LOVING THE ENEMY

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Raymond Mbah smiled at her across the conference table on Thursday morning and she smiled back with the same warmth she had always given him, and neither smile meant what it appeared to mean.

That was the thing about betrayal that nobody prepared you for. Not the anger — the anger was clean and manageable, something you could work with. It was the performance that came after the discovery that cost the most. The requirement to sit across from someone who had been selling your company's secrets over lunch and treat them as though they were still the person you had hired, because the moment they knew you knew, the evidence trail went cold and the seven days David needed became worthless.

She had always been good at performance.

Today she was exceptional.

The Thursday morning meeting covered three agenda items — a product update, a client retention report, and a hiring proposal for two new engineers. Raymond presented the client retention numbers with his usual quiet competence, and she listened and asked the right questions and told him the analysis was thorough, which it was, because whatever else he was, he was genuinely good at his job.

That was the part that sat worst, she thought. Not that he was incompetent. That he had been both useful and treacherous simultaneously, and she had only ever seen one half of it.

After the meeting she went directly to her office and closed the door and sat for five minutes doing nothing at all, which was the closest she allowed herself to falling apart during working hours.

Then she opened her laptop and sent David a one-line message: He was in the room today. I held. How are we doing on the timeline?

David's reply came within the hour: Making progress. Stay the course.

She stayed the course.

Kael called at noon, as he had taken to doing — not every day, but often enough that she had stopped being surprised by it and had started, quietly and without announcement, looking forward to it.

"How are you holding up?" he asked.

"I sat across from him for ninety minutes this morning."

A brief silence. "And?"

"And I told him his retention analysis was thorough." She looked at the ceiling. "Which it was. That's the absurd part."

"Compartmentalisation is a skill," Kael said. "You're very good at it."

"I'm beginning to think it might also be a liability."

"How so?"

She considered the question honestly, the way she had been allowing herself to do more often in conversations with him — arriving at the real answer rather than the managed one. "I've been compartmentalising you for three years. Put you in a drawer labelled finished and told myself the drawer was closed. And then you walked into a boardroom and the drawer turned out to have never been properly shut."

The silence that followed was warm rather than empty.

"For what it's worth," Kael said quietly, "I never managed to build the drawer in the first place."

She looked out of her window at the familiar skyline. "That is either very honest or very convenient."

"Both things can be true."

She almost laughed. "Don't be clever when I'm trying to be serious."

"You're always serious. I'm providing balance." A pause, and then his voice shifted — still warm but more grounded. "Aisha. You're doing the right thing. Holding steady, letting David build the case properly. I know it costs something to sit across from him and perform normalcy. But when this is over, the case will be airtight because you didn't flinch."

She breathed out slowly. "I know."

"And when it's over," he said, "I'm going to take you somewhere that isn't an office or a café or a market, and we're going to have a conversation that has nothing to do with fraud or transaction records or corporate sabotage."

She was quiet for a moment. "What kind of conversation?"

"The kind we've been having around the edges of everything else." His voice was straightforward, unhurried. "I think we've earned it."

She thought about the drawer that had never been properly shut. About her mother's voice saying how a thing begins is not the same as what it becomes. About egusi soup eaten at a dining table with the lamp in the corner casting everything in a softer light.

"Ask me again when this is over," she said.

"I will." No hesitation. "Count on it."

The call from Sule came at three in the afternoon, on her personal number rather than the office line, which meant it was not for general consumption.

"I found something," he said. "You need to see it in person. Not here."

She understood immediately. "Café Grâce. Five thirty."

"I'll be there."

She arrived first, as she always did — a habit of punctuality that was also a habit of control, of needing to be settled in a space before anyone else entered it. She ordered tea she did not particularly want and sat with her back to the wall facing the door, the way her father had always sat in restaurants, and waited.

Sule arrived at five twenty-eight, which told her something about the weight of what he was carrying. He was not a man who arrived early.

He sat down, ordered nothing, and placed a printed document on the table between them without preamble.

It was a bank statement. Or rather, a summary of one — the kind that David's contacts in the financial intelligence space could access through channels that existed in the productive grey area between legal and extralegal, the kind of channels that produced information you could use to know where to look even if you could not use the document itself in court.

The account belonged to Raymond Mbah.

Aisha looked at the numbers. Four deposits over fourteen months. Regular, identical in amount, transferred from a holding company registered in Douala.

She looked at the name of the holding company.

NDG Consulting Solutions.

She looked at Sule.

"NDG," she said.

"Ngo Diane Grace," Sule said quietly.

The initials sat on the page like something that had always been there, waiting to be read correctly.

Aisha looked at the document for a long time. Not because she was surprised — the shape of it had been clear for days — but because there was a specific kind of grief that came with confirmation. The difference between suspecting someone you had loved and trusted and knowing it. The way knowing closed a door that suspicion had left fractionally open.

Diane. Who had sat across from her in a studio apartment in Yaoundé seven years ago with a laptop between them and said, with the particular conviction of someone who believed completely in what they were building, this is going to change things, Aisha. I know it is.

She had been right. Just not in the way either of them had imagined.

"Send this to David tonight," she said. "His secure email, nothing else."

"Already prepared." Sule folded his hands on the table. "Are you alright?"

The question again. Everyone kept asking her that. She was beginning to understand that she had spent so long being visibly fine that the people around her had developed a specific alertness to the moments when she might not be.

"I will be," she said. Which was, she had decided, the most honest answer available.

Sule nodded. He did not push further, which was one of the things she valued most about him — he understood the difference between support and intrusion.

They sat together for a few minutes in the quiet of the café, the city doing its reliable late afternoon thing outside the windows, and she allowed herself the small luxury of not performing anything at all for a little while.

Then she picked up her phone and typed a message to Kael.

Aisha: NDG Consulting Solutions. Run it against everything you have on Fotso Advisory and EkoCorp. I think it's the link we've been missing.

His reply came in four minutes.

Kael: On it. Are you okay?

She looked at the question. At the simplicity of it. At the fact that he kept asking it not because it was the polite thing to say but because he actually wanted to know.

Aisha: Getting there.

Kael: That's enough for today.

She put the phone in her pocket and finished her tea and looked at the city through the café window and thought about seven years ago and studio apartments and the specific cruelty of people who took your trust and used it as architecture for something designed to hurt you.

Then she thought about a man who answered on the first ring and said go home like it was care and not instruction and had not once, since walking back into her life, given her a reason to doubt him.

The grief was real. She was not going to pretend otherwise.

But so was everything else.

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