“Oh, you are fucking dead!” He looked down, glaring at me with an animal fury.
I still held the gun pointed at him. But I wasn’t sure what to do. Now there was nothing to muffle the sound. A group of people was headed toward us. I was an FBI agent, not a cold-blooded killer. But even as FBI, I was toast. I’d be explaining what I was doing here for the rest of my life. From an Israeli jail cell!
“Turn around,” I yelled at him. “Open your jacket.”
The blond guy eyed the people coming toward us. He slowly opened his jacket. “What are you going to do, mate? Shoot me?”
He had to be armed, but I didn’t see a gun. Even worse, these people were coming closer and I was brandishing one. He didn’t know who I was. He didn’t know where Andie and I were staying. What he did know was that if I hadn’t already put a bullet through his head, with all these people coming close, I probably wasn’t about to now.
“Start walking.” I pointed the gun. “Back down the hill. Walk!”
Chapter 105
BLONDIE OBLIGED ME, but slowly, angrily. He cast a cold eye at the approaching crowd, blood oozing from his thigh. I hadn’t killed him, and he saw things were working to his advantage now. The asshole had me gauged perfectly.
“Tell Remlikov all bets are off if I don’t find what I’m looking for.” I started to back away.
There was an entrance to Ben Gurion Street maybe a hundred yards below. People were streaming through the gates by the dozens. I figured that in a crowd, even he wouldn’t shoot. I could outrun him. All I had to do was make it that far.
I took off, darting through hedges and trees as cover. I glanced around to see him scamper up the knoll, remove a gun from the back of his jeans, then straighten into a shooter’s crouch.
I didn’t hear a sound, but a bullet whizzed past my ear, thudding into the trunk of a nearby tree.
He started after me. It was freaky. The guy had a .40-caliber bullet lodged in his thigh, and it wasn’t stopping him a bit.
I was no longer backpedaling. I ran down to the entrance that led onto Ben Gurion, a busy thoroughfare, where I figured maybe I could lose him. All I had to do was find a cab and make it back to the hotel. That’s all!
A boy and his girlfriend were just turning into the park. He was wearing sandals and a Linkin Park T-shirt, and had a guitar slung around his back. I heard something zing past my shoulder. Right in front of my face the kid wheeled around and hit the pavement, his shoulder exploding in red. His girlfriend put her hands up to her face and screamed.
“Get down! Get down!” people were shouting.
I stared in disbelief.
An innocent person was down. This was way, way out of control now. I knew I should’ve stopped and ended it there. Taken him down, waited for the cops, something logical and sane. There were screams and bedlam everywhere. I took a look back for the blond-haired killer. I had lost him! Policemen were running up to the scene from Ben Gurion. I didn’t know what to do. I made a quick judgment that the kid would be all right.
I took off toward the square.
Concealing myself in the crowd, I tried to put as much distance as I could between me and my assailant. I was praying the police would corral him, but then I spotted him—his blond hair and darting eyes—racing along the perimeter wall, following my path. I pushed deeper into the crowd.
I hurried without a clear destination through the crowded streets, searching frantically for a cab. I could still get out of this. All I had to do was get back to the hotel. They had no idea who we were.
I found myself racing down a narrow street of bazaar merchants, angling away from the park. Hundreds of tiny stalls—leather jackets, embroidered shirts, baskets, spices—crowded with hawkers and tourists.
I zigzagged through the side-by-side stalls, switching sides of the street as I strained to see if he was still behind me. And he was—knocking over racks, pushing people out of his way, gaining. Sirens were coming from the entrance to the park.
This madman wouldn’t stop. I was on a crowded street with no cabs. You don’t know where you’re going, Nick! At some point I was going to have to stop and confront him. I should have shot him when I had the chance.
Two more rounds zinged by my head, slamming into a stall in front of me that was filled with colorful fabrics, toppling it over.
I ducked, picking up my pace. The end of the street was fast approaching. The problem was, I was going to get there quicker than I had a plan for where to go next. It opened to a terraced cul-de-sac, maybe twenty feet above a busy street below. I was trapped. Cold reality set in—Nick, you’re going to have to fight this bastard.
I turned at the corner and just stood there, staring at my options: leaping into the crowded street below or facing him. I gripped my gun. I thought of Andie, the image she had lived with for the past year, the blond man hurrying away from the juror bus.
This was the man who had killed her son.
I stopped behind a stall at the end of the street. Maybe it wasn’t Cavello, but this was the man who blew up the jury. I had no real plan. I wasn’t a cop or a fugitive. Just someone whose adrenaline was racing. Someone who was about to make a stand.
The blond-haired killer finally staggered into the cul-de-sac.
“Put it down,” I said, pointing my gun at him.
“Put it down?” He smirked, coming to a stop. He stared at me. “I don’t know who you were, but you’re a dead man now, friend.”
Chapter 106
HE STARTED TO RAISE his arm, and I jerked off two shots. Both hit home, tearing into his chest. He grabbed the top of a nearby stall, fabric falling all over him as it crashed down. He tried to get up. I saw him elevate his gun hand, frantically tearing garments off himself.
“You blew up that bus!” I screamed.
The blond killer hesitated. It took him by surprise. Then a smile creased his lips, as if he found all of this amusing. “I did.” He winked, trying to free his gun hand. “Boom!”
I hurled myself at him, smashing my fist into his face. He staggered backward into the railing. I held him by the shirt collar, out of control. I hit him again with everything I had in me. Teeth cracked, and blood spurted from his mouth. But he didn’t go down.
“Well, here’s a message.” I flung him with all my might toward the railing. “Boom your fucking self!”
The killer smashed against the edge, still trying to right his gun toward me, and toppled over, jerking a shot wildly into the air.
Like a dead weight, he landed on top of a parked car below.
I went over to the railing. People were screaming, running out of the way. I was exhausted, out of breath, gasping for air. For a second, I didn’t care who saw me. I didn’t care if I heard a police siren or if the cops found me.
Then I came to my senses. I couldn’t believe what my eyes were seeing.
The crazy bastard opened his eyes. He looked up at me. He wouldn’t die. Blood was matted in his hair and on his shirt. He rolled off the car and, with legs like jelly, staggered backward toward the street, somehow still in possession of his gun, arcing his arm upward.
Toward me!
I didn’t move. I just stood there staring at him. “Die, you sonovabitch,” I said. “Die!”
He crouched between two cars. I could see he was having trouble breathing. Then he quickly stepped out and aimed to shoot at me. There was a smirk on his face.
I heard the beep. And the chilling screech of brakes. It was sharp and penetrating, bone-rattling loud.
The killer spun. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. The look on his face was one of disbelief.
The bus careered into him, throwing him fifty feet into the street. His gun flew out of his hand and hit the pavement with a crack that sounded like a shot.
I heard screaming. I took a last look. He was just a crumpled, bloody mound.
This time I wasn’t waiting around for another encore. When the crowd looked up, the balcony was empty.
Chapt
er 107
MINUTES LATER, I was knocking on the door of our hotel room. “Andie, let me in!”
The door opened, and I almost fell through, collapsing into Andie’s arms. “God, Nick, I didn’t know what to think,” she said, throwing her arms around me. She stared at my bloodstained shirt, the black-and-blue marks on my neck.
“Nick!”
“I’m all right,” I said. “But we have to get out of here now!”
I changed quickly. We dragged our bags downstairs and paid. In minutes we were weaving back through the streets, Andie driving, to the coastal highway, headed back toward Tel Aviv. We had a ten-o’clock flight out of there. I closed my eyes, leaned my head back on the headrest, and blew out an exhausted breath.
“You weren’t supposed to stay.” I turned my head and opened my eyes.
“What?”
“I said an hour. I was thirty minutes late. I told you to get out of there. You weren’t supposed to stay.”
Andie stared at me as if she’d misheard. Then a smile creased her lips. “Braveheart was on the movie channel . . . I got caught up.”
Andie took one hand off the wheel and briefly patted my arm. “I told you I wasn’t leaving you, Nick.”
We drove a little longer, the lights of Haifa fading into the darkness. I felt as empty and exhausted as ever before in my life.
“Did we get it?” she finally asked.
I hesitated a little. “Yeah, we got it.” I smiled.
“So are we headed to Paris?”
“Stopover.” I nodded.
“Then where?”
“Still love me?” I asked.
“You scared the hell out of me, Nick. I don’t know what I’m feeling.”
“You should have been in my shoes.” I paused. “No. Not really.”
A smile edged across my lips. A wide one—triumphant. I couldn’t believe we had pulled it off.
Then Andie was smiling, too. “Yeah, I still love you,” she said. “So where?”
The end of the earth. Cavello had taunted me. Come and get me, Nicky Smiles.
That’s what had made me laugh. Why I knew Remlikov had told me the truth—the name of Cavello’s ranch: El Fin del Mundo. The End of the World.
“Patagonia,” I told her.
“Patagonia?” Andie looked at me. “I’m not even sure I know where that is.”
“Don’t worry. I do.”
Part Five
EL FIN DEL MUNDO
Chapter 108
THE YOUNG GIRL’S pathetic wails echoed through the large stone house. Her name was Mariella, and she was still curled up on the bed, blood on the pillow from the cut he’d opened on her face.
“Shut the hell up,” Dominic Cavello finally barked at her, wrapping his robe around himself and stepping over to the window. He threw open the shutters, letting in the afternoon light. “Better me than some ignorant farm boy, don’t you think? Or maybe your father, drunk on beer. Or is your father your lover?”
A brown haze had settled over the vast valley outside the bedroom window. Soon it would be winter. Everything would change. The pastures would be blanketed in snow, and a howling wind would lash them for months—frigid and unending. Cavello’s skin turned cold just thinking of it.
Still, it was worth it—all that he had given up to be free. He had the largest ranch in the region. The extradition treaty with the U.S. was weak and rarely, if ever, tested. He had anyone who mattered in the local government on his payroll. He was safe.
And there were no delicacies like young Mariella back at Marion prison.
A couple of bodyguards, armed with machine guns, were lounging on the fence next to one of his Range Rovers, sipping coffee. At the girl’s sobs they looked up and met Cavello’s eyes. Hard to tell what they thought, and he didn’t care.
“I told you to stop whining.” He came back at the cowering girl. “You sound like a hen. Is that what you want—to sleep in the barn with the other hens? Or maybe”—he undid his robe, feeling himself come alive once more—“you want to screw Daddy again.”
She reared up and cursed at him in Spanish. Cavello rushed forward and slapped her across the face again, slicing open her lip. He slipped off his robe and pushed her back on the sheets. He grasped her by the wrists as she struggled, staring at her perfect breasts, at her young pussy. “Yes, I think that’s what you need.”
Suddenly, he heard shouting downstairs, and then a loud knock at the bedroom door.
“Who is it?” Cavello snapped.
“It is Lucha, Don Cavello.”
“What do you want? You know I’m busy.”
“I’m afraid we have a little problem, Señor,” Lucha called through the door.
Lucha ran security for him here at the ranch. He oversaw the men downstairs and the dogs that patrolled at night. All the local law enforcement people in Ushuaia were on Lucha’s payroll. He was an ex-policeman from Buenos Aires.
Cavello pulled himself off the girl and belted his robe. He cracked open the door. “You’re pissing me off. Not a good idea, Lucha. What kind of problem?”
“The girl’s father. He is in the house right now. He is demanding to see her, Don Cavello.”
“Pay him off.” Cavello shrugged. “Get Esteban to give him a day or two off. I’m busy now.”
“Señor Cavello, this one is different,” the security man said. “The girl is fifteen.”
“Pig! Filth!” The father’s angry shouts rang down the hall.
Mariella threw herself off the bed. “Papa!” she screamed. Cavello grabbed her. She tried to break free and run for the door.
“This is not so easily disposed of, Don Cavello,” Lucha continued. “If word gets out, it will draw attention.”
The farmhand’s loud voice could be heard calling him a pig—and his daughter a whore.
“Bring him here,” Cavello ordered. “I’ll talk to him myself.”
“Don Cavello?”
“Bring him here!”
Lucha nodded, and two of his men dragged in the burly, wild-eyed farmer. He glared at Cavello with venom in his dark eyes. He spit on the polished hardwood floor.
“He says he is dead to the world now, Don Cavello. And you as well.”
Cavello stared into the farmer’s angry eyes, while he stroked Mariella’s slender backside. “He is right, Lucha. It is wrong to leave him in such shame. Give the man his wish.”
“His wish, Don Cavello?” The security man looked on, unsure of what to do.
“Kill him. Shoot him. Bury him.”
“No!” The daughter’s eyes flared up. “No. Señor, no!” She fell to her knees, pleading with him in Spanish.
The security man hesitated. He was paid well to do as Cavello wished, and he would do what had to be done. “That will take care of one problem, Don Cavello.” He nodded toward the girl. “But what of the other?”
Cavello looked at beautiful Mariella, disappointed. He knew he would not find one like this again.
“Kill her, too. Better yet, I’ll kill her myself. Eventually.”
Chapter 109
IT TOOK TWENTY-TWO HOURS, and three feature-length movies, to travel from London to Santiago, Chile, halfway around the world. Then another four and a half hours on LAN, the Chilean airline, down to Punta Arenas, a gray, ice-free port at the foot of the Andes, at the bottom of the world. We could have flown directly to Ushuaia, but if Remlikov had double-crossed us, I didn’t want to be arriving there.
It was autumn in the southern hemisphere, and we were down at the very tip. The sky was slate gray, and a steady wind beat into our faces anytime we stepped outdoors. It took a day to adjust. Remlikov said Cavello’s ranch was near Ushuaia, a twelve-hour drive.
“Where the hell is Ushuaia?” Andie asked, squinting at the map.
“South.”
“I thought we were south.” Andie smirked cynically.
I pointed at a dot at the very tip of South America. “All the way south.”
For years, Ushuaia was p
retty much noted for its remote prison. I had a book on Patagonia by a writer named Bruce Chatwin. He described a fabled and mysteriously remote land. Magellan had stopped there, and all he had encountered were Indians who didn’t wear much clothing and huddled around fires in the most hostile climate. The Land of Fire, he named it. Tierra del Fuego.
As we sat there on the second morning in our rented Land Cruiser, ready to pull out, Andie said to me, “All I can say is, if Remlikov turns out to be a liar it’s a helluva long drive back.”
The route south and east was weather-beaten and winding, but the landscape was spectacular. Like nothing I’d ever seen anywhere. We immediately climbed up through the Andes. Craggy, saw-toothed mountains jutted from sprawling plains. Massive ice-blue glaciers nestled between the peaks. The channel coastline was rocky and irregular, as it must have looked a million years ago. As if God couldn’t make up His mind between beautiful and desolate. At almost every turn in the road, swirling clouds opened to sudden chasms of the most brilliant blue.
We finally crossed the border into Argentina. The winding road hugged Beagle Channel, islands and peninsulas pushing out into a blue-gray sea that looked freezing cold. Occasionally men on horseback with scarves over their weathered faces waved silently from the side of the road. The landscape was barren and lunar.
We eventually came upon a roadside cantina, the first commercial establishment we’d seen for miles. There were gauchos sitting around outside, hearty-looking locals who looked us over and probably wondered if we’d gotten our seasons wrong.
“I get the feeling we ought to stop,” Andie said. “The closest McDonald’s is probably about thirty-two hundred miles away.”
The meats at the cantina were roasted on open flames and served smothered in a green chimichurri sauce with vegetables on tortillas. Not outstanding, but not half-bad. We took a picture of a sign that read ANTARCTICA, 807 MILES in a dozen languages.
A young cowboy with a multicolored shawl let Andie climb up on his horse. Her smile was one I’d remember until I died. I hoped that wouldn’t be too soon.
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