THE ASSIGNMENT
He sat on a sofa in his living room, sharpening his dagger with a honing steel. The keenness of his dulled blade edges needed to be restored. There was a scar; a deep cut that slanted across his rigid face. He’d lost an eye and the black patch over it made him look like a one-eyed evil captain of a pirate ship.
The smell of weed and alcohol filled the air around him with bottles standing tall on the low table in front of him. Wraps of weed and packets of cigarettes were scattered over the surface. His phone rang on the left arm of the sofa he was seated on, but he chose to ignore it until the caller called back a second time. Turning down the volume of his TV where a woman was moaning loudly in the adult movie that was playing on the screen, he sluggishly reached for the buzzing phone and answered.
“You sure took your time,” said the lady on the other line.
“What do you want?” he asked with a thick voice.
“I have a job for you,” she said and added after his silence, “what I want you to is simple-”
“-I don’t do simple,” he cut her off but she dismissed his arrogance and continued anyway;
“I’m sending some data to your mail.”
At this point, he got up and slowly walked over to the laptop resting on his dining table. He pressed the spacebar and the screen came alive. A moment later, an email came through. He opened it and saw a picture of a young lady.
“Her name is Grace Ayodele.” The caller’s timing was perfect, as they she knew he had just set eyes, or in his case, eyes on the photo.
The last name rang a bell in his head that he had to ask, “Any relations to Bunmi Ayodele?”
“Yes. She’s her daughter. Now you understand the gravity of this assignment.”
Bunmi Ayodele was a renowned lawyer who witnessed the killing of a journalist after he’d confronted her client, a one-time senator, Honourable Engineer Patrick Chukwu in his house and threatened to expose him as the thief, organ harvester, murderer, and rapist that he was. Barrister Ayodele had always known that her client was corrupt but rape, organ harvesting, and murder? No this was on a whole new level.
The journalist wasn’t just bluffing, he had incriminating evidence that would put Patrick away for good. She watched as her client ordered his boys to beat the young man to death and so it was. He’d promised her that no harm would befall her even after what she’d witnessed but a few days later, she mysteriously disappeared and for over a week now, she was considered missing.
“Do you want me to take her out?”
“No. The people I work for want her alive. I have your account details, I’ll send you part payment now and the remaining later after you’ve delivered her to me without so much as a scratch on her body.” She ended the call.
He snorted contemptuously and dialed another number, waiting, as it rang on the other line.
A voice answered the call, “Boss, twale.”
“Work don show. Prepare the boys.” He cut the call.
A VISIT FROM THE THREE MUSKETEERS
Grace had just returned from class and was in her apartment off campus when she heard a series of knocks on her door. She wanted to be alone this hot afternoon with no desire whatsoever to see anyone. All Grace could think about was what had happened to her mother and why she was taken. She was kidnapped, and Grace saw the footage of the three guys that bundled her into a black van just outside her office. But the question remained; why hadn’t the kidnappers reached out to air their demand? Or had they…? No. She’d rather not be negative in her thinking. Inspector Sambo had assured her that the police were doing everything in their power to find her mother and bring those three individuals to justice.
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The knocking continued and she rose angrily, hoping to God as she headed to answer the door that the person outside wasn’t her friend, Eric because she was more than ready to snap at whoever was unlucky enough to have disturbed her peace and quiet.
“What?!” she snarled at her visitors upon opening the door.
“Uhmm,…”Chike drawled lazily, her vicious attack had thrown him off balance. Beside him were two others, Jide and Kosi, “you’re Grace, right,…Grace Ayodele?”
She kept silent, looking at their faces, trying to figure them out, for she knew she recognized them from somewhere. But where? Then it hit her, “Shit!” Grace immediately slammed the door and ran back inside. They rushed in after her and she was already on the phone, most probably calling the police. “Stay back!” she threatened, flashing a kitchen knife at them as Chike gently approached her.
“Grace, calm down, okay? Put the knife down,” he said politely with careful steps towards her. She was scared, he could tell, they all could. Obviously, she thought of them as the kidnappers that abducted her mother. They were the three guys in the footage she saw, bundling her mum into that black van. That alone had discredited them.
“Grace, please hang up the phone now,” Jide said to her.
Someone picked on the other line and she screamed, “They’re in my apartment!”
Chike and Jide quickly rushed at her, one seized the phone and hung up, while the other grabbed her and covered her mouth from the back. She struggled, flailing her legs in the air. “Kosi, the tape,” Chike said, nodding toward the sellotape on a table beside her.
Jide grabbed a chair and they forced her into it after she bit Chike’s palm and tried to run. Kosi tied Grace’s hands to the chair and sealed her lips with the sellotape.
Chike huffed in dismay and stepped back, away from Grace, rubbing the back of his head.
“Great. Now she thinks we’re the bad guys,” said Kosi.
Chike bent over to look at Grace as she struggled against her restraints, muffling God-knows-what. He tried to convince her that they had nothing to do with her mum’s kidnapping and that they were, in fact, secretly working with her. But he could tell by the look in her eyes and the nonstop struggle to free herself, that she wasn’t buying what he was trying to sell.
Jide’s patience was running thin and he groaned in contentment;
“Chike, this is a complete waste of the time we don’t even have,” he said, almost snapping out of frustration.
“What, you got a better idea?” Chike asked.
“Yes!” came the reply, “we knock her out, bag her up, and drive her to the safe house. And then when she’s conscious again, we can explain everything. Easy peasy.”
“No way!” Kosi objected, “That is completely out of the equation-we’re not doing that.”
“She already thinks we’re the bad guys!”Jide’s voice rose in annoyance.
“But we’re not.”
“She doesn’t believe that!” he blew a raspberry and turned to Grace, “Look here pretty face. We didn’t kidnap your mum, okay? But the ones who did- the real bad guys, they’re going to be here any minute, so your best option right now is to come with us, got it?” the words rushed out of his mouth.
“Listen, if we wanted to hurt you, we would have done so already,” said Kosi.
Chike squatted before her and said calmly, “Now, I’m going to slowly take the tape off your mouth but you have to promise not to scream, can you do that?” he asked nicely.
She hesitated, shifting her gaze across them for a bit before nodding silently. He peeled the tape off her mouth and a gasp came forth.
There was the loud noise of screeching tires outside the apartment block and Kosi, who was standing by the window, peeped through the curtains and saw red power bikes parking by the walkway. Their riders dressed in red outfits and matching helmets alighted and were walked towards the apartment.
“Urh, guys,…”Kosi called the attention of her friends,”we’ve got company.”
“Cops?”Chike asked, wondering how they could have gotten there so fast given that it was barely three minutes ago that Grace had called them.
“No, not the cops,” she replied, “the Red Bikers.”
“The what?” the others, including Grace, chorused in shock.
The Red Bikers were a gang of notorious criminals infamous for their clean espionage and assassination.
“They’re coming for you, Grace,”Kosi added.
“We gotta go. Now.”Chike set her loose and she didn’t waste any time in showing them the back door where they escaped through.
THE CHASE
The front door got kicked down and four riders barged into the house. “Search the place,…find her,”one of them ordered and that instant, they saw through the window, a car speeding away with Grace at the backseat. They rushed out, mounted their bikes, and chased after them.
Kosi sped up to the main streets, steering the car recklessly as she weaved through the line of traveling vehicles.
“Can you please slow down?” Grace panicked at the speed at which Kosi was driving.
“Not an option,”she replied and increased the speed.
A lorry suddenly came out of nowhere directly ahead of them.
“Kosi, watch out!”Chike, who was in the front passenger seat, pointed at the obstacle in front of them. Grace shut her eyes, screaming as she thought she was as good as dead. Kosi drifted the car in an instant and the honk of the lorry sped past them.
“Are you insane?”Grace lost her temper.
“Relax, I saw it coming,”said Kosi, unaffected by the tension in the car. She looked through the side mirror and sighted two Red Bikers bursting out from behind a bus and were quickly catching up. “Seatbelts, please.”
They all immediately clasped theirs on.
“Hold on to something, this is about to get really rough,”Kosi added.
“Rougher than almost driving into a van?!”Grace snapped.
“Actually, it was a lorry,”Simon corrected her.
“I don’t give a shit-she almost killed us!”
The two bikers now caught up and were on both sides of the fast moving car. They each took out a pistol and aimed at the driver.
“Get down!”Jide exclaimed.
“No need,”Kosi’s calmness in the midst of the storm was amazingly reassuring. She immediately put on the brakes and the car slowed down, putting the riders in front. By now one of them hard squeezed a round and his bullet took down his ally on the other side. In a twinkle of an eye, she took a very sharp swerve and knocked down the other rider with the side of the boot of her car. He crashed dangerously, tumbling over and over until got run over by a random speeding vehicle.
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“Still thinking we’re the bad guys?” Jide asked Grace where they were both seated at the back.
Kosi exceeded the speed limit and was now driving at almost two hundred kilometers per hour. Grace braced herself, thinking that if she didn’t die at the hands of those relentless bikers, then she’d definitely die in a car crash, owing to Kosi’s speed which was making her nauseous.
Another rider popped up behind them and opened fire, alarming passersby as they took to their heels, seeking shelter against the pelting bullets. Kosi looked through the rearview mirror above her and saw how close to the car he was at such high speed. She smirked and hit the brakes again, the car halted for a brief moment and at that moment, the rider lost control, running the bike into the boot.
The force from the collision flung him into the rear window which broke as his helmet-protected head protruded into the vehicle. Grace screamed when she saw his head sticking out between her and Jide. The latter forced out the rider’s helmet and bashed him on the head and in the face with it but he wouldn’t fall off. “Kosi!” he called out and she knew exactly what to do. She took an abrupt turn, so sharp and precise that it threw the rider off completely.
Jide noticed how shaken up Grace was and asked if she was okay. She nodded nervously and asked how Kosi was so calm.
“Kosi, turn left!”Chike instructed and she listened. The car tires squeaked, producing smoke as she changed direction into a street market, away from another biker. People ran off the road, some, screaming as the honking car sped through the populace, knocking off traders’ tables and any other obstacle in its path. Everybody was shifting off the road except for an old lady, who was sluggishly crossing to the other side.
Kosi honked over and over as she drove closer at such high speed but the Grannie didn’t seem to be aware of what was happening. Kosi’s people were blabbing about the old woman and she replied to them keenly,”I’m not slowing down.” Paying a deaf ear to their shouts, she sped up, then veered the car off the road and onto a series of long steps beside the Grannie. The car jacked dangerously as it traveled down the steps with Grace’s screams breaking all the way down to a tarred road. Kosi switched the gear and accelerated onward. The rider slid his bike down the iron railing beside those long steps and continued to chase after them.
“Damn! This guy just wouldn’t give up,”said Jide as he saw the rider catching up with them.
There was a railway up ahead and Kosi was driving directly toward it. The sound of an approaching train was heard, its horn blaring loudly. She looked to her right and saw it coming. There was a slight chance that she could cross the rail before the train would get to that point, and she was willing to risk it. “Hold on tight.”
“Uhm,…Kosi, “Chike called softly, he didn’t want to believe what she was about to do what he thought she was about to do, “what’re you doing?”
She ignored him and put her foot down, tightening her hold around the steering wheel as she accelerated. There was a noise inside the car as they all objected to it but she did not slow down.
“That’s it, we’re going to die- we’re going to die!”Grace panicked, almost losing her sanity.
They shut their eyes, hearts already sunk into their stomach whilst they prayed to God that they made it across. And in a flash, the car zoomed through to the other side, right before the honking train whooshed past them, serving as barrier between them and the rider who had by now brought his bike to a sideways halt. He raised the visor of his helmet to reveal the deep scar across his face and a patched-up eye as he fumed, watching the noisy train travel steadily in front of him. His targets had driven away on the other side, far from his reach. He put down the visor, revved his engine and rode away.
Story by: Samuel Francis
