Black_Tide

by Patrick Freivald

  Matt frowned. "That was a heck of a martini for a fourteen-year-old."

  "Sixteen in that picture. Sweetman and Kamen have both been arrested on many occasions, sometimes with but most of the time without Marie Thill. The charges range, mostly disorderly conduct and possession of controlled substances, speeding, driving without a license, noise ordinance violations, that kind of thing. Typical behavior for kids with way too much money and inadequate supervision. None of the charges ever stuck."

  Matt leaned forward. "So where do we find Kamen?"

  Janet shrugged. "At last count she has seventeen homes, nine in the United States, five in Europe, one each in Beijing, Hong Kong, and a private atoll near the Maldives. But she spends most of her time here." The screen clicked to an aerial photograph of a large city with a lot of swimming pools. "In a cozy nineteen-thousand-square-foot pad in Los Angeles. She's not there now, but that shouldn't be a big surprise. Big K has a bout in Rio de Janeiro tomorrow."

  Keene frowned. "I don't have any jurisdiction in Rio."

  Matt shrugged. "We do."

  * * *

  Monica stepped out of the store into the lights of a camera crew.

  A bottle-blonde in a light blue skirt-suit shoved a microphone in her face. Her smile didn't reach her eyes, and her crow's feet showed that instead of Botox, she just didn't mean it. "Missus Rowley, is it true that the attack on White Spruce was directed at your family?"

  Monica opened her mouth, closed it again. The police hadn't released the fact that Adam had been taken, and Matt had warned her not to share that information with anyone.

  "Missus Rowley?"

  "No. I don't know what you're talking about." She pushed the cart past the reporter and stepped around the camera man.

  "Where is your son, Missus Rowley?"

  Monica turned. It would be so easy to break her pert little nose, and in White Spruce she could have done it and gotten away with it. "I don't know where you get your information, but you leave me alone."

  She ignored a barrage of questions—and the growing crowd—as she loaded the truck. Finished, she pushed the cart out of the way. Ted raised his eyebrows as she got in, then settled back down, his tail thumping against the floor mat. She revved the engine, put it in gear, and lurched forward.

  The cameraman rushed toward her, blonde in tow, as she reached the stop sign at the edge of the parking lot. Tires shrieking on the blacktop, she merged into sparse traffic with the gas pedal to the floor, blinking away tears in order to see the road.

  A quarter-mile later she slowed to within five of the speed limit. Ted chuffed up at her with his sad Bassett eyes.

  "I don't know, Ted. But if I find out who told them, I'll kill them."

  * * *

  Sakura shifted in her seat, trying to get comfortable.

  Matt hung up, unplugged the satellite relay from his cell phone, and turned thunderous eyes to her. "Somebody leaked that Adam's missing. A reporter ambushed Mon outside a Walmart."

  The NSAIDs dulled the pain but couldn't eliminate it, and she refused narcotics as a matter of course. She raised her voice over the drone of the private jet's engines. "Any ideas?"

  "It didn't come from my office," Keene blurted, his hands raised in a defensive gesture.

  "Why would it come from your office?" Sakura said.

  "It wouldn't."

  "Then why did you say that?" She ignored his frown to press the point. "If you had no worry of leaks then you wouldn't leap to defend your colleagues."

  Keene turned to Matt. "Your partner got a problem with the FBI?"

  She managed not to snarl.

  Matt snorted. "My partner is better at reading people than anyone I've ever met. Do we have a confidentiality problem?"

  "No." He didn't hesitate, but his eyes flickered as he said it.

  Matt looked at her, one eyebrow raised.

  "He believes but is not one hundred percent confident in the assessment."

  Matt closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. "Great. Just great."

  "Now wait just one fucking minute—"

  Sakura put on her headphones, turned up the white noise, and went back to sleep.

  * * *

  The plane touched down at Galeão–Antonio Carlos Jobim International Airport just after noon. While not as hot as Matt expected, the humidity still slapped him across the face as he stepped down to the tarmac. A salty, nauseating odor permeated the soupy air: unwashed bodies, unflushed sewers, and rotten fish.

  Keene put his hand to his nose, drawing a glare from the sweating porter unloading their luggage.

  "Guanabara Bay," Sakura said. "You get used to it."

  Keene rubbed his face with both hands. "That smell is exactly why I never had kids."

  Sakura ignored him and approached the waiting car, a light blue late-eighties Caprice Classic with a dented fender. She got in the driver's seat.

  Keene flashed his eyebrows at Matt. "Personal chauffer, huh?"

  "Get in the car before she hurts you." Matt didn't wait for a reply, and Sakura hit the gas before Keene had a chance to close his door or buckle up.

  Sakura led them down a long highway that smelled even worse than the airport, right through rolled-up windows. She took an abrupt turn, then another, and in moments Matt found himself looking across an endless slum of multistory concrete buildings sprawling across a steep hillside. She wound through the streets, higher and higher, without a hint of hesitation.

  "Fight is here," she said. "This favela has some tourist attraction for such things. No rules street fighting popular with Yakuza and others with the means to travel for it. Kasahara-san lost his Codecasa to an American here."

  "Cod-a-what?" Matt asked.

  "Yacht. Very big, very expensive."

  Keene's forehead wrinkled down. "You know a lot about this."

  She nodded, once, without taking her eyes from the road.

  "Who was this Sahara guy?"

  "Kasahara-san is Yakuza, very important in the global heroin trade. Though now in prison he is thought to control at least sixty percent of the global market, including almost all exports from Afghanistan and Mongolia."

  "And you know him how?"

  "I was his enforcer, bodyguard, and mistress for three years in my later teens. My testimony put him in prison."

  Keene gaped like a fish, looking from Sakura to Matt and back.

  Matt turned his gaze out the window at the passing slums. Keene's presence transformed their usual comfortable silence into a taut string, so by the time they'd arrived at the venue his nerves had rubbed raw.

  They parked several blocks away and walked through a growing crowd of dark-skinned people in bright but threadbare clothing. On the far side an artificial railing cordoned off a line of fancy cars, Ferraris, Corvettes, and chopped Mustangs glinting in the fading sun in brazen defiance of the squalor around them. Matt had, against everything he expected, gotten used to the smell of rank humanity, but now it mingled with a spicy, not-unpleasant aroma reminiscent of Christmas cider and grilled chicken.

  The roar of the crowd reached a crescendo as they approached. In the center of the throng, a black iron cage hung thirty feet above the ground from a rusty crane, and on the floor a man lay on his stomach and twitched, one arm dangling over the side. Underneath him a drizzle of red splattered the crowd, and they cheered for it.

  "These guys don't fuck around." Keene nodded toward the wall of muscle guarding three black limousines, each boasting an array of computers in their open trunks. As money changed hands, a bevy of well-dressed goons circled through the crowd and back to the cars, where small men in expensive suits hammered away at the keys.

  The cage crept toward the ground and the crowd parted beneath it, a frantic struggle against the surge of humanity to keep from being crushed by the massive weight. A couple of bruisers opened the door and let the victor out, a topless mid-weight fighter with streaks of blood down his face and chest. The loser they carried, his head lolling as they
pushed through the crowd.

  Matt scanned the throng for signs of Libby Kamen, but Sakura beat him to it.

  "There."

  He followed her gaze to a crowd of large men near the cage, conspicuous more for their expensive black suits than their Caucasian skin. In front of and ignoring them, Kamen chugged from a giant belled tube of green plastic. Pale liquid spilled down her white tank top, soaking it to expose the construction-crew orange bikini top beneath.

  Her laughter drowned in the crowd noise, a flash of white teeth under a mop of dirty-blonde dreadlocked weave. Matt tried to reconcile this carefree, spirited girl with a monster who would order men to rape and murder. His mind balked.

  "They see us." Sakura gave them a princess wave, her face a flat, indifferent mask.

  "What the hell are you doing?" Keene said.

  She shrugged. "They saw us. No reason to play coy. I'll plant the tracker."

  The crowd roared as Big K stepped into the cage, upraised fists wrapped in strips of black leather. His opponent stood six inches taller, a well-tanned brute in a black leather mask and ridiculously tiny white shorts. An announcer babbled in Portuguese, introducing Big K and "Rancoroso."

  They couldn't move in the sudden press, so Matt watched Karthik as the bell rang. The smaller man slid forward and feinted with a left jab. Rancoroso stepped into it and cuffed Karthik on the side of the head. Karthik rolled with the blow and brought his own knee up into the side of Rancoroso's.

  Matt eyed the sloppy work with feigned interest. Neither man exhibited much discipline, and both used street fighting techniques that could benefit from serious honing by a true master of the martial arts. But Big K's ferocity matched his speed, impressive for an unaugmented man, and Matt took pause.

  Big K telegraphed moves he shouldn't have, took hits with too much anticipation, and didn't press the advantage as much as he could. He's playing around. The crowd cheered at the theater. Matt tried to push closer, earning him nasty glares and more than a few elbows to the midsection.

  He looked down at a sharp sting in his side. A young man had buried a thin knife into Matt’s kidney. He smiled a vicious killer's smile that turned to ash under Matt's unwavering gaze.

  "Ouch." Matt plucked his wallet from the pickpocket's hand and smashed his forehead into the bridge of his assailant's nose. The would-be thief collapsed in a spray of blood and the crowd swallowed him.

  "Be careful. A pickpocket just knifed me," he said for the benefit of the microphone in his ear bud.

  "Acknowledged," Sakura replied.

  Karthik spun inside a haymaker and smashed his elbow into Rancoroso's solar plexus. The big man hunched over and stumbled back, but Karthik pressed the attack, kicking and kneeing in a haphazard series of strikes that could have opened up a vulnerability, but didn't.

  Definitely on purpose.

  Matt turned his attention to the girl.

  Libby watched with rapt attention, eyes wide, body leaned forward in anticipation, a wall of muscle in dark suits separating her from the crowd. Her bodyguards looked in every direction, save the one who kept his eyes trained on Matt.

  With thousands of people jammed to standing room only, Matt gave up trying to close the distance. He leaned his head to the side to be heard over the noise. "You got her?"

  "No," Sakura replied in his ear bud. "Need a few minutes to make the cars."

  In the cage, Karthik stepped to the side in a fluid dodge and kicked Rancoroso in the temple. The bigger man dropped to the ground, and Karthik fell on him, driving his full weight onto his elbow, which impacted Rancoroso's throat. The crowd exploded in cheers and boos.

  Matt watched the larger man writhe on the steel floor. "Fight's over. You'd better hurry."

  Chapter 14

  Sakura drifted the rear end, downshifting and punching the gas just before they hit the intersection. Their lumbering vehicle skidded through the turn, tires throwing gravel as the back end fishtailed around. The 5-liter V8 roared, throwing Matt back against the seat again.

  In the far distance, Kamen's bright yellow Corvette disappeared around the mountain curve.

  "This is bullshit," Keene said, his face a jaundiced green-yellow.

  "Oh?" Matt asked.

  "If they made us at the fight then there's no way they don't know we're following them, and this shitbox can't hold a candle to a Camry much less that Z06, especially on these roads."

  Matt's opinion of Keene ticked up just a hair. "Right."

  "So they want us to follow them, which means it's a trap." Keene lifted his sunglasses to look Matt in the eyes.

  "Right."

  "And you're following them anyway."

  They blew past a man leading a burro down the side of the road, the wind from the vehicle ripping his hat from his head. Sakura jammed the car into high gear and the four-speed whined in protest. She glanced in the rear-view mirror. "You want out? Jump."

  "I'm not saying that. I'm just saying it's a trap."

  Matt responded by patting his AA-12 combat shotgun. "It is, but not their trap. Four miles up ahead the Brazilian military has a checkpoint, and they're on the lookout for that little hot rod."

  Keene grunted. "So you're flushing them out."

  Matt shrugged. "If they're unarmed, we have a nice chat and take them into custody. If they're packing illegal hardware, the Federales do it for us."

  Sakura rolled her eyes. "Policia Militar. The Federales are Mexican."

  Keene pulled out his phone. "Let me call for backup. The CIA—"

  Matt cut him off with an upraised hand. "The Shop has already been informed and are embedded with the PM. Just sit back and let Sakura play sheepdog."

  Keene looked from his phone to the road to Matt, sighed, and put it away. "Woof."

  A half-mile later the road broke into a small village, a collection of a dozen concrete homes around a central square. The hand-pump well combined with the rectangular, two-story buildings to give the area a depressed Eastern Bloc feel. Chickens scattered as they approached, and a young boy led goats down an alley between two buildings and out of sight.

  On the far side of the square, the Corvette sat sideways in the road, blocking passage with the help of a pair of Korean War-era Jeeps. A bodyguard stood behind each Jeep, using the engine block as cover, pistols drawn and resting on the hoods. Armed men lurked on the balconies on either side of the street.

  A man by the jeep pulled up a long tube and pointed it at the car.

  "Plan?" Sakura asked without taking her foot off the gas.

  "Follow the goat," Matt said, grabbing the door handle.

  "Oh, shit!" Keene hunkered down as far as he could manage.

  Sakura whipped the wheel counter-clockwise, throwing Matt against the passenger-side door. They disappeared behind the building as the RPG streaked toward them. The explosion obliterated the far wall of the alley as the car slid sideways into the narrow space, blasting them with deafening noise and heat and chunks of plaster.

  Matt popped the handle and used his momentum to carry himself around the door, and pushed into a hand-stand before launching himself upward onto the top of the car. They crunched sideways into the wall at speed, slamming the door and destroying the side-view mirror in a spray of concrete dust.

  Matt hit the wall feet first, already at a run that carried him straight up the side of the building. He grabbed a window sill one-handed and launched himself inside, training the AA-12 through a girl's faded pink bedroom before blasting through the door to the upstairs hall.

  A woman screamed. Sharp pops from the men's pistols met the characteristic chatter of Sakura's REC-7. Matt leapt over a charging Doberman onto the front balcony and shoulder-blocked a gunman over the railing. The man cried out in startled terror and landed with a wet thud on the dusty street.

  Matt slammed the door then opened fire, sending a pair of fin-stabilized fragmentation grenades into the man one house over. He stumbled backward and looked down in stunned confusion, then his chest exploded
in a steaming red mess that sent gobbets of flesh raining down to the street.

  Whispers rejoiced at Matt's bloody brains splattered against the wall, so he took the warning and dropped to the floor. Puffs of concrete erupted from the wall above his head. Prone, he ignored the rifleman shooting at him from across the street, found his range and fired another grenade, this one triggered to explode upward.

  It skimmed over the dead man on the adjacent balcony to the next, passing between metal railings straight between a gunman's knees. Without waiting for the explosion he sprang up and leapt across, following the grenade to draw fire away from Sakura and the car.

  * * *

  Sakura dropped behind the car as bullets punctured the engine block. By the sound, the shooters held low-caliber hunting rifles—what Matt would call a varmint gun—which plinked as they hit the metal, and at least one medium weapon, maybe a 7.26 mm with two hundred grains behind it. She looked under the car but saw no feet, so she flashed her hand up and whipped it back down just as another barrage pinned her in place.

  A quick scan of the alley revealed little of use—a rat skeleton, a rotted-out plastic garbage barrel, and the shattered remains of the side-view mirror. She snatched a piece of broken mirror and pulled it to her chest. Readying the REC-7 with her right hand, she raised the mirror in her left.

  All three balconies across the street had men on them, at least four armed combatants. Keene huddled in the back seat, covering his head with his hands. The glass shattered in her hand. She whirled left and fired a burst around the side of the car before ducking back.

  "Keene! Now!"

  He didn't move, didn't open the door, nothing.

  She swore, rolled to the wall, and popped up again. The shooters reacted, but she shot first. One man stumbled back, his weapon tumbling to the street. Sakura streaked left with her finger on the trigger. As bullets sprayed their position the gunmen ducked for cover, so she backpedaled down the alley and ducked behind the building.

  Slamming another magazine home, she ran to the back door and yanked it open even as an unarmed man burst through, wide eyes white behind dark skin. She struck him in the throat hard enough to stun, stepped forward and hooked her leg behind his, using her body to knock him to the floor as she moved past. A woman huddled in the corner of the kitchen with two small children, their heads pulled against her bosom.