White Bone (2 page)

O
ne of only a few fifty-year-old bull elephants left in Kenya, Grandfather had been previously shot and wounded by poachers and was distinguishable by a large tear in his left ear. He was always seen in the company of a half-dozen females, and his arrival caused a moment of hushed reverence among Koigi’s squad. The men were prepared to lay down their lives for the likes of Grandfather.

Koigi spoke Swahili, directing three of his best to take up a protective position. As his men deployed, Koigi monitored them, first with his naked eye, then through the night-vision binoculars. Good men, he admired them all.

“Boss?” the first of his two snipers asked.

Koigi answered flatly. “Provide cover if engaged.”

The clouds on the horizon lit up like smoke in a wildfire. The moon was improbably the size of the sun.

By dividing his small squad, Koigi was taking yet another
calculated risk. Such strategies could backfire. When the attack came—and it would come, as his source was reliable—it would be at the hands of an assortment of misguided, greedy locals under the direction of a well-trained Somali. Guuleed was a pus-oozing sore from across the northern border. Before an ounce of elephant blood spilled into this beloved soil, Guuleed’s would flow freely, his head on a pike. Koigi lived for this moment.

“Boss, why does Grandfather not wear a collar?”

“Because the KGA has its head up its ass.” The Kenya Game Agency, along with funding from private conservation groups, had begun collaring and GPS-tracking several dozen elephants. His men chuckled softly. “But more likely he’s taken too many darts from treating his wounds.” Repeatedly tranquilizing the elephants could turn them aggressive.

When the firefight came, shots rang out, sounding like the dull popping of firecrackers. It happened quickly—two or three minutes that felt like an hour. The bittersweet smell of cordite and gunpowder warmed Koigi’s nostrils. The crack of gunfire sent the elephants running. Bullets whistled over Koigi’s head. Chips of rock sprayed around him. An elephant dropped, first to its front legs, then collapsed and tumbled in a nauseating slow motion. Koigi, rifle in hand, screamed—an amateurish mistake. He caught a bullet in his vest near his left shoulder. Fell face-first in pain.

Dragged to cover by the ankles, Koigi saw his men kill at least two, including a driver. An engine revved.

“Retreating,” his man announced.

“Stay with them!” Koigi ordered, but he could hear it was too late.

The sound of the engine faded.

“They fought longer than necessary. They could have escaped
with fewer casualties.” Koigi spoke between clenched teeth. “The first we’ve seen of this.”

“Desperate,” said his man.

“Yes, but the question is: why?”

Far below the hill, dust rained down onto the wounded elephant as she exhaled her final breath, her tusks spearing the rising moon.

Dear John (that’s a funny way to start a letter),

We have not seen each other in over six months and the few e-mails we share are typically little more than simple greetings. I write to express my gratitude and appreciation for sharing with me your skills and experiences. They have taught me well and have provided great opportunity. I have gained from these.

I have now completed my first solo exchange, and I am most pleased to report a success. Perhaps the opportunity for sharing the details will arise in the near future. This would be most welcome.

John, as we’ve written to each other, we often joke. Of course. I have no problem with this. Now I must be more serious. I find in my heart both something missing and something fulfilling. Missing, when too much time separates us. Fulfilling when we are together. It is a small thing, perhaps. I cannot say. But its very existence interests me. Excites me, even.

Folding the overly creased letter and zipping it into an inside pocket of his windbreaker, Knox failed to appreciate the English countryside’s mid-May blossoms. The breeze rustled branches twisted like arthritic fingers in an all-pink orchard. A pale dawn yawned dully behind a steady drizzle. The silent swipe of the Mercedes’ wiper blades moved out of sync with the beat of The Killers in his earbuds. His reflection revealed a face hardened by the sun, by the stress of caring for his adult brother’s special needs. And by his deep concern over the events of the past twelve hours.

He opened a phone photo of him and Grace, his sometime co-worker, in Istanbul’s Inebolu Sunday market shot a year earlier. He leaned lower and angled himself to check the driver’s rearview mirror, alarmed by his current state. He looked north of forty, nearly a decade off, enhanced in part by his hair having gone dark due to a long, snowy Detroit winter. He’d lost some weight, adding lines to his already leathery face. Grace looked out through those expressive Asian eyes of hers, modest, subdued. They hid her ambition well, disguised her unruly sense of superiority and often unearned confidence.

He touched his jacket where he kept her letter. He felt like he was back in high school. She’d probably tossed his return letter the moment she’d read it. Their contact over the year had amounted to some random texts and the occasional video chat, prompted by loneliness or friendship or whatever force binds one person to another in confusing ways.

Their recent letters—one in each direction—were something altogether different, all the more profound. And now Knox was traveling—all on a hunch. The last-minute ticket had cost a small fortune; leaving his brother would cost him sleep.

The cool English countryside was nonetheless in bloom. Forty-five minutes from Heathrow, the Uber car exited the M25 for the
A41 and finally headed west of Northchurch, down a hedge lane called Cocksgrove. The parallel lines of towering trees gave way to a manor house and a loose-stone horseshoe driveway that fronted an ivy-covered, three-story brick spectacle. A backdrop for a costume drama. Water sprayed over the Italian fountain’s four horses ridden by trumpeting angels.

Knox heaved the oversized brass knocker, forgoing the electronic call box. Paused. Pounded it down again impatiently.

A manservant answered. A black tuxedo with a white vest. Eight thirty-six
A.M
. At six-foot-three, Knox towered over him.

“Mr. Winston,” Knox said, stepping past the man and into the foyer’s cathedral ceiling and checkered marble floor. “Mr.
W-i-n-s-t-o-n
?” His voice echoed. The manservant’s expression did not vary.

“You will find him in the breakfast room, sir.” The manservant directed with an open palm. “He’s expecting you.”

“He’s what?” Knox moved more reluctantly down the portrait-lined hall. The place was a costume drama cliché. He passed a nine-foot-tall Siberian bear rearing on its hindquarters, and Knox hung his small duffel bag over the bear’s right forearm without breaking stride.

The manservant picked it off.

Knox stopped short when he saw the man at the end of the long and perfectly polished dining table. “Sir.”

Graham Winston was far younger-looking than Knox had imagined. Mid-fifties at the most. Not quite leading-man handsome, but attractive. Strong shoulders, soft hands with manicured nails, Beretta country clothes, including bush-brown, narrow-wale corduroys and a heavy gray sweater that nearly matched his hair.

“You were expecting me?”

“Sit down, please,” Winston said, having stood to shake hands.

“How? Dulwich?” The only connection Knox had to Winston
was through his Rutherford Risk “control,” David Dulwich—aka Sarge—certainly had the means to track his international movement.

“How may I help you? No, no! First, let’s get some food in you. How’s that sound?”

A footman approached and pulled back a chair. Knox sat. A place setting was air-dropped around him by two others.

“Coffee?”

“Please.” It was poured for him, along with orange juice and a glass of ice water. Sugar and cream appeared. All this in fifteen seconds. Knox studied the dignified man at the head of the table in silence and sipped his coffee. He had an appetite brewing.

“I tried to reach Sar—Dulwich—but ended up speaking to Brian Primer, who, in typical chief executive fashion, left things fuzzy around the edges. I don’t like fuzzy. I need a couple of answers.”

“Long way to travel for a few questions.”

“Important questions. You wouldn’t take my call, as you’ll remember.” Winston showed nothing. “Straight answers would be appreciated.”

Again, no reaction.

“Grace and I—Grace Chu, Rutherford Risk—stay in touch. We didn’t used to, but you know . . . things change.” He was experiencing the uncomfortable mix of jet lag and coffee. “I guess you could say we’ve become friends. So anyway, maybe three or four weeks ago, I caught up to her on a video call. She was on her phone, Heathrow in the background. Said she was visiting a friend of ours. That’s all she said. Well, you’re the only person she and I share in England, so I understood the context. An operation. Solo. Important, because you’re an important client of Rutherford Risk. I wasn’t involved. No harm, no foul. End of discussion. But then her texts stopped. Not that I get that many anyway. But one a week. Maybe two. You know? Contact. Of course they would stop when
she was on an op. I’ve got no problem with that. I knew she’d make contact when she resurfaced.”

“If you have come to ask me for specifics . . . I don’t mind sharing, if the proper paperwork’s taken care of.”

“I finally got a text,” Knox said. “Yesterday.” He paused, taking note. Winston hadn’t expected to hear that. “Yesterday,” he repeated. “London time, at any rate. There are a couple things you need to know. One, when we’re in the field we don’t send casual texts, unless the op isn’t classified or an at-risk. Texts leave contrails, meaning you can be sourced. Two, if you do text or call, you take a number of precautions, including using pre-paid SIM cards, ghost protocols, VPNs. You know most of this. So, here’s the situation. Grace texted me from her number. Now, that’s intentional. That’s telling me something. Her text was an emoji and a question mark. That’s all. The emoji was a bomb. A tiny little bomb followed by a question mark. Any guesses, sir?”

“Terrorism? A drone strike?” Winston lifted his cleft chin in consideration. “Not sure what you’re playing at.”

“Blown,” Knox said. “She’s worried she might have been blown. Discovered.”

“I am aware of the expression, John.”

“Yeah, well, so the thing is, the only reason she would involve me is because she doesn’t trust her communication lines with you. She knows what kind of events a text like that sets into motion. She will send me an abort the moment she’s in the clear. She hasn’t done that, meaning she’s not in the clear.”

Winston looked as if he’d been sucker-punched.

“You’re paying attention,” Knox said.

“No reason to be rude, John. Hungry yet?”

Knox reached to refill his coffee but was beaten to it by a pair of arms leaning over his shoulder.
This could become habit-forming
, he
thought. He addressed the man connected to the coffee urn, requested four eggs, sunny-side up, dry wheat toast, lean ham and smoked salmon.

“I can’t trace calls. Rutherford Risk can, so I called Sarge, but no joy. I wanted access to the company’s Digital Services department. There’s a tech there, Vinay Kamat. Vinay will do anything for me. But not this time. He stonewalled me.”

“No one likes being stonewalled.”

“You see? I knew I should come here, straightaway. If it’s your op, Mr. Winston, then you can request whatever you want from tech services, including putting a source on the text sent to me to confirm beyond a doubt it was from Grace.”

“She’s fine.” The deep voice came from behind Knox. It belonged to David Dulwich. Prior to joining Brian Primer’s security firm, he’d been Knox’s supervisor for contractor work based out of Kuwait. In recent years, Dulwich had hired Knox on a freelance basis to perform dead drops or kidnapping extractions. Most recently, Dulwich had betrayed Knox and Grace during the Istanbul op, something nearly but not entirely forgiven by Knox.

“What the hell?” Knox barked at Dulwich. “You’re tracking my reservations now?”

“I look out for my friends,” Dulwich said. He sat down and waited to be served. “Don’t read too much into it.”

“Where is she? Did you hear what I told him about her text? A bomb and a question mark.” He closed his eyes to calculate. “Ten, maybe eleven hours ago.” Knox paused. “You got the same text, didn’t you?”

In the silence, though, Knox reconsidered. Among Dulwich’s many skills, he was completely unreadable, even by a close friend and associate like Knox. “No, you didn’t. And why would that be, one might ask.” He directed this to Winston.

“I’m merely an observer at this point,” Winston said. “Carry on.”

“You want to tell him?” Knox asked Dulwich.

“John’s implying Grace wouldn’t contact me if she feared she’d been blown because it might compromise the op if traced to me or, God forbid, you, sir.”

“Ah!” Winston said.

“Loyal to a fault,” Knox said. “That’s our Grace. Contacts me because I have nothing to do with anything you two are up to. Me, because if her text is traced, the trouble stays away from you, and she knows I can handle it.”

“If you say so,” Dulwich said.

“So? What now? You call Vinay. We get her twenty and you or I, or both of us for that matter, hunt her down and get her out of whatever hellhole you have her in. Why? Because that’s what she’ll expect.”

Dulwich sat stoically. The kind of stoicism Knox had no room for. Not when this tired, this concerned.

“Kenya,” Dulwich said. “The op is in Kenya.”

“She wouldn’t leave me hanging like that. I should have gotten a second text. Something. Anything.”

“It is disturbing,” Dulwich said. “Not alarming. Not yet, but disturbing. We both know there are a hundred reasons for it—dead phone battery, loss of reception, loss of phone—none of which are worth getting too worked up over.”

“Ten, eleven hours.”

“Understood. But, John, it’s the first I’ve heard of it. Give me a moment, would you?”

“You wouldn’t take my call! You’d have heard of it sooner if—”

“Easy!”

“Primer wouldn’t give me the time of day. Kenya? What the fuck?”

Dulwich had a gnarly, road-rash kind of face. It looked as if some
of his medals for heroism might have been pinned to his right cheek at one point. The scars were, in fact, the result of field sutures and subsequent skin grafts to repair fourth-degree burns over 60 percent of his body. Knox had dragged the man from a burning truck cab in the middle of a desert; that act of selflessness hung between them always, like something ready to detonate.

“It’s a solo op,” Knox said. “That’s fine. It’s Grace, so it’s mostly forensic accounting. Help me out here.”

“You’re doing fine on your own. No reason to panic, John,” Dulwich said. “I should have taken your call. Mea culpa.”

“I can’t take another Istanbul, Sarge. We put that behind us. You fuck with me now and we’ve got problems, you and me. Big problems.”

“The two of you need a moment? I can leave the room.”

The eggs were delivered.

“Well, maybe not.” Winston stabbed a piece of sausage and stacked on a slice of tomato. He lifted it to his lips but did not take a bite.

“I have many resources within the government,” he said, “including Number Ten, if I must play that card. I’d rather not. My contacts are not without substantial resources in Nairobi.”

“Is that a double negative?” Knox asked. Some egg yolk leaked from his lips. He wiped it with a starched and ironed piece of cloth. “Are you talking about British Intelligence? Bring ’em on. Let’s trace that text.”

Winston gave no acknowledgment. He might not have heard.

“We’ll await this evening’s contact,” Dulwich said. “She’ll post on one of two websites. Nothing coded or tricky, just a post to let us know she’s still going good.”

“Every night? Did she post last night?”

Dulwich wasn’t pleased. “Solar flares or something. Murphy’s Law, right? We’ll give it the rest of the day.”