by Marc Cameron
“You speak Spanish, right?” he asked over the radio.
“A fair amount,” Midas said, knowing the question was meant for him, since the others were too far away.
“What does ‘Esto huele mal’ mean?”
Midas chuckled. “Where’d you see that?”
“Painted all over the street in front of the culture ministry.”
“Escrache,” Midas said. “I read about that. Argentines are big on shaming elected officials that they feel have done wrong—graffiti, signage, even screaming at them on airplanes or in public places with megaphones.”
Ryan laughed. “My dad gets a lot of that.”
“I voted for him,” Midas said. “Anyway, ‘Esto huele mal’ means ‘This smells bad’ or ‘This stinks.’ Not sure what—”
Ryan cut him off. “Hold on,” he said. The urgency in his voice caused Midas to fall silent.
Walking up Avenida Alvear, past the Hyatt and almost even with Ryan, was a tall brunette. He turned quickly, looking away before she had a chance to see his face. Jack had seen this woman the evening before, at the restaurant with Adara. It dawned on him that the blonde who met Chen had been with this one. Ryan hadn’t been able to see more than her profile from his vantage point, but the brunette had been facing him. The two women had definitely been together. He saw no headphones or Bluetooth earpiece, but the brunette spoke to someone as she walked, perhaps, Ryan thought, utilizing the same sort of hidden microphone and neck loop he wore.
He started to follow but caught sight of an Asian woman from the corner of his eye. She was about the same age as the brunette, early thirties, with high cheekbones framed by shoulder-length hair. She stepped out of a side door of a building connected to the Hyatt, waited a beat while the brunette walked past, and then fell in behind her. She was dressed nicely in snug jeans and a loose designer T-shirt, but she bore angry pink scratches from jaw to forehead, as if she’d slid into home plate on her face. Ryan couldn’t tell if her dark eyes were beautiful or terrifying, but he decided he would find out soon enough.
He gave Midas a quick brief over the radio.
“Good catch,” Midas said. “I don’t know about the Asian, but the brunette has to be in comms with Chen. She’s probably letting him know the foreign minister had arrived.”
“That’s my guess.” Ryan looked over his shoulder at traffic before crossing the street after the Asian, who seemed to be locked on to the brunette. “I’m going to stick with them and see where they go.”
“Stay in range for comms,” Midas said. “I’ll reach out to Ding and bring him up to speed.”
The Asian woman took a right at the first block while the brunette went straight. Ryan knew it was stupid, but he was more than a little disappointed. Maybe she wasn’t involved at all. The leggy brunette continued walking against traffic on Alvear for several blocks, past the popping flags of the Palace Hotel and two sets of arbolitos, touting their money exchange outside high-end shops selling Montblanc and Rolex. Any preconceived notions Jack had on this surveillance were quickly dashed. The Asian woman was nowhere in sight, and now the brunette wasn’t going to her car as he’d first assumed. She turned right, as if to head back to the Retiro train station. A block later she turned left again.
“Northwest on Libertador,” Jack said, as much to make sure he still had a clear signal with Midas as to update him on the location.
“Copy that,” Midas said.
“This is weird,” Jack said, “Asian girl has broken off. Doesn’t look to be a factor. I can’t tell if this one is doing a really basic SDR or just zigzagging her way to wherever she’s going. So far she hasn’t even checked behind her.”
“Watch your ass,” Midas said. “Maybe she’s not alone. Your Asian woman could turn up again soon and stick a knife in your fourth point of contact.”
“That’s a nice thought,” Ryan said, watching the woman trot across Avenida del Libertador. Risking one’s life against ten lanes of aggressive Argentine drivers made for the perfect method to shed a tail.
Ryan tried to keep the woman in his peripheral vision as he continued up the street toward the crosswalk, willing himself to remain at a normal pace. The signal turned green just as the brunette disappeared into the trees.
No one would think twice about someone running to beat the crossing signal on such a wide street, so Ryan made up some time sprinting toward the park. He slowed when he reached the grass, staying parallel to what the brunette’s route would be if she went straight after entering the trees.
The park was a fairly narrow one, and a railway yard with numerous tracks, switches, and uncoupled train cars lay directly on the other side, spilling out of Retiro Station to the south. This yard formed a natural line of demarcation between the upscale Recoleta neighborhood and the shantytown of broken brick dwellings in a warren of narrow streets known as Villa 31—one of many such slums in Buenos Aires collectively, and appropriately, called villas miseria. Nearly fifteen city blocks long and more than five blocks wide at is widest point, the Villa—Argentines pronounced it “vizha”—was a gray swath of nothingness next to the tracks on most maps. Tourists might think it was just part of the train yard. Close enough that its residents could smell meat cooking from Recoleta restaurants if the wind was right, Villa 31 was home to many of the hardest-working people in Buenos Aires—as well as some of the city’s most violent criminals.
Maids and service workers who lacked the proper references to rent an apartment in the city often paid half as much to rent a room with a communal bath and pirated electricity in a crumbling departamento from one of the neighborhood bosses who ran everything from rent collection to dispute enforcement inside the Villa. Villa 31 was a city within a city, but few people admitted to living there. Police braved the streets only in well-armed squads, and then only during daylight hours. If someone needed an ambulance at night, as Ding Chavez put it, “forget about it.”
Ryan caught sight of the brunette a moment later, a hundred feet away and walking in his direction. He sat down on a bench across from a weathered older man who was throwing pistachios to a chattering flock of bright green parrots about the size of small pigeons. Ryan put his back to a gum tree but used the man’s eyes and expressions to help guard his six o’clock. It wasn’t an optimum setup, but human beings usually reacted in some way to danger, and Jack couldn’t very well keep looking over his shoulder all the time. The birds and the man ignored him.
The brunette worked her way through the waist-high grass and weeds along the railyard fence until she found what she was looking for, a gap in the chain-link. Jack imagined the same makeshift gate was used by commuters from Villa 31 each morning and evening to and from their jobs so they didn’t have to walk all the way to the other side of Retiro Station to get over the tracks. If the brunette had seen Ryan, she showed no sign of it. Instead, she turned sideways to slip through the gap, and then, checking both ways for oncoming trains, trotted across multiple sets of railroad tracks. Ryan couldn’t help but think she looked like pictures he’d seen of East German refugees fleeing the no-man’s-land to get over the Wall. Reaching the far side, she ducked through a second gap in the railway fence to enter the slums.
If it was difficult to follow her through the park, it would be impossible for Jack to follow her into the shantytown. Aside from the prospect that she might see him, venturing into Villa 31 without knowing someone on the inside was a good way to get yourself dead in a hurry.
Ryan gave a nod to the man feeding the parrots and headed back toward Midas. He bought a choripán—chorizo sausage on a bun—from a guy in the park, because he didn’t know when he’d get to eat again. He’d give Midas a break when he got there.
“Lost her,” he said, eating as he walked. “I’ll explain when I . . .”
“Say again,” Midas said. “You cut out.”
Ryan lowered his voice and dropped the barely eate
n choripán into a trash can along the path. “It’s her,” he said. “The Asian woman. Looks like she’s picking the lock on some kind of tool shed or utility building in the park.”
“Copy,” Midas said.
Ryan swung wide, keeping to the trees and keeping the small stone building in view. He came around in time to catch a glimpse of the Asian woman’s back as she pulled the door shut behind her. The building was maybe eight by eight and had no windows. It didn’t look like she’d been running from anyone. Jack scratched his beard, thinking through his options. One of them, probably the smartest one, was to walk away. He’d been never been very good at that.
He listened outside the building for a half a minute. Nothing. The lock fell quickly to his granddad knife. There was nobody inside, though there was only one door, so the Asian woman had to have gone somewhere. Ryan took a small flashlight from his pocket and played it around the small space. There was a lingering smell that he couldn’t put his finger on—but it wasn’t good. The building looked to be storage for the lawn maintenance department, with a couple Weed Eaters and assorted rakes and shovels. A row of plastic trash cans lined a platform along the back wall. One lay on its side, presumably tipped over by the woman. Ryan entertained the idea that she could be hiding in one of the cans. But that was stupid. To what end? She hadn’t even known he was following her. He peeked over the edge of each one anyway, at once relieved and disappointed to find them empty. The platform was about six inches high and made of weathered wood timbers. It was old, probably older than the building, making Ryan wonder if the place had been used as something other than storage in the past. Closer inspection revealed grass clippings sticking from under the edge of the wood, and, when Jack gave it a shove, it moved.
He pulled the overturned trash can out of the way, revealing four freshly disturbed timbers that formed a three-foot square.
“I’ll be damned . . .” he muttered, pushing what was essentially a trapdoor out to one side. “She’s gone underground.”
“Underground?” Midas said. “Speak to me, brother. What’s going on?”
“I’m going after her,” Ryan said. “Don’t be pissed, but I’m pretty sure we’re about to lose comms.” He coughed at the rank wind that hit him in the face when he moved the boards.
“Es huelte something something?” he said.
Midas came across the net, confused. “What?”
“That phrase from the graffiti I asked you about earlier,” Ryan said. “It means ‘This stinks,’ right?”
“Huele,” Midas corrected. “Esto huele mal.”
Ryan peered down into the blackness below, pausing for a moment in hopes of picking up any sound of the Asian woman. He heard nothing but the moan of the sickening breeze as it blew upward out of the inky hole.
“It sure as hell does,” he muttered, half to himself.
39
Each Campus operator carried the same basic components for Everyday Carry—firearm, knife, flashlight, and cell phone. Some of them, like Clark, carried little else, relying on their pistol and badass experience to get the job done. Dominic Caruso, who’d been trained by the FBI, carried things like extra nylon restraints that looked like shoelaces and even flat rubber stoppers used to block interior doors when searching buildings. Ryan fell somewhere in the middle. In addition to his pistol and an extra eight-round magazine, he carried two knives, a small Streamlight ProTac flashlight, and a Zippo lighter. His cell phone would be useless for communication underground, but it did provide a backup source of lighting. Adara had issued each operator a small trauma packet containing an envelope of Celox hemostatic gauze and a SWAT-T soft rubber tourniquet. The kit was just one more thing to carry, and he’d be a happy camper if he never had to open the damn thing, but given the dark hole in the ground over which his feet now dangled, he was glad to have it.
Ryan thought seriously about ripping up a piece of his shirt and plugging his nose, the smell was so noxious.
“Talk to me, Jack,” Midas said. “Give me a description of where you’re going down.”
“I’m sending you my lat and long now.”
“Perfect,” Midas said. “That way we’ll know where to look for your body. How about you wait for me and I’ll come back you up?”
“Stay put,” Ryan said. “Somebody needs to keep an eyeball on the Chinese delegation. I’ll be fine. Just going down to have a little look.”
“Copy that,” Midas said, sounding unconvinced. “My training says to trust the guy on the ground . . . but watch yourself.”
“Will do,” Ryan said, and lowered himself into the blackness.
Ryan found a rusted iron ladder just inside the opening and hooked an arm through the top rung while he dragged the wooden cover back into place. He was hesitant to use his light, concerned that it would tip off the Asian woman that he was behind her, and he counted nine rungs before his feet splashed into something cold and oozing. The awful smell told him it probably wasn’t water. Though it was only ankle deep, his Rockports were going to be good for nothing but a short trip to the nearest dumpster when he made it back aboveground.
Pausing in the pitch blackness, he fought the urge to gag and strained to hear any sign of the departing woman. When he heard nothing, he drew his pistol and decided to take a chance with the flashlight. Ryan found himself completely alone at the bottom of a deep tube of red brick and mortar, approximately thirty feet in diameter. It looked like an old grain silo set in the ground. Four arched brick doorways—each about the same size as his six-foot wingspan—ran from the sides of the cavern with what was presumably sewage flowing out of the two doors to his left, and into the two to his right, toward the Río de la Plata. The bricks at the base of the arch to Jack’s immediate right had telltale splash marks on one side. Closer inspection revealed hairlike moss just below the surface. The color of unripe limes, the moss swayed and billowed with the current like some kind of primordial ooze. By holding the powerful beam of the Streamlight at a low angle, Jack could see an obvious trail of discoloration in the moss, made by the weight of recent footprints. Most of the moss was undisturbed. He followed, moving slowly, pistol held back near his waist and flashlight slightly away from his body. Every few seconds he stopped and listened, but he heard nothing except the gurgle of flowing water . . . or whatever this was.
Buenos Aires was old, first settled sometime in the late 1500s. It was already a thriving city by the time the thirteen American colonies north of the equator declared their independence from England. There were tunnels under cities all over the world, the Catacombs beneath Paris; waterworks of an old wool business under Bradford, England; and abandoned sewers crisscrossing subterranean New York City. Ryan remembered from his history classes at Georgetown that Jesuit priests used a series of hidden tunnels here to move secretly between their numerous churches—both in centuries past and in more recent times of bloodshed during the “Dirty War,” when the military junta ferreted out communist insurgents and anyone else they deemed to be a dissident. Some of the tunnels had been discovered and were now in the guidebooks. Some remained hidden. Others had been flooded by overflowing groundwater and sewer systems. This one was covered with a wooden door, obviously known to someone besides the Asian woman. Small niches, approximately a foot high and half as deep, were built into the brick walls, as if meant for statuary, leading Ryan to believe this tunnel wasn’t originally intended to be a sewer.
He passed three smaller archways splitting off from the main tunnel as he sloshed along, one to the right and two more to the left. The trail of discolored moss told him to continue straight ahead. Twenty minutes after he’d first splashed down in the tunnels, Ryan came to another rusted iron ladder on the wall. The tunnel continued into the darkness, but the ladder was wet. Someone had recently climbed up.
Ryan felt like he’d been going generally east, and he suspected he was somewhere near the marina on the Río de la Plata, but i
t was impossible to know for sure without going up to peek out. When he stood completely still, he thought he could hear laughter.
He holstered his pistol and dropped the flashlight back into his pocket. Faint pinholes of light shone down from something at the top. Ryan hauled himself upward rung by rung, going slowly enough to let the sewage drain from his boots. He was careful not to slip. Walking through shit was one thing. Going for a swim in it was a whole other ballgame. He was reasonably certain he’d been vaccinated against hepatitis. Probably. Maybe. He began to mull over the idea of contracting cholera or jungle rot or whatever bug might swim up a person’s toenails from fetid water. A bath in Clorox was starting to sound inviting by the time he wrapped one arm around the top rung and put the flat of his hand against a metal grate.
Ryan pushed up slowly, peering under the edge at a pile of steaming donkey crap inches away. He knew very little about barnyard scatology, but the donkey that had manufactured the stuff happened to be standing right above it. A quick look around said he’d not been going east at all, but north. The dirt streets and broken block buildings could be nowhere else but Villa 31—the same place where the tall brunette had disappeared.
Frenzied Spanish voices, most male but at least one female, jerked Ryan’s attention to his left. His vantage point from under the donkey cart allowed him to see little but a set of scrambling feet. They were small and wet, and sliding under the donkey cart, directly for him.
Ryan barely had time to yank his head back into the tunnel before the Asian woman shoved the metal grating aside, pulling it shut behind her as she slid feet-first into the hole—landing squarely on Ryan’s knuckles where they curled around the pitted metal rung. Ryan was strong, but the impact of 120 pounds of fleeing woman knocked him off the ladder.