Page 107 of Duty Preserved

Donovan.

I didn’t know if he was alive. I didn’t know if any of them were alive.

The room assembled itself in pieces as my vision cleared. Unpainted walls with moisture staining along the bases. A corrugated metal roof, rust spotting the seams of the sheeting overhead. It appeared to be an agricultural building of some sort, the kind of structure used by livestock operations all over the Laikipia corridor. A farmstead somewhere off the reserve.

Read the room.

I did what I did with any unfamiliar case. An animal comes in without a chart, I start with observation. What’s in front of me?

A table against the far wall held papers and a two-way radio with a coiled antenna. Plastic crates stacked three high against the adjacent wall, their labels printed in a language that wasn’t Swahili or English. Drag marks scored the floor where the crates had been repositioned recently.

I thought I could hear voices through the walls. Men talking. It was hard to be sure because whatever they’d drugged me with hadn’t fully worn off, and my own heartbeat was so loud in my ears it crowded out everything else. I tried to take long and deep breaths through my nose to calm myself.

I had to calm myself.

I listened harder. The voices sharpened, but I still couldn’t make out words. Men speaking casually outside the door. An engine ran somewhere nearby, a steady mechanical rumble that could have been a vehicle or a generator.

The light from the curtain gap fell across the floor in a narrow stripe. Late morning, maybe. The angle was high enough that the sun had been up for hours. I’d lost time. A lot of it. Whatever they’d used on that cloth had put me down hard.

My face ached. The left side, above my jaw. Something pulled beneath the skin when I clenched my teeth against the cloth. I didn’t remember being hit, but during the taking, while I was fighting or after I went under, someone must have struck me.

My wrists burned where the plastic cut in. The bindings weren’t coming off without a blade. I flexed my hands behind my back. My fingers were going numb, but they still moved.

I was terrified. But I was thinking. And as long as I could still think, I was still in this.

The door opened.

A white man walked in. Mid-forties. Solidly built but not large. He wore khaki pants and a long-sleeved bush shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms. His boots were scuffed and mud-caked. His hair was cropped short, going gray at the temples. He didn’t scan the room or check the corners. He walked straight to the chair behind the table, picked it up, carried it across the floor, and set it down facing mine. Two meters between us. He sat down, crossed one ankle over the opposite knee, and rested his hands on his thigh.

He studied me for a moment. Brown eyes that didn’t move from mine. Then he leaned forward and untied the cloth across my mouth. He pulled it free and dropped it on the floor beside his chair. He sat back.

“My name is Willem Nasser.” South African accent, thick enough to place immediately. “And you’re Dr. Calloway.”

He already knew my name?

“I want you to understand what this is,” he said. “And what it isn’t. Nobody is going to call your family and ask for money. That’s not the business I’m in.”

“What business are you in?”

“Horn. Ivory. Whatever the market wants.” His tone didn’t change between the commodity list and the sentence that followed it. “I’ve been doing this a long time, Dr. Calloway. Fifteen years across four countries. I don’t dress it up, and I won’t apologize for it. It’s just how I make my living.”

His expression didn’t shift. He wasn’t justifying himself and he wasn’t performing. The casualness in his posture was real.

“You kill animals for money.”

“I do.” His eyes held mine. “I made peace with that a long time ago. I expect you find that difficult to hear, given your profession.”

“You know nothing about me.”

“I would disagree.” He rubbed his thumb along the side of his index finger. “The market doesn’t care about your feelings, Dr. Calloway. Or mine. A kilo of rhino horn is worth more than gold in the right hands. I didn’t create that demand. I supply it.”

He let a beat pass. Watching me absorb it.

“So why am I here?”

He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. Elbows on his knees.

“Because you matter to the man who’s been making my work very difficult.”