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?

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?”

The driver stopped on the shoulder behind a burned-out old Ford Ranger. I asked him to pop the trunk, then went around and got my duffel.

I dug inside, looking for the pants I'd worn on that first day. I'd already trashed the shirt, but I was pretty sure-

Yes, here were the trousers, smelly and bloodstained from my time in jail.

I looked in the front pockets, but both were empty.

When I checked the back, I found what I was looking for, the one thing they'd missed when they took just about everything else at Kirikiri: Father Bombata's card.

I turned to the driver, who was waiting impatiently for me, half in, half out of the car.