War Lord

Nineteen

The party was breaking up. The bodyguards stood first and formed a loose diamond around the table where their principals sat. Falco put his arm around the tarantula guy while Charles played the gentleman and saw to Sugar’s chair, pulling it out for her. The four of them, surrounded by the muscle, strolled toward the lobby, laughing and chatting like they were off to a little league game.

‘They’re on the move,’ I informed Petinski, who was hurriedly stuffing various items into a shoulder bag.

‘Let’s go.’

I was still wearing the robe, the swimming costume beneath it, and my feet squelched in a puddle of water on the carpet. I slipped the robe and dropped the trunks to the floor and suddenly realized that Petinski was staring at me. Man, I’d forgotten about her completely. ‘Nothing you haven’t seen before, right?’ I said, toughing it out, turning to rummage through my clothes for clean undershorts.

‘Excuse me?’

There was no way I was going to stand around blushing. ‘Or maybe you haven’t.’ I stood up straight and square. ‘Petinski, meet Little Coop. Little Coop, Petinski.’

Her eye line took an excursion. ‘This is totally inappropriate behavior. There are rules, Cooper.’

‘It’s a he-said-she-said thing unless you have proof. You want me to vogue for your camera?’

Petinski glanced at her Canon as if considering it, then turned her back on me and walked to the door. ‘Just hurry the fuck up, would you?’ She snatched her bag, tucked it under an arm and stomped out.

I shrugged. It was easier to dress without an audience anyway and a minute later I caught up with her at the bottom of the fire stairs in the lobby.

‘Evidence or not, Cooper, the bullshit you just pulled is in my report,’ she snapped.

Down in reception, Gracia smiled at us as we crossed to the front entrance. I gave her a veiled thumbs-up and she returned it with excited silent clapping.

I waved down a cab while the stretch Hummer eased out of the hotel’s forecourt, a Hyundai SUV following. A few moments later Petinski and I were heading through the tunnel separating Ipanema and Copacabana from the rest of Rio, tailing the Hyundai.

‘What about ABIN and its cordon?’ I asked, testing her.

Petinski’s eyes were glued to the traffic in front. ‘A bird in the hand, right?’

I realized I was sitting on a newspaper, and pulled it out. O Dia, read the masthead. The Day, I figured. An ad on the front page for women’s underwear caught my eye. Then I clocked the main story of the morning, which included a photo of a burning vehicle outside a familiar home. There was an inset photo of von Weiss, and another of a snake with its black mouth open, fangs bared. I showed the paper to Petinski.

‘Underwear, Cooper?’

‘The house, Petinski…’

‘Oh, sorry. It’s just that I… I sometimes think you’re, y’know, preoccupied.’

I passed her the paper. ‘My mind is always totally focused on the job at hand.’

‘Yes, it’s just that I’m not sure what you think your job is,’ Petinski countered as she examined the photos. ‘That’s a mean-looking snake.’ She read the caption out loud, ‘Preta de Mamba,’ then double-tapped an app on her iPhone, opening a translator.

We drove for several minutes, slicing through the traffic, catching several amber streetlights and running one red to keep the Hyundai in view.

‘It’s a black mamba,’ Petinski announced. ‘A venomous snake, it says here, found in central Africa. It’s aggressive, and has been known to attack and even chase its victims. It’s the world’s fastest snake, apparently.’

I leaned forward and asked the cabbie, ‘Can you read, translate and drive?’

He nodded so I passed the paper forward and tapped the story. Glancing at the front page he said, ‘I have read this, já. A man who keep snakes at his house — he was robbed. The thief, he burn a truck to distract people and stole some valuable thing. This snake, it got loose and kill two people who work in the house. But now it has been caught. The man who owns the snake is rich and powerful. He offer reward for anyone who can give policia informações on the thief.’

I recalled the glass case being smashed, and seeing the thin black shadow whipping across the floorboards, too quick to identify before it vanished under a cabinet. A black mamba. A killer. Now I understood the cause of the fear I saw in the face of the guard who ran screaming from the room. He must have known what had slithered into the night.

The driver’s eyes darted into the rear-view mirror several times, checking us out. We were paying him to follow someone, and now we were asking about a front-page crime. I didn’t want him feeding anything to the police, concerned bystander — style.

‘Journalists,’ I told him, gesturing at Petinski and myself.

‘Ah, journalistas,’ he said. That seemed to do the trick and he went back to keeping track of the road ahead instead of his nosy passengers.

‘Are you going to call someone?’ I asked Petinski, opening the window to let in the traffic noise.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You don’t think you should inform whoever it is you really work for that we’re tailing the criminals who stole the nuke?’

‘I made a brief report when I uploaded photos taken at the pool. What do you expect should happen here, Cooper? You think we should just spirit them off to Gitmo? Think it through. We don’t know where the weapon is and these people won’t hand us a road map to its location.’

‘Then we might as well sit on our hands, ’cause they ain’t gonna lead us to it either.’

‘No, but despite all the smiles and backslapping we’ve seen these people carry on with, they have to be feeling the pressure. A nuke is a long way from a case of M16s with erased serial numbers. Someone will cave, make a mistake, and when they do, we’ll be there to exploit it.’

‘Call in the 82nd like I suggested, Petinski, because if they don’t crack and the weapon is used, the White brothers, von Weiss and everyone else connected with this will go to ground and we’ll have nothing.’

‘There’s nowhere on earth they can hide where we can’t find them.’

‘Right, just like we knew where to lay our hands on bin Laden for all those years.’

Petinski refused to be diverted. ‘I’ve been told to tail them and not lose sight of them. And that’s what I’m going to do.’

‘And what’s my role in all this? To hold your purse?’

‘If that’s what it takes.’

‘You want them to break, Petinski? Apply pressure.’

‘You do nothing unless you clear it with me, Cooper.’

Over his shoulder, the driver informed us, ‘Yes — to Pão de Açúcar. That is where they go.’

The road soon opened out into a circular area with a packed parking lot, far too many tourist buses for the available spaces clogging the place. Thick cables angled up from a terminal toward a vertical face of brown rock towering above the parking lot. I spotted Chas and Falco White trotting up the crowded stairs of the terminus with their unidentified friend and Sugar, the bodyguards in the loose diamond formation around them, a parting made for them through the sea of tourists by several uniformed police. There was a buzz in the throng, the kind brought on by the presence of celebrities. People held up their phones to get photos.

Our cab driver took us to the edge of the crush. Petinski paid the fare while I attempted to force a path through the mass, but it closed in solid behind the Whites and almost seemed to lift them up and deposit them at the doors of a cable car on the verge of departing. Eventually, when I reached the ticket office, I had to wait my turn behind a short, round, sweating tour guide with hair plugs who was having his book of ticket stubs checked by a meticulous young woman determined to find fault.

A buzzer sounded and a rotating orange warning light lit up in the platform area. The door closed on the cable car carrying our persons of interest. The car then slid slowly out of its bay and accelerated into a climb toward the rock face, a massive granite formation that seemed to burst out of the flat ground. Petinski caught up to me in time to miss the next cable car, and we only just managed to squeeze into the one after that.

Looking around, I figured either everyone in the confined space was CIA or MI6 or ABIN, or no one was. Cameras clicked and the atmosphere filled with oohs and ahhs as the rapidly increasing elevation provided views of several golden sand beaches lapped by blue water. And maybe in a few short days all that sand would be turned to glass as a minor sun burst from a milk can and bloomed over it.

The cable car docked on the crown of the hill and the load of tourists or secret agents, I wasn’t sure which, followed the signs down to another terminal where a second car was to hoist us to the peak of Sugarloaf Mountain. Petinski and I had lost sight of White and the rest, but there was no place else to go other than up, so we joined the queue and waited for the second leg of the journey.

‘I know we’re not here for the view,’ said Petinski, ‘but that’s a heck of a view.’

She was right; this was some panorama. The cream colors of Rio wrapped themselves around countless beaches and bays of blue-green water at the bases of what I could only describe as perky, surgically enhanced bumps poking up all over the place.

The cable car eventually docked on the top of Sugarloaf. Petinski and I threaded our way through the crowds milling about, and set off to locate the White brothers. The view was hard to ignore, but we did our best and concentrated on casing the small numbers of bars, fast-food joints and junk shops catering to the steady stream of tourists. But the White brothers and the rest of their party were nowhere to be seen.

‘They have to be here somewhere,’ muttered Petinski, hands on her hips, scoping out the vicinity.

Several tourists pointed at a Boeing passenger jet away in the middle distance as it banked and headed straight for Sugarloaf. It banked steeply again, just as I was getting nervous that it might land on top of us, and headed for a frighteningly short runway across the bay. The vultures wheeled on the air currents, moms and dads took photographs, and kids ate ice cream. I could have been on vacation. A helicopter suddenly shot around the side of the mountain and filled the air with the snarl of jet engines and rotor thump. Kids ran to the fence for a closer look as the chopper came to a hover abeam a heliport a little down the side of the mountain before the incline dropped vertically away. It was a large civilian job painted silver with thick blue and red stripes that ran from nose to tail rotor. I was familiar with the type, a French-made Eurocopter EC225, the civilian version of the military Super Puma. Aircraft like this ferried workers to oil rigs. It drifted toward the landing pad, wowing everyone who’d never fallen out of the sky in one of the fuckers, and sat in midair twenty feet or so over the pad before settling gradually onto its wheels with an eardrum-rupturing noise that cleared the sky of vultures.

I turned my back on the racket and was about to set off on another tour of the facilities to try to locate our suspects, when Petinski nudged me in the arm. Whadaya know… It was von Weiss stepping out of the aircraft behind a pair of bodyguards in expensive suits. He jogged slightly hunched over beyond the rotor downwash and shook hands like a visiting dignitary with the party that stepped into view: Falco and Charles White. So that’s where they’d been lurking. Petinski took pictures, just one of many people doing so. A small crowd followed von Weiss out of the aircraft — no one I recognized. One of them was a girl in a short white dress, with shoulder-length golden hair and skin. She joined von Weiss’s side and both were introduced to the tarantula in the cream and orange knit. I wondered how von Weiss — a neo-Nazi and probably also a believer in the master-race crap — felt about shaking hands with a black man. He seemed okay with it from this distance. Sugar was down there, too, I saw. Von Weiss didn’t shake hands with her, I noticed, but she scored an air kiss from his girlfriend, the buttery blonde.

A four-man security team that had spilled from the Eurocopter, all of them fair-haired and well over six five, formed an Aryan diamond pattern around the party. The Whites’ security team formed a looser, outer ring, and all of them moved slowly to the stairs that would bring them up to the main viewing area. I looked around for other helicopters. Good move on von Weiss’s part. Arriving by chopper he could spot the tail; and indeed two other choppers were standing off a mile away in a stationary hover.

The turbines on the Eurocopter spooled up. It lifted thirty feet off the platform and pivoted slowly through ninety degrees. Petinski kept snapping away at it as it backed away from the heliport and then spiraled into the sky. One of the choppers holding station in midair started to move also.

‘I think you got it,’ I said to Petinski, who was still snapping. ‘C’mon.’

The crowd’s interest in the new arrivals evaporated once the aircraft had departed. Petinski and I drifted along, acting innocent, keeping the party in view. They moved to a bar, one of von Weiss’s stormtroopers performing a quick site inspection before the principals ventured in. I noticed the bodyguard palming the bartender something, which resulted in two tourist couples being shown the exit. Von Weiss didn’t care to share. Meanwhile a waiter organized a single large table from smaller ones for the group, and everyone sat. Drinks came next. Petinski anchored herself in some shade under a tree and took more photos. I wondered what they were talking about. It would’ve been good to have a microphone in there. The muscle lined up across the front of the bar facing the viewing area and suggested seeking other venues to the rare tourist game enough to approach and ask if the place was open for a drink.

‘We just gonna sit here until they leave?’ I asked Petinski.

‘We’ve got the Whites and von Weiss in the one place. This is where the action is.’

From what I could see, the only action was sitting up there in the bar with von Weiss and the Whites in the form of Sugar and the sleek blonde. ‘Meeting out in the open like this? Von Weiss is thumbing his nose at us. Showing us he can’t be touched.’

‘What do you want to do, Cooper, go up there and accuse von Weiss of stealing a WMD?’

She had a point. And she was right about me wanting to do something, but what? My mind was a blank.

‘Look, we’re not the only people on this, Cooper,’ she again reassured me. ‘But we’re the only people on this here. We play it by the book and do what we can.’ She motioned at her camera. ‘Most importantly, we stay in the background and don’t blow our cover. Fate has put us in the box seat. Let’s just see what happens.’

I didn’t like it, but I had no alternative.

Petinski removed the chip from her camera and thumbed in a fresh one. I glanced around. There wasn’t much for me to do. ‘You want a Coke or something?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, it’s hot,’ she said, glad to give her trophy partner a task.

‘Back in a minute.’ I brushed a wasp out of my face and went off in the direction of the vendor. Along the way I saw a sign pointing to the washrooms and decided to make a detour there first. I found them eventually on the side of the mountain, roughly below the bar occupied by von Weiss and company. According to a traffic cone, the women’s was closed for cleaning but the men’s was still open. A kid appeared in the doorway, struggling with his fly. His mother, loitering nearby, berated him for dawdling, their cable car on the verge of departure. I went around behind them into the dimly lit cinderblock structure. There wasn’t a lot of ventilation inside, so I breathed through my mouth, leaned over the urinal and thought of running water. Halfway through the business, a man came and stood beside me, grunted, then exhaled loudly with relief. Neither of us acknowledged the other, both of us willing a veil of privacy around our personal space as we answered the call of nature.

Finished, and with a sense of being pleasantly unburdened, I zipped my fly, drew back from the urinal and washed my hands under a tap in a putrid basin. No towels in the wall dispenser. I shook the water off as the other guy arrived to take his turn at the basin. He came into the light: a heavy-set black man with meaty shoulders and traps so pumped up that he didn’t appear to have a neck, except that his expensive pink-and-white-striped tie had to be looped around something. On his black cheeks the stubble was short, coarse, sharp as iron filings and uniformly arranged as if aligned by a magnet under his skin. A mid-length ’fro stood out on his head a couple of inches. He glanced sideways at me and our eyes met for less than a second — more than enough time for us to realize that we had met once before, and that I had to kill him before he killed me. He roared and charged at my midsection, buried the point of his shoulder into my solar plexus and drove me into the wall. My head slammed into the empty paper towel dispenser and I felt the box crumple with the impact. He then tossed me hard into the concrete-block wall and I dropped like an old suitcase with a broken handle. A kick to the ribs came next; the kick was his and the ribs were mine — I’d have preferred it the other way round. The air rushed out of my lungs and wouldn’t come back. I couldn’t breathe. He bent over me to smash his elbow into my face. I moved and he missed, which opened up the angle to his nutsack making it fair game for the toe of my boot. So I drove it up, burying it between his legs, using the last of my strength. The man cried out and slumped to the floor beside me, curled into a ball, groaning.

Air started to work its way back into my lungs. I managed to suck down a breath, then another. The man came unsteadily to his feet, standing over me. Maybe he had small nuts and my kick had missed the spot.

‘Get up,’ he panted.

I came to my feet slow, using the wall.

‘Show me your hands.’

I showed them — empty.

His weren’t, not entirely. A dull black Walther fitted with a suppressor the size of a pork sausage occupied his right.

He put the gun in his jacket pocket with some difficulty, the sausage making it tricky, and poked it at me. I didn’t know this goon by name, but I never forget a face. And neither did he, it seemed. Around six months ago I’d laid eyes on him a couple of times in Cyangugu, a small town on the Rwandan side of the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. US advisors were on the ground there training a force of former insurgents, preparing them for integration into the DRC’s army. At the time, I was in-country on close protection duties, babysitting a pair of touring celebrities entertaining our advisors. This asshole was there riding shotgun for Charles White, who was selling stolen US-made weapons to all takers, including claymores like the one that almost gave me a haircut. I guessed he was aware that Chuck and I weren’t on the best of terms.

‘What now?’ I asked him.

‘We go for walk,’ he replied with a heavy French accent.

‘Then what?’

‘You know what. Turn around.’

As I began to do as he asked, the metal hand-towel dispenser remodeled by my head pivoted off its bracket, dropped off the wall and fell with a ringing clatter onto the concrete floor. The suit with the gun flinched a little, blinked and half turned, taking the gun in his pocket offline. I had maybe half a second. I used it to grab his tasteful silk tie, and yanked it as hard as I could, pulling it toward me. His body was twisted slightly and the force came from an odd direction. He teetered on his front foot, off balance, which I compounded by pulling down one side of his jacket, pinning an arm. I aimed a right cross at his chin and shortened the blow an inch or two so that the point of my elbow crashed into his nose. His hands went to his face and he reeled back. I helped him on his way, grabbing a handful of ’fro and bouncing his head off the wall. There was a loud clink as his teeth came into contact with the water pipes running down to the basin, and a couple of them flew out of his mouth and dropped into it, rattling like glass marbles against the porcelain. The pipe also caught his forehead, dazing him, and he slumped to the ground, the Walther clattering out of his hand.

I looked around, panting, unsure what to do, my heart working overtime. I couldn’t leave this ape in the toilet block, and I didn’t want him raising any alarm bells with the White brothers and von Weiss. I had to get him out of here and dispose of him somewhere, somehow.

I picked up the Walther and stuffed it in the back of my pants, then frisked him. His wallet and three magazines of what looked to be armor-piercing rounds became mine. Obviously, this guy wasn’t going to let a little body armor stand in the way of a kill.

‘Hey, you in there…’

It came from outside. A woman’s voice. It was a whisper, a hoarse whisper meant for me. It didn’t sound like Petinski. I wondered if maybe it was police. If so, how’d they know to address me in English rather than Portuguese? Maybe it wasn’t police…

A woman appeared at the entrance, blonde and attractive. I’d seen her before.

‘I’m armed and dangerous, honey,’ I said.

‘That makes two of us.’

She showed it to me. Small, 22 caliber, gold plated, pearl handle.

Unsure about what to do, I propped the unconscious brute against the wall, leaned on him and checked the Walther in case I needed to use it in a hurry. ‘What do you want?’ I asked her, stalling, taking the Walther off safety.

‘You’re CIA, formerly OSI. Your name’s Cooper. I saw a picture of you walking into the tailoring shop over the CIA station downtown.’

‘And you’re von Weiss’s toy.’

‘More accurately, I’m Emma Shilling, MI6. We’ve got three minutes, perhaps less, before someone comes looking for me. And in the meantime you’re going to need help dealing with that.’

I figured she meant the sack of shit propped up like a drunk against the wall. ‘Put your costume jewelry away and come in with your hands where I can see them.’ MI6. I couldn’t check that the woman was who she said she was, but I figured she’d’ve shot me if she wasn’t.

Slipping the weapon into a gold mesh purse, she clickety-clacked into the lavatory block on strappy heels. ‘What happened?’

‘He splashed on my shoes.’

‘You’re fucking crazy. He’s got friends just around the corner.’

‘The guy jumped me. We’d met before — another time and place. My cover was blown in a heartbeat.’

‘We have to get rid of him.’

‘He’s too big to flush. I tried.’

The MI6 agent — if that’s what she was — wasn’t exactly outfitted for body disposal. Her dress was a white pleated fabric only slightly heavier than air, and it floated as if in slow motion around her slim, fit body. The unconscious sack of shit had blood oozing down his chin. I took my jacket off and handed it to her. ‘If you’re gonna help, put this on.’

She took the jacket. ‘Wash his face.’

She spoke with a clipped English voice, like any moment she was going to ask me if I liked fox hunting. It was an upper-class public-school accent. I’ve hung out with enough Brit SAS guys to recognize one when I heard it. Turning on the tap in the sink, I cupped some water onto his nose and mouth and rinsed off most of the blood. Two teeth had been trapped by the grate over the drain hole. I pocketed them. When I was done, the woman threw on my jacket, turned inside out and worn wrong way round like a smock, and hooked her arms under his.

‘We’re between cable cars,’ she said. ‘As soon as a fresh load of tourists arrives, a queue will form here, so we don’t have long. There’s a path down there, a kind of nature walk. Out the door, down some stairs and veer left.’

I shouldered most of the guy’s weight and made for the door, his feet taking one step for every three of mine. The woman acted like a rudder, guiding him from behind. A middle-aged Asian male heading for the john cut across our path with his wife, a short, thickset woman wearing jeans and a tourist t-shirt with the statue of Christ on it, arms outstretched. Both stopped and gaped at us disapprovingly as if thinking surely it was a little early in the day to be falling down drunk.

‘Something he ate. Too much iron,’ I explained to them as we stumbled past.

The man hurried his wife out of our way and pointed her toward the lavatory block.

‘Down there,’ directed the nicely dressed British agent.

I half fell down the steps and dragged our now semi-conscious captive with me. He was a heavy fuck. I wasn’t going to be able to haul him too much farther.

‘Left,’ said the woman.

The path cut a tunnel through heavy jungle. Beyond the leaves and scrub were glimpses of another part of Rio across the bay, rising whitely from more turquoise shoreline.

‘How much farther?’ I grunted.

‘Thirty yards or so.’

The heavily concussed man staggering between us was regaining more control over his limbs with every step. He was going to snap out of it properly any moment and I wanted him down on the ground with a gun in his face when that moment arrived.

‘To the right,’ the woman said as a fork in the path appeared. We followed it to the right until the fence came to an end at a signpost warning of danger ahead.

‘I need to ask him some questions,’ I said.

‘No, we have to get rid of him now. I need to get back to von Weiss, and you have to vacate the area as soon as possible, because this man is going to be missed and they’ll come looking. We’re stopping here.’

Gladly. I stopped, panting, sweating heavily. His legs might have been moving, but I was still more or less carrying him. I rolled the man off my shoulder, into some low shrubs, insects chirping unseen in the bushes around us.

The woman parted a branch, which revealed a sheer drop and an unobstructed view of the ocean and sky. Black vultures wheeled on the air currents rising around the rock. ‘We do what the locals here do when they want to get rid of a body.’

‘And that is…?’

‘Feed the birds.’

Kneeling down, she grabbed a handful of his coat and tried to roll him toward the edge. He rolled some, but not enough.

The man groaned, on the edge of consciousness. I lifted his arm, pushed him over onto his side and then shoved him with my boot toward the void. He rolled onto his front and then his side. Another shove and the incline took over, momentum gathering, and then he tumbled off into the sky, gone without further sound.