“What do you want?” I screamed up at the one holding my legs. He had a very round face, flat nose, kind of a Mike-Tyson squint. It was a struggle to keep still and not fight him, but I sure didn't want him to lose his grip.
The SSS man, or whoever he was, grinned down at me over the curve of my knees.
“You been here long enough, Cross. Time to cross you off.” He laughed over his shoulder, sharing the joke with his partner.
Even if the swimming pool had been directly below me, which it wasn't, I figured I was too high to survive any fall. My blood coursed through me. I could feel it everywhere, especially in the growing pressure in my head.
But then my body was moving again. Inside!
My spine scraped hard against the aluminum window track, and I came down on the floor of my hotel room.
Cross Country
Chapter 71
I JUMPED UP and went at the nearest SSS man, until the other pressed his gun into my ribs.
“Easy,” he said. “You don't want to get shot now, do you?”
I saw that my duffel was out on the bed.
And packed.
“Pick up the bag.”
“Who sent you?” I asked them. “Who are you working for? This is insane!”
He didn't answer me. Instead, they grabbed me and moved me out into the hall. Freak One shut the door behind us and pocketed the key.
Then they both just turned and walked away.
“Go home, Detective Cross. You're not wanted here. Last warning.”
There was a bizarre half minute or so while they waited for the elevator, talking low to each other. Then they calmly got on and left me standing in the hallway.
Clueless.
And keyless.
Obviously they'd taken this as far as it was going for now. Whoever they were, police or not, and whatever connection they might have to the Tiger, they didn't kill for him.
They hadn't even tried to put me on a plane.
But why not?
What was going on in this crazy country of theirs?
Cross Country
Chapter 72
IT WAS HARD to fathom or predict, but my situation in Lagos actually got worse over the next hour or so. The front-desk people at the Superior insisted that I had “checked out” and that no rooms were available, something I knew to be untrue.
I tried half a dozen hotels on the phone and got the same story everywhere-credit card denied. It was looking more and more like the two strong men who had evicted me from the Superior were indeed representatives of the state, whatever in hell that meant here in Lagos.
I tried Ian Flaherty several times and left a voice mail twice, but I didn't hear back from the CIA man.
So I did the next thing I could think of. I got a driver and asked him to take me to Oshodi Market. If I couldn't get hold of Flaherty, I'd go back to his valued informant. I was quickly running out of options.
I knew I was in the middle of something bad-but what was it? Why did everybody seem to want me out of the country? What did it have to do with the murder of Ellie Cox?
It took over an hour to get to the market and another fifty minutes of wandering and asking around to find the rug stall I was looking for.
A middle-aged man with one dead eye, not Tokunbo, was working today. His English was poor. He nodded at Tokunbo's name-I was in the right place-but then shooed me off for a customer.
I couldn't afford to just hang around hoping for a miracle, so I cut my losses and found my way back to the car. The only Plan C I could think of was to go to the US consulate.
But then, crawling through more traffic on the way to Victoria Island, I thought of something else. Plan D.
“Can you pull over, please?”
