Andrew Britton - The Exile

Harper straightened in his seat. “Maybe you’re right, Ryan,” he said. “But I haven’t told you it’s going to be easy. Nusairi is our starting point, and we have no choice but to see where he takes us. Right now he’s all we have.”

“He’s all you have,” Kealey corrected. His eyes locked with Harper’s. “I’m sorry. But I want no part of this.”

He started to slide out of the booth, and Harper knew it was time to bring out his hole card. Okay, Allison, here we go into the proverbial breach. For the sake of everyone involved, I hope it’s worth bulldozing through all those lines of ethicality you talked about.

“How do you put relative value on good people’s lives, Ryan?” he said. “I’m just wondering.”

Kealey paused, staring at him. “What are you talking about?”

Harper put his hands out in front of him, palms up in the air, as if they were two sides of a scale. “Here’s Lily Durant,” he said, motioning with his right hand. “And here’s Naomi Kharmai.” He moved his left hand. “I’m just trying to understand the way you measure one against the other…and then decide the president’s niece had less intrinsic worth. Or was what you did for Naomi more about purging your own conscience?”

Kealey had frozen across the table, his eyes still boring into Harper. They were suddenly hard as stone. “You miserable son of a bitch.”

Harper remained very erect. He turned his hands over, set them down flat on the tabletop. “We’ve been working with the Feebs to find Javier Machado and other members of his network. It would help us get to the bottom of some lingering questions about Brynn Fitzgerald’s abduction. And Naomi’s death. But they’re gone, poof, like ghosts after the midnight bells have rung. No one knows what happened to them…which you might agree is probably for the best overall.”

“Is this a threat, John? Because you don’t scare me.”

“In all the years we’ve known each other, I’ve never for a second believed anything scares you, Ryan.” He didn’t blink. “Except maybe failing at what it is you do best.”

“What kind of ambiguous horseshit is that?”

Harper shrugged. “I was actually trying to be tactful-serves me right for overrating my people skills,” he said. “But to answer your first question…I consider you a friend, and there’s no threat, implicit or explicit, in anything I’ve said. But I am making an appeal.”

“To what? Some kind of guilt complex you’ve decided I’m carrying in my brain?”

Yes, Harper thought.

“No,” he said. “Your sense of justice.”

Kealey’s lips peeled back in a humorless grin. It was almost a rictus. “Now there’s a platform for your high and righteous sermon. Justice. For Lily Durant, I assume. But how does she figure into this? I mean really figure in. Because as far as I can tell, it’s got nothing to do with finding the people who killed her and everything to do with settling some kind of interagency feud.”

“You’re dead wrong,” Harper said with an adamant shake of his head. “In fact, we-that is, the director and I-agree that finding the man who pulled the trigger in West Darfur might be the only thing that can bring this all to a halt. Everything Stralen has done so far has been because of what happened to Durant.”

“Except it doesn’t seem Stralen has done anything without the president’s approval.”

“Come on, Ryan. You’re acting like you haven’t heard a word out of my mouth. If Lily Durant hadn’t been the president’s niece, or if they hadn’t been as close as they were, maybe Stralen wouldn’t have been able to talk him into it…whatever the hell ‘it’ may be. But she was his niece, and they were close, and he’s been making political decisions based on misplaced emotion.”

Kealey shook his head. “I’ve got news for you, John. Lily Durant can’t be brought back to life. No matter what the hell we do.”

We. Harper filled his lungs with air, exhaled slowly through his mouth. There you had it-the word he’d wanted to hear. Allison had more than earned her chit.

“No,” he said. “She can’t. But if you can find the man who killed her, we can take the emotional element out of it. Perhaps then he’ll be more likely to listen to reason.”

Kealey gave him a long look, settling back into the booth. “And justice will have been served. Is that right?”

Harper’s smile was tinged with sadness.

“As much as it can be,” he said.

NORTH DARFUR

The Beechcraft A36 Bonanza wasn’t much of a plane, even by North Africa’s lax aeronautical standards. Certainly, it would never have passed an FAA inspection. The exterior was painted eggshell white with a brown stripe running the length of the fuselage, a dated color scheme betraying the aircraft’s twenty-nine years of service. Fresh paint on the port wing hinted at recent damage to the wing’s leading edge, a defect that would have grounded any pilot with an ounce of concern for the lives of his passengers. But for all its faults, the single-prop plane was ideal for the ninety-minute flight from Khartoum to Nyala Airport. They were now less than twenty minutes out, having departed the Sudanese capital just after eight that evening, and both passengers were eager to get on the ground, though only one showed any sign of his inner turmoil. Ismael Mirghani was sweating profusely, despite the frigid air inside the cabin, and his hands were in constant motion, searching for some way to fill the time.

The second passenger was oblivious to Mirghani’s fidgeting. His interest was fixed on the reading material he’d picked up at Khartoum International. Al-Rayaam was by far the largest and oldest newspaper in Sudan. It could trace its roots back to the 1940s, but as he read through the headlines, Cullen White was disappointed to see that its reputation for honest, straightforward reporting was completely undeserved. As far as he could tell, Al-Rayaam was nothing but another mouthpiece for the Sudanese president. The paper neglected to mention the demonstrations that had taken place the day before in Zalingei, Tulus, and Al-Fashir. Even the massive protest in Khartoum-a demonstration that had cost White more than three hundred thousand dollars in bribes and “donations” to organize-had been largely ignored.

That in particular bothered him more than he cared to admit.

The article he was looking for was buried in the back of the political section, a bad sign right from the start. Anything that showed Bashir in a positive light would have appeared on the front page, but the fact that they’d printed the story at all meant they had skewed the facts to their liking. When White finally managed to find the passage, he read through it quickly: Approximately three hundred students gathered in Martyrs Square outside the presidential palace Tuesday to protest the ongoing violence in West Darfur, despite clear indications that the army has been working hand in hand with local leaders to ease the SLA’s stranglehold on the region. According to Deputy Police Commander Mohammed Najib al-Tayeb, the incident outside the palace could have been easily avoided. “These young men were clearly misguided,” al-Tayeb said in a written statement to the press. “For this reason alone, it is difficult to hold them accountable. In many ways they are victims themselves. Victims of Zionist propaganda and colonial lies, and I sincerely hope that they use this opportunity to examine their choices. If they hope one day to have a country of their own, they must learn to stand as one, united against the imperialists.” The deputy commander was pleased to announce that the dispersal of the crowd resulted in no serious injuries, though he noted that additional police units had been dispatched around the square to prevent another such incident.