I couldn’t help feeling that the entire foray had been fun—after the grueling reconnaissance mission that ended, regrettably, without any payoff of a gunfight for my team, a hasty throwdown against a corrupt financial officer was almost a night on the town by comparison. Both figuratively and literally.
I’d long harbored a curiosity about exactly how far removed personality types such as these were from becoming career criminals versus career soldiers, whether military or paramilitary. And in the end I hadn’t come up with any good answer; if you were an adrenaline junkie as I was, or simply enamored with guns and gear, the line between knocking over banks or armored cars and special operations seemed at times to be perilously thin. Sure, people could moan about patriotism and duty all day—but while those notions had succeeded in getting me to eagerly sign an Army contract as soon as I turned eighteen, after a couple deployments I was locked into the job for the rush, period.
Working with magnificent assholes like these didn’t hurt, either. I turned and slapped Ian’s arm, grabbing hold of his sleeve and shaking him.
“That phrase in Russian—a stroke of genius.”
Ian, startled, pulled his arm away and shrugged. “Thought we could cast some suspicion on those Gradsek mercs, since Keyamo clearly saw we were white.”
“Brilliant. What did you say?”
Ian shrugged again. “I said ‘shut the fuck up.’”
I jabbed an index finger at his face. “You little genius. What did I do to deserve you?”
Reilly was far more solemn about the whole affair, looking uncharacteristically brooding.
He said, “I just—I just wish we could’ve, you know…”
“What?” I asked.
Reilly hung his head. “...used the Bentley for exfil.”
I frowned. “Well, thank the powers that be that we’ve got Ian on our side. He brings a thirty-pound brain and spits Russian off the cuff. You’re upset we didn’t steal the car and get rolled up by the cops three minutes later.”
Tolu called back from the driver’s seat, “Me friend’s chop shop, boys. Would make fast work of it and we could split the money, notin spoil.”
Then he braked the van to a halt, Worthy climbing in the back with us as Cancer slid inside the passenger seat.
As Tolu pulled away to begin the route to the safehouse, Cancer looked back to the cargo area with his face flushed and glistening with sweat as his eyes darted across the massive yield from Keyamo’s interdiction.
“Well, that sucked. Looks like it worked, though.”
Ian looked up from his trove of stolen items. “Don’t celebrate just yet—we still have to find out what intelligence is here.”
24
Cancer cracked open another beer, tossing the cap beside its comrades littering the safehouse kitchen countertop. After taking a long swig, he deposited the bottle opener beside the pile and turned to saunter back to the team’s operation center, AKA the living room.
A promising sight greeted him—a foldout table erected for the purpose was now covered with Keyamo’s possessions, none of which Ian would allow anyone to touch until he’d completed his meticulous inventory. His teammates had initially sat around the table at rapt attention, eager to see what mysteries would unfold, and the interest had peaked when Ian forced open the briefcase to reveal close to three hundred thousand USD worth of non-sequential Nigerian naira currency. That particular revelation elicited a few low whistles and suggestions they hit the Abuja casinos rather than report the findings to Duchess.
But morality had taken precedence, if morality meant that Duchess was now monitoring Keyamo’s communications and would, therefore, discover exactly how much money had just been lost.
Besides, after opening the briefcase, Ian had taken so goddamned long to piece through everything, searching for hidden papers and SIM cards in every fold of material, that most everyone had soon lost interest. Worthy and Reilly had drifted off to bed, while David nursed a beer while transmitting detailed photographs to Duchess—for all the team knew, some seemingly innocuous item could hold greater intelligence ramifications to one nerd or another at CIA headquarters.
Cancer, for his part, had never been big on intel. Tell him who needed to be hit and when, and he’d get it done. Or if his duties as a sniper required comprehensive reporting on the layout of an objective as the mission in Sambisa had, he’d gladly relay details all day in the hopes of getting to shoot someone at the end of it.
The current situation, by contrast, was so far outside his give-a-fuck o’meter that he ordinarily would have left David and Ian to their own devices long ago.
But Cancer remained awake, incrementally chipping away at his sobriety while he watched the intelligence operative and team leader process their findings, for one reason and one reason only: after his desperate sprint through the woods with cops in pursuit, he was simply curious to see what the corrupt banker had been hiding.
To that end, he noted that Ian had hooked up Keyamo’s laptop and cell phone to devices that would clone their contents, simultaneously screening for and suppressing malware before the files could be transmitted over a secure government connection.
After taking another pull of beer, Cancer asked, “You sending the digital shit to Duchess?”
Ian didn’t break stride, continuing his pat-down of the now-empty laptop satchel. “Yeah. She’ll let us know if the analysts find anything interesting.”
“Lemme ask you something. Why not just give all this shit to the ISA team who handed us Keyamo’s pattern of life on a silver platter? We’re four shooters and one brain. From what little I know of the ISA, they’re basically all Ians, right?”
Ian looked up quizzically, as if he hadn’t considered that as an option.
“You know, that’s not a bad question.”
“Because,” David said over his shoulder from the computer, “Duchess probably wants to vet everything we recovered before deciding what to pass along to outside parties. Pretty standard CIA practice.”
Now on Cancer’s side, Ian countered, “Sure, but the ISA gave us Keyamo.”
“They absolutely did,” David replied, “and we’ll probably never know how Duchess pulled that off. But we work for the Agency. Whatever she worked out on the back end is her business. Duchess says clone and send everything to her, that’s what we’ll do. Besides, you want those ISA dudes to know who we are and where we’re hanging our hats in sunny Abuja? What if one of them gets rolled up?”
Cancer let the inquiry trail off without a response, scanning the table contents as David resumed working at the computer. This had been a pretty solid excursion, Cancer reasoned. According to Duchess’s ISA contact, Keyamo had been maintaining the same routine for months on end, and was thus ripe for the picking from any number of greedy parties. And if Ian’s use of Russian served its purpose, it would throw Keyamo—and whoever he was in bed with, financially speaking—off the scent of American involvement.
But so far, the looming question remained: what intel had they actually harvested? And to Cancer’s dismay, the unenviable answer could be summed up in two words: