War Lord

Eighteen

I opened my eyes. A light breeze rolled around in the folds of the translucent white curtain closing off the outside balcony. Beyond the curtain I could hear folks splashing about in a pool somewhere below.

The sun was already up and my Seiko was set to go off in a minute’s time at six a.m. The pull-out sofa bed was as comfortable as any I’d ever slept on, or would have been but for the injury the swinging candlestick had done to my forearm. I turned my head and had a look at it. The skin was purple from elbow to wrist. I ran my fingers along the swelling, made a fist and rotated the arm left and right. Sore as hell, but nothing broken.

The Seiko buzzed.

The door to the bedroom was open. The bed was messed up but no one was in it. I got up, took a shower and mentally went through the leads we had to go on. We had so few that the review took no more than a handful of seconds, so I just stood under the water and tried not to think about the doomsday clock ticking down to midnight. Nine days, maybe less, and we were still going nowhere.

‘That you in there, Cooper?’ a voice called out. Petinski’s.

‘No, it’s George Clooney,’ I said. ‘Cooper had to go out. You mind coming in and passing me a fresh bar of soap?’

‘Breakfast is here and it’s getting cold,’ she said.

If I wasn’t mistaken, we were sounding like an old married couple. And given that we weren’t having sex, behaving like one too. If the woman down at reception got the hotel detective to check on our sheets, we’d be bounced out of here on false pretenses. Somehow I didn’t think that line of reasoning would make Petinski any more accommodating. I toweled off and threw on the robe hanging from a gold-plated hook on the door.

Petinski’s idea of breakfast wasn’t mine. Where were the scrambled eggs, bacon and pancakes? All I could see on the tray was muesli and fresh fruit salad. Nothing here was gonna go cold, unless she was referring to my appetite.

‘I’m having a swim first,’ I said.

‘After a shower?’

‘Shower first, swim second. House rule.’

Petinski shrugged. ‘Hurry, we have to get going.’

‘Get going where?’ I wondered. It was occurring to me that maybe I was being a little too managed. Spoon fed, even. I had no proper briefing, no resources, no intel beyond what Petinski chose to pass on.

‘CIA has a lead on Randy’s whereabouts. They’ve had a tip-off. They believe he could be in one of von Weiss’s safe houses. You and I have been volunteered to help ABIN close the cordon. We have to roll out of here in an hour to make the rendezvous at eleven.’ My partner was almost perky.

I picked up a handful of clothes, my wallet and the spare passkey. ‘What’s ABIN again?’

‘Brazil’s national intelligence agency — counter terror, et cetera.’ I knew that… ‘See you in twenty minutes,’ she concluded.

‘Okay,’ I said, though I had other plans. My gut told me the safe house would be a waste of time. If nothing else, it seemed odd that the type of operation the Brazilians wanted us in on wasn’t happening at dawn when most folks were dopey. This one was going down at brunch, a far more civilized time. My interest was in Céu Cidade, von Weiss’s favela and Rio’s mainline for drugs and guns patrolled by his private army. The place was a rat’s nest and we’d only scratched the surface. If I was von Weiss and had something to hide, that’s where I’d hide it. ‘Have you checked the camera? Are we receiving?’

‘The Mercedes left twenty-seven minutes after we did, a tall man driving — not our subject. The resolution isn’t great. Other than that, nothing of interest. Check the file after your swim. Just make it quick, will you?’

‘Yes, boss,’ I said as I walked out, a comment that earned me a good lip pursing.

The elevator was pulling into my floor so I decided to ride it instead of taking the stairs. The doors slid back. The box was pretty full, occupied by five large African males, all of whom were wearing sunglasses. I walked in, turned, and stood as the doors shut, the air reeking of sour animal, testosterone and Abercrombie & Fitch cologne. The way the men carried themselves — a kind of nervous aggression — was familiar. A sideways glance in the mirror confirmed that four of the men were bodyguards for piggy in the middle, a tall weasel-thin hombre with dusty matte-black skin wearing a cream-and-orange-striped knitted shirt and cream-colored pants, an ensemble that looked as natural on him as lipstick on a tarantula. Dime-sized diamonds were punched into the lobes of both ears. The four men at four points of the close protection box around him were heavy-set, bearded and needed a bath real bad.

The doors opened on the first floor and I offered to let the Africans out first. The bodyguards hesitated and looked me up and down. My own training told me that they were nervous about letting a stranger wander around behind them.

‘Beautiful morning, isn’t it?’ I said complete with goofy smile.

I got four frowns in return, but they decided I was harmless and moved out. Their principal ignored me completely — no eye contact at all. Keeping the box formation the men turned right, heading for the pool, taking up as much room as possible so that other hotel guests had to walk in single file, hugging the wall to get past. I wondered who the veep was and what his story might be, because they moved like men used to ambush, almost as if they expected one to appear and cut them down at any moment. Housemaids, maybe, bursting out of the laundry and attacking them with boxes of Tide.

I gave a mental shrug. They were none of my business and I was none of theirs. I detoured to the pool shop and bought a pair of swim trunks because my undershorts, aside from being undershorts, had a hole in them. After changing, I strolled out onto the pool deck and saw that there was a casual restaurant facing the beach on one front and the pool on the other, where a breakfast crowd had gathered. The Africans had taken one of the larger tables out in the open, closer to the pool. A waiter was speaking with them, his notebook open. The bodyguards appeared to be more focused on the space they found themselves in than on ordering breakfast. I recognized the body language. They were getting their lines of fire worked out, noting the exits and so forth, in case of an emergency that had nothing to do with a burnt side order of sourdough toast. Again, I wondered who these guys were.

I grabbed a towel from the cabana boy and claimed a lounge chair, dumping my clothes and towel on it. Several guests were in the pool doing slow languid laps. That was about my speed, so I joined the queue flopping back and forth. After around ten minutes of this I came to a stop to catch my breath and blow the watery snot out of my nose.

Meanwhile, the situation at the restaurant had changed somewhat. To start with, there were a few more guests now and, at one large table in particular — the one occupied by the African party — the mood was rowdy. I did another lap underwater, coming up for breath at the shallow end, then pushed off the wall to do a lap in the silence at the bottom of the pool. I came up and hooked my elbows over the tiled ledge as a second party of Africans swaggered across the courtyard, heading for the tarantula and his pals, all of whom stood to welcome the new arrivals with various gangsta handshakes.

At the sight of all this, my heart rate soared and rang the bell at the top of the scale because I recognized one of the new arrivals. Jesus, last time I saw this guy in the flesh it was nighttime in a clearing on the top of a hill in the east Congo rainforest where he was touting the killing power of the claymore anti-personnel mine to a bunch of rapists and butchers. And shortly after, the thing almost blew my head off. Some faces you don’t forget. Especially when you’ve taken the time to look at all available Interpol shots of that face in the hope that you’ll meet it one day in a dark alley and you’ll have a baseball bat in your hand.

The face’s name: Charles White, arms dealer, killer and most recently the middleman who, according to Petinski, had somehow managed to get a W80 nuclear warhead out of continental USA and into the hands of this Nazi-loving von Weiss we were stalking. And now here he was, about to sit down to eggs Benedict. Only it was broad daylight, and where was my Louisville Slugger?

On closer inspection, I also recognized Falco, Charles White’s older brother. And now that I thought about it, two more of the party — a couple of the bodyguards accompanying Charles White — also looked pretty familiar: muscle that had accompanied him in the DRC.

I glanced up at my balcony. The door was open, the curtain pulled aside, the room behind it a dark rectangle. I scanned the other balconies facing the pool: several other rooms also had their doors open and the curtains drawn back. Was ABIN up in one or more of those rooms, watching proceedings? Or maybe CIA? Or MI6? I scoped the restaurant. All I could see were waiters and guests behaving like waiters and guests. Where was the guy sitting on his own, reading the newspaper with the hole cut in the masthead? Or the nonchalant couple taking their newborn child for a walk in a stroller? If Charles and Falco were under observation, whoever was doing it knew their stuff.

I got out of the pool, walked to my lounge chair and toweled off. Bundling up my clothes, I wandered over to the hotel door without showing any apparent interest in the breakfast club. The casual act ended when I reached the hallway, where I broke into a sprint for the elevator. A couple of minutes later, I fell into my room on the fifth floor.

‘Petinski!’

‘Shhh, quiet,’ she hissed from somewhere inside. I found her sitting cross-legged up on the TV cabinet with her camera, lining up the Africans through the open balcony doors. ‘Charles and Falco White,’ she told me without lowering the viewfinder.

Old news. ‘Who’s the guy with the close protection?’ I asked.

‘Don’t know.’

I joined her in the shadows.

‘We shouldn’t be so surprised those two would turn up here,’ she continued, her digital Canon peeling off rapid-fire shots. ‘They’ve got money, the Palace is one of Rio’s finest hotels, and this city’s where they live.’

‘I’m staying on these guys,’ I said. ‘ABIN can plug its own holes.’

‘You don’t like following orders, do you, Cooper?’ Petinski said quietly.

‘Orders I like just fine. It’s stupidity I’m not down with.’

She climbed off the cabinet, removed the micro memory card from the camera and fiddled around with her iPad while I watched the tables down in the courtyard. A few minutes later she joined me at the cabinet as a woman entered the restaurant area, her back to Petinski and me. She wore a short bright-blue dress cut low at the back, and walked on low heels toward the focus of our attention. It was the kind of walk that makes men lick their lips — I licked mine.

‘Look, the entertainment has arrived,’ said Petinski.

When the woman was close enough, Charles White grabbed her, lifted her clean off her feet and sat her on his lap, side-saddle. She threw her head back and laughed, maybe a little too hard.

‘Jesus,’ I said under my breath.

‘What’s up?’ Petinski asked.

‘That woman down there. Her name’s Sugar.’

‘You know her?’

‘She worked at Jubilee. She was involved with Randy and Alabama.’

It took Petinski a few moments to get around to asking the obvious question. ‘Intimately?’

There was no way to soften it. ‘Yeah, I believe so.’

‘Both of them?’

‘Unconfirmed on that score. And there have been other connections.’ Me, for example. I took out my cell and showed her the picture of Sugar sitting with Ty Morrow in the Green Room several hours after he’d supposedly fled from creditors in his jet.

‘Men are such fucking idiots,’ she murmured.