Kin was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall when his phone buzzed.
He looked at the screen. Lina. He hadn't expected the call as it had been a while since they last talked a few days ago. He picked it up and walked to the far corner of the room and answered.
"Kin."
"Lina."
"You sound tired."
"I am tired."
"You always say that." She was quiet for a moment. "I saw the news. They are still investigating. The apartment is gone, Kin. Both of them. Mine and yours. They took everything out and sealed the doors. The building manager called me yesterday. He said the commission has taken the whole floor my whole apartment is gone ."
Kin closed his eyes.
"I am sorry," he said.
"It is not your fault."
"It is."
"Kin." Her voice changed. It got softer, then harder. "When you come back, we are going to get our things. I do not care how. I do not care what it takes. We are going to walk into that building and take back what belongs to us. You can do that, can't you? You can plan a heist?"
He almost laughed.
"I can plan a heist," he said.
"Good." A pause. "Come home."
"Soon."
"I love you."
"I will come home as soon as possible."
She hung up. Kin stood in the corner with the phone in his hand for a long moment and then put it in his pocket and walked back to the table.
***
The interrogation room had not changed since the night before.
The same steel chair in the middle of the floor. The same drain in the corner. The same thick walls that had been built to hold sound and had done their job twice now, once with the pager and once with the gun. The general sat in the chair with his wrists and ankles strapped, and his head hung forward, and his eyes were open and looking at nothing. He had been like that since the slap. He came up out of it for a minute or two at a time and went back down, and Odile had told the guards not to give him water until he asked for it by name.
Kin stood against the wall by the door. Selah stood on the other side. Odile sat at the small table with the folder open in front of her and a pen in her hand that she still had not used.
Nia walked in again at seven and looked down at the general in the chair.
"He looks smaller than I thought," she said.
"He is small," Odile said.
"He looks smaller than that."
Odile closed the folder and stood.
"Take his clothes," she said.
***
The two medical crew who had been standing outside the door came in and did it quickly.
They unbuttoned the robe and slid it off the shoulders. They worked the trousers down past the knees and pulled the boots off one at a time. The general sat in his undershirt and his shorts and did not move and did not look at anyone. The bruise under his eye had gone a colour that was almost green. The bandage on his hand was the only thing on him that had been put there recently, and it had been put there by the same people who were now taking his clothes.
They folded the uniform and set it on the table and stepped back.
Nia picked up the jacket and held it against herself. It fitted. It fitted better than Kin had expected, because the general was a small man and Nia was a small woman and the difference between them was less than a hand's width across the shoulders.
She looked at Odile.
"The face," she said.
Odile opened the second case.
***
The face took twelve minutes.
When it was done, Kin looked at the chair and then at the woman standing beside it, and for a second he could not tell which one was which.
The general sat with his head hanging forward in his undershirt. Nia stood beside him in his uniform with his face on. Grey at the temples. The same set of the jaw. The same line between the brows. The same slight downturn at the left corner of the mouth. She was the general the way the general was the general, and it was wrong to see it on a woman, and it was right, and Kin stood by the door and did not move.
Then he noticed the bruises.
They were on her wrists and her forearms, yellow and green where the medical crew had healed the breaks but left the marks of the healing. There was a thin line of red at the base of her thumb. There was a scab under her left ear that she must have picked at. She was not a clean general. She was a general who had been handled roughly for a night and had not slept well, which was exactly what the men at the gate would expect to see.
Nia pulled the jacket straight and looked down at herself, and something in her face changed as she did it. She buttoned the last button and rolled her shoulders and the general's voice came out of her mouth, low and measured and dry.
"It fits," she said. "I thought it would hang off me." She turned to Odile. "Why does it fit."
Odile looked at her over the top of the folder and said nothing.
Nia looked down at her own chest and then back up, and the general's face went through something that a general's face should never do.
"I have no boobs," she said. "That is probably why it fits so well."
Kin smiled and looked away.
She caught him doing it and leaned over the table with the general's face on. "If I had them, Kin would have given me a perverse look like the one he gave Selah."
She giggled. It came out in the general's voice and it was horrible. Selah turned her head and looked at Kin with an expression that was not quite an expression at all. Nia saw her do it and changed the subject immediately, which was the only sensible thing to do.
***
The door opened at eight, and Kin was moving before he had decided to move.
The katana came off his back and into his hand in one motion, and he put himself between the doorway and the general in the chair, and his weight settled onto the balls of his feet, and everything in the room went still. He had not heard a signal from the corridor. He had not heard the medical crew. The door had simply opened, and a man had come through it, and two more men had come through behind him, and Kin's whole body had decided in the space of half a second that this was the end of the plan and the beginning of something worse.
"Kin." Odile's voice, flat and quick. "Stand down. They were called."
Kin did not lower the blade.
"They were called," Odile said again. "I sent for them an hour ago. Put the sword away."
Kin looked at them.
It was the grey man from the woods. The one who had held a rifle on Kin and then put it down he was accompanied by two others who he had beaten up the previous night.
Kin lowered the katana.
"You should knock," he said.
The grey man lowered his hands.
"I will remember that," he said.
***
He walked to the table and looked down at the plan.
Odile had laid it out while they waited. Three sheets joined with tape. The stadium on the top. The route on the middle. The residence on the bottom, with the warlord's suite marked in a neat square.
"This is what you want us to do," the grey man said.
"This is what we are proposing," Odile said.
"Say it."
***
She said it.
The rebels would take Nia to the gate at noon. Not the real general. The general was here, in the chair, and would stay here until the operation was over. The rebels would take Nia, dressed in the general's clothes with the general's face on, and they would present her at the gate as the man they had captured the night before. They would say they were the ones who had taken him from the compound. They would say they had him alive and unharmed and were willing to return him for a price.
They would be taken into the guardhouse to negotiate. But Nia would stay outside heavily guarded. They would name a number high enough to be serious and low enough to be paid. They would refuse to hand the general over until the money was counted. They would stall.
While they stalled, the men at the gate would be looking at Nia. They would see the general's face. They would see the general's uniform. They would see the bruises on her wrists and the scab under her ear and the way she stood like a man who had been handled roughly for a night. They would believe. And believing, they would take her in.
She would be inside the compound with the general's authority and the general's face and the general's access. The men would not question her. The men would not look twice at her. She would walk through the residential building as if she had lived there for twenty years.
And while she was inside, she would have the general's men talk to the warlord. She would tell them she was unwell, after being attacked and would want him to come see him. The men would carry the message. The warlord would come. He would come to visit the general who had just been rescued from kidnappers, because that is what a puppet does when his handler calls. And while he was in the room with her, while the two of them were alone and the guards were outside and the compound was quiet, she would have her chance.
If she took it, the mission was over.
If she did not, the mission was not over. The rebels would still be at the gate. The veterans would still be on the eastern road. The compound would still be full of men who had been told the general was back and would not be expecting anything else.
That was the second stage. If Nia could not kill the warlord herself, she would delay. She would keep him in the room. She would keep him talking. She would give the veterans time to move, and the rebels time to move, and Kin time to move. Together they would infiltrate the compound while the warlord was still inside it, and they would inflict damage on him in the line of fire. They would not need to be quiet. They would not need to be clean. They would need to be fast, and they would need to be many, and they would be both.
The forest would be rigged.
That was the third stage. While the rebels negotiated at the gate, a second team would be in the trees behind them, laying charges along the track and the ridge and the three paths that led down toward the village. If the army decided to follow the rebels after the ransom was paid, they would follow them into the trees, and the trees would come down on top of them. It would not stop a full pursuit. It would buy time. Time was the only thing anyone in this room could buy.
***
Kin raised the question of the rebels.
"You are asking them to be blamed," he said. "You are asking them to stand at the gate where every camera in the city is pointing and then run into the woods where every soldier in the district will follow them. The story the newspapers tell tomorrow will be about them. The warlord will spend the next six months hunting them, assuming this mission is not a success . They have been hunted by him for six years already, and now you are asking them to be hunted one more time. And when it is over they will not be able to come home."
Odile looked at him for a long moment.
"What would you prefer," she said.
"I would prefer they were not blamed."
"Then the story becomes the general captured by unknown men. The warlord's people will spend the next six months looking for unknown men. Everyone in this building will be an unknown man. You will not be able to walk down a street in this country again."
"I know."
"Then you understand why I built it this way."
"I understand it. I do not like it."
Odile was quiet.
"I have a counter plan," she said. "It will fall into place two days from now. I have not told you about it because it depends on what happens tomorrow, and I did not want to burden you with it before we knew whether we would live to need it. But I can tell you now if you want to hear it."
"Tell me."
She told him.
Kin did not say anything for a long time.
"Then the rebels take the blame for tomorrow," he said.
"They take the blame for tomorrow," Odile said. "The rest of the story will be written later."
***
Lastly Kin asked about the veterans.
"Who are they," he said. "You keep saying the word and I do not know what you mean."
Odile set down her pen.
"They are retired soldiers," she said. "The men who served under Diallo before he became what he is. Men who were loyal to him and then watched him turn the army into his own private guard. When he started using the soldiers to clear villages and take land, some of them left. Some of them were dismissed. Some of them were jailed and then released and then left the country. There are twelve hundred of them within a day's drive of this city, and every one of them has a reason to want him dead."
"Why have they not done it before."
"Because they were waiting for someone to lead them. Because they are old and they have families and they did not want to die for nothing. Because it takes a certain kind of moment to make a man pick up a rifle again after he has put it down." She looked at him. "This is that moment. They know the speech is tomorrow. They know what the speech will do. They are not doing this for money and they are not doing this for you. They are doing this because they have been waiting eleven years for a chance to shoot at the man who took their army and turned it into a butcher's yard."
Kin looked at the plan.
"Twelve hundred men," he said.
"Twelve hundred men on the eastern road, waiting for a signal," Odile said. "If Nia fails, they move. If Nia succeeds, they go home , champions nevertheless."
***
The grey man had been standing at the table through all of it without saying a word.
He looked at the plan for a while. Then he looked at Nia, who was standing at the wall with the general's face on and the general's uniform on and a cup of tea in her hand, and who looked, from the side, exactly like the general.
"How did she do that," the grey man said.
"I do not know," Kin said.
"I have looked at her four times in the last hour and every time I have forgotten she is not him." He shook his head slowly. "I knew the man for eleven years. I sat across from him at a table once. I watched him sign a document that took my brother's land. If I had walked past her in the street this morning I would have crossed to the other side and kept my eyes down."
"That is the point."
"It is a very good point."
He turned to Kin and put out his hand.
Kin looked at it.
"There is a condition," the grey man said.
"Name it."
"When this is over, the general belongs to us."
Kin looked at him for a long moment. Behind him, on the chair, strapped and half-conscious, the general sat with his head hanging forward and did not hear any of it.
"After the mission is complete," Kin said. "When the warlord is dead and the speech has not happened. Not before."
"After the mission is complete," the grey man agreed. "When the warlord is dead and the speech has not happened. Then he is ours. We will not ask for money. We will not ask for land. We will ask for him."
Kin took his hand and shook it.
"Done."
***
The grey man left to brief his men.
Odile went with him to make sure the timing was written down correctly, and Selah went to check the vehicles, and the medical crew went back to their posts in the corridor. For a few minutes Kin was alone in the room with the general in the chair and Nia at the wall.
Nia walked over.
She still had the tea in her hand. She stood beside Kin and looked down at the plan on the table without saying anything.
"You are scared," Kin said.
"I am not."
"You are holding the cup too tight."
She looked down at her hand. The knuckles were white. She loosened her grip and set the cup on the table and did not say anything for a moment.
"I have never done anything like this," she said. "I run. That is what I do. I run and I do not get caught. Walking into a building as somebody else and having to stand still and let people look at me is not running. That is the opposite of running."
"You will be fine."
"You do not know that."
"No," Kin said. "But the alternative is that seventeen hundred people die tomorrow morning. And you are the only one who can walk through that door, their lives are in your hands."
Nia looked at him.
"That is a terrible thing to say to somebody who is scared," she said.
"I know."
She laughed, and it came out in the general's voice, and Kin flinched without meaning to.
"I will be fine," she said. "You do not need to worry about me. Worry about yourself. You are the one who is going to be sitting in a van outside waiting while thousands of men are waiting for a command to clear out any threats within a given radius."
"I know."
"And you are the one who is going to have to come in after me if I am late."
"I know."
"Then you should sit down and rest." She looked at him. "You have not slept in a while. It shows."
Kin looked at the general in the chair and then at the door and then at his own hands. His hand had healed in the night, the one the .50 had gone through. The fingers moved when he told them to. The bones had knitted wrong in one place and he could feel it, a small lump under the skin where the new bone had grown over the old, and he would have to break it again later to make it right.
"I will sleep when this is over," he said.
"That is what everyone says."
"It is what I mean."
Nia picked up her tea and went back to the wall.
***
By noon, everything was set.
The rebels were in the loading bay with Nia. The veterans were on the eastern road with the trucks under tarps. Selah had the vans ready in the yard. Odile had run the plan four times on paper and had found four things to change and had changed them.
The general sat in the chair in the interrogation room and did not know that any of it was happening. He had woken up an hour ago and had been sitting with his eyes open and his mouth closed ever since. He had not asked for water. He had not asked for anything.
Kin looked at him one last time.
Then he walked out of the room and closed the door and did not look back.