. And I'm going to give him a hard kick when I see him next."

Josh fired the Land Cruiser's motor and glided down the hill, pulling up in front of the church and getting out.

They didn't speak as they crept through the gate protecting Annika's garden and entered the room that had been her home since she'd arrived in Africa. It was even more austere than he'd imagined -- a twin bed neatly made with threadbare blankets, an old armoire, and a desk with a cross hanging above it.

"Give me some help," she said, kneeling next to the armoire. They slid it away from the wall, and she began prying up the loose floorboards that had been beneath it.

"What's that?" Josh said, catching a glimpse of gray metal. "You've got to be kidding me. A safe?"

"My father was afraid for me when I came here. He sent it."

"Did he send the concrete it's set in, too?"

She shook her head seriously and spu
n t
he combination dial. "I believe that yo
u s
hould put your faith in God. But a littl
e c
ement doesn't hurt, either."

A moment later she had retrieved a pouch containing her passport and a stack of money about an inch thick.

"I don't suppose you have a gun in there."

"No guns," she said, hanging the pouch around her neck and slipping it beneath her shirt. Her expression melted into one of resigned melancholy as she looked around the room. "I'll never be back here."

With his mind occupied entirely by staying one step ahead of Gideon, Josh hadn't considered the effect all this would have on her. The village was her home. And not only that, it was the place she had devoted her life to. The people here were as much a family to her as the people she'd left in Europe.

And now it was over. No good-byes. No standing back and reflecting on everything she'd accomplished. No celebration of the village's bright future. She was just going to disappear forever.

"I'm so sorry Annika. I . . .

His voice faded when the sound of an engine became audible, so close that it seemed as though it had been there the whole time and they just hadn't noticed it.

"Come on!" he said, grabbing her arm and pulling her toward the door that led to the garden. He threw it open, but instead o
f r
unning for the jungle, he dragged Annika to the floor. They hit hard, but he still managed to kick the door shut just as a staccato burst of machine-gun fire sounded. Annika threw an arm over her face, protecting it from the splintering wood as the bullets penetrated the room. A moment later, the guns went silent, replaced by the sound of laughter.

Josh dragged the armoire into a position barricading the rear door while Annika crawled toward the one leading to the main part of the church. She peered through it for a moment and then motioned for him to follow as she ran crouched through the tightly packed benches. Angry shouts and terrified screams penetrated the gaps in the walls, echoing eerily around the structure.

Josh kept up for a few seconds but then slowed when it occurred to him that this was exactly what the men who had shot at them wanted -- to flush them out the front of the church and into the square where their comrades were waiting.

Ahead of him, Annika slid up to the edge of a window and looked outside. The morning light illuminated her face, and he actually had to turn away when he saw the horror there. This was his fault. He'd killed them both.

In the small plaza, men in dirty fatigues were making a game of dragging terrified, half-dressed villagers from their homes. Children wailed, women struggled, and men were beaten with rifle butts at the slightest hint of resistance.

Josh counted six soldiers, all teenagers and all staggering drunk despite their tender age. The only adult stood in the shade of the machine gun mounted in the bed of the rust-eaten pickup he and his team had arrived in. He was unsteady but didn't seem quite as hammered as the others. His uniform, consisting of a pair of gray camouflage pants and an unbuttoned olive drab coat, was clean and untorn. There was a flash of pink and yellow whenever the jacket swung open, and Josh found himself mesmerized by the odd familiarity of it.

He moved closer to the window, concentrating on the man. Without the ubiquitous grin and subservient gait, he was transformed. But still there was no mistaking the Hawaiian shirt or bulging cheeks. Luganda.

Josh was too preoccupied with his bartender's betrayal to notice the quiet whimper that escaped Annika when a bawling child was thrown to the ground in an effort to shut him up. But he wasn't so distracted as to overlook her breaking for the church'
s f
ront door. He chased her down before she could reach it, grabbing her around the waist and clamping a hand over her mouth as she fought against him.

"What are you going to do?" he whispered. "Throw rocks?"

She got an arm free and pulled his hand from her mouth. "This is about us, Josh. Not them."

He knew she was right, and he was disconcerted at how easy it was to hide from the realization. Everything in this country seemed vaguely like a movie to him -- real enough to look at, maybe even interact with on some superficial level, but not an actual part of his reality.

When he was certain she'd stay put, he released her and went to the window again. Despite the lack of military discipline, Luganda's soldiers worked with impressive efficiency. The huts were all empty now, and the entire population of the village was kneeling in the square. It wasn't a movie. These were real people. And real guns.

"Is there any other way out of here?"

She didn't seem to hear him.

"Annika!"

She blinked a few times. "No. Just the front and back doors."

Outside, Luganda had one hand on th
e s
houlder of what seemed to be his youngest soldier and was pointing at the church with the other. The kid, probably no older than thirteen, nodded reluctantly before heading their way. The other boys cheered him on drunkenly as he thrust out the machine gun hanging around his neck.

Josh looked behind him at the empty church, trying to quell the panic rising in him. The makeshift barricade of the back door seemed to have held, but judging from the silence coming from that part of the building, it was due more to a lack of interest than the strength of the barrier. Those men were just there to keep them boxed in.

"Is there anywhere we can go? Somewhere to hide?"

He let himself feel a small glimmer of hope when she took his hand and led him back down the aisle. She'd put in a safe, maybe she'd built an escape hatch of some sort. Or maybe she really did have guns and hadn't wanted to resort to them until it was absolutely necessary.

When they got back to her room, though, she knelt down in front of her desk and looked up at the cross.

"Annika, what the hell are you doing?" "Praying. I know you say you're not religious, but I think you should pray wit
h m
e. You might --"

"Are you fucking kidding me? There's a time and a place for praying, and this sure as hell isn't it."

"No? Then when?"

The sound of the front door to the church opening reached them, followed by the echo of approaching footsteps. He picked up one of the boards she'd removed to expose the safe while she looked on passively.