Buried Strangers

by Leighton Gage

  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—”

  “What did they do to them? What did they do to the peo-ple you helped to find?”

  “Kept them in cells under the building.”

  “And then?”

  “Harvested them. That’s what he called it, harvesting them. Like they was corn or something.”

  “Their organs? He harvested their organs?”

  “Not all their organs, just their hearts. He only does hearts.” Roberto’s face was getting red with the effort of con-taining himself. “Let me go to the toilet,” he said. “Please. I’m gonna lose it.”

  “Does Bittler have people in those cells now, right now?

  Maybe.”

  “What do you mean, maybe?”

  “Well, I . . . I talked to him. Told him you were after me. Told him I was on the run.”

  “And how, exactly, did you happen to know that? Know that we were after you?”

  “I can’t tell you. Look you gotta—”

  “You’d better tell me. And I don’t gotta anything. Not even let you live.”

  “My mother.”

  “What about her?”

  “She lives across the hall. She told me that a couple of federal cops broke down my door.”

  “She own a cat?” the cop leaning against the door asked.

  “Yeah, a cat.”

  “How long ago did you talk to Bittler?”

  That from Silva.

  “An hour or so ago. Maybe more.”

  “Okay, back to those cells of his. Who might he still have in there?”

  “An Indian baby from the Xingu, maybe two.”

  “How did he pull that off?”

  “There’s this wimp who works for the FUNAI. He stole a couple of babies from some Indian tribe. One of them was supposed to be used for his sick kid. The other one was a kind of payment, or maybe a reserve in case the first one didn’t work, I’m not sure.”

  “This wimp,” the cop leaning against the door said, “was his name Oliveira?”

  “Yeah. Oliveira.”

  “Alright,” Silva said, “so there’s a baby, maybe two. Any-one else in those cells?”

  “I really gotta go. Now.”

  “Answer my question.”

  “Just some old . . . some guy about your age.”

  “And how did he get there?”

  “There’s this travel agency Bittler uses sometimes. They arrange trips for people who want to get into the States and can’t get a visa. Every now and then one of them winds up at the clinic. They think they’re going to Mexico, but they get harvested instead.”

  Silva leaned in close, got right into Roberto’s face.

  “Tell me more about this guy about my age,” he said, his voice as cold as ice.

  And that was when Roberto finally lost control of his bowels.

  RIBEIRO KNEW the location and layout of Bittler’s Clinic, and there was no time to lose. Ribeiro’s presence on the raid would be a plus, but traveling with a man whose pants were full of excrement wasn’t a pleasant thing to contemplate. Silva tasked Hector to take Ribeiro down the hall to the bathroom so he could clean himself up.

  While that was happening, he called their pilot and told him to preflight the helicopter. Then he alerted ERR1.

  The Brazilian federal police had four elite hostage rescue units (Equipes para o Resgate de Reféns) designated ERR1 through ERR4. The first of these, based in São Paulo, was composed of twenty-two men and two women. One of those women, Gloria Sarmento, commanded it. Gloria was a bril-liant tactical leader, a crack shot, and highly skilled in jujitsu. She was also known to be absolutely fearless. Even Arnaldo Nunes, a macho to his fingertips and generally contemptuous of women bearing arms, was once heard to remark that Gloria had more balls than a pool hall.

  Her first word to Silva was, “Where?”

  “Morumbi,” he said. “Ninety-seven Rua das Tulipas. A clinic belonging to a doctor by the name of Bittler.”

  From the way his voice echoed back to him, he knew she’d put him on a speaker phone. He could hear scrambling in the background, people assembling their equipment.

  “What?” Gloria said.

  “Hostage situation. An infant child, maybe two, and Arnaldo Nunes.”

  “Nunes? That Neanderthal? Man, I’d love to save his ass. I’d never let him forget it. Where are you?”

  “Guarulhos. I’ve got a helicopter. I’ve also got a man familiar with the location.”

  “Bring him, and get him to make a sketch of the interior of the building. If he has any idea where the hostages are being held, tell him to mark it. If there are multiple possibil-ities, tell him to rank them and write in numbers. One for the most likely, two for the second most likely, and so on. I’ll pick a staging area where you can land. My people will fol-low in a couple of vans. You have a cell phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the number?”

  He gave it to her. She fired it back at him. He confirmed it.

  “I’ll call you in fifteen minutes,” she said.

  And hung up.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  THEY WERE ALREADY IN the air when Silva and Gloria spoke again.

  “There’s a vacant lot about a kilometer to the northeast of the target,” Gloria said. “Tell the pilot to follow the river. When he’s directly above the Morumbi Bridge, he should alter his course to three hundred and forty degrees. That will bring him in over the bluff. Look for a white cross and my helicopter. I’m already down. And tell him, for God’s sake, not to fly over the clinic. The noise may tip them off. It’s a large building with a mansard roof, parking lots in front and back, about three hundred meters beyond the landing site, the only house on the street without a swimming pool.”

  Silva relayed her instructions to the pilot, who asked him what the hell a mansard roof was.

  In the rear seat of the Aerospatiale Squirrel, Hector was sitting next to one of the windows. Ribeiro was on the other side of the aircraft. There were two empty seats between them, but judging by the expression on Hector’s face, it wasn’t far enough. If the helicopter had had wings, Hector would probably be sitting on the tip of one.

  Silva sympathized. He had one of the air-conditioning vents pointed toward his face, but even with his nose in the slipstream the s
mell of excrement was overpowering.

  Ribeiro had his tongue between his teeth, a pencil in his hand, and was drawing on a clipboard. He looked up and saw Silva holding his nose, staring at him.

  “It’s your fault I smell like this,” he said. “You shoulda let me go.”

  “How come it’s taking you so damned long?”

  “I’m finished.”

  Ribeiro handed Silva the clipboard. The work was crude, none of the lines parallel to one another. It looked like it had been drawn by a five-year-old.

  “Where are the hostages?” Silva said, searching for marks or numbers and not finding any.

  Ribeiro leaned forward. “I couldn’t get it all on one sheet,” he said.

  “Don’t do that!”

  “What?”

  Silva waved a hand in front of his nose to dispel the stench. “Sit back in your seat.”

  Ribeiro did.

  “That’s just the main floor,” he said.

  Silva flipped to the next sheet.

  “That’s the cellar under the building. That’s where they take out the hearts and burn the bodies.”

  “They, huh? And you never did anything like that?”

  “No, I told you. I never killed nobody. I swear to God.”

  “Can you get to the cellar from the main floor?”

  Ribeiro shook his head.

  “Only from the parking lot in back. There’s a ramp that leads down to a door. You can see it right there.” He extended a finger and started to lean forward again, but then he caught Silva’s warning look and drew back. “Right there,” he repeat-ed. “Bittler made it that way on purpose, to keep it secret.”

  “Look,” the pilot said.

  Silva didn’t have the eyes of an aviator, and it took awhile for him to locate what the man was pointing at: a white cross in the middle of what looked like a little park and, nearby, another helicopter. When they got closer, Silva could see the cross had been made with some kind of white powder.

  Seconds later they were down and the white powder was all around them, kicked up by the wash from the aircraft’s rotor. Silva disembarked, coughing and beating the powder off his gray suit. Gloria Sarmento, in black body armor and carrying a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun, was waiting for him.

  “Just to get something straight before we begin, Chief Inspector.”

  “Yes.”

  “You outrank me, but I’m good at doing what I do, and this is my show. I don’t want you to interfere.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Silva said.

  “Where are the sketches?”

  “This one’s the ground floor,” Silva said, handing it over.

  “How old is the guy who drew this?” Gloria said, studying Ribeiro’s work. “Five? Six?”

  “Only mentally,” Silva said. He handed her the other sheet. “That’s the basement where they keep the hostages.

  Access?”

  “Only one way in. From the parking lot in back.”

  “Steel door?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “I’d better go over there and talk to that creep,” Gloria said.

  “Don’t get too close,” Silva warned. “He stinks.”

  GLORIA DIVIDED her people into two teams: Hammer One and Hammer Two. Hammer One was charged with breaching the perimeter and assaulting the main floor. Hammer Two, commanded by Gloria herself, would attack the complex beyond the ramp. She briefed them in the stag-ing area, and then they all piled into the vans, Silva, Hector, and Ribeiro included. The guys sitting on either side of Ribeiro wrinkled their noses and moved as far away as possi-ble on the crowded bench.

  The other female member of ERR1 looked at him and said, “Phew.”

  She was a perky brunette with short hair named Sarah Dimenstein. All the other members of the team were in full gear, but Sarah was wearing a skirt and blouse.

  Gloria, sitting next to Silva, caught his expression and smiled. “Why shoot our way in,” she said, “if we can do it with finesse?”

  THE DRIVE to Bittler’s clinic took less than a minute. They parked the vans out of sight of the guard at the main gate. The teams lined up on the sidewalk.

  “You can follow us in,” Gloria said to Silva. “From what that creep said, I don’t expect them to do any shooting, but keep your head down anyway.”

  “I’ll follow you around to the back,” Silva said. “Whatever is down there is my major concern at the moment.”

  “Do me a favor,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Get that nephew of yours to cuff the creep and chain him to something downwind.”

  SARAH APPROACHED the gate, carrying a small purse and wearing a microphone in her bra. The transmitter was in the small of her back. From their place of concealment, Gloria couldn’t see the guard or the gate, but she could hear every word of his exchange with Sarah. And so could Silva.

  “Help you?” the guard said, his voice tinny through the intercom.

  “I’m trying to find this address,” Sarah said.

  They could hear the crinkle of paper. They knew she was waving a sheet from a small notepad, holding it up. A few seconds went by and there was the whir of a motor and the squeak of hinges: the sound of the electric gate being opened. Footsteps approached Sarah’s microphone.

  Gloria smiled. “He’s out of his hole,” she said, “and away from the damned alarm button. We’re in.”

  “Let me see,” the guard said. They could imagine him extending a hand to take the paper, imagine Sarah reaching into her purse. And then, “What the hell is this?”

  “This,” Sarah said, “is a nine-millimeter pistol and this”— there was a short pause—“is my federal police ID. Turn around and face the wall.”

  ACCORDING TO the man stationed at the gate, there were two other guards inside the building. All three were munici-pal cops, moonlighting for a security company. They were there to protect the place from thieves and to keep undesir-ables like panhandlers and salesmen from molesting the staff and patients. Federal cops with a legitimate right to be there were something else again.

  One of the other two guys on his shift, the guard who’d been on the gate said, would be watching the monitors hooked up to the security cameras. He’d be doing that from a small room under the main staircase just off the reception area. The other guard would be on his break, reading, sleep-ing, or watching TV up on the second floor. Provided the man covering the monitors hadn’t seen Sarah’s gun, it should be easy enough to disarm him, and the other guy should be even easier, since he’d be taken by surprise. And as soon as they were convinced that they were dealing with federal cops, and not a band of armed robbers, the guard who’d been on the gate added, they’d be sure to cooperate.

  Ribeiro, now handcuffed to one of the metal pickets in the perimeter fence, confirmed that the security men were unaware of the illicit activities that went on in the base-ment, probably not even aware that there was a basement.

  Sarah strolled up the walk as if she had every right to be there. Once inside, she spoke to the guards.

  The rest was, as Gloria later put it, a cakewalk. On the main floor, Hammer One found a functioning operating the-ater with a woman already anesthetized and ready to receive a new heart. Upstairs, there were patients recovering from recent operations.

  The ward nurses were left to care for their charges, the remaining staff was lined up in the reception area. Ribeiro was called in to finger Teobaldo Vargas, the anesthesiologist, and Gretchen Furtwangler, Bittler’s secretary, who, he said, were complicit in Bittler’s and Andrade’s crimes.

  People wrinkled their noses and turned their heads away as Ribeiro moved down the line. When he pointed them out, Teobaldo tried to hit him, and Gretchen spit in his face.

  A scrutiny of Furtwangler’s Rolodex revealed the address of Manolo Nabuco, the pilot. A team was dispatched to arrest him at his home. Less than half an hour later, the call came through. They’d found him in bed with a teenage pros-titute, bot
h of them high on cocaine. He’d been taken into custody without a fight.

  ARNALDO AWOKE to find himself staring upward into a battery of lamps. He blinked against the glare, tried to move a hand in front of his face and couldn’t. His arms were still under restraint. A head poked into his line of vision, the face looking down on him.

  “Oh no,” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” Gloria Sarmento said, “sleeping on the job again, Nunes?”

  “You!”

  “Me.”

  “This is a nightmare,” he said. “Please tell me it’s a night-mare.”

  “There, there” she said, “you don’t have to worry any-more. You’ve been rescued. You’re safe at last. Now, just lie there quietly for a moment while Decio takes a picture of the two of us. I’m going to hang it on the wall of my office.”

  She brought her smiling face down and put it cheek to cheek with Arnaldo’s. There was a flash as a strobe light went off.

  “You shoulda let them kill me,” Arnaldo said. “It woulda been more merciful.”

  GLORIA’S NUMBER two, a gaucho from Rio Grande do Sul with the unlikely name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Carvalho, walked into the cremation room, saw the partially consumed body of a baby on the grate, and managed to make it back into the hall before he vomited. He went into the bathroom and washed his mouth out with water. Then he went back and sealed the door with yellow crime-scene tape.

  An Indian baby, just one, was found sleeping on a cot in one of the cells.

  SILVA WAS the one who found Bittler. The doctor was lying in a pool of his own blood, his body concealed behind the pump-oxygenator. His throat had been slashed from ear to ear. The cut was very clean, a sign that it had been made with an extremely sharp instrument. There was a look of sur-prise frozen on his face. Death would not have been imme-diate, but as a doctor, he would have known that his injury was fatal.

  Later, a scalpel bearing traces of his blood, and Claudia Andrade’s fingerprints, was found among the medical instru-ments on a nearby table.

  Paulo Couto, the chief medical examiner, who was famous for seldom speculating about anything, speculated that the scalpel was the instrument used to kill him.

  Silva was convinced that it was Claudia who had done the job.

  And Claudia was nowhere to be found.