Her Name Is Knight (Nena Knight) Read online

  Her watch read 11:00 p.m.

  “It’s time,” Witt announced through their imperceptible ear comms. He was holed up with Network, their all-seeing mission control, in the undisclosed location in Europe from which all their successful missions spooled.

  “Echo, you copy?”

  “Copy,” Nena said, tamping down her unease and shedding the rest of who she was. It was time, as Witt said, and that meant it was time to be the other half of her, time to be Echo. Just one name from her long, sordid history of names.

  “The security system?” she asked.

  Nena and Alpha, second-in-command of their five-person team, watched together as the red lights on Alpha’s handheld device flashed twice, then emitted a long flash before changing to green, confirming that the mansion’s security-and-surveillance system was off line and now running on Network’s feed. Anyone watching the cameras would see only a loop of the empty house and grounds.

  Witt’s crackly voice always provided Nena a sense of calm. “Keep it clean, family. In and out.”

  She, Alpha, Charlie, and Sierra pulled on the rest of their gear: night vision goggles, black ski masks, thin gloves to hide any identifying marks or their racial makeup.

  The team slipped out of the black nondescript van, leaving X-ray behind in the driver’s seat. Covered in darkness, they crouched low, pausing before beginning their hustle toward the entry point. They moved in snakelike tandem through the ornate statues of naked women and cherubs lining the walkways. Each member swept the perimeter with their weapons, checking for guards.

  The layout of the mansion and its grounds was burned in Nena’s memory as if she’d lived there all her life. It took them three minutes to cross the lawn using the bushes and palm trees for cover. They were coming up to the house when Nena spied two guards standing atop the low-slung shingled roof. She leveled her semi at her target and squeezed off a shot. Before the man was down, she aimed and shot again, dropping his partner. She’d been dispatching for so long that taking lives, even corrupt ones, elicited no more emotion from her than firing off an email. She didn’t relish killing. Killing just . . . was. It was keeping order and advancing the Tribe’s cause.

  The Cuban’s new foray—peddling immigrants through their black-market transit system—jeopardized the Tribe’s business partnership with the organization. The Council wouldn’t allow their funds to support human trafficking. After all, was it not from their lands that so many Africans had been stolen, sold, and shipped to America to be enslaved? They’d never sanction that dark part of their history being revitalized. But Juarez, the Cuban, wasn’t the one who made the decisions. Juarez was only the face of their drug empire. It was his number two, Esteban Ruiz, who was the brains behind the face, marking Ruiz for dispatch. With him gone, the organization would be under the Tribe’s control and their wrongs set right by the Tribe’s standards.

  She gave another signal, and her team split up, the other three branching off to their preplanned locations while she located the mark.

  She found Ruiz where she’d known he’d be, behind his massive oak desk in his office. His executive chair was turned away, facing a wall of TV monitors, his head back, and at first, Nena thought he might be asleep. Even better.

  She shouldered the strap of her rifle, pulling her sidearm and aiming it as she neared him. Her steps faltered when a deep groan emanated from him. That was when she noticed movement beneath him. He had one hand resting on the arm of the chair, the other . . .

  She craned her neck, unable to tell where the hand was, only that it was moving. She didn’t even want to guess.

  She pushed away the unwanted thoughts and closed in. She put the gun to the back of his head and squeezed the trigger. He was so engrossed he hadn’t noticed her. His head jerked forward, then dropped, chin to chest.

  She was leaning over to make sure he was really dead when a dark head of hair popped up from below, in front of Ruiz, like a prairie dog on one of those National Geographic documentaries. She recognized the uniform. He was one of the guards. Couldn’t be more than twenty, if that. She swallowed her surprise with a blink. This information was not in the intel. And she hated surprises.

  He looked up, but before the young guard could make sense of his slack-jawed lover, the exit wound between his eyes, or the thick rope of blood forking down both sides of Ruiz’s nose, Nena repositioned her gun and put a bullet in him too. The guard’s head plopped back into the lap he was intimately, and quite recently, familiar with.

  Nena swept the room, ensuring there were no more playthings who would pop out at her. Her eyes landed on the array of TV monitors and narrowed, zeroing in on one screen that looked different from all the others. It was a black-and-white video feed of Juarez in his bedroom—and she could see he wasn’t alone. She swallowed, visions of what could have gone very badly running through her mind. How Network had missed this feed, she had no idea. They’d been lucky.

  “Dispatch is complete. There’s a separate feed running,” she muttered into her comm device. “Looks like the mark’s been watching number one’s bedroom.”

  “We see it,” was the response she received. This time it wasn’t Witt but some member of the Network team she didn’t care to know. “Leave him. Use the flash drive to burn their system and return home.”

  “But what if it’s in the cloud?”

  A pause. “It’s not. They’re old school.”

  She didn’t register the last part because the screen held her attention hostage, her jaw tightening as she made sense of what she was watching. Through her earpiece, Nena heard the team engaging more guards, clearing the home, readying to return to the van—each soft grunt, each pewt of the silencers, each padda padda pat-pat of the semiautomatics. She forced herself to move on her new orders. She found the computer and slipped in a small flash drive Network would use to fry the system.

  Then she hustled, leaving the room to head downstairs. But she paused at the top of the carpeted steps. Time was winding down, but what she’d seen on the screen made her turn around and run up the next flight of stairs instead of down. She had to do one last thing. People thought slavery was long dead, but they only had to look at the recording of the Cuban’s master suite to see that slavery did indeed still exist, and right in this very home. It was something of which Nena knew all too well. That was, before she became Echo.

  She recalled the mansion’s layout, finding the master suite quickly. Ignoring the chatter of her team and Network communicating in her ear, she grabbed the doorknob and twisted silently. The door opened on a slight creak, making her pause. She listened in case anyone inside had heard. No one had.

  “Echo, switching to a private channel,” Witt said in her ear. A second later he asked, “What are you doing?” She grimaced. Witt never went off script during missions. But then again, neither did she. Her straying from the playbook must have worried him enough to break protocol. “You’re off course. Get where you need to be.”

  But Nena was where she needed to be. She pushed the door open wide enough to enter a suite bathed in burgundy and gold and furnished with a massive four-poster bed that would fit six grown men. The room felt bigger than her little home in Citrus Grove, bigger than any room she’d imagined when she was a girl living in Ghana. This ugly, dark room reminded her of Fifty Shades, but in it was the stuff of nightmares—and the Cuban, the boogeyman.

  The girl Nena saw was nothing more than a waif. It was difficult to tell her ethnicity from behind the veil of long stringy hair obscuring her face like something out of a horror movie. The straps of the inappropriately adult negligee slid off her young shoulders. She trembled so violently the massive satin-covered bed shuddered beneath her. Her whimpers struck a nerve-jarring chord in Nena. Memories of barbed wire, the Hot Box where she’d been kept, and the bodies—so many bodies—flashed through her mind and nearly brought her to her knees.

  His back to where Nena stood in the shadows, the Cuban carefully selected a collar with an attached
leash, smiling lecherously. He did it as if he were choosing an engagement ring. He lurched toward the girl while shrugging off his robe, revealing he was naked as the day he was born.

  The girl, now on her knees, whimpered louder. Her eyes were wide as she stared from behind the curtain of hair and whispered, “Por favor, señor. No.”

  Nena wasn’t sure why she was hesitating. Why she watched as he fastened the choker around the girl’s bone-thin neck and clicked the lock. The girl winced when he cinched the collar too tight. Every time he touched her, she jerked as if branded with a white-hot poker.

  Nena holstered her sidearm and, from the sheath strapped to her back, pulled out her blade.

  “Time,” Witt warned.

  “You gonna love it, mami,” the Cuban said.

  Nena’s muscles grew taut as she readied herself.

  “I’m gonna give it to you good.” The Cuban slapped the girl hard, so hard Nena felt its sting. He pulled his hand back, up behind his head. His fingers curled into a tight fist.

  It was the girl’s high-pitched whinny of terror that finally spurred Nena to action. She moved swiftly, ignoring the thick, wiry carpet covering the Cuban’s back or how he smelled of body odor and stale cigar smoke.

  The girl was no longer looking at him. She was staring openmouthed at the creature behind him. Nena held her fingers to her lips in a silent communiqué.

  Ignoring Witt calling time in her ear again, she raised her arm, grasping the Cuban’s face and jerking it back against her chin. With her opposite hand, she dragged the blade across his neck, separating the soft, quivering folds of skin as if she were cutting through softened butter.

  He gurgled, blood bubbling out of the gaping wound. His hands flew to his neck in a futile effort to seal his skin back together.

  She released him, his body falling with a heavy thud on the floor. Nena and the girl watched as his life spilled out in a growing pool around his body.

  “What. The bloody. Hell?” Witt growled through Nena’s earpiece, snapping her back to attention. The team was waiting for her. Nena had deviated from the plan long enough.

  A rustling from the bed drew Nena’s gaze to the girl, who she considered carefully. What to do with her? Nena couldn’t leave her like that. She couldn’t take her either.

  The girl’s tiny hands picked at the collar around her neck, and without another thought, Nena stepped to the Cuban’s bureau of sex paraphernalia and the little key dangling on a hook inside it.

  She could hear the team checking in with Network as they returned to the van. She’d skew the mission time if she was late, possibly compromise the safety of the whole team if more of the Cuban’s men arrived on-site. She had to move. She tugged the key off the hook. The girl would need to figure out how to survive, or not, on her own.

  Witt growled, “For God’s sake, you need to leave now.”

  “On the way.” Nena gave the room one final sweep, her eyes pausing briefly at the bed, before she slipped through the doorway. Behind her, the girl scrambled toward the little silver key that had landed among the satin sheets and pillows. As Nena raced through the hallways and down the stairs, away from the girl in the bed who’d reminded Nena of a past she wished she could forget, she felt like she was running right back to the beginning of it all.

  4

  BEFORE

  Before I became Echo, before I was Nena, I was Aninyeh. And this is my story, my recounting.

  Of who I was.

  Of how I came to be.

  My journey begins in my small village, nestled among the plush, vibrant green forests and cocooned on Aburi Mountain. If one is looking for me, they will often find me on the cliffs, overlooking the world below. My favorite time of day is early morning, when everything is still dewy and the fog is low lying and heavy but burns away as the sun comes up. It’s hot in Ghana, not uncommon for the late summer. This year has been a good year with a fair amount of rain, which allowed crops and our animals to grow well enough to sell at market and feed the village. We are prospering.

  Here on the mountain, the temperature is cooler, perfect. On a clear day, I can stand on the cliff, look out through the dissipating fog, and see Accra, only twenty-five miles away but seeming so much farther from where I stand. The deep valleys below constantly remind me of how beautiful my home is. Of its richness. Of how lucky I am to be an African, a Ghanaian, a N’nkakuwean.

  “Papa says to mind our business and do not covet—”

  “—what our brother or sister has. Yes, I know, Aninyeh.” Ofori, my brother, rolls his eyes. “Does not mean I cannot worry about what happens to me after Wisdom assumes leadership and Josiah becomes his counsel.”

  When Ofori gets this way, jealous over things our older brothers have and he does not, I strain from not slapping him senseless. Wisdom—tall, fierce, brave Wisdom, who not only inherited Papa’s Christian name but has a name that reflects his demeanor—will assume the title of chief as firstborn when Papa steps down. Josiah is three minutes Wisdom’s junior and will become Wisdom’s chief advisor.

  “You should be glad there are no responsibilities binding you to N’nkakuwe like them,” I tell Ofori. Why he does not see his luck, I do not know.

  The kitchen of our family home is a warm blend of cooking spices and sweetened pastry. Auntie, Mama’s closest cousin, who stepped in when Mama passed, glistens as she stands over a cast-iron pot of bubbling bean stew laden with bits of salted codfish. In a minute, Auntie will heat a pan of oil to fry the ripened sweet plantains. Bean stew and fried plantains are Papa’s and my favorite.

  I consider all of this as Ofori steals a bofrot, a small round ball of sweetened fried dough. In the background, Auntie complains he will ruin his dinner. Diligently, I count bofrots in my head, dividing them by the six of us. I grimace because Ofori has already had more than his share.

  Auntie says, “Ofori, you should be with your papa and the twins, seeing to the end of the day.”

  “Why?” he asks, popping the last of his stolen goods in his mouth.

  “Why what?” she asks.

  “Why should I follow them around when I will never govern? They do not need me.”

  “You will be on the council of elders, Ofori. That is important work because a chief cannot rule well without his council,” our auntie says as she flaps her free hand at him. “Now leave this women’s work and see to your father at the village center.”

  My shoulders jerk as if pierced with a sharp stick. That Auntie delegates where the place of women and men should be is archaic, and I have no plans to adhere to it. My fifteenth birthday will come in days, and when I am eighteen, I will attend university abroad, not in Ghana like Auntie thinks. I will travel the world as Papa did, learn even more languages than the ones Papa has taught me. No one will tell me what a woman can or cannot do. But I say none of this aloud. I value my head too much and would rather not be thumped on it with the heavy wooden ladle she wields or have my ears boxed.

  My father is the village chieftain, so technically I am a princess. But there are lines even modern-day princesses dare not cross.

  Ofori deftly dances beyond my grasp when I catch him stealing yet another of the bofrots. “Ey!” I yell, about to charge after him, but Auntie grabs me by the neckline of my school uniform, preventing me from leaving her side.

  “These do not count!” Ofori laughs as he scampers away.

  “Mind the snakes!” Auntie calls at his retreating figure. She says this at morning and at dusk, when the many snakes that share this mountain with us are the most active. There are other animals, bugs—no lions or predators, but still harmful things. However, snakes bother Auntie the most.

  “Auntie!” I protest. “Ofori has eaten too many.”

  “Hush, child.” She smooths her furrowed brows. “There are enough, and all will be well.”

  Will it? What is it like to run the nightly village perimeter checks with Papa and my brothers? They check with the other men to ensure everyone’s made it back
safely, that there is no outstanding business between villagers that may result in conflict. My chest tightens and my eyes blur with unwanted tears, as I know Ofori is off with Papa and the twins. He bemoans the privilege while I remain trapped in this sticky, boiling kitchen doing “women’s work.” The resentment burns in my chest, making me lose focus, and I nearly slice off a fingertip with the knife I am using to cut ripened plantains into diagonals.

  Ofori is not considerate of others, not like Papa, who is fair, honorable, and the hardest worker. Papa never asks others to do what he would not do first. He is a leader, a big man, loved by most, and would never take more than his share of bofrots. Not like Ofori—

  A burst of staccato noise cuts through Auntie’s chatter.

  She waves it away as if shooing buzzing flies. “Boys practicing drums or whacking sticks in swordplay,” she says after clearing her throat of its slight tremor. “Maybe a hyena or other animal has wandered too close to the village perimeters.”

  I nod, but I know better. And when screams begin piercing the walls of our kitchen, Auntie knows better too.

  I freeze, the knife like an extension of my hand hovering over the cut pieces of fruit, all thoughts of frying plantains and bubbling bean stew vanishing.

  Auntie reaches a hand—skin weathered and leathery from years of plunging them in hot water, churning banku and beating cassava leaves—out to me. “Aninyeh, wait!”

  But I dash out the door, ignoring her increasingly frantic calls. I quicken my pace down the walk, through our high wrought iron fenced gates, and out into the unknown, moving farther from our compound, which is larger than most in the village because of our family lineage.

  N’nkakuwe sits on the cusp between the old world and the booming cities of Accra and Kumasi. It is not Papa’s family land. He is from a tiny village in Fanti land, low-lying valleys nearly four hours from here. The history of my father’s people goes back hundreds of years to when the Ashanti and Fanti peoples warred among themselves for dominance and to trade with the Europeans who sought out African goods—goods being slaves.