Chapter 23

Chris Bawa's face was filled with indescribable pain as he took a step back, his expression dazed even though he fought to steady himself against the shock.

"No!" Chris whispered hoarsely; his eyes were filled with disbelief as he pointed the gun at Stanley's head. "You lie! Dinah wouldn't lie about me, not in a million years! Now you're making me angry, Stan, and believe me you don't want to do that!"

"She fucking did!" Stanley screamed. "That's what convinced me and Sir Lance, you asshole! That was what went down, and if you're telling me she lied then this thing is deeper than you think, and you'll be better off out of KOE! A week ago, Sir Lance had intel that you were still dealing with the imperialists and using your connections to organize another assassination attempt. And again it was irrefutable, the said correspondence was intercepted by the Ministry of Power! Chris, if you stay here in the kingdom, they'll eventually find you and kill you!"

Chris dropped to one knee beside the man, and his face was so mean that Stanley began to weep pathetically.

"Don't kill me, Chris, please!" he groaned as tears fell down his face. "I don't wanna die, no, no, Prodigal. They showed me evidence of why they wanted me to lie! I could not say no! That's the whole truth, man, that's the fucking bloody truth! Now help me, man, please! Get the first aid box. I'm bleeding to death here!"

"What do you know about the three Ts?" Chris asked softly.

"What? Three what?"

"The Taipan Trajectory!" Chris said grimly. "Are you part of that?"

"What the fuck is that?" Stanley wailed in agony. "I don't know what the fuck that is!"

Chris raised the gun and pointed it at the man's forehead.

"What do you know about Taipan?"

"I don't know shit!" he screamed. "You'll kill me for nothing, Prodigal. I don't know anything of that crap, I know nothing!"

Chris held his stare for a moment, and then he lowered the gun.

"Who ordered the hit on my brother?" Chris asked softly.

"Chris, Chris, what the fuck are you…."

Chris pressed the gun against Stanley's forehead.

"Five," he said.

"Chris, don't be an idiot!" Stanley screamed. "Your brother died in a bank robbery!"

"Four," Chris said.

"Chris, fuck it!" the man screamed in anguish as his tears fell. "Your brother was an accident! Accident! Robbers broke into the bank and shot him!"

"Three."

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!" Stanley screamed.

Two."

"Chris, hold on, hold on, you don't…"

"One."

"Okay, okay, okay, okay!" Stanley said and held up his hands. "Roland was asking questions, man! He wanted your case made public; your trial made public! He was getting stronger, more vocal, making people uncomfortable! He spoke to journalists, to international pressmen about his junior brother who had been accused wrongly, jailed for life wrongly, and no one knew what was happening to you. He just wouldn't quit, Chris, and we had intel that he had started petitioning the African Union and the United Nations. I tried to warn him, man! I tried, as a friend and as a rep of the SPF. But he would not listen! Kept making too much noise about your fucking case!"

"I'll ask only once," Chris said coldly, his voice shaking. "Who put the contract on him? And what team carried out the hit on him?"

"Carl Acquah put the contract on him!" Stanley screamed. "And the team was external! A four-man mercenary gang from the Zero District. I don't know their protocols, man, only heard the name Zinga, or something like that… yeah, the Zinga Gang!"

Chris' face was screwed up with passion as he put a hand across his mouth and pressed the gun harder against Stanley's forehead.

"You bastards!" he said with feeling. "You murdered my brother! Damn buzzards! Carl has no bloody authority to order a hit of that level! You bloody knew about it! You and Sir Lance!"

"Not Sir Lance, Chris, not Sir Lance!" Stanley screamed as tears mingled with phlegm and blood fell on his face. "Yes, Carl ran it through my desk, and I okayed it! There was no other way around it, Chris. You know how these things work! Kingdom security first! I didn't want the death of your brother on Sir Lance's conscience, so I didn't inform him. Secondly, I didn't want to be a part of it, so told them to keep it away from me. I informed the Council of Elders, and they agreed that Roland should be shut down. When their permission was given, I gave Carl Acquah the go-ahead but told him they should not use SPF squad, to make it look like an accident. Just saw the brief in a flash! Please, I beg of you! Don't kill me, I had no other alternative!"

Chris' face was blasted with pain and grief as he sat down on the deck and dropped the gun. Tears blinded him for a moment as he moved back until his back hit the port side of the powerboat.

He put his head back as pain washed through him with the image of his elder brother's kind face etched in his memory!

Rollie! Oh, Rollie! I told you to lie low, my brother! Rollieeee!

Brother, friend, mentor… life!

How could they do this?

How could they kill an innocent man? Why the hell had they touched Roland?

Dear Lord, why?

Lying on the deck, Stanley looked at the gun Chris had dropped with incredulous eyes. His gaze shifted to Chris and he saw that the young man was so suffused with the grief of his brother's death that he was lost for the moment, barely aware of what was going on around him.

Stanley Adu licked his lips with his cruel eyes narrowed.

This was his chance!

He swivelled once in a ninety degrees spin and picked up the gun with his uninjured right hand.

He pointed the gun at Chris' head.

"Prodigal!" Stanley screamed with great hatred. "You asshole! You'll go to hell before I do!"

He struggled to a sitting position with the gun still pointed.

"You're going to die, motherfucker!" Stanley screamed. "You fucked up! In this business, we always separate passion from stone-cold reality! You slipped up! And you don't get any second chances from me! Who's the pussy now, huh, Chris? Who the fuck is the pussy now? You are the fucking, stinking, bloody pussy, Chris!"

 Then he fired at Chris rapidly, pulling the trigger eight times!

***

"Where are they?" Sir Lance screamed as he wiped his face with a huge, white handkerchief. "We should be on top of them if Stanley's Body Tracker is active! What the hell is happening? Somebody should tell me something sensible, goddammit! Paul, hey Paul! Stop the fuckery! What the hell is happening?"

The helicopter was now approaching the White Coves where four other helicopters were keeping a hard line, preventing any boat from approaching the coves before being inspected by the Coast Guards.

"I don't know, sir!" Paul Blankson, confused, answered. "The damn signal is on my radar right here! Idle! We should be on top of them, sir! I don't know what the hell this is! They're on the radar, and yet they're not on the sea!"

"Chris was able to block my signals to the police earlier this morning with a device he has," Effe chipped in quickly as she looked at the small but powerful locator in her hand. "If he still he has it, then there's every likelihood that he has blocked Mr Adu's tracker too."

"Damn it! Somebody shave my balls bald!" Sir Lance said explosively, causing all of them to be uneasy, and he looked at Effe with hard eyes. "So, what are you saying? What's going on? He blocked and misdirected the heat? That should not be possible, Effe! This is top-notch technology!"

"In tech development, everything is possible, sir," Effe said calmly. "If you know what you're doing, you can come up with ways to thwart even the best security systems. Chris knows all the SPF security protocols. He built most of them himself or was instrumental in getting them established. I am certain he knows his way around most of them."

 "Effe, the body tracking system was instituted after Prodigal was imprisoned," Paul Blankson said. "There's no way he would know about it!"

"Maybe he doesn't, but that shouldn't stop him from assuming there's something like that," Effe said quickly. "From the little time I have been with him, he has been very thorough and meticulous, not leaving anything to chance. He had all the right angles covered. Believe me, he might be blocking the tracker, or misdirecting it with one of his devices."

"So, what do you say?" Sir Lance asked tightly. "Give me something, Effe, please! Every second we waste could prove fatal for Stanley, and us! Prodigal is skilled, and I shudder to think what he might do to Stanley if he is convinced he had a hand in his brother's death!"

Effe looked at her locator again.

"Chris is a tech-savvy, sir," she said. "If he suspected that the Director had a trace on him, he would take precautions. So, maybe he threw the signal off with another device, but since it is still embedded inside the Director, we might not be too off. Looking at the arc of the sea from the airport, the safest place for Chris would not be the White Coves!"

"Be clearer, Effe!" Sir Lance cried explosively. "Make some sense to me! I don't understand what you're saying! Effe, my dearest girl, stop the fuckery and speak to me in a language I understand, please! I'm not one of your damn techie guys! I'm an old man who wants to be told that my shit stinks, and not that it is a by-product of nutrients that have been absorbed leaving the chaff! Tell me white is white and not eggshell, cream, broken white, vanilla and nonsense! Forgive me for my choice of words but damn it, tell me something, Effe!"