Buried Strangers cims-2

by Leighton Gage

  And less evidence would be a good thing for Roberto Ribeiro.

  The passport Ribeiro was using was, as his mother had remarked, a fine piece of work. The gold lettering on the green, cloth cover was faded and, in part, worn away. It bore visas from the United States and France as well as stamps for multiple entries and departures, all of which were genuine. In fact, the whole passport was genuine, except for the altered photograph and the pages with the holder’s vital sta-tistics. The document had been stolen at that very airport two weeks earlier and was the former property of a salesman dealing in agricultural products.

  Ribeiro’s new name was Eduardo Noronha, and his birth-place was listed as Sao Paulo. His mother had foreseen no problem with that and there wouldn’t have been one had he not come up against a zealous young border-control agent named Renato Wagner.

  Ribeiro, who’d never been abroad in all of his life, didn’t know the drill. He handed over his new passport for perusal, but he didn’t hand over his ticket.

  “I need the ticket, too,” Wagner said.

  One of the tasks of the inspectors was to make sure that the visitor had paid his departure tax. The evidence of that was a stamp affixed to the ticket.

  “Oh, desculpe,” Ribeiro said, and reached into his pocket.

  The one word was enough. Desculpe, sorry, had been pro-nounced with a slurry, sibilant “s.” The only people who talked like that were cariocas.

  Wagner double-checked the birthplace on the passport. Sao Paulo. He had it right the first time he’d looked. Something was fishy.

  “You from Rio de Janeiro?” he asked.

  “Born and bred,” Ribeiro said proudly.

  Wagner nodded. The dumb bastard hadn’t even bothered to memorize his history. He glanced at the flyer that had been taped under the counter not two hours earlier. It was out of sight of the passengers, but in clear view of all of the agents.

  “Uh-huh,” he said, and pushed a button.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Arnaldo expected the drug to wear off, but some-how it didn’t. It was a mystery. They hadn’t fed him, so he couldn’t be taking it in that way. And he hadn’t seen a sin-gle soul in all the time he’d been in the cell, so he didn’t think they were injecting him.

  And that was another mystery, the time he’d been in the cell. He had no way of knowing, no way of keeping track. They’d kept his watch. The single lamp in the ceiling never went off, so there was no way of distinguishing when it might be day and when it might be night.

  The lamp was enclosed in a steel cage, so the prisoners couldn’t get at it. Not that he would have bothered. The light was so dim that he had no problem falling asleep.

  And that’s about all he wanted to do. Sleep.

  So, maybe that was the way they were doing it. Waiting until he was asleep, and then sneaking in and putting a mask over his face or a needle in his arm. Or maybe they were pump-ing in some kind of gas through the vent up near the light. Or maybe it was in the water. He doubted it was the water. There was just the one tap and it looked like a normal tap. They hadn’t given him a glass. To drink he had to bend over the sink.

  But drugging him they were. He was sure they were get-ting it into him in one fashion or another. There was no other explanation for the way he felt. He was dazed and dis-oriented. And he was in no condition to put up a fight when the two of them finally came for him.

  It wasn’t the carioca. It was a man and a woman. The woman appeared to be in her early thirties and the man maybe a decade older. Both were wearing green medical scrubs. The gurney they’d brought was equipped with leather restraints that buckled around his upper torso, wrists, thighs, and shins. By the time they’d finished, he was all but immo-bile. The ride down the hall took only a few seconds. They wheeled him into a tile-walled room smelling of hospital and positioned the gurney next to a metal table surmounted by an immense surgical light.

  “Your doctor will be with you in a moment,” the guy in green scrubs said.

  And laughed.

  Hector Costa stared into the mirror and rubbed the bristles on his chin. He didn’t like the idea of being in the office unshaven. The bags under his eyes made him look as if he’d had a long night of drinking behind him. He splashed some water on his face, dried it with a paper towel, and returned to where his uncle was still working the phone.

  “I’m going down to the padaria for breakfast and a razor. Want anything?”

  “Coffee with milk and a buttered roll,” Silva said, and started dialing the next number on his list.

  HECTOR WAS sitting at the counter, reading the morning paper, and sipping cafe com leite, when his uncle stepped up behind him and grabbed his arm.

  “We’ve got him,” Silva said.

  “Ribeiro?”

  “He was trying to board a flight to Paraguay. They’re hold-ing him at Guarulhos. Come on.”

  There was a car waiting in front of the office, Babyface Goncalves behind the wheel. Babyface started rolling even before Hector had fastened his seat belt.

  Sao Paulo shares with Bangkok the distinction of having the most serious traffic gridlocks in the world. Isolated inci-dents make those gridlocks even worse.

  The isolated incident du jour was a tractor trailer whose driver had misread the height of a viaduct over the marginal, one of the belt roads that rimmed the city. The cab of the big truck passed under the Limao Bridge with more than twenty centimeters to spare. The forty-foot container it was pulling did not. The leading edge of the container hit the concrete abutment at a speed of almost fifty kilometers an hour, and stuck there, bringing the rig to an immediate stop and block-ing one lane of traffic.

  The driver, who hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, had been propelled out of his cab by inertia. He’d flown through the windshield and come to rest on the other side of the dividing island, where he’d been promptly run over by a delivery van.

  The driver of the van, in a desperate attempt to avoid the collision, had stood on his brakes and been rear-ended by another tractor trailer that had jackknifed over the entire road, blocking it in both directions.

  When Babyface rolled to a stop, they had almost five kilo-meters of stalled vehicles in front of them. The traffic behind them was bumper to bumper, so they were effectively trapped. Television helicopters were converging at a distant point directly ahead. Silva, seated in front next to Babyface, switched on the radio. The accident was on all of the traffic reports:

  “. . expected to impede the free flow of traffic for at least the next four hours,” the announcer said. “Drivers are advised to avoid the belt road at all costs. Seek alternative routes.”

  That was all Silva had to hear. He punched the button to shut the radio off, and he didn’t do it gently. “Call for a god-damned helicopter,” he said.

  Babyface did. But it took almost thirty-five minutes to get there and find a suitable place to land. The spot chosen by the pilot was a construction site about three hundred meters from their car. Babyface stayed behind the wheel while Hector and Silva transferred to the aircraft.

  After that, it was easy sailing. A ten-minute flight brought them to Guarulhos. A golf cart was waiting on the tarmac. They were met by a female agent with a federal police badge pinned to her black blazer. She brought them to the interro-gation room, one level down from the arrival hall.

  It was a windowless space with a television camera mounted high in one corner, a steel table, and four wooden chairs, all bolted down. There were two other federal agents in the room, both in suits, both with badges pinned to their lapels, both leaning against the wall, and both looking down at Ribeiro.

  One of the federal agents was Antonio Moreira, the guy who headed the federal police assigned to Guarulhos. He was one of the first people Silva had spoken to after sending out the advisory e-mail. The other agent was a young guy who looked like he could have been Babyface’s younger brother. If it hadn’t been for the badge, Silva might have taken him for a teenage bystander.

  “
You got the wrong guy,” Ribeiro was saying when Silva and Hector entered the room. He’d shaved off his mustache, streaked his black hair with gray, and ditched the Flamengo medallion, but it was him, no doubt about that.

  He was seated at the table, sweating profusely, and shak-ing his head. It wasn’t that hot in the room, but he was blot-ting his forehead with a handkerchief clutched in a meaty left hand about the size of a boxing glove. His other hand was cuffed at the wrist. A chain ran from the cuff to an eye-bolt welded into the top of the table.

  “Crap,” Delegado Moreira said, “You’re Ribeiro. Stop denying it.”

  Ribeiro kept shaking his head.

  “No way,” he said.

  Moreira looked up and smiled at Silva. He introduced the young guy as Renato Wagner, the man who’d spotted Ribeiro.

  “Good work,” Silva said, “but now I think it would be bet-ter if you left us alone.”

  Wagner frowned, but Moreira winked knowingly at Silva.

  “I think we’ll take a stroll down the hall,” Moreira said. “You can’t hear a damned thing from down there. The door to this room is steel. It has a way of dampening anything that happens inside.”

  He took Wagner firmly by the arm and led him into the corridor. Hector closed the door and leaned against it. Silva sat down at the table.

  “Now,” he said, “let’s talk.”

  CLAUDIA WAS laying out her instruments when Bittler hurried into the operating suite. He wasn’t wearing scrubs, a mask, or gloves. That alone was enough to tell her that some-thing was terribly wrong.

  “Teobaldo,” he snapped to the anesthesiologist, “Leave us.

  I haven’t got him completely stabilized,” Teobaldo said, pointing at an unconscious Arnaldo.

  “I don’t care,” Bittler said. “Go. I’ll call you when we need you.”

  Once the door had closed behind Teobaldo, Bittler came around to her side of the operating table, leaned forward, and spoke in a harsh whisper.

  “They’re onto Roberto.”

  Claudia went to the double door and opened it. Teobaldo was bending over, his ear to the crack.

  He looked up at her sheepishly.

  “Go to your office,” she said. “I’ll call you there.”

  “And if the guy on the table dies?”

  “He dies. Go.”

  When he’d taken off down the corridor, she closed the door and turned back to Bittler.

  “Tell me,” she said, “tell me everything.”

  Bittler’s account of his conversation with Ribeiro made Claudia angry, angrier than she could ever remember. But she suppressed her rage, and stood listening to his ration-alizations as if she accepted them at face value.

  She recognized the game was over, recognized they’d lost, but the man in front of her, a man she’d once respected, was so blinded by self-importance and convictions of intellectu-al superiority he couldn’t see the disaster in its true light. If he’d listened to her in the first place, it would never have come to this. Roberto would have been long dead. The deba-cle was his fault, Horst Bittler’s fault, and no one else’s.

  “They haven’t caught him yet,” he was saying, “and with a little luck they never will. But we’ll have to act quickly, just in case. If they do catch him, we can’t count on him to keep his mouth shut. The records are a problem. They’ve been good enough for a superficial inspection, but they won’t stand up to in-depth analysis. We’ll have to destroy them.”

  “How about the others?” she said. “Gretchen? Teobaldo? That pilot you’ve recently taken into our confidence? What about them? What’s to prevent one of them making a deal and selling us out?”

  He considered that for a moment. “They’re expendable,” he said.

  “And I am, too, I suppose.”

  He avoided her eyes.

  “No, Claudia, of course not. I’ve always regarded you as my partner. Now, stop talking foolishness and let’s get busy. God knows how much time we’ve got to do it all. A few days at the minimum, I suspect. Unless they catch up with Roberto. If that happens, they could be here sooner. We have to make sure that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, for them to find. First the records. We could-”

  “Set a fire in the archives? Burn down part of the building?

  Yes, yes, an excellent idea. Destroying part of the build-ing would lend verisimilitude. And the holding cells? How can we justify the holding cells?”

  “Claim that we intended to extend the clinic’s services to the treatment of the violently insane? That we had the cells constructed for that?”

  “No. No, they’ll see through that in an instant.”

  “They will. But can they prove otherwise?”

  “You’re right. Proof is all.”

  But she’d only been toying with him.

  “You’re a piece of work,” she said.

  “What?” His eyebrows climbed almost to his hairline. She’d never spoken to him like that. He flushed a deep red.

  “I said you’re a piece of work.”

  “How dare you?”

  “I told you more than once to get rid of Roberto. But, no, you thought you knew better.”

  “There was no reason to believe-”

  “There was. There was every reason to believe that the man was a liability. You just didn’t want to see it.”

  “I resent your tone.”

  “And I resent your actions. I spent years preparing to practice my profession, and now you’ve put it in jeopardy through your lack of judgment. What am I supposed to do with my life from here on in? Tell me that!”

  “You’re overreacting, Claudia. You’ll continue as you’ve always done. I will endeavor to forgive your lapse in courtesy. Now, if there’s nothing more. .”

  She shook her head in disbelief.

  “Do you actually believe we can carry on? Just clean the place up and act as if nothing has happened?”

  “We have the Kramer woman upstairs, waiting for her new heart. Get Teobaldo back in here and remove his.” He pointed at Arnaldo’s recumbent form. “Then, while the corpse is being dismembered, we can burn the body of the other Indian brat. But we’ll have to clean his ashes out of the oven ourselves. Damn Roberto Ribeiro!”

  “You intend to go forward? You intend to harvest this heart and then implant it in the Kramer woman? After what you’ve just told me?”

  “Why not? They won’t get onto us as quickly as all that. No use wasting what we have. Don’t forget that we already have the Kramer woman’s money. It’s against my principles to give it back.”

  The man was insane. Strange that she’d never noticed it before.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  “I am Chief Inspector Mario Silva,” the man in the gray suit said, “and you”-he put his finger on Roberto’s chest-“are Roberto Ribeiro.”

  Roberto shrank away from the pressure of the finger and shook his head. “I’m not,” he said. “It’s a case of misshapen identity.”

  “The word you’re looking for, you filho da puta, is mis-taken, mistaken identity, not misshapen identity, and you are Roberto Ribeiro, and if you deny it one more time, I’m going to hurt you.”

  The cop came no closer; he didn’t shout, he didn’t bluster. But, somehow, Roberto felt as if the temperature in the room had taken a plunge. He looked into the man’s eyes-blacker than coal-and shivered. Seconds before, he’d been sweat-ing like a pig, and now he shivered. It didn’t make sense. It was almost as if his body were responding on some primitive level.

  “Personally,” Silva said, “I don’t think you deserve to live. The way I figure it, you’ve been complicit in the murder of dozens, maybe even scores, of people.”

  Roberto shook his head. “You got the wrong guy. I never even heard of-”

  Silva hit him in the face with the back of his hand. The blow came so quickly, so unexpectedly, that Roberto didn’t have time to raise his arm, or even turn his head. He put his free hand up to touch his nose. It wasn’t bleeding and it didn’t seem
to be broken, but it stung like hell.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “What-is-your-name?” Silva said, spacing out the words.

  “Okay, okay, it’s Roberto Ribeiro, but I don’t know nothing-”

  “Let’s get something straight,” Silva said, cutting him off. “I’d like to kill you, I truly would, and I-”

  “Kill me? You can’t kill me. You’re a cop, for Christ’s sake.

  Shut up and listen to me,” Silva said savagely. Then he took a deep breath and went on in the same tone as before. “And I will kill you,” he said, “if you don’t tell me everything I want to know.”

  “I-”

  “Believe me, Ribeiro. Believe me, when I say this room will be the last place you’ll ever see, my companion and I the last people you’ll ever meet, unless you respond truthfully to my questions. Truthfully, mind. If I catch you in a lie, even a little one, I’m going to hurt you again.”

  Roberto tried to swallow, but his throat was suddenly too dry.

  “Don’t make me work too hard to get the answers I need, Ribeiro. If you do, and you’re not dead when I’m finished, then I’ll kill you anyway. Do we understand each other?”

  Roberto nodded.

  “Honest to God,” he said, “I never killed nobody.”

  He saw the cop’s eyes narrow, and he flinched.

  “I got to take a shit,” he said, “really bad.”

  “Shit in your pants for all I care,” the cop said. “Keep talking.”

  “I got to go, I’m telling you.”

  “Talk.”

  “It was him. Him and the woman. They did it. All I did was to. . to help find people.”

  “Who’s him?”

  “Bittler. Horst Bittler. He’s a doctor. He’s got a clinic in Morumbi.”

  “Where in Morumbi?”

  “Rua das Tulipas, number ninety-seven.”

  “And the woman?”

  “She’s a doctor, too. Claudia Andrade. She works with him.”

  “And the people?”

  “Lots of people. I can’t remember. Look, I’ll tell you every-thing, just let me go to the shithouse before I-”