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I watched Zane fold out of his sprawl to answer the door while I added a third scoop of grinds to filter. It was going to be a long day; strong coffee was going to be my only coping device.
“Nice jammies,” Smith snickered.
I glanced down at my grey lounge pants complete with bright yellow combat-ready rubber ducks—a Christmas gift from Kira. I was pretty sure she’d given a variation of mine to the whole team. My rude hand gesture to Smith was met with a chuckle.
Zane cut through the exchange to announce, “The two of you are on a flight to Cairo. It leaves in four hours.”
I had yet to process the Cairo part before Zane went on, “Nebraska is meeting with Amani Carver. Her flight will land a few hours after yours.”
“Amani Caver, the man who bought the microdrone tech from that dipshit, Mark Shillings?” Smith inquired.
“One and the same,” Zane confirmed.
“Why is she meeting with him? The Raven project is dead. The Sparrow was scrapped in testing and the payload capabilities were never authenticated,” Smith correctly pointed out.
“The Sparrow project was completed,” Charlie contradicted. “Or the sale of the plans were completed. Amani has a talented team ready to reengineer any hiccups. The meeting isn’t about the drone. Nebraska requested a sit-down as a show of loyalty to warn Amani Maddon is ready to execute his end game.”
I didn’t want to think about why Nebraska would be loyal to the man who bought the schematics to a microdrone that was so small it was basically undetectable with the plan to use the silence and maneuverability of the UAV to drop nerve agents to decimate throngs of people.
Amani Caver was a modern-day Chemical Ali.
“What’s Maddon’s endgame?” Smith asked Charlie though his eyes were glued to the percolating nectar of the gods slowly filling the coffee pot.
“Did you read the files Nebraska gave you?” Charlie asked impatiently.
“No. I was more interested in Paulo Alves and why Nebraska was there to kill him.”
I was too far away to get a read on Charlie but I didn’t miss the slight tic in his cheek. The prison riot wasn’t in the files he sent.
“Paulo was personal.”
“Personal how?” Smith pushed.
“He was a low-level criminal. Content to sell drugs, pimp women, do his part in his gang, but never made moves to move up. Could’ve been he was lazy or too strung out himself. Either way he was a street dealer. Not someone we would concern ourselves with. But Nebraska had an informant—husband and wife. She liked them, they were good people doing what they could to clean up their neighborhood. She was in Brazil getting intel on a large shipment of cocaine Primeiro Comando da Capital planned on moving out of the country. She went to see her informants. When she got there the neighborhood was in mourning. Her informants’ daughter had been brutally raped and murdered. Everyone knew Paulo had done it but no one was talking. Before she could find Paulo he was picked up on drug charges. With overcrowding and the corruption, Paulo would spend a week in Conjunto then he’d be released. Nebraska made sure he didn’t leave the prison.”
How could one woman be such a contradiction? She’d mete out justice to a rapist who otherwise would walk free for his crimes while sitting with a man who was planning what would amount to mass murder.
The better question was, why was I contemplating the woman’s actions?
I yanked four mugs out of the cupboard while I forced myself to listen to Nebraska’s father and ignored the knot of apprehension quickly twisting at the thought of her alone in Egypt meeting with a very dangerous man.
“It’s my understanding she knew you were in the prison and left your mission undisturbed,” Charlie finished.
“She did,” Smith confirmed, but offered nothing else. “What’s Maddon’s endgame?”
The stretch of silence had me turning back to the living room. Charlie’s gaze was fixated on my TV. His face was stoic. His shoulders tense. It was a given the man wasn’t happy to be in my living room in the middle of the night, but it was more. I’d venture to guess it even went beyond his daughter meeting with Amani Carver.
“I’ve known Maddon for the better part of forty years. When I met him, he was fresh to clandestine services. He was a cocky asshole like the rest of us when we started. Came in hot, thought he could make a difference and was ready to get out into the field. Back in the eighties we were ass-deep into the war of drugs. New tactics were in their infancy. Maddon excelled at gathering sources. He managed to build a network in Central America that didn’t just help the cause; it propelled the operation into overdrive. So much intel was being sent back to Washington they had to scramble to bring in more analysts.”
As interesting as that was, I wasn’t sure why a history lesson was relevant. I jerked the half-full carafe from the machine and filled my mug.
“I’ll take one of those, too,” Smith called from the living but was already making his way into the kitchen.
Zane had moved to a chair Layla had convinced me to buy to complete what she called the aesthetic of the room. She also called it a club chair, whatever the hell that meant. I called it uncomfortable and useless. But right then with Zane sitting in it staring at me I could add too small to uncomfortable.
“Is Maddon’s time in Central America pertinent? My men have a flight to catch,” he asked impatiently.
One could say my boss didn’t like his time wasted. Taking that a step further he really didn’t like it wasted in the middle of the night.
