Chapter 1: Central Area Boom

When the next song came on, it became clear there was not going to be an escape for me from the first adventure of that telling night. It was the night that changed everything. I had played my way into the hands Udoka EGWUNBA, the daughter of a traditional group leader in a remote village in Akwa Ibom. How she had saddled her way to the top of the waters past rapids was a thing of wonder before that night.

 However in that moment, the only thing visible was my watching her slip a triangular shaped pink pill in my glass of Veuve Cliquot. The sparkles reached the rip of the glass this time, as she twirled the glass half-full in her hand.

 Her crimson red nails scrapped the knee of my other leg, whilst my left leg dangled for balance in the enamored freeze of time. I realized what she was doing, yet had not the will to stop it. I was going to spill tonight, I thought. In more ways than my brain’s purging thoughts.

 She touched my lower thigh and peeked into my eyes. As heavy as I already felt my upper lids, it was apparent they gave her a different kind of appeal. She must have seen seduction, cause she advanced in few moments later, brushed my cheek with that traveling hand and its quirky fingers. She drew closer and breathed in my space. I could inhale every breathe, with the sensation that ar0used from her chocolate and berry-scented exhale. She let it all off close to my mouth. It was heavier air. I felt them when their vibrations hit my lips. I took it all in.

“Are you sinking with the moments…?”

I wanted to speak from the depths of me. She was deploring all her magic on hypnotizing me. I was going to take the drink in a few seconds and gulp down whatever she wanted a will for me in addition to the half bottle of whiskey I had had earlier completing my research, and that would be the beginning of whatever.

She smiled sheepish and covered my legs within girth of the spread of hers. Her pink laced dress responded to her motion, and the split of the side let them spread from her left thighs as they laid swinging my vision to their side. Her right stood firm on the ground before me when she handed me the glass of what used to only be my deluxe champagne in the glass.

I wanted to take the glass when she tilted my hand to the side and put the glass to my mouth. I parted my lips and she kept a perfect curve as she made me take it all. Stroking two fingers across her bare thighs now. They were slightly hairy, very tender in sight and as she sunk the nails off each finger one after the other, my eyes stayed touching the linear points of a horizontal view of her thighs from her knees up until the lace of her charcoal black panties. She must have have wanted me to sneak that peek.

Few minutes later, she sat next to me. One leg across the other as she leaned into the handwoven rafia couch we laid. “Are you starting to feel better now?”

I was wondering which of our worlds existing in parallels she meant. If it was the momentary glimpse or the wide and wild one that had brought us to the place we were and cause the infiltration of the moment ago. “What do you want Udoka?”

“The Honorable wants to see you. Has to see you tonight, you’re becoming a big nuisance to his project and he has to make an example of you before this becomes a trend.”

“Ah”, I scoffed, dropped my hand to my side, and continued “I cant be missing for too long, and when I come back out, I could go on the record about all of this events that has happened”.

She shook her head slowly as though in recompense mode with me. She gave another one of those her lounging smiles and shot straight, “Its not like I answered an advert to a “Wanted” for you, but better me than who? Least you know I’ll have you handed over in one peace.”

“Wait, does that mean you don’t know what they plan to do with me?”

The last four months have been intensely chaotic for me as I was more on the run than in my own skin after I stumbled upon a story and discussed it with my boss. Dr. Rufus Ajoke was not one to let a story like that be published on his new network. But given it is a substantial one that wont be away from public knowledge for too long regardless how they try to keep it buried, they started to make moves to keep it manicured before release.

The members of the Federal House of Representatives in the capital had created a committee to sovereign over the inquisition of a disastrous attack that happened in the Ageva community of Okene local government in Kogi state. Six Rep members were assigned and Honorable Akinpelu Shonubi was the rep member who chaired the committee.

 He had made it known from his ascension to seat that he was not going to give room to any media body saying anything on the events until given permission.

 An odd stance from someone with such close ties to the Villa that his views clashed with those of an administration that claimed to promote Freedom of speech.

It was ordinarily worrisome to believe. The present administration had risen to power on the wings of an intense propaganda that took apart the pillars of the previous ruling administration. Both were factions of the same political party, but the differences in their political philosophy was where they stood apart. This time, the side that aided violence in charting their course, including from election campaigns to being in power were the ones that won after breaking out to forming a new party months before the elections.

Sixteen school pupils had been presumed dead after weeks of being abducted by a squad in military uniforms that was reported to have driven into the compound of the school at 4:25 AM on a Thursday morning in April after a rainy previous evening. Activities on the college grounds usually shut early whenever it rained in the evening. Some wealthy families in the Federal Capital owned stalls in the compound that sold to students and lecturers alike, and there were some other artisans from the community that displayed their wares and merchandises in the college of technology compound in Koton Karfe. It was a community nearest to the border between Kogi state and the Federal Capital Territory that house the Aso rock villa where the president resided. It was primarily home to the Egbura Koto people that had more than 400-year history of inhabiting those lands. The town is the roots for the Egbira civilization and hosted the historic site of the greatly famed Igu kingdom.

The new administration was lucky one to have aced the finishing to a half-decade project the previous administration had started before its second term. The Koton Karfe college of technology housed teenagers and young adults who were admitted to learn and build world class technology hub of human resources.

Two years into the program, a group of students and an instructor were taken hostage by a group that came into the school compound in army uniforms and batches on their uniform that displayed “Special Forces” insignia. They were readily presumed to be from the Armed Forces’ elite squad.

The men marched toward the school hostel, asked for their house master and house mistress, then made them provide the entire team on a students’ competition squad that won at a technology summit completed in Lisbon, Portugal just a few months earlier.

They had made the AgroGuard AI that the medial fell in love with and labeled the NigerFarm resilience. It was a comprehensive AI powered climate-smart farming platform for smallholder farmers and mid tiers all the way for integration to work for large scale commercial farmers. It combined satellite and drone imagery with low-cost solar powered IoT sensors, and edge ML for real-time decision support. They also setup an arm of the firm to be the division that handles their need for Multi layer data acquisition.

It was one part that required sound expertise creating a room for MODIS source for satellite data and drone mapping capabilities. When the Federal Government refused to sponsor the project building from inception, a senator from Benue North East senatorial district. Senator Terhemen Gemade had taken it upon himself to provide thirty six million naira they spent building a setup laboratory for the team and allotting them with comfort and sufficient resources to build the NigerFarm.

When it was displayed at the summit in Lisbon, they won most impact technology award, and then offer started to stream in to invest in the service.

In a very questionable course that happened behind closed doors severally, the team leaders that comprised of one lecturer from the school and a coding director that volunteered while on vacation from his family in Newcastle decided to open investment into the project from only one source. The Meredin Caliphate from Adamawa state.

People started to complain this was a group that was known to only invest in projects that promoted Islam. They were also popular to have backed a militant group from North East community in Bonta community in Konshisha LGA. The Bonta Boys were rumored to have earmarked from the Igede Area after years of working for a now-deceased religious leader, Bishop Igbinde. When he died, they came together and formed the Bonta Boys.

They were later acquired by a huge funder of the Meredin Caliphate, who integrated them into the cause of the group’s ambition. They sacked schools and kidnapped their headmasters, brutalized only to later receive huge ransoms before their release. It had happened more than six times, it was becomig a routine and yet-to-be kidnapped schoolheads waited and lived in daily shudder of the day their turn would come.

Since the kidnapping at the college of technology, a media outlet that rivaled mine published the story that some disgruntled members of the Bonta Boys had murmured after a fight in a night bar along the highway that linked the Igede area with the Shangev Tiev community that was most popular for illegal mining. The members of the terror group had a dispute and some angry members were said to have lost in an exchange of fits and then threatened to release body cams of their abduction of the students. A truck driver who had alighted to have a drink and at the bar before lodging claimed to have overheard that conversation. When he called in on a radio program at WAZOBIA FM in Abuja, he made that admission, and since then it started to shake the nation. Some senators who had reported ties to the Meredin Caliphate started to clean up their social medias and distance themselves from them in public and private. They deleted tweets where they praised the Caliphate for keeping their traditional beliefs of the religion alive.

Since the students went missing, Senator Ter had sleepless nights not just from conscience but from parents of those pupils who were abducted. He was being hankered down to have known a thing or two about the event. He was famously at loggerheads with the team because he was turned down on his offer to buy into the successful tech project. He wanted to chaperon the startup and he boldly believed it was within his rights since he had sponsored the team and funded the whole.

I was a casual friend to Senator Ter. How our friendship had started was not very clear to me, but it had been at a technological summit regarding mining precious stones without unfriendliness to the ecosystem. He had called me and informed me of how bad things were getting for him since the kidnapping. He too started to get worried about the bad name it might carve him for the ages if the pupils were never found or reported dead.

Many such cases had happened in the middle belt communities where students would be kidnapped from secondary schools and higher institutions and wind up dead after a month or beyond. This abduction was four days to pass the one month mark. The senator had hired me to conduct investigative report on the matter and have it published without bias, but then it was an unspoken truth that it was to be written to make him not look guilty as the perpetrator. He was elusive with me when I questioned him about whether or not it was him who ordered the abduction. He was a man I had met since the year he became a senator of the Federal Republic.

However, since he started in office, he had been a regular at our famed pub where we all drank a few bottles and exchange men’s wisdom. A year into his time, he started to brush off our weekly meetups with news of travels and agreements with foreign investors. He slowly became a completely distant fella and I had to hold my side of the sea. He was older, he would claim to have lots of family issues I could not yet understand.

 My having a two year old with my longterm girlfriend did not seem to him enough to make me understand what it took to have a family. I always let him have first say on that topic. Now was a different time I needed him completely honest with me to know what I was getting myself into.

Now I was vulnerable in the hands of Udoka, the famous blogger that had been brazen enough to have taken down a fuel theft empire. I was being skeptical of her moral stance too, since she had taken on the skin of a feral animal baiting and about binding me that evening.

“How much are you promised for handing me over, Udy?” I managed to ask to buy some time and see if I could leverage something more for whatever they were offering her.

She sneered, “You lot think everything always has a number on it? Some acts are to be owed. The Honorable will pay me back…someday down the line”.

I shook my head slowly and slurred the words, “The sen…se-sen…”

“Senator Ter? He’s done after this tenure. The administration has no use for him again. At least he’ll go back home to his father’s money”, She dismissed.

 There had been claims the senator’s father was one of the men that benefited from the fuel subsidy scam that had been the bone of contention in the country for almost two decades. He had publicly denied it several times and his mother had followed suit. All that graced public record was that his family was wealthy from distributing petrol and petroleum products across the northern region of the country. Their fuel stations structure suffered a collapse less than a five years into the business, yet they remained in public eye and the family was always present at celebrations and awards organized for the elite families that called the shot at the nation’s economy.

Senator Ter was able to distant himself from the murmurs of nepotism and a corrupt family when he appeared to have lived two weeks on the IDP camp setup by the government after the Agatu genocide for the displaced persons from the three communities that suffered from the doomsday attacks. He did it in solidarity with the displaced persons forcing the federal and state government of the aggrieved state to start mobilizing resources for the construction of a temporary residence for them. It had made him the man of the people for more than that moment. This was the persona he ferried his political journey with.

“I don’t…listen, I don’t care what he did before I came on board. I am only working a story, and I swear..Udy…”

She took out a napkin and wiped my beading brows, “Don’t worry, the sweat will subside soon. Then only the woo woo feeling will remain. You wont do any drama here, baby. We will walk together to the car, and you can leave your keys with one of the security men. We let him know you’ll be back for it”.

I felt my body become too heavy for a willing soul of mine to control. I was tingling the tips of my fingers against the handle of the chair as she lifted me from the chair, I found support on the stability of her standing. My head tilted to the side and they found rest of the ample cleavage she had swooned me with from the onset of the night I had barely remembered planning or assenting to.

There I was, standing with an arm across the famed curves of Udoka, yet I was unable to grasp the tense sensual electric cells I had always imagined they would pass. Maybe they were being passed, but the d@mned pills she slipped into my drink was blocking the feeling.

I wanted the feeling. I wanted to escape too. It played a few scenes in my head the sort of life that awaited me following the act that had just spurned at the lounge.

We made our way past the two aisles close to where we sat in the VIP. Now we could see the others who were seated in the main lounge where the music blasted beyond the healthy decibels. I was not paid much attention. It was easy for anyone noticing my staggering walk to presume I was another junkie with a girl exiting the VIP to having a rendezvous till dawn. It would be be elating and comforting if that were to be the case. There would be a rendezvous, but definitely not with her as it seemed those minutes.

When we made it to the exit, the silence that overwhelmed the room caused us to pause in our steps. We shot a glance at one of the TVs hung high in the lounge, it was the exit, so the channel was usually a news or reality show channel. This time, it was a reality show channel that paused to give the breaking news.

As Udoka’s clutch and car key fell off her hand…I listened to the presenter announce …

“SENATOR TERHEMEN GEMADE, HONORABLE FELIX AJUWON AND HONORABLE AKINPELU SHONUBI ARE DEAD. THE THREE LAWMAKERS ACROSS BOTH CHAMBERS…”

As we stayed frozen for more than half a minute, soon as the people started to murmur, I jerked myself from Udoka’s loose grip and watched her lose stance and started to slip. I quickly pulled her hand closer and she came falling on me. My lack of balance threw us both over the next table closest to the aisle we had anonymously walked a minute ago. Some cold drinks spilled on my back and neck, while I held her tight to prevent her from falling to the ground. She did not seem to bulge during the fall. That startled me and I jerked her around in both arms. We were now on the floor. I was sitting upright, as the people from the table flew up in anger and started hurling insults at us. Studying the unwanted attention that was gathering, I stood and held her by the arms and dashed us both for the exit.

On getting out to the parking lot, she was still looking confused when I slapped her in the cheek, “Udy! Udy, come on. Get a grip! Where is my car key?”

She looked like she had seen a ghost. “I…I…tossed it to the…to the bush…around there. Lets go in my car!”

She motioned to where she parked. But as we advanced, I started to hear voices of people that were careful to not be seen easily when one walked toward that part of the lot. She shuddered and stretched her right hand to curb my walk outside of her parallel.

 I walked back in line behind her and whispered, “What is going on? Those are not your guys?”

“Wait…” she studied them and I watched as she carefully removed the wedge on her heels. She pulled on the heel strap and held her clutch very close.

“Run!” She yelled and I followed as she tunneled through the maze of cars in the lot. It was a football night, so the cars were a lot and some were poorly packed. Most of those drivers would be familiars who tipped the security men handsomely. They, of course, acted like they owned the place. The invisible shareholders.

We paraded through the cars with three of those men looking around for us. She kept muttering “blood of Jesus, blood of Jesus…” as we crouched to the barbed wire fence. That was when the explosion happened. It threw shards of broken glasses around the lot. Some of it landed few meters from where we laid, almost melting into each other. She smelled good. That was the second time I noticed that night. I tried to disengage myself from the moment by running through my mind’s heaps what fragrance she was wearing. It scented familiar- before the thought landed, I blocked the images of the who made it a familiar one and recognized it was Elizabeth Arden’s.

“Where she enter? She never see am comot since?” We heard faint voices of the men as one of them drew near and banged a hard object on one of the bonnets of the cars.

The smoke from the exploded car started to draw attention. Some who had not really found the booming sound offensive were starting to engage from the thickness of the smoke and the fire lowing and rousing with the dashing wind of the evening. Some people from the lounge started to run outside and parents with teenagers were screaming and asking for firefighters. We all knew that would take another half hour if not more before they got the will to make it down there to douse or document the fire as another statistic data.

I started to maneuver the base wires of the fence. One after the other I disembarked the clench from one pattern to another as I let loose more than four steps before pushing the opening a little wider to enable us to make our exits from the compound.

We made it out but it was not without its downside. We slipped as we made it out on the carpet grass that stretched beyond the compound. We were only unaware it was mushy land close to the fence. We fell toward the stream and I had it worst. My entire pant’s ankles were badly stained while she only slipped with her hands both falling in the swamp. She struggled for her clutch and the shoes that were now badly broken at heels. She gave them one last sorrowful look before tossing them in the swamp. She walked past me and headed for the stream where she washed her hands and the exterior of her clutch. I followed and was able to get the water to clean my pants. I cleaned my hands and rub them on myself to dry.

I wanted to sit on the grass and lay there exhausted, but she quickly grabbed me from under my armpit and hurried us towards the bridge from us. A police checkpoint was on the exit of the bridge and that night we saw them preparing to exit, blaring the siren as they made for the lounge to respond to the emergency. We waited a bit for them to pass before we noticed they left two personnel behind. We managed to walk through the unbalanced terrain that led to the passage underneath the bridge. We walked it to the other side, holding hands all the way like we feared one of us would go missing anytime.

As we crossed to the other side of the bridge, we noticed several flashlights pointed at the paths we had just taken. That was when we realized it was only a matter of time before they saw the footprints we would have left boldly in the mushy lands. We headed to the side of the road and waited for the cars that looked official to pass. No show for the hilux trucks as they could be harboring any kinds of persons. Their occupants were always unpredictable. We stayed low behind a woven bush close to the kilometer post.

That was when we noticed an old truck that tilted to a side from the weight of the load it carried. It was drivers that delivered poultry and feeds from the north to the southern parts of the country. I waved for them to stop, they let us sit at the back where they packed the piles of corn and unprocessed guinea corn. We journeyed with them till we got off at Kabba girls grammar school. That was when she got the courage to open her purse and check her phone. She was reasonable enough to realize we were not in the best position to take sides just yet, so she handed me my phone.

She screamed at the breaking news atop her list of 113 New Messages on WhatsApp and iMessage.

“Maaaaaaad…” I exhaled at the realization of what it meant for her. And for me, down the line.