Scott Mariani - The Devil’s Kingdom - Part 2 of the best action adventure thriller you'll read this year!

Now all that remained was to catch the perpetrators of this terrible crime. That job belonged to the man standing in the window. His name was Zayd Qureshi, and he was one of the most senior detectives of the Royal Oman Police’s Special Task Force. The ROP had pledged that they would not rest until the perpetrators were brought to justice.

The Al Bu Said residence was empty except for Qureshi and his number two, Detective Faheem Bashir, who had served in some slightly mysterious capacity in the Sultan’s Armed Forces before transferring to the police. Qureshi had long ago given up quizzing Bashir about his secretive background. And at this moment, it was the last thing on his mind. He liked to revisit the scene of the crime when all had gone quiet. It helped him to still his thoughts, and get into the head of the criminal. To catch a crook, sometimes you had to think like a crook, see the world through their eyes.

Qureshi’s investigation team had managed to trace certain leads. A car seen racing away from the scene of the murder had been traced to its owner, who told the police it had been stolen; his story was confirmed by CCTV footage of the theft, although the thief’s identity was still unknown. So far, the police had produced no solid results. The only thing they knew for sure was that this was a highly professional robbery to order, evidenced by the fact that the thieves forced Hussein Al Bu Said to open the safe but left a fortune in cash and jewellery unmolested.

‘There’s only one reason why anyone would do that,’ Qureshi said out loud, to nobody in particular. ‘But what did they take?’

Faheem Bashir, who had no better idea of the answer than his superior, said nothing and went on looking around the desolate crime scene as though it might cough up more clues for them.

Neither Qureshi nor Bashir noticed the presence of the third man who had stepped silently into the room behind them.

‘They took the Star of Africa,’ the man said. ‘Hussein’s diamond.’

The detectives turned, startled. It was highly unusual for anyone to be able to sneak up on Bashir like that.

‘Who are you?’ Qureshi demanded. ‘How did you get in here?’

The stranger made no reply. He was about ten years younger than Bashir and twenty years younger than Qureshi; somewhere in his early thirties, lean and compact in build. His black hair was swept back from a high brow and a chiselled face that radiated a brooding, simmering energy. His dark eyes were mournful, and yet filled with a contained fire of rage that Qureshi found unsettling.

The stranger gazed around him, apparently uninterested in the detectives, as though all he’d come for was a last look at the place. Then he turned and left the room without another word.

Qureshi went to go after him, but Bashir stepped into his path, gently pressed a hand to his boss’s chest to block him, and shook his head.

‘What are you doing? Get out of my way, I want to talk to that guy, find out who he is and what he’s talking about. What diamond?’

Bashir let his hand drop, but he was still shaking his head.

‘I could tell you who he is,’ Bashir said. ‘But I’d have to kill you.’

The Democratic Republic of Congo

It was a rough road that the lone Toyota four-wheel-drive was trying to negotiate, and the going was agonisingly slow. One moment the worn tyres would be slithering and fighting for grip in yet another axle-deep rut of loose reddish earth, the next the creaking, grinding suspension would bump so hard over the rubble and rocks strewn everywhere that the vehicle’s three occupants were bounced out of their seats with a crash that set their teeth on edge.

At this rate, it was going to be several more hours before they reached the remote strip where the light chartered plane was due to pick up the two Americans and fly them and their precious cargo to Kinshasa. Once they got to the airport, the pair intended to waste no time before jumping on the first jet heading back home and getting the hell out of here. But safety and escape still seemed a long way beyond their reach. They were still very much in the danger zone.

The battered, much-repaired old Toyota was one of the few possessions of a local man named Joseph Maheshe who now and then hired himself out as a driver and guide to tourists. Not that many tourists came here anymore, not even the thrill-seeking adventurous ones. It was a precarious place and an even more precarious trade for Joseph, but the only one he knew. He’d been a taxi driver in Kigali, back over the border in neighbouring Rwanda, when the troubles there twenty years earlier had forced him and his wife, both of them of Tutsi ethnicity, to flee their home never to return. Joseph had seen a lot in his time, and knew the dangers of this area as well as anyone. He wasn’t overjoyed that the two Americans had talked him into coming out here. He was liking the grinding sounds coming from his truck’s suspension even less.

While Joseph worried about what the terrible road surface was doing to his vehicle, his two backseat passengers had their own concerns to occupy their minds. They were a man and a woman, both dishevelled and travel-stained, both shining with perspiration from the baking heat inside the car, and both in a state of great excitement.

The man’s name was Craig Munro, and he was a middlingly successful freelance investigative reporter based 7,000 miles from here in Chicago. In his late forties, he was twice the age of his female companion. They weren’t any kind of an item; their relationship was, always had been and would remain professional, even though the lack of privacy when camping out rough for days and nights on end in this wilderness sometimes forced a degree more intimacy on them than either was comfortable with.

The woman’s name was Rae Lee, and she had worked for Munro as an assistant and photographer for the last eighteen months. Rae was twenty-four, second generation Taiwanese-American, and she’d been top of her law class at Chicago University for a year before switching tracks and studying photography at the city’s prestigious Art Institute. She had taken the job with Munro more for the experience, and for ideological reasons, than for the money – money being something that wasn’t always in good supply around her employer’s shabby offices in downtown Chicago. The camera equipment inside the metal cases that jostled about in the back of the Toyota was all hers. But as expensive as it was, its true value at this moment lay in the large number of digital images Rae’s long lens had captured last night and early this morning from their concealed stakeout.

It was an investigative journalist’s dream; everything they could have wished to find. More than they’d dared even hope for, which was the reason for their excitement. It was also the reason for their deep anxiety to get away and home as fast as possible. The kind of information and evidence they’d travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to acquire was precisely the kind that could get you killed. And the Congo was a very easy place in which to disappear without a trace, never to be seen again.

The hammering and lurching of the 4x4’s suspension made it impossible to have any kind of conversation, but neither Munro nor Rae Lee needed to speak their thoughts out loud. They were both thinking the same thing: when they got back to the States, their work would begin in earnest. The physical danger would be behind them, but the real grind would await them, and Munro’s endless deskbound hours of writing the sensational article would be just part of it. There would be scores of calls to make, dozens more contacts to chase, many facts to verify before they could go live with this thing. It was serious business. While what they’d found would cause a substantial stir in certain quarters, not everyone would be supportive. Some very wealthy and powerful people would use every ounce of their influence to block the publication of this information in every way possible. But what they had was pure gold, and they knew it. They were going to be able to blow the lid off this whole dirty affair and open a lot of eyes to what was really happening out here.