Getting Asim to Ciudad del Este was, therefore, a simple matter of gagging him, binding him, and driving him there in the trunk of one of the rental cars.
Less than an hour after leaving their isolated safe house, Ben-Meir and the two associates who accompanied him were safely across the border. Fifteen minutes later, they arrived at the back door of Al-Fulan’s auto dealership.
It was 2:15 in the morning. The narrow lane was deserted. The four men who’d entered the building to subdue the guards were expecting them. The guards themselves had already been drugged and transported to a distant location.
Ben-Meir’s men hustled Asim inside, tied him to one of two chairs nailed to the floor in Al-Fulan’s office and removed his gag.
The mullah, talked-out and exhausted from his ordeal, looked around him with bleary eyes. Then he closed them for a while—and dozed.
He awoke, an hour later, with the arrival of Jamil Al-Fulan.
“Do not bring that traitorous filth close to me,” he said angrily. “Even the air around him is polluted.”
Al-Fulan made a show of attempting to advance on the mullah. But it was no more than that, a show. “How dare you?” he shouted as they bound him to the other chair. “How dare you call me a traitor?”
“Because that’s what you are!” the mullah shouted back. “They told me what you did. You lured me into a trap.”
“And am I any worse than you? You, who betrayed everyone and everything.”
“I? Betray?”
“Don’t play the innocent with me, Asim. I know what you’ve done.”
“You believe the lies these Zionist pigs have told you?”
“I believe the recording they made of your interrogation. They played it for me. You spilled your guts and gave up your friends. You are despicable!”
“Despicable? I? You are—”
Ben-Meir interceded. “Quiet,” he said. “One more word from either of you and the gags go back in.”
Neither wanted that. They fell silent.
The chairs had been positioned to face Al-Fulan’s desk. Ben-Meir stepped behind it and sat down. The other members of the team gathered around him.
For the first time, Al-Fulan and the mullah could see the extent of the force the Israelis had marshaled against them: an even dozen, eight men and four women. The oldest was Ben-Meir himself; the youngest, a youth who looked to be no more than eighteen.
“As you have undoubtedly guessed by now,” Ben-Meir said, “we are members of Israel’s secret intelligence service.”
“I knew it!” the mullah said.
“I told you to be quiet. You will have ample time to respond when I have finished.”
The mullah’s eyes narrowed in hatred. He started to curse.
“Do it,” Ben-Meir said. “Gag him.”
A gag was stuffed into Asim’s mouth. Ben-Meir waited until it had been secured with tape and continued. “Our government does not tolerate attacks on its representatives or their families. If you were in Israeli territory, you would be tried for the murder of our ambassador to Argentina, his wife and children.”
Al-Fulan opened his mouth. A minder stepped forward, gag in hand. The Paraguayan pressed his lips together and shook his head.
“But,” Ben-Meir continued, “you are not in Israel, and neither one of you has the prominence of an Eichmann, so we’re not going to the trouble and expense to take you there. In cases like yours, we have an established procedure: confession, condemnation, execution. You have confessed. A quarter of an hour ago, the President of Israel signed your death warrants. You’ve been duly informed. Now, you may speak.”
Al-Fulan licked his lips. His voice came out in a croak. “Let me go,” he said, “and I will make you rich.”
Ben-Meir shook his head.
“No, wait,” Al-Fulan said. “Let me finish.”
“Go ahead. Finish.”
Al-Fulan inclined his head in the mullah’s direction. “He prepared the bombs. He sent Nabulsi to São Paulo, and he did the job in Buenos Aires. All I did was to supply the money. He’s the one you really want, not me. Why don’t you just kill him?”
The mullah’s face turned bright red, and a vein in his forehead began to throb.
Ben-Meir shook his head.
“Think about it!” Al-Fulan said. “Think of the money! If you let me go, you’ll all be rich, and I’ll disappear. You’ll never see me again. No one need ever know.”
“Gag him,” Ben-Meir said, “and remove the gag from the other one.”
When it was done, the mullah tried to spit in Ben-Meir’s face. The spittle fell short.
“Say your piece,” Ben Meir said. “I will give you fifteen seconds.”
“You are all doomed,” Asim said. “There are one point six billion of us and less than fourteen million of you. And except in your Zionist state, your numbers shrink from day to day. We, however, grow more numerous each year. You are surrounded on all sides by enemies. You cannot stand against us. We will destroy all of you and return your cities to dust—”
“His fifteen seconds are up,” Ben-Meir said. “Put back the gag and let’s finish this. Zivah.”
She took a step toward him. “Yes, Amzi.”
“Put it where they can see it,” he said. “Set it for four hours. We don’t want to awaken the Chief Inspector too early.”
At 3:27 in the morning, the Israelis filed out of the room, leaving the two condemned men tied to their chairs, staring wide-eyed at a digital timer moving inexorably toward zero.
At 7:25, the numbers ran out, and the remaining C4, all thirty-seven kilograms of it, exploded.
Afterwards, the Paraguayan National Police concluded the two terrorists had accidently blown themselves up while assembling a bomb of spectacular proportions.
But at 7:30 A.M., while the ruins of Jamil Al-Fulan’s auto dealership were still smoldering, Mario Silva’s telephone rang.
And Amzi Ben-Meir told him what had really happened.
Chapter Forty-Five
ON THE THIRD OF January, seven weeks to the day after the deaths of Jamil Al-Fulan and Asim Massri, Stella Saldana was inaugurated as the new governor of Paraná.
By that time, the former governor, Abbas, was already ensconced in his new house on Saint Barthélemy, counting his money and plotting a return.
Madalena Torres was in São Paulo transforming a senator into a governor.
Braulio Serpa was still looking for a job.
And the federal cops were no closer to discovering who’d planned the murder of Stella’s husband.
The solution came in early February—and from an entirely unexpected direction.
The telephone rang in Silva’s apartment at eight o’clock at night. Irene, as usual, was well into her cups. And Silva, as usual, was the one to answer it.
“Hi, Mario. Heard about old man Saldana?” It was Luis Chagas.
“Hello, Luis. How’s the new job?”
“I’m in heaven. Stella is a dream to work for.”
“When you say old man Saldana, I assume you’re talking about Plínio’s father? Orestes?”
“I am.”
“What about him?”
“His son, Lúcio, is up on charges of defrauding his clients. It’s going to be the first time a Saldana ever got convicted of anything in the State of Paraná. Not that they haven’t done a lot of nasty things—they have. But it’s never gone farther than vague accusations. Not this time. This time, Stella is all over it. Lúcio’s going to do jail time for sure. And, when they told Orestes about it, he went ballistic. He had a stroke. Then, while he was still in his hospital bed, and unable to talk, his mother had him declared mentally incompetent. He’s been committed to the same institution he committed her to.”
“Ha! And is he? Mentally incompetent, I mean.”
“The judge said he is.”
“What do you say?”
“Who am I to argue with a judge? Recently appointed, by the way, and an old law-school colleague of Ste
lla’s, so they tell me. But all that’s just a bit of gossip I thought you might be interested in. It’s not the reason I called.”
“No?”
“No. My boss and I are in Brasilia. She’d like a word with you.”
“About what?”
“That’s between you and the governor.”
“All right. Where?”
“We’re at the Meliá.”
“The Meliá is fine. When?”
“Four o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”
“Works for me.”
“And Mario.…” An element of caution had crept into Luis’s voice.
“Yes?”
“Come alone.”
GOVERNOR STELLA Saldana’s suite was one of the best, just two floors below the rooftop swimming pool. Chagas answered his knock and ushered him inside.
The window in the living room looked out on the television tower. Stella had coffee and croissants waiting. Silva accepted the coffee and passed on the croissants. Chagas excused himself and left. Stella set down her cup and tilted her head at the door from which he’d made his exit.
“He didn’t want to be here for this,” she said.
“I noticed.”
“But it’s at his insistence that I’m talking to you now.”
She picked up her cup, took another sip of coffee, let the silence stretch out. Silva, wisely, said nothing. After a while, she continued. “Before I spoke to Luis about this, I was the only person alive who knew.”
Silva frowned. “Knew what, Senhora?”
“Knew what really happened to Plínio. I will not repeat this anywhere or at any other time. And if you go public with it, I’ll deny it.”
He raised a curious eyebrow. “Then why, Senhora, are you going to tell me anything at all?”
She took one breath, two, and then the plunge. “So I’ll have it off my conscience—and so you can stop wasting your time.”
“Wasting my time?”
“Any further investigation of Plínio’s death is a complete and total waste of time. There’s no one left to punish, and without my help, you’ll never get to the bottom of it.”
“He was your husband, Senhora. And he was murdered. How can you possibly—”
“He wasn’t murdered.”
“What?”
“Plínio’s death was an accident.”
“An accident?”
She’d said it. Now, she wanted to get it over with. She hurried forward.
“It was supposed to be a stunt, a ploy to capture votes. Cataldo was supposed to shoot at Plínio, but he was never meant to hit him. It was all Plínio’s idea. He planned it, and he convinced Nestor to help him pull it off.”
Silva sat back in his chair. “Maybe you’d better tell me the whole story.”
“I just did. The rest is detail.”
Silva crossed his arms, thought of the waste of time and energy, thought of the time he’d taken away from the bombing case, thought of the fact that Danusa might still be alive had he not been misled by the lies. Most of all, he thought of Jessica Cataldo and her orphaned children.
“Then tell me,” he said, “the detail.”
“The polls suggested the election could go either way. And when Plínio thought Abbas was about to embarrass him with that girlfriend of his—”
“Wait. You mean to tell me you knew about Eva Telles?”
“Of course I did. It’s not as if she was making any secret of it.”
“You confronted your husband with it?”
“I did. Eva Telles is a greedy little gold-digger. She thought she’d captured his heart, but it was a dalliance on his part, nothing more. He’d had his fun. Even before we spoke about it, he’d made up his mind to tell her it was over. I think, in a way, he was relieved I found out.”
“So you had no intention of leaving him?”
“I did not. We had plans, he and I, for the State of Paraná. Good plans. We’d been cherishing those plans for years. I wasn’t about to let his sordid little affair get in the way of fulfilling them.”
“But?”
“But if Abbas did what my husband suspected he was going to do, if he divulged to the press that Plínio had been cheating on me, it was sure to cost us votes, maybe even cost us the election. Plínio was worried. He felt he had to do something.”
“And what he did was?”
“I told you. He staged an attempt on his life, a completely bogus one. At least, that’s what it was supposed to be. No one was going to get hurt. Cataldo wasn’t going to come out and say it, but he was going to imply Abbas was behind it.”
“So Abbas would get the blame, and your husband would get the votes?”
“Exactly. An attempted assassination trumps cheating on your wife. The votes Plínio stood to gain would put him safely over the top.”
“I see. How was it supposed to go down?”
“Cataldo was to shoot and miss, after which Nestor would wrestle him to the ground. That was all.”
“Why would Nestor Cambria, a cop who was honest his whole life long, go along with something like that?”
One of the prints on the wall of the suite was an artist’s interpretation of how a village street must have looked in colonial times. Diamantina, Ouro Preto, someplace like that. She stared at it without seeing, and shook her head.
“I asked him that,” she said. “I had to know. It was one of the reasons I went to the hospital on the day he … died.”
“And?”
She looked back at Silva.
“Nestor wanted to be the State Secretary for Security. He reasoned the same way Plínio did. Even if they had to play a dirty trick to win the election, it was for the good of the people.”
It was Silva’s turn to shake his head. It wasn’t the Nestor he knew, but he’d been exposed to that kind of thinking before. The lust for power did strange things to people, changed them in ways that was difficult to predict. After a moment he said, “How about Cataldo? He’d be accused of attempted murder.”
He’d be arrested, charged and convicted. Then he’d be pardoned.”
“Pardoned?”
“Part of the deal. Plínio, once he’d been elected governor, could pardon him. Forgiving the man who’d tried to kill him would make him look even better.”
“But Cataldo would still wind up doing jail time. And after it was all over, he’d be classified as a convicted felon. Why should he go along with a crazy scheme like that?”
“You used the key word. Crazy. To kill a man like Plínio in front of thousands of people, in front of television cameras, would be crazy. That’s the way they intended to play it. Cataldo wouldn’t be cast as a villain. He’d be cast as a deluded soul in need of medical attention. He wouldn’t go to jail. He’d go into an institution for psychiatric care. Then he’d be cured. And he’d make a public apology. And Plínio would see to it that his record was expunged.”
“Could Plínio do that?”
“Probably not, but he was perfectly willing to lie. He convinced Cataldo he could.”
“And if, later, he went back on his word?”
“Cataldo would have had a history of mental illness by then. Who’d listen to a man with a record of delusions?”
Silva scratched his head. “Why would Cataldo even consider doing it at all? Was it for money?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“No?”
“Cataldo was an idealist. He believed in Plínio. He was naïve, and my husband had a silver tongue. Plínio convinced him the end justified the means, convinced him he’d be acting in a good cause, and convinced him that, together, they’d be able to realize the things Cataldo had been fighting for all his life, everything from gun control to saving the whales. The money was nothing more than icing on the cake.”
“How much money?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t involved. I got the essentials of the story out of Nestor that night in the hospital, but I had people waiting for me, and I couldn’t leave them mill
ing around in the corridor for too long. I’d planned to go back, talk to him again, question him about the rest, but I never got the chance.”
Silva fell silent, mulling it over.
Outside the suite an elevator pinged. They heard voices approaching, but the people, two women engaged in a heated discussion, passed and moved on.
Stella’s attention had been diverted by the noise, and she was looking at the door. Not so Silva. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her. “Who else knew about this?”
She looked back at him.
“No one. Only Cataldo, Nestor and Plínio. That’s why I told you you’d be wasting your time trying to get to the bottom of it.”
“But you knew as well, Senhora. You just told me you did.”
Again, she shook her head. “I was brought into it at the last minute. By the time Plínio told me what he was planning to do, it was too late to do anything about it.”
“What do you call ‘too late’? Surely—”
“Plínio knew I wouldn’t agree to a scheme like that, knew I’d try to argue him out of it. So he didn’t tell me a thing until we were together, in the car, before he mounted the podium to give his speech. He made the driver get out. And then he told me.”
“If he hadn’t told you before, why did he tell you then?”
“Don’t you believe me, Chief Inspector? Do you think I was actually involved in orchestrating any of this?”
“Please answer my question, Senhora.”
“He told me to spare my feelings. He didn’t want me to be shocked when I saw Cataldo taking out a gun. And I think, too, he wanted to prepare me, so I wouldn’t go all to pieces, and I’d be poised when I spoke to the press.”
“What did you do when he told you?”
“I objected. I protested. I told him he was crazy.”
“And he?”
“Said it was too late. Said Cataldo was already in the crowd, waiting for him to finish his speech. That trying to stop it would ruin his candidacy; ruin everything we’d worked for. And besides, if Cataldo didn’t go through with it, he’d always be a risk. But, if he did, he’d have to keep his mouth shut.”
“I see.”
“I don’t think you do. If you did, you wouldn’t be looking at me like that. Do you think I haven’t been over this a thousand times in my head? Do you think I haven’t asked myself what else I could have done? It was a moral choice, Chief Inspector, a question of the greatest good for the greatest number. I did what I felt was right. And, remember, no one was supposed to get hurt.”
Perfect Hatred Page 24