Instruments Of Darkness Read Online Free Page B

came back with a pack of cards in her hand.
        'Poker?' she asked.
        Moses, who had fallen back with his head resting on some blocks of cash, sat up.
        'You deal, Miss Heike.'
        'Miss Heike beat us no small,' I said to Moses.
        'There's nothing like playing with other people's money,' she said and riffled the pack of cards. The noise from the cards shot through me and I sat rigid. The tickering from the car, but not the car, the noise of a playing card flicking over the wheel spokes of a bicycle. There was always fifty bicycles behind you in Cotonou. That was the tail. The noise had stopped as soon as we'd got to the house. Vasili was right - Madame Severnou's first lesson. How to outwit the Oyinbo without raising a sweat.
        'Something the matter?' asked Heike.
        There was a click at the gate. Moses turned on to his knees and was up at the window looking down like a cat.
        'It's Helen,' he said.
        'What're we nervous about?' asked Heike.
        I found myself staring down at over a million pounds in cash and feeling things going wrong. With Heike here I'd lost concentration, hadn't thought things through. I'd had that feeling in the port this afternoon that Madame Severnou was going to be trouble. I'd done nothing about it and now lesson number two was coming. How to burn the Oyinbo for the lot.
        Moses knew what I was thinking and was already packing the tied-up blocks of money into carrier bags.
        'Let Heike do that,' I said, tying up the bedsheet. 'Tell Helen to go back to her sister and get the car ready.'
        Heike was on the floor packing the money. I picked up four carrier bags and the sheet and ran downstairs. Moses was reversing the car into the garage. Helen slipped out through the gate. I flung the money into the boot and ran back up the stairs. Moses was out and opening the gates. I hit Heike coming through the doors telling me she had it all.
        I left the lights on, checked the floor and dropped down the steps two at a time. Moses drove the car out and I closed the gates. The car pitched and yawed over the mud road. Heike leaned forward from the back seat. We parked up under some bougainvillaea that fell down the walled garden of the house on the opposite corner to mine. We could just see the gates. It was very dark and the light cast from the living room window was blocked by the head of the palm tree in the garden. We sat with our breath quivering like sick men waiting to die.
        After fifteen minutes the paranoia wore off. Moses played a drum solo on the steering wheel. Heike sat back, looked out the window and hummed something from Carmen. I sat with my back against the window and my arm hung over the top of the seat and played with her fingers.
        'So/ asked Heike, with a little German creeping into her accent to show me she was annoyed. 'What's going on?'
        'It's a lot of money,' I said, only half concentrating, 'and the person who gave it to me wasn't very happy about what she got in return. I think we might be getting a visit. We were followed out of the port this afternoon but I thought we'd lost them.'
        'It's a lot of money for rice.'
        'It's for parboiled rice,' I said. 'Seven thousand tons of it. The Nigerians won't touch anything else. There's an import ban, too, which gives it a premium.'
        'You're going to smuggle seven thousand tons of rice into Nigeria?'
        'Not smuggle, exactly. The Nigerian government have said that each man can bring in a bag of rice legally. We've got five hundred guys who are going to take two hundred and eighty sacks each, one at a time, through the border at Igolo, north of Porto Novo.'
        'You can do that?'
        'It needs a bit of help which is why my client, Jack Obuasi, cut this woman, Madame Sevenou, into the deal. She can oil the Customs.'
        'Have I met Jack?'
        'If you had it would have probably been in his