The Missing Corpse

Chapter 1: Shawn

Shawn Wayles stepped off the crowded bus and into the seething, sweating chaos of the Malaba border, where Uganda and Kenya bled into each other like a bad wound. The heat hit him first, thick and merciless, turning his shirt into a second skin. The air smelled of diesel, fried food, and the sour tang of unwashed bodies.

The road ahead was a clogged artery, lined with trucks that stretched back into Kenya, their engines growling low like hungry animals. They carried everything-fuel, electronics, sacks of grain-whatever kept Uganda breathing. Drivers leaned against their rusted rigs, smoking cheap cigarettes, their eyes dull with boredom or something darker.

Shawn fit right in. Or, at least, that was the plan.

He had traded his usual sharp suits for faded jeans and a sweat-streaked t-shirt, his backpack light but packed with what he needed. No one would mistake him for a tourist. He looked like a man with somewhere to be and nothing to prove. Which was exactly the point.

The border pulsed with life. Vendors shoved plastic bags of roasted peanuts at passing travelers. Men waved tattered currency in the air, promising the "best exchange rate" in rapid-fire Swahili. Somewhere in the distance, a truck horn blared, long and angry.

Shawn moved through the crowd like a shadow, his eyes scanning for trouble without making it obvious. He avoided the main customs checkpoint-it was for the clueless and the unlucky. Instead, he slipped toward the footpath where locals crossed in a steady, unbothered flow.

That was when he spotted the boda bodas, a swarm of motorcycle taxis waiting like vultures at the edge of the road. Their riders-young, wiry men with hard eyes and quick hands-scanned the crowd, looking for fares.

One of them stood out. Not because of his face, but because of his shirt. It was old, sun-faded, the red almost pink now, but Shawn recognized the logo immediately.

Boston Red Sox.

Jesus Christ.

Thousands of miles from Fenway Park, and here it was, stitched across a stranger's chest in the middle of a border town.

Shawn walked up, swung his leg over the back of the motorcycle, and settled in.

"You a Red Sox fan?" he asked.

The driver glanced back, confused. "I don't know what that is."

Shawn smirked, tapping the logo. "The team on your shirt."

The guy looked down like he was seeing it for the first time.

"Oh, this. I don't read everything on my clothes, but yes, I like Red Sox."

"Who's your favorite player?"

"I don't know the players. I bought this shirt in the used market. Maybe someone else wore it before."

That stopped Shawn cold. Maybe someone else wore it before.

The words sat heavy in his mind. The driver had no idea what Red Sox meant, no connection to the game, to the city, to the culture-but he was wearing it anyway.

It wasn't his. It never had been.

Shawn felt something shift in his gut, an old instinct waking up. The world was full of things that didn't belong where they were. Sometimes they were harmless. Sometimes they weren't.

"Fair enough," he said, slapping the driver's shoulder. "Let's go."

The engine growled as they shot forward, dodging potholes and weaving through foot traffic. Shawn stayed loose, but his mind was already ticking through possibilities, mapping exits, counting the faces around him.

The driver made a sharp turn. Too sharp. And then they stopped.

Shawn's stomach went cold.

A group of men stepped forward from the side of the road, moving fast, surrounding them before he could react. The driver said something in Luganda.

The men grinned. Then, all at once, they started shouting.

"Sir! Best rates! Best rates!"

Money changers.

Jesus. Shawn let out the breath he'd been holding.

They were just hustlers, not thugs.

The men held out bundles of Ugandan shillings, waving them like bait. But Shawn wasn't interested in the loud ones. His eyes locked onto a man who stood a little apart from the chaos.

He wasn't shouting. He wasn't desperate. And in his hand, gleaming in the dusty afternoon light, was an iPhone 15 Pro Max.

Shawn blinked. Something about it made his skin itch. Not the phone itself-hell, he had the same model sitting back in a hotel safe-but the way it looked here, in this place. It was too new. Too clean. Like it had never seen a day of struggle in its life.

"Nice phone," Shawn said, stepping forward.

The man looked up, smiling slow.

"We're making money here, boy," he said, his English smooth, his accent thick. "That's why we have these iPhones."

Shawn reached into his pocket, pulled out a few Kenyan notes. The man took them, his fingers moving fast over the iPhone screen, calculating.

For a moment, it felt like something had shifted. Like two worlds had scraped against each other in a way they shouldn't have.

The latest tech in the oldest kind of hustle.

Shawn took the Ugandan shillings, sliding them into his pocket.

"Fair exchange," the man said, grinning.

Shawn nodded.

The boda boda driver, his mission complete, barely acknowledged Shawn as he wove through the crowd and disappeared into the sea of bodies. Shawn didn't watch him go. He had other things to worry about.

He moved through the throng, scanning the taxi park. The place looked like a graveyard for vehicles that had survived one too many bad roads. The shouts of conductors filled the air-sharp, urgent calls of destinations, names spat like warnings.

"Kampala! Kampala! Full van, we move now!"

That was a lie. The van was never full. Not yet. But it was the game they played.

A young conductor, sweat glistening on his forehead, shoved his way toward Shawn. "Forty thousand to Kampala," he announced.

Shawn dug into his pocket and handed over the shillings. Eight dollars, give or take. A small price to pay for blending in.

The van waiting for him was a relic from another era, its paint peeling in great, jagged patches, as if the vehicle had given up trying to hold itself together. The sliding door shrieked in protest as Shawn pulled it open. Inside, fourteen seats-at least, in theory. He settled into the front, close to the driver.

"Full soon?" Shawn asked.

The driver, a wiry man with a sunken face and a grin too wide for his weary eyes, nodded. "Soon, soon," he promised, but they both knew what that meant.

"Five minutes" could be an hour.

He settled in, his back pressed against the cracked vinyl seat, and watched as passengers trickled in. A mother cradling a sleeping child. A man with a bundle of sugarcane strapped to his back. A teenager carrying a live chicken that flapped once in protest before settling into miserable silence.

The van creaked under the weight of its occupants, but still, they waited. Another twenty minutes passed before the conductor slammed the door shut and smacked the side of the van with his palm. "Tugende!" Let's go.

The driver gave a satisfied grunt, twisted the key in the ignition, and the van shuddered to life.

They lurched forward, coughing up dust as they escaped the border town's tangled streets. Shawn let his gaze drift to the window.

As they rumbled forward, Uganda unfolded around him. The landscape changed from dry, choking red earth to something lush and alive. Banana trees stretched toward the sky, their broad leaves swaying in the afternoon breeze. Tea and coffee plantations rolled by in endless rows, green against the dark soil. Small villages dotted the roadside, their thatched roofs barely visible through the dense foliage. Shawn let himself admire it, but only for a moment.

It was beautiful. Almost peaceful. But Shawn had learned the hard way-beauty was a liar.

You could admire the rolling hills, the endless green, the postcard-perfect scenery, but it didn't change what lurked beneath. Power, greed, the silent violence that kept men in charge and others buried beneath them.

The driver hummed tunelessly under his breath.

Shawn shifted in his seat.

He could feel it, even here, in the quiet hum of the van's engine. That weight pressing against his ribs, that old, familiar whisper in the back of his mind. Something was waiting for him in Kampala.

Shawn let his head rest against the rattling window, eyes half-lidded, watching the Ugandan countryside unspool like an old film reel. Even the banana trees seemed to drop under the weight of the humid air, the occasional mud-brick house blurring past, laundry flapping on sagging lines. The road hummed beneath the tires of the ancient taxi van, and his mind drifted back-not to the present, but to that cold goddamn room on the sixth floor in Langley, Virginia.

It had smelled like fresh carpet cleaner and stale coffee. The kind of place that tried too hard to look nondescript, as if the weight of its secrets didn't saturate every inch.

*

Boylston Aldrich had been waiting, stiff-backed in his chair, his expression grave. That in itself was unsettling. The man had the face of someone who had spent years in the game, someone who...