The Armada Legacy (26 page)

‘You came to Spain to intercept the hitman,’ Ben said.

Nico nodded. ‘I didn’t know why Serrato was gunning for Cabeza, didn’t care. But for Serrato to give the order himself, I knew it had to be important. Maybe so important, that if I took out Cristo and anyone else who came after, there was a chance the Stingray himself might even show up. So I borrowed money from Felipe and flew out to Spain in a hurry. An ex-cop always knows where he can find a hot gun. I paid three hundred euros to this dope dealer in a backstreet in Granada for a forty-four and a speedloader full of hollowpoints. Then I bought this junk car and drove out to Cabeza’s place. I got there just in time. Cristo was about to kill Cabeza with that SIG, but I blew his ugly head off before he could pull the trigger. Found the sonofabitch’s Beemer up the road a ways and pitched it over the side of the mountain along with his body. That was last Saturday.’

The same day Brooke was taken, Ben thought. ‘How did Cabeza handle it?’

‘Let’s just say that after that, he didn’t need a whole lot of persuading to hide someplace safe. I drove him to the safe house in Montefrio and then came back to hang around here, set my trap and wait for the next guy to show up. Turned out the next guy was you.’ Nico shrugged.

‘Nice dummy, by the way,’ Ben said. ‘Pumpkin was a stroke of genius.’

‘Had you fooled, you gringo motherfucker.’

Ben ignored the jibe. ‘And you’re certain this safe house of yours is secure?’

‘You’re worried about walking into another trap, right?’

‘I’d be surprised if Serrato wasn’t onto you. Who else knows about the place?’

‘Felipe, nobody else. Trust me, it’s safe. I left the handgun with Cabeza, just in case; not that the fucker knows how to use it. He’s kind of a strange guy. Wears this goddamn silly pork pie hat all the time, like the one Gene Hackman wore in
The French Connection
? Drives me nuts. I wish he’d answer the damn phone, too.’

‘Why does Serrato want Cabeza dead?’ Ben asked. ‘Does Cabeza even know the reason?’

‘Sure he knows,’ Nico said. ‘And he’s told me what it’s all about. The English guy, Forsyte, he knew too. They were going to meet to talk about a bunch of papers that came out of this sunken Spanish warship. That’s what it’s all about, some bits of paper that must be, like, five hundred years old.’

Ben remembered what Simon Butler had said about the foreign-sounding man calling himself ‘Smith’ who’d contacted him soon after the discovery of the mysterious casket and bribed him to arrange the snatch in Ireland. Had Smith been working for Ramon Serrato? It seemed the only answer. ‘What else did Cabeza say?’ he asked Nico.

‘He said a lot of these papers were written in some kind of code.’

‘Code?’

‘You know, spy stuff. Forsyte needed a history guy with the right knowledge to decode that shit because he was pretty sure there was some big old secret there. He was bringing them to show him. Cabeza says the guy was holding onto it real tight.’

The attaché case, Ben thought. Now it was clear to him what Forsyte had been carrying around with him and protecting so carefully. ‘So Forsyte died the night before they were due to meet. And the fact that Serrato sent a killer to take out Cabeza at the same time means he was very anxious to cover up whatever was in those papers.’

Nico nodded. ‘Anxious as hell. Though killing don’t exactly come hard to Ramon Serrato, believe me.’

Ben’s mind churned. He knew enough about the history of espionage to know that spies, covert missions and encrypted intelligence had been around for as long as warfare, which was about as long as humans had walked the earth. But what he couldn’t understand was what a former Colombian drug-lord-turned-businessman might possibly want with a bunch of old codes dug up from a sunken ship.

Nico interrupted his thoughts. ‘There’s more. Cabeza said that not all the papers were written in code. One of them was a letter from the King of Spain.’

Ben looked at him. ‘A letter from the King of Spain.’

‘You heard me, man. You know how the whole of South America belonged to Spain once? So, back in those days the King of Spain, I guess because he owned everything, he used to parcel up bits of land and hand them out as rewards to folks, ten thousand acres here, fifty thousand there, just like that. The bigger the service to the crown, the bigger the piece of land they were awarded. Whole parts of Texas and California are still owned by those people’s descendants. At least, that’s what Cabeza says. What the fuck do I know?’

‘Get to the point,’ Ben said impatiently. None of this was bringing him any closer to Brooke, and he hadn’t come to Spain for a history lesson.

‘Well, Cabeza said this letter Forsyte was going to show him—’

‘The letter that he’d got from the wreck of the Armada warship.’

Nico nodded. ‘—was more than just a letter. It was a royal warrant, bearing the King’s seal. A land grant to some guy he wanted to reward back then in fifteen-something.’

‘What’s that got to do with coded documents?’ Ben said, confused.

‘Well, Cabeza says that the guy being rewarded with all this land was a Spanish spy operating in England back then. Must’ve been one hell of a good agent, because we’re talking about five hundred thousand acres.’ Nico gave a low whistle. ‘I can’t even imagine what half a million acres looks like, can you? Except this wasn’t exactly prime pasture land. It was half a million acres of jungle.
Peruvian
jungle. The Spanish took Peru from the Incas, right? They fucking owned the place. Peru? Think about it.’

‘Serrato lives in Peru.’

‘Right. And we know that Serrato’ll wipe out anyone who gets between him and that letter, anyone who even knows about it. Which means …’

‘Serrato’s after the land,’ Ben said.

‘That’s my guess too. He must’ve been planning this for a long time. Bet your ass that’s why he moved there in the first place. Somehow those documents are connected to him and he’s gonna use them to stake a claim.’

Nico looked at Ben. ‘Now you tell me. What does an evil motherfucker like Ramon Serrato want with half a million acres of Peruvian jungle?’

Chapter Thirty-Six

The HM-1 Panteras chopper whipped up a wide circle of dust with its downdraught as it took off from the compound, then climbed rapidly upwards into the early morning sky.

It was one of two light assault aircraft that had once belonged to the Brazilian army and were now owned by Ramon Serrato. Nobody had questioned why a perfectly respectable businessman would need a pair of armoured military helicopters still equipped with their cabin-mounted 20mm cannon.

But then, a man with Serrato’s connections didn’t tend to come in for too much official scrutiny these days, especially not in these parts. As he knew very well, the praise that the Peruvian government had garnered from the US authorities back in the nineties for their efforts against organised crime and the drug trade was ancient history; in more recent years the country’s rulers had chalked up one of the worst reputations for corruption and human rights abuses in South America. It was Serrato’s kind of place, all right.

He gazed calmly through his dark glasses at the endless expanse of lush rainforest below. Next to him sat his men Vertíz and Bracca, nursing their weapons. Vertíz was silently, mechanically unloading rounds from the long, curved magazine of his Colt M4 carbine, rubbing the brass casings to a polish against the sleeve of his combat jacket and slotting them back in. Bracca was equally quiet, deeply absorbed in testing the sharpness of the huge bone-handled Bowie knife he always carried with him by shaving hairs off his muscled forearm. He kept the knife’s twelve-inch fullered blade so shiny that nobody could ever have guessed the amount of blood it had spilled in its time.

Nobody spoke at all during the hour-long journey as the almost unbroken green canopy rushed past under the chopper. Now and then the trees parted to reveal a twisting stretch of murky river; making its slow way up one of them was an ancient flat-bottomed riverboat whose wizened brown pilot craned his neck up at the passing helicopter and for a brief instant met Serrato’s mirrored gaze.

The next break in the jungle canopy was a few miles on: a man-made clearing some five hundred metres in diameter that had only very recently been created. Not a tree was left standing on the broad patch of razed earth. From the air it was almost perfectly circular, and dotted with vehicles and tiny figures. Logging crews in orange overalls and hard hats were still hard at work round its edges as a giant Tigercat machine on caterpillar tracks wrenched trees out by the roots and stacked them in a huge heap for the massive circular saws to cut up. There was no danger of the logging crews reporting to the authorities what they might have witnessed down there that day – they all worked for Serrato and they all knew the cost of a wagging tongue. In any case, he controlled a good many of the authorities too. He’d soon be making a number of them extremely rich.

Parked in a ring closer to the centre of the clearing was a cluster of open-topped Jeeps and a truck, around which stood a team of twenty or so heavily-armed men, all looking up intently at the chopper coming in to land.

The helicopter touched down. Serrato waited for the rotors to slow and the dust to settle, then stepped from the aircraft and straightened his suit. The immaculate beige silk struck a contrast against the jungle clothing of the men who walked across from the vehicles to greet him. Bracca sheathed his Bowie knife, grabbed his rifle from the floor of the chopper, and he and Vertíz jumped down after their boss to flank him, one either side, as they’d been doing for years.

‘Where’s Vargas?’ Serrato asked the ground team leader, Raoul.

‘They’re on their way, boss. Radioed in five minutes ago.’

Serrato nodded. ‘And so everything went as planned?’

‘Sure, boss.’ Raoul motioned behind him at the thick forest beyond the edge of the clearing. ‘All taken care of, just like you ordered.’

‘Was there any resistance?’

Raoul grinned. ‘Nothing we couldn’t handle.’

‘I want to see,’ Serrato said.

‘Sure, boss,’ Raoul repeated, but his words were drowned out by the buzzing approach of the second helicopter. They looked up, shading their eyes from the dazzling sun, as the bright red JetRanger appeared over the forest. Its pilot brought it carefully down to land thirty metres away across the clearing. The aircraft’s side hatch opened and a short, stocky, olive-skinned man in a rumpled white suit clambered down with some help from his aides, clutching at the rim of his Panama hat to keep it from flying off in the hurricane from the rotors. He waved to Serrato and crossed the razed earth towards him.

The man was in his fifties, with a cheerful round face that sported a carefully trimmed moustache and belied the fact that he was almost as calculating and ruthless as Serrato himself.

Almost, but not quite. His name was Aníbal Vargas, and he was a senior member of the Peruvian government’s Ministry of Housing, Construction and Sanitation, the department concerned, among other loosely defined matters, with the registration and administration of rural land deeds. He was also one of several men in the country who knew exactly with whom he was dealing in Ramon Serrato, and had no problem doing business as long as it was well away from the prying eyes of the press and the political reform activists who made his life far harder than he felt he deserved.

Vargas had amassed himself a small fortune during the last twenty years, massively augmenting his government salary by quietly and illegally offering concessions to oil, gas and logging operations willing to pay a premium kickback for the chance to sneak in and devastate great swathes of rainforest that were supposed to be protected in the interests of indigenous people. He’d always operated comfortably under the radar, shielded by the fact that Peru’s regulatory framework was weak, the infrastructure rotten, and the whole system generally so beleaguered by inefficiency and incompetence that neither the bureaucrats nor most of the public even cared any more.

As for the rainforest Indians themselves, aside from the occasional uprising against outsiders coming to plunder their ancient territories, their rights were as easily squashed in modern times as they’d been throughout history, going right back to the Conquistadors.

It was the same story in Peru as in Paraguay, Colombia, the whole tropical Amazon basin. In their time the Indians had been bribed, cheated, shot at, burned out of their homes, murdered wholesale, and their numbers ravaged by diseases contracted accidentally from outsiders – or sometimes introduced on purpose. The Natural Protected Areas Law of 1997 had made little real difference to their plight, although the steady growth of welfare organisations such as MATSES, the Movement in the Amazon for Tribal Subsistence and Economic Sustainability, was a pain in the butt for men like Aníbal Vargas and his colleagues, whose unofficial purpose it was to undo any progress they achieved.

‘You’re late,’ Serrato said.

Vargas was more at home in an air-conditioned office than in the middle of the jungle. He was already perspiring heavily as he stammered his apology, beating away the insects that swarmed around his face, drawn to the scent of fresh sweat. The heat didn’t bother Serrato. He was cool and calm. He said to Vargas, ‘Now let me show you what your department should have been doing.’

‘Are we going in there?’ Vargas asked, pointing at the jungle and thinking of venomous snakes and spiders as large as his hand that could scuttle up a trouser leg and sink their fangs into soft flesh. Serrato only nodded. Vargas lifted his hat to wipe the sweat from his balding scalp.

It was cooler under the trees. The jungle was strangely quiet, deserted by the hordes of howler monkeys and the many, many birds whose calls would normally fill the air. It was the silence of death.

The team leader went first with a couple of his men. Serrato followed, still closely flanked by Vertíz and Bracca who were eyeing every leaf and frond with suspicion, their loaded, cocked weapons at the ready. Vargas stumbled along in their wake, cracking twigs with every step and swatting at flies, and the rest of the ground team brought up the rear. Eighty yards into the dense, lush thicket, Serrato paused to peer at the shaft of an arrow embedded in the knotty bark of a tree.