War Lord

Twenty

The woman who’d identified herself as Emma Shilling had dropped my coat on the path. I recovered it and caught up with her power-walking back toward the lavatory block, checking her watch, agitated. ‘I’ve been away ten minutes. That’s too long.’

‘The facility was closed — you had to wait.’

‘The people I’m with are very tense. Paranoia levels are high.’

‘They seem pretty relaxed.’

‘Trust me, they’re not.’

‘Serves ’em right for using fake passports,’ I said.

‘You and I both know that’s not what this is all about.’

‘Really? What’s it about?’

‘Nice try. You’re with the Company. Ask your people at Langley.’

‘CIA? We’ve just met and already you’re insulting me.’

‘If you’re not CIA, then what are you? You bloody Yanks have more bloody secret agencies than I’ve had sodding boyfriends.’

‘I take it you get around.’ She ignored that so I cut to the chase. Or a small part of it at least. ‘Randy Sweetwater. The name ring any bells with you?’

We were close to the block and could observe it clearly through the trees. There were more people milling around — the cable car must’ve arrived. The cleaner’s cone was now in front of the men’s section, closing it to the public, but a giant of a man nevertheless walked out of it and went straight into the women’s without a moment’s hesitation. I’d seen this guy earlier getting out of the chopper, directing the security: one of von Weiss’s men.

‘Shit,’ the Brit muttered when she saw him and drew back into deeper cover.

‘Who’s Dolph Lundgren?’

She knew who I meant. ‘His name is Julio Salvadore. He’s a sociopath from Paraguay and he’s von Weiss’s right-hand man. He’s come looking for me. This is not good.’

‘Like I said, the facility was closed, and you went on a hunt to find another.’

She took a second to process the excuse before nodding, accepting it. Meanwhile, I wondered what the cleaners would make of the blood spatter. I hoped they got to it before Dolph did. Speaking of whom, he exited the women’s toilet, a perplexed female tourist trailing in his wake, binoculars around her neck. She checked the signage on the wall, evidently wondering whether it was she who was in the right section, while the Paraguayan looked around the area, hands on hips. Yep, he was a big motherfucker: six five and maybe two hundred and fifty pounds.

The British agent opened her purse, took out a black Chanel tube and used it to paint her pink lips a shade pinker. ‘How do I look?’

In fact, nothing like a woman who’d just helped wrangle a gorilla off a mountaintop. I picked a leaf out of her golden hair, which was dead straight and cut Cleopatra-style. Dark makeup accentuated pale blue eyes that shone like there was a light source somewhere behind them. Her skin was olive, smooth and free of lines or blemishes of any kind. I pegged her age at maybe twenty-five. She was a nice juicy goat staked out by MI6 to catch a lion. ‘You’ll pass,’ I told her.

‘Okay, here goes.’ She turned to go down the path to work her way back to the bar from another direction.

I stopped her. ‘Randy Sweetwater was a pilot. He worked for von Weiss. Firecracker coloring… good with women.’

The tiniest of lines formed between her eyebrows. ‘American, right? Yes, I think I’ve met him. He was around a lot, but not lately. He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?’ Shilling must have seen something in my face. ‘Von Weiss has a sensitive nose for double agents. If he suspected him, even a hint, he’d have been disappeared.’ She took a card from her purse and gave it to me.

I already knew that von Weiss believed someone in his inner circle was a double agent. Did he know there were at least two? ‘What about you?’

‘I didn’t come into this without skills.’

‘Neither did Randy.’

‘This is how I pay the rent, okay? What do you do?’

I looked into her bright blue-gray eyes and was reminded of sunlight on stainless steel. She’d handled the disposal of a body as easily as most women order cocktails. Yeah, she had skills, but she was working in an environment where they could easily get overwhelmed. I glanced at the card. A logo — silver on blue. ‘“Olympe.” What’s that?’

‘A restaurant. Von Weiss will be there tonight. You be there too, if you can promise me you won’t kill anyone.’

‘I can’t be in the same room with White — he’ll recognize me.’

‘He won’t be there. I’ll try to find out what I can about your friend.’ She started to move.

‘Not so fast,’ I said.

‘I have to go now, okay?’

‘The guy in the orange knit — who’s he?’

‘A business associate of von Weiss’s. He’s representing another interest — I don’t know whose. An important customer. That’s all I know. I’ve never seen him before today.’

‘Find out who he is.’

‘You’re giving the orders now?’ she asked.

‘Find out who he is, please. And watch out for the girl on his knee.’

‘Sugar?’

‘Yeah. I think you’re her type.’

I went back to the ledge to make doubly sure there was no evidence left behind. A little crushed foliage, but that was it. I leaned out over the ledge. The drop was sheer all the way to the bottom five hundred feet below. A steep incline of scree, clear of suspicious-looking lumps of clothing, rose to meet the rock face from a bed of dense, dark green jungle. It was as if the mountain had opened up and swallowed the body whole. Convenient. Not even the vultures seemed especially interested in anything other than working the updrafts. That would change when the body — wherever it was down there — began to decompose. In this wet heat, I gave it a few hours. My fingers found the teeth in my pocket. I took them out and tossed them at the wind.

A couple of kids were chasing each other along the path when I rejoined it. I took the steps three at a time, up to the populated section of the lookout where the concessions were clustered. And a few minutes later I rendezvoused with Petinski and her camera in the shade of her tree.

‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked.

‘The head,’ I replied.

She glanced at my empty hands. ‘Weren’t you getting me a Coke?’

I took the card from my pocket and handed it to her. ‘I picked this up instead — an invitation to dinner. It’s where von Weiss will be this evening.’

‘What? How…? Who gave it to you?’

‘Emma Shilling.’

‘Who?’

‘The blonde number snuggling up to our chief suspect over there. She’s MI6, so she says.’ I motioned at the bar where Shilling had rejoined the table. The man named Salvadore came in a few seconds behind her, but from another entrance.

‘Jesus, Cooper…’ said Petinski as she snapped off some more frames of the changing situation at the bar.

I noted von Weiss leaning toward Shilling for an exchange of words. She smiled, adding a shrug, laughed vivaciously, put on a show. The man called Salvadore bent toward the boss’s other ear, and then Charles White got in on the act, beckoning one of his peeps over. The tarantula and Sugar sipped their drinks and observed. Moments later, White’s two remaining bodyguards got up from the table and strolled off in the direction of the washrooms, presumably to hunt for their missing colleague.

They’d find no trace of him. The cleaning detail was an added stroke of luck. I couldn’t have planned it better if I’d planned it.

‘You want to tell me what you’ve done, Cooper?’ Petinski asked, wary as hell.

‘Applied pressure,’ I said.

‘Which means?’ Something on my forehead caught her attention and led to a closer examination of my face. She gripped my chin with her fingers and turned my head from side to side. ‘You’ve been in a fight.’

I opened my jacket and showed her the Walther’s handgrip. Then I told her about the run-in with the Whites’ bodyguard, that we recognized each other and, as a consequence, one of us had to die. I said I preferred it to be him. She said there was a hung jury on her preference. I told her about Shilling happening along at an opportune moment, and how she helped me dispose of the body. That didn’t get me anywhere with the jury, so I defended my actions further with some backstory about the slaughter the newly dead guy and his boss were promoting in Africa. Jury, still hung. I got a lecture about professional conduct, and I was about to get it all over again when von Weiss’s chopper roared around the back of the mountain and made further dressing-down impossible to hear. Giving her what little news I had about Randy Sweetwater would have to wait.

Charles White’s bodyguards came back from their search empty-handed. Something had happened to their buddy — he’d just up and disappeared. And now they were leaving in a hurry. Pressure applied. Petinski caught the departure on her Canon.

The Sugarloaf Mountain lookout lost a lot of its appeal once our persons of interest had flown away, so Petinski and I caught the next cable car to the base station, and from there made a beeline for the Palace. Petinski wanted to check in with her superiors, whoever they were, and I wanted to have a shower and wash the bodyguard’s killing off my skin. Petinski was sitting at a desk by the balcony when I came out of the bathroom wearing a towel.

‘Why would reception send us champagne?’ she asked, holding a half-bottle of Bollinger. She read from a card. ‘“From your friends at reception.”’

‘I think it had something to do with the thumbs-up I gave Gracia there this morning as we left. A little victory signal.’

‘Thanks a whole bunch, Cooper.’

‘Just maintaining our cover.’

Petinski shook her head.

‘What have you got there?’ I asked, seeing photos up on her iPad.

‘Which of these men did you throw off the cliff?’

Three photographs taken at the bar earlier were lined up on screen.

‘The guy on the right,’ I said. His face was turned three-quarters to the camera lens. High cheekbones, broad nose and dark skin with black eyes beneath a heavy brow.

‘I got us reservations at the restaurant. We were lucky — they had a cancellation.’

‘So long as it wasn’t von Weiss who canceled.’

‘Good point. That reminds me, I had Langley check out Shilling. Her real name is Amanda Shaeffer. She’s a captain in the Royal Marines. A commando — Green Berets, no less. These days she works for a counter-terror research group attached to the UK Ministry of Defence, which can mean anything, including MI6.’

Curiosity drew me back to the desk. On the iPad screen, shots of White’s henchmen were replaced by a publicity photo of a woman crawling through a muddy trench with a light machine gun in her hands. Amanda Shaeffer. I barely recognized the woman I’d met earlier. The accompanying assessment sheet said she’d graduated from the Royal Marines Commando Training Centre at Lympstone, Devon, on her first attempt — a rarity.

‘Britain doesn’t let women fight on the frontlines,’ said Petinski. ‘I guess the Ministry of Defence found a way to tap into her talents.’

‘I asked her about Randy,’ I said.

Petinski looked up. ‘And?’

‘She’s seen him around, but not for a while.’

‘How long’s “a while”?’

‘She didn’t say, and there was no time to elaborate.’

My partner scowled, well aware that pulling a disappearing act around von Weiss could mean the worst.

‘We’ll find him,’ I said, only because I couldn’t say much else.

She sat back in her chair, let her arms hang loose by her side and closed her eyes for a few long seconds. ‘I appreciate the encouragement, Vin,’ she said when she opened them. ‘But Randy knew the risks. It’s important to me that you know my concern for him isn’t about our personal relationship. That ended before this mission began. I don’t even have the right to resent Alabama. She was just next in line. If it wasn’t her it would’ve been someone else. I’m concerned because Randy was my partner, professionally speaking.’

‘Vin?’ I said, a little stunned. ‘Have we broken through something here, Kim?’

‘Is that all you took out of what I just said?’

‘Of course not.’

‘You’re not making this easy, y’know.’ She fingered the card from the restaurant. ‘You’re good at what you do, Cooper. It’s random and it’s not my way, but I have to admit it’s effective. You made contact with MI6 and now we’re going to be able to stay on von Weiss and maybe gain some intel on him in real time. I’ve been pretty uptight. I’m sorry that we haven’t worked more as a team.’

‘Is this an apology for being an abrupt, blunt, aloof, snooty, humorless, uncommunicative ice maiden?’

‘What?’

‘Apology accepted.’

‘Don’t you ever take anything seriously?’ she asked.

‘Who’s joking?’

Petinski blinked at me.

‘One thing, though. You mind if I stick with Petinski? Calling you Kim just feels like some other person.’

She stood up.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

‘To take a bath. That okay?’

‘You get an answer from Washington on this unknown guy with von Weiss?’

‘No,’ she snapped impatiently. ‘He’s not in our database. They’re checking with our friends and allies. There’s nothing we can do for the moment. So, if you don’t mind…’

‘Go right ahead. Hey, I might review the photos you took today. Where do I find ’em?’

‘There’s a folder on the desktop.’ Petinski disappeared into the bathroom and I heard the water run.

I went to her collection of Mac products, selected the laptop, opened the folder and set up the six hundred and thirty-seven photos in it to run as a slideshow. At two seconds a slide, that would be a little over twenty minutes viewing time. I poured two Glenfiddich minis into a short glass with rocks, sat back and watched. I skipped the chopper landing and went straight for the party settling into the bar. First up: Sugar. She really was as hot as I remembered her and I felt a certain tingle, the memory of our time in the Bally’s pool coming back. Her smooth coffee-colored skin, that cute button nose and a pair of full lips that could suck the shell off a boiled egg. In the photo I was looking at, the tarantula was beside her, leaning back, one arm hooked over the back of his chair. He was smirking, his other hand unseen under the table. Knowing Sugar, and from the smile on her lips, I could guess at what it was up to. ‘Lucky bastard,’ I murmured.

A procession of photos of Falco and Charles White came next, a continuous series of them dealing with the waiter, placing orders. Seeing photos of Charles White sitting happily instead of lying face down on the ground with the back of his head blown out was hard to take. Their dead bodyguard featured in several shots. Knowing the guy’s immediate future chased away the bad feelings and replaced them with a happy glow.

Individual shots of von Weiss and then Shilling followed. I paused the show on a photo that captured them together. Von Weiss’s attention was directed at someone opposite, out of view, probably the tarantula, while Shilling’s was focused on von Weiss. On her lips was a Mona Lisa smile. I wondered what she was thinking.

I examined von Weiss. His face was peeled and implanted to the point of absurdity — like an extreme makeover gone horribly wrong. He was one of Brazil’s richest men, an arms dealer, a suspected killer, the illegitimate child of an infamous Nazi war criminal, a world authority on snakes, and — given that he’d somehow managed to get his hands on one of our nukes and intended to use it — also something of an evil genius. A complex character. I wondered what type indicators would sit at the bottom of his emails.

Back to Shilling/Shaeffer. If I had known nothing about her, her presence at the table wouldn’t have been surprising. Von Weiss might’ve looked a little freakish, but he had money, and money, generally speaking, seemed to help beautiful women overlook plenty. Shilling fit the part of the rich guy’s trophy perfectly: perfect golden hair, perfect golden skin, eyes that hinted at infinity, perfect body. They seemed the perfect couple. Only, as Shilling herself had said, it didn’t take much for von Weiss to disappear people who weren’t who they said they were. Given what I knew about the real Emma Shilling, I could see a few bumps ahead in their relationship. I hoped she knew when to run.

I sipped at my single malt and watched one of White’s bodyguards get directions to the head, followed not too long after by Shilling, who excused herself, stood up from the table and also took directions from one of the bar staff, right around the time I was being stomped on.

The slideshow continued while I chose an ice cube and rolled it around in my mouth. Von Weiss summoned Salvadore, who took the same exit Shilling did, presumably because she wasn’t back from the powder room quick enough for his liking. More photos of the Whites, the tarantula, von Weiss, Sugar and the bodyguards. Eventually Shilling reappeared, followed by Salvadore.

With the chopper’s arrival, the party vacated the bar and headed for the heliport in a hurry. Petinski had snapped off shots of the arriving chopper, and then swung her camera back to von Weiss’s party, and then back to the chopper. There were close-ups of the aircraft’s registration and other markings. It pivoted and approached the heliport with the cockpit front-on to the camera. Close-ups on the aircrew followed. It was when she brought the lens to bear on the pilot that I nearly choked on the ice cube. I went through several photos to make doubly sure, and then enlarged the clearest of them. Jesus, there was no doubt. I knew this pilot. His name was LeDuc. He was the little French fuck who’d double-crossed me and a bunch of others back in the Congo. He’d flown us into a trap on a UN chopper and then sprung it. People died because of this asshole’s perfidy. LeDuc was AWOL from the Armée de l’Air, the French Air Force, and had made Interpol’s Most Wanted list. He was near the top of mine. I owed this cocksucker a strike with a rusty machete to the side of the neck, and seeing his Frog face suddenly back in my world I renewed the vow to collect.

That LeDuc was part of von Weiss’s troop made sense. The weapons the Whites were trading in central Africa came from the Brazilian arms dealer. And in the Congo, LeDuc was teamed up with Charles White. LeDuc, White, von Weiss — they were all in it together. The blood pounded in my temples. I downed the rest of the single malt, put the laptop back on the desk, stood up, turned to go to the fridge and ran straight into Petinski — hard. She rebounded off me. I grabbed her hand so that she didn’t end up sprawled on the carpet, and her towel almost fell away. In a panic, she snatched it and held it against her breasts. We were close. I could smell her peppermint breath and her moisturizer. I grinned and said, ‘Oops,’ as I released her hand.

Our lips were only inches apart. Did I read something in her eyes — a weakening of her resolve, perhaps? I closed the gap between us an inch or so, reading her signals, feeling the electricity.

‘Don’t even fucking think about it, Cooper,’ she whispered.