“Yes, actually he will. You might have to kill him, but we would prefer you didn’t. His name is Alex Cross.”
“I see. Alex Cross. Not smart to travel all the way to Africa just to die.”
“No,” said the white man. “Try to remember that yourself.”
Part Two
SIGN OF THE CROSS
Chapter 27
THE TIGER WAS an enigma in every way, a mystery no one had ever solved. Actually, there were no tigers in Africa, which was how he got his nickname. He was like no other, one of a kind, superior to all the other animals, especially humans.
Before he went to school in England, the Tiger had lived in France for a couple of years, and he had learned French and English. He discovered he had a gift for languages, and he could remember almost everything he learned or read. His first summer in France, he’d sold mechanical birds to children in the parking areas outside the palace at Versailles. He’d learned a valuable lesson there: to hate the white man, and especially white families.
This day he had a mission in a city he didn’t much like because the foreigner had left too much of a mark here. The city was Port Harcourt in the Delta region of Nigeria, where most of the oil wells were located.
The game was on. He had another bounty to collect.
A black Mercedes was speeding up a steep hill toward the wealthy foreigners’ part of the city—and straight toward the Tiger as well.
As always, he waited patiently for his prey.
Then he wandered out into the street like some poor drunkard on a binge. The Mercedes would either have to stop very quickly or strike him head-on.
Probably because he was so large and might dent the car, at the last possible moment, the chauffeur applied the brakes.
The Tiger could see the liveried black scum cursing him from behind the spotlessly clean windshield. So he raised his pistol fast and shot the driver and a bodyguard through the glass.
His boys, wild, were already at both rear doors of the limousine, breaking the side windows with crowbars.
Then they threw open the doors and pulled out the screaming white schoolchildren, a boy and a girl in their early teens.
“Don’t harm them, I have other plans!” he yelled.
An hour later, he had the boy and girl inside a shack on a deserted farm outside the city. They were dead now, unrecognizable even if they were found eventually. He had boiled them in a pot of oil. His employer had ordered this manner of death, which happened to be common in Sudan. The Tiger had no problem with it.
Finally, he pulled out his cell phone and called a number in town. When the phone was picked up on the other end, he didn’t allow the American parents to speak.
Nor would he ever talk to the local police, or to the private contractor who worked for the oil company and was supposed to protect them from harm.
“You want to see young Adam and Chloe again, you do exactly as I say. First of all, I don’t want to hear a word from you. Not a word.”
One of the cops spoke, of course, and he hung up on him. He would call back later, and have his money by the end of the day. It was easy work, and Adam and Chloe reminded him of the obnoxious and greedy white children who used to buy his mechanical birds at Versailles.
He felt no regret for them, nothing at all. It was just business to him.
Just another large bounty to collect.
And just the start of things to come.
Chapter 28
I WAS DETERMINED to follow the psycho killer and his gang wherever it took me, but I could see this wasn’t going to be easy. Quite the opposite.
“You took my passport? Did I get that right?” I asked Nana. “You actually stole my passport?”
She ignored the questions and set a plate of scrambled eggs in front of me. Overdone and no toast, I noticed. So this was war.