Silent Assassin (19 page)

“Then maybe we should outsource this one,” she said.

C
HAPTER
37

 

“Y
our hand should be higher on the grip,” Morgan told his daughter. “You’ll be able to control recoil better that way.”

Bloch had told Morgan to spend a few days with his family, and he took the opportunity to take Alex to the shooting range. He took her to a place half an hour from their house, a wooded area with a large pit excavated to be used as a firearms range. There were a handful of other shooters there with them, and gun reports rang out sharply, muffled by the ear protectors. Alex took her position and fired three shots.

“Not bad,” said Morgan.

“Not bad? I missed the target completely!”

“But your form is good. You just need to relax a bit more. You’re psyching yourself out. Try again. Take a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then squeeze the trigger gently.”

She shot three more times. This time, she hit the target twice, though wide of the bull’s-eye.

“See?” he said. “You’re getting better already.”

“I guess. Now I need to reload.”

“Hold on,” said Morgan. “Lesson time. First thing you need to know is that a weapon can be your best friend or your worst enemy. You always handle it with respect and you never take it out of your holster unless you intend to use it. Remember this always: there’s no such thing as a warning shot. When you take out your weapon, it’s to put someone down. Do you understand?”

She nodded solemnly. “I understand.”

“Good. Now look. That guy’s about to shoot an automatic. I want you to listen for the shots and count how many bullets he spent.”

The man loosed a long string of bullets.

“So,” said Morgan. “How many was that?”

“How am I supposed to know?” asked Alex, bewildered.

“By listening,” said Morgan. “It helps to know the firing rate for most common automatic weapons. But let me tell you, that knowledge could save your life.”

Later, in the car, she asked him, “What’s it like to kill someone? I mean, in cold blood.”

“Is that something you plan on doing sometime soon?” he asked.

“It’s just a question.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Well let me tell you something. All this training you’re doing isn’t worth a thing, not a thing, if you’re not willing to shoot. You can’t hesitate, can’t stop yourself from doing what you need to do. You’re your own worst enemy in that situation. Because, nine times out of ten, the one who wins any fight is the one who shoots first.”

“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” she said breezily.

“Don’t get cocky,” he said. “Talk is cheap. It’s different when there’s a person’s life in your crosshairs.”

“All right, Dad,” she said. “I’ll keep that in mind. Can we come again tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve got something I need to do down in the city. But maybe next week.”

They were quiet during the ride back to the house, and Morgan began to think that Alex was putting more time and energy into his way of life than he had realized. He was not entirely comfortable with her choice, but knew that the more he objected, the more she would dig in her heels. He wondered what Jenny would say when she found out what her sweet little girl was up to.

 

 

Morgan went back to Boston early the following morning and spent the better part of the day at a deli, pretending to read a newspaper and watching the doors of the building that housed the Zeta Division headquarters. And he waited.

He moved when he saw Bloch emerge. He couldn’t help smiling lightly at his luck. The day had turned out warmer than expected, and Bloch had worn a bright red blouse under her coat. She walked out holding her coat folded in her arms, and the red of her blouse was like a beacon to Morgan. He managed to keep his eye on her as she maneuvered around the people on the Common, toward Arlington Station. He hopped the train after her and followed her to North Station. There, he slinked after her, until he saw the man she was there to meet. Smith, the man who had recruited him.

The two talked, but both were well trained in avoiding lip-readers, subtly shielding their mouths and keeping their lips from giving away their words. He waited behind a pillar and took out what looked like a regular ballpoint pen, but was in fact a spy camera. The image projected lightly on his sunglasses. He zoomed in on Smith’s face and snapped a series of shots.

Not two minutes after they had met, Bloch and Smith nodded to each other and parted ways, Bloch walking back in his direction. Morgan hid behind the pillar so she would not see him, blending in with the people waiting for their trains. Now, he just had to wait a few minutes to be sure that she’d be gone, and—

“Hello, Cobra.”

Smith was facing him and looking into his eyes with humorless triumph. If being unflappable hadn’t been part of his training, Morgan might have jumped back in alarm. As it was, he managed to remain mostly unruffled.

“Mr. Smith,” he said in greeting.

“How very nice to see you again, Mr. Morgan. A real pleasure. What a surprise, seeing you here.”

Morgan had been caught. There was no use denying it anymore, or pretending that there was any other reason why he might have been there. “Tell me who’s behind Zeta Division,” he said.

“I am behind Zeta Division,” said Smith.

“And who’s behind you?”

Smith stared blankly in response.

“How many other divisions are there?”

“I have nothing to say to you, Mr. Morgan. You try my patience simply being here. You have the chance to make a graceful and repentant exit. I suggest you take it.”

Morgan wasn’t having it. “What is the Aegis Initiative?”

For a split second, Smith’s expression changed into something that Morgan might even have called surprise, but he immediately masked it with the slightest gloating smile.

“It’s only natural to be curious,” he said. “And, to be perfectly honest, we can’t expect, in this line of business, that our operatives
not
try to snoop.” He moved in closer so that Morgan could smell the menthol cigarettes on his breath. “So here’s the deal: you get
one
. This one. I walk away, and we never speak of this again. You shut down your line of inquiry completely, and accept that there are some things that you are simply not meant to know. Do we have an understanding, Mr. Morgan?”

There was nothing else to say, Morgan supposed. “Yeah, we have an understanding.”

“Good,” said Smith. “Go home, Morgan. Take some personal time. Think about what you want for your life. Like, for instance, if you wish to continue living.”

Morgan just fumed silently at the threat.

“Now,” continued Smith, “you will remain here for five minutes as I walk away. Do not attempt to follow me. It will get you nowhere, and I will know. There is no quicker way of getting on my bad side than following me. And you do not want to be on my bad side. Five minutes, on the clock. Good-bye, Mr. Morgan.”

And Morgan watched as Smith walked away, blending into the crowd, and out of sight.

C
HAPTER
38

 

D
r. Vogt was sweating profusely as he looked into the microscope at the brain tissue he had collected from an infected rat. They had mere days to do the work of months although Vogt had to confess that the armed men were a pretty strong incentive. He had managed to grow a colony under carefully controlled conditions. The colony had formed a puffball, which was a ball of spores that would eventually burst, releasing spores in every direction. He had kept the colonies in glove boxes, so that they never had any contact with the air they breathed.

He was startled out of his work by the Russian barging into the laboratory.

“What is happening,
Herr Doktor
?” he demanded. “What is taking so long?”

Vogt tried to avoid looking at the Russian’s bandages, which were crusted with dried blood. He looked at Julian, who was standing frozen and white in the corner, holding a clipboard in his bandaged hand.

“The spore collection is coming along well,” he said. “We will have the amount you requested in about a week.”

The Russian nodded. “What about the cure?”

“A cure is elusive,” said Vogt. “There is no known medicine that will kill the fungus that will not also seriously affect your own cells. Not for the infection in the brain. All you can do for now is to continue to take the serum.”

“It’s
not working
!” the Russian cried. “It’s spreading. I can
feel it
. Consuming me.”

“It is possible that I will not be able to stop it,” said Vogt quietly, bracing for the Russian’s reaction.

“Then
what am I paying you for?
” The words came as a subhuman growl, and the Russian’s face contorted with rage, looking like some kind of animal. Vogt backed away against the table. The Russian lunged, and he saw the fist coming at his face.

The Russian struck again and again. Vogt felt and heard the breaking of bone in his face. Each stroke made his ears ring and his mind flash white. With one of the impacts, he suddenly couldn’t see out of his left eye. Finally, the Russian seemed to tire, and stopped his attack.

Vogt slumped on the ground, his awareness fading. Before he lost consciousness, he heard the Russian say, “Pick him up. Get this done. We deploy the fungus within the week.”

C
HAPTER
39

 

C
hapman sat at the table of the situation room with the rest of the Emergency Investigative Task Force and a few other significant personages. Around him was a group of very important and very, very nervous men and women, sitting at the edge of their seats with their eyes firmly glued to an image on the big screen.

“The President has just authorized the operation,” said Schroeder. “The team is moving out.”

Waiting was agony. The SEAL team still had to arrive on site by helicopter, which meant fifteen minutes of nail-biting
nothing
. Still, everyone just watched the screen, where there were feeds from each of the helmet cameras of the team. Right now all they could see was the inside of a troop transport helicopter, all in green from the night vision.

It had been a week since Smith had whispered in his ear about the lab. The past seven days had been a mad scramble to coordinate the various intelligence agencies. There’d been a worldwide search of mycologists and labs. Finally, they’d caught a break: a qualified mycologist, a research superstar, had abruptly quit his job in a prestigious German institute and then disappeared. They traced his whereabouts to Turkey, where they had found that some very expensive laboratory equipment had been shipped a few months before. It took all of seven days before they had a location for the lab—an achievement to be proud of.

But right now, Chapman was only nervous. The operation could fail, and it could fail spectacularly at that. These were the best-trained men in the country, but even that was no guarantee of success—there was always the possibility of a tragic twist of fate, of a tiny misstep having dire consequences. Chapman wasn’t a religious man, but if he were, he’d be praying at that moment.

“Moving out,” said one of the SEALS on the monitor, and suddenly, the images began to change as the men left the helicopter. He ran along the dusty ground, in line with three SEALS ahead of him, toward a low building that looked fuzzy in the night vision. The lead SEAL planted a bomb on the door of the building. The door blasted open, and then they threw flash grenades inside. The brightness overwhelmed the night vision for a moment. They went inside, and there were no armed guards posted at the door.

The image followed them as they spread around the facility, finding empty room after empty room.

“Clear,” same the report.

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

“It’s empty,” said the team leader. “No one here.”

There was a palpable sense of dismay in the room upon hearing that.

“Documents have been burned,” he said. “Hard drives are fried. There’s a body. The scientist. And three others. This was the place, all right. But whatever happened here, they’re done.”

C
HAPTER
40

 

P
eter Conley opened his eyes to the first rays of the sun coming over Ipanema beach. He looked to the side and saw the gentle curve of Sonia’s back, a thin mist of sweat on her smooth tawny skin. The gentle rise and fall of her breathing told him that she was still asleep. He rolled out of bed and began stretching.

Sonia stirred on the bed, rubbing her eyes and mumbling sleepily in Portuguese, “What time is it?”

“Six or so,” he said, reaching for the sky with his hands.

“Oh,” she said, sitting up. “So early.” The sheet fell about her lap, exposing her ample breasts.

He touched his toes, then ran in place for ten seconds.

“Why don’t you come back to bed?” she said languidly.

“I’m not sleepy anymore.”

“Who said anything about sleep?”

He turned to see her mischievous smile, with all those pearly white teeth. He grinned back, and climbed onto the bed. He ran his hands over her skin. They kissed, deeply, fiercely. She grabbed his hair, he grabbed hers, and they fell on the bed together, bodies tangling.

An hour later, Conley stepped out of the shower, and she was already putting on a white low-cut sundress.

First, he called Chico, an agent with Brazilian Intelligence who was collaborating with him.

“Nothing new here, Cougar,” Chico told him. “I mean, we got a couple of new drug murders up in the favelas.” That was the proper term for the slums of Rio. “BOPE ran an operation today, might be you’ll want to take that up with them.” Short for Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais, BOPE was the group primarily responsible for running crime suppression and antidrug operations in the favelas, and the few who had the guts and the guns to face the informal armies of the drug lords.

“All right, bud,” Conley said. “Just let me know if anything . . . out of the ordinary turns up, will you?”

“It’s the first thing I’ll do.”

Next, he tried to call up Captain Siqueira, from BOPE. He was told that the captain wasn’t coming in until a few hours later. There was nothing Conley could do, so he went for a run on the beach

It was a pleasant day, and people filled the
calçadão
, the broad boardwalk that ran along the beach. Young and old, rich and poor, shared this space, many shirtless, lean bodies basking in the sun. Conley jogged steadily, the sun hot on his shoulders and the salty wind blowing in his face, his sneakers hitting the stones that made up the boardwalk, which were black and white and arranged in a pattern that resembled waves. He made it all the way down the beach, and stopped for another stretch. As he pulled his foot against his thigh, a young man in shorts and a tank top came toward him, then pulled out a small knife.

“
Perdeu, gringo
,” he said, brandishing the blade.

Conley looked at him blankly. He was just a kid, definitely no older than eighteen, with tan skin and hair dyed an ugly golden-blond. He had a defiant look on his face, of triumphant self-satisfaction. Conley knew the type. One of those who grew up in the favelas a little too impressed with the money and power of the drug dealers, out either to prove himself or to make a little cash to buy some small luxury, like expensive sneakers or a videogame.

“Money,” the kid insisted impatiently. He pronounced it
mo-neigh
. “Money!”

Conley grabbed the wrist on the kid’s knife hand and twisted. The blade clattered on the ground. Then he kneed him in the abdomen and kicked his legs from below him. The kid fell to the ground, groaning in pain.

“Take this as a lesson, kid,” said Conley in Portuguese. “Turn your life around. Or the next guy could be the death of you.”

He got out of there, leaving the kid still in pain on the ground. There was a crowd forming around him already, and he didn’t want any extra attention.

He got quickly back to the apartment and showered again, putting on some fresh clothes. It was a twenty-minute drive to the BOPE headquarters. At the gate was a sign that said, V
ISITORS
W
ELCOME
, BUT MAKE NO SUDDEN MOVES,
along with the familiar BOPE emblem: a skull crossed by two handguns with a knife stuck vertically through the bone.

The guard at the door waved him inside, and he drove in. He found parking, walked inside, and told reception whom he was there to meet. Soon enough, a square-faced, pug-nosed man in a black T-shirt and black military fatigues walked out.

“
Capitão
Siqueira,” said Conley, warmly.

“Our American friend,” he said. “Conley. What brings you here today?”

“I’m told you were running an operation today. I thought I’d come check in and see how it went.”

“Our boys just got back. We raided the house of a lieutenant from Paulinho AK’s outfit.”

“How did it go?”

“We captured the son of a bitch, and then another one to boot,” said Siqueira. “Popped a couple of their soldiers in the process.”

“Not bad,” said Conley.

“All in a day’s work for the skull,” he said laughing. Siqueira walked him to one of their interrogation rooms, where a thin, jittery man with curly brown hair who sported a big scar on his left cheek was sitting. He looked bruised and cut, with a fat lip and a black eye. There was blood on his shirt, still red and not quite dried.

“He looks a little roughed up,” said Conley.

“He
resisted arrest
,” said Siqueira. “We had no choice but to use force. And he ended up
volunteering
the location of the second one. Caught a big fish, just sitting on his ass at home watching soccer. In and out, no fuss, no problems. And we’ve got some valuable information from him. It looks like there’s a new coke supplier in town.”

“Interesting,” said Conley. “Where from?” Cocaine was a truly globalized business, and suppliers came from all over the world.

“He said the guy was
alemão
. German. But to these assholes, every European is German, so that doesn’t tell us jack shit. Anyway, apparently this gringo’s got a big shipment coming in, and made some interesting demands in how he wants it done. Wants it shipped to Miami, every gram of it. Nothing is supposed to get sold here, or even used by any member of the gang.”

“Is that unusual?” asked Conley.

“Only how insistent he was. I mean, usually, it’s all about the money with these guys. As long as they get paid, they’ll give the gang a sample, let them turn over the merchandise if they’re willing to pay. But this one wants it to go directly there, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.”

“Huh,” said Conley. “Got anything you can use to get to this guy?”

“Not yet,” said Siqueira. “But we’ll get him.”

“All right,” said Conley. “Keep me posted if there are any new developments.”

“Even if I don’t, somehow you always find out.”

Conley went back to his apartment, where he called up some more contacts, some in law enforcement, others on the criminal side. He took a break to watch a
novela
, one of the daily soap operas that he had gotten hooked on while in town. He had dinner, and it was well into the night when his phone rang.

“Hey, Cougar? It’s Chico. You said to call you if something happened. Well, something happened. I’m not sure what it is yet, but it’s strange. Real strange. It’s over near you. I’m going to give you an address. Just one second.”

Chico gave him the address, and Conley walked out the door. He walked back in his door two hours later. The first thing he did was to pick up the phone and dial.

“Bloch here.”

“Look, I don’t even know what the hell this is supposed to be about. But it seems weird enough that I felt I should call it in right away.”

“What is it?”

“A bunch of people—I guess the term is ‘ripped each other apart’—in a fancy apartment.”

“What do you mean, ripped each other apart?” Conley might have expected morbid curiosity, but Bloch’s tone was one of keen interest.

“Well, it’s pretty gruesome. At first, they thought it had been murder—revenge, serial killer, something like that. But if you take a look at the scene, a lot of the bodies have attack wounds. Mostly, they didn’t even use weapons, just their bare hands and teeth.”

“Were they mental patients? Were they under the influence of something . . . unusual?”

“Not as far as I could tell. They seemed like normal people, but I mean, who knows? I sure as hell don’t know what to make of it.”

“I might,” said Bloch. “Can you lay down a quarantine on the location?”

“Might be tough, but I think I can.”

“Don’t think. Do. Use whatever means necessary. Keep the scene secure. If you can, take charge and don’t let anyone in or out. Keep the media out of it, and the local police as much as possible.”

“What’s this all about?”

“You stay put, get inside that scene, and make sure that it doesn’t get contaminated and is changed as little as possible. Cobra will be there by morning.”