War Lord

Thirty-four

I had an official debriefing session with Arlen and Beale, followed by one with Naval Criminal Investigation Service and then another with CIA. When it was all done, I told Arlen I was heading back to South America on the next available. He wasn’t happy about it, but he swung it anyway, organizing a C-2 to take me to Mombasa, the nearest international airport. From there I hopped international flights back to Rio.

Connections were better flying west to east and only twenty-one hours later I met Jeb Delaney as the sun came up at airport arrivals, Galeão International.

‘You look like a chilli dog left on the griddle too long,’ he said when he saw me.

‘I tan weird.’ I debriefed him on what I was permitted to say, which wasn’t much, before asking the question uppermost on my mind. ‘What you got on von Weiss?’

‘To be honest with you, Vin — nothin’. And Adauto Robredo has even less, though he’s been crackin’ heads all over the place tryin’ to get us some leads. But he does have a theory.’

‘He agrees with us that von Weiss is in-country?’

‘He does.’

‘The profilers back home think he’s holed up somewhere in Euro Disney.’

Delaney grinned.

‘Did I tell you when von Weiss met Petinski, he gave her a condom?’ I said.

‘A condom…’

‘Maybe he was out of flowers.’

‘That’s fucked up. You think he kidnapped her?’ Delaney wondered.

‘I hope so.’

‘Not a pleasant thought.’

‘It’s a better one than outright murder.’

‘What’s to say she’s not dead? He kidnaps her, does whatever he’s gonna do, then kills her.’

‘That’s what my boss thinks. And meanwhile, we’ve got nothing on von Weiss.’

‘Same problem here,’ said Delaney. ‘The authorities couldn’t prove he was behind the shit that went down in Céu Cidade. He’s a crafty SOB.’

‘What about the black Mercedes SUV? I saw von Weiss’s number two — whatshisname, Dolph Lundgren, the big blond guy — driving it.’

‘Salvadore?’

‘Yeah, him.’

‘The vehicle was found dumped in the sea. It was registered to a little ol’ lady in the ’burbs with no connection to anything. Forensics got nothin’ from it.’

‘And nothing from the surveillance hard drives at the favela?’

‘We’ve got some frames of Salvadore escortin’ a woman from the vehicle at the main entrance to von Weiss’s citadel. We thought it was Shilling. Turns out it was a dancer from a nightclub, a decoy. The whole fuckin’ thing was a setup played out for your camera. Authorities got nada.’

I gave my face a vigorous rub.

‘I know how you feel,’ Delaney said. ‘So do Robredo and his men. He’s gonna meet us at your hotel to work through what we do next.’

‘Where am I staying?’

‘This time around, a few rungs down from the Palace. Our station doesn’t have much of a slush fund.’

‘Yeah, sure.’

A short drive later, we pulled up at a bargain hotel off Copacabana Beach, two doors down from the strip joint I’d seen on my last visit that offered a beer and lap dance for twenty bucks. I was too late — the offer had expired. I signed in at the hotel, dumped my overnight bag in a small room that had the stale sweaty protein smell of a porn theater about it, and met Delaney back down on the street. The mid-morning crowds were heading to and from the beach in a steady stream, the Havaianas flip-flops on their feet making scuffing sounds on the sand-sprinkled sidewalks. The CIA agent was on his cell, looking around. He spotted what he was hunting for, stepped out on the street and waved at a blue Hyundai SUV idling along.

‘Robredo,’ Delaney told me when I arrived beside him.

The sergeant pulled up, a man in a BOPE uniform in the passenger seat beside him — a pale rope-thin guy sporting a pencil moustache. He looked like a carney, the type that rode the dodgem cars and carried a switchblade in his shoe.

We got in and Robredo turned and said hello, along with a bunch of other things in Portuguese I didn’t understand. He introduced the carnie beside him as Officer Pedro. More handshakes. Delaney and the two Brazilians then went into another lengthy discussion before Robredo sped off carelessly down the street, weaving through the flip-flop traffic.

‘What was all that about?’ I asked Delaney.

‘Pedro here has a number of strings to his bow. He’s a BOPE tactician as well as being a profiler.’

‘A shrink.’

‘Be nice. Anyway, Pedro and his colleagues think von Weiss is gonna know we’re strugglin’ to come at him with the law because, one, he’s planned it that way and, two, we’re sure he would’ve had the word confirmed from the street that we’re spinnin’ our wheels.’

‘If he knows that, what’s he hiding for?’ I asked.

‘Because he’s afraid.’

‘Of what?’

‘In this part of the world, the rules of the game can get bent out of shape to favor the authorities. There’s that, and he’s worried that if he shows his face someplace like Berlin…’

‘His ass will get redacted and he’ll find himself waking up on the Gitmo express.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So now what?’

‘BOPE has its own unofficial intelligence network of snitches. And because no one has seen von Weiss or any of his people on the street, they’ve come to the conclusion that he’s not on the street.’

‘Then where is he?’ I asked.

‘On the water.’

I remembered discussing this very possibility with Petinski the last time von Weiss vanished, right after the encounter with the black mamba in my hotel suite had put me in hospital. Brazil has a million uninhabited rivers and tributaries to hide it in. Petinski hadn’t thought much of this suggestion at the time; I wasn’t sure I thought much of it now, but it seemed somehow vaguely ironic that it was the only straw we had left.

The Hyundai turned onto a pontoon bridge, the end of which disappeared into the haze a mile or two away across the water. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘The naval station over on Niteröi. Pedro was a lieutenant in the Brazilian Navy before he joined BOPE. He has contacts.’

Ten minutes later, we pulled up at a guard station. Robredo showed his ID to a man in an unfamiliar uniform, and the officer, Pedro, leaned across to have a word. The guard stuck his head in through the driver’s window for a look-see and Delaney and I both gave him a nod. The boom came up and we were waved through. Pedro gave directions left, right and then straight ahead. We eventually stopped outside a long whitewashed building that had the look of a dormitory about it, within sight of the bay. A Brazilian Navy officer jogged over, chatted to Pedro, made a vaguely welcoming hand gesture at the rest of us, and then led us to a small airless briefing room where the temperature was sitting on a hundred degrees with no intention of moving. The walls were covered in maps — some old, some new — as well as photos of various Brazilian Navy ships. A digital projector hung from the ceiling. There were three tables, two computer workstations on all but one of the tables where maps were opened out.

Pedro, Robredo, Delaney and the new guy, whose nametag told me I should call him Marchèse, went into a huddle while I went to the wall and got a hint of the enormity of the task ahead. There was well over a thousand miles of coastline to look at, puckered by the delta of the Amazon River.

‘We’ve got a patrol boat for two days,’ said Delaney.

‘Great. Who’s got the beers?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Might as well get something out of it.’ I gestured at the map detailing the coastline south of Rio. ‘He could be anywhere.’

‘Von Weiss has villas at several spots south of Rio and São Paulo. Angra dos Reis, for example. There are plenty of deserted inlets and bays all along this area. He could disappear quite easily around here and still feel close to home.’

I didn’t have a better idea and Angra dos Reis sounded familiar. Shilling had mentioned the place.

The Grajaú wasn’t a big ship — a little over forty meters long, a crew of around thirty, a Bofors 40mm cannon up front and a 20mm cannon facing aft behind the superstructure. A brass plate in the wheelhouse said she’d been commissioned in ’93, none of which interested Delaney in the slightest as he was violently seasick from the moment we left the dock. We motored down the coastline, stopping occasionally to investigate any large expensive vessels that looked like they might be on the lam.

The town of Angra dos Reis was located in a bay surrounded by soaring granite peaks covered in green jungle, and was a picturesque playground for the rich. I joined the crew scanning the shore with powerful binoculars, most of which appeared to be focused on finding topless babes sunning themselves on the beaches or boat decks. I was thus diverted once or twice myself. Okay, maybe three times.

Von Weiss’s villa was located a mile south of town in a private bay, its own golden sand beach and a private impenetrable backyard jungle. The rigid-hulled inflatable boat was launched and Robredo, Delaney, Pedro and I went with an armed party of sailors to have a closer look at it. The villa itself was an ultra-modern concrete box floating on a single stressed concrete beam in the center. The place was locked up tight. It presented like no one had been there for some time, the utilities all turned off at their mains. The inspection was a complete waste of time. We piled back into the RHIB and motored out to the mothership, and kept heading south to waste even more of it. I found myself wishing Pedro was ex-Air Force with contacts in a helicopter squadron. A Super Puma could investigate in an hour what the Grajaú could cover in a day.

We called it quits at nightfall, the Grajaú’s commander taking the boat out to sea for more general duties. I stayed up for a while, out on the deck, and spent the time going over in my mind conversations I’d had with Emma Shilling and Petinski, one dead and the other almost certainly dead. I wanted the opportunity to give their deaths some meaning. I wanted von Weiss. I wanted to find him and I wanted to spend some time watching him crap his pants while he faced his own mortality. But I probably had more chance of winning the New Jersey lottery, a lottery I never entered.

The ship’s first sergeant found Delaney and me bunks in a closet the size of an overgrown footlocker, where there wasn’t enough room for me to lie on my side. Sleep didn’t come easy, due partly to the cramped quarters, partly to Delaney, who was in the bunk above heaving loudly into a bucket, and partly to the burns on my arms, legs and neck throbbing in time with the ship’s diesels.

The search of the coastline resumed at first light. Delaney didn’t look so great, but everything in his stomach had long since been expelled so at least the hurling had stopped.

‘You look like they just pulled you from a trash compactor,’ I told him when he joined me on the rolling deck.

‘I wish I felt that good,’ he said, the rancid meat-like green tinge nevertheless gone from his face.

The sun blazed up over the cloudless horizon like it was expecting a fanfare. We rolled slowly through the swell and resumed the search, scanning the line of jungle meeting the water, interest increasing with the occasional sighting of a luxury cruiser, which inevitably came to nothing.

It was a quarter to ten, the heat from the morning sun almost crushing, when I took a break and went down to the mess to rustle up a paper cup of ice water. On the way back I stopped in what was probably the officers’ wardroom to have a look at a framed map on the wall of the coastline around São Paulo and see if I could place the ship in relation to it. The name on a speck of rock more or less adjacent to São Paulo caught my attention. I went back outside and found Delaney. Everyone up on deck seemed pretty happy, and then I saw why. We’d pulled around a headland and a big pleasure boat was moored in the protective nook of a little bay. Three oiled-up women — two black, one white — were lying naked on the deck just behind the bow. They were young, maybe twenty-three. A couple of the seamen were waving at them. One of the black women stood up and waved back, her shining breasts wobbling back and forth.

‘Queimada Grande. Ring a bell with you at all?’ I asked Delaney.

‘What?’ said Delaney, distracted, a big smile on his face. The black woman turned around and showed us her ass. It was a nice ass. Nice legs, too. The sailors whooped. An officer made an appearance and snapped at the crew, and the feeling that we were on a pleasure cruise evaporated.

‘Queimada Grande,’ I repeated. ‘Have you heard of it?’

‘Yeah. It’s an island crawlin’ with poisonous snakes. What of it?’

Jeb Delaney hadn’t seen the autopsy report on the hand sent to Alabama, which mentioned the venom detected in its veins. He didn’t know about Fruit Fly, alias Diogo Jaguaribe, and how he’d died; he hadn’t been briefed about Randy Sweetwater’s ring on the amputated hand’s finger; or where and how Roy Rogers’s horse fit into the picture.

‘Do you know where the island is?’ I asked.

‘Off the coast of São Paulo, I think.’

‘It’s close. We have to go there.’

‘It’s off limits. No one goes there.’

I looked at Delaney and watched the tumblers line up in slow motion.

‘Oh, shit,’ he said.

It took three hours of motoring along at the Grajaú’s maximum speed, the bow peeling white curls out of the blue water, to bring us within a few miles of the island. The captain took his ship over the horizon so that the only indication of land was a line of thin cloud. It was explained to Robredo and Pedro, who passed it on to Delaney, who passed it on to me, that if there was a vessel moored at Queimada Grande, it would most likely have dropped anchor on the western side of the island, sheltered from the Atlantic groundswell. That meant there was a good chance we could sneak up on it, the landmass obscuring the Grajaú from radar.

The island was a weathered haunch of rock in the middle of nowhere, covered mostly in grass and jungle. A tiny white lighthouse was visible at one end of the island’s spine. Waves pounded the rocky shore and flocks of birds wheeled around it. The horizon was utterly empty in every direction, and certainly no boats were visible. The Grajaú’s commander changed course, cut the throttle, and an announcement came over the ship’s speakers. An armed party of sailors ran up on deck.

Robredo and Pedro handed out lifejackets and helmets. Robredo then looked around and, when the coast was clear, palmed Delaney and me a Glock each. I checked the mag and the chamber before holstering it beneath the lifejacket.

A few minutes later, we climbed down into the RHIB and sped for the southernmost tip of the island. As we rounded it, the water smoothed to glass and the driver pushed the throttle to the stops.

Coming around another rock spur revealed a quiet inlet, a sleek white hyper-luxury vessel over a hundred feet in length moored in the center of it. The name on the back of the boat, written with intertwined snakes, was Medusa. Von Weiss’s boat. Hoo-ah!

A man on its bow looked up and around, the serenity broken by the sound of our outboards. He saw us an instant later, froze for a second, then ran toward the ship’s wheel. The navy boys knew what they were doing and ran the RHIB up to the ship’s stern, cut the motor then reversed it hard, which stopped it on a dime. With perfect timing, a seaman leaped onto a low ramp used to launch the tender and intercepted the guy, stopping him with a gun in his face before he could reach the wheelhouse and warn anyone.

I jumped across, following two seamen, and extracted the Glock. The man from the bow was one of those tall, blond, well-built Aryan Chippendale stereotypes. I recognized him from the night at Olympe, and from the meeting on Sugarloaf.

‘Do you and the boys also do bachelorette nights?’ I asked him as the seaman cuff-locked his hands. He looked at me strangely, but nothing I hadn’t seen plenty of times before.

I followed the boarding party, becoming one of them as they swept through the boat. We’d managed to achieve complete surprise. Mostly the crew of the Medusa was going about its lawful business. They were hired by a crook, which didn’t mean they were themselves crooked. However, to avoid confusion, everyone was shown a pair of cuff-locks and confined under guard at the stern of the boat.

I followed two seamen into one of the bedrooms and found the guy I called Dolph Lundgren standing naked in the middle of the room with his eyes closed. A black woman was kneeling in front of him. The shock of our arrival, which she caught in the reflection of a mirror along one entire wall, caused her to gag. She threw up violently into his crotch. Dolph yelped and was about to slap her until one of the sailors jammed a gun in his ribs. The woman raced for the bed, pulled the red satin sheet off it and wrapped it around herself.

‘Hey, Sugar,’ I said. ‘Nice to see you again.’

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and eyeballed me, scared but indignant. If I’d been within slapping range, I believed she would have tried.

Dolph, alias Julio Salvadore, sat on the bed, pointing at the mess between his legs, complaining bitterly. He got laughs from the seamen, plus a set of cuff-locks.

‘Von Weiss. Where is he?’ I asked Sugar. She was too preoccupied with her own situation to want to help, so I left her and Dolph with the men from the Grajaú and went back out into the main passageway. It came to an end at a set of double doors. Three seamen already had it covered, and were about to breach and clear the room behind the doors. They tried the knob. Locked. I whistled at them, low and breathy and more of a hiss — not loud, just enough to catch their attention. I signaled them to give me a little room. When they were clear I ran and hit the doors in the center, all my weight behind a front kick. Something went crack and the doors flew open.

It was a big room, the shape of it following the bow of the ship. Von Weiss sat in a chair. He was naked but for a pair of jackboots on his feet and a black Nazi SS peaked cap on his head. In his left hand was a WWII-era Luger P08 pistol. In his other was his erect member. The scene reminded me of Shilling’s confession, if that’s what it had been. Beside von Weiss was a king-size bed covered with a swastika, the bed itself flanked by crossed flags of the Third Reich. And behind the bed, watching on, was a large portrait of a scowling Adolf Hitler. Various high-powered rifles and handguns were racked up in a glass case on the wall. Von Weiss was pointing the classic pistol at a woman I barely recognized, standing in the center of the room.

‘O Magnifico,’ I said.

He swung the Luger toward me.

I pulled the trigger. The Glock fired and von Weiss dropped his antique with fright. The slug missed his head by an inch, a round hole of sunshine now punched in the curved wall behind him. I meant to hit him. Maybe I was fatigued.

‘Move and the next hole goes in your eye,’ I said. ‘You have a thing about eyes, right? Or was that your old man’s thing?’

‘Vin,’ Petinski whispered, the thick makeup on her face streaked with tears and lined with terror. She was wearing an SS cap identical to the one on von Weiss’s head. He’d dressed her in the black blouse of an SS officer, decorated with an iron cross, the buttons open down the front revealing her breasts. From the waist down, Petinski was naked. Her outstretched arm was shaking. A large golden-colored snake was wrapped around it, forked tongue darting from its lance-shaped head.

‘How much money do you want?’ I heard von Weiss ask.

I took aim and blew the snake’s head off.

‘No!’ he shouted.

I gave the signal to the seaman. He pulled the lever, reversing the RHIB’s engine, and the boat backed away from the shore.

‘Thanks, Cooper,’ was all Petinski said.

‘No problem.’ I put my arm around her shoulders and gave them a squeeze.

Von Weiss was standing on the rocks in his birthday suit and a peaked Nazi cap yelling at us, shielding his head from the angry birds diving on him. He was yelling that we should come back and get him. Or maybe to get him a pair of pants — I wasn’t entirely sure which. He looked ridiculous and scared. I’m no shrink but I thought the image would help give Petinski back some of her strength.

‘We can’t leave him there like that,’ Delaney said.

‘You mean semi-naked?’ I asked.

‘No, you know what I mean. Hell of a lot of poisonous snakes on that island. He won’t survive.’

Petinski flicked the hair out of her eyes.

Von Weiss had terrified and humiliated her. He’d also murdered Shilling, tortured Sweetwater, tried to kill me with a black mamba, and stolen a W80 that he’d hoped would ignite a fresh wave of global terrorism. A dangerous fuck of the first order. Maybe if he was allowed to walk he’d learn from his mistakes and next time we wouldn’t get off so easy.

‘No, he probably won’t,’ I said.

Petinski smiled and squeezed my arm, popping a blister beneath her fingertips.