The Job (14 page)

“As far as you want it to go.”

Oh crap, Kate thought. That wasn’t good. She had occasional thoughts about him. Thoughts that didn’t sit well with her job
or her dedication to law and order. Thoughts that got her all warm and mushy inside.

“Will I have my own bedroom?” she asked him.

“If that’s what you prefer. It’s a two-bedroom suite.”

“I suppose it will be okay then.”

Nick took a simple platinum band out of his pocket and slipped it on Kate’s ring finger. “Now it’s official.”

Kate stared at the band with equal parts horror and terrifying happiness. The happiness was sitting like a tennis ball in her throat and sending flashes of fire across her chest. No one had put a ring on her finger before. Actually, someone had tried several years ago, but she’d broken his hand. Not intentionally. It had been one of those reflex reactions.

This is pretend, she told herself. Get a grip. This is the job, for crying out loud. And if you ever do get married for real, it’s not going to be to a man on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list!

“This sort of caught me by surprise,” she said to Nick.

“I’ve never been a fan of long engagements.”

“I get that,” Kate said, “but you realize you’re going to have to explain this to my dad.”

Kate sat on her comfy bed in her comfy bedroom in her luxurious suite and called Carl Jessup on her cellphone. She wanted to get him at the office before he went home. It was almost 6
P
.
M
. the previous day in Los Angeles. Kate filled him in on her progress in the broadest possible terms and without mentioning any names.

“My work in Spain is complete,” she said. “My investigation has taken me to Lisbon.”

She wasn’t about to admit to any heists, or aiding a wanted fugitive, or any other illegal activity on a phone line routed through the federal building. The National Security Agency had offices in the building, too.

“It sounds like you are on the hunt,” Jessup said. “What can we do to help?”

“I need someone to do some research for me.”

“I’ll put Ryerson on it,” Jessup said.

“He’s not going to like running investigative errands for me.”

“It’s not for you, it’s for the Bureau. Besides, you want our best man on this.”

“I’m your best man,” Kate said.

“Second best, then. Hold on a sec. I’ll bring him in here and put you on the speaker.” She waited for a moment, and then heard Ryerson come in. Jessup spoke again. “Okay, Kate, I’ve got Seth here with me. Bring us up to speed.”

“Greetings from Lisbon.”

“Really? She’s in
Lisbon
?” Ryerson said. “The most exotic place I’ve been sent on assignment is Duluth.”

“Kate is over there on Nick Fox’s trail,” Jessup said.

“I thought the thief turned out to be a Nick Fox copycat.”

“She was,” Kate said. “Her name is Serena Blake and she used to work with Fox. That’s why she thought she could commit a string of crimes and pin them on him.”

“So case closed,” Ryerson said.

“Not quite,” Kate said. “Serena is facing prison stretches now in four countries, so she was desperate to cut a deal with us. I told her unless she had something on Fox, I wasn’t interested. Turns out she had a tidbit. She says he’s in business with Lester Menendez on some kind of plot. If we can find Menendez, we’ll find Fox.”

“Menendez is a ghost,” Ryerson said. “He’s even more elusive than Fox. With all due respect, there’s no place to start.”

“There’s the chocolate,” Kate said.

“Oh, no, not that again,” Ryerson said. “Just because I disagree with you on this, that’s no excuse to throw accusations at me. How many times do I have to tell you? I didn’t take your precious half-pound bag of M&M’s. I wouldn’t go near your cubicle unless a HazMat team cleared it first.”

“I know you took them. I’m a crack FBI investigator, but that’s not the chocolate I’m talking about. Menendez loves fine chocolate. He goes for the rarest, purest, and most expensive chocolate there is. I don’t think he’s lost his taste for it just because he has a new face and body. I need you to find the people who make that chocolate and get me a list of their European customers.”

“There will be hundreds of names, maybe thousands. How will you know which one of them is Menendez?” Ryerson asked.

“I won’t, but I’m working on it. That’s why I am in Lisbon. My sources tell me Fox is here. If he is, Menendez may be nearby, too. If I can find out who Fox contacts, I can compare the names to the list.”

“I think she might be on to something,” Jessup said to Ryerson. “I think it’s worth a few hours of your time. Get her those names as soon as possible.”

“Yes, sir,” Ryerson said, not sounding all that happy.

Modern downtown Lisbon, the Baixa, lies in a valley that runs south to the Tejo riverfront, where it ends at the Praça do Comércio, once a scenic spot for public executions. The royal
palace also stood there before the earthquake, tsunami, and fire of 1755 wiped it away in what many at the time believed was a heavy-handed message from God.

The hill on the east edge of the city is topped by the restored ruins of the Castelo de São Jorge. Sloping away from the castle, the Alfama district is a tightly packed medieval maze of crooked buildings. The buildings lean against one another like staggering drunks trying to keep their balance on the steep cobbled streets. Laundry lines hang across the streets, and the air is thick with the smell of cooking fat.

On the hill to the west is the Bairro Alto, the “upper district,” which is no less densely packed, but is substantially wealthier. Its narrow streets are laid out in an orderly grid with expensive houses, restaurants, art galleries, and shops for the rich. The Bairro Alto is the bohemian and artistic heart of Lisbon, where crowds pack the tiny streets and steps at night drinking, carousing, and relieving themselves outside the countless tiny taverns and
fado
houses. Performers, waiters, and the hungry homeless sing loudly and mournfully in the
fado
houses, expressing their bluesy unending longing for what was and what can never be. The songs merge together into a sorrowful, chilly breeze of cigarette smoke and salty fish aroma that drift up to the top of Bairro Alto.

Kate took it all in while she waited for Nick outside the ornate yellow Vincenzo Palace hotel, once the opulent home of Count Vincenzo, the sardine king of Lisbon.

“Hard to believe, but you almost look happy to see me,” Nick said, greeting Kate with a friendly kiss on the cheek.

“I read about
fado
in my guidebook, but now that I’m hearing it I don’t get it.”

“It’s like mariachi, only the singers who come to your table are wearing black and they’re joyless.”

Nick led her around the corner and down the slender Rua das Flores, which ran alongside the steep Rua do Alecrim, the Bairro Alto’s major north-south boulevard, all the way to the waterfront.

“The man we’re seeing to help get the word out in the underworld about our treasure is a
fado
singer,” Nick said.

“His name?”

“Diogo Alves.”

“You say that like his name is supposed to mean something to me.”

Nick sighed. “Don’t they teach you anything at Quantico? Northwest of here, there is the Aqueduto das Águas Livres, a 213-foot-tall eighteenth-century aqueduct that spans the Alcântara valley. It used to bring fresh water to the city and served as a bridge for traveling vegetable merchants. In the late 1830s, over the course of several years, over seventy people plunged to their deaths from the aqueduct in a wave of baffling suicides.”

“There must have been a
fado
singer on the aqueduct. What does that ancient history have to do with Diogo Alves?”

“It wasn’t until four members of the same family killed themselves that authorities began to suspect something was amiss. Turns out those seventy people were robbed and thrown
off the aqueduct by Diogo Alves, Portugal’s first recorded serial killer and still the worst. Alves was hanged in 1841 and was considered so supremely evil that his head was chopped off and put in a jar of formaldehyde for scientific study. The aqueduct has been closed to foot traffic ever since.”

As they walked closer to the waterfront, the crowds thinned, and the brightly painted buildings with elaborate ironwork and colorful flowerpots gave way to peeling paint, boarded-up windows, rusted wrought-iron bars, and graffiti-covered walls. The shadows thickened, the night became darker, and they were alone. Nick seemed cheerfully oblivious to the danger in the air. Kate wasn’t. All her senses were heightened. The story Nick told as they descended into the darkness hadn’t helped.

“I hope the Diogo Alves that we’re meeting tonight isn’t a headless reanimated corpse,” Kate said.

“Diogo is a distant relative of the serial killer. He owns a sleazy bar at the waterfront, sings
fado
to the customers, and works as a talent agent for crooks. He makes introductions and organizes crimes for a small cut of the action. He’s also known as the law among the lawless, resolving disagreements and passing judgment on offenders.”

“They’re all offenders.”

“There are always rules,” Nick said. “If there’s a killing among crooks, Diogo is the one who decides if it was justified. If he decides it wasn’t, he carries out the punishment himself.”

“What kind of punishment?”

“He likes to toss people from very high places.”

“Lovely,” Kate said.

“We’ll be fine. We haven’t killed anyone. We’re just here to do business. If we want to get word to Menendez, Diogo is the person in Lisbon who can do it.”

A few blocks from the waterfront they hit Rua Nova do Carvalho. A half block to the east, Rua do Alecrim began its ascent to Bairro Alto by bridging over a warren of seedy and dangerous-looking streets. The area once teemed with sailors looking to satisfy their desires in dive bars with names that evoked their faraway homes. The Oslo. The Copenhagen. The Texas. The Jamaican.

The crowds of sailors had faded away decades ago, and the few bars that remained catered to drunks, drug addicts, prostitutes, and sexual tourists. Tonight the street was deserted, the breeze kicking up bits of trash as if they were fallen leaves.

Nick gestured to the tunnel where Rua Nova do Carvalho passed under the Rua do Alecrim. “Diogo’s bar, the Slam, is through there, on the other side.”

“Of course it is,” Kate said, putting her hand in her jacket pocket, taking hold of a miniature telescoping baton.

Nick strolled into the tunnel, and Kate followed cautiously a few steps behind him. Before entering the tunnel she noted the dark alley to her left, and the steps up the hill to her right. Light inside the tunnel was dim to nonexistent. The sick yellow glow of a streetlight could be seen at the far end.

Kate’s eyes adjusted to the darkness just as two figures peeled away from the walls, like shadows come to life, to block their
path. She sensed one more man coming out of hiding behind her and Nick.

One of the men in front of them wore a white tank top and droopy jeans. All of his visible skin was tattooed. She couldn’t see all of his tattoos in the lousy light, but it was hard to miss the dead goat etched across his bald head, the devil’s horns on his forehead, the tears at the corners of his eyes, the tombstone on his throat, and the daggers on his cheeks. She couldn’t see what the other guy looked like, only his silhouette.

Tattoo spat out some words in Portuguese that were laced with menace and the promise of violence. Nick responded affably in Portuguese as well, a smile on his face. Kate stepped up beside him, keeping her eyes on Tattoo.

“What does he want?” Kate asked.

“He wants us to pay a toll to pass, but I find the charge unreasonable. I offered to buy him and his friends a drink at the Slam instead. Or at least I think I did. My Portuguese isn’t great.”

“What’s the toll?”

Tattoo grinned, showing off a gold tooth, and took a straight razor out of his back pocket. “His money and your body,” he said in English.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Kate said. “You and your friends step aside now and I won’t break your jaw.”

Before Tattoo could reply, she yanked her hand out of her pocket and whipped open the baton, which instantly telescoped out from palm-size to twelve inches of tempered bone-cracking
steel. The baton was small, but the dramatic value of simply brandishing it and extending it was considerable.

Tattoo instinctively reared back in surprise, but when he saw how short the baton was, he grinned and stepped toward her.

“I’m going to take that little stick from you and—”

Kate acted before he could finish his threat. She swatted him across the face, breaking his jaw and slashing his cheek open. The pain and shock made him drop the razor, which she kicked aside as she spun around to take out the man behind her, who was charging at her with a switchblade.

The thug who’d been standing next to Tattoo took a swing at Nick. Nick calmly ducked under the blow and drove his fist deep into the man’s gut. The thug dropped to his knees, all the wind escaping from him like a deflating balloon.

Kate sidestepped the other assailant’s blade, and whacked him in the kidney with her baton as he passed, and then once again across his back for good measure, knocking him face-first to the ground.