Oware Mosaic Read online

  “Yeah, I know. That’s what caught me so off guard.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, looking at me like she didn’t believe me.

  “These Unos are custom made, right? Is this where you got the bikes?”

  “Nope.”

  “Liar.”

  “Well, you’re not as dumb as you look.”

  “I was about to say the same thing to you.”

  We both walked out of the garage, giggling. Lamp whistled and the door clanked back down and closed. My heart was pounding, and I stuck my hand in my jeans, feeling for my panic pills. I didn’t need them, but it felt good knowing they were near.

  I hope those idiots cleaned the car outright. All I need is for them to find some blood under the tire well or something and we’re in deep trouble.

  “You know where we’re going?” Lamp asked.

  “Um, yeah. I think. Just over a block on the other side of the street, right?”

  “Affirmative.”

  When we got to the witness’ house, an older white man, in his early fifties, was sitting on a bench in front of his house smoking a cigar. The tip of it, burned ash-orange. There were trees all around his house, and a lamp post standing at the edge of his property made his face look ghoulish.

  An aye-aye sat on his shoulder asleep. It looked like it was somewhere in between a hybrid of a cat or a bat. Like a pug dog, it was as cute as it was ugly, if that makes any sense. One of its ears stood up when we approached but otherwise, it was either too old or too sleepy to pay us any mind.

  “Are you Thomas Benja?” Lamp asked.

  He raised his head, looked at us, and took a puff of his cigar. “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m DCI Lamp, and this is Dr. Xo.”

  He squinted like the smoke burned his eyes when Lamp said the word doctor. “Doctor? Kids these days are passing all the tests in their neural schools without getting a day of real experience. Back in my day, they had to really work in a hospital in a residency to be called a doctor.” He blew out a puff of smoke. “Hmph. What are you? Barely out of your training bra? Sixteen-Seventeen.”

  “I’m almost eighteen,” I said.

  He laughed, and coughed, the sound was filled with phlegm. “Same difference. Now, what do you want?”

  “We understand you have a daughter named Frankie,” Lamp said.

  “What’s this about?”

  “Are you Frankie’s father?”

  “Yeah, I am. What of it?”

  “We just want to follow up on a case,” I said.

  He threw down his cigar and crushed it with his foot. “Not that mess about the dead body police found at the rundown water plant, yesterday. Frankie reported it, as soon as she got out of there. They made her go over it, again and again. Do you people ever stop harassing innocent folk?”

  “Is she here?” Lamp asked.

  “No, she’s out with her little skateboard dyke friends.”

  “Do you know who she spoke to?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember their names, but they were some cocky sonsofbitches. I think one of them was a major. The other one looked like he couldn’t catch a thief if it stole the pants right off his legs.”

  I shook my head, in utter disbelief, and traded glances with Lamp.

  A woman stuck her head out of the window. “Who in the devil are you talking to this time of night, dear? Thomas, everything okay?”

  “Fine, Meredith. Go back to watching your American game shows on your corneal stream.”

  “Your food is getting cold,” she said. “I know I didn’t slave over this old-ass stove so you can let it go to waste!”

  “I told you I’ll eat when I’m ready! Now leave me alone, woman!”

  “Well, hurry up! A news alert is saying that people should stay indoors, that the IGP has just called for a mandatory curfew, plus, I want you to rub my feet!”

  “I’ll be inside in a minute.”

  “Well, come on, then! My feet hurt!”

  He turned to us. “Interview’s over folks. Go harass someone else for a change.”

  “Can you tell us where we can find Frankie?” I asked. “It’s really important.”

  Lamp said, “And it may help us to finally solve this case and give closure to the parents of the girl who died.”

  He sighed and took out another cigar. “Is that right?” Patting his pocket, he reached in and pulled out a cigar cutter. While he clipped off the end of his cigar, he said, “To be honest, I don’t think she’s with those ruffian friends of hers. I think she went to meet her friend, Jinni.”

  That buckled Lamp and I caught her before she fell to the ground.

  “Whoa, there, Missy,” Thomas said. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Sometimes the heat makes me lightheaded when I don’t drink enough water.”

  She stood up straight and wiped her hand down over her lips. “Go on. You were saying.”

  “All’s I was saying was that Frankie seemed mighty upset after seeing the dead girl, and I know that whenever my daughter got real uptight, her friend would always calm her down.”

  “You two adopted her?” I asked.

  “What kind of fool question is that? Of course we did! Can’t you tell?”

  “How long ago was that? That you adopted her?” Lamp asked.

  He started getting flustered. “I—I don’t know. One day, about three years ago!”

  “When Frankie was ten?” I asked.

  “Yes, Meredith found her walking down the road late at night, nearly naked and bruised so bad we knew she’s somehow found a way to escape from one of them filthy trafficking rings—wait-a-second, Frankie’s calling me, now.”

  He started speaking to her, while Lamp and I backed off, and let our eyes roam around the place.

  “Hey,” I said. “Can you hack the computers in this house to see what’s on their drives?”

  “No, but I know who can.”

  “Who?”

  “The Old Man. He is one of the best hackers in Ghana.”

  “Am I ever going to meet this mystery person?”

  She shrugged. “I’m sending him a neuro-text and asking him now if he can gain access to—whoa, that was quick.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He needed a physical address to find the IP address for the computer, and… There. I just sent it to him.”

  “Okay, he just neuro-messaged me, too. How’d he get my ID number?

  “I gave it to him.”

  “You what?”

  “Relax, sister. You can trust him.”

  “Yeah, well. He said that in order to compromise their computer, he’ll need to find an exploit that has any vulnerabilities he can hack into.”

  “Yeah, he messaged me that, too,” Lamp said.

  “Maybe we can find an email or social networking account that can give us more background,” I said.

  “Well, I can tell you this,” the Old Man neuro-texted us.

  I asked messaged back, “What?”

  The Old Man messaged, “The owner of one of the computers has a Metasploit Framework, a Nmap, network mapper, a Nessus vulnerability scanner, and Maltego. Girls these are hardcore hacker software.”

  “Hey, Old Man,” Lamp messaged him. “We gotta go!”

  Lamp and I went back over to Thomas.

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  “Why wouldn't it be?” he said. After a breath, he offered, “Frankie never spoke about what happened. And we could never bring ourselves to ask her, but it didn’t matter. Meredith brought her home, fed and bathed her, and the next morning went out and bought her some things from the market, clothes, toys and that stupid skateboard. That’s all I can tell you. Now, if you’re done wasting my time, I’d like to go inside my house, now.”

  I nodded and extended my arm to shake his hand. “Thank you, sir.”

  He fumbled in his shirt for his lighter and acted like he didn’t see my hand. The aye-aye yawned when he stood
and crawled down from his shoulder onto the bench. “Come on, Jubie,” he said. “We’re going inside.”

  Retracting my hand, I said, “Cute pet.”

  He spoke over my words. “Why don’t you put an end to child slavery at Lake Volta?” he asked, walking toward his front door. “That’s all them low life thugs in the underground city do is traffic kids from all over Africa, just so they can profit off of them kids. That’s why we don’t give ’em a dime of our hard-earned pension. I’d rather live in this dump than rub shoulders with people who turn their backs on their own.”

  “Sir,” Lamp said, making him stop and turn around. “I sent my ID number to your registered neuro-mailbox, please give me a call if you can think of anything else that would help.”

  “Not gonna happen,” he said, and slammed the door behind him.

  The shades on his window rattled and we heard Meredith rip a hole in him for not fixing the stove, yet.

  My corneal stream flashed alerting me of an incoming call.

  I recognized the number and answered. “Kofi, what’s up?” I said.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Um, I’m out having drinks with Lamp. I mean Samora. You know? The whole being there for someone when they grieve.”

  “Get home, now!” he said.

  “No! Dude, I just told you I’m out with Samora.”

  “For once, do as I say! Auntie Yajna’s still at work. I have the twins and we’re safe, but there’s a—”

  The temporal transmission ended.

  “What the?” I said, and glanced over to Lamp.

  Her eyes were welling up, her lips twitched, and she let out a weak smile. A tear rolled down her cheek.

  “Oh, damn. I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “It wasn’t you; it was how he thinks Frankie is with my sister, now,” she said, and sniffed. “What’s going on?”

  “I—I don’t know. We got disconnected. Let me call him back.”

  10

  01010100 01100001 01110100 01110101

  With a mere thought, my neural implant dialed up Kofi’s temporal transmitter, or rather his mind-phone, but he didn’t answer.

  “He’s not answering?” Lamp asked.

  “No, the jerk is ignoring me.”

  “Something’s wrong. Did you hear Meredith say something about a mandatory curfew?”

  “Yeah, let’s get back to the bikes.”

  We walked off of Thomas’ property onto the wide dirt road. A middle-aged woman, cradling a child bumped into me. The young boy in her arms seemed comatose. His eyes stared forward like he was in a zombie-like stupor. I tripped over her heel, but she didn’t slow one bit, just kept going without a hitch.

  “Hey,” Lamp said, calling her. “What’s happening?”

  I tapped Lamp on her arm while looking down the street toward the village market area. “Hey,” I said. “Check this out.”

  Humans and enhumans alike, poured through the streets in rivers of fear. Most of the roads outside of Accra were dirt tracks, so their feet clouded the air with dust and chaos. There were people running in every direction, pushing and knocking others down. A woman convulsed on the ground, gagging while being trampled.

  “Hey,” I said. “Don’t trample that lady!”

  A man ran by us, and Lamp grabbed his arm. His eyes were like blood moons under the shining street lamp.

  “What is this?” she asked, but he tore out of her grasp, and dashed off.

  People ran over the woman on the ground like a frightened herd of antelopes. Her hands were cranberry red like sobolo juice. Another woman stopped to help her but suddenly fell to her knees. The second woman hit the ground in jerky convulsions and rolled to the dirt road. In a wild smacking fit, she slapped her own head like she was trying to shoo wasps away.

  “What’s wrong with everyone?” I said, desperate for anyone to respond.

  An old bearded man ran to the aid of both of the women, pushing people out of his way. But before he could get to her, released a guttural scream, and fell to the ground, holding his head. Stumbling through the streets, Lamp and I found ourselves gravitating toward the old bearded man. In split-seconds, his ears leaked red fluid and his arms stiffened like he had suffered a stroke.

  I wanted to run over to them, to investigate what had happened to the man but thinking about the twins’ safety struck fear in my heart. Again, I put out a mind-call to Kofi.

  Nothing.

  Maybe he wasn’t ignoring me. Perhaps, someone had done something to jam our neural transmissions. I supposed something like that was possible but continued to hypothesize for any reason why the hysteria swirled around me in a whirlpool of madness.

  I stopped a thirty-something-year-old woman wearing beehive braids.

  “Hey!” I said. “What the hell is going on?”

  She swiped my hand away, and ran off, looking over her shoulder at me like I was the one who caused all of the craziness. Lamp and I traded looks. I scanned the area, looking for someone watching the chaos in delight.

  “Terrorist attack?” Lamp said.

  “There’s no one on the rooftops, nor peering through windows.”

  No one standing from afar to see his or her work in full display.

  A motorbike crashed into someone’s front door. The rider, a light-skinned boy with short braided hair, picked himself off of the ground just to get knocked to the ground again by a broad-shouldered man in a purple dashiki. The man kept going.

  “They’re holding their heads in a frantic rage like it's a migraine from hell,” Lamp said.

  “His hands are drenched in blood,” I said, and bent down to see if the woman was still alive. She wasn’t. “The leakage is coming from their ears.”

  The braided-hair boy cursed at the man who fled from him and ran into the house, shutting the door he’d damaged in his wake. A tall lanky teenage boy staggered past us. His eyes were also like dead moons.

  “He’s foaming at the mouth,” Lamp said.

  The disoriented teenager faltered like he’d lost a considerable amount of motor function, or perhaps he’d been born that way. He had a limp and held one of his arms bent like it had been fractured. Still, he managed to knock an elderly man’s food rations out of his hands when he passed him. The frail toothless man wailed so loud it sent a shiver through my body.

  “We have to do something,” I said.

  Lamp grabbed my arm and tugged me to follow her. “We need to get inside, away from this chaos.”

  I broke from her grasp and went over to the toothless man. I tried to collect his food among the shuffling feet, but it was like trying to grasp a ball being kicked around by footballers. I only recovered the toothless man’s carton of milk.

  I handed it to him and asked, “Do you know what’s going on?”

  The man seemed to have difficulty understanding me.

  “What is wrong with everyone?” I asked him, shaking him.

  He stared at me and his eyes widened. His head started to tremble, and his mouth pulled back into the grin of a man overcome with insanity. He fell on the ground and his body convulsed.

  “Omigod,” I said, and turned him on his side.

  Vomit leaked out of his mouth and he started gagging.

  I spread my arms out, trying to keep people from trampling us, and said, “Stay back! This man is having a seizure!”

  No one cared or bothered to listen to me. They were dealing with similar crises, themselves. The toothless man’s face twitched, but his eyes told me that he had traveled to a faraway place. Placing my hand on the man’s shoulder, I watched his eyes roll to the back of his head. He started making a jarring sound. I planned to stay with him until the seizure was over and he had calmed down, but within seconds, he was dead. There was also leakage of fluid and blood trickling from his ears, and that confused me. The symptoms were all starting to show themselves: sudden neurological impairment, muscle weakness, seizures. But the blood leakage? That stumped me. I
t didn’t add up with the other complications. It could have been a number of diagnoses, botulism, some deadly toxin, but the question I had was not what, but how? Nothing could be determined without a tox report. I needed to do an autopsy of this man to find out. But at the moment, that seemed ludicrous because it dawned on me that if they had contracted type of pathogen, there was a high probability that we had it, too.

  A white van rolled a few meters beside us, and came to an abrupt stop, making dust rise in the air. On the side of the van was an image of green hands, palms facing upward. Just above that image was a moss-colored map of Africa. The words AFRICA CDC was printed next to the image of our continent.

  I turned to say something to Lamp, but she was gone. Epidemic Intelligence Service officers exited the vehicle with a sense of urgency. They wore blue HAZMAT suits. They each had yellow self-containing breathing apparatus equipment on their backs. Two more vans rolled up, and more EIS personnel got out. Those health workers wore white decontamination suits and SCBA’s were also on their backs to ensure their air quality was self-contained.

  “We need you to come with us,” a voice said behind me.

  I turned around. It was Major Grunt.

  “Grunt, what the hell is going on?”

  “Feeni, put this on,” he said, and handed me a gas mask.

  There were five other GAF soldiers behind him, one of them was Lamp. Her eyes were different. She looked at me like she didn’t know who I was. They were all wearing gas masks and held rifles in their arms. They wore battle dress olive fatigues.

  I pushed the gas mask back toward him, and said, “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can,” he said. “Just pull it over your that big head of yours and snap the chinstrap into place.”

  “What’s the matter with Lamp? What did you do to her?”

  “She’s a Z3, which means during an emergency response, she only listens to the orders of the Head Dispatcher.”

  “Z3? I don’t understand.”

  “There’s no time to explain, Feeni. Now put the gas mask on! You, of all people, know you can trust me.”

  “Grunt, what is this? A terrorist attack?”

  “We can’t be sure, yet. We have orders to secure and quarantine the entire region until CDC gives us an all clear. That’s why I want you to get your butt back home with your brother and the twins.”