Black Rain: A Thriller (23 page)

The driver’s face wrinkled at the thought, but he hit the gas and did as Moore said. A moment later he returned on foot, making his way in a casual saunter.

Moore studied the man. He was young and good-looking, with blond highlights in his hair and a glowing tan in the middle of winter. He wore sharply creased slacks and a cashmere turtleneck. “Dear God,” Moore whispered, “they’ve sent me a ski instructor.”

As the man reached Moore, he said, “Which way?”

“Does it matter?” Moore asked gruffly. He took a quick look in both directions and began to walk away from the monument and out toward the bridge. He needed to stay in the open.

The blond man rolled his eyes and followed. For a minute they just walked—no words or gestures, just two men walking on the slope that led up to the bridge.

“What’s your name?” Moore asked, finally.

The blond man laughed.

“No names, then,” Moore said. “Fine. I’ll call you Sven. You look like a Sven to me.”

Sven didn’t seem to object and the two continued walking—Moore in his heavy boots, orange scarf and
bulky layers of cotton and wool; Sven in his cashmere and expensive Italian shoes, now getting ruined in the snow.

“You’re the guy on the phone the other night,” Moore guessed.

“Very observant,” Sven replied.

“Are you also a dry cleaner?”

“What?”

“I’m wondering how you got that note in my pocket,” Moore said. “I never felt it placed there, so I thought it might have come back from the dry cleaners like that.”

Sven kept walking.

Moore read his face. “Not your doing.”

“I just took the call.”

“Somehow it figures,” Moore said, the tone of a disgusted veteran in his voice.

With that, he picked up the pace, heading out onto the bridge deck, out over the river, where it would be colder and Sven’s thin clothes would be less adequate than they already appeared to be.

Sven seemed aware of that fact. “Where the hell are we going?” he whined.

“We’re not going
anywhere,”
Moore said, looking down at the Potomac, dark and ominous against the white snowbanks. “We’re just walking. Staying out in the open, out in public, where I’m less likely to perceive you as a threat and have to kill you because of it.”

Sven laughed. “Am I supposed to take that seriously?”

“Take it however you want,” Moore said, continuing the walk. “Not like they would miss you anyway.”

Sven seemed to clench his jaw, and Moore guessed the remark had hit the target.

“I don’t think you understand the situation,” Sven told him. “You’re the one who needs us. I’m just here to find out if you’re worth the time.”

“Really?” Moore said. “Important errand they’ve sent you on. You must be so proud.”

Moore turned away from him, but Sven grabbed his shoulder to spin him back around. “Listen to me, old man—”

Moore knocked the hand away and bore into Sven with fury in his eyes. “No, you listen to me, you worthless little fuck. I don’t deal with pawns or messengers. Forty years in this business—that’s what I’ve got. So if the people who sent you have anything to say, they’d better have the balls to come see me themselves. Or at least send someone who matters.”

Sven began to say something but Moore cut him off.

“You’re a fucking nobody and you don’t know jack shit about this operation. You don’t even know how your people contacted me.”

Sven’s face was red with anger.

Moore’s eyebrows went up in mockery of his opponent. “Come on, then. Let’s hear it. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me how important you are and just what it is that you know.”

“I know enough,” Sven said finally. “I know they pulled you off an important job and you don’t like that. I know that your career is pretty much done and you don’t like that either. Forty years you’ve got. I say forty years they used you, now you’re getting kicked to the
curb, and that must burn you up pretty bad or you wouldn’t be here in the first place, would you?”

Moore stared at Sven and the anger, both real and pretend, seeped away. When he spoke again his voice was like gravel. “As a matter of fact, it does,” he said truthfully. “But coming here was a mistake.”

He looked at Sven with a trace of pity in his eyes. “Go home,” he said. “Go home before you get yourself killed. You think this is going to happen? You really think so? If people switched sides every time they got pissed off, then where the hell would we be?”

Sven didn’t answer and Moore shook his head in disgust. “Go home and tell your people that I’m not interested. You tell them that money is not enough to get me. And the next time they want to offer me something, they better not send some punk kid who’s wet behind the ears and worried about his lips chafing in the cold.” Moore shook his head even more dejectedly than before. “I’ve got files older than you.”

With that he turned his back on Sven and looked out over the stone railing of the bridge. With a gloved hand, he brushed the snow from the section in front of him and rested his forearms on it, gazing out at the black water rippling gently beneath the gray-white sky. “Forty years,” he mumbled, “and this is how it ends. What a joke. What a fucking joke.”

In a heated room far from the bridge, Gibbs listened to every word, and for the first time he began to understand why Moore was held in such high regard. He’d played it masterfully. Sven was furious, angry enough to
tell Moore volumes just to prove that he mattered, or to run back to his superiors and insist that Moore had balked and would need more prodding to come aboard. A sure sign that Moore was legit as opposed to being bait for a trap.

It was almost enough to make Gibbs wish the drama were real. But the situation was not as Moore had been led to believe, and despite his work, Moore was involved in a game he couldn’t win.

Back at the bridge Sven smiled for the first time. “Why don’t you come with me?” he said. “You can tell them yourself.”

Moore turned to face Sven, his back to the railing. He was tempted. He and Gibbs had planned for this eventuality. The two cars would be able to track him, follow him to whatever site Sven had in mind, but it felt rushed. Moore declined. “Not until I know who I’m dealing with.”

Sven shook his head and looked down the road. Moore realized it was vacant. “Wrong answer,” Sven said, pulling a slim pistol from his coat.

Before Moore could react, Sven fired twice into his chest. Moore fell back against the railing and then stumbled forward. Sven caught him as his knees buckled, holding him up and shoving him backward against the railing and then forcing him up and over the top.

Moore tumbled toward the river, his coat fluttering like a cape, until he plunged into the icy, black water and disappeared beneath the surface.

Back up on the bridge, Sven watched for several seconds. The foam of the impact receded, smoothed over by the flow of the river. Only Moore’s orange scarf reappeared, floating to the surface and twirling in the current before passing out of sight underneath the bridge.

Satisfied, Sven turned back to the street. A shiny black Audi pulled up and the rear door opened. He jumped in and the car sped off.

Farther away, Stuart Gibbs listened through headphones that issued nothing but static now. He turned to the control panel, found the switch for Moore’s wire and flicked it off.

Moore was gone. Blundin was gone. And within twenty-four hours the entire team in the Amazon would be gone. Vanishing with them would be the last evidence of the NRI’s Brazil project.

M
ark Polaski’s face turned ashen at the news. The message from NRI headquarters had come directly from Stuart Gibbs. Polaski’s daughter had been struck by a car while jogging. She’d been taken to the ER with severe head and neck injuries and wasn’t expected to regain consciousness. A ticket had been purchased in his name on a direct flight from Manaus to Miami, where a private jet would meet him. The Manaus flight left at 9:43
A.M.,
if he could get there in time.

He looked at Hawker. “Can we make it there in time?” he asked, quietly.

“If we leave now,” Hawker said.

As Polaski climbed aboard the Huey, the others wished him well. Devers handed him his pack and McCarter, suddenly reminded of his own losses back in the real world, promised to look him up on their return to the States.

Polaski barely acknowledged them. He sat in the copilot’s seat, staring blankly at the deep, azure sky, fumbling in his backpack for something.

Beside him, Hawker ran through a short version of the checklist, pressing the ignition switch and waiting
for the needles to come up. The blades above them wound up slowly. As they began to hum, Hawker pulled back on the collective and the helicopter’s weight came off the skids.

Once they became airborne, the helicopter pivoted to the east, lowered its nose and began to move off, gathering speed and altitude as it went.

Before long, they were cruising, droning along at five thousand feet and 120 knots. In three-and-a-half hours they would cover what had taken the group ten days by boat and foot.

Inside the cockpit Polaski had lapsed into a state of silence. Hawker let him be.
What could one say that would matter anyway?
He busied himself with a pilot’s routine, checking the instruments and scanning, his eyes settling on one section of the sky, focusing for a moment to make sure it was clear, and then switching to the next in a constantly repeating pattern. Scanning was a process ingrained in pilots from the day they begin flying and Hawker fell into it out of habit, not expecting to encounter any aircraft. But he spotted something just the same.

A tiny black dot appeared in the sky at the Huey’s two o’clock position. Like a smudge on the windshield, it was motionless, showing no relative movement—the unmistakable sign of a converging path.

Hawker adjusted his course slightly and put the Huey into a shallow climb.

The other helicopter continued on its path. Before long, Hawker could make out the type, a Hughes 600, commonly called a NOTAR, an acronym that stood for No Tail Rotor, because it used funneled exhaust from its
turbine for directional control instead of the standard rear blade. More ominously, this particular NOTAR was black, devoid of any markings and carrying a pair of external pods on either side.

“What’s wrong?” Polaski asked, coming out of his trance.

“No markings,” Hawker said.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Hawker replied. “But it can’t be a good thing.”

The NOTAR passed beneath them, off to one side and heading in the opposite direction. Hawker kept his eyes on it, craning his neck around and slewing the Huey to the right in an effort to keep the target in view. Just before it passed from sight, he noticed something else: the NOTAR had banked into a turn. It was coming back around.

Back at the camp, Danielle returned to the satlink to apprise Gibbs of Polaski’s departure.

“Confirm they have departed,” he said.

“Affirmative,” she said. “Five minutes ago.”

There was an extended pause and then Gibbs said, “Understood. I’ll contact you at nineteen hundred with an update. Gibbs out.”

Danielle went to cut the link, reaching for the switch, and then paused as she remembered needing to speak with Gibbs about a bug in the defense system. The latest in a long line of electronic problems they’d been having. She grabbed her notes and pressed
transmit
.

There was no response.

She pressed it again. “Stuart, are you still online?”

She checked the display.
Link terminated
. Apparently, Gibbs had hung up.

She retyped her authorization code, pressed
initiate
and waited. Nothing happened, and then the display read:
Link not established, please retry
.

She tried again, only to receive a more ominous response:
Authorization Invalid—Access Denied
.

A knot began to form in her stomach. She exhaled in frustration and looked around for help, but Polaski was in charge of the beta test on the satlink and he was gone.

Hawker’s eyes swung forward. The black NOTAR had continued its turn and would soon be obtaining a position behind them. In an effort to prevent that, Hawker forced the throttle and dropped the nose. As the Huey picked up speed, he looked back for the other helicopter, but he couldn’t see it anywhere.

Polaski turned in his seat. “Are we in trouble?”

“We might be.”

Seconds later, a burst of tracer fire took away any doubt.

Hawker threw the stick over and dove toward the forest, five thousand feet below. The NOTAR followed, and despite the speed they’d picked up, it was closing in fast.

The NOTAR was two generations younger than the Huey. It was smaller, lighter and faster. Hawker could never hope to outrun it or outmaneuver it over the long run. And without weapons of their own, the situation seemed desperate—like being accosted on the street by
an armed man: if they asked for something you gave it up, and if they didn’t ask, then you ran like hell and hoped you were lucky. As Hawker yanked the Huey into a hard left turn and dove toward the river; he hoped they were lucky.

“Who are they?” Polaski shouted, trying to be heard above the noise.

Hawker didn’t answer. The Huey accelerated rapidly. The needle on the airspeed indicator swung through the yellow arc and past the red line: a marking that pilots call
Vne
, for Velocity—Never Exceed. The speed was labeled that way for a reason. Beyond
Vne
the structural cohesion of the airframe came into question. As if to emphasize the point, the old Huey began shaking violently, rattling and threatening to come apart around them.

They dove to treetops and leveled off with the engine screaming and the craft shuddering under the strain, skimming across the canopy at 150 knots. Shells tore in from the left and Hawker cut toward them, forcing the NOTAR to overshoot. A higher clump of foliage loomed in their path and Hawker pulled up, hearing the skids ripping though its leaves. He dropped down behind and raced on.

“Look out,” Polaski shouted.