Short Story

Stanley Chuck

Max puffed on his cigarette and remained impassive. He looked at his strap wrist watch; the time was 7:15pm. He had a meeting with the ex president’s chief of defense staff. While in prison, he had learned to sit and wait.

            Three years ago, Max worked for the government, the National Intelligence Agency, three years ago he had legally murdered a top government official, and  two months ago he had been a prisoner inside Kuje prison walls.

            He puffed on his cigarette and groped into the past. In 2008, Max was recruited by a senator to work for the NIA. Though the senator had argued against recruiting him, but Max had insisted.

The senator had thought it debasing and shameful to have Max work for the security, but Max had stressed and pleaded that he loved the NIA. He wanted to solve problems and he picked the NIA because he would love the opportunity to relate with foreign countries on national issues. So he was given the job because it was his choice, under the watchful eyes of director Santos Bakare.

            Director Bakare was tasked by the senator to watch Max because Max had a reputation for reckless behaviours. He had been flown out to complete his studies in Oxford, England, after been found guilty by the family of associating with the bad guys at school while studying in Nigeria. His friends proved to be a bad influence on him and the family. Max’s word-view had changed during his four years stay in Europe. He came back a refined person, but once a reckless young man is always a reckless young man.

            The senator who recruited him in the NIA had offered him a job from the president three years later. It was important that the president got re-elected as the election drew near.

   ‘The president has been controlled by a certain group of people. It was by luck that the presidency slipped out of their hands. Some of us in the government want that luck to continue.’ The senator had said.

Six months before the general elections, it was discovered that the spokesman to the president made an unaccounted use of $6:8bnUSD. The oppositions raised an alarm that the spokesman be probed and jailed, the masses screamed of corruption and demanded for the cruxification of the spokesman, but the president remained calm.

            Particularly, Max loved the president. Though considered highly unpolitical by most people and too civil for the seat he was occupying, the president was more intelligent and had more wiles than was accredited to him. He was the most educated person to ever occupy the seat in Asorock.

            The president was aware that if he did what the opposition and the masses wanted, the spokesman would be disgraced and he, the president, would also be implicated. The money was to be used for election campaign.

Few weeks later, the spokesman had an accident and died. The masses celebrated and the media tagged it ‘HAS DIVINE JUSTICE TAKEN PLACE?’ But it was Max who planned the murder of the spokesman.

A year after the spokesman’s death, and the president having won the election, a lot happened in Asorock. There were threats of blackmail and scandals. Soon an airplane carrying fourteen passengers from Lagos to Abuja crashed and all the passengers aboard died.

The plane was carrying three politicians including the senator who had recruited Max into the NIA, and who had asked him to handle the ‘spokesman’s problem.’ The nation mourned their deaths, some slammed and cursed the airline for inefficiency and incompetence, again many who hated the government celebrated and demanded for the death of more politicians. But Max mourned the death of his godfather. The man who had flown him to London when his life was seen to be in danger, the man who took him as a son after the death of his father, and the man who gave him the NIA job he wanted.

            The senator was his uncle. He was his godfather. And he knew his death was another planned murder. Only this time, it was not by him, but by someone else.

            The next followed. Santos Bakare was replaced by another director at the NIA. Max quit his job. Two days later, illegal drugs were found in his car and he was taken to prison.

            It was after two years in Kuje prison that he was smuggled out by a close friend of his uncle, the ex-chief of defense staff. Then he was given another job. Again, this time, it was a job he had always wanted while in prison.

            Max’s job was to assassinate the president of the federal republic of Nigeria.