At eight the next morning Nikki sat at a window table at EJ’s Luncheonette, blowing on her large coffee and waiting for Lauren Parry to pick up her phone. Instead of corporate jazz or Soft Hits of the Eighties and Nineties, the programming for anyone stuck on hold at OCME was a loop of short messages about New York City’s municipal opportunities and services. Rather than Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” or Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” the mayor invited you to call 3-1-1 for all your information needs and some monotone DOT administrator extolled the virtues of Alternate Day, Alternate Side Parking. Where were Annie Lennox’s “Sweet Dreams” when you needed them?
“I have a question for you,” said Heat when Lauren finally came on the line. In the background she could hear the snap of gloves and the lid of a metal pail clanging open against a wall. “It’s about that bruise on Father Graf’s lower back. You recall it?”
“Of course. What about it?”
It had come to her in bed with Rook—appropriately enough—at dawn. Heat had been sleepless, mulling the confrontation she planned to bring to her captain in the coming hours. Next to her, Rook turned onto his side and Nikki rolled to face his back, using her fingertips to comb down the sprung hairs on his cowlick. He looked thinner to her than when he had left. His shoulder muscles revealed more cording, and even in the waxy light his ribs were defined by deeper shadows between them. Her eyes traced his vertebrae to the small of his back, where she saw the fading bruise. While they were drying each other from their shower, she asked him where he got it.
Rook told her that two weeks before, he had ridden by cargo ship from Rijeka, on the Adriatic, to Monrovia on the West African coast, where he witnessed what he considered a brazen daylight offload of black market arms. The dealer, who was on the wharf to supervise the transfer of thirty tons of AK-47 rounds, plus crates of grenade launchers, onto waiting trucks, kept glancing up from his Range Rover to the ship’s navigation tower, where Rook was lurking, trying to be inconspicuous. But after the convoy lumbered off the pier, Rook went below to his crew quarters, only to be grabbed by three of the dealer’s goons. They put a hood over his head and drove him for over an hour, to a plantation in the hills. There, they removed the sack but handcuffed him while he waited, locked in an empty horse stall in the barn.
At nightfall, he was taken to the great lawn beside the yellow plantation house, where the arms dealer, a former MI6 operative named—or at least using the name—Gordon McKinnon, was at a picnic table tossing back Caipirinhas under strings of fiesta lights shaped like red chili peppers. Rook decided not to let on how much he knew about McKinnon from his research . . . that the former British SIS man had amassed a fortune brokering black market weapons to embargoed nations in Africa . . . that the blood flow from Angola, Rwanda, the Congo, and recently Sudan could be traced to the drunken, sunburned, ginger-haired man right before him.