Secrets by Jane A. Adams Page B

hundred miles away, Bud was channel surfing. There was a nag at the back of his brain that wasn’t usually there once he’d finished a job. Something about this one refused to let go. Bud wasn’t in the business of having a conscience about his actions, so he knew that the nag had nothing to do with that. It was more, he recognized, that the whole project felt unfinished; unresolved, which seeing as he wasn’t usually in the business of bothering about what happened after he’d been paid, was an equally strange sensation for him to be indulging in.
    He’d caught something on one of the rolling news channels earlier and that had got him thinking too. It was only a vague hint of a report, not repeated in the next bulletin, but there’d be an item about a warehouse being broken into and a security guard badly injured, and then that small scrap of information; that an ambulance had been called out to the scene a half-hour earlier in response to some incident with a van. The report implied that this had, maybe, been a simple RTA, and the reporter had clearly not been told if the two incidents were related. The van had been missing from the next bulletin, had scant mention in the third, but Bud had been watching closely by then, looking behind the cordon as the reporter spoke to camera, and he had caught just a glimpse of the van and it had confirmed his suspicion. It was the van he had briefly driven in with Ryan the afternoon before.
    The niggle left the back of his brain and came and perched on his shoulder. So, what’s this really all about, the niggle said.
    â€˜It’s about none of my business,’ Bud told it, but a few minutes later he was down in reception, checking out and telling the curious receptionist that he’d had a call from his wife and needed to head for home.
    Since leaving Ryan, Bud had changed cars twice, an hour later and he’d changed his ride yet again, and was heading further north and east, and the niggle had now grown into a fully fledged nag, that sat beside him in the passenger seat and told him to keep driving and not to stop.

TWELVE
    A nywhere but the Congo in 1961 and the meeting Adam had just left would most likely have been impossible. Adis Ngouba, French schooled but British trained, aide to the embryonic Ministry of Trade. Duane Emerson, an American technician, doing his best to put his government’s case. Piotre Vasse, a Ukrainian engineer, who spoke English as if it were a language worth strangling. Edward Chambers, some kind of attaché with the British mission, who had flown in three days before, with his young bride, Molly, in tow. And Adam himself, another Brit, his specialty communications and electronics.
    The four men had met a dozen times in the past three weeks, then Edward joining the conversation late, but coming quickly up to speed. Twelve meetings, suffused with a heady mix of political manoeuvring and technical discussion. And an awareness that the country stood on the brink of civil war and that all the talk and planning could well come to nothing.
    Today Adam was glad to get free of the meeting. The conference room of the Leopold Hotel, the only neutral ground all five men and their backers could agree upon was stiflingly hot. Ceiling fans did their best to revive the stale air and all the windows had been thrown open, doing little to alleviate the heat, just letting in the noise and dust of the street below.
    Adam forced himself to remember how important these meetings were. The future of the entire country was being decided by men like him in rooms like this. Mostly the excitement of being in on the ground floor was enough to keep him going, but today, it wasn’t working for him.
    He was hot and tired and sick of cloudless skies.
    Out in the street, traders were shutting up shop and clearing their goods off the streets.
    There will be rain, they told him. Get inside.
    Looking up at the polished blue of the sky, Adam