Back in Korhogo, she brushed the thoughts from her mind and adjusted the volume knob on the speaker mounted to the wall. Then she turned her full attention to the man sitting at the table.
Who are you, Mr. Hayes?
“Looks like you got yourself into a bit of a spot, mate,” Wikus said, crossing to the table. “I’m going to ask you a few questions”—leaning into Hayes’s face—“and you damn well better answer them.”
The South African was an imposing man, with thick arms and the barest hint of a neck. A bruiser. The kind of man who got off on inflicting pain, but instead of the fearful looks Mallory was used to seeing when the burly merc went to work on a man, Hayes appeared almost bored.
“What are you doing in the Ivory Coast?”
“I’m a reporter.”
“I dated a journo once,” Wikus said, unzipping the assault pack.
“What was he like?”
Getting a person to do your bidding was a subtle art, one that Mallory had mastered well before she came to work for Cabot. Which is why she had given Wikus clear instructions on how she wanted the interview handled.
“You can yell, scream, and be as menacing as you like, but do not hit him, understood?”
She’d felt confident that she’d made herself clear, but when Wikus looked up from the pack, his face red and his hand curling into a fist, she wasn’t so sure.
But instead of flattening Hayes’s nose he upended the assault pack and dumped the contents on the table.
“What’s this, your recorder?” he asked, picking up a pair of night-vision goggles.
“What do you want?” Hayes asked.
“Well, that’s simple,” Wikus answered, lowering himself into the chair across from the American. “I want to know how a nice-looking lad like yourself ended up landing here with a dead man in the cockpit and a plane filled with more lead than a number two pencil.”
25
KORHOGO, IVORY COAST
While Hayes was fully enjoying watching the South African fight to control his temper, the man was starting to get on his nerves.
“Listen, man, we both know you ain’t running shit, so why don’t you do me a favor?”
“What’s that?” Wikus said, leaning forward.
“Shut the fuck up and go get your boss.”
The fact that Wikus didn’t immediately flatten his nose confirmed his earlier suspicion, that whoever was on the other side of the glass had the South African on a tight leash. But Hayes was tired of screwing around and the man’s incessant questions were giving him a headache.
“Look, fuckface, I’m not telling you shit, so stop wasting my time and the world’s oxygen and go get your mommy.”
Wikus came out of the chair like he was strapped to a rocket. “That’s it, you smart-mouthed cunt,” he said, firing a meaty fist toward Hayes’s face.
Even with his hand cuffed to the table, he knew he could take Wikus to the ground without breaking a sweat. Hayes also knew that while it might feel good for a few minutes, it was the fastest possible way to blow whatever cover he had left.
But there were ways to hurt a man without making it look intentional.
Hayes waited until the last second, and then, flexing his neck and bringing his shoulders up to his ears, dropped his forehead into the path of the man’s punch.
He’d taken some hard hits, but Wikus punched like a mule and the blow snapped his head back, the force pushing the chair onto its back leg, and if it hadn’t been for the cuff securing him to the table, Hayes knew that it would have sent him to the floor. He tried to shake it off and right his chair, but the simple task left him feeling like a drunk trying to pass a field sobriety test.
He’d untangled the cuff from the chair and had just gotten all four legs on the floor when Wikus came charging around the table. His face blood red. Eyes brimming with the promise of violence.
Hayes jumped to his feet and kicked the chair into the enraged South African’s path. It was a weak counter, one he fully expected the man to avoid. But at the last instant one of the wheels hit a crack and the chair tipped onto its side, driving one of the arms into Wikus’s groin.
The blow stopped him like a .357 to the skull and he dropped to his knees, mouth stretched in a silent O.
Before Hayes could press his advantage, someone in the hall booted the door and a rush of Ivorian soldiers came flooding into the room. They rushed toward the table and Hayes was preparing himself for a beatdown, but the soldiers ignored him, grabbed the sobbing South African from the floor, and dragged him out.
Leaving Hayes and the woman from the tarmac alone in the room.
“I, uh . . .”
“You wanted the one in charge,” she said. “Well, here I am, Mr. Hayes.”
He studied the woman as she walked toward the table, wondering why she was here, what she wanted with him. Usually he found all the answers he needed in the eyes, but this woman’s were blank and, behind a perfect coat of makeup, her face was unreadable.
“Lady, who are you and why are you people so interested in who I am and what I’m doing here?”
“My name is Theresa Mallory,” she said.
“You’re not a cop and you obviously don’t work for the government, so what do you want?”
“I’m a lawyer,” she answered, taking his passport from her bag and opening the front cover.
“You going to get me out of here?”
“Considering the body we found in your plane, it’s not a lawyer you need, but a priest.”
“Is that why you’re here? To offer absolution?” Hayes asked.
“Mr. Hayes, do you know the penalty for traveling under forged papers in Ivory Coast?”
“Who says they’re fake?” he asked, slipping back into the good ol’ boy routine.
“I do,” she answered, the tone of her voice cold as ice.
Back in the day, when Hayes had to operate overseas, he and the rest of the Treadstone operatives traveled under false papers—or non-official cover, as it was known in the State Department—but Hayes didn’t have that option now because his passport had been confiscated before he was booted from the States.
While the loss of his papers was a pain in the ass, it wasn’t a game changer and Hayes knew that all he needed to do to get new papers was visit one of the many cache sites he’d set up during his time at Treadstone.
On paper it seemed like an easy enough solution, but it wasn’t until he made the first attempt at a bus station in Berlin that Hayes realized he was being watched. Once he suspected that he was being followed, he backed off the drop and set about to identify the surveillance team.