War Lord

by David Rollins

  ‘Well, is it?’ I asked her.

  ‘Is it what?’

  ‘In the area?’

  ‘Doesn’t appear to be,’ she said.

  I checked left and right. A house piled up in one spot near the wall had a roofline that extended beyond its neighbors’. I went up to it and found the front door – solid, and locked. I brought out my gadget – the Glock.

  ‘You want to gain entry?’ Petinski asked.

  ‘That’s what I had in mind.’

  ‘Put the gun away,’ she said, backing up half a dozen steps. She then bounded toward the brickwork beside me. At the last instant she leaped and hit the wall with her front foot and pushed up so that her hand found a ledge at least ten feet off the ground. In one fluid movement her other foot sprang off a crack and she was in midair, reaching for a pipe. I watched her swing herself completely around it and then push herself up, feet first. One leg hooked over a balcony and the next instant Petinski was over it and gone. The woman climbed like a monkey.

  Moments later the front door opened. ‘Coming in?’ she asked politely.

  I put my finger to my lips.

  ‘Relax, the place is empty. Could be a shift worker lives here.’

  Inside it smelled of boiled meat, cheap tobacco and urine. My least favorite Air Wick. Petinski led the way up a steep, narrow flight of concrete steps ending in a covered veranda, the one through which she’d gained entry. The top of the von Weiss compound wall was three feet above our heads, and about the same distance away. I looked down over the balcony and confirmed a drop of about twenty feet to the ground. Starlight caught on the jagged shards of broken glass set into the top edge of the compound wall’s cinderblocks.

  The home we were in was small and open to the elements on the side facing the wall. Plastic sheeting hung down from the ceiling, a makeshift screen against the rain. Behind the plastic and down one end was a stove with gas cylinder, a sink, a compact bar fridge covered in football decals, and a small table and chair. Down the other end, a narrow wire bed frame occupied the compact space with an old mattress on top. There was also a long plank of wood between cinderblocks on which stood various electrical appliances, magazines and football kitsch. A nearby floodlight on the compound wall lit the place like it was under arrest.

  ‘Got any cash on you?’ I asked Petinski.

  ‘No, why?’

  I took some reals from my pocket and left them on the fridge. Next, I grabbed the mattress. The smell of it reminded me of the A-Star as I hauled it out onto the veranda and set it down. ‘Keep an eye on the guards at the front gate. Let me know when no one’s looking.’ I readied the Glock.

  A few seconds passed. ‘Now,’ she whispered.

  I squeezed the trigger, shot through the nearby floodlight’s metal shroud and killed the light. No glass tinkled to the laneway below, which was the general idea. Passing the Glock to Petinski I hoisted the mattress to the veranda’s wall, picked it up by its bottom end and half pushed it, half threw it at the top of the wall across the way. The mattress came to rest straddling the top edge, covering those glass shards. I went inside and came back out with the plank of wood. The damn thing weighed a ton – hardwood. I propped one end on the veranda wall and lowered the top end onto the mattress.

  ‘Put a foot here.’ I pointed at the end of the plank and Petinski secured it as I leaned on the makeshift bridge, testing its strength.

  ‘Hurry,’ she told me.

  ‘I’m hurrying.’

  ‘You call that hurrying. If it had been me up there we’d be in the bar ordering—’

  ‘Something virginal with an umbrella in it,’ I said. I shinnied to the top of the plank and popped my head over the wall. It was dark. Wrestling with the pack, I removed the NVGs and slipped them over my head. Then I got hold of the camera, a small remote video recorder attached to a sticky base. I popped my head over the wall again to ensure that the coast was clear. It was. There wasn’t much open area on the other side of the wall, though more than was usual in this housing compress. Down the far end, behind the gate manned by the armed sentries, was a brightly lit courtyard. A black Mercedes SUV gleamed under those lights. Could it be the same vehicle that had driven out of von Weiss’s compound earlier in the evening? Sure it was. What were the chances that identical black SUVs would be in both places? Limited.

  This compound had been set up to operate like a fort. I already knew that a wall went all the way round it. Snipers in the rooms of the uppermost houses, plus a machine gun or two behind sandbagged emplacements up high, could keep an assaulting force with only small arms at bay for some time. Any attack would probably also have to deal with armed resistance sniping at it from the rear, from the homes farther down the hill. And no doubt there would be underground tunnels for escape if necessary.

  I went back to concentrating on those armed guards at the gate. When I was sure the coast was clear, I threw the sticky camera at the wall of the house opposite. It stuck, finding a brick ledge above block. Lucky throw.

  Eighteen

  I opened my eyes. A light breeze rolled around in the folds of the translucent white curtain closing off the outside balcony. Beyond the curtain I could hear folks splashing about in a pool somewhere below.

  The sun was already up and my Seiko was set to go off in a minute’s time at six a.m. The pull-out sofa bed was as comfortable as any I’d ever slept on, or would have been but for the injury the swinging candlestick had done to my forearm. I turned my head and had a look at it. The skin was purple from elbow to wrist. I ran my fingers along the swelling, made a fist and rotated the arm left and right. Sore as hell, but nothing broken.

  The Seiko buzzed.

  The door to the bedroom was open. The bed was messed up but no one was in it. I got up, took a shower and mentally went through the leads we had to go on. We had so few that the review took no more than a handful of seconds, so I just stood under the water and tried not to think about the doomsday clock ticking down to midnight. Nine days, maybe less, and we were still going nowhere.

  ‘That you in there, Cooper?’ a voice called out. Petinski’s.

  ‘No, it’s George Clooney,’ I said. ‘Cooper had to go out. You mind coming in and passing me a fresh bar of soap?’

  ‘Breakfast is here and it’s getting cold,’ she said.

  If I wasn’t mistaken, we were sounding like an old married couple. And given that we weren’t having sex, behaving like one too. If the woman down at reception got the hotel detective to check on our sheets, we’d be bounced out of here on false pretenses. Somehow I didn’t think that line of reasoning would make Petinski any more accommodating. I toweled off and threw on the robe hanging from a gold-plated hook on the door.

  Petinski’s idea of breakfast wasn’t mine. Where were the scrambled eggs, bacon and pancakes? All I could see on the tray was muesli and fresh fruit salad. Nothing here was gonna go cold, unless she was referring to my appetite.

  ‘I’m having a swim first,’ I said.

  ‘After a shower?’

  ‘Shower first, swim second. House rule.’

  Petinski shrugged. ‘Hurry, we have to get going.’

  ‘Get going where?’ I wondered. It was occurring to me that maybe I was being a little too managed. Spoon fed, even. I had no proper briefing, no resources, no intel beyond what Petinski chose to pass on.

  ‘CIA has a lead on Randy’s whereabouts. They’ve had a tip-off. They believe he could be in one of von Weiss’s safe houses. You and I have been volunteered to help ABIN close the cordon. We have to roll out of here in an hour to make the rendezvous at eleven.’ My partner was almost perky.

  I picked up a handful of clothes, my wallet and the spare passkey. ‘What’s ABIN again?’

  ‘Brazil’s national intelligence agency – counter terror, et cetera.’ I knew that . . . ‘See you in twenty minutes,’ she concluded.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, though I had other plans. My gut told me the safe house would be a waste of time. If nothing else,
it seemed odd that the type of operation the Brazilians wanted us in on wasn’t happening at dawn when most folks were dopey. This one was going down at brunch, a far more civilized time. My interest was in Céu Cidade, von Weiss’s favela and Rio’s mainline for drugs and guns patrolled by his private army. The place was a rat’s nest and we’d only scratched the surface. If I was von Weiss and had something to hide, that’s where I’d hide it. ‘Have you checked the camera? Are we receiving?’

  ‘The Mercedes left twenty-seven minutes after we did, a tall man driving – not our subject. The resolution isn’t great. Other than that, nothing of interest. Check the file after your swim. Just make it quick, will you?’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ I said as I walked out, a comment that earned me a good lip pursing.

  The elevator was pulling into my floor so I decided to ride it instead of taking the stairs. The doors slid back. The box was pretty full, occupied by five large African males, all of whom were wearing sunglasses. I walked in, turned, and stood as the doors shut, the air reeking of sour animal, testosterone and Abercrombie & Fitch cologne. The way the men carried themselves – a kind of nervous aggression – was familiar. A sideways glance in the mirror confirmed that four of the men were bodyguards for piggy in the middle, a tall weasel-thin hombre with dusty matte-black skin wearing a cream-and-orange-striped knitted shirt and cream-colored pants, an ensemble that looked as natural on him as lipstick on a tarantula. Dime-sized diamonds were punched into the lobes of both ears. The four men at four points of the close protection box around him were heavy-set, bearded and needed a bath real bad.

  The doors opened on the first floor and I offered to let the Africans out first. The bodyguards hesitated and looked me up and down. My own training told me that they were nervous about letting a stranger wander around behind them.

  ‘Beautiful morning, isn’t it?’ I said complete with goofy smile.

  I got four frowns in return, but they decided I was harmless and moved out. Their principal ignored me completely – no eye contact at all. Keeping the box formation the men turned right, heading for the pool, taking up as much room as possible so that other hotel guests had to walk in single file, hugging the wall to get past. I wondered who the veep was and what his story might be, because they moved like men used to ambush, almost as if they expected one to appear and cut them down at any moment. Housemaids, maybe, bursting out of the laundry and attacking them with boxes of Tide.

  I gave a mental shrug. They were none of my business and I was none of theirs. I detoured to the pool shop and bought a pair of swim trunks because my undershorts, aside from being undershorts, had a hole in them. After changing, I strolled out onto the pool deck and saw that there was a casual restaurant facing the beach on one front and the pool on the other, where a breakfast crowd had gathered. The Africans had taken one of the larger tables out in the open, closer to the pool. A waiter was speaking with them, his notebook open. The bodyguards appeared to be more focused on the space they found themselves in than on ordering breakfast. I recognized the body language. They were getting their lines of fire worked out, noting the exits and so forth, in case of an emergency that had nothing to do with a burnt side order of sourdough toast. Again, I wondered who these guys were.

  I grabbed a towel from the cabana boy and claimed a lounge chair, dumping my clothes and towel on it. Several guests were in the pool doing slow languid laps. That was about my speed, so I joined the queue flopping back and forth. After around ten minutes of this I came to a stop to catch my breath and blow the watery snot out of my nose.

  Meanwhile, the situation at the restaurant had changed somewhat. To start with, there were a few more guests now and, at one large table in particular – the one occupied by the African party – the mood was rowdy. I did another lap underwater, coming up for breath at the shallow end, then pushed off the wall to do a lap in the silence at the bottom of the pool. I came up and hooked my elbows over the tiled ledge as a second party of Africans swaggered across the courtyard, heading for the tarantula and his pals, all of whom stood to welcome the new arrivals with various gangsta handshakes.

  At the sight of all this, my heart rate soared and rang the bell at the top of the scale because I recognized one of the new arrivals. Jesus, last time I saw this guy in the flesh it was nighttime in a clearing on the top of a hill in the east Congo rainforest where he was touting the killing power of the claymore anti-personnel mine to a bunch of rapists and butchers. And shortly after, the thing almost blew my head off. Some faces you don’t forget. Especially when you’ve taken the time to look at all available Interpol shots of that face in the hope that you’ll meet it one day in a dark alley and you’ll have a baseball bat in your hand.

  The face’s name: Charles White, arms dealer, killer and most recently the middleman who, according to Petinski, had somehow managed to get a W80 nuclear warhead out of continental USA and into the hands of this Nazi-loving von Weiss we were stalking. And now here he was, about to sit down to eggs Benedict. Only it was broad daylight, and where was my Louisville Slugger?

  *

  On closer inspection, I also recognized Falco, Charles White’s older brother. And now that I thought about it, two more of the party – a couple of the bodyguards accompanying Charles White – also looked pretty familiar: muscle that had accompanied him in the DRC.

  I glanced up at my balcony. The door was open, the curtain pulled aside, the room behind it a dark rectangle. I scanned the other balconies facing the pool: several other rooms also had their doors open and the curtains drawn back. Was ABIN up in one or more of those rooms, watching proceedings? Or maybe CIA? Or MI6? I scoped the restaurant. All I could see were waiters and guests behaving like waiters and guests. Where was the guy sitting on his own, reading the newspaper with the hole cut in the masthead? Or the nonchalant couple taking their newborn child for a walk in a stroller? If Charles and Falco were under observation, whoever was doing it knew their stuff.

  I got out of the pool, walked to my lounge chair and toweled off. Bundling up my clothes, I wandered over to the hotel door without showing any apparent interest in the breakfast club. The casual act ended when I reached the hallway, where I broke into a sprint for the elevator. A couple of minutes later, I fell into my room on the fifth floor.

  ‘Petinski!’

  ‘Shhh, quiet,’ she hissed from somewhere inside. I found her sitting cross-legged up on the TV cabinet with her camera, lining up the Africans through the open balcony doors. ‘Charles and Falco White,’ she told me without lowering the viewfinder.

  Old news. ‘Who’s the guy with the close protection?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  I joined her in the shadows.

  ‘We shouldn’t be so surprised those two would turn up here,’ she continued, her digital Canon peeling off rapid-fire shots. ‘They’ve got money, the Palace is one of Rio’s finest hotels, and this city’s where they live.’

  ‘I’m staying on these guys,’ I said. ‘ABIN can plug its own holes.’

  ‘You don’t like following orders, do you, Cooper?’ Petinski said quietly.

  ‘Orders I like just fine. It’s stupidity I’m not down with.’

  She climbed off the cabinet, removed the micro memory card from the camera and fiddled around with her iPad while I watched the tables down in the courtyard. A few minutes later she joined me at the cabinet as a woman entered the restaurant area, her back to Petinski and me. She wore a short bright-blue dress cut low at the back, and walked on low heels toward the focus of our attention. It was the kind of walk that makes men lick their lips – I licked mine.

  ‘Look, the entertainment has arrived,’ said Petinski.

  When the woman was close enough, Charles White grabbed her, lifted her clean off her feet and sat her on his lap, side-saddle. She threw her head back and laughed, maybe a little too hard.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said under my breath.

  ‘What’s up?’ Petinski asked.

  ‘That
woman down there. Her name’s Sugar.’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘She worked at Jubilee. She was involved with Randy and Alabama.’

  It took Petinski a few moments to get around to asking the obvious question. ‘Intimately?’

  There was no way to soften it. ‘Yeah, I believe so.’

  ‘Both of them?’

  ‘Unconfirmed on that score. And there have been other connections.’ Me, for example. I took out my cell and showed her the picture of Sugar sitting with Ty Morrow in the Green Room several hours after he’d supposedly fled from creditors in his jet.

  ‘Men are such fucking idiots,’ she murmured.

  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?’