The Devil's Proposal
Nairobi, Kenya. A shopping center in the crowded heart of downtown.
After a long stretch of nothing but chaos, Smith had come looking for a proper meal for once. He stepped into an American fast-food place, and when his order came up he carried an oversized cheeseburger and a coffee to a table. Meaning to shake the exhaustion soaked into his bones, he took a deep pull of the strong coffee first.
"Nnnh—okay. I can live again. Ha. I seriously thought I was gonna die."
Once the coffee had warmed his gut, he took the cheeseburger in both hands. He was just about to bite down when the phone he'd set on the table went off—riiiing, riiiing.
He set the burger back down, picked up the phone, and checked the number.
"Never seen this one. Who the hell..."
He didn't know who it was. That didn't mean he could let it ring.
"Hello."
He wasn't far enough along to be called a veteran, but he'd come up as a field operative, and Smith had the uncommon memory that came with the work.
"How do you know this number?"
The memory surfaced. In the interrogation room at Mogadishu Airport, he had shoved a business card stamped with the CIA logo into the face of the very man calling him now.
In that instant—damn it. I screwed up.
At the time he hadn't imagined for a second that the bastard would slip away, so he'd done it without a thought. Looking back, it was no ordinary mistake.
"Leaving that aside. Why'd you call? You walked off like we had nothing left to say to each other. What—you here to confess now?"
"Business?"
"Whose wound are you rubbing salt in? Huh? And whose fault is all of this, right now?"
Al-Shabaab's attack on the U.S. Embassy. Right after the bombing, the group had issued an official statement declaring themselves responsible. And as for their reason—
We have confirmed that the United States and the government of Somalia stand behind the attacks that continue, to this day, against our comrades. Accordingly, we planned this jihad in order to make the United States and the Somali government pay the price, and we hereby officially declare that we have no intention of halting our jihad until the attacks against the members of our organization cease…
With its fighters vanishing in droves, Al-Shabaab's leadership had taken a heavy blow. Unable to uncover what was behind the disappearances while the damage kept piling up, they had planned this attack to tighten their grip on the organization and turn the discontent inside it outward. Pinning the vanishings on the United States and the Somali government also served to paper over their own incompetence.
"Enough. Tell me why you called. Or hang up."
"You'll solve our problem? How?"
American special forces had gone into Mogadishu on an operation once before, taken massive casualties, and failed. Mogadishu was the ground of the mission the world came to know as Black Hawk Down. Small wonder the United States had no wish to send troops into a city where there was almost nothing to gain.
"You're saying you'll wipe Al-Shabaab off the earth? Don't tell me you're planning another mass kidnapping."
"Don't give me that. We went through your house. The private prison you built underground. Ammonia, biological secretions—traces of at least three hundred people locked up in there. If you think we're leaving it alone because we don't know, you're dead wrong."
"You son of a bitch. You called me to play word games?!"
Smith, who had been heating up, went quiet for a moment and thought. Then, a little later—
"Then what is it you want?"
"A customer?"
"What?"
Smith was speechless. And yet he couldn't deny the offer had its hooks in him. If they really could eliminate Al-Shabaab—what did a few tens of millions of dollars matter?
"I could have you locked up again over this. You serious?"
"Why?"
"Yeah. You wouldn't have called without that kind of cover."
"Fine. Your proposal. I'll think it over. But I don't think we can have this conversation over the phone."
"Important business gets done face to face. That's how trust gets built. Come here. Or I'll come to you."
"All right. When?"
"Now? What are you talking about?"
A chill ran the length of Smith's spine. He turned on reflex.
"Ah."
His eyes met the man he'd spun around to face. The stranger lowered the phone in his hand and gave a small wave. He was sitting there with his face changed to that of Jose Maldiano, a soldier of the Italian Mafia.
The man rose, crossed the floor at an easy pace, and took the seat across from Smith. He looked at the startled face in front of him and smiled, bright and easy.
"Well. If you'd rather talk in person, then let's do it that way."
"You— you son of a—"
Back at the embassy, Smith fell into a long deliberation.
His first thought, when the offer came, had been to ignore the whole thing and take the man. Little by little, though, he came around to the view that it wouldn't be that easy. The man wouldn't have come alone, and if Smith tried to grab him by himself, the odds were better that he'd be the one who got taken. Call in troops, and there was no guarantee the last disaster wouldn't repeat itself. These were people who had made hundreds vanish without a trace. Hiding a single body of their own would be nothing.
That certainty only hardened after he checked the entry records at Nairobi Airport.
No record of entry under the name Maldiano.
He'd confirmed it with the immigration office, and sure enough the man's entry was recorded nowhere. Africa's security and its borders might be loose, but going after a man who did not exist in the official record carried too much risk if the attempt failed.
And at the same time, the offer the man had thrown him was far too sweet. If, for a price, they would actually and reliably remove Al-Shabaab's fighters, then from where Smith stood—a man who needed to land a real blow on Al-Shabaab—there was nothing about it that was bad.
He turned it over and over. It would have been good to have his superior, Mitchell, at a time like this. But Mitchell was one of the U.S. Embassy staff badly wounded in the last attack, and right now he was lying in the intensive care unit at Nairobi University Hospital. Which only made it more impossible for Smith to leave Al-Shabaab alone.
He was the one, after all, who had written up proposal after proposal for drone strikes on Al-Shabaab's strongholds and leadership, or for decapitation raids. What came back was always the same breed of answer. Wait. The operation lacks effectiveness. We cannot commit U.S. forces to a danger zone. In the end, all he could do was blame himself for sitting idle even after a colleague had been badly hurt.
While he was still turning it over, word came from home.
"Goddamn it. They won't even send the army, and they want me to eliminate them? Those bastards at headquarters! They think the job's done if they sit at a desk and fire off an email!"
He balled the order that had come in with both hands and hurled it onto the table. It hit with a flat thud.
"Ah—fuck!"
He raged for a good while. Once the heat had come down a little, Smith finally made up his mind. He picked up his phone and called somewhere.
"Yeah. It's me. Let's meet again. What for? The business, obviously. That thing you said—I want to hear the specifics. Yeah. Send me a place and a time. Make it soon. If this drags out, I don't know how my thinking might change."
He hung up. Then he kicked the chair back and sprawled into it.
"Fuck it. Come what may. Goddamn it."
And yet something in a corner of his mind felt wrong. The thought kept coming back to him—that he might just have taken the devil by the hand.