Baltasar growled at Gibson to get on with it. With a mock salute, he opened the interface for Dol5’s exploit and triggered the firmware update. It would take about three minutes to reconfigure Baltasar’s pacemaker. To look busy while waiting, Gibson tabbed around among his open windows and started defragmenting his hard drive.
When the update was complete, Gibson input the sequence of commands that he’d memorized last night. When sent, they would instruct the pacemaker to gradually increase Baltasar’s heart rate to dangerous levels. It would be unpleasant at first, terrifying by the end. Especially for a man who had already suffered one heart attack. But terrified suited Gibson, it suited him fine. There would be plenty of time to reset the pacemaker once Baltasar found himself in a more compliant frame of mind. Gibson opened a text file, began to write code in a babel of Python, C++, and Java, waiting for Baltasar to begin to feel the effects.
It didn’t take long to realize that something had gone badly wrong. Baltasar made a slurping, throttled sound like a man trying to drink a thick milkshake through a narrow straw. Unable to draw a clean breath, his face went the blackened red of an overripe cherry. Baltasar locked eyes with Gibson. It was impossible, but for a moment Gibson felt certain that he knew. But there was no accusation in the old man’s panicked stare, only helplessness. He knew he was dying and only needed to believe he wouldn’t be alone.
Well, Gibson had been in Baltasar’s place, and he knew better. Dying was something that you had to do alone.
As soon as he realized how quickly it was happening, Gibson swore and hurriedly switched back to Dol5’s exploit interface to send a cancel command. It was too late, though. Baltasar clawed at his chest as if trying to dig out his own heart. His eyes fluttered coquettishly, and he slumped sideways out of his chair. Fernando was the first to react, leaping forward to catch his father. No one else moved. The guards, mouths agape, hovered purposelessly in place like drones that had flown out of range.
Fernando lowered his father gently onto the ground, looked around at all the stunned faces, and screamed for an ambulance. That shocked everyone out of their torpor; Anibal was the first to find his phone.
Fernando started CPR but didn’t look like he knew what he was doing beyond mimicking what he’d seen in movies. Ignoring the guards, Luisa rose and went to Fernando. She knelt opposite him, on the far side of Baltasar, and told him how to do chest compressions. She counted to thirty as he worked, told him to pause, and delivered two deep breaths into Baltasar’s mouth. Then Fernando began again. Together they fought to resuscitate the man who had raised them. Anibal, who had known them both since they were babies, stood over them, a gun in one hand, a phone in the other, describing the situation to emergency services.
For a moment, Gibson saw them as the children they’d once been. Luisa, the elder of the two, gently taking charge and telling Fernando what to do and when. Fernando kneeling over his father and doing exactly as she said without question. It was a surreal and strangely touching scene. Despite everything Gibson knew about them, he felt a strange solidarity with the pair. But this was how people were—at each other’s throats until an emergency reminded them of what was really important.
Minutes ticked by. Luisa’s face was a taut, expressionless mask, but Gibson could see the swell of emotions beneath the surface struggling to get free. Her cousin was having no such luck controlling his feelings. Tears streaked his face, and with each round of compressions, he became more frantic. By the fourth round, Fernando was sweating from the exertion. Luisa stopped counting and looked away. Fernando picked up where she left off, but when he reached thirty, Luisa only shook her head. Baltasar Alves was gone, and all the amateur CPR in the world wouldn’t bring him back.
She reached across the no-man’s-land of Baltasar’s body to take Fernando’s hand. Tried to anyway. Fernando slapped it away and said something sharp in Portuguese. Gibson might not have understood the words, but he understood the change in her expression well enough. Whatever truce had existed between them, however brief, was over. Unless Gibson badly missed his guess, Fernando was laying the blame at her feet. Gibson didn’t see that it was in his interests to disabuse Fernando of the notion.
Hendricks leaned in to Gibson and whispered, “Did you really just kill a motherfucker with a laptop?”
Yes. He hadn’t meant to, but that’s exactly what he’d done. Somehow the distinction did little to make him feel any better about it. Glancing back, he caught George’s eye—plan B had gone off the rails. They would need to improvise a plan C or wind up beside Baltasar Alves.
On the other side of the desk, the argument between the two cousins continued to escalate. It was plain that they were fighting for control of Baltasar’s kingdom. From his knees, Fernando gestured angrily at his dead father. Then he looked up at Anibal and spoke to him in a calm, hate-filled voice. It had the imperious tone of an order. The gun twitched in Anibal’s hand but stayed at his side. His mouth formed a tight, straight line. Fernando said it again, more forcefully.
The gun came up this time. Anibal shot Fernando in the chest, casting his vote for who he thought should run the Algarve. The impact drove the losing candidate backward and down, his legs twisting awkwardly beneath him. He lay there motionless. From that range, Gibson thought he must be dead. But then Fernando’s hands twitched and came together over his wound. Anibal shook his head, irritated with himself, and stepped forward to finish the job. Luisa stopped him with a single word. She rose to her feet and held out her hand for the gun, never taking her eyes from Fernando. You’d lived the wrong sort of life when people lined up to put you out of your misery.
Anibal nodded, turned the gun around in his hand, and held it out for her to take.
“Obrigada,” she said, one of the only words Gibson knew in Portuguese, even though he’d been saying it wrong for months: thank you.
Weighing the gun in her hand, Luisa stepped over Baltasar so she could better look down into Fernando’s eyes. Gibson didn’t want to watch but couldn’t bring himself to look away.
“Bad shit got a half-life to it,” Hendricks muttered under his breath. “You watch.”
Luisa said something quietly to Fernando, spat on the floor at his feet, then turned smoothly and shot Anibal in the head. His sombrero spun away prettily as he dropped to his knees and flopped onto Baltasar’s ankles. As the gunshot echoed away and dissolved into silence, Luisa stood at the center of the three bodies and surveyed the carnage with archeological detachment. As if she had stumbled upon the ruins of a long-dead civilization and was trying to reconstruct how they must have lived their lives.
Across the warehouse, two men loyal to Anibal backed slowly away and then turned and ran. Those who remained lowered their weapons in a sign that the king was dead, long live the queen.
“Oh, shit,” Gibson said.
“Exactly,” Hendricks said.
They weren’t talking about the same thing.
Without considering the consequences, Gibson leapt out of his seat and rushed to Fernando. Luisa barked at him to stop, but he ignored her. More than likely it would get him killed, but with Anibal lying dead and Fernando not far behind, Gibson couldn’t afford to wait.
Fernando’s eyes were closed. There was no tension in his face. No pain. He wasn’t dead, not yet; Gibson could still see his breath curling faintly up into the cool air. If he didn’t look below the neck, Fernando might be mistaken for someone taking a siesta. One glance down shattered that illusion. Through Fernando’s tented fingers, his suit had turned black with his own blood.
“What the hell are you doing?” Luisa said, pressing the muzzle of her gun to Gibson’s ear.
Slowly, Gibson looked back at her. “Anibal is dead. Fernando is the only one left who knows where the children are.”
“The slaves?”
“Who else?” he said angrily.
“Is that what this has all been about for you?”
“Why else would I still be in Portugal?”
> Luisa didn’t have an answer to that. Her stern expression softened, and she pointed the gun away from him. “Fine, ask him, then. Find out if you can.”
“Really?” Not what Gibson had expected from Luisa Mata, but people had been surprising him all day.
Luisa looked at the bodies all around her and said, “Do I look like I need any more bad karma?”
Gibson understood that impulse. Subconsciously—or, hell, maybe consciously—he’d been seeking some way to redeem himself since arriving in Portugal. What a foolish notion it was, this vain hope that if he saved a few children it might ease his guilt for all those other things he’d done. Maybe it worked that way for some, maybe Luisa Mata was one of them, but for him, he knew that even if he saved every child in the world who needed saving, his mind would still find ways to remind him why it wasn’t enough. Why it would never be enough.
Nodding his thanks, he turned back to Fernando, who still hadn’t stirred. Gibson tried calling his name a few times, no response. Then he resorted to slapping him, lightly at first, then harder and harder.
“Hello,” Fernando rasped wetly. “What have I missed?”
“Anibal is dead.”
“Oh,” Fernando said, taking in the news. “Understandable.” He tried to raise his head to see the hole in his chest but couldn’t muster the strength. “How does it look?”
“An ambulance is on the way.” No one had cancelled Baltasar’s ambulance, so that was technically true. Although Gibson doubted it would make any difference.
“That’s very thoughtful.” Fernando was laboring now for breath. “You were always a good friend.”
“Tell me where the children are,” Gibson said. “Would you do that for me?”
“Why? It’s empty,” Fernando said.
“What do you mean? Where are the children?”
“Never going to get the blood out now,” Fernando said, feeling the lapel of his jacket. “I think it’s ruined.”
“Where are the children, Fernando?”
It took a moment before Fernando’s eyes focused. “Being loaded onto a bus, most likely. Couldn’t risk leaving them where they could be found with you sniffing around.” Fernando coughed thickly. “Had to move up the delivery.”
“What bus?” Gibson demanded, but Fernando had slipped out of consciousness as his body prepared itself to die. There would be no last words, no heartfelt confessions. Even if the ambulance arrived miraculously in time, what were the odds of Fernando Alves growing a conscience in his dying moments?
There had to be another way. Gibson wracked his brain but couldn’t see it. The frustrating thing was that Fresco Mar was connected to Fernando’s slave warehouse, but while Gibson could see the data that flowed back and forth, it didn’t give him a real-world address; he couldn’t see the source. It wasn’t like . . . The thought trailed off into space as another idea muscled its way into his mind. It was a big one, and it seemed generally pissed off at Gibson for taking this long to think it.
CHAPTER FORTY
“I want to make a deal,” Gibson said too loudly. To his dismay, his voice boomed through the quiet of the warehouse.
Luisa turned back to him. “A deal? I don’t know that you’re in a position to bargain.”
“I still have the shipment, assuming you want it.”
“And I still have your friends, assuming you want them.”
And like that, they were back to the original standoff. Some of the players had exited the game, but the stakes hadn’t changed.
“What do you say we lay off threatening each other,” Gibson said, standing up and stepping toward her and away from Fernando. It felt like bad luck having this conversation so near his body.
“What else is there?” Luisa asked, with only a trace of sarcasm in her voice.
“It just hasn’t gotten us very far,” Gibson said, sweeping his hand across the three dead bodies like a model on a game show displaying the prizes.
“Did he tell you where the children were?”
“No, he seemed more concerned about his suit.”
“There’s something admirable about a man who sticks to his principles until the bitter end.”
“But I think I know how I can find them.”
“So what is it you want?” Luisa asked.
“The kids. I want them taken care of.”
That was clearly not what Luisa had anticipated. “Define ‘taken care of.’”
“Taken care of,” Hendricks interrupted. “They don’t get shipped back to whatever war zone they were trying to escape. They don’t get turned over to Interpol.”
“They get what they thought they were coming for,” Gibson said. “Safety. Jobs. A chance.”
“How many are we talking about?” Luisa asked.
“Forty-some,” Hendricks said.
Luisa considered it. “And what do I get?”
“A whole lot of good karma,” Gibson said.
Luisa almost cracked a smile. “That is certainly enticing. And when will I get the shipment?”
“Right now,” Gibson said.
Her eyes narrowed. “The shipment is your only bargaining chip. What’s your angle?”
“No angle. But Fernando’s having those kids transported as we speak. Time’s up. One of us has to give first, or else we’ll just wind up back at threatening each other. So, I figure, why not me? Besides, I don’t get the impression you’re exactly good with what Fernando did.”
“No, I am not.”
“So, do we have a deal?” Gibson put out his hand. “I give you the shipment, and you make sure these kids get a fair shake?”
Luisa did the same, then hesitated. “And then you will get the hell out of Portugal?”
“With pleasure.”
They shook on their hastily negotiated arrangement. It felt good. Gibson even gave it a fifty-fifty chance that he hadn’t just gotten them all killed. Luisa had accumulated quite a body count in the last twenty-four hours, and it wasn’t impossible that once she had what she wanted she’d simply kill them. But Gibson didn’t think so. That wasn’t the read he had on Luisa. He guessed he would see how good his hunch was in a few minutes.
Disarming the shipment proved anticlimactic, especially after the life-and-death struggle that had preceded it. A few keystrokes and it was done. The most dramatic moment came when Gibson stepped across the painted yellow line and the Klaxon didn’t scream its warning and a countdown didn’t begin. He turned back with a grin. Everyone had moved away to a safe distance except for Luisa, George, Jenn, and Hendricks, who stood at the edge of the circle.
“See?” Gibson said.
“Never a doubt in my mind,” Hendricks said.
Screwdriver in hand, Gibson approached the shipment. From a distance it had looked large, but up close and personal, Gibson was stunned by the size of the pile. It had to be ten feet high. And this was only one of four annual shipments? It boggled his mind to imagine the sheer scope of the operation in those terms. He thought about all the lives it would affect. The damage it would do. Weighed against the lives of several dozen children, had he done any good, or was he simply trading one evil for another? Was that all life was? Choosing the grenade you hoped would cost you the fewest fingers?
Carefully, he detached one of the tightly wrapped bundles of explosives. A show of good faith. He brought it back and handed it to Luisa. She turned it over in her hands.
“If it’s a fake, it’s a damn good one,” Jenn said.
“I’d have bet real money it was all a bluff,” Hendricks said. “I’ll be damned.”
“So, are we square?” Gibson asked Luisa. All four looked at her expectantly. This was the proverbial moment of truth.
“We are,” she said. “Find the children. Bring them back. I will see they have a home here. My uncle would’ve wanted that.”
“Thank you,” Gibson said.
“Where will you start looking?” Luisa asked.
Gibson pointed straight up. “The roof. I have an id
ea. Hendricks, will you be a second set of eyes?”
For once, Hendricks didn’t ask any questions. “Yeah, I can do that.”
“Okay, then,” Gibson said. “We’ll be right back.”
Together they took off at a trot. Gibson felt good. Reinvigorated. Not being dead had really put a smile on his face. Even his ankle didn’t hurt so much. Outside, he climbed the ladder fixed to the outside of the warehouse, followed by Hendricks.
On the roof, Gibson took a moment to orient himself. He flinched at the sight of the two snipers. They sat side by side in the shade, backs against one of the massive air-conditioning units. The men passed a cigarette back and forth between them like two ex-lovers who had sworn this would be the last time. They stared at Gibson and Hendricks sullenly. Like their compatriots below, they seemed unable to process the death of Baltasar Alves or what it meant for the Algarve. Neither reached for the rifles set across their legs, so Gibson took off at a slow jog, feeling reasonably certain that he wasn’t going to get shot in the back.
“What are we looking for?” Hendricks asked.
They came around a corner, and Gibson saw it. The laser bridge that had seemed so out of place yesterday. At the time, Gibson hadn’t yet discovered the gigabytes of video stashed away on the Fresco Mar servers, so he had put it out of his mind. But now it all made sense—Fernando and Dani Coelho had installed the laser bridge to create a secure, high-speed link between here and their child-trafficking warehouse. The genius had been putting it in plain sight and trusting it to blend into its surroundings. After a few months, no one would have even looked at it twice, much less thought to ask questions.
Gibson pointed his arm along the laser bridge. “What direction is this?”
“Northeast? I think. Do I look like a damn Boy Scout? Soon as I’m back down on the ground, I’ll have no idea.”
“Well, it’s gotta be that way. No more than a couple of miles. A laser bridge needs line of sight, so the warehouse is literally straight that way.”
“Hold that thought. I’ll be right back,” Hendricks said and then disappeared back the way they had come. He returned with one of the sniper rifles.
Debris Line (Gibson Vaughn) Page 26