The Taste of Fear (A Suspense Action Thriller & Mystery Novel) Read online

  Good luck, God bless. M.

  Fitzgerald spent the next several hours going over the information he’d been sent. Then he booked the first flight leaving for Tanzania the following morning.

  CHAPTER 3

  Tuesday, December 24, 10:01 a.m.

  Arusha, Tanzania

  “When would you like me to pick you up?” asked the guide, a native of Zanzibar. He was small, bald, quick to smile, and dressed exactly how Scarlett thought a safari guide should dress. Khaki shorts, an olive vest with about twenty pockets on it, and a cotton twill bush hat. He’d met Scarlett and Sal at Kilimanjaro International Airport forty minutes ago before driving them to Arusha, the first and last stop of any size before they reached the lodge atop the volcanic caldera.

  “Come back in an hour,” Sal told him.

  Once the guide wheeled the big Land Rover away into traffic, Sal and Scarlett were immediately swarmed by a dozen men, each toting the cheapest safari package in town. They explained repeatedly that they were not interested. The street hawks were by degrees obstinate, indignant, but finally resigned.

  “Good God,” Sal said, straightening his blazer.

  “It’s what they do,” Scarlett said.

  “It’s barbaric.” He shaded his eyes with his hand against the morning sun. “There should be a supermarket somewhere nearby. I’ll get the supplies. Why don’t you browse around and meet back here in, say, thirty minutes?”

  Scarlett agreed and Sal left, waving off a new group of vultures that had descended upon him. Scarlett took a moment to get her bearings. She was standing at the base of a white-trimmed clock tower, surrounded by belching trucks, taxis, and an eclectic mix of locals and khaki-clad tourists. On the drive into the city the buildings had been rickety wooden things with tin roofs. Here, in the government district of the CBD, most were concrete, painted various shades of washed-out white, blue, yellow, and red. Almost all of them were plastered with gaudy, dated advertising.

  She started down what a street sign announced was Sokoine Road, storing the name away in case she got lost. She passed tailor shops filled with row after row of sewing machines and kiosks selling candies and phone cards. Women with perfect postures balanced fruit or baskets on their heads while men led their cattle and other livestock. Children played in the alleyways with toys fashioned out of string and empty bottles. She even spotted a couple native Masai warriors dressed in their checkered regalia and holding long spears. From somewhere in the distance came the toxic smell of burning garbage.

  All in all, Scarlett’s first impression of Arusha was that of a tourist-hungry frontier town—Africa’s twenty-first century equivalent of the Wild West. It was fascinating and exotic and a little intimidating all at the same time.

  On the next block she came to what appeared to be the central marketplace. A few hundred cages containing squawking chickens and roosters surrounded the entranceway. Beyond them, inside the tented structure, the maze of stalls was filled with everything imaginable. Sandals soled with tire tread grips, colorful cotton kangas, traditional medicines, vividly colored vegetables, you name it. Some people were sucking baobab seeds and tamarind-like sweets. Others offered to guide her around for a private tour, probably looking for a tip. She politely declined. If she started doling out money, she’d never leave the place in one piece.

  While she wandered up and down the aisles, merchants tried to lure her to their stalls with shouts of “Karibu!” and “Hello friend!”

  Scarlett waved, flashed the smile she usually reserved for the paparazzi, and felt irrationally guilty for not stopping at each.

  Once she did a big loop and was returning to the main entrance, she paused at a display selling beads, woodcarvings, and jewelry on which the outline of the African continent had been painted. She pantomimed a ring around her finger. “Rings?” she said, to clarify.

  The old woman behind the counter—she must have been sixty-five or seventy, well above the life expectancy in the country—nodded eagerly. She plucked from her wares not a ring but an ugly steel pendant with a black string attached to it. She cracked the thing in half and dropped it in Scarlett’s cupped hands. Scarlett was surprised to find it housed a tiny compass. She turned left, then right. The needle spun accordingly. The woman punched 3000 into a calculator, obviously Tanzanian shillings.

  “Do you take American money?” She pulled a ten from her wallet.

  The woman snatched the bill and tucked it away inside her clothing. She smiled at Scarlett, revealing a mouthful of crooked and broken teeth. Scarlett smiled back. Several seconds passed before it became apparent that no change was forthcoming. She had never been very good at bartering, but that exchange felt more like highway robbery. Still, the old woman was happy—which she should be. Ten dollars was likely ten days of wages for her.

  Scarlett left the market and found Sal back at the clock tower. A zippered sports bag was at his feet. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the bag.

  “The supplies,” he said.

  “They don’t use plastic bags here?”

  “Guess not. I had to buy the damn thing.” He nodded toward a small café across the street. “Why don’t we eat there? Then we’ll be able to see the guide when he returns.”

  They got a table on the patio in the shade of the awning and ordered eggs, coffee, and a platter of fruit. The coffees came first. While Scarlett was sipping hers—milk, no sugar—she saw a woman pass in front of the café, carrying two plastic bags stuffed with groceries. She chuckled to herself.

  “You mind sharing?” Sal said, looking at her curiously. When he saw what had amused her, his face darkened and he stood.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To get my money back.”

  “Please, Sal. You’re going to go all the way back to the supermarket to argue over a two dollar bag you bought, or however much it cost?”

  “It’s the principal behind it.”

  “If you do, I’ll mention it during my next interview. They’ll love it—billionaire scrooge.”

  Sal hesitated, but sat back down. Scarlett studied him. What was on his mind? He’d been gung-ho about this safari, this stage for reconciliation, when they had discussed it at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. But ever since—back home, where he’d slept in one of the guest bedrooms, in the car, on the plane—he’d been quiet, detached even. Was he second-guessing coming on this getaway with her? Having doubts about the whole process of working things out? Or did his surly mood have more to do with his work? Perhaps he was more concerned with the Prince Tower opening than he was letting on. After all, the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression wasn’t the best time to be launching a $1.5-billion hotel with rooms that ranged from $800 to $30,000 a night.

  She was about to ask him this when he leaned back in his chair and said, “You know, I don’t understand why Western imperialism has gotten such a bad rap.” He was staring past her to the dirty street, the paint-peeled buildings. “How can advancing law and order, reforming health and education, implementing a modern economy be a bad thing?”

  “Because it wasn’t ours to change,” she said. “How would you feel, Sal, if some hotshot came in and instigated major changes in your company?”

  “That would be impossible, cara mia, since I’m both CEO and chairman.”

  Scarlett smiled despite herself. His playful arrogance was one of the things she’d missed most about him during their separation.

  “We literally flattened Japan,” Sal went on. “But look at them sixty years later. They’re the world’s second largest economy. Look at this place after sixty years of self-rule. They’ve gone backward. Barely one in ten Tanzanians has electricity or a flushing toilet. Look beyond this relatively affluent city to the wars and famine, genocide, disease, human rights abuses, and military dictatorships that plague nearly every corner of the continent. Did you see the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda? It’s right down the street. We passed it coming in.”

>   The waiter returned with their breakfast. Scarlett tried the eggs, which were greasy but good. She sucked on a piece of pineapple.

  “What about self-determination?” she said. She knew she couldn’t win this argument. One of Sal’s causes was Africa, just as hers was ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  “Self-determination?” He smiled thinly. “What good is self-determination when your leaders are corrupt despots? At least when the British sent money to the Colonial Civil Service, the Englishmen in charge spent it according to design. Contrary to that, the majority of foreign aid poured into sub-Sahara Africa since the fifties has leaked back West as capital flight—mainly to the Swiss bank accounts of the ruling elite.”

  “It’s not as simple as that—”

  “No, it’s not,” he quipped. “What is simple is to blame all of Africa’s problems on colonialism, apartheid, globalization, multi-nationalism.” He finally turned his attention to his plate. He cut a slice of egg white and set it atop a piece of dry brown toast. He cut the toast, speared it with his fork, and stuck the bite-sized piece in his mouth. “All I’m saying,” he concluded with uncharacteristic snappishness, “is that things have gone to hell here. The people of Africa were better off under the British and the French, the Germans and the Portuguese.”

  Scarlett set down her fork and knife, convinced there was something weighing heavily on his mind, something that had nothing to do with their marriage. “If you need to get back to the office, Sal, I understand. We can postpone this safari. I’ll fly back to LA in the morning—”

  “I’m not going back to the office, and we’re not postponing anything.” He dabbed his lips with a paper napkin and stood. “Take your time eating. I’m going to stretch my legs. It’s a three-hour drive to Ngorongoro Crater.”

  Scarlett watched Sal walk down the sidewalk until he disappeared from view. She pushed her plate away from her, leaned back in her chair, and sipped her coffee thoughtfully.

  Damien Fitzgerald spotted the sign for the travel company, a red-and-yellow thing that filled the entire second-floor window of a brick building on Mikocheni Coca Cola Road. He didn’t know why someone would name a road after Coca Cola. Maybe the city’s first Coke bottling shop used to be on this street. Or maybe the guy whose job it was to name streets was drinking a Coke when he got to this one. Fitzgerald didn’t care one way or another. All that mattered was that he’d finally found the office for Magic Africa Safari.

  After landing in Julius Nyerere International Airport, he’d browsed the Internet for all the safari companies in Dar es Salaam that serviced Tanzania’s northern safari circuit. There had been several dozen. The addition of the keyword “luxury” narrowed the search significantly. He wrote down the telephone numbers and addresses of the ten most expensive companies. He didn’t think Salvador Brazza would settle for anything less. It turned out he was right. He hit the money on the third outfit he called. Yes, Salvador Brazza and Scarlett Cox had booked a safari with them, the woman on the phone had said. But no, she could not provide any details. It was prohibited by management.

  Bollocks to management, Fitzgerald thought once more. What was the big deal with giving out some information? It was just an itinerary he wanted. Was it because Brazza’s wife was a celebrity? Did she receive special treatment?

  Probably. Bloody actors.

  So instead of getting the information he wanted neat and tidy over the phone, he’d been forced to drive around Dar for the past forty-five minutes, searching for the travel company. Dar was a big city with a lot of one-way streets and mindless pedestrians. Needless to say, he was no longer in a very good mood.

  He swung the rented Toyota Land Cruiser to the curb and parked behind an idling meat truck. He got out, the heat hitting him like a blast from an open oven. It was the middle of the summer below the equator. He crossed the street and entered a brick office building. The lobby was small but well-maintained with polished floor tiles, a potted plant, and an imitation leather sofa. The number between the Up and Down buttons on the bronze elevator plate read 4. He pressed Up and waited. The stainless steel doors had a bright annealed finish in which he could see his reflection. At sixty-one, he was as tall and lean as he’d been at thirty, if slightly softer around the waist. His graying hair had receded into a well-defined widow’s peak while white stubble textured his sharp jawline. Seeing himself now, he thought he looked absurdly how someone in his line of work was supposed to look. That, of course, was because he knew what his line of work was. To a stranger on the street, he could just as easily have passed as a fit university professor, or a lawyer.

  A chime announced the cab’s arrival. He took it up to the second floor. The doors opened directly into the travel company. A long counter lined with neat piles of magazines and flyers separated the customer area from the employee area. A WWF poster on one wall showed a sea turtle swimming in marine-blue water. The caption read: “Warning: It is illegal to kill turtles in Fiji.” Fitzgerald wondered how many East Africans were flying ten thousand miles away to Fiji to kill turtles.

  In the employee area two black men clicked away at their computers, while a white woman was wading through a sheaf of papers with a fluorescent yellow highlighter. The woman saw Fitzgerald, smiled, and approached the counter. She was dressed in maroon slacks and a cream blouse. A colorful silk scarf was knotted around her neck. It was just like the one around his own neck, only his was mud brown, and he didn’t think she was wearing hers to conceal a six-inch-long scar.

  “Can I help you?” she asked him in the same South African voice he’d heard over the phone.

  He took off his sunglasses and hooked them on the V-neck of his black T-shirt. “I called earlier,” he said, the words coming out raspy, like a man who smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. He’d been speaking like that for the better part of thirty years, ever since he’d been garroted and left for dead in the hills of Northern Ireland. “I asked for Salvador Brazza’s itinerary.”

  Her smile faltered. “I told you. We cannot give out that information.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “No, we can’t.”

  Fitzgerald withdrew the Glock 17 from the holster beneath his jacket. The barrel was outfitted with a Gemtech threaded suppressor. He pointed the pistol at her face. “Yes, you can,” he repeated.

  She froze. The two men at the computers jumped to their feet.

  “Stay still,” Fitzgerald warned them without taking his eyes off the woman. She was young, early twenties, just a girl really, somewhat pretty. Her eyes were wide, her cheeks flushed, her heart probably racing. The funny thing about fear was that it produced the exact same symptoms as excitement, the only difference being the addition of willingness to the latter. “I would like Salvador Brazza’s itinerary.”

  She didn’t move.

  He nodded to her computer. “Go on, lass. Go print it off.”

  Still didn’t move.

  He slapped the counter. “Go on!”

  That broke her paralysis. She hurried to her desk and fiddled with the mouse. Her hand shook badly.

  The older of the two men said, “You don’t need a gun, man. Put away the gun. We’ll give you whatever you want. Just take it easy, hey?”

  There was always a hero. Fitzgerald pointed the Glock at the hero and squeezed the trigger. The term “silencer” was a misnomer because you could never truly silence the report of a gunshot. But you could suppress it. Now the suppressed shot made only a soft pop. A purple dot appeared in the man’s forehead, leaking a line of blood. He toppled backward.

  The woman screamed.

  The second man bolted for the back door. Fitzgerald fired three rounds into his back. The impact threw him forward onto his chest.

  “Shut up,” he said to the girl.

  She stopped screaming, though her mouth was quivering, as if she was keeping it closed by force of will alone.

  “Did you print the itinerary?”

  She hunkered down over the keyboard and hi
t a few keys. She made a frustrated noise, like she’d screwed something up. Her hands were shaking worse than ever. Then the freestanding laser printer in the corner clicked and hummed and spat out a sheet of paper into the tray.

  “Go get it,” he told her.

  She went to the printer, retrieved the single piece of paper, and brought it back. The flush had drained from her cheeks, leaving her face an alabaster white. Her mouth was still quivering, and she was making small, pathetic noises. She was no longer very attractive.

  Fitzgerald snatched the paper from her hand and gave it a quick scan. It was what he wanted. “If you had given me this information over the phone,” he told her, “none of this would have happened.”

  “Please don’t kill me.”

  “Why didn’t you give me the fecking information over the phone?”

  “Management prohibits it.”

  “Management’s dead, lass.”

  “Please don’t shoot me.”

  “Was it because Scarlett Cox is a celebrity? Is that the reason?”

  “What?”

  “Is that why you wouldn’t give me the itinerary?”

  “No. I don’t understand. What?”

  He shot her twice in the chest. She collapsed to the floor, dead.

  It was her own bloody fault.

  Fitzgerald slid across the counter and searched the men for their wallets, collecting a combined grand total of twenty-five thousand shillings—or about ten quid. The girl had what looked like a real half-carat diamond on her engagement finger, which he took. He didn’t see her handbag, but he didn’t bother searching for it. He cleared out the register to complete the robbery-gone-wrong scenario, then left through the back door, where he discovered a gray-painted stairwell. He holstered the Glock beneath his jacket, slipped on his sunglasses, and skipped down the stairs to street level, whistling an old Irish tune as he went.