Nadia
258 Words
Abidjan.
Kofi arrives at a sun-bleached apartment block near the school. Nadia opens the door before he knocks, she heard his footsteps on the stairwell and has already decided, one way or another, that this is the moment.
Nadia had been inside the network for six years. Not by choice ,not entirely. A financial consultant recruited under false pretenses, kept in place by knowledge of what happened to people who left. She had watched everything. Memorized everything. And when they asked her to use a fourteen-year-old girl as leverage, something in her calcified.
She had dropped the earring deliberately. Not in the pool, in the drain beneath it, but where only a forensics team would find it. She had researched Kofi beforehand: three commendations, one internal affairs complaint that went nowhere, a reputation for following things past the point of comfort.
"I needed someone stubborn," she says.
"Here's the deal, I will testify. Full account, names, dates, transaction records I photographed over six years on a phone the network didn't know about. But not to Interpol. Not to strangers. I will do it with you here in the room, or I won't do it at all".
Kofi steps outside and calls Adaeze. "I found her." A heartbeat skips. "Is she alive?" "She's alive." He hears Adaeze exhale, the sound of someone who has been holding their breath for months.
Kofi then returns to the apartment. The door is open. But Nadia is gone
On the table is her phone, the photographs, the six years of evidence
- Writer
