A short Story, written in times of inertia, unedited.

......continued from last week.

The supervisor did not need to do that must image polishing for the country; the events of the past months had really touched her. She was afraid of her self, the way she felt now she would gladly kill any body that was pleased with what happened in New York and enjoy doing it. She would go any where she had to in order to help her country and company get everybody involved in the devastating suicide attacks.

The TN had it’s source. A thirty three year old Somali known simply as Ali was one. He worked for a charity that in practice raised money for terrorist organizations. After much intelligence gathering through sub-terfuge which was infact made possible by the involvement to the charity he worked for, he discovered and penetrated an underground network through which dozens of dangerous terrorists were transported to the most unusual places on earth for hiding. Elaine flew to Lagos and then to Calabar to wait as instructed , she checked into the Marian Hotel on the third of December. She stayed three whole weeks at the hotel until a few hours to Christmas Eve she was called to the phone. Her superior relayed to her, how to find to and recognize Ali at a pre-arranged rendezvous’.

Calabar is a city of sex and nutritional delicacies people come with their money to eat and have sex, they rarely come for other reasons. The university provided enough sex to go round but fratricidal fueds in the town were traced to sex. On the day Elaine arrived Margaret Ekpo international Airport from Miami Via Muritala Mohammed International Airport Lagos it was raining, It rained almost all through the year in Calabar. Within an hour of her arrival she checked into Marian Hotel and settled down to the waiting game. Finally, after three weeks her superior called from Miami and gave her instructions. On the night of the twenty fourth she drove the hired opel Scorpio to the state housing estate. She was provided a road map of the city by the Hotel car hire manager. She arrived the joint at eleven on the dot, there were about ten people in the dinning hall but she recognized him the moment she walked in. He looked haunted tall and very lean he looked tired of the life he was living. A white suit hung behind his back on the chair and a black Stetson lay on the table when she walked in, she would have just taken one or two snacks and simply walked out if the hat was not on the table. She sat on a table close to his and shot a glance at him, he had not taken his eyes off her since she walked into the joint. When the waiter came to her table she raised a clean two hundred Naira note up above her head and pared closely at it as if to ascertain its geniuses. She made her order and put the note down. Ten minutes later she got up and left, the man went after her. She waited for him at a phone pool out on the street until he caught up with her and the walked along side each other. Quickly he brought out a folded envelope from his breast pocket and handed it to her, and then he increased his pace and walked on away. After she received the envelope she turned back and started walking back to drummer’s port where her car was parked. She knew there was trouble the moment she came into the premises; she saw two men casually walking away from her car, her first thought was she could have been set up for a car bomb. She had a vague idea about what Ali had just handed to her, she promised herself she would not let its mental weight distort her alertness and reasoning. Cautiously she walked towards her car pretending to be oblivious of both men who were equally making out to be unawares of her presence. The parking lot was dimly let but a few feet to the car she saw what the men had done. On the side of the car she could see, which was the left, both front and back tires were deflated.

She heard a distant scream from the direction Ali had taken and it was followed by a gunshot. The two men she had seen near car had gotten onto the road turned around the side of the parking ground and were now approaching her from the right side. She broke into a run, she was trained for such emergences. Her car was parked at the last parking space to the hedge that demarcated the drummer’s port parking space from that of the next building. She ran behind the hedge, if her pursuers were tempted to shoot they would have a hard time hitting her because it was dark and the hedge interfered with their vision. They ran after her and the darkness did not seem to affect their speed. She was an athletic in high school, all she did take her high heeled shoes off and both men were denied any advantage they had envisaged. There weren’t people on the street but commercial motorcycles and cars moving up and down the road, non of the drivers or riders seemed to notice anything. That was long before GSM telephone came to town and only phone booths on the road were in the other direction, so she had no means to call, and in effect no one to call. She continued to run and men about a hundred metres behind her did the same. At a point where the road slightly bent to the right, she turned and her pursuers had not come into view then she left the road she spotted a house that had two large pillars in front of it, it was not a good place to hide but she closed it. From training she knew that the most effective hiding places where the very unusual ones. Surely the men did not expect her to hide in such a place on the street. They ran along past her hiding place as she took one step at a time round the four sides of the pillars making sure that as they moved along, one part of the pillar shielded her from the men. She waited for a minute and when she did not hear their footfalls anymore she slightly bent her head forward in order to peep and see how far they were away from her. A second after she bent her head, a piece of lead fired by an unseen third man she was unaware of exploded on the pillar exactly where she had moved her head from. The force of the contact sent fragments of concrete splashing all over stringing her on the head like a swam of bees. She screamed and fell and as she did so, her fall took her out of harms way as two shots that would have ripped her chest open hit the pillar almost simultaneously. She got on her feet in a second and dashed across the street. The sniper might not have seen where she ran to because he fired no more shots. Still stunned by the close shave she tried to get her mind to think, looking further down the street she saw the lights in a first floor apartment on and a sigh that said “open”. She made for the building, when she entered the staircase, she wanted a few seconds to see if she had been seen. She almost fell off her skin when she saw her two original pursuers joined by a third man, and the trio were walking towards the building she had entered. She did not know if she had been seen. She dashed through the double door below the RA-CONSULTANCY sign. The office was empty but it had sign of life. She opened a door marked “private” and saw a door on one side of the passage and two on the other. One the side that had two doors she saw the sign “managing partner” posted on the door. She quickly walked over and opened it, inside she saw a man that sat behind the only table, obviously the managing partner. He had both his legs on the table with the soles pointed directly at her. They were Italian shoes, she could tell. He had a bottle of brandy in his hand, she was disappointed but this was not the time to get choosy. On the table, close where the legs were she saw a name plate.