Page 63 of Soul on Fire
“No. But I know who did. He’s who you’re tracking, isn’t it?”
Elliot said nothing. His hands shook. Behind him, the angry crowd had grown swollen. Vicious shouts and threats hammered down the street. Machetes dragged on the pavement, in between cries for justice and to cut down the bombers.
“I know what he’s planning,” Bai said. “Come with me or they will kill you.”
“Why should I trust you?” Elliot snapped. He could shoot this man and take his jeep. Drive away. Find Carla and Jim and Riley, maybe even Carter, and get the fuck out of there. Their cover was blown. They had to evac, now. Where was the nearest American facility? Uganda? Central African Republic? Where could they go?
“We both want the same thing. We want to stop Majambu. But I cannot do it alone, and you cannot stop him without my help.” Bai’s dark gaze bore into his, unblinking. “I know where he’s going.”
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kisangani
The Congo
Bai tookthem both across town, whipping the jeep up and down tarmacked roads and potholed, dirt-packed alleys. He was running a countersurveillance route, Elliot realized, slumping in the backseat out of sight with Ikolo. Bai never stopped, never braked, and the near constant turns disoriented Elliot until he closed his eyes and rested his dizzy head on Ikolo’s stomach. There wasn’t a chance in Hell he’d be able to backtrack the route they were driving.
Eventually, they pulled to a screeching halt outside a drab, single story concrete house, something that looked transplanted from the 1950s to the middle of Africa. Overgrown shrubs hid the entrance and front drive.
“Inside,” Bai said. “Quickly.”
As they ran inside, Elliot spotted Kisangani’s skyline, the three- and four-story buildings rising in the center of town and the flecked green minaret of the grand mosque on the northeast bank of the Congo River. They weren’t in the city anymore, but out in the sprawling neighborhoods, the suburbs of Kisangani. The forest lived on the edge of this house, pushing into the walls and hanging over the roof. The whole block of old fifties homes were being swallowed by the forest.
Bai led the way inside the house to an empty room, the walls mostly knocked down. There was one table in the room, and a single laptop sat in the middle. Bai went straight for it.
“Do either of you read theNew York Times?”
Elliot blinked. He limped closer, one bloody hand gripping the side of his knee. Ikolo followed, leaving enough of a distance for Elliot to go kinetic if he needed to, take out their mysterious Chinese rescuer. He appreciated Ikolo’s tactical awareness more than he could ever say. “No,” he said simply. “Where are we?”
“This is a safe house established by the Chinese mining association. There are many like it across the Congo in all the areas we operate mines,” Bai said. “There was a reporter at theNew York Times, a Chinese-American woman named Emily Wu. She used to visit her mother every year in Guangzhou, China.”
“Your point?” He was done with mind games, with playing hide and seek. Every part of him ached, pain trying to swallow him whole. He was cut off from his people with no supplies, no resources, just him and Ikolo. They were both wounded and now stuck with a member of China’s secret police.
“Emily was murdered in Guangzhou. She was strangled and thrown into the river and her body washed ashore last week. Any deaths of a foreign national on Chinse soil are given extra attention, but the police ruled her death a robbery, a mugging that ended tragically. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“And?”
“And they were wrong.” Bai spun the laptop toward Elliot. CCTV footage showed two men dressed in black and carrying a body between them approach a railing on a bridge over a river. They swung together and let go, the body sailing into the darkness and disappearing. Both men looked down, shielded their faces, and walked out of the frame.
“I’m sorry she was murdered, but what does her death have to do with anything?”
“Emily was murdered for what she had uncovered here in the Congo: a plan to attack the West in a two-fold strategy.”
“We know about Majambu. You said you knew where he was going. We don’t have a lot of time to mess around,” Elliot growled. “I have a team out there I need to get back to.”
“They have already been evacuated,” Bai said. “A Special Forces team training Ugandan troops flew across the border to evacuate them from the airport. As of now, you are presumed dead in the bombing.”
A chill spread through Elliot. They’d fallen off the map and right into Chinese hands. “Are we your prisoners?”
Bai hesitated. His eyes flicked over Elliot and Ikolo, from head to toe and back. “No,” he finally said. “I need your help and you need mine. For now, we’re partners.”
“I’m listening,” Elliot said. “Why do you need our help?”
“I traveled to Guangzhou to investigate Emily’s death and recovered her laptop from her mother. On the way back to Beijing, I managed to crack into not only one, but two hidden and encrypted partitions in her hard drive. The first contained only stories she was working on for her paper. Hidden sources and classified contacts in government. But the second…” He tapped at his laptop again and then spun it back toward them. “The second was filled with files tracking the diplomatic and trade activities of eight separate countries. Official diplomatic travel, including flight plans and the specific tail numbers of every plane over a span of years. Exports, down to the delivery date and cargo. This kind of information, this specificity, is not something a journalist would dedicate her time to. This is the activity of a spy.”
“You’re accusing Emily of being CIA?”
