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he was running clean.”

      “Let’s get out of here, then,” Schwarz said, looking around. “The natives are starting to get curious.”

      Lyons stood and nodded.

      “Let’s roll.”

      Kenya

      “DOESN’T THAT JUST BEAT everything?”

      McCarter’s voice was so dull with disappointment it barely held a trace of his accent. Beside him in the SUV, Hawkins just slowly shook his head.

      “It’s the French,” he said. His disbelief only served to thicken his Texas drawl. “Why did it have to be the goddamn French?”

      McCarter didn’t have an answer.

      Their vehicle was parked on a bluff overlooking the river. Halfway across the dark brown waters they could clearly see the commercial ferry taking cars across to the other side.

      Based on its current speed, the two Phoenix Force members estimated it’d be another half hour before the ferry unloaded its cargo on the far side and made its way back to pick them up.

      To make matters worse the ferry was loaded with the French racing team. The laughter of the other racers was clearly audible as they powered away across the water. One of the Frenchmen lifted up his arm and flipped off the two men.

      “I guess I had that coming,” Hawkins said.

      “They started before us,” McCarter pointed out. “So the fact that we’ve caught up to them again, means our times are good.”

      “Sure,” Hawkins conceded. “But I’d feel a hell of a lot better with them at our six than running flat out ahead of us.”

      “What do you want to do?”

      “According to the map there’s another crossing down the river,” Hawkins answered. “We get there and across, we could gain even more time.”

      “Better damned if we do than if we don’t?”

      “I sure as hell don’t want to burn daylight just sitting here if we have another option.”

      McCarter released the parking brake and put the idling SUV into gear. “Let’s hit it,” he agreed.

      The SUV powered across the open terrain.

      McCarter navigated the riverbank for almost a mile until it twisted in a great bend. Reading the map beside him, Hawkins instructed him to cut straight cross-country to meet the waterway where it looped back.

      Still battered by the lack of a road, the two men found the going relatively easy across a flat stretch of grassland. McCarter kept one eye on his watch while Hawkins used the dashboard compass, his much abused race map and the GPS unit to coordinate their position exactly. Soon he was plagued by a constant, low-grade headache. As they pressed on without an update on Monica Fischer’s condition, their worry mounted.

      Copses of trees proved the most difficult obstacle to navigate but the route called for them to ford several small streams along the way. McCarter gunned the vehicle through one such obstacle and clawed his way up the other side and the men found themselves on an immense plain.

      “That’s it,” Hawkins said. “That’s the last stream for a while and we’re on the veldt before the river crossing.”

      According to their plan McCarter slowed and stopped the vehicle. Hawkins quickly got out, retrieved a grease gun from the cargo space and crawled under the vehicle to do his preventive maintenance.

      As Hawkins worked, McCarter slipped out from behind the wheel to stretch. On a whim he crawled up onto the roof of the SUV and scanned his surroundings. The wild distance seemed vast as he scanned the terrain.

      To the west he saw a small group of water buffalo wallowing in the mud beside the small stream they had just crossed. Beyond them a herd of giraffes moved easily across the grassland.

      He felt at peace despite his exhaustion. The cares and worries of his singular occupation seemed far away. He felt the burden of his responsibilities lift off his shoulders like a bird taking flight.

      He looked at his watch and noted how much time had passed. He was pleased. He calculated that their alternate route would put them in front of the Frenchmen in another hour.

      “We might just win this thing, after all,” he called down to Hawkins.

      Hawkins answered from beneath the rear axle but his reply was drowned out by the ringing of the satellite phone on McCarter’s belt. The Briton pulled it free and answered, figuring it was Manning with an update on Fischer’s condition.

      He listened for a moment, then sighed.

      “Hello, Barb. What can I do for you?”

      Brazzaville; Capital, Republic of the Congo

      THE NIGHT WAS HOT.

      The heat was cloying, so humid it clung to the body in a blanket of damp. It made showering a superfluous activity. Despite this Rafik Bagdasarian had taken two in the past hour.

      The first had been to wash the smell of the woman off him.

      He’d been infatuated with her ebony skin and rich accent, but once he’d paid her, he’d come to the conclusion that whores were whores the world over. It didn’t matter if it was Moscow, New York, Paris or Brazzaville.

      He took the second shower to calm his nerves. This one the Armenian mafioso lieutenant took with an iced tumbler full of Ouzo. In his years as arms merchant, contract killer, drug smuggler and human trafficker he’d come to love the anise-flavored liquor.

      Walking through the suite of the Olympic Palace Hotel, he toweled off his pale, lanky body then poured himself a second drink. His body was covered with swirling green ink tattoos that announced his résumé and biography to those who knew how to read them.

      Skulls, daggers, horned monsters, Catholic iconography all twisted across his lean, muscular frame. He was a problem solver, which was why his captain had sent him to the Congo.

      Taking his drink, he stepped out onto his balcony and looked across the dirty water of the Congo River at Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The twin cities of Kinshasa and Brazzaville were the only national capitals sharing a river border or situated so closely together.

      The unique circumstance had done nothing to help the two countries, however, Bagdasarian thought.

      He stepped off the balcony, tossed back his drink and began to think. The civil war of Congo-Brazzaville in 1997 and the larger war in Congo-Kinshasa in 1998 had left the poverty-stricken nations and their capitals in ruins with political systems decimated.

      From the power vacuum strongmen with guns had emerged.

      It was a situation and environment Bagdasarian understood well. His own criminal clique had risen to prominence during and after the chaos of his own country’s bitter, bloody and protracted war with neighboring Azerbaijan.

      He lit a French cigarette and buttoned his shirt. His area of operations for the Armenian syndicate was Africa, but he wasn’t just here for them. This time it was bigger; this time the Chinese principal had set him into motion.

      Failure was not an option.

      In the valise on the bed in front of him was a large amount of francs and a Walther PPK.

      The woman he’d bought had served for something else beside sexual gratification.

      Prostitutes were the elements of the criminal underground most readily available to foreigners in any country. They haunted the hotels and nightclubs promising sweaty miracles in exchange for cash.

      But they were also conduits to the black market.

      Prostitution went hand in hand with drugs and where you found a drug dealer you found someone who could, if the wheels were greased, get you a gun or introduce you to all manner of nefarious operators.

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