by Jason Kasper
I dropped the magazine and saw that it was fully loaded. Then I popped up the tip-up barrel to see the backing of a chambered round and received the business end of an AK-47 to my temple as a result.
I set the tiny .32 back down. At the time I didn’t know how I could possibly get a gun close to the Handler, but if such a thing as a perfect assassination weapon hidden for me in Rio existed, then this was it. Knowing I was fated for death, and recalling my father’s words the first time he handed me a pistol, I pointed to it.
“I’ll take this one.”
Enzo, in no mood for humor, looked and sounded impatient. “You plan on hunting rats?”
“Something like that.”
Then Enzo’s tone grew more serious and Gabriel’s expression graver as he translated, “A shit heater like that only has one purpose, gringo.”
“Again, that’s my problem.”
Enzo’s voice lowered to a severe baritone. “Someone tried to kill me with that a few weeks ago. Taped it to his wrist, under his sleeve. My bodyguard—”
“Filho da puta,” one of the men muttered.
“—my late bodyguard missed it during a pat down. The shot missed my head by a few inches.”
I shook my head. “Bad marksmanship. Why was he trying to kill you?”
“I shot his brother.”
“Seems a reasonable cause for revenge.”
Enzo suddenly looked much older, his black eyes meeting mine with equal parts candor, pain, and some inexplicable third element. “I shot his brother three years before that.”
“It took your shooter that long to find you?”
“No. He was waiting until he grew large enough to use the pistol. When he tried to kill me, he was nine years old. A born gangster, the kind I would have liked to hire, you see?” I nodded, and Enzo continued. “But his brother was a piece of shit. A rat. I killed him over some stupid girl. I cannot even remember her name now. You see the lesson there?”
“No.”
“The problem I created was worse than the one I solved. Hunting rats can be a complex proposition. I almost died learning that lesson, and I have not forgotten it since. All because of that little pistol.”
“Then you’ll be glad to see it gone. Let me take it, ‘al favor, and I will tell my employer that you must be rewarded for your help.”
Enzo eyed me warily. The events that drew me to him were what they were, and he had no choice but to regard me with suspicion, freeing me at best and killing me at worst.
Then he nodded his concession, and our business dealings were concluded.
Enzo and his crew walked us back to the front gate, where we were met head-on by two guards with a boy between them. The kid couldn’t have been much older than seven, walking urgently with an envelope pinched in his tiny fist.
Our procession stopped abruptly as Enzo snatched the envelope and began ripping it open while exchanging Portuguese with the boy.
I looked to Gabriel for explanation.
“Courier,” he said. “Police are still barricading the favela.”
Enzo pulled a single sheet of paper from the envelope, and as he unfolded it I felt equal parts curiosity at its contents and a rabid desire to leave, with the balance focusing on the latter.
Enzo shouted, “Espera aí!”
Every gun was suddenly pointed at Gabriel and me.
I raised my hands non-threateningly. The pair of MP5s and the shotgun slung over my shoulder were empty, and most of the present company knew that—the backpack with the ammo and loaded .32 was still being toted by a guard.
Enzo examined the page, then my face, and back again.
“No problema,” I said, resorting to my extremely limited Spanish and trying to keep my focus on Enzo’s eyes. Gabriel and I were one word away from getting executed or worse, a mournful shift in fate after a negotiation that had yielded everything we hoped for except a radio.
Enzo rotated the paper so I could see it, pointing to a picture displayed in the middle of the page.
It was Micah, and beside his face was an image of Parvaneh.
Their expressions were focused, attention directed to something happening off-screen. I scanned the background of the photo and realized it was taken yesterday in Ribeiro’s penthouse conference room.
My face and Gabriel’s were absent from the page.
I dropped my hands. “I see all gringos look the same to you, jefe. But I’m ten years younger than the guy in that picture. And my translator here is a bitch, but he’s nowhere near as hot as that señorita.”
Gabriel translated, halting mid-sentence to glare at me when his mouth caught up with my description of him.
“Tell him,” I said. Gabriel finished speaking, and Enzo’s eyes didn’t move from mine. Like most people whose lives had been a day-to-day process of survival, he’d learned to trust his intuition. And his intuition was telling him that I was lying as quickly as I could move my lips.
“Besides,” I continued, “she’s the reason I’m here in the first place.”
Enzo’s stare was fiery now, the consequences of catching me in a lie growing along with his suspicion. “Explain.”
“She slipped my ambush yesterday. Almost got killed chasing her here.”
“This bounty is from my boss, the Master of Rocinha. But he sent it on behalf of the big boss.”
“I warned you about my employer.”
“Every mule thinks their middleman is God. You never said Ribeiro.”
“Of course I didn’t. Keep reading.”
Enzo glanced at the paper, speaking succinctly as Gabriel said in English, “Cash reward for these two. Double if they’re alive. And the pursuit team is to be helped in any way possible.”
I gave a knowing nod and spoke with authority. “Good. That applies to me too.”
But Enzo shook his head gravely. “This says I must comply with a team of men in uniform, with military equipment. You’re some gringo off the street. Maybe you speak the truth or maybe you lie. But if you come back here again, I will kill you. That is the only warning you will get.”
The gate was opened, and a shove sent me stumbling outside. Gabriel received the same farewell, tripping over his feet and falling to the ground before the metal doors slammed shut.
“Hey,” I yelled. “What about our—”
The backpack with our ammo sailed over the wall, arcing above our heads as I raced in vain to catch it until it slammed into the ground, out of reach.
I grabbed it and hurriedly unzipped the back to begin loading our weapons.
“You can’t be serious,” Gabriel hissed. “Get out of the street with those guns.”
I turned to see the favela around us filled with civilians.
In the streets of Rio that we’d traveled by Suburban yesterday, ducking into an alley for temporary isolation would have been a simple task. But the favela was no better for privacy than the center of Times Square. Instead, I followed Gabriel into the churning mass of bodies that flowed through the streets as people made their way through the slum.
I pulled my jacket over the pair of submachine guns and the breacher shotgun dangling from my shoulder, watching civilian eyes dart away from me as I did so. These people were no strangers to minding their own business, particularly when the alternative involved drawing the ire of someone with automatic weapons. Children scampered among the adult crowd, chasing each other and shouting in shrill voices. Skin colors ranged from every possible shade, with the balance falling amid coffee and cream. Most of the men and boys were shirtless, and those who didn’t wear sandals simply walked barefoot.
Gabriel’s scrawny form led me to a tight footpath between buildings, where we tucked ourselves into a small inlet stacked with milk crates as people passed behind us. For the moment, it was the closest we’d get to being hidden.
I dropped the backpack against the stucco wall and knelt in front of it, loading and chambering an MP5. I slid two of the long, curved spare magazines into my belt.
“I can carry a gun,” Gabriel said suddenly.
I loaded the shotgun with three shells from the backpack, racking one into the chamber and slipping a fourth into the loading port. I asked, “Know how to use one?”
“Well—not really.” His eyes darted from side to side with the admission, whether out of insecurity or general anxiety I couldn’t tell.
“Then let me worry about shooting.”
I slung the shotgun and MP5 beneath my windbreaker. Then I found a discrete interior pocket in the backpack and inserted the .32 pistol inside, where it had the best chance of surviving a hasty pat down. I slipped the spare MP5 barrel-down inside the bag, zipping it shut into an oblong shape over the stock.
Behind me, Gabriel asked, “Why did you pick that little pistol? We could have used something bigger—”
“Five seconds ago you didn’t know how to shoot. Now you’re a pistol expert?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Then let me worry about the guns.” I looked to the wall before us, its uneven brick surface covered in graffiti ranging from beautiful mosaic patterns to illegible scrawl. The centerpiece was a spray-painted image of a bull standing on two legs and holding a smoking gun. Beneath it a sprawl of graffiti read, POLICIAIS SÃO MONSTROS.
Eager to distract Gabriel from the pistol, I nodded to the image as I donned the backpack. “Does that mean what I think it does?”
“Police are monsters.”
“If these people think the police are monsters, I wonder what they’re going to think about Ribeiro’s kill team. Come on. Let’s go find the other two.”
Leaving the footpath, we proceeded along the side of a road descending a hill, where the buildings—if you could call them that—were a testament to decades of haphazard repair using sheet metal and slats of wood from shipping pallets.
As soon as Gabriel and I had set off for the local narco-mansion that morning, Micah had relocated Parvaneh to places unknown. His logic was sound, preventing her compromise in the not-unlikely event that Gabriel and I were caught and tortured into betraying their location. But this precaution had necessitated a corresponding link-up plan, and so instead of returning to a known point, we were to walk down a central market street until Micah signaled us.
Gabriel appeared at ease among the people, but my senses were on high alert. While we could meld into the crowd, there was no escaping the stationary watchers sitting on every flat surface and looking out from windows and balconies overhead. Our only security was to keep our heads down and continue moving. I whipped my head sideways at the sudden whooping of adolescent boys, seeing them inside an open doorway playing a video game.
“Start talking,” Gabriel said. “Look casual.”
“All right. You did good back there.”
“Is that your apology for threatening to shoot me in the car last night?”
I ducked out of the way of two children racing past, shrieking as they chased each other. “No.”
“You may be the hired gun, David, but I’ve got many years of service to the Organization.”
“Don’t really care.”
We crossed into a colorful, bustling marketplace. The architectural chaos around us succumbed to orderly merchandise from clothes to fruit stacked and lined as neatly as one could find anywhere in the world. Clothes, produce, and electronics, along with their vendors, were shaded by bed sheets strung overhead across the road. I was relieved to spot bottled water. My thirst was a cruel repetition after the African desert, and I felt a compulsion to stock up as much as we could.
I reached into my sock and pulled a few spare bills I’d stashed. “Let’s pick up some food and water.”
He took the money, saying nothing before approaching a vendor.
I stopped at a row of foldout tables with precisely stacked pyramids of oranges, apples, bananas, and vegetables. Gabriel did the buying, unzipping the bag on my back and placing his purchases inside. My eyes fell upon a table loaded with piles of raw fish. The gray bodies were heaped atop one another in a collective mound of death, though not motionless—dark flies clustered around agape mouths and lifeless eyes emerged from the pile in every direction.
I looked over my shoulder at Gabriel, who was placing his purchases beside the weapon in my bag. “Zip it up. We’re done.”
We continued walking through the crowd, heading downhill past a few tables of old men playing dominoes. Micah shouldn’t be much farther ahead, I thought, trying to listen for the call of his voice guiding us toward his new refuge. Instead, I heard a low drumming sound over the noise of the crowd, so faint at first I thought it must have been wishful thinking. Then it grew louder, erasing any doubt in my mind—a helicopter was skimming the favela to our front.
“You hear that?” I said excitedly. “The Outfit helicopter is flying search patterns. If it gets close enough, we can—”
Gabriel cut me off. “I looked over your file before you got down here. We pulled it as soon as we found out who we were waiting for.”
My file. Of course the entire delegation would have read it by now: even Sage, my attractive redheaded flight attendant onboard the Handler’s jet, had seen it before picking me up from the Complex.
I said, “And I’ll bet you’re about to tell me every profound deduction you’ve made on my worth as a human being.”
“You didn’t report any Latin American countries on your prior travel.”
We bypassed a hill of bloated canvas sacks leaning against a wall. “That’s because I’ve never been there before.”
“No, you’ve been to the Dominican Republic. Not the tourist areas, either.”
It was getting harder to act normal as we continued walking. My short stay in that country had bridged the gap between my time with Boss’s team and the Outfit, and it had no explanation besides being a criminal exile that I had to keep secret at all costs.
“That’s fascinating, because I’ve never visited. Tell me more.”
“Back there during the arms buy. You were trying to say please, but you said ‘al favor.’”
The sound of the helicopter faded. “So?”
“That’s short for haz al favor. Spanish, but a very specific dialect.”
“Might have picked it up from someone in the Army.”
“I don’t think so, David. My guess is you spent time in the rough areas of the southern Dominican, probably Barahona Province. There are some fugitive communities in that area. It would be of great interest to the Handler if you lied about having been there.”
“You’re reading too far into this.”
“Maybe. I think I’ll report you anyway, just to be safe. The Organization comes first in all things.”
“How dutiful of you. Report whatever you want because—”
A burst of automatic gunfire came from above and behind us.
The first sound of the attack wasn’t the gunshots themselves; someone was firing supersonic rounds from a suppressed weapon. As a result, all we heard was a cracking whip of bullets breaking the sound barrier as they sliced through the favela’s dank air and laced into human flesh. A woman beside us flung her legs upward as if she’d slipped on an oil spot, and a grizzled man moving the opposite direction dropped to his knees.
Gabriel took a stuttering step, confused, his lack of survival instinct maddening to me as I grabbed him and hurled him behind the nearest cover.
That cover happened to be a few short stacks of car tires not nearly big enough to hide behind, but all we had was a wall of collapsed civilians between the shooter and us. Gabriel hit the street hard and I dove atop him a moment later, desperately claiming what little real estate there was to occupy.
The favela residents were no strangers to gunfire—the initial scream of a woman could be heard, perhaps, but it was then followed by the silent, orderly scuffle of a tremendous mass of people to indoor locations of relative safety. There was no trampling the fallen, no endless shrieks of despair. Instead the crowds fled with a sobriety forged through
frequent exposure to violence.
I got to my knees and readied the MP5 against my shoulder, then leaned out from the side of the tires with my sights up.
A brrap of bullets hit the tires to my front, the vibration of the impacting rounds reverberating against me as a heaving shudder in the rubber. Based on terrain, the shooter couldn’t be more than a hundred meters away.
The walls around us were a staggered, swirling mass of roof atop roof, marred in all directions by a thousand black spider eyes of windows. Even if I miraculously identified the shooter at a millisecond’s glance, I had no chance of effectively returning fire.
Gabriel looked at me, his expression betraying a terrified search for reassurance in my face and finding none. “What do we do?”
Our situation was worse than he realized—the tires provided temporary reprieve from being shot, but our assailant didn’t care if he killed us. The suppressed gunfire meant he was one of the three men we had seen extinguishing our rescue signal last night, and he was now pinning us down after a chance sighting. We would have been better off hearing multiple shooters: a single gunman meant the other two men were maneuvering in to finish us off.
I inhaled the toxic smell of burning rubber as bullets smoldered inside the tires and looked for our options, however bleak.
The wall behind us had no immediate door in sight, and the nearest alley to the right was set far into the now-abandoned marketplace. To our left was a staircase descending the hill, but to reach it required a ten-foot sprint across open ground.
“See that staircase to our left?” I asked. “Wait for me to distract the shooter and then run there faster than you ever have in your life. I won’t be able to buy you much time.”
Sliding to the opposite side of the tire pile, I exposed my MP5 barrel as if by accident. Another hailstorm of rounds came racing into the tires, and by the time I recoiled and told Gabriel to move, he was already sprinting away.
The impact of bullets spread along the wall behind his racing figure, the spray of fire ending abruptly before he vanished down the stairs.
The shooter was either reloading or baiting me to move, and I didn’t wait to find out if it was the latter. I instinctively flung myself toward the stairs, falling short and slamming on my side before rolling over the edge.