Need You Now

51

M ongoose was on the move. He did his best work at four A.M.

More than three years had passed since his last visit to Ciudad del Este. That one had been the capstone in a string of nine visits over a four-month period, all paid for by the U.S. government, all under the name Niklas Konig, a wealthy investor from Berlin. German was only one of five languages he spoke fluently, and on his first visit with Manu Robledo he’d spoken mostly Spanish. By their fifth meeting, he had befriended Robledo. By the eighth, they’d forged a business relationship. After the ninth, Robledo had traveled back to Miami with him to meet his Cushman connection, Gerry Collins. Collins had already been brought on board: Mongoose, personally, had sat him down, told him that Treasury was fully aware that he and Cushman were running a Ponzi scheme, and promised that Collins could get off with a prison sentence of ten years-as opposed to ten decades-if he cooperated. Operation BAQ had launched without a hitch. Manu Robledo and his highly suspect clientele would take a $2 billion loss without ever knowing that they’d been set up. A thing of beauty, and a perfectly acceptable result under a public policy cost-benefit analysis, if only Cushman’s scheme had, in fact, been worth the mere $6 billion that Treasury had estimated, not $60 billion.

Morons.

Mongoose climbed another step in the dark stairwell, then stopped. A bumpy puddle-jumper flight from São Paulo had left him with a nearly unbearable pain that radiated down his leg. Another painkiller would have been useless. After three years of living on pills, his system had built up a tolerance. Excruciating pain was a way of life, though sometimes it was so bad that it was impossible to stay on task. The pain-more specifically, the pills-had definitely made it impossible for him to remain with the agency. At least that was what the psychiatrists and pain-management specialists had told the bureaucrats on the disciplinary review panel. Shitheads, all of them.

Focus, damn it!

He closed his eyes and breathed in and out, slowly, letting his mind conquer this useless part of himself. After a minute or two, the pain lessened; it never completely went away. Pain was always somewhere, in his spine, in his lower back, in his hip. The worst was the pain down the back of his leg that felt as if some sadist had heated a knife with a blowtorch, jabbed him in the ass with the white-hot blade, and sliced him open from hip to heel. Pain on some level was with him every minute of every day, ever since he’d awakened in the hospital three years before and heard the doctor say that his motor function was unimpaired and that, in time, the pain could possibly go away. Possibly. The doc had been only half right. There were days when Mongoose would swear that there was something to be said for paralysis-for no feeling at all.

Only the promise of revenge kept him going. Sweet revenge.

Mongoose lifted his right foot, the less painful option under the current pain pattern, and took another step. He knew the Hotel Hamburg well. He had stayed there before, and he had climbed the back stairwell many times. The elevator would have been easier, but there was a security camera inside it, and the last thing he wanted was a digital recording of his visit. He knew the doors to the stairwell were never locked, knew that there were thirty-two steps from ground level to the second floor. He climbed the last eight slowly, then opened the door at the top of the stairway.

The hallway was empty.

Without a sound, Mongoose let the door close behind him, and he started toward Room 217. Carpeting muffled his footfalls. He needed to go only as far as the fifth door on the right. His stealth was merely a precaution to prevent any light sleepers from checking out a noise in the hallway and laying eyes upon him.

He stopped outside the fifth door. The rooms on either side of 217 were vacant. Mongoose had paid the desk clerk to make sure of it. He had the key to 215, which was an adjoining room to 217. He also had Room 219-just to make sure no one would overhear what was about to happen in 217.

He entered Room 215 and locked the door behind him. He did not switch on the lights. The glow of the moon between the parted draperies, through the window that overlooked a parking lot, was the only light in the room. He closed the drapes and waited for his eyes to adjust. Then he stepped farther into the room and laid his bag on the bed. It was his tool kit. He unzipped it and found the serrated diver’s knife. Just enough moonlight shone through the crack between drapery panels for the blade to glisten. He fastened his tool kit to his belt and stepped closer to the door to the adjoining room-the door to Room 217.

He took a deep breath, adjusting his mind-set, reminding himself that his actions were justified by more than just revenge. His old “friend” Robledo had shared much about himself-about his grandparents coming to the Tri-Border Area in the major wave of Lebanese-Muslim immigration that followed the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948; about his father, though an Argentine citizen, returning to battle the Israelis in the 1982 Lebanese War, only to fall alongside another 17,000 Lebanese killed. The war was considered an Israeli victory, with one major footnote: Hezbollah took control of southern Lebanon and southern Beirut. Mongoose was quite familiar with rumors that it also controlled the Tri-Border Area. One of many unsettling rumors. He’d also heard that the homicide rate in Ciudad del Este was more than five times that of New York City.

Mongoose wondered how many men had boosted the rate in both cities in the same week.

Mongoose threw his weight against the door and busted through to the adjoining room. Before Robledo could move, before he was even fully awake, Mongoose grabbed him, cuffed his hands behind his back, and threw him down onto the floor. He drove his knees into Robledo’s spine, shoved one side of his face against the carpet, and put the knife to his neck.

“Don’t move,” said Mongoose.

“Please, don’t!”

“Quiet!” he said, making sure that Robledo felt the cold steel of the knife as he reached into his bag with his other hand and removed his tool of choice. Not the garrote. This time, it was the same class of tool that had been used on Gerry Collins.

“I can make you a rich man, I promise,” said Robledo, his voice shaking. “Just don’t do this, please!”

“Begging already, Manu?”

Robledo’s body stiffened, as if perhaps there were a spark of recognition. “Do I know you?”

Mongoose leaned closer and hissed into his ear. “Don’t you remember me, Manu? It’s your old friend, Niklas Konig.”

“No, no way! Konig is dead.”

It was the one thing the Central Intelligence Agency had done right after his shooting-the certificate of death issued for Niklas Konig.

His hands a blur, Mongoose dropped the knife and, with the speed of a trained assassin, wrapped the wire saw around Robledo’s neck. With enough back and forth, it was fully capable of beheading a man. Eventually.

Dead, you thought?

“You wish,” said Mongoose as he jerked the wire saw.

“Please, stop! Please! ”

Another jerk of the wire deepened the flesh wound, enough to reveal that Robledo was a screamer.

“Stop!”

His begging made it all the more satisfying for Mongoose, but clearly a gag was essential. He quickly taped Robledo’s mouth shut, but as he tucked the roll away in his bag, Robledo squirmed and managed to kick over the cocktail table. Mongoose brought him under control with a tug on the wire, taking care not to inflict fatal injury, the tape muting Robledo’s cries of pain.

The upended cocktail table lay a few feet away, the four legs pointing upward like a dead animal with rigor mortis. For demonstrative effect, Mongoose went to work on one of the table legs, the saw cutting through solid pine in seconds. It dropped to the floor just inches from Robledo’s eyes, which were wide with fright, as big as saucers. Mongoose leaned closer to his prey, adding a touch of poetry to his sense of justice: “NATO-approved commando wire saw, Manu. Purchased right here in Ciudad del Este. Just like the one you used on Gerry Collins.”

Robledo groaned, but, again, the duct tape did its work.

Mongoose checked the thickness of the carpeting. Things would surely get messy, and his mind flashed with thoughts of sleeping guests in the room below waking to the steady drip, drip of blood seeping through the ceiling.

The bathtub.

With one hand Mongoose drew the wire tighter, and with the other, he grabbed Robledo’s shirt and dragged him across the floor to the bathroom.

“Be a good boy, Manu. Do exactly as I say, and I promise to make this quick.”

As quick as paint drying .