But how can there be a terrorist threat with a gang feud, porn DVDs, and Brazilian slaves?
Damn it. I had to find someone I could trust who understood I was a conscript in this war, not a volunteer.
And I had to find out how a porn merchant and master of a sex slavery empire could possibly pose an international threat in, of all places, Brazil.
♦
That morning I’d sent a jpeg of Henrique Marinho walking around his mansion with his strange guest—the man with the widow’s peak who got along with Marinho’s Dobermans—into the great beyond. By the time I was back from Taubaté and checking my e-mail in the hotel’s Net café, there was a response from “Sibar Sexy.’ With no hello or goodbye, Simon had typed in caps: I SPY. I SPY BIG.
Shit. Easy enough to decode. Marinho’s mate was MI6, someone way up there from Legoland.
I signed in to Instant Messenger and typed in: ARE YOU THERE?
The response was instant: YES.
I typed back quickly: THX FOR LEGO PIECE BUT NEED MORE.
Sibar Sexy is writing a message …
THERE IS NO MORE.
There had to be, I thought. I was in the biggest Catholic nation in the world, but somehow there was an international threat tied to Islam being hatched here, which involved sex slaves and British intelligence. He had already told me it was bigger than Brazil.
I was about to whine and plead for him to tell me more when a new line flashed on the screen: THEY WILL USE SAMBA AS TEST CASE.
I couldn’t understand this at all. Who will use what as a test case? Then another line: FOZ.
What was Foz? An acronym? I sent a one-symbol question:
?
He must have typed so fast he completely ignored punctuation: YOU MUST STOP IT CAN’T SAY MORE BIG EARS LISTENING I HAVE FAITH IN YOU.
I typed back quickly: NEED TO HOOK UP WHEN DONE. HINT. Pretty much the same thing I asked him in Paris. Where do I meet you? How do I find you?
And an answer just like the last one came back: SOLO RUN ON THIS ONE. Five seconds, ten … A FAR, FAR BETTER THING, ETC. LOL.
Oh, oh, The Simon Highsmith bravado. Just enough self-promotion to remind me he was trying to stay on the side of the angels. He was definitely in trouble, and on past cases, he would tease me or goad me, want to get involved in my business or have me ride along. But wherever he was, he wanted me to keep out this time, thinking of my safety. I offered, and he shot me down. Even though our cases, by his own admission, were somehow connected.
Mine was a “test case,’ and he was somewhere with the bigger piece, hunted by the bigger sharks.
And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do at the moment to help him.
9
The next morning I made my eyes bloodshot combing through the spoils of the USB flash drive, the one downloaded with all the goodies from the administrative assistant’s computer. I learned nothing from the shooting schedules or the payroll accounts, and I certainly didn’t learn anything from the paid invoices for the bottled water delivered to the Silky Pictures building in Rio. The assistant had everything, and I do mean everything. Ecch. Financial stuff puts me into a coma.
Helena once passed along a great saying she got from a banker: “Big money has no shame.’ In other words, I didn’t need to play accountant, because often you can ignore the more intricate, buried figures. If the profit is big enough, the bad guys inevitably have to park it out in the open, hoping no one pays attention. This time the saying was right.
Literally hundreds of thousands had been transferred as payments from Silky Pictures to a company called Lemos. I smelled another inside joke. Just as ladrão meant thief, Lemos was the name of the Portuguese explorer who first came to Brazil. The Lemos Company might be a dead end, only existing so that Marinho could launder his profits, but I thought I better check it out anyway.
It took another hour to track down the Brazilian equivalent of Companies House in London—a government office here that could tell me where Lemos was headquartered, who ran it, and what the business was actually about, whether it made anything or did anything or was just part of the Marinho Monopoly board. Of course, this office had to be in the capital of Brasilia, and I was told it would take a day or two for the information to be dug out of the record archives and sent to me.
Great. More waiting.
I returned to watching Henrique Marinho’s house in Barra da Tijuca. He sat by the pool in shorts and a shirt buttoned only halfway up, reading his beloved furniture catalogues. Guy had a serious fetish for acquiring stuff. His gang friends swam and splashed away, and his guards glowered, and I knew Marinho would have to leave his enclave sooner or later.
I didn’t have long to wait. After a couple of hours, Marinho went into his house and changed, and came out jangling a set of car keys, two bodyguards ready to come with. I went for my car. Marinho drove for about forty-five minutes and then parked his car at a sensible distance from the edge of the morros. I did the same.
This is where the favelas are, the shantytowns that are infamous blights on the glamour of Rio, São Paolo, and other cities, yet now are paradoxically also tourist attractions in the safer quarters. Can you think of anything more repulsive than “slumming it’ through an actual slum on a bus tour, as if the residents there are animals in a zoo?
I couldn’t tell which favela he and his mates were venturing into, but I didn’t hesitate to tail him into the winding streets. Hey, I’d made my way out of tough spots in Sudan, Thailand, Nigeria. I thought I could handle myself here, especially since I was dressed in a casual top and shorts, wearing my “tailing work’ sneakers. Plus there were enough black and mixed-race people here that my color made me blend in. Or so I thought.
I was hopelessly naïve.
I barely knew more than two words of Portuguese, but they didn’t have to hear an accent. It was in the way I walked, the way I moved past the homes made out of bricks and aluminum sheds and sometimes even garbage. My confidence in assuming I had a right to go where I wanted to was a dead giveaway to these people. You don’t belong.
Never mind my confident stride. Most favelas don’t have running water, and my clothes were clean, not ones worn for days. And not clean as washed in a bucket but machine-washed clean. Marinho could come and go as he pleased, because he packed a gun. They feared him. I was an alien here, a gringa looking for trouble and about to get it.
Teresa, you idiot.
Men on the steep hill of the street were looking down in disbelief that I should be so stupid, and Marinho eventually looked back. He remembered me, oh yes. Then he was on his cell phone. I was too far away to hear and couldn’t understand anyway, but the rising pitch of his native language and the hand gestures tipped me off that he was just as amazed as the favela residents. His two guys stayed with him, but within seconds a new gang of thugs jogged around the corner and down the hill. Marinho pulled out a large black and silver gun.
The worst of it was, just as in London, I knew he only drew it to stop me. If he planned to kill me on the spot, he wouldn’t need his pals. Oh, yeah, he had other plans for me. Marinho would want to know why I’d followed him back here after the frame job and what else I knew and who I’d told. Then his creeps would have fun with me.
Needles right close to my eyes. Won’t allow another sadistic stunt like that. Ugh.
I could run.
Yeah, right. This was where drugs and gang warfare thrived. They would know exactly where to get ahead of me and cut me off. The people who sat in front of their shacks and sheds wore glum passive expressions. These people would not interfere. Why should they? They’d watch with their stoic blankness. The ad hoc life in these ad hoc streets would go on after my blood was washed away by the rain.
I ran anyway.
I heard the crack of the automatic behind me, a millisecond later the metallic pang of the bullet smacking into an aluminum panel. Then two more, pang, pang, a spiteful child drumming a stick along its side, gunfire to scare the shit out of
me and make me stop. I’ve been shot at before, but let me go on the record as saying it’s far preferable if you know where you’re going as you flee in terror. The squeals sound more heroic.
But I didn’t. I ran into a labyrinth of broken, winding streets so narrow and cracked you couldn’t even navigate a motorcycle within them. As I ran, I heard heavy footsteps above me. Marinho’s boys were above my head, jumping from corrugated aluminum roof to brick and garbage surface, easily following me with their bird’s-eye perspective.
Along the rooftops—none at a horizontal angle or at the same level—women hung washlines, kids pedaled their tricycles to nowhere, and a couple of them dared to play soccer. You even heard the hiss and pop of barbecue meat from the two-stories as I looked for which way to go. Marinho’s thugs chased me tramp tramp tramp on rusting metal. They waved their guns to scare the favela residents out of their way but didn’t fire at me. I was right: They wanted to take me alive.
Can’t keep this up forever. I’m good for a short sprint, but no, I’m not the girl who jogs at five in the morning, hate those cheerful, oh-so-tireless people. I’ve told friends that if you have to run, it had better be away from something or towards a buffet table. And I sure wasn’t a woman who glowed. I was drenched now, my lungs burning, and the favela went on and on. If I climbed up to see ahead, I might run to a roof edge where I couldn’t get down. The same could happen to them, but they had their mates at street level to intercept me as they doubled back.
“Damn it!’ I snapped, finally losing my temper and feeling the chill through the fear sweat. I got out of London— London, the city with the most CCTV in the world and big efficient police forces that can calmly, nonchalantly scoop you up like a bug in a pair of tweezers. I made it out of Paris. Only to—what? Get captured by these sociopaths after a stupid reckless mistake? No.
Fail, and something bad happens here in this country. You know it. Simon warned you as much.
So don’t fail.
If you can’t run, you fight, I told myself.
Um, yes, that’s all fine, very plucky, darling, but you do remember they have guns, right?
I was hoping not to concentrate on the negative.
Fight anyway. Use what’s available for weapons.
I turned a corner and spotted a worn but thick rope tied to a pair of oversized, literally gigantic alligator clips. Must be large for the sake of some industrial machinery purpose, “borrowed’ from a factory or construction site so the resident could climb up the wall. No one around to object to my taking it. Good for me.
Then I doubled back through the honeycomb of zigzagging streets, which forced the gang to split up. I had no idea if the guys on the ground were closing in, but I had to deal with the ones above first. As one ran along a slanted corrugated roof, I hopped up on a set of crates. Pang, pang, pang, and here he comes, hope this works—
I swung the rope up in my best lasso fashion, and it was the weight of the big iron clips that completed the arc. The cord wrapped around his legs, but the iron clips flew into his crotch. He yelled out in pain. Hitting him there wasn’t the idea, but a nice added benefit. I don’t know whether he slipped, or if my pull really did yank him off his feet. But he slid off the ramp of the metal roof and landed hard on the pavement.
“Merda!’
One of the guys on the opposite rooftop saw what happened. He half climbed, half jumped his way down.
The first guy was out of it. I unwound the rope as quickly as I could, and as the second thug ran up, his gun was out of his belt. I swung the rope, and the big iron clips hit him like a wrecking ball. Smack. You don’t get up from that, any more than you pop back up after falling off a roof.
Run, Teresa.
I dropped the rope, too cumbersome to take with me, scurrying through the streets again—but these all went up into the hills, and I couldn’t find a down route. I heard more shots behind me, but only when I turned a corner did I realize someone was shooting back.
Cops? No. The police made raids on the favelas, but couldn’t venture too deeply in, and I would spot them in big numbers, wouldn’t I? This sounded like a single automatic rifle.
As I ran down another ripped and scarred avenue, small fingers yanked me hard around my biceps. As soon as I let out a yelp, a hand covered my mouth, and then I looked into the large dark eyes of a peculiar girl.
She was a head shorter than me, with a round face and café-au-lait skin, with large full lips and a slightly hooked nose, her curly hair in a wild black cloud. She wore a man’s white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up and Levi’s torn at the knees, with one tear suggestively under the curve of a buttock. Her shoes were sensible but expensive-looking. She may have been petite, but like many Brazilian girls, her face and body were an exotic ripe blend, so much sensuality packed into her curves that no way could the shirt hide it, two undone buttons showed the divide of her breasts.
I’m describing her now, but truthfully, what caught my attention right away was the rifle she was holding. From barrel end to stock, it was as tall as she was.
“Gringa,’ she whispered with immediate disgust in heavily accented English. “You are an idiot.’
“Thank you,’ I whispered back. “Call me anything you like while you shoot those guys, just get us out of here.’
She hefted the rifle with impressive skill and sniper-fired at a guy on a rooftop. There was a crack that made me cover my ears, and the thug dropped.
“I have work to do,’ said the girl. “You fuck that up.’
“Fine! You give me cover fire to the nearest way out of here, and I’ll be on my way!’
The girl fired again, missing Marinho as he ducked behind another tumbledown structure, hitting one of his goons in the neck. This wasn’t the movies. The goon didn’t fly backwards as if a cannon had hit him. His legs gave out, the bullet short-circuiting the cables to his feet. He fell on his back, making a hideous, haunting wet gurgle, one hand to his throat.
None of his friends did anything.
Except Marinho, who shoved out his arm and fired off several loud rounds. I heard a piercing cry above our heads.
One of the bullets had struck a child, a girl who looked about nine.
Oh, sweet Jesus.
She’d been ducking for cover with her older brother, who now called hysterically to someone in the house. I heard a horrible scream and the wail of the girl’s mother—
“Oh, my God!’ I blurted out. Horrible. I wasn’t paying attention to Marinho and his thugs any longer. I was taking a step out to see the mother frantically sobbing for help. Oh, God, the child—the bastard fired wildly hoping luck would find the target, and the little girl—
“Get back, fool!’ barked the girl with the rifle. “We can do nothing for them!’
This was a nightmare, a South American West Bank, and don’t tell me I can’t do anything. “We have to get her to a hospital!’ I said.
“You don’t know what goes on here, gringa. I have big fish to—’
“I don’t give a shit!’ I yelled. “We are not running out on a wounded child because these bloody maniacs tried to hit me!’
She stared at me a moment, and it felt longer than it really was. There was time enough for Marinho to squeeze off a couple more shots that ripped away the bricks above our heads.
“What’s your name?’
“Teresa.’
“I am Beatriz,’ said the girl.
Well, well. Small favela.
I have no idea where she pulled out the 9mm automatic from, but she held it out to me, a big ugly black and silver gun.
“Do you know how to use?’ she asked.
Yeah, I’d held guns before. Don’t like them. And I wouldn’t even try after that lunatic’s indiscriminate fire.
“No thanks,’ I said. “But I’ll be grateful if you’ll keep them from shooting me …’
“You crazy woman! Get back here!’
Too late. Ran for an alley about twenty yards away, Beatriz popping o
ff round after round to hold Marinho back. My rationale was that the poor mother would be stranded up there, unable to run a gauntlet of thugs to reach help or to take her daughter out. Hell, they’d probably charge her for the privilege of leaving her own district. And no ambulance or doctor would come in here.
I went into billy goat mode. I sized up the hand and footholds I had available in the amateur brickwork and scaffolding, but I was terrified of a bullet slamming into my spine and dropping me on the spot. Beatriz switched her rifle to full automatic fire. A steady, cacophonous barrage as I climbed the accordion folds of the hanging metal. I hoped, in my selfish survival frame of mind, that the goons didn’t take her out either. If they did …
The mother waved her arms, still hysterical, enraged at me on the one hand for being the cause of it all, but making an equally raw appeal to help her. My nerves shot, I started to make my own complaints in English, ripping a blouse off a clothesline and saying, “At least have the bloody sense to apply pressure!’
I put the blouse on the girl’s stomach—it was soaked in blood within seconds. I motioned to the little boy to bring more clothes off the line, and he went robotically to help, his eyes saucer-wide with the trauma of seeing this. The mother screamed over the side of the roof. It wasn’t hard to get the gist: You shot my child. Let me take her to get help.
Not allowed.
I crept behind some cover and yelled out: “Marinho! Listen to me, you bastard! The little girl’s in trouble!’
“Too fucking bad!’ he laughed. “Come down, Miss Knight, and maybe I will let them go.’
Beatriz let out a long burst of automatic fire—yeah, it summed up my reply.
“We are leaving,’ I announced, and I carried the little girl in my arms down the stairs to the interior of the house. I had to prop her head on my shoulder as if she had fallen asleep in my arms. Poor little kid. Thirty seconds more, and she would have made it to the stairs with her brother. I couldn’t imagine living like this, but I was getting a good idea.
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