Thomas Prescott Superpack (97 page)

This left Rikki, Gina, and myself.

We were finally able to get a room in a dumpy motel across the street, who at the sight of Gina’s wad of cash, kept our names off the books. The three of us spent the ensuing days searching the internet, making calls, and threatening careers. It took us a week to sort everything out and then another two days of planning.

Two hours earlier, we had landed at Heathrow airport.

Rikki took a deep breath and pulled the door open. Gina and I glanced at each other, then watched as Rikki made her way across the street and to the large turnstile entrance to the 96-story
Alidi
building. I wished I could see the look on her father’s face when he saw her. But she’d said she’d needed to do it alone. Fortunately, it would all be captured by the video camera hidden in her jacket and I, along with millions of others, would watch it soon enough.

I leaned forward and said to the black cab driver, “Let’s go.”

He eased into the downtown traffic and continued on. Gina’s hand found mine.

Twenty minutes later, we reached an area known as the Albert Embankment, which stretched for a mile along the River Thames in Central London.

We stepped from the cab and looked at the building to our right that had been made so famous by James Bond. Known as the SIS Building or the British Secret Intelligence Building, it was best known as the MI6 Building.

I wonder if Q was in there somewhere.

We walked past the building and continued on for two blocks, then stopped in front of a three-story building with hundreds of small flags from different countries dangling from the roof parapet. The building was far larger than it had appeared online.

The IMO Building or International Maritime Organization Building, was home to an emergency two-day conference on the topic of maritime piracy, one elicited by the very attack I was part of eleven days earlier.

Gina and I crossed the street and sat on a bench near the river. Thirty-seven minutes later, thirty men and women—mostly men—exited the building.

Gina nodded at a man in a suit and said, “That’s him.” She pulled a walkie-talkie from her pocket and said, “White hair, blue suit, black briefcase, headed towards you right now . . . hold on . . . he’s talking to two other guys . . . hang back . . . alright . . . go.”

The cab we’d just exited a half-hour earlier, pulled up to the curb just as our mark raised his hand in signal. A moment later, the cab pulled into traffic, then did a U-turn and stopped directly in front of us. Gina and I opened both back doors simultaneously and squeezed in around our mark.

“What? What the hell are you—” the man stammered.

“Shut up,” I said.

He whipped his head from Gina, then back to me, then back to Gina. “Gina?”

“Roger,” she said matter of fact. Then she punched him in the face, the sound of his nose breaking filling the small cab, and said, “That’s for killing my father.”

≈

The moment Gina had seen the photo of herself flutter to the ground in the Zulu prison, she’d known. She hadn’t been sent to save three kids. She’d been sent to die. She wasn’t sure how the man in the prison had come to have her picture, whether he’d been the man who was supposed to do the job, or if he’d simply found the picture and clung to it, much as he’d clung to the beacon. But it didn’t matter. Someone had her picture. Someone was supposed to kill her or make sure she was in that prison when the missile struck.

But who had supplied the picture? The photo was from the WHO website, so theoretically anyone could have access to the photo. But how had it gotten to Ptutsi? And who had sent it?

She couldn’t believe for an instant that Paul would send her to her death. Never. Which would only leave one man. His father. Roger Garret. But why would Garret, National Security Advisor to the President, a man that for many years Gina had thought of as a second father, a man that she’d always believed was destined to be her father-in-law, a man she knew loved her, want her dead?

She couldn’t think of a single possible reason.

Back at the motel with Thomas and Rikki, she had racked her brain. The last time she’d seen Roger Garret had been at her father’s funeral six years earlier. She’d remembered hugging Garret, wiping her tears away on his shoulder. She hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, but looking back on it now, she’d remembered the way he’d said, “I’m sorry.” The way he’d said it, eyes downcast, almost as if he were apologizing. Gina had always figured it had been some weird guy thing, like if he’d been in the car with him, or hadn’t let him drink and drive, or if he’d only called him back maybe he might not have been on the road at that time, or some change of circumstances that would have altered the outcome. But could he have been simply apologizing because it had been his fault?

But it was the second thing that he said, that tripped a wire in her brain. He had asked where her father’s effects would be sent. Did she want him to store them for her? She’d been so distraught at the
time, that she hadn’t even answered.

At the motel, Gina had called her best friend who had been holding her father’s belongings in her storage. Gina had forgotten about Roger’s inquiry and the box had been sent to Bolivia, but it had been too painful for Gina to open, and she had sent the box back to the States. She had her best friend expedite the box to their motel in South Africa and it had come two days later. Gina had been going through the materials, tears dripping from her eyes as she looked at her father’s many medals and decorations. Just some old papers, photos of her mother, and two worn copies of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, her father’s favorite novel. One of the copies was a first edition. Gina pulled the book out and watched as three yellowed notebook pages fluttered out.

It was a letter.

It was from a missionary. His name was Doug Haniferr. The letter was written in a shaky hand. She doubted the man was still alive by the time the letter reached the States. In straightforward speak, the man detailed that he was doing missionary work in a remote village in South Africa called Ptutsi. The village was a hotbed for AIDS and nearly half the people in the village were infected. He’d been in the village for the past eighteen months trying to get some of the villagers to take Christ into their hearts before they perished. But now
he
was perishing. Although he had received all his immunizations, he had still contracted malaria. He knew without a doubt that he would be dead soon. This letter was a last ditch effort to get some added medical aid to the people of the village. He knew that the U.S. could only allocate so much money to so many things, but he thought he had stumbled on an answer. While helping extend a mass grave, he had noticed a couple things in the soil. He’d been a geology major in college, before going into the seminary. He’d done a rudimentary test, mixing one cup of soil with one quart of water, shaking, then allowing to settle. And as he’d suspected there had been a rainbow like oily film on the surface of the water.

Hydrocarbons.

≈

“This whole thing was about oil,” I said.

Blood gushed from Garret’s nose, stemming over his hands, and I couldn’t tell how he reacted to my statement.

After Rikki had shown me the Google results on the search for her father and diamonds, I had been certain that Track Bowe had been behind the takeover of the
Afrikaans
, the ransom of his daughter, and the attempt to flatten an entire village all in an effort to turn Ptutsi into a diamond mine. According to Google, Track owned two diamond mines in South Africa and he was in the process of hunting for a third site. I’d assumed he had somehow discovered that the land beneath the Zulu village of Ptutsi was brimming with the stones, but I’d been wrong. It was brimming with oil.

The first night at the hospital, I spent a good eight hours on Gina’s satellite phone (luckily she had a bunch of spare batteries.) I read everything I could find about the attack on the
Afrikaans
, the Professor—Baruti Quaroni—the Warlord—Keli “The Mosquito” Nkosi—and Track Bowe and his many operations, including his two diamond mines in South Africa. Other than Track owning the cruise line, I couldn’t get the pieces to fall into place. Why ransom his daughter? Why pay one billion dollars? Plus, thinking back on what Quaroni had said to Rikki, it didn’t seem credible. He’d told her that she’d have to ask her father what he was getting out of it. But why wouldn’t he just tell her. She was about to die. Quaroni didn’t tell her because he didn’t know? For all he knew, it could have been Track behind it; whoever was pulling all the strings was doing so anonymously.

So it was back to the drawing board. What was this really all about? And who was the one real person controlling everything.

It’d happened when I was visiting Gilroy. When he’d flipped me off I thought back to when he’d first flipped me off in the show lounge. When he’d said that everything always came down to oil, and how there was more oil in Africa than anywhere else in the world—they just hadn’t found it yet.

So I started reading articles about oil and Africa and Gilroy wasn’t lying. They suspected there were enormous reserves hidden in the forgotten continent. There had even been four drilling ventures within fifty kilometers of Ptutsi. A number of different people felt there was a huge reserve in that general area, but it’d yet to be tapped.

Two hours later, Gina had shown me the letter from the missionary.

“Are you guys fucking nuts?” Garret roared.

“I found the letter,” Gina said. “From the missionary. I found it.”

Garret’s face fell. After three long breaths, he said, “He wasn’t supposed to die.”

“Oh what, he was just supposed to drive off a cliff and survive?”

“No, I mean, it shouldn’t have come to that. He didn’t need to die. All I wanted was the letter.” From next to him I could see how long the words had been bottled up. They’d been fermenting for too long and he actually breathed a loud sigh as they finally diffused into the atmosphere.

“What happened?”

I’d done enough interrogations to know when
someone wanted to talk. Garret took a deep breath and said, “Seven years ago, a letter found its way to me. I’m not sure why I was the one to open it, but I was. How I wish I weren’t. I take it you know the contents of the letter—a missionary who had a good suspicion there was a huge reserve of oil under the ground of an AIDS stricken Zulu village. A missionary that was more than likely already dead.”

“And suddenly you are the keeper of the Holy Grail,” I said.

“Wrong, this made the Holy Grail look like a Styrofoam cup. Striking oil in South Africa, one of our biggest allies would not only mean trillions of dollars, it would mean an end to a war.”

“A war? In South Africa?”

“No, the Middle East.”

Gina and I gazed at each other. Neither of us had made the connection.

“We would no longer have to rely on them for oil,” Garret said defiantly. “We could pull out all our troops, let them go back to blowing each other up. Do you really think we would be over there, still be over there, if it weren’t for all that oil? If we found another oil resource, our troops would be out of there in six months. Guaranteed. This isn’t about money. This is about National Security.”

“Rationalize it any fucking way you want. You still tried to murder four hundred people on a cruise ship and nearly a quarter of million people in that village.”

“Finish telling me about my father,” interrupted Gina.

“Okay, so I’m the only one on the planet that knows about this oil reserve, or suspected oil reserve. But it makes sense because for the past ten years people have been drilling around this village looking for oil, everything points at oil, but no one thought that it might be directly under this village. So, I start thinking of ways to get this Zulu village moved. But because of all the apartheid shit, the South African government is strict, and not oil, not anything would get them to throw people off their sacred land, not to mention uproot a mass grave more than a half mile in radius. It would take an act of God to move those people.”

“Or a huge fucking missile.”

“Right,” he said with a laugh and I nearly broke his nose back into place.

“I started making some calls, a couple of friends of friends, and your father walked in. Heard me talking on the phone.”

“Let me guess, you were gonna have some people just go in there and shoot them all.”

“Indeed I was. And for quite cheap. But your father overheard me and when I looked for the letter the next day, it was gone. I begged your father to give it back. Told him that I wasn’t going to do anything. I’d just been making some calls. But he didn’t trust me. And after all we’d been through.”

Gina stared at him.

“He was my best friend, Gina. Had been for nearly twenty years. I didn’t want to kill him. But, I needed that letter. And more importantly, I was sick of watching kids die in a land that we had no business even being in.”

“Kill the few, save the many,” I said.

“Exactly.”

I punched him in the nose. It did not go into place. In fact, I think it was on his right cheek now. It took him a long minute to stem the bleeding.