War Lord

by David Rollins

  ‘Because they staged it,’ said Petinski. ‘They put on a show. They let us see them bring her here. They lured us into a trap, hoping to kill you and me. And when they were sure we were on our way, they disabled the camera.’

  If that was true then Shilling’s cover was definitely blown. She was in mortal danger. The discovery also explained the shots fired at my head from the sniper rifle, the ambush in the house where the guy had his throat cut. Perhaps I’d been seen planting the camera. The facts sure pointed in that direction. Maybe, like Petinski said, we’d been played. And now Shilling was going to pay the price – or had already paid it – and if she paid it like the unfortunate individual we’d found here? Jesus . . .

  I gestured at the body. ‘What would cause that kind of swelling?’

  ‘Anaphylactic shock,’ said Delaney.

  ‘You mean like nuts?’ I asked.

  ‘No, like snakebite. Robredo says he’s seen this kind of reaction before.’

  ‘Snakes,’ Petinski said. ‘The personal von Weiss touch.’

  Was it my imagination or was I starting to hear thunder every time I heard this guy’s name? ‘I want to see that control room.’

  Robredo, Delaney, Petinski and I arrived there five minutes later, a small, windowless air-conditioned shoebox stuffed with computers, phones and screens. Several personnel were already occupying chairs behind the equipment.

  ‘Everyone here BOPE personnel?’ I asked Delaney.

  ‘No, sir,’ said a woman with a broad Kentucky hills accent sitting in the chair in front of me, raising her hand.

  ‘Tyra’s on the cultural attaché’s staff,’ Delaney explained. ‘Tyra Marr – Vin Cooper and Kim Petinski,’ he said, introducing us. Delaney refrained from mentioning her sponsoring agency openly, although ‘cultural attaché staff’ was code for CIA.

  ‘Hi, y’all,’ the woman chirped.

  ‘Can you drive this boat, Tyra?’ I asked her.

  ‘Sure, no problem.’

  ‘You mind skipping through the security cameras one at a time?’

  ‘All hundred and seventy-three of them?’

  A hundred and seventy-three? ‘We’ll make ourselves comfortable,’ I said.

  ‘You want to view the cameras out in the favela too?’

  ‘He’s got the whole place wired?’

  ‘Your suspect sure is a nervous bunny.’

  Tyra shared a few words in Portuguese with her colleagues, and a black and white image of the familiar front entrance of the compound came up on the main screen. A view of the compound in its entirety appeared on a smaller secondary screen, a red wedge showing the camera’s direction and range, together with various digital readouts nailing the specifics.

  ‘The resolution is full HD and output can be provided in all the usual spectra. How do you want it served up?’

  ‘Infrared. How big are the cameras?’ I hadn’t seen a single one in the entire joint.

  ‘The lens is the diameter of a pinhead.’

  That explained that.

  ‘How long do they keep recordings filed?’ Petinski asked.

  ‘How far back you wanna go, honey? They got terabytes of memory.’

  The camera Petinski and I wanted turned out to be number fifty-seven. Tyra took the recording back to the previous evening, at about the time I was poised on top of the wall, surfing a mattress, and there I was in glorious thermal black and white. Petinski’s guess was right. The assholes had known about our attempt at surveillance from the beginning. Which meant that when von Weiss sent Petinski the French champagne with a side order of prophylactic, he was just toying with us. I felt like a putz – outwitted, outplayed and outsmarted. But it was Shilling who was going to get voted off the island.

  ‘What about the cameras down in von Weiss’s playroom?’ I asked.

  Tyra pushed some buttons and moved a joystick. ‘If you’re hoping to get him on camera committing murder, babe, it ain’t gonna happen, I’m afraid. That history’s been wiped.’

  Okay, so having the guy smiling for the birdie while his victim blew up like a football bladder was too much to hope for. I tried another angle. ‘Let’s see if we can get that Mercedes SUV arriving with Shilling.’

  ‘Nope, no good, neither,’ said Tyra, after isolating the relevant cameras and checking the recordings. ‘Wiped.’

  Only straws were left. I took one. ‘Then let’s see if we can pick up the SUV coming into the favela. There are only two entrances, right?’

  ‘Let’s take a look,’ said Tyra as her team went to work. ‘No, wiped also,’ she said eventually.

  ‘They’ve been thorough,’ Petinski observed quietly.

  ‘What about checking the car’s departure?’ I asked. Petinski shook her head like it was a lost cause. I wasn’t ready to give up. ‘The Benz isn’t here now, so it must have left. We’re going to dot the t’s before we call it quits.’

  Using as a starting point the time at which the recordings had been wiped at the compound, Tyra stayed on the camera with a view taking in the post office down in the valley. She then took a stab at the approximate time the Mercedes would have arrived at that point. Nothing moved on screen at all until a couple of dogs moseyed across the road. She rewound the view at five times the speed for the equivalent of ten minutes. Nothing. Then she did the same going forward. She was shaking her head and about to stop the show when headlights grew out of the shadows.

  ‘Hey, there it is.’ Petinski pointed at the screen as the SUV glided around the bend.

  ‘It took the car thirty-five minutes to leave the compound and arrive at that point,’ said Tyra. ‘Seems a little long.’

  ‘They stopped somewhere along the way,’ Petinski concluded.

  Was it possible that von Weiss’s men had gotten lazy or maybe run out of time to erase all trace of the vehicle’s passage through the favela? ‘Check the cameras along the route. See if you can find where it stopped.’

  The vehicle’s departure from the compound had been wiped, along with its journey most of the way to the post office. It took an hour, but Tyra and her team eventually found a camera picking up the car as it crawled out of a narrow lane.

  ‘Good hunch, Cooper,’ said Petinski. ‘You were right – they took a detour.’

  ‘Find the turnoff,’ I said.

  Within minutes, Delaney, Petinski and I were racing in a convoy of BOPE SUVs down the main road, swerving around a stream of ambulances heading back up the hill. Overhead, the BOPE chopper worked the area we were headed to with its searchlight, looking for movement.

  ‘Cooper, I’ve been thinking,’ said Petinski quietly beside me. ‘Von Weiss has been one step ahead of us all the way. This could be another setup. Perhaps he wants us to search this area.’

  I looked at her.

  She shrugged. ‘It’s possible . . .’

  Yeah, it was possible. I passed it along to Delaney. ‘Jeb, tell your friend Robredo to be careful. Could be another trap.’

  *

  Roadblocks were set up in the area and Robredo’s men began searching house to house. Petinski, Delaney and I were kept out of it, this being BOPE turf. After twenty anxious minutes, the sky to the east beginning to lighten, a BOPE officer appeared from behind a building and ran toward us. ‘Please, this way,’ the man said with a heavy accent when he reached us, out of breath, sweat soaking his forehead. We followed him at a jog along an alleyway that doubled back on itself and climbed through the chaotic stacked housing, and eventually arrived at a doorway guarded by Robredo and his men, their weapons at the ready.

  ‘What makes them think this is the place?’ Petinski murmured.

  Delaney spoke briefly with Robredo, who answered him in a hurried whisper before snapping an order at one of his men. The officer responded, producing two large hand grenades of an unfamiliar type from his webbing.

  ‘They found these explosive devices rigged with tripwires at the access points to this house,’ Delaney said. ‘For our safety, the sergeant wants us to bac
k it up a little.’

  A pair of officers escorted us around the end of a wall and almost immediately a brace of flash bangs detonated, the ear-splitting racket amplified by the brick and cinderblock cavern. As the echoes subsided, screams and shouts from the people living in the vicinity increased in intensity and rained down on us from above. An empty beer bottle came down and smashed on the paving. A stream of urine followed along with a bucket of shit.

  Robredo appeared from around the corner, breathing hard, his face haggard, and ignored the neighborhood anger. He motioned at us to follow him as he spoke to Delaney.

  ‘What did he say?’ Petinski asked.

  ‘He says this is the place,’ the CIA deputy confirmed as we walked toward a heavy red door. ‘There’s a body inside. It’s not good.’

  I prepared myself. I had a feeling this was going to be worse than Mr Soufflé with his anaphylactic shock. The home we walked into was surprisingly modern and spacious inside with expensive light fittings, warm white marble slabs on the floor and classical bronze sculptures of naked women lining the walls. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the woman lying on a white mink rug in the center of the room, and my testicles felt light and vulnerable as I walked around her. It was Shilling. The familiar golden hair. She was on her side, naked. Splotches of blood stained the white mink rug and spattered her shoulders. Her olive skin was flawless, but for a triangle of paler skin across her buttocks where an ultra-brief bikini had prevented tanning. Shilling could have been asleep, except for a couple of obvious signs to the contrary, the lesser of the two being that she plainly wasn’t breathing. But that was far less striking than the other reason: her eyes, which were open and staring. I remembered them as being a steely blue and yet now they were a bright sulfurous yellow in color. Both oozed a trickle of blood and fluid from punctures. They stared out of her skull at nothing, grotesque. Petinski’s hand went to her throat as she turned away in horror. ‘Mengele. That’s what he did in Auschwitz,’ she said. ‘His experiments. He killed people trying to change the color of their eyes.’

  I took a step toward the body, but a terse word from Robredo made me hesitate. Something moved in the shadows thrown by Shilling’s legs and torso. It was a large brown snake the thickness of my arm and at least as long as the woman’s body. The thing moved again, this time bringing its head up and over Shilling’s legs and along her side. Its forked tongue flicked from its mouth every few seconds, tasting the air as it brought a coil across her ribs and breast. The damn thing was challenging us.

  A rapid exchange ensued between Delaney, Robredo and one of his men. ‘It’s a bushmaster, Cooper,’ the CIA deputy said. ‘It’s deadly. Very aggressive.’

  I found myself wondering if it had killed the British agent before von Weiss applied his handiwork. Robredo’s man, who seemed to know what he was doing, took out his knife and slashed at the snake, lopping its head off. He then kicked it scudding across the floor. The serpent’s headless body immediately slid into tight coils before falling off Shilling’s body and writhing beside it.

  ‘He told her it was a python,’ I said.

  ‘How do you know that?’ Petinski asked.

  ‘She told me some things.’

  I made a pact with myself at that moment that I was going to kill von Weiss, and I was going to do it mean.

  Petinski was down on her haunches, examining Shilling’s eyes. ‘Doing this – pulling shit like this out of his father’s handbook. It’s a challenge of sorts. He has to know we’ve dug into his past.’

  Robredo spoke into his shoulder mike and a couple more BOPE officers came in, stared at the naked woman on the floor and then began searching the room. Another man walked in with a blanket and threw it over the body. The cop in me thought about the crime scene being compromised, but after what we’d seen, all of us were beyond that now. Shilling was a casualty of war.

  ‘You’d have t’ say von Weiss is out of the favela business permanently,’ Delaney remarked. ‘After this shit, the asshole’s burned his bridges. There ain’t a man in a BOPE uniform that wouldn’t shoot the fucker on sight.’

  ‘You had a tail on von Weiss, right?’ I said. ‘So let’s pull him in.’

  Delaney glanced at the ground and looked anywhere other than at Petinski and me. ‘We . . . er . . . we took the tail off him yesterday.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Washington told us he was no longer a person of interest.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘The Rio desk’s not big. We got resources issues, other priorities . . .’ He chose not to finish this mealy-mouthed bullshit. Maybe he heard what he sounded like.

  ‘What about a couple of von Weiss’s low-life associates, Falco and Charles White?’ I asked. ‘You know them?’

  ‘Yep – arms dealers, former US citizens, and now residents of Brazil. We don’t have a watch on them neither, but we know where they live.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘In a ritzy apartment block beside the Copa Palace – your hotel. They both keep penthouse suites there.’

  ‘You’re shitting me,’ I said, although it did explain why I’d seen them breakfasting at the hotel. For all I knew, the brothers had egg-white omelettes poolside at the hotel every other day. All this time I could have just strolled next door, taken a ride in a lift, knocked on Charles White’s door and evened our account with a little lead deposited between his ears. ‘Meet us there in an hour. Bring a fuckin’ sledgehammer.’

  *

  It was early but already hot, the sky a misty blue, the beach across the road filling fast. The folks on the sand were mostly too preoccupied oiling themselves up to notice a BOPE van with roof-mounted gun turret squeal to a stop in the forecourt of the Excelsior, the apartment block overlooking the pool at the Copa Palace.

  The rear doors flew open and Robredo’s troops almost threw themselves out, itching to get to the men in the two rooftop apartments who, they’d been briefed, were involved in the killing and wounding of their comrades at the Sky City gun battle a short while ago. They ran at the double to the main glass doors and burst straight through them. The concierge attempting to block the way with a raised hand was brushed aside. The men charged up the fire stairs while Delaney, Petinski and I took the elevator, accompanied by two detectives from the local PD who were armed with a warrant to make the search legal. We arrived on the top floor in time to see a length of railway track with handles take the door clean off its hinges at apartment number two. The door to apartment number three got the same treatment. Flash bangs were thrown in to make a statement. After the splintering crash and the aftershocks of breaking glass ceased, men surged into both apartments, shouting, weapons shouldered, ready for violent retribution.

  Unfortunately, no one was home.

  The apartments were on the spare side of comfortable: white leather couches, African art, zebra-skin rugs, designer touches, lots of dark wood and plenty of glass, most of which now crunched underfoot.

  ‘There are wall safes,’ said Delaney as the railway-track battering ram was called up. ‘PD says their warrant’s good for us to take a look inside.’

  The first one, in Falco White’s apartment, withstood two blows. Inside, fuck-all of significance – some share certificates, rental agreements and so forth. The boys had their technique down pat on the second safe and stove the door in with one hit. The detectives took over and removed a handful of documents, most of which appeared to be on various bank letterheads. Large envelopes containing cash of different currencies were also removed along with three passports. One of them, a Brazilian passport, was Charles’s. The other two had his photo, but the names and nationalities were different.

  ‘Passport violations,’ I muttered. Emma Shilling would’ve rubbed her hands together.

  Wearing gloves, Petinski leafed through one of the passports. ‘Everyone involved in this is going to be traveling on false documents.’

  Robredo handed an elaborate leather box to Delaney along with a fancy printed
envelope. ‘This was found on the dresser in the bedroom,’ Delaney said, lifting the envelope flap and extracting a card with childlike printing on it. He read aloud: ‘“A small tocan of my apreesheashon.” It’s signed Gamal. Who’s Gamal? From the spelling, an English major, obviously.’

  I was surprised he had to ask, but then I remembered he had no need-to-know.

  ‘Gamal Abdul-Jabbar,’ replied Petinski.

  ‘A spider from Somalia,’ I added, ‘fond of knitted shirts. He’s here on business. What’s in the box?’

  Delaney opened it and whistled. ‘A Patek Philippe.’ The box held a man’s wristwatch.

  ‘I take it that’s a good one.’

  ‘If expensive is good, then this baby’s around forty-five-thousand-dollars worth of good.’

  Gamal had bought the watch for White to show ‘apreesheashon’ for the entertainment provided – Sugar. And I was sure she’d earned every cent.

  ‘You’re going to have to coordinate a sweep of all the known residences kept by von Weiss,’ I said. ‘Will your station chief cooperate?’

  ‘She’ll be fine with it.’

  ‘What about city hall?’

  ‘After what happened up at Céu Cidade? Não problema, senhor.’

  ‘Another avenue that might be worth checking: von Weiss has a pilot by the name of André LeDuc, alias Laurent Duval. You can check him out further with Interpol and the Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. Might be worth seeing if the asshole’s recently lodged any flight plans.’

  ‘Sounds like you know him.’

  ‘Only well enough to want to kill him,’ I said.

  Twenty-four

  Aside from a brief catnap, we’d been up the best part of twenty-four hours. I yawned wide and long and leaned against the wall while I waited for Petinski to locate the key.

  ‘I’m going to bed for an hour,’ she said as she unlocked the door to our suite. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I can join you for a few minutes if you like,’ I said.