LOVING THE ENEMY

CHAPTER TEN

The leak came from inside the house.

That was the phrase that kept turning over in Aisha's mind on Tuesday morning as she sat in her office with the door closed and the blinds angled just enough to signal that she was present but unavailable. She had a list of seven names in front of her — the seven people who had had unrestricted access to TechNova's financial records in the eighteen months before the loan crisis. Seven people she had hired personally. Seven people she had trusted without reservation because that was what you did when you built something — you chose your people and you believed in them and you did not spend your days looking for reasons not to.

She stared at the list and felt something she rarely allowed herself to feel at work.

Betrayal. Clean and cold and specific.

She folded it in half and put it in her drawer and went to her afternoon meeting and was completely professional for two hours, which was one of the more demanding performances of her career.

Sule came to her at five.

He closed the office door behind him, which he only did when the conversation was not for general circulation, and sat across from her with the expression of a man who had found something and was deciding how to deliver it.

"You asked me to look at who benefits if TechNova fails," he said.

"I did."

"I found something." He placed a single printed page on her desk. "EkoCorp filed for two government contracts last year that we won. Standard enough. But three months before we won the second one, they restructured their entire bid — completely overhauled the technical proposal. The kind of overhaul that usually takes six months minimum."

Aisha looked at the page. "They knew our proposal."

"They had to. The changes they made were too targeted. They weren't improving their bid generally — they were responding to ours specifically. Someone gave them our technical documentation."

She was quiet for a moment. "The same person who gave them our financials."

"That would be my guess." Sule leaned forward slightly. "There are three names on your internal access list who also had access to the contract documentation. I didn't pull the list officially — I just know how our systems work."

"Tell me the three names."

He told her.

Two of them she dismissed within seconds — people whose histories and loyalties she understood thoroughly enough to be certain. The third name sat differently.

Raymond Mbah. Head of business development. Hired fourteen months ago with an impeccable CV and references that she had checked personally. Quiet, competent, the kind of professional who generated no friction and therefore generated no attention.

She looked at Sule. He was looking back at her with the careful neutrality of someone who had reached the same place and did not want to be the one to say it first.

"Don't approach him," she said. "Don't change anything. I don't want him to know we're looking."

"Understood." Sule stood. "Aisha. I'm sorry. I know this isn't —"

"It's information," she said. "Information is useful. Thank you, Sule."

After he left she sat alone for a long time.

Raymond Mbah had attended Grace's birthday drinks last month. Had stayed late at the product launch in March, helping pack up equipment without being asked. Had sent her a brief, genuine message when the debt crisis became known internally — Whatever you need, just say the word.

She thought about that message now with a different kind of attention.

Then she picked up her phone and called Kael.

He answered immediately, which she had noticed he always did when it was her. She had filed that observation away without comment.

"Raymond Mbah," she said without preamble. "Head of business development. Fourteen months. I need everything your team can find on him — professional history, financial records, any connection to EkoCorp or Martin Eko. Can you do that without leaving a trace?"

"Yes." No hesitation, no questions about why. "Give me until tomorrow evening."

"Thank you."

A pause. "Are you alright?"

The same question he had asked her at the café. She was beginning to understand that he asked it not as a courtesy but as a genuine inquiry — that he actually wanted to know the answer and would receive it properly if she gave it.

"No," she said honestly. "But I will be."

"I know you will." Said with the quiet certainty of someone who had watched her long enough to have evidence for it. "Go home tonight, Aisha. Whatever is in those documents will still be there tomorrow."

"I have work —"

"You have a mind that needs rest to function at the level you require it to. Go home."

She looked at the stack of files on her desk. Then at the window, where the evening was settling over the city in gradients of amber and grey.

"You are surprisingly bossy for someone who doesn't work here," she said.

"I'm making an observation. What you do with it is entirely your decision."

She almost smiled. "Goodnight, Kael."

"Goodnight."

She went home.

She cooked properly for the first time in a week — nothing complicated, just rice and plantain and the remainder of a stew she had made on Sunday, the comfortable ritual of a meal that did not require performance. She ate at her table instead of her desk, which felt like a small but deliberate act of self-preservation.

After dinner she called her mother, who talked about the harmattan coming early this year and a recipe she had been adjusting for twenty years and had finally resolved, and Aisha listened and laughed in the right places and felt herself decompress by degrees, the way you did when the person on the other end of a call had known you longer than your grief and your ambition and your carefully constructed professional self.

"You sound tired," her mother said.

"I'm fine."

"You say fine the way your father said fine. Like it means something in between."

Aisha looked at her half-empty plate. "Something happened at work. I'm handling it."

"Something with the company?"

"Yes."

"And the man?"

She paused. "What man?"

"Aisha." Her mother's voice had the patient amusement of someone who had raised a child and therefore could not be deceived by her. "The one from the market. The one who made you mention egusi soup and then change the subject. That man."

She was quiet for a moment. "It's complicated, Mama."

"Love is always complicated. That's how you know it's real and not just convenience."

"I didn't say it was love."

"You didn't say it wasn't."

Outside, the city was moving into its night frequency — quieter, warmer, the particular sound of Yaoundé after dark that she had learned to find comforting rather than lonely over five years of living in it alone.

"He came back into my life for reasons that may not have been entirely his own," she said carefully.

"Meaning someone else put him there?"

"Possibly."

Her mother considered this with the seriousness it deserved. "And does that change how he has behaved since he arrived?"

Aisha thought about the bar. The market. The soup. The café. The way he answered on the first ring. The way he said go home and meant it as care rather than instruction.

"No," she admitted. "It doesn't."

"Then you have your answer."

"It's not that simple."

"It is exactly that simple. The circumstances are complicated. The person is not." A pause. "Your father came into my life because his car broke down outside my father's house. Completely random. Completely inconvenient. The best thing that ever happened to me." Another pause, softer. "How a thing begins is not the same as what it becomes."

Aisha sat with that for a long moment.

"When did you get wise?" she said finally.

"I was always wise. You were too busy being brilliant to notice."

She laughed — genuinely, the kind that arrived without effort — and the sound of it surprised her slightly, the way laughter did when it came in the middle of difficult weeks.

After she hung up she sat in her quiet apartment and let her mother's words settle. The circumstances are complicated. The person is not.

She thought about Raymond Mbah, who had smiled at her across conference tables while feeding her company's vulnerabilities to its enemies.

She thought about Martin Eko, patient and deliberate, building something destructive in the background while TechNova built something real in the foreground.

She thought about Kael, who had been handed a rigged situation and had navigated it with more honesty than most people managed in uncomplicated ones.

She opened her phone and typed a message.

Aisha: I went home.

The reply came in under a minute.

Kael: Good. How was dinner?

Aisha: Rice and stew. Nothing remarkable.

Kael: Did you eat at the table or the desk?

She looked at her dining table, where her plate still sat.

Aisha: The table.

Kael: Also good.

She stared at the exchange for a moment — the smallness of it, the domesticity, the way it felt like something that had been happening for years rather than weeks.

Aisha: We'll find it, won't we. All of it.

His reply took slightly longer this time. When it came it was three words, and they landed with the settled weight of a promise made by someone who understood the cost of broken ones.

Kael: Every last piece.

She put the phone down and looked at the city through her window for a long time. Then she went to bed, and for the first time in two weeks she fell asleep without a document in her hand.

Outside, Yaoundé held its breath the way cities did at the edge of something — not knowing yet what was coming, but feeling the particular electricity of it in the air.

Something was building. In the dark, in the distance, in the careful architecture of two separate investigations converging toward the same name.

And in a quiet apartment on a Tuesday night, something else was building too. Closer. Warmer. And considerably harder to dismantle.