White Bone (26 page)

Knox slowly rocked his chin over his shoulder, making sure to lock eyes with the man. “My friend found the ivory.” He spoke with a keen familiarity, as if sharing a secret.

For just a nanosecond, the fire in the man’s eyes dimmed.

Knox shoved back the chair and began a pirouette with his long right arm, extending it to slap the gun away. His momentum allowed him to crane forward and separate the chair from the card table. As he rotated, the chair hooked in his left elbow whistled past and took the man down. Knox dropped to pin the man, but too late. Pistol-whipped in the back of the head, he faltered. The man heaved him aside, but the act sent the gun spinning across the floor.

The two came to standing, Knox semiconscious, Rambu working out a numb leg. They charged like bull elephants, heads lowered, each throwing punches into his opponent’s gut. Knox stretched to kick the man’s weakened knee but missed. He took a blow in his bad ear, his head ringing like a bell tower. Threw a knee and caught some ribs; heard the man choke for air.

There was a hunting knife on that belt as well; Knox saw the flash of steel and blocked with his forearm. He threw an ineffective elbow to the man’s jaw. Knox feinted to his own right, throwing his opponent onto the hurt knee. As he went down, the knife’s blade flashed. Knox’s arm bled.

Grace came to mind. Knox attacked recklessly. He took the man into a chokehold. The knife fell.

“Where is she?” Knox whispered. “The Chinese woman? One wrong word . . .” He eased. “Where?” He tightened.

Rambu squirmed, trying to break the hold. But Knox had him now. There was no undoing it. He tightened the grip, thinking of this man and others with Grace, imagining what they might have done to her. “Where?”

“Lost her!” Rambu choked out.

“Where?”

“Olio—” Rambu threw back his head and caught Knox in the jaw. Knox lost his grip, pissed at being lured into a stupid mistake. The inside of his cheek bled, an all-too-familiar metallic taste.

Both men reached for and held the knife, the blade’s tip alternating its interest like a water witcher. Rambu used his considerable weight advantage against Knox, rolling and working to lie fully atop him. Knox bucked to keep him off. And still the knife tip winked.

In an instant, Knox drove his knee up between the man’s legs and took possession of the blade. He punched it into the man’s thigh—it was like stabbing a tree. The man rocked forward. Knox kneed him in the forehead, and the man was out cold. Knox tore the radio off the man’s belt and cut through his pants to expose a cell phone and wallet. Took them both.

He hurried to the balcony, vaulted and landed well onto the hardpack. Grace’s bags were nearby. Grabbing them, he clambered up the dirt hill and into the hotel’s lush landscape, running hard for the car pool.

Spotting a filthy, muscled-up SUV in the driveway, he skidded to a stop and knifed the front tire. The blade lodged in the steel belting; unable to extract it, Knox left it.

He found a key rack in a staff shed and, third in the line of eight, the vehicle it fit, a Korean crossover. He threw Grace’s bags into the passenger seat. Lights out, he drove slowly through the compound’s electric fence gate, snapping and sparking its wires before leaving the Chyulu Hills and descending onto the flat gray span of the moonlit savanna.

N
ews of a Nairobi market bombing hit Koigi hard. Seventeen confirmed dead and sixty-eight wounded, a dozen critically.

He had little doubt al-Shabaab would soon claim responsibility. The country he loved was coming apart before his eyes. And his precious elephants and their tusks were financing it.

Koigi called Graham Winston. He waited nine minutes to be connected.

“You heard about the Nairobi bombing?” he asked without preamble.

“Yes. Just now.”

“I need real-time GPS coordinates. The intel I’ve been given puts me in the man’s exhaust.”

“I don’t have that information.”

“Please, I need it. Now.”

“We’ve lost visual. No movement at either camp for the past two
passes. There was a storm. They could be hunkered down, but it looks otherwise.”

Koigi processed the news. “The satellite phone?”

“I’m told it’s turned off.”

“You know they have his coordinates. They can read the phone’s coordinates when it’s off
and
the battery’s disconnected. Please, call someone.”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“I met with Knox. He’s headed south. I’m sending men to support him. Depending on Guuleed’s location, I may join them. Listen, if Guuleed has fled his camps, there’s got to be good reason. If he’s in or near Nairobi, then maybe we can connect him to this bombing. If he’s headed south, then Knox is in trouble.” He waited for some response. “Hello? Please?”

“What you are asking me to do is no easy thing, my friend. I have someone inside sympathetic to our cause. Real-time coordinates is at another level. It requires me to reveal what I know. And I know more than I should.”

“I won’t ask you to put yourself at risk of criminal charges. And I understand the value of informers at every level, believe me. What I can say is this. Guuleed is a poacher, first and last. If he and his men are on the move, there’s a damn good reason for it, a reason dear to both of our hearts. Of this, I have no doubts. He is on the hunt. They have information, and they’re acting on it. There is only suffering to come of that.”

Winston took a long time before speaking. “If I’m to pull this favor, and I intend to do so, it could very well be the last time we are in this close to operations. You understand what that means?”

“Given the American and the missing Chinese woman. Factor in Guuleed’s sudden movement. It’s an important risk to take.”

“But you understand?”

“I do. Yes. I understand.”

“Do whatever you must. God’s speed.” Winston disconnected the call.

Less than an hour later, Koigi received the first e-mail detailing Guuleed’s real-time GPS coordinates.

The poacher was headed south on the road from Ngong to Kajiado.

G
race’s clothes and personal items lay in a heap on the passenger side of the Korean car. Knox was driving one-handed. He had yet to turn on the headlights; the view from Ol Donyo Lodge’s hillside location was vast. He didn’t want to reveal himself. For the same reason, he avoided the brakes, finding a speed that allowed him to navigate the barely visible dirt track at a steady pace.

Grace’s bag had been packed neatly. Tidy. In a way that tightened Knox’s chest. Something about touching her clothing, having a visceral connection to her skin, her smells, her presentation of herself, caused the emotions he’d been suppressing to rise to the surface.

What he had not told Dulwich in England, what he’d not fully admitted to himself, was that the exchange of two short, handwritten letters had changed his situation with Grace, had propelled him onto that jet without so much as a second thought. He would not be able to handle her loss.

For nearly ten years, Knox had worked hard to allow feelings only for Tommy. When he’d found himself under the spell of a woman, he cut the relationship off before it could develop further. He’d been an intentional asshole, or settled into big-brother mode with female friends who clearly wanted more.

Grace? Grace had sneaked up on him, coming through the job, surprising him, impressing him. Pissing him off. Driving him crazy. Calling him out. What had provoked her to write him an unsolicited letter expressing affection—in her backhanded, Chinese way—he had no idea. He’d resented it for its honesty, resented her for sending it.

And then, sober and sleepless, he found himself unable to shake it. Her words had sunk into him like nails, demanding a response. He promised himself he’d never give it to her.

A day later, reading her letter for the fifth time, he’d picked up a pen and started to write.

Dear Grace:

Thanks for the letter. That took/takes a lot of courage. I could pretend you mean nothing to me, but that’s all it would be, pretending. We could go on, seeing each other once or twice a year for Rutherford as we have, doing our jobs and going back to our corners. Maybe that’s the smart thing to do.

Here’s the deal. My brother is the most important person in my life. He’s also an adult and someone who hangs around my neck like a flashing sign:
DON’T GO NEAR
. I’m no use in a relationship, which is why I catch women when I can (something I know bothers you) and never look back. I am by definition a one-night stand, a weekend fling. I’m like a divorced man with children, only my child is twenty-six, has seizures and is mentally around fourteen. No
one signs up for that. No one. Not even an angel, Grace. And you are that!

Look, you’ve been involved in a relationship for years now. From what you’ve told me (which isn’t much), it goes back to when you two were kids. So we both have baggage. Mine is ongoing and indefinite. Yours is in need of resolution, if I may be blunt. You need to go back to him, or move on. It’s unfair to anyone else you become interested in (including me, potentially) to leave that unresolved.

Our lives are complicated. No news there. Because my contact with women is typically physical and short-lived, I rarely reach the point of caring too terribly much. Then you came along. In Istanbul, when you went missing, I went nuts. And I knew. You are not just another woman to me.

What this means, I don’t know. But I wanted you to know along with me. For what that’s worth.

Yours,

John

Her clothes, collected on the floor, reduced to a small pile, looked so insignificant. The contents of the bag revealed nothing. It seemed impossible and drastically unfair that this should be the last he knew of her. A pile on the floor of a car, bumping across a rutted dirt track.

As if hearing his thoughts, the clothes shifted and danced with the subtle jostles of the floorboards, worming lower. A sliver of white appeared. The corner of a piece of paper.

Knox leaned for it, caught a tire in a rut and felt the car pulled violently to the side of the track. The car bounced up and out into the bush before he caught hold of the paper and straightened out, gripping the wheel tightly and directing the vehicle back onto the road.

An envelope. He leaned on the brakes—something he’d
promised himself to avoid—and skidded to a stop, throwing up a billowing plume of dust that carried slowly forward and swallowed him. By the light of his cell phone, he turned the opened envelope over, desperate for some message from her, intentional or not.

It was his handwriting. Her name. Her Hong Kong address. His letter to her. He dug through the pile of clothes, unsure how he’d missed this, a wave of despair and frustration, of irony and unacceptable emotion choking him.

His letter was her one possession beyond some laundry and makeup, lotions and toothpaste. His hand shook as he pinched the letter itself, pulled it from the envelope. Unable to bring himself to confirm its contents, he slipped it back inside and dropped the envelope onto the passenger seat.

He’d not heard back since he’d opened up to her. Had found the wait agonizing, palpably painful. But she’d kept the letter; had kept it close. He felt overjoyed, angry, alone. He felt her, there, on the floor, there, in the envelope. In his thoughts.

He put the car in gear and drove, switching the headlights on and gaining speed.

I
t was not her imagination. The closer Grace drew to the sound of the elephants, which were now less than fifty yards away, the more their pace quickened. No matter how delicately she moved, the rhythm of their movement also increased.

Blinded by the absolute darkness, she gave up and walked slowly, arms outstretched, moving around thickets, trying to avoid stumbling. At first the parallels to her tempo had seemed coincidental, or at most the result of the herd hearing her. Soon it became apparent that the trigger for their movement was something far subtler. Unable to catch up, to even close the gap, she remembered Olé’s warnings about predators like lion, hyena and jackal. The elephants’ keen sense of smell and easy identification of humans had in part led her to strip and routinely smear animal dung in layers over her body.

She stopped, shed the foul-smelling clothes and backpack of the men she’d killed, tied a piece of the remaining car seat upholstery to a bush as a marker. She put the water bottles into the sack she’d
fashioned, slung the weapon over her shoulder and tried again, hurrying to catch up.

It took her nearly twenty minutes to relocate the herd. Without her pursuit, the elephants had stopped. Free of everything but the gun, Grace was able to draw much closer. She smiled ruefully in the dark; in her natural element the elephants now allowed her company.

Awed by their magnificence, their size and stature—they seemed to have no fear—she stayed with them. They moved as a group, their trunks swaying, huge ears flapping. She could hear their raspy breathing, low and sonorous. Found it comforting. Their loamy scent was as sweet to her as that from a stable of horses. Among them she no longer felt alone.

One of the elephants evacuated; Grace crept forward and coated her limbs and belly, grateful for the warmth and thankful for the chance to erase any traces of the clothing.

The horizon behind her glowed gray, then a rich blue. When the sun finally rose, it did so exceptionally fast. She took sightings for compass landmarks and counted six elephants, five adults and a juvenile. The tusks of one were sawed off to stubs. Another had one broken tusk, its spectacular twin curved long and low to the ground. This older elephant wore a heavy-duty nylon collar, filthy, torn and fraying. Fixed to the collar was a beat-up black brick the size of a lunch pail.

The Larger Than Life rangers had explained the collar monitoring. Grace had probably seen the signal from this collar on a computer screen. From headquarters, they tracked collared elephants live, plotting their course by the day, week or month. Some elephants walked in relatively straight routes, others wandered randomly.

If only she could lead the collared elephant around the bush so its tracking device wrote SOS or HELP on the monitors! Like walking
messages into wet sand at the shore. Or if she knew electrical engineering—then she might have been able to rewire the collar to transmit a message.

Sighing, Grace studied the burns on her right hand, where she’d fished the melting phone from the campfire. Each opportunity brought her within inches of rescue—only to be denied. She caught herself crying, fought to stop.

The elephant with the collar meandered over to her, as if to comfort her. She looked up and spoke softly to the giant, and he stepped closer still. Grace held her hand out. The elephant sniffed and then coughed through its trunk, wetting her hand. It sniffed more and stepped back, giving her a good look at the battered GPS transmitter.

Grace had been raised by a Buddhist father and Christian mother, but had never found much use for either faith. Her days in the bush had changed that; she’d succumbed to prayer and an impractical reliance upon a greater cause at work in guiding her actions. She’d begged for forgiveness for the lives she’d taken, wondering if the nightmares would ever leave her. She feared that she’d condemned herself to a living hell, that, like the elephant, she would never forget.

Something a ranger had said during the tour of the radio shack echoed in her mind. She could recall nearly verbatim his explanation of the collars:

“Tracking collars allow us to pass along to our rangers in the bush the animals’ real-time locations. Should a collared animal stop moving for over twelve hours, we issue an alert. It has three possible explanations: the collar has malfunctioned and is no longer transmitting; the collar has fallen off; or the animal is dead—poached for its ivory. In any case, we respond after twelve hours. Usually Mr. Brantingham flies directly to the site.”

The rangers waited because the elephants could remain stationary for long periods, but rarely over twelve hours. Could she last
that long? And a more critical question: how to destroy an indestructible box strapped to a five-ton mammal, the neck of which was well over her head?

The gun strap, heavy on her shoulder, announced itself. Grace adjusted it before she fully realized what she was doing. Touching the weapon, feeling the stock’s smooth wood, its clean balance, she shuddered. How could the same gods that had led her to her best chance at rescue now lead her to think such a thing?

Had it come to this? To save herself, would she have to kill the very animal Graham Winston sought to rescue?

Grace squatted, staring at the only elephant wearing a collar, trying to reconcile her predicament, weighing one life against the other. The huge dark eye, fringed by dark, soft eyelashes, stared back as if reading her thoughts.

“What would you do?” Grace said softly. “If you would allow me to cut the collar, I would not have to do this. Do you understand? But even with this machete, it will not be easy. It is a thick collar and it is designed to withstand such attempts. It will not yield easily to the blade.” The elephant blinked. “I will need time, you see? No, you do not see. You understand none of it.”

To the elephant, it was but another warm day. An odd-smelling creature squatting on her haunches beside him was making noise.

Grace succumbed to the oppressive fatigue, the irony and the inevitability of what she must do. First, her shoulders shook, then the laughter rose in her throat and bubbled out as despair. The snakebite on her wrist had swollen into an ugly purple bruise; her ankle throbbed, her skin was so caked and dried she wanted to cut herself out and shed it. She had a spear, a machete and a Kalashnikov. Some soiled clothing and a backpack a kilometer behind.

A copse of trees lay ahead. Grace wondered how the elephants traveled. She knew them to be as smart as whales—trainable, and
capable of long-term memory—but did they follow specific routes, like migrating birds, or did they travel randomly? They slept standing up, often in the heat of the day. Could she take advantage of that? How?

She looked up into the sky, closed her eyes and listened. Where were her rescuers? Why was no one looking for her? She spoke a Chinese curse at herself for deliberately masking her travels over the past ten days. The more she’d uncovered, the more she’d feared becoming an object of government surveillance or the target of the black marketers using the clinic. The visit to the Kibera slum and her carefully choreographed meeting with Maya Vladistok had signaled an unexpected level of caution among the locals. She should have understood then what kind of trouble this could lead to. But she’d ignored it for the sake of her own vanity and the opportunity to work an unusual case on her own.

Ambition digs its own grave; it needs little help beyond ego.

Tears formed. Grace wiped them away so that she could see more clearly. Carefully, quietly, she double-checked the Kalashnikov before pulling the weapon to her shoulder and wrapping her hand tightly in the strap to secure it. Again, the tears threatened. Again, she held them at bay. A single shot. To be fair, it had to be the best shot of her life.