Alex Berenson - The Night Ranger

Wells wondered if Thompson had come to Kenya to be here when the reporter showed up. A hands-on chief executive instead of a guy calling the shots two continents away. But so what? Up close Thompson came off as slicker than Wells would have liked, but the truth was that WorldCares was a business, with employees all over the world.

“Okay, the big day comes, they pile in the Land Cruiser, head out. You say good-bye?”

“No.”

“You didn’t say good-bye to your own nephew?”

For the first time, Thompson seemed slightly defensive. “I thought he’d be back by the end of the week.”

“Then what happened?”

Thompson went to the window, looked out into the Kenyan night. “They vanished. Into thin air, that’s the cliché, right? And true in this case. No emergency calls, emails, nothing. Scott told me that they were planning to go north to Dadaab, then west to Garissa and down, but I guess the Kenyan police had blocked the road north that morning, so they went south instead.”

“Was that typical, the roadblock?”

“Moss could tell you better, but I think so. Maybe once, twice a month. But the roadblocks don’t usually last long. Anyway, I don’t know why Suggs didn’t wait, but instead he decided to take this one-lane dirt track that goes maybe a hundred miles south and eventually hits another little track that runs east-west. If they’d taken that second road west, they would have linked up eventually with the main road to Mokowe. But they never got there. The police found the Cruiser on the first road, about ninety miles south of Dadaab.”

“In an abandoned village.”

“Not exactly. When you get there, you’ll see. Eastern Kenya is mostly scrubland and watering holes. The settlements are a few houses each, extended families. The photos show a single hut nearby. Crumbling. Maybe somebody started to dig for water there and thought they had something and then it dried up.”

“Any reason they would have been taken there?”

“From what the cops showed me, the road turns in a way that makes it easy to block.”

“And the car was just left there?”

“Taken off the road, next to the hut. The police found it when they drove down the next day.”

“Is there phone service down there?”

“I think so. From what I’ve seen, even the most desolate parts of the scrub have at least some service.”

“Did you know where they were staying?”

“They were planning to pick a hotel after they reached the island. So, that afternoon, I was talking to the reporter and then, I’ll never forget, Jasper—our security guy—he came in, said he had to tell me something. Since then I just keep waiting for them to show up, like if I take a cold shower or chew off my tongue or something, they’ll walk right in.”

Again, the answer felt canned to Wells. Thompson didn’t strike him as the type to fade into this-must-be-a-dream wish fulfillment. “I’m sorry. I know it’s late and I have just a few more questions. Have you talked to my old friends from Langley?”

“At the embassy, after I was done talking to the State guys, a man who said his name was Gerald came in. He didn’t give me a card, just a phone number. I felt he was more or less telling me where he worked without saying it. He asked for numbers and email addresses for the volunteers and Suggs, too. He gave me an email address, told me to forward any ransom demands. Even if they didn’t seem real. He said they checked the satellites, too, but they didn’t have anything in the area that afternoon.”

“Too bad. That would be the easiest way to track them. He get back to you?”

“Not yet. Which kind of upsets me.”

“It sounds like they’re running databases. They may not be able to do much more. I wouldn’t count on them having too many sources inside Shabaab, and if it’s a smaller group it’s even less likely. One last thing. Tell me about the ransom demands.”

“All junk. Someone emails from a Kenyan email account asking for a million dollars to an account in Dubai. I ask for proof, I get a Photoshopped picture from the paper.”

Wells took a final look around the suite. Two laptops sat on the coffee table beside a black leather wallet. A map of Kenya lay on the bedside table, along with two phones, a Samsung touchscreen and a cheap local handset like the ones Wells had bought.

Then Wells realized. An international phone . . . a local handset . . . and at least one more mobile, the one in Thompson’s pocket. Three phones, if not more. Wells carried multiple handsets so he’d be harder to trace. What about Thompson?

“You have a phone fetish,” he said. “Like me.”

Thompson followed Wells’s gaze to the bedside table. “Local and international.”

“Plus the one in your pocket.”

“Oh yeah, I like to have two local carriers just in case.”

“Sure. Can you give me all your numbers?”

“Of course. And my emails too, the private and the public.” They traded numbers. Wells stuck out his hand. Thompson ignored it and enveloped him in a hug, his thick arms heavy on Wells’s back, palms moist through Wells’s shirt. “You think you can find them, John?”

“I’ll do my best.” Wells extricated himself. He’d never been the hugging type.

“And you’ll go up there tomorrow?”

“Probably.”

“I’m going to fly back in a couple days. I’ll see you up there.”

“Can’t wait.”

—

Nearly three a.m. in Nairobi, seven p.m. in Langley. Back in his room, Wells called Shafer.

“No rest for the wicked.”

For a heartbeat, Wells found himself back on the couch at Castle House, his mouth on Christina’s.

“John? You there?”

“I have numbers and an email for the elves to trace.” He gave Shafer everything he’d gotten from Thompson.

“And these belong to—”

“The CEO of WorldCares.”

“Getting conspiratorial in your old age.”

“I just spent an hour-plus talking to the guy. He answered every question I had.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know. Probably nothing. He drinks.”

“How much?”

“A bottle of wine for dinner.” It didn’t sound that bad when Wells said it out loud.

“Don’t be such a Muslim neo-Puritan.”

“Forget the wine. Tell me why he has two local phones.”

“I’ll do my best to find out. Maybe I’ll do a little bit of research into WorldCares, too. That press conference rated five hankies. I wanted to go over there my own self.”

“You do, I’ll feed you to the lions.”

“How Old Testament. I’ll call you after we run the numbers. Could be a day or two.”

“Night, Ellis.”

“An honest man’s pillow is his peace of mind.” Click.

5

LOWER JUBA REGION, SOMALIA,

NEAR THE KENYA/SOMALIA BORDER

Little Wizard knew about the hostages. Four wazungu and a fat Kenyan. They were over the border in Ijara District, north and east of Ijara town. Of course Little Wizard knew. He knew everything that happened in the lawless zone where Somalia met Kenya.

Little Wizard was twenty years old. He’d been born Gutaale Muhammad, but no one called him that. Not since a firefight four years before in Mogadishu. Gutaale was at the point, leading a half-dozen other teenage soldiers. He was a scrap of a boy, wiry and strong, with light brown skin and tightly curled hair. They walked around a corner, past a burned-out building that had been a guesthouse for aid workers decades before, in happier times. Gutaale looked up to see a boy even younger than he was leaning out a second-floor window twenty meters away. The boy swung an AK out the window, shooting wildly. Not a boy, then. An enemy soldier. Gutaale was about to fire back when all the air went out of him. Like he’d fallen from the top of a high tree. A killing shot. He doubled over, went to his hands and knees. Blood trickled from his stomach, just below his ribs. A wrecked pickup truck lay five meters away. He dragged himself to it and lay halfway under it in dust and mud.