She threw away her water bottle, adjusted her tied-back shirt to ensure that it revealed some of her flat belly, and made a beeline for Feo.
When she reached him, she put her hand on his shoulder and said in English, “I saw you a few minutes ago and thought I just had to meet you.”
He stopped and looked at her in confusion because he didn’t know any English, so she gave him a high-wattage smile. Smiling was not her thing, so it was killing her to put on the act.
He looked her up and down and smiled back at her with Tic Tac–sized teeth that went in all directions. The way his hungry eyes ogled her body made her skin crawl.
Despite her discomfort, she continued the performance, pointing back and forth from him to her before making the universal gesture for taking a picture. She took out her phone to emphasize the point.
The idea of a selfie with a pretty girl—better yet, one who was wearing a jersey of his native national team—was too good for Feo to pass up, just as she’d hoped. He nodded and grinned even wider.
She indicated a spot under one of the team banners hanging in the concourse. It also happened to be only twenty feet from where two policemen were standing and talking to each other.
Feo nodded again and put his hand on the small of her back to guide her over there. She swore if his hand drifted down to her butt, she’d break every one of his fingers no matter how it affected the mission.
However, it did give her an excuse to reciprocate and put her hand on his back. She brushed against the pistol tucked under the waistband. With a casual motion, she lifted Feo’s shirt so it exposed the gun.
When they reached the spot for the selfie, she nestled in close to him, trying not to inhale the ungodly amount of nauseating cologne he was wearing. She held up her phone with one hand while she took a small ampoule of fast-acting superglue out of her pocket with the other.
She pretended to have some trouble taking the picture, but that was only to give her a little extra time. In the hand behind Feo’s back, she flipped the top off the ampoule. She squeezed a few droplets of glue onto the hammer of the pistol before dropping the shirt back over it and throwing the ampoule away.
The glue would take a few seconds to harden, so she snapped several pictures with the phone in multiple angles and orientations. Feo was in no hurry to finish. He was eating it up.
By the count of ten, Raven knew the glue had hardened and she suddenly flinched as if he’d pinched her. She slapped him and started yelling in English.
“Hey! This guy just groped me!”
She turned and waved frantically to the police officers.
As she expected, Feo started cursing back at her and getting in her face. He wasn’t going to take a hit from some disrespectful girl without fighting back.
She reared back again, but slowly enough so that he could grab her forearm.
Exactly as she wanted him to.
She rotated her body and clasped his wrist so that his arm bent at an awkward angle. Feo let out a yelp of pain. Raven used his body weight against him to flip him over and slam him to the ground facedown. The pistol was now fully exposed because his shirt was pulled over his head.
She backed away and screamed, “Ele tem uma arma!” She’d memorized the phrase.
He’s got a gun!
The police officers saw the pistol and rushed over as they drew their weapons.
There had been a small chance that Feo would have opted for a shoot-out instead of risking a stay in a Brazilian prison. That’s why she had glued the hammer down. Even if he had tried to fire it, nothing would have happened. He would have gone down in a hail of bullets, and neither of the police officers would have been injured.
But that would have been messy. This way was a lot tidier.
One of the policemen put his boot on Feo’s back while the other removed the weapon, before handcuffing him. They lifted him to his feet while he spewed rapid-fire, angry Spanish. Raven couldn’t understand it, but she bet it consisted of a few choice words about her.
She put on a scared look and tried to make some tears flow. She couldn’t squeeze any out, but the officers got the picture. One of them even tried to console her. He said some kind words in Portuguese and then nodded for her to go.
As they led a still-fiery Feo away so the disturbance wouldn’t attract onlookers during the halftime festivities, she turned and went back to her spot across from the men’s room.
“First guy is out of the picture,” she said over the comm system to Linc, who was just going inside the restroom.
“I saw,” he replied. “Nice job. If it weren’t for that sweet judo move, I would have thought you were the prototypical damsel in distress.”
“It was easy. Men are suckers.”
“Present company excepted?”
“I stand by my statement.”
“I’ll try not to let that hurt my feelings,” Linc said with a laugh.
“Maybe I should teach a seminar on the Oregon someday about how not to be one,” Raven said.
“I’ll be in the first row.”
That got a split-second grin from her, but it disappeared when people started streaming out of the stands. She checked the monitors, and they showed players heading toward the locker room for halftime.
A minute later, she saw López and his companion head into the men’s room.
Raven said to Linc, “Your turn.”
14
Linc pretended to use one of the urinals and kept his eye on the entrance. The modern bathroom, remodeled for the Olympics, was filling with drunk spectators rushing to make room for their next beer.
“López and his friend are coming in,” Raven said over the molar mic. “López is in the lead.”
“Got it,” Linc replied.
He acted like he was zipping up and headed toward the sinks, which were across from the stalls. In his hand was a small spring-loaded syringe filled with a fast-acting barbiturate formulated to knock out the assassin in a few seconds.
Linc caught López’s eye as the CIA agent rounded the corner. López nodded back, and Linc went back into sloshed mode.
“Hey! There’s my friends again!” he cried out sloppily.
He stumbled forward, and López neatly sidestepped him so that Linc fell into the Mexican’s arms.
“Aye!” the assassin yelled, but that’s all he got out as Linc sunk the needle into his shoulder.
The man, distracted by the knee Linc sent into his groin, doubled over and went limp before he could recover.
López and Linc took him by either arm and carried him to one of the stalls.
“You’re not feeling so good, huh?” Linc announced for the benefit of anyone who might be listening. “Throw up in here.”
López took the cue and said something similar in Spanish.
They shoved him into the stall, and Linc put him head down on the toilet seat. By the time anyone checked on him and found him unconscious, Linc and López would be long gone.
Linc turned and saw López backing away to give him enough room to get out of the stall and close its door. What the CIA agent didn’t see was another man lunging toward him with a knife.
Linc shouted, “Look out!” It probably saved López’s life.
López spotted the attacker at the last moment and swiped at the man’s wrist, which had been aiming at his heart. The fast reaction kept him from being murdered, but López wasn’t quick enough to dodge the knife altogether.
The switchblade plunged into the side of his abdomen. By this time, Linc was able to extricate himself from the stall and grab the stranger by the neck. Linc towered over the man and outweighed him by a good forty pounds, so it took no effort to pick him up and slam his head into the granite countertop of the nearest sink.
The knife-wielding assailant instantly became a lifeless rag doll and fell to the
floor, the blade dropping from his hand and bouncing under a stall door nearby.
Linc whipped around and saw López clutching his stomach. Blood was oozing from between his fingers.
“How bad is it?” Linc asked.
“Bad,” López said through gritted teeth. “But not bad enough to wait for the cops to show up.”
Not only would an investigation cause a diplomatic incident but they didn’t know who in the Rio Police Department was on Ferreira’s payroll. If they wound up in custody, they could easily be dead by morning.
A crowd of men was gathering to look at the prone man on the floor with the caved-in head.
“He slipped,” Linc said to no one in particular. “Someone call an ambulance!”
He didn’t know if anyone saw the fight or spoke English, but casting doubt on what happened might give them a few seconds.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said to López. “Raven, López got knifed in the side. He’s on his feet but bleeding.”
“On it,” she replied curtly.
As they were leaving the men’s room, Linc had his head on swivel looking for any more assassins in the crowd. Nobody caught his eye, but he did see Raven bartering with a female fan wearing a baseball cap and a scarf with the Mexican flag on it. Raven handed over a wad of bills and got the scarf and cap in return.
She joined them as they made their way through the spectators toward the exit. She put the cap on López’s head as a simple disguise and wrapped the scarf around his midsection. He winced as she cinched it into a tight knot.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Someone was following López,” Linc said. “They must have gotten word from Ferreira that he was a possible spy.”
“And seeing you conk his friend out convinced them of that.”
“Apparently.”
“Where are we going?” López asked.
“We’ve got an extraction rendezvous five miles from here,” Linc said. “Can you make it?”
“Car?”
“We’ve got three motorcycles waiting in the parking lot.” They’d planned on that mode of transportation since they knew López was an experienced rider and getting through the dense after-match traffic would be much easier than with a car.
López shook his head as he hobbled along. “I don’t think I could handle a bike.”
“He can ride with me,” Raven said. “You provide us cover.”
That made sense to Linc. She was good on a cycle, but Linc was the most experienced biker on the Oregon. He even had his own, heavily customized Harley-Davidson that he occasionally brought out of the ship’s hold for rides during R & R. He could fire a gun while driving through traffic if needed.
They were at the north exit of the stadium when two men spotted them from across the concourse.
Linc and Raven hustled López to the exit while their pursuers tried to get through the swarm of people between them.
Three BMW motorcycles were waiting in the parking lot where they’d left them. While Raven helped López on her bike, Linc opened the storage case on the back of his and withdrew a Glock pistol. He turned and saw the two men bolt from the exit with weapons in hand. One was talking on his phone as he ran.
Linc didn’t wait for them to fire. He took each of them down with a single shot as they came toward him.
The sound of the gunshots would surely draw police attention. Linc took a backpack from the motorcycle case and put it on, then got on the bike and started it up. None of them took time to put helmets on, using sunglasses only. López leaned against the backrest of Raven’s motorcycle, one hand around her waist and the other pressing on his wound to stem the blood loss.
As he flipped up the kickstand, Linc saw three vehicles screech around the corner. The phone call from the bad guy must have gotten through. Two men on red Ducati racing bikes were followed by a black Porsche SUV with men hanging out of the windows holding MP5 submachine guns.
“Go! Go! Go!” Linc shouted.
Raven’s rear tire squealed as she took off, and Linc was close behind. They sped onto the relatively empty boulevard.
“We’ve got to lose them before we get to the bridge,” Raven said, her voice in his head as clear as if she were right next to him despite the wind rushing past.
“Working on it,” Linc replied.
Their destination was the midpoint of the Rio–Niterói Bridge. If they didn’t put some distance between themselves and the pursuers, they’d never live long enough to make the rendezvous with Juan.
15
When MacD got back down the Sugarloaf Mountain trail with Jessica Belasco, the monkeys chattered to announce their presence to Hali. Belasco abruptly stopped at the sight of the equipment he had been prepping.
“You’re kidding me,” she said.
“Jessica Belasco,” MacD said. “Meet Hali Kasim, our resident expert on paragliding.”
A gold and white semicircular parachute wing was spread on the ground, its suspension lines converging on a harness tacked to the ground to keep the chute from taking flight early. The canopy, as the wing was called, constantly threatened to rise into the air as the breeze took hold of it.
MacD was beginning to enjoy paragliding almost as much as Hali, who had fallen in love with the sport during a stop in Jamaica when he went parasailing. In that case, the parachute had been dragged by a boat and winched out from the stern as it rose into the air. That’s what usually was done with uninitiated tourists.
But Hali had become such an enthusiast that he learned how to paraglide by launching from a high cliff and soaring freely through the sky, eventually becoming an expert. His record for duration and distance riding thermals was two hours thirty-eight minutes and forty miles, still far short of the three-hundred-fifty-mile record. They’d even rigged a winch at the back of the Oregon so Hali could be towed by a launch behind the ship like an airborne water-skier.
“Nice to meet you.” He was busy unrolling the second parachute, so he nodded to a helmet and said, “Brought that for you.”
She walked over to it in a daze and picked it up. “I can’t fly one of these things.”
“You’re not going to,” Hali said. “I am. We’ve got a tandem harness.”
She looked at MacD, who shrugged as he helped Hali finish prepping the second canopy, which was red and blue. “Fastest way down. Can’t take the cable car, as you already pointed out. And hiking back down would take hours, during which time your friends would be able to intercept us.”
“This is insane. How can you be sure my cover is blown?”
“Ah can’t. Langston Overholt seems to be sure, though.”
“But—”
“Listen. You can stay and hope they haven’t found out about you or you can come with us. That simple.”
Her griping was starting to get on MacD’s nerves. He pointedly looked back up the trail. They were still alone, but that wouldn’t last long.
Belasco followed his gaze, then grimaced and put on the helmet.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
MacD pointed at Ilha da Laje at the mouth of Guanabara Bay.
“See that little speck down there? We’re landing on top of it. No way your friends can get to us there.”
“And then what? A boat picks us up?”
“Sub.”
She rolled her eyes. “This just keeps getting better. Who are you guys?”
“Private contractors. We’re all partners in the firm. Ah can get you a brochure later so you can learn about our time-share opportunities.”
“Great. I’m being rescued by Chuckles the Clown.”
“Hey! You guessed my Ranger call sign!”
Belasco turned to Hali, who helped her into her harness. “You have to put up with this all the time?”
Hali smiled. “That’s why I get pai
d the big bucks.”
“How long will it take us to get down?”
“Ten minutes tops. Light breeze. Should be a smooth ride.”
“And I should still be on my undercover mission,” Belasco said. She wheeled on MacD. “If I find out you burned me for no reason, I’ll make sure you regret it.”
“Is it too early to regret it now?” MacD asked.
“Maybe I should let you two ride together,” Hali said. “That way, you can continue this whole ‘will they, won’t they’ tension.”
“Oh, please.” She jerked a thumb toward MacD. “My ex was a better-looking version of this guy.”
MacD looked at Hali and shook his head. “It’s good we’re getting paid for this. Ah’ve never heard somebody complain so much about getting his life saved.”
Hali just grinned and gave him a shrug. While Hali put on his own harness and connected it to the suspension lines and to Belasco, he told her how they were going to launch.
“We’re going to face the canopy, and I’m going to pull it into the air,” he said. “Once it catches the wind, we’ll turn around and head down the hill toward the cliff until we take flight. Got it?”
Now she was starting to look nervous.
“You’ve done this before? The tandem thing?”
“Hundreds of hours,” Hali said assuredly.
MacD knew that wasn’t true. Hali had practiced it for the last two days with MacD to literally teach him the ropes. Before that, he’d done it maybe half a dozen times. Guess he wanted to calm Belasco. Panicky people did stupid things.
She nodded, and MacD and Hali checked the molar mics to make sure they were communicating. Then MacD clipped into his harness.
Just before Hali pulled the canopy up, the monkeys started going crazy.
“Someone’s coming,” MacD said.
The sounds of footsteps pounded down the trail, and Belasco’s three companions emerged from behind the trees twenty-five yards away. They were momentarily dumbfounded by the vision of the colorful canopies spread on the ground.
But their surprise didn’t last. Although they drew weapons, they had to dive for cover when MacD pulled out his SIG Sauer semiautomatic pistol and shot at them.
Marauder (The Oregon Files) Page 7