Worthy continued watching his phone, seeing that the beacon remained stationary.
Duchess had assured them that with the Intelligence Support Activity’s wealth of surveillance equipment in Abuja, the tracking data following Keyamo’s phone should occur in near-real time.
That much was of little consolation to the team, however, and after the debacle of trying to roll up Usman along the highway, David had wisely mandated that a team member follow the banker as soon as he left work. Worthy couldn’t argue with that—if the timeline on this kind of free-range operation was as tight as Duchess seemed to think it was, rolling the mission to the next day could cause it to not occur at all.
The beacon suddenly began moving, each blip bringing it closer to the compound exit—too fast for a walking man, Worthy noted with pleasure.
“Here we go,” he said to Tolu, looking up to see a pair of slightly oval-shaped headlights gleaming from either side of a massive front grill approaching the exit gate.
Worthy transmitted, “Eyes-on a black Bentley sedan exiting the compound; vehicle make and phone tracker check out. We’re moving now.”
Then Tolu began driving, but not in pursuit of Keyamo’s Bentley; instead, he took a circuitous route toward Ahmadu Bello Way, the four-lane road their target used to get home.
Ideally they’d have a rotation of two or three cars to maintain continuous visual on Keyamo without arousing suspicion during the three-kilometer drive to his residence, but the mission ahead didn’t leave that kind of manpower to spare.
So Tolu sped down the side streets instead, moving toward an intercept point along the main route as quickly as he could—which, given the number of other cars on the road, turned out to be one hell of a lot slower than Worthy would have preferred.
“This traffic is terrible,” Worthy muttered.
“You think this is bad? Never visit Lagos.”
“I thought you liked Lagos.”
“Like?” Tolu echoed, sounding irritated. “LOVE. Lagos is my home, the greatest city in all of Africa. But a ten-minute drive takes an hour, and this is because everyone wants to live there.”
Then, his tone growing more playful, he added, “Lagos is also where I learned to drive like this.”
He swerved around the vehicle to their front, accelerating toward oncoming headlights before cutting back into his lane. Worthy’s passenger mirror nearly clipped a bicycle piloted by a woman who, to the point man’s alarm, didn’t seem to notice.
Then Tolu careened right, speeding through a parking lot before re-entering the side street ahead of two slower vehicles. Bracing a hand on the door panel, Worthy watched his phone display and said, “Just take it easy. He hit a stoplight; we’ve got time.”
“Listen well well,” Tolu answered him, maneuvering the car around their next corner, “I know we got time. Because you got me at the wheel, no wahala.”
No sooner had the sentence left his mouth than he slammed on the brakes, screeching to a halt in front of a man pushing a shopping cart loaded with bags.
Tolu laid into his horn, shouting, “Comot for road!”
Then he floored the gas, narrowly missing the passing man as Worthy’s back was thrust into the seat from the acceleration. They were rapidly approaching the intersection with Ahmadu Bello Way, and Worthy watched Keyamo’s beacon heading northwest as Tolu stopped at the corner.
“Just wait here,” Worthy said, continuing to watch his phone as the car behind them laid into its horn, the driver incensed as Tolu let several gaps in traffic slip by.
Looking up, Worthy saw the sleek black sedan glide past a moment before the tracking beacon arrived at their location. He said, “Go, go,” and Tolu hit the gas, cutting off a vehicle in the nearest lane by way of merging with traffic. They barely avoided a collision but Tolu didn’t seem to care, weaving through traffic as he called out, “I see the Benny, right lane. Three cars ahead.”
Worthy checked his phone again and then squinted ahead, trying to locate Keyamo’s vehicle but finding it hard to distinguish from the other cars on the road.
“You sure?”
“The taillights,” Tolu said. “Yes, I am sure.”
Sure enough, Worthy saw the red glow from a pair of oval-shaped lights ahead, then transmitted, “Re-acquired visual on Ahmadu Bello Way, we’re three cars back approaching the intersection with Gimbiya Street, break.” Pausing to check his phone again, he continued, “Minimal tracker delay, almost negligible.”
“Got it,” David replied. “Then keep your distance, and don’t get spotted. As long as he goes straight to the house, we’re home free.”
Worthy watched the Bentley slow before the intersection, then slide into the right turn lane. The cars between them proceeded straight, eliminating any visual gap as Tolu asked, “You want me to go straight?”
“No,” Worthy replied in a split-second decision. “We’ve got to be sure. It’s only one turn.”
Tolu steered into the turn lane then, putting their vehicle directly on the Bentley’s bumper for an uncomfortable few seconds before the final car crossed the intersection and Keyamo took the corner.
“Right turn,” Worthy transmitted. “He’s now eastbound on Gimbiya, final stretch.”
Tolu hung back a few car lengths, negotiating the final stretch of their surveillance route as Worthy tried to process the sight before him.
Most of what he’d seen of Abuja had been incredibly modern: sleek buildings and tree-lined boulevards, with far more commonalities than differences with any major American city. He was abstractly aware that roughly half the population of Nigeria lived without electricity on less than a dollar a day, but he hadn’t seen that reality firsthand—until now.
To his right were hotels and apartment buildings, restaurants and bars. But to his left, a row of street vendors peddled their wares beneath sloppily erected tarps and bedsheets, and beyond them, what appeared to be an open field served as a dumping ground for piles of trash. The de facto landfill was lit by sporadic cooking fires, and he could make out clusters of homeless families picking through the garbage, many of them children.
To his front, Keyamo glided along in a twelve-cylinder Bentley sedan that retailed for a quarter million in the US, and probably contained an additional six figures’ worth of optional features—and that extravagant vehicle now took a right into the entrance of his neighborhood.
Tolu proceeded straight, leaving Worthy to take in a fleeting glance of the Bentley’s taillights slipping past a guardhouse and down the residential street.
Watching sidelong as the car faded from sight, Worthy transmitted, “He just turned into the neighborhood. I’m staging for exfil.”
David replied almost at once, “Copy, we’ll take it from here.”