Silent Assassin (20 page)

C
HAPTER
41

 

M
organ arrived in Rio de Janeiro just past 9
A.M.
, and the first thing to hit him was the heat, thick and muggy, even inside the airport. He had come by chartered jet, since time, apparently, had been of the essence. Morgan had already been in bed when he got the call from Bloch. She hadn’t been too generous with the details. She’d told him that there was a bit of violence down in Rio, and that it might be somehow connected to Novokoff, but not much else. Because of his familiarity with both Conley, and the case, he’d been shipped off to Brazil.

He took a taxi, whose driver was definitely overcharging him. He drove like a maniac. Traffic was definitely not the worst he had seen—it was far, far better than Kabul, for one—but it was much worse than even Boston.

Morgan took the opportunity to get a look at the city. A good stretch of the city, specifically the areas closer to the sea, was perfectly flat. But farther inland, as well as at certain outcroppings near the water, the terrain was steeper, with tall hills that loomed large in the distance. On many of these hills grew favelas, organic and chaotic, even beautiful in their own strange way.

After about half an hour, the taxi came to a stop, and Morgan paid up and got out. He had asked the driver to drop him off a few blocks from his destination. It was a safety precaution, and kept the driver from knowing more than he ought to.

He was in the affluent neighborhood of Leblon. He had looked over a map in the taxi, and knew the turns he’d have to take to get where he wanted to go. He walked the sidewalks, which had remnants of sand in between the stones. The heat made him start sweating, but it wasn’t a long walk. Soon enough, he spotted Conley standing in front of a building, waiting for him.

Conley smiled as Morgan approached, and they embraced.

“It’s good to see you, my friend,” said Morgan.

“Likewise,” said Conley. “I never thought I’d see you come here.”

“What does Bloch have you doing down here?”

“I’ve been working the drug trade. It’s deeply entrenched in the city, embedded in the slum communities. The whole situation is delicate, and cracking down on it isn’t as simple as swinging a big stick. I’m working with a special local squad, the BOPE. They’re used to going into the drug-dealer-controlled favelas. They see as much action as any soldier. I should know. I’ve been out with them on operations before.”

“What do you think’s the point?” asked Morgan. “I mean, why is Zeta interested in the drug trade in Brazil?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” said Conley. “Of course, it’s relevant to global security. But why here specifically? No idea.”

“Hmm.”

“Speaking of,” said Conley, “have your investigations turned up anything new?

“Nothing much,” said Morgan. “Not even Fastia could help me. Except one thing. Ever heard of a thing called Aegis?”

“Aegis?” asked Conley. “Like the shield of the Greek goddess Athena?”

“Well, I guess that’s the idea,” said Morgan. “Something to do with protection. The name of—well, of something. Some kind of entity. But I can’t tell you what it means. Or what the organization does.”

“But I guess you’re going to want to find out,” said Conley.

“Like a dog with a bone,” Morgan said. “So, tell me. Why did I fly five thousand miles?”

“What I’ve got to show you is a crime scene. A local forensic team got to it earlier, but it’s mostly preserved. We’ve managed to keep the media buzzards at bay for now. We’ve had a little less luck with the real ones, though. Look, you’d better brace yourself. It’s not pretty up there.”

“Are you kidding me? I’ve seen my share of violence, same as you.”

“Not like this. Trust me, Dan, you are not ready for this.”

C
HAPTER
42

 

T
his much Conley had right: it was the grisliest scene that Morgan had ever laid eyes on.

“Holy hell,” he said.

“Nothing holy about it, buddy.”

Morgan had put on a biohazard suit, helped by a Brazilian forensic investigator who had eyed him suspiciously but said nothing. Conley, in his own suit, led him to the stairs. Each apartment in the building took up one entire floor, so the investigators had set up camp in the apartment immediately below, in order not to disturb the crime scene. They climbed the stairs carefully in their big rubber boots, and then they walked in through the laundry room. That led into the kitchen, and Morgan saw the first of it.

The kitchen was spacious, with an island in the middle. On the island were two bodies. On top was a woman, whose hair had been mostly pulled loose from a bun and who was wearing a loose-fitting dress. Her face was mangled and broken, and a large chef’s knife had been pushed into her skull though her right eye. Still, for all the damage, she wore an expression of pure, unmitigated fury on her face. Under her was a man, arms still locked in the position of pushing her away, his face clawed—Morgan now noticed that the woman had blood and pieces of flesh on her fingernails—and a large chunk of his neck was torn out.

“Is this what you call—”

“Trust me,” said Conley. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

And then they moved into the living room, and Morgan knew
exactly
what Conley had meant.

They were in the penthouse, so the living room opened up into a spacious sunlit terrace. Just about everything about the decoration was white: the walls and ceilings, the carpets, the couches and armchairs, even the lamps. Which, of course, just made the blood all the more stark. And there was a lot of it. Morgan counted eleven bodies between the living room and the terrace. All of them were dressed in what had once been expensive semiformal clothing, but had in most cases been torn to shreds, and all of it had been dyed crimson.

The guests were mostly in their late thirties to mid-forties, Morgan noticed. Almost all the men lacked wedding rings. “This here was a party of playboy heirs and trophy wives,” Conley told him.

Outside on the terrace, there was a pool where a thin waterfall went right over the edge of the building, caught by a gutter about two feet down, producing the effect of a pool that ended in nothingness. The water had turned a deep crimson with blood. There was a body floating in it, facedown. One man was halfway through a door to the terrace, impaled on stalagmites of tempered glass. Blood had pooled on the floor all around him. Three more bodies lay on the ground, one of them on an upholstered chaise longue that had once been white. His eyes had been gouged out, and his face looked torn, as if it had been bitten or clawed. Another looked as if his trachea had been torn clean out.

It had been less than twenty-four hours since this had transpired. Bodies would decompose quickly in this heat, but the air-conditioning had been cranked up all the way, and it chilled Morgan through the thick plastic of his suit.

Morgan saw the remnants of cocaine on the glass of the coffee table.

“Peter!” he said. “Take a look at this.”

Conley walked over and examined the table. “Cocaine? Not exactly a surprise, in this kind of party.”

“
No
,” said Morgan. “Look. Apparently they all started suffering the effects at about the same time. It’s unlikely that one infected person would have spread the fungus so quickly. There has to be a vector, a means of delivery. And I think this is it.”

“Cocaine? To spread the fungus?”

“Think about it. Pope, back when we interviewed him, said that the fungus survives in dry media, like, say a powder. It’s already subject to traffic and smuggling. They can use the existing supply chains to get it into the U.S. Plus, it will have hordes of people infecting themselves as they get their rush.”

“Besides, it doesn’t make sense for this to be a targeted killing,” said Morgan. “These people were
rich
, but not
important
. Relative unknowns who only
spend
money and don’t make any. Who could care enough to use a stolen biological weapon to kill them? Unless . . .”

“Unless?”

“This wasn’t deliberate,” said Morgan. “Someone sold them this cocaine without knowing what it contained.”

Morgan saw a shiny metal object, half-obscured by a fallen body. He bent down to pick it up. It was a digital camera, lightly smudged with blood. He fumbled with the thick rubber gloves, but managed to turn the gadget on and open the saved pictures. There were a number of photographs that had plainly been taken in that same apartment, in the nighttime. Pictures of the party.

“Hey, Peter,” he said. “Help me out with this.”

Together, they identified each body with the picture. They had to use the clothing in a lot of cases, because the faces had been so badly scratched that they couldn’t make out any of the features.

“We’re missing this guy,” said Morgan, pointing at a picture of a man who looked to be in his late thirties, wearing a popped collar and making a party face.

“Are you sure?” asked Conley.

“He’s not here,” said Morgan. “Check for yourself.” Conley examined each of the corpses carefully. “You’re right,” he said. “No sign of him.” He turned to one of the Brazilian investigators and had a quick exchange. “He says there was no one else,” Conley told Morgan. “They combed the entire building for stragglers. If he left this apartment, it was before the carnage.”

“Well, we got our lead,” said Morgan.

They went back down to the lower floor. With difficulty, Morgan removed the tiny memory chip from the camera and set it apart to be sterilized. Then, dripping sweat, Morgan removed the biohazard suit. He got the clean chip and pulled out the tablet he’d brought with him, then inserted the chip.

“Now we only need to find this guy in a city of six million. Do they have any kind of image database? Drivers’ licenses, something like that?”

“I was actually thinking something a little lower tech.”

“What?” Morgan asked, pulling on his shirt.

“You’d be surprised at what doormen know about the people who live in and frequent their buildings.”

They went down to the lobby together. The doorman was being kept in quarantine in a rec room. He looked pale and on edge, but he seemed friendly enough when Conley approached him. Conley showed him the image of the missing guest on the tablet, and they had a quick exchange. Then Conley walked back to Morgan.

“I have a name. Rodrigo Bezerra. I’m calling it in. We should have an address in a few minutes.”

C
HAPTER
43

 

C
onley’s contacts gave them an address for a Rodrigo Martins Bezerra only twenty minutes away, and sent a picture to Conley’s cell phone. Bezerra was forty-three and tan with short dark hair and a smiling, untroubled face that made him look about ten years younger. He lived in an upscale apartment building, not quite as nice as the scene of the crime, but still one of considerable luxury.

Security was tight in the local buildings, especially the richer ones. There was a double gate on the outside, with a reinforced hut for the doorman. Through a two-way metal drawer, Conley slipped the man his police credentials, which he had acquired through his local contacts. They argued for a bit, and the guard let them in.

“He most likely knows English, but let me do the talking,” said Conley. “We’ll get more out of him if we’re a little more attentive to local cultural subtleties.”

“Are you saying I’m blunt?” asked Morgan with a grin.

They arrived at the floor and knocked on Rodrigo Bezerra’s door. Conley rang the doorbell, and Bezerra, wearing Bermuda shorts and a white shirt with three buttons undone, opened the door. He looked like he hadn’t been up very long.

“Hello,” said Conley cordially. “We’re conducting an investigation with the help of local police. We were wondering if we might ask you a few questions.”

“Hey, gringos!” he said jovially, masking a distinct nervousness underneath. “Come in! Come in! What can I help you with, my friends?”

“You were at a party yesterday,” said Conley. “Is that right?”

“I go to a lot of parties,” said Bezerra. He didn’t seem any more nervous than before. Morgan figured he couldn’t know what had happened.

“Well, they don’t all end like this,” said Conley.

“Oh, I don’t know how it ended,” said Bezerra. “I left early.”

“We know,” said Conley.

Bezerra looked puzzled. “What do you mean, you know?”

“Bezerra, I know you and the guests were using cocaine at the party.”

“What? Cocaine? I never—”

“Stop,” said Conley. “I don’t care. I didn’t come here to arrest you for drug possession. But I need to know: did you use any yesterday?”

“No, of course not, I—”

“Don’t lie to me,” said Conley. “If you did and we don’t get you to a doctor right now, you’re going to die. So again: did you use last night?”

“What? What are you saying?”

“Answer the question, Bezerra,” said Morgan.

“No. Not last night. I—I have a drug test coming up. At my job. Why? What happened at the party?”

“They’re all dead, Bezerra,” said Conley.

“Dead?”

“The cocaine was tainted. They were poisoned, everyone.”

“What? Poisoned?”

“We need your help,” said Morgan. “We need to know where they got those drugs!”

“I don’t know! I wasn’t with them when they got it!”

“And you don’t know where they go?”

“How should I know?”

“Listen, asshole, if you don’t tell us, more people will die,” said Morgan. “A lot more. I guarantee it.”

“Okay, okay! Look, I wasn’t with them, so I don’t know. But they have this guy. I don’t know his address. Just a name and a number.”

“All right,” said Conley. “What is it?”

 

 

They only got a first name, Robson, for the dealer, in addition to the phone number. The address that the number was registered to was bogus. Conley had his people run a trace on the phone instead. This led them to a nearby favela. Morgan was following Conley up the hill, through the favela. There was a strange beauty to the accumulated buildings, growing organically around, against, and on top of each other. The houses were made of exposed brick. Water reservoirs were equally exposed, and clotheslines hung between windows. Above, there were tangles of wires and a mess of television antennas.

Conley drove them in his local car, a Ford compact. By this time, the sun had long disappeared behind the hills that rose from the sea. People were slowly streaming up the hill, coming back from the day’s work, on foot, on bicycles, and in vans.

“This place is controlled by a gang led by a man named Paulinho AK. That’s AK as in AK-47. Apparently he’s partial to the Kalashnikov.”

Conley pulled over. The signal was coming hundreds of feet from the mass of houses to their right.

“From here, we walk,” said Conley. He led the way in between two houses. The alleyway was so narrow and the buildings on either side were so tall that it almost felt like a cave, dark but for lights that shone from windows and the occasional external light. The twilight still appeared overhead, nothing but a sliver that ran the length of the passageway. They came at last to a door, damaged and with peeling green paint and a lot of exposed brick underneath. The outside of the house was painted white and with the dirt of many years. Conley banged on the door.

“Robson?” he called out, pronouncing it
Hobson
.

The door opened, and there on the threshold stood a thin man, about thirty, in a threadbare T-shirt that looked like it had some campaign slogan on it. His eyes were red and puffy.

He spoke in a way that told Morgan that they were not exactly welcome there.

“He says he doesn’t sell here,” Conley told Morgan. “That we shouldn’t have looked for him here. And for us to get the hell out.”

They exchanged more words. The dealer seemed worried all of a sudden, and beckoned them in. “I told him they had been poisoned,” said Conley. “And that I’d tell his boss he pilfered the drugs if he didn’t play ball.”

Morgan nodded, and the man continued.

“Well, this is something,” Conley said. “He says his boss doesn’t know he sold that cocaine. Says he stole it off a new shipment.” The man continued talking. “He swears he only sold it to the people who held the party last night. Said they wanted to buy a lot. He only . . .” Conley frowned. “Uh-oh.”

“What?” said Morgan. “Uh-oh what?”

“He says they just finished snorting the last of it.”

They drew their guns almost simultaneously and aimed them at Robson.

“Stand back!” Morgan yelled. Robson just looked at them, scared and wide-eyed, like he didn’t know whether to run, stay put, or attack. Conley shouted something in Portuguese. They exchanged words, and then Robson slowly kneeled with his hands behind his head.

“I told him we don’t want to hurt him,” said Conley. “And that he might be sick.”

“Uh-huh,” said Morgan. “Hey, Conley, did I hear you correctly when you said that
they
just finished snorting all the cocaine?”

Right on cue, an animal scream came from the other room, and in ran a woman. She was squat, long-haired, and would have been pleasant looking, except for the look on her face. It was a look of wild rage, with flared nostrils and a mouth twisted into an inhuman grimace. She stared at them for a moment, panting like a rabid hyena, then lunged. Morgan and Conley both gunned her down with three bullets each.

Their attention next turned to Robson. He had stood up, and his face was now distorted, similar to hers.

Conley spoke as if he were talking him down. The man seemed fearful of the guns, and looked down in pain at the slain woman. This just seemed to enrage him further. Morgan saw him tense up, ready to leap at him, and loosed two more bullets from his gun, hitting the man twice in the chest. He collapsed, still alive, contorted on the ground. His chest heaved as he wheezed, and he stared at them with eyes full of hatred. Morgan shot him once more in the head to put him out of his misery.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Conley. “The whole neighborhood must have heard the shots.”

“Police?” asked Morgan.

“No,” said Conley. “The police don’t come up here. The drug lord is the law here. His soldiers are going to come, and if they find us here, we’re as good as dead.”

They ran out of the house and into the alleyway. Morgan dashed after Conley, trying to keep up as his partner wound through the narrow passageways. Conley emerged into the street ahead of Morgan and stopped dead in his tracks. Morgan soon came out into the street as well and saw why.

As they stood there, all around them were skinny young men in T-shirts and tank tops. They were all holding mismatched weapons, everything from handguns to assault rifles, all with tough-looking faces, chins up and eyes narrowed. The only thing the guns had in common was that they were all pointed at Morgan and Conley.

“Drop your gun!” Conley shouted to Morgan, letting his drop to his feet and raising his arms above his head. Morgan tossed his aside as well, and followed Conley’s lead by putting his hands up. Conley spoke a few words in Portuguese to them. One of the armed young men said something to the others, and others seemed to relax slightly. At least Morgan and Conley weren’t getting shot immediately.

Conley exchanged some words with the men in Portuguese, then spoke to Morgan.

“They’re
soldados
. Soldiers. Enforcers for the drug lord. Paulinho AK. He’s the boss around here.”

“Wonderful,” said Morgan. “What now?”

“The options were that they could kill us here and now, or we could go with them and have Paulinho deal with us.”

“Tell me they’re going with the second option,” said Morgan.

“That’s what it looks like.”

“So tell me. This Paulinho wouldn’t by any chance be the friendly, merciful type of drug lord, would he?”