The smell from the food tray pulled him to it. The plate was piled high with beans and rice, fried yucca, and a large hunk of bread. There was no silverware, but he wouldn’t have used it if it had been provided. Lest they take the food away from him before he finished, Tupac shoveled it into his mouth and then mopped the plate with the bread. He washed the last of the meal down with a liter of water from the large plastic bottle.
Watching him finish, the guard pointed at the now-empty tray.
“Push it all back out here.”
Tupac shoved the tray and empty bottle through the slot and watched the bald man carry it away, switching off the light as he departed.
In the darkness his thoughts turned to the blond woman he’d only seen once before. She’d been with the neo-Nazis when they had recaptured him in the rain forest. She’d laughed in Conrad Altmann’s face, and he’d done nothing about it. Tupac wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t just witnessed it. Now she was giving orders as if she was running the whole show. What in the name of the old gods was going on?
For the time being, he’d have to leave it alone. The food in his belly was pulling the blood from his head, and he was just so damn tired. He lay down and curled up on his right side, head resting on his arm, and gave thanks for the soft, warm sweat suit. More badness awaited him on the other side of sleep, but for right now, he’d try to stay awake and enjoy this feeling.
In the pitch-black dungeon cell, Tupac blinked once, then twice. The third time he closed his eyelids. They fluttered briefly but did not open again.
Tupac didn’t hear his cell door open, but he felt rough hands roll him onto his stomach and cuff his hands to a belly chain. By the time he had struggled back to wakefulness, his feet had been shackled together with only a foot and a half of slack between them. When he was pulled to his feet, he noticed the steel operating table outside his cell. Beyond it, the blond woman stared at him, her blue eyes showing no hint of emotion. Beside her stood a grinning Conrad Altmann, expectation shining in his face.
Then a black cloth hood was pulled over his head, shutting out the view entirely. The two guards tugged hard on his arms and he shuffled forward, stumbled, and was roughly pulled back to his feet, before being thrown face up atop the table. Tupac felt thick leather straps bind his feet and upper torso so tightly that movement was impossible. The next strap locked his head in place, leaving him with the claustrophobic feeling of being in traction.
A soft, warm breath caressed Tupac’s right ear, her whisper so soft that only he could hear it.
“This doesn’t have to happen. Just answer one question. Where is the silver staff?”
Something about that warm breath and soft, sexy voice filled Tupac with a dread that he had difficulty suppressing. He hadn’t seen any surgical instruments before the hood had been pulled over his head, but the table had blocked much of his view.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Tupac’s hearing was so finely attuned that he could hear a roach crawling across his cell floor. He found himself listening for the zing of surgical steel being removed from a case. Instead he felt a latch click and the table tilted back so that his head was lower than his feet.
What the hell?
The bucket of ice-cold water that splashed into his face and neck, soaking and compressing the cloth sack against his nose and mouth, surprised Tupac, causing him to gasp and cough. Worse, as the cloth absorbed water, it cut off his airflow. More water was poured down onto the sack that covered his head, more slowly now, just a steady trickle. Tupac’s muscles spasmed, and his chest heaved as his body’s natural drowning response kicked in.
As he fought to free himself, the metal surgical table shook, and the leather straps creaked and groaned. But they held. The bitch was waterboarding him. Tupac struggled to calm himself, but the claustrophobic grip of the straps combined with his inability to draw a breath thrust him into a mindless panic of coughing, sputtering madness. It was as if his conscious mind and his body had become disconnected. No matter how well he understood what she was doing to him, no matter how much he told himself he wasn’t really drowning, his body bucked against the straps as it fought its way toward the imaginary surface of this death pool.
It took two minutes for him to realize that the water had stopped and that air was flowing back through the pores in the cloth again. It took another minute and a half before his breath stopped whistling in and out of his throat.
Then the warm breath was back, that soft voice whispering.
“Where is the silver staff?”
“Screw you, Nazi bitch!”
This time Tupac braced himself, but it did no good. He tried to draw a breath and failed, felt a scream climb out of his throat, but only managed a coughing fit that threw his body into another convulsive panic attack. He wanted to die and yet fought for life. In his despair, Tupac tried to yell, “Stop!”; tried to tell her where the staff was hidden; tried to offer to take her there. But the hell-bitch wouldn’t let up, and he couldn’t get the words out through the suffocating sack. When she finally stopped the flow of water, the moment of weakness had passed.
Again he heard her question, but this time Tupac met it with silence.
For the next hour the water torture continued, until Tupac was too exhausted to struggle.
When two small hands pulled the sack off his head, Tupac found himself looking into her face barely two inches from his own, felt a strand of her blond hair cling damply to his cheek. For the briefest of moments, he thought he saw sadness in those eyes, but decided it was just a trick of his fevered brain.
The woman straightened. “Put him back in his cell, and remove his chains. We’ll start again in the morning.”
CHAPTER 46
For the second day in a row, Jack Gregory remained in the sniper hide, getting a feel for the rhythms of Altmann’s compound. Yesterday, when Conrad Altmann departed, Janet Price had not gone with him. She had remained inside throughout the remainder of the day and the night. When Altmann arrived aboard his helicopter again this morning, Jack had his confirmation. Tupac Inti was being held somewhere inside the main house, probably in the basement.
Janet was here to make sure that Jack didn’t try to bust Tupac out. Because she was deep cover, she would be taking steps to protect Tupac while making it appear to Altmann that she was doing exactly the opposite. Whatever was happening in there, Jack figured that the big Quechua shaman was having some bad days. Jack only wished he knew more about what the NSA and Altmann wanted from the man.
Three hours after Conrad Altmann had climbed off his helicopter, he reappeared, and Janet stepped outside with him. The two faced each other, exchanging words. Jack let the scope reticle steady just above the bridge of the neo-Nazi’s nose. Altmann’s expression was a curious mix of excitement and frustration. Jack shifted his aim to Janet but could only see her back. Her gestures reminded Jack of a hostage negotiator calmly trying to talk a perp into releasing a hostage.
Again Jack shifted views. Altmann listened, nodded, then turned and walked to his helicopter. From the pool deck, Janet Price watched the chopper lift off and then turned to face up the mountainside toward the spot where Jack lay hidden. He watched her eyes carefully as she scanned the hillside. Jack lay in shadow, so there would be no telltale reflection from his scope, but she was doing exactly what he would have done had he stood in her place, seeking out the best spots for a sniper to hide. Her eyes looked directly at him and stopped, shifting ever so slightly as she studied the dense brush that provided an optimal view into the compound.
Just as he was beginning to wonder if he’d been made, she shifted her eyes to a spot higher up and to Jack’s right, studying it just as carefully.
A minute later, she dropped her gaze and walked back into the house.
Jack crawled backward into a covered position, rose to his feet, and began working his way through dense brush to the spot he’d left the hiker’s backpack. Removing the scope and
custom stock, Jack disassembled the Dragunov rifle into three pieces, sliding them into slots on the tall backpack between the main compartment and the frame. Stowing the spare magazines inside an inner backpack pocket, he slipped the backpack over his shoulders, adjusted the straps, and began working his way through the steep woods toward a distant hiking trail.
By the time he reached it, he was just one more dirty eco-tourist making his way out of the mountains, looking forward to a beer and a good night’s rest at a cheap hotel. As his long strides carried him closer and closer to Cochabamba, Jack decided that, before he finalized his plans, he would take advantage of both of those luxuries.
Janet Price was an unwanted and dangerous complication, but she’d dangerously complicated his life once before, and he’d enjoyed it. The memory of a cool Mediterranean night, her warm body moving against his, stoked a hunger he’d been doing his best to repress. But as he hiked into Cochabamba and neared the hotel where he’d prepaid for a weeklong stay, he just couldn’t get her out of his head.
CHAPTER 47
The afternoon cloud cover continued to lower over La Paz as Dolf began to wonder whether Bolivia’s chief of intelligence would show. Based on the weather forecast, he had chosen to meet at this scenic outlook, knowing full well that nobody wanted to visit a place that normally provided a beautiful panoramic view of La Paz on an afternoon when visibility was limited to a few hundred meters.
As the meeting time came and went, Dolf felt his patience wane. He didn’t have a lot of faith in General Esteban Montoya’s competence, but he did count on the man’s loyalty. After all, Conrad Altmann had long since bought and paid for it, and Altmann had enough blackmail material on the man to ensure his imprisonment if revealed.
Montoya did have one thing that interested Dolf Gruenberg: a high-level contact within Cuba’s Directorate General of Intelligence, or DGI. And that man, Chumo Garcia, had excellent connections to the Russian FSB. Like Conrad Altmann, Dolf hated the communists, and the current Russian government was a kissing cousin to its Stalinist ancestor. But under Klaus Barbie, Conrad Altmann had apprenticed and mastered the art of infiltrating intelligence services. In that world, the line between friends and enemies was loosely drawn based only on your current interest.
The sound of a shoe scraping gravel caught Dolf’s attention, and he turned to see the heavyset general appear out of the thickening fog. General Montoya paused long enough to say something to the two security personnel who accompanied him and they stopped thirty meters from where Dolf waited, turning to look back down the hill in the direction from which they’d just come.
Dolf applied the fake grin that others found so winning, and shook the general’s extended hand, resisting the urge to squeeze the flabby palm like a damp sponge.
As the general spoke, he stepped up to the edge of the low stone wall that surrounded the scenic lookout, and Dolf stepped up beside him, as if they were merely two tourists gazing out at the beautiful view. The fact that they couldn’t see shit through the fog didn’t seem to matter to General Montoya. It was stupid, but Dolf understood it. Few men felt comfortable looking up into Dolf’s face as he gazed down at them. And only Conrad Altmann made Dolf feel that he was the one looking up.
“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me what is so sensitive that it requires pulling me out of my office to this lovely spot?” The general’s voice was heavy with annoyance.
“There is someone whom Herr Altmann is interested in checking out. He would like you to have your DGI contact perform an extensive background search on her.”
General Montoya turned toward Dolf. “Who is this person?”
“She goes by the name of Janet Mueller.” Dolf handed the general a large manila envelope. “This is all the information we have on her. It includes background material from our European contacts, a photograph, and a set of prints I pulled from a drinking glass.”
General Montoya undid the metal clip that secured the envelope and removed the contents, pausing to stare down at the full-page photograph that topped the sheaf of documents. A low whistle escaped his lips.
“Quite a looker.”
Dolf said nothing.
Pushing the stack of papers back into the manila envelope, General Montoya nodded. “I’ll notify Señor Altmann when I have his answer.”
Dolf shook his head. “The packet is to be delivered directly to me.”
The general’s dark brown eyes narrowed. “Directly to you?”
“Herr Altmann would not like his European friends to think that he is questioning their information.”
A knowing grin curled General Montoya’s lips. “I see. If it should come to light that you did some unauthorized digging on your own, it would merely be an embarrassment instead of an affront.”
Dolf nodded. “When I get the background file, twice the usual fee will be deposited into your account. If your DGI man’s response also includes Fraulein Mueller’s FSB file, there will be a matching bonus. But I need it in the next two days, three at the latest.”
General Montoya’s grin grew wider, revealing a mouthful of yellow, tobacco-stained teeth. “Any information my Cuban friend can find will be in your hands by Friday.”
Then the general turned and walked back to where his men waited, disappearing in the fog without a backward glance. Dolf waited until he saw the military sedan’s headlights slice through the fog and then turn to descend the hill.
Alone again in the gathering darkness, the image that filled Dolf’s mind was of Janet Mueller’s face as she’d stabbed her knife between his splayed fingers. When he cut those pretty lips off her face, he’d give her a grin to die for. But before Altmann would give him permission to do that, Dolf needed ammunition.
With the fog swirling about him, Dolf started down the hill toward his car. The FSB would get him what he needed.
CHAPTER 48
“Tell me what you’ve got, Levi.”
Levi Elias stood beside the big screen in the NSA director’s private conference room, a red laser pointer in one hand, a Bluetooth remote control in the other. Looking at the concern on Admiral Riles’s face didn’t help alleviate his own worry. Seated on the admiral’s right, Dr. Denise Jennings was the only other participant in this briefing.
Levi pressed a button on the remote, and the picture of a man wearing a Cuban military uniform appeared on the big screen.
“This is Colonel Chumo Garcia, a senior intelligence figure in the DGI. Early this morning we picked up a series of queries initiated by this man, seeking information about Janet Mueller. Principal among the recipients of his queries was General Alexandr Prokorov, head of the Russian FSB.”
Levi changed the image to a balding, distinguished-looking man in a civilian suit seated at a large conference table.
“Included in the packet was this picture and an almost complete set of fingerprints from Janet Price’s right hand.”
The screen changed to show Janet Price, her hair dyed blond, her eyes contact-blue, staring directly into the camera. It was a German passport photograph issued to Janet Mueller.
Admiral Riles turned to Dr. Jennings.
“Denise, has Big John picked up how Colonel Garcia became interested in Janet?”
“So far Big John has only identified one other person in the request chain, General Esteban Montoya.”
Levi changed the image to show the portly Bolivian general standing in review of new graduates at the Bolivian police academy. Levi pointed a red dot from the laser-pen at the general’s face.
“Obviously, this is not the brains behind the query. But it isn’t difficult to guess who is, considering that we’ve known for a long time that General Montoya is on Conrad Altmann’s payroll.”
Admiral Riles leaned back in his chair, his left hand rubbing his chin as he paused to consider this information. Levi met his intense gray eyes.
“Do you think Janet has been compromised?”
“No, sir. We expected them to have suspicions, and we know
Janet can get under people’s skin with her directness. I think this is probably just Altmann’s due diligence.”
“Contacting the head of the FSB seems like a bit more than due diligence.”
“Normally I would agree. But you know how much the neo-Nazis hate the communists. Even if Altmann wanted to use them, he would never do so directly. And I doubt that he would trust General Montoya to make such a query on his behalf.”
Levi paused, hoping that his analysis was correct. If not, his words might get Janet killed.
“I think Altmann told General Montoya to dig into Janet Mueller’s background and that General Montoya was hoping for a nice bonus, so he contacted his old friend in the DGI and, without mentioning Altmann, offered him a piece of the action. If Colonel Garcia didn’t have anything on Janet, it’s reasonable that he would have asked the FSB for help.”
“Can we get word to Janet?”
“No, sir. She’s gone dark.”
“What about The Ripper? Do we know his current location?”
“Not with a high degree of confidence. He ditched the laptop and hasn’t returned to the house in Santa Cruz. However, Dr. Jennings tells me that Big John has noticed a series of large payments to construction, plumbing, and electrical contractors in the Cochabamba area for information about previous jobs. The only thing all of them have in common is that they were each involved in the construction of Conrad Altmann’s Cochabamba compound.”
“Where we believe Altmann is holding Tupac Inti?”
“Yes, sir.”
Admiral Riles nodded and stood. “Okay. Stay on this, both of you. I want to know the second anything changes.”
CHAPTER 49
Standing at the base of the cliff, with the three-quarter moon showing dimly through the high clouds, Jack felt more alive than he had since last week’s battle with the neo-Nazis at the southern edge of the Amazon. Over the past two years he had learned one thing. Only by staring directly into the face of death could you truly appreciate life’s wondrous beauty.
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