Elizabeth Lowell - Innocent as Sin

Fifty men cheered. The guard with the Kalashnikov pointed his weapon in the air and fired wildly.

The Siberian came and stood in the doorway beside the rebel officer. He looked out at the ragtag army and smiled. His own spies in their midst and in the camps of the Camgerian forces told him that the rebels were close to toppling one of the most stable of the countries among the oil-rich, tribally divided lands lying along Africa’s western coast. If the rebels won, there would be prolonged and brutal tribal warfare.

And oil concessions for the Siberian who brought guns to the winning side.

He turned a mental page in his account book and began formulating the final stage of his plan to move from trading illegal arms in the field to trading oil from the safety of America. Now that the rebels had received fresh stocks of Soviet-era arms, the Democratic Republic of Camgeria would need better weapons. The Siberian would supply them.

And make many, many millions of American dollars, plus connections with and favors from the present African regime. The latter would buy him what money alone couldn’t-a place at the international oil-trading table.

Blood didn’t stick to oil.

A glint of light caught his eye. The flash came from a rocky hill about three hundred yards off the runway.

Instantly he stepped back into the dark interior of the plane. It would be like the rebels to try and make off with the arms, the coltan, and the diamonds. Or perhaps the Camgerian government had discovered he was selling to both sides of its little war.

In the shadows of the aircraft’s cargo hold, the Siberian lifted his binoculars and studied the spot where he’d seen the flash of light.

Like everything else away from the tropical coast, the hill was covered by scrub and dust. He could make out what might be a sniper’s keep and thought he could see men inside. But he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t seeing his own paranoia in the moving wind shadows. The binoculars were inferior Moldavian goods.

Impatiently he turned toward the guard who had the sniper rifle. With both voice and gestures, the Siberian said, “Give it to me.”

The man hesitated until his officer barked a command. Reluctantly the guard handed over the rifle.

Still concealed by the shadows inside the plane, the Siberian rested the weapon on a crate and studied the hillside. The telescopic sight brought details into sharp focus.

There were two men. White. Both faces were hidden-one by a camera with a very long-range lens, the other by field glasses.

Then the man with the camera ducked down into the blind. Through the light grass screen across the front of the blind, the Siberian could see that he was reloading the camera. Film, not digital.

Russian curses echoed in the plane. The cameraman had at least one exposed roll of the Siberian overseeing the unloading, the rebel officer inspecting arms, the diamonds and coltan, the rebel brandishing weapons that were being delivered in contravention of African Union and United Nations arms embargoes, in the face of world opinion and all civilized standards. And those would be the headlines if the photographs were ever published.

It would ruin him. He’d live out his life in the stinking hell of Libya’s “freedom.”

He stared through the rifle’s telescopic sight. “Is the weapon accurate?” he asked.

The officer translated.

The guard grinned, nodded, and answered.

“He has it zeroed in at two hundred and fifty yards,” the officer translated.

“Excellent,” the Siberian said.

He changed his aiming point to compensate for the differences in range and for the fact that he was firing uphill. He would wound one. The other would try to save his comrade.

And both would be his.

Slowly the Siberian’s finger took up slack on the trigger.

The spotter moved slightly. For a timeless instant the Siberian and the spotter were frozen in each other’s sights.

As the last of the slack in the trigger vanished, the spotter threw himself on the cameraman and shoved him away. The shot echoed. Birds shrieked and leaped for the sky.

Dust leaped from the spotter’s cammie shirt, followed instantly by blood.

When the Siberian worked the bolt to reload, it was rough, gritty. The scope jerked. By the time he reacquired the grass blind, both men were gone. Cursing, he fired several times. Then he stepped into the doorway and stabbed toward the hill with his finger.

“Spies,” he shouted. “Kill them!”

The officer yelled at his army. As the rebels turned toward the hillside, two men broke cover and began scrambling over the crest of the hill. The rebels fired, but the men were too far away for accuracy.

The Siberian lifted the rifle to his shoulder and fired two more shots without any real hope. A sniper’s rifle wasn’t much good on moving targets. Disgusted, he slammed the rifle onto the crate.

While the rebels watched, the wounded man fell.

Finally!

Before the Siberian could bring the sniper rifle to bear again, the cameraman bent over, picked up his wounded comrade, pulled him into a fireman’s carry, and vanished over the crest of the hill.

“Strong,” the Siberian said, surprised. “Very strong.”

And very unexpected.

He gestured at the staring rebels. “Go after them, shit-heads!”

The officer translated and the rebels ran toward the hill. Before they were halfway, an engine started on the other side of the hill. Moments later dust rose from the tires of a fleeing Land Rover.

The Siberian looked at the officer, who shrugged and said, “There is a track over there that leads to three roads. The Camgerian army controls two of them.”

Unease crawled through the Siberian’s belly. He had been very careful in his violent climb to the top of a violent profession. No one had ever captured his face on film.

“Prepare to take off,” he shouted into the cockpit.

The pitch of the engines increased.

“Get those men,” he told the rebel officer. “Bring me their film and I’ll give you two artillery pieces and a helicopter gunship. Do you understand?”

The officer grinned. If the Siberian would pay a million at first offer, he’d pay more on the second. “I’ll get the film. Then we’ll negotiate.”

The aircraft doors slammed shut as the plane accelerated down the dirt strip, scattering rebels like dust.

Five years later

Near Phoenix, Arizona

Late March

Thursday

8:30 A.M. MST

Kayla Shaw walked out of the little adobe house and put the last of her mementos into the Ford Explorer. It wasn’t much of a load, really. Some photos, her grandmother’s prize bridle, her mother’s barrel-racing trophies, her father’s favorite hunting rifle. Small things rich with memories. After work, she’d come back and pack up her clothes.

Technically the place was hers to use for another month, but it felt melancholy to be a tenant rather than an owner.

As Kayla found a safe spot for the small, unframed landscape painting she carried, she remembered her excitement at discovering the piece in a garage sale. It had been just after her parents had died, when she’d been making the difficult adjustment from beloved child to adult orphan. Something in the painting of a predawn forest had whispered to her of time and loneliness and the faintly shimmering hope of a sunrise that might be more imagined than real. When she’d turned the painting over and seen “Maybe the Dawn” written on the back, she’d known she would buy it.

She touched the name slashed in the lower left of the painting. “R. McCree.” The artist had helped her through a bad time. She’d been looking for his-or her-paintings ever since, but hadn’t found any.

Leaning against the cool metal frame of the vehicle’s door, she glanced around at the ten acres of Dry Valley Ranch that had been her home for her whole life. The adobe walls of the house were the dusty color that came of age and Arizona weather. Sun had turned the timber fence of the corral a lovely shade of gray. The lean-to barn looked lonesome and enduring, like a windmill at a remote cattle tank-like the windmill that still supplied water to the house and corrals.

Ten acres of memories.

Sadness curled around her with the cool morning breeze. She hoped the new owner would love Dry Valley as she and her parents had. She hoped, but she didn’t know. She’d sold the ranch to someone she’d never met, never seen, and knew only through his agent.

“Change, change, change,” she said, pushing her dark hair away from her eyes. “Hello, good-bye, hello to something new. And good-bye, always good-bye.”

Despite her lingering sorrow, Kayla knew that selling the little ranch was the right thing to do. The grazing leases on federal lands had lapsed long ago. Without the leases, there was no way to make a living. Even one cow would starve on Dry Valley’s ten acres. The ranch was a tiny piece of desert at the farthest fringe of Phoenix’s urban sprawl. The house was as spare as the land and needed expensive repairs. Yet taxes had steadily risen as the county assessor reappraised the ground for its potential, instead of its reality.

Good-bye, ranch.

Hello, career in private banking.

Too bad she really wasn’t happy in her work. But every request she’d made to transfer out of private banking had been met with a polite, firm refusal.

It was enough to make a girl think of hitting the road.

I’m not a girl. I’m an adult. Lots of people don’t like their jobs, but they suck it up and get the job done anyway.

“Think of tomorrow as going to another continent,” Kayla told herself. “Everything fresh and undiscovered.”

The thought of distant horizons made her restless. Her job as a private banker was demanding, often fascinating, but it didn’t ease her wanderlust.

Okay, so don’t think about new continents and of years backpacking around the globe. I’m an adult now, with an adult’s responsibilities.

Grow up.

Kayla slid into the driver’s seat, made sure that the pile of escrow documents she’d signed earlier wouldn’t spill off the passenger seat, and admired the check clipped to the big folder. As a private banker she’d handled much larger checks, but none of them had been her own. Her clients’ money was just that-theirs, not hers. If she thought of their money at all, it was simply as numbers to be moved from one place to the next.

The check clipped to the folder was hers-$246,407.

Exactly.

Without meaning to, she looked at the battered backpack stuffed into the passenger foot well.

I could go anywhere in the world.

Until the money ran out. Then I’d have nothing.

Grow up.

It was a good chunk of money, but Phoenix’s red-hot housing market would gobble it up and not even burp.

Looking away from the backpack, Kayla started the vehicle. She hoped her next real estate deal would be as clean and easy as this one had been. On the real estate agent’s advice, she’d offered the ranch at a high price, “looking for the market.”

She’d found it, at full price.

The buyer’s agent had handled the transaction with the dispatch of the lawyer he was. She’d gotten her price, subtracted the closing costs and rent for the next month, and driven to the ranch to begin packing.

Today she’d have her own money to deposit in her American Southwest account. It wasn’t the answer to all her problems, but it was a financial security she’d never had before.

Maybe that security would help her to deal with Elena Bertone, the most demanding client in the history of the demanding world of private banking.

Phoenix, Arizona

Thursday

8:40 A.M. MST

Andre Bertone shifted his weight, making the expensive leather chair creak. Few office chairs were built well enough to accommodate the barrel-chested bulk of a man who stood six foot three inches and weighed two hundred and eighty pounds, most of it muscle. The satellite phone he held to his ear looked almost dainty against his hand.

The musical accents of Brazilian Portuguese spilled out of the decoder and into Bertone’s ear. Despite the beauty of the language, what was being said made a red flush crawl up Bertone’s face. There were very few people in the world who could call him to task. Joao Fouquette was one of them.