Morgan elbowed him as hard as he could, but the impostor just tightened his hold. The lack of circulation to his brain began to take its toll, and Morgan knew he was as good as dead if he didn’t somehow get free. He had one last idea. Pushing against the man, he swung both his feet upward and rested them against the wall only long enough so that he could reach his hand into his right boot and grasp the hilt of his knife. He then pushed off the wall as hard as he could. The man staggered backward into the tiny bathroom, and his hold loosened just enough for Morgan to free himself, spin around, and plunge the knife, now in his hand, deep into the man’s gut. The man gurgled, slumped against the wall, and crumpled to the floor.
It had been many years since he had killed a man, and it filled Morgan with a sudden mental clarity. He searched the man’s pockets for something that might identify him and found a slim wallet in a shirt pocket, sticky with blood. He opened it and ruffled through it, taking the money to make it look like a robbery. He then checked the cards. “What the . . .” It was an employee ID, with the dead man’s name and along the bottom, the words, ACEVEDO INTERNATIONAL. Why was a man who worked for a government contractor posing as a CIA informant? Morgan got up and closed the bathroom door. He didn’t have time to think about that, not at the moment; with luck, the body would remain hidden long enough for Morgan to escape from the zoo.
He picked up his Glock and ran, making his way out of the grove and around a number of cages back to the orangutan habitat. People stared at him and backed away, and soon he noticed why: his shirt and arms were spattered with blood. He reached the orangutan cage to find two men standing there, playing out the same scene that he’d had with the impostor minutes earlier. Screw it, he thought, and he pulled out his gun. This was no time for finesse.
“I was sent by Cougar,” he said, holding up the Glock. “Which of you is the man I’m looking for? Which of you is Zalmay?”
The slighter of the two, a bewildered young man, sheepishly raised his hand. The other immediately reached for a gun, and Morgan quickly fired two rounds into the man’s chest, prompting screeches from animals and bystanders alike. The young man stood frozen, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.
“You need to come with me,” Morgan said, but Zalmay backed away, terrified.
“We need to get out of here now! There’ll be others!” Morgan insisted, and then he caught something out of the corner of his eye. While most of the zoo’s visitors were now running as fast as they could away from them, one figure in a burqa had just drawn a submachine gun from under her garment. This seemed to convince Zalmay. He and Morgan bolted just as she opened fire on them.
They dashed as fast as they could, bullets whizzing past them, hitting the ground and walls around them. Morgan was taking the most direct route to the exit when he spotted a man up ahead, running toward them, with a black submachine gun of his own.
“Turn here!” Morgan yelled to his companion, and they took a right on a path that led them along the perimeter of the zoo. There was a tall fence to their right, and to their left, a low wall separating them from the sunken animal habitats ten feet below.
Then Morgan saw him—the same man who had cut them off before had doubled back to intercept them on their current route, and he was now only about fifty yards away in front of them. Behind him and Zalmay, the woman in the burqa was still approaching. To go forward or backward and try to face either of them with only his handgun would be suicide. There was only one possible way out.
“Jump!” he yelled.
“What?”
But Morgan had already climbed over the wall to the animal habitat. Looking only at the dusty ground below, he pushed off. He tried to land on his good leg but still felt fire in his bad knee when he hit. Moments later, his companion landed beside him, tumbling over.
Morgan got up, and as he looked around, he saw piercing green eyes staring at him from no more than six feet away. She had been reclining lazily, at least three hundred pounds of sleek tendon and muscle. Now she seemed to be taking an inordinate interest in these intruders who had just landed in her home.
They had jumped, literally, into the lion’s den.
CHAPTER 14
Morgan looked into the lioness’s eyes, and out of the corner of his he could see her muscles tense. Half-remembered words from the story Baz was telling him in the car flashed in his mind: some jackass who’d wanted to show off for his friends had jumped into the lions’ enclosure, presumably the very one he was standing in right now, and had been mauled to death. One wrong move, and Morgan would meet the same fate. He stared into the lion’s eyes, at the tips of her long yellowed teeth, at a jaw that could crush steel. The first rule of surviving an encounter with a predator, passed on by an asset during a mission in sub-Saharan Africa, echoed loud and clear in his mind: don’t act like prey.