Gabby stared at the ringing cell phone that sat on the kitchen table beside her while the yellow center of her egg oozed across the plate onto a slice of half-burnt toast. Any appetite she’d managed to recover vanished.
“Gabby, what are you doing?” Sabrina entered the room from the kitchen with a cup of coffee and reached for the offending object. “Your phone’s ringing.”
“Don’t answer it.”
“You have to—”
Gabby knocked the phone from Sabrina’s hands and watched it slam onto the tile floor. The persistent ringing stopped. “I said don’t answer it.”
“Hey.” Sabrina pushed aside the pile of Bride magazines cluttering the table for her and Michael’s Valentine’s Day wedding in order to set her coffee mug down, then slid into the seat beside her. “What in the world’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Look at yourself. You can’t sleep, and you’re not eating.” She picked up her fork, then dropped it back onto the plate. “You’ve been a wreck ever since you returned from Africa.”
Gabby pressed her fingertips against her face. She’d tried to sleep, but how could she sleep when her dreams were haunted with images she couldn’t forget.
Sabrina took a sip of her coffee. “I thought we were best friends. Tell me what’s going on.”
Rising, Gabby stalked into the kitchen with her uneaten food and dumped the cold eggs down the garbage disposal. Sabrina would pester her until she told her, and she didn’t have the energy to fight. “I’ve received some threatening phone calls and e-mails the past couple of days.”
Just like her father.
Sabrina followed Gabby back into the dining room, where she sank back into the padded chair. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
“Because you’d worry—like my mother worries—and try to convince me not to have my series printed.”
“An article isn’t worth your life.”
Gabby waved the notion away. “You don’t understand.”
“What happened over there?”
Gabby flipped through the pages of one of the magazines, wondering how different her life would be today if she’d opted to cover wedding trends. “Apparently someone didn’t like all the questions I was asking.”
“Do you know who’s behind the threats?”
Gabby shrugged, wishing the answer wasn’t so elusive. “I talked to at least a dozen investors from Lusaka to Bogama to Dar es Salaam. There were some who seemed to legitimately want to help the people working for them, and others who were obviously exploiting their workers and pocketing all the profit. All it would take is one who didn’t like what I wrote about them.”
“Apparently you found that one.”
“That’s not all.” She toyed with the rounded handle of her half-empty coffee cup. “The last night we were in Bogama, I was involved in an … incident.”
“An incident?”
Gabby sat back and folded her arms across her chest. She could still hear it all—the shouts, the glass, the gunshots … “We stopped at a red light. A gunshot shattered the driver’s window, and a half dozen men surrounded the car and dragged the driver out onto the street.”
“Oh, Gabby …”
“The men were scrambling to get into the car when another shot was fired,” she continued. “Apparently our driver had a weapon they hadn’t counted on. In the confusion, my translator, Adam, managed to scoot into the driver’s seat and drive away. It all happened so fast …”
“What happened to the driver?”
“We found out later he was taken to the hospital with several broken bones and a concussion, but he lived.”
“He’s lucky.”
“We all were.” Gabby shoved back a strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead. “But I can’t live in fear. My father didn’t.”
“No, he didn’t, but that doesn’t mean you can take chances with your life.”
Gabby glanced up and caught Sabrina’s gaze. “So I live in fear and never go out until … when? I can’t even trace this guy.”
“Isn’t that what you’re doing now? Living in fear?”
Gabby pressed her lips together. She’d spend the past twenty-four hours trying to figure out where to go with this. Holing up in her house wasn’t the direction she wanted to take.
Sabrina reached out and squeezed her hand. “Maybe the truth in this case isn’t worth your life.”
This was the conversation she’d wanted to avoid. “I’m not the first journalist who’s believed they’re onto something that’s worth the risk of exposing. Look at Don Bolles, Ivo Pukanic, Anna Politkovskaya—”
“And your father?”
Gabby slumped against the back of the chair and shut her eyes. She could still read the headlines as if it were yesterday. “Freelance journalist murdered for his hard-hitting commentary that angered corrupt officials…”
She opened her eyes and caught her friend’s worried gaze. “This isn’t about my father—”
“This has everything to do with your father. Everything to do with your trying to finish what he wasn’t able to do.”
Gabby slammed her fists against the table, rattling the remaining dishes. “Did you even read what I wrote? Businesses, foreign investors, and even governments are coming into these small, unknown countries promising schools and roads and hospitals, but in exchange they’re stripping them of their natural resources and exploiting their people. Working conditions are deplorable, children are dying because of the lack of safety regulations—”
“I read your article and saw in it the compassion you have for those people, but it’s not worth your life.”
“But you didn’t see what I saw.” Gabby choked back the tears. “Children, some of them only three or four years old, caked in mud from riverbeds, were working in narrow tunnels mining coltan for cell phones. Others I found sifting through sand for gems inside homemade mineshafts. These children are dying from dynamite accidents and floods and …” She pressed her fingers against her pounding temples. “I can’t get them out of my head. I see them at night when I close my eyes, and they’re still there in the morning when I wake up. They need a voice—”
“And you can’t be their voice if you’re dead.”
Her cell phone started ringing again from beneath the kitchen table. Her hand trembled and knocked over the coffee mug in front of her. Lukewarm liquid ran off the edge of the table and splattered onto the floor. She grabbed for a napkin and stopped the thread of coffee snaking its way toward the stack of magazines.
“This has gone too far.” Sabrina picked up the phone and answered the call. “I don’t know who you are, but—”
She stopped mid-sentence.
“Excuse me?” Sabrina’s face paled. She listened to the response then handed Gabby the phone. “I think you ought to take this. It’s someone from Interpol.”