CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
THURSDAY, 4:35 A.M. EST
Sunday couldn’t sleep. So he’d surrendered to his insomnia, showered, dressed, and trudged back into the office. He’d always had difficulty sleeping through the night. He wanted to count sheep, but his mind had other ideas, churning over whatever problem he was trying to solve. It had been this way as a child in southern California, as a graduate student in Wisconsin, and especially as an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. The trouble of work consuming all his mental space had only worsened after he joined Purple Cell.
Jessica Ryker was now somewhere in Russia. She’d been off-line and unreachable for the past—he checked the time—forty-five hours. That wasn’t unusual. That was part of their business. Part of the deal. The MO for Purple Cell was usually the same: accept an impossible puzzle, dig deep until you solved it, and . . . then wait.
Sunday didn’t know when Jessica would resurface. Maybe it was the lack of sleep or the stress or the nagging knowledge that it could all end without warning. But he couldn’t help but wonder, sitting alone in a dark cubicle on the third floor of the old CIA headquarters building, if this was precisely how Purple Cell might end. Would Jessica Ryker just . . . not come back one day? Would everything she’d done, everything they’d done together, just finish . . . with a long silence?
Just do your part. His mind returned to digging. Not the statistical analysis of attacks on oil facilities that he was doing for Purple Cell. He’d hit a dead end with that. He’d found a correlation in the data but no story, no evidence, to back it up. A statistical anomaly, he decided. Too small a sample size. Or just bad luck. So instead Sunday had concentrated on another project at the request of Jessica’s husband, to comb through intelligence on Judge Bola Akinola.
It wasn’t the first time Sunday had pulled an all-nighter working on a problem for Judd Ryker. Jessica had never said so explicitly, but Sunday knew she would have wanted him to help Judd. And this time Sunday felt a strong desire to get it right. Because he wanted to help Judd Ryker. Because it was Nigeria, the land of his parents. Because of his cousins back in Kano and Zamfara. Working on Nigeria was, he admitted, a guilty pleasure.
But investigating Bola Akinola also made him queasy. The judge was a hero in many ways. A brave hunter trying to kill the beasts of corruption in a country where beasts were everywhere. At great personal risk, Bola Akinola had taken on some of the most crooked politicians, the most notorious criminals in the country. He was staring into the eyes of the monsters and not blinking.
But now Sunday had doubts. There were always accusations against prominent people, of secret bank accounts, of petty vices, of the eventual victory of hidden weaknesses that exist deep in the souls of all men and women. Sunday had thought Akinola was an exception, that he could resist the urges of normal men. But there it was, in the British press in black-and-white: Judge Bola Akinola, chairman of the Nigerian Crime and Corruption Task Force, had failed to accurately account on his asset disclosures for luxury properties held in Monaco, London’s posh Mayfair neighborhood, and a villa in the Cayman Islands.
Sunday hoped the story was a false plant. Mere propaganda that slipped through the usual journalism filter. The British papers, keen to scoop their competitors and prone to believe the worst about subjects from one of their former colonies, were especially loose with such accusations. And once one paper had the story, surely more would come.
Had Judge Bola Akinola become dirty? Sunday wanted to know the truth. For Judd Ryker. And for himself.
Sunday finished reading through all the open-source reporting on Akinola. Diplomatic cables from Abuja and Lagos hadn’t provided any new insights, either. He was about to pull up top secret signals intelligence to seek out any potential clues, when his office phone rang.
Sunday glanced at the clock. Four thirty-eight a.m.? Who’s calling me at this hour? The incoming ID was a jumble of numbers he didn’t recognize.
“Aaay?” he said hesitantly.
“There you are,” Jessica said with a huff. “I’ve been trying to get you on your cell.”
“My phone’s in the glove box of my car in the parking lot.”
“Couldn’t sleep again?” she asked, softening her tone.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “Are you safe?”
“I’m fine. I can’t say where. I’m on a burner phone that I’ll flush right after I hang up.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I need your help. I’ve got something urgent.”
Sunday looked at his computer screen listing news articles about Bola Akinola with a slight pang of guilt. Was he being dutiful by surreptitiously helping her husband? Or disloyal?
“Go,” he said, wondering how he had wound up, again, stuck in the middle of the two Rykers.
“Target acquired,” Jessica said. “I need everything you can find on him.”
“Roger that. What’s the name, ma’am?”
“It’s a judge in Nigeria supposedly working with someone in the U.S. government,” she said. “We’ve got to find out what we can about the judge and a way to warn the Americans without blowing my cover.”
Sunday’s stomach jumped into his throat. “No,” he blurted.
“No what?”
“Don’t tell me the target is Bola Akinola.”
“How do you know?”
“Ma’am”—Sunday paused to swallow—“I’m already investigating him. That’s why I’m in the office.”
“How’s that possible? How do you know my target?”
Sunday closed his eyes. “I was helping a friend. On another problem.”
“What friend?” Jessica snapped.
“On what I thought was another problem.”
“Who is it, Sunday? Who’s been asking you about Bola Akinola? Tell me right fucking now.”