The Janson Option (20 page)

1°19' S, 36°55' E
Jomo Kenyatta International Airport
Nairobi, Kenya

J
essica Kincaid told herself that there were two kinds of reckless. Reckless where you risked your life like a dumb football clod—going too fast on a motorcycle without a helmet, for instance, or pulling a John Wayne in a firefight when you know damned well that the way to win a firefight, which was to not get killed, was to raise your head no higher than necessary to acquire your targets. That was the kind of reckless Janson was always warning her about.

The other kind of reckless was when you risked your cover, which wasn't usually a problem for her. She was intensely private and made a habit of stealth, always, so it was a very small shift of gears to go operational. So while she would happily go nuts on a Ducati sport bike, she never got reckless with cover.

Problem was—except for a decent reading on the CT scan Janson had ordered her to get in Nairobi—she had nothing to show for her trip. She'd been hoping to make up for Ahmed and Isse bagging them. But none of the contacts the real estate guy Salah Hassan had set in Nairobi's “Little Mogadishu” neighborhood of Somali expatriates had panned out, and she was heading back to Janson empty-handed.

Then life intruded with a double whammy. Nairobi Airport locked down because of a drone crash. They claimed it was brush fire, but she had seen it from the corner of her eye. Someone's secret military UAV had augered into a nearby sorghum field. That ate up an hour. Then the damned plane broke down and she had to wait while Lynn and Sarah and a passel of Kenyan mechanics figured out why an oil-pressure sensor had gone haywire.

Stuck with time on her hands, she limped into the airport bar.

Which brought Kincaid to the fit, intelligent-looking guy with his arm in a sling who was nursing a beer. To her eye, he had US Special Forces stamped on his forehead, making him a prime source of boots-on-the-ground information. But SF guys were trained to report nosy questions, so unless she did a superlative job of tamping down curiosity, Paul Janson would get a call from an old friend asking, not politely, “What are you doing on our turf?”

Her first and best step was to get the SF guy to open the conversation, which was not too hard with a poor bastard who'd been in-country for a month and warned that Somali camel herders' daughters, as beautiful as they were, were off-limits. She sat one stool over, ordered a beer, and they exchanged nods.

“NGO?” he asked, meaning some nongovernmental agency like Doctors Without Borders. She looked the part, wearing khaki pants loose enough to conceal the bandage on her thigh, combat boots, a long-sleeved checked shirt, and a floppy canvas bush hat.

“AID,” she answered, making herself more official. She was carrying United States Agency for International Development paperwork to back the lie. “You?”

“Sleeping sickness eradication,” he lied back.

“I thought that was mostly in West Africa.”

“We're making sure it stays there.”

“How'd you cut loose from your group?”

“Putting a buddy on his flight” was the cryptic answer. “Where you headed?”

“Mog… you?”

“Yeah.” He didn't sound thrilled.

She said, “The place is a mess.”

He said, “Makes in-country look like paradise.”

This went on through two more beers.

Kincaid decided she would have to be a lot more reckless if she was going to learn anything that would help spring Allegra Helms.

“When's your flight?” she asked.

He looked at his watch. “Fourteen hundred… Yours?”

“I don't know. They're swapping out some damned thing.”

“What line? The Turks?”

“Private.”

He looked at her.

She said, “I lied. I'm not AID.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“Meant to.”

“Who you with?”

“Corporate security.”

He nodded solemnly. “Corporate security in Mog? Now you're really lying.”

“We're trying to spring a lady who got kidnapped.”

“Oh.”

They sat silently sipping beer for a few minutes. Then he asked, “How you making out?”

“Lousy.”

He asked, “What are you, like, a ransom negotiator or something?”

“Or something.”

“That where you got your limp?” he asked.

“Slipped in the shower.”

He patted his sling. “Me too.”

Kincaid glanced at him. Far from tamping down curiosity, she saw questions blooming like daisies on his face. But before she got too reckless she had to get something back from him. She asked, “Who are
you
chasing?”

He looked her over very carefully. Then he said, “Bad guys.”

Kincaid nodded. Bad guys from a US point of view in this corner of the world were al-Qaeda, and that was all he would tell her.

He asked again, “What are you?”

“Sniper.”

He almost spit his beer. “Why you telling me this?”

“'Cause this job's going to hell and I need every bit of help I can get.”

“Where is she?”

“On a hijacked yacht off Eyl.”

“Oh, her.”

Kincaid watched him very carefully to see whether he would back off, which would indicate that Special Forces was planning a rescue. But he just nodded. If they were, he was not part of it. Neither had he caught scuttlebutt of a SEALs operation.

“You know who I mean,” she said.

“I'm just a guy in a bar.”

“No kidding… You know anything?”

“Not what you'd expect,” he said, “but I heard something really strange.”

Kincaid kept her mouth shut. She didn't even ask what he'd heard. She just waited and prayed that he would take a crazy chance on his gut reading of her.

He spoke into his glass like it was a microphone and all he had to do was whisper. “I'm not doing this job. I just heard about it. Kind of tangential to something I'm doing. Cell intercepts? There's a guy on the yacht.” He glanced at her, testing.

“Mad Max.”

“Right. Max talked to a guy in Mog. On the guy's phone.”

“I don't get it.”

“ELINT's been listening to the phones of a certain guy in Mog. Right?”

Kincaid nodded. Electronic intelligence surveillance of telephones, sat phones, cells, and radio. A modern version of what Janson used to call wiretapping. “OK…?”

“So there's a call to one of the guy's own phones in Mog from another of his own phones in Eyl. Both phones are mega-encrypted. You get what I'm saying?”

“The guy in Mog wanted to talk privately with Max, so he somehow delivered to Max an encrypted phone he could trust.”

“You got it.”

“What did they say?”

“Whoever told me what went down was not going to tell me any more. But it sounds like the guy in Mog wanted something from the pirate holding the lady. Right?”

“Right.”

He shrugged. “It's not much.”

One way to get somebody to tell more was to impress them with how much you knew. Kincaid asked, “Was the guy in Mog named Gutaale?”

“No.”

“No? Somebody with the president?”

“No, no, no. Nothing like that.”

“Then who?”

The SF guy looked around like they were kids passing notes in high school. “The dude they're trying to trace? He's totally hip to e-tracking. Every time they think they've nailed him, he and his folks are gone when they kick in the door. They know tech. They know computers. They know as good as we do.”

“Who is he?”

“He's got one of those Somali nicknames.”

“The Italian?”

“How'd you know?”

Jessica Kincaid plucked her cell from her shirt pocket as if it had just vibrated for a text, and pretended to read the message. “Bird's fixed. I'm outta here.” She jumped off her barstool and extended her hand. “Pleasure talking to you, soldier. Stay safe.”

He shook her hand and held tight a second. “Hey, what's your name?”

Kincaid gave him a warm kiss on the cheek before she took her hand back. “Don't make a liar of me.”

M
OHAMED
A
DAM,
the president of the newly declared Federal Republic of Somalia, had a smooth brow, a black mustache, close-cropped hair, and a youthful appearance, except for an incongruously white goatee. His office looked like he had moved in just the day before. The walls were bare. His desk was cluttered with computer monitors, keyboards, mobile and landline phones, and open files. Nearby, printers and fax machines held more files and newspapers. He was working in shirtsleeves with his jacket slung over the back of his chair. He was frowning at his computer monitors, tugging his goatee with one hand and manipulating a mouse with the other, when his chief of staff ushered in American oilman Kingsman Helms. Helms thought he looked bewildered.

“Mr. Helms. I'm told you have urgent news. Does it concern the safety of your wife?”

“No, I have—”

“I'm sorry. And I am sad to tell you that while I presume the rumors she is held by Maxammed are true, Maxammed has ignored my attempts to make contact with him through clan brothers. We are, as I'm sure you know, vaguely related.”

“I thank you for your effort,” Helms said. “But in fact, I've come to report the latest from my headquarters in Houston. If you're not too busy,” he added politely, indicating the computer.

“Decisions loom,” said Adam, “and demand to be resolved. What do we name our national celebration for returning expatriates? Our homecoming for youth? Do we call it a simple welcome-home? Some suggest we call it the Homecoming. Others protest that that sounds like an American football game or a movie about vampires. Do we call it Coming Home Youth? Or Welcome Home Youth? What about older people? We need them too, after all. What do you think, Mr. Helms?”

Helms said, “I think one can waste a lot of time on slogans.”

“Do you?” President Adam removed his glasses and hooked one of the wire temples over his finger. Without his glasses, his eyes were piercing. He asked, “How about ‘New Energy for a New Tomorrow'?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“American Synergy Corporation's slogan last year was ‘New Energy for a New Tomorrow.'”

“Oh, yes, of course.”

“It's featured in the title of a promotional Blu-ray video,
American Synergy Corporation—New Energy for a New Tomorrow
.”

Helms allowed an indulgent chuckle. “Turn your back and the media department runs amok.”

“I recall that Blu-ray touted your personal slogan. How did that go? ‘At ASC, leadership is not about now, not about today. Leadership is about then, about the future, about tomorrow.'”

Helms kept his smile intact. “What is it they say about publicity? As long as they spell—”

President Adam cut him off with a cold gesture. “Give us our due, Mr. Helms. We too are trying to sell something. Or at least convince ourselves we have something to sell.”

Helms bowed his head as if to acknowledge the point. “We have slogans in common.”

“Judging by your current office accommodations in his seaside villa, we also have Home Boy Gutaale in common.”

“Which is one of the subjects I hope you have time to discuss,” Helms replied smoothly.

“Was Gutaale on the agenda of your Houston meeting?”

“Some asked what he wants.”

“I know what the warlord wants from me,” said President Adam. “What does he want from you?”

This was not the cautious Raage whom Helms had grown accustomed to. Nor was he acting like the detached academic that ASC Research depicted in his dossier. It occurred to Helms, belatedly, that while Adam had worked in education his whole career, he was among the tiny minority of elite Somalis who had not fled but stayed in the country through two decades of violent civil war. Helms realized he had to make some fast decisions about how to proceed because mild-mannered President Adam had become surprisingly more direct, more blunt, and more in charge. As if he were rising to the occasion. Aren't we all? Helms thought. He had said and done things today with Paul Janson that he could not have imagined a week earlier.

He decided to give Adam a straight answer. “Gutaale wanted money and the imprimatur of a global corporation.”

“Legitimacy.”

“You could call it that. May I ask what he wants from you, Mr. President?”

“He wants me to ask Parliament to appoint him vice president.”

“Vice president? That would be a big step up for a warlord.”

“It can be argued that the difference between a warlord and a politician is the difference between war and peace.
Inshallah,
we are headed toward peace.”

Kingsman Helms was ready to change horses in midstream if Gutaale turned out to be the best horse to back. He told himself that if Gutaale attained high public office it would be to his advantage to persuade Maxammed to free Allegra. “Would Parliament agree?”

“It's within their power. And you, of course, know that Gutaale has broad support.”

Helms ignored the jibe and fired back, without a trace of a smile, “Such a vice president could make your life, potentially, a risky proposition.”

President Adam shrugged. “The Koran says we cannot know when or where we will die.”

“May I ask, Mr. President, what do you want from Home Boy?”

The president looked at him guilelessly. “His clan connections are golden. Combined with mine, which are less weighty, and the respect I command abroad, which far outweighs his—pooling our strengths—we could bring stability to our nation. That's what I want. What does the American Synergy Corporation want from Home Boy Gutaale, Mr. Helms?”

“Stability.”

“What about exclusivity?”