An African Affair

Table of Contents

 

 

 

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Copyright © Nina Darnton, 2011

All rights reserved

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Darnton, Nina.

An African affair : a novel / Nina Darnton.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-51693-5

1. Women journalists—Fiction. 2. Americans—Nigeria—Fiction.
3. Assassination—Nigeria—Fiction. 4. Organized crime—Nigeria—Fiction.
5. Lagos (Nigeria)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3604.A749A69 2011
813’.6—dc22 2011001507

 

 

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Beware, beware the Bight of Benin
For few come out though many go in.

—Old sailor’s rhyme

The operations room at Langley was unusually busy for a Thursday morning.

Even in the slowest of times, the windowless chamber—the nerve center of the CIA, where all reports and rumors were gathered—was frantically active. The operatives remained vigilant, ready to mobilize at the first sign of trouble anywhere in the world. And today, April 15, 1994, problems were brewing in all the usual places: Serbia continued its attacks on Bosnia, the Hutus escalated their slaughter of the Tutsis, and Moscow and Chechnya were growing increasingly hostile.

The operations room seemed small considering its importance, measuring only thirty by forty feet. In the middle, four computers divided the space into quadrants. An operator sat in front of each monitor scanning the incoming reams of words, then forwarding each report to the correct department as more information streamed in. The operators—two men and two women—were too preoccupied to talk to one another.

A light hanging from the center of the ceiling suddenly flashed, bathing the walls in an eerie yellow glow. It alerted the operatives that someone not cleared to receive classified information had entered.

The stranger was a tall, lean man with piercing eyes that darted around the room, taking everything in. He was standing at the door with his escort, a middle-aged analyst from the Africa section plump from years of sitting at a desk.

“Every news story, every intercept, every piece of economic data, even every weather report pours in here,” the analyst bragged, “and is forwarded to the appropriate desk in less than ten seconds.”

The stranger smiled. He remembered walking through an experimental psych lab where white rats pressed little bars to receive food pellets. Ten seconds, he mused—hardly enough for a considered judgment. The scene reminded him that the CIA was a gigantic vacuum cleaner, sucking up every tidbit, while hobbling the agency with an overload of information.

One of the operators seemed particularly busy. The computers—set back to back—allowed no one else to see the screen.

“That man,” the escort said, pointing, “handles all the field reports. Obviously they get top priority.”

The young man suddenly sat upright.

“My God!” he exclaimed before hunching over and hitting some keys.

“What happened?” one of the women yelled.

The young man started to speak, then looked nervously at the two men by the door.

“We’d better leave,” whispered the escort, touching the stranger on the elbow.

The coded message was forwarded directly to the deputy director for operations, who immediately summoned an emergency meeting. Within ten minutes, a small group of highly placed analysts and operatives dropped what they were doing and made their way to a secure conference room on the fourth floor. Word had spread throughout the building: William Agapo, their most valuable agent in Nigeria, had been assassinated.

Fortunately, the top experts on Nigeria were already at Langley to discuss what was euphemistically called “the Nigerian landscape,” a volatile mix of corruption and drug smuggling with an overlay of politics.

As the analysts and agents filed into the room, there was none of the usual banter. They arranged themselves around an oval mahogany table. James Woolsey, the soft-spoken director, took his seat at the head of the table. Dave Goren, the station chief in Lagos, sat next to him. Goren’s pale blue eyes searched the room, then focused on the doorway as Peter Bresson, the elegant ambassador to Nigeria, entered with Bob Albright, the deputy director, a short, scruffy man with crumbs from breakfast still caught in his beard. Albright paused for a moment, staring hard at Goren, who got the message, sighing theatrically as he gave up his seat next to the director.

The last to arrive was Vickie Grebow. Being inconspicuous was not one of her talents. No one could help but notice this thirty-five-year-old Amazon with her platinum blond curly hair and five-foot-ten-inch frame. Everything about Vickie was big—her throaty voice, her exaggerated New York accent, her expansive gestures. She seemed exactly the wrong person to work for an undercover agency, but although she was always noticed, she was never seen.

She plopped her large black shoulder bag on a chair next to Dave Goren and sat down next to it.

“Jesus, I’m sorry,” she said to no one in particular. “How did it happen? What do we know?”

“Not much,” Goren said. “The message said he and his wife were found in bed with their throats cut. The house was ransacked. The police are calling it a robbery.”

“No surprise there,” said Vickie.

“Anything taken?” Bob Albright asked.

“We just contacted his secretary,” Goren replied. “She said he had taken home all his private papers a few days ago. His safe there was blown. Whatever was in there is gone.”

Vickie leaned forward. “Just papers? What about jewelry, cash, electronics?”

“We only know about the safe. There may have been jewelry in it, but the expensive rings and bracelets on the dresser weren’t touched.”

“Well, that’s practically a signed confession, isn’t it?” Vickie blurted. “They found out he was working for us and killed him.”

Goren raised his eyebrows condescendingly. “Just like that, Vickie, you solved it. It’s so easy, we don’t even need trained analysts to figure it out.”

Vickie shot him an angry look.

“You just heard from a trained analyst. Am I going too fast for you?”

Bob Albright suppressed a smile. “Hold on,” he said. “We don’t know what happened. But Vickie’s right, Dave, it’s probably not just a simple robbery.”

“Besides, he lived in Ikoyi,” Vickie broke in, “home to foreign diplomats and rich Nigerians. It’s well patrolled. Most of the houses are surrounded by cement walls and protected by security guards.”

Goren snorted. “Right. He had two. They ran away.”

“Question them,” Albright ordered. “Were they paid to disappear? Did they recognize anyone?”

“If they know who did this they’ll be afraid to talk,” Vickie said.

“It’s our job to make them afraid not to talk,” Goren shot back.

“That’s where we differ, Dave. I think it’s our job to help them feel safe to talk.”

Albright nodded his head slowly up and down, a personal tic they all knew well. It meant he had reached a decision.

“We need another asset on the ground. Vickie, I want you to go to Lagos as soon as possible,” he said. “Your cover will be as the new deputy political officer. Bill, your office can take care of the details. Nose around, Vickie. I know you’re good at that. We want information on this killing, of course, but without Agapo, we’ve lost our eyes and ears. We need to know what that tin-pot dictator is up to and get a fix on his opposition. So far, we’ve remained neutral—at least officially. You’ll report to Peter on paper, as Dave does. But be sure to keep me up to speed.”

“I’ll need to be brought up to date on the details,” Vickie said. “Are you thinking it’s the work of local operatives or are we looking at Solutions, Incorporated? A mercenary operation that assassinates people who can’t be bought off would suit Olumide perfectly.”

“The point is, we don’t know,” Goren said, “but that group seems too sophisticated for overt assassination. Why not hire some local to do it?”

He turned to Albright with an air of exasperation. “My apologies if I’m out of line here, but we know that Vickie’s strengths—great as they are—are intuitive, not intellectual. Don’t we need more mature analysis for this situation?”

The director impatiently pushed back his chair and rose.

“I think we’ll go with Bob’s plan. If you have a problem with it, Dave, get over it.” He turned to the deputy director. “And keep me apprised of whatever they find.”