War Lord (21 page)

I
opened my eyes. A light breeze rolled around in the folds of the translucent white curtain closing off the outside balcony. Beyond the curtain I could hear folks splashing about in a pool somewhere below.

The sun was already up and my Seiko was set to go off in a minute’s time at six a.m. The pull-out sofa bed was as comfortable as any I’d ever slept on, or would have been but for the injury the swinging candlestick had done to my forearm. I turned my head and had a look at it. The skin was purple from elbow to wrist. I ran my fingers along the swelling, made a fist and rotated the arm left and right. Sore as hell, but nothing broken.

The Seiko buzzed.

The door to the bedroom was open. The bed was messed up but no one was in it. I got up, took a shower and mentally went through the leads we had to go on. We had so few that the review took no more than a handful of seconds, so I just stood under the water and tried not to think about the doomsday clock ticking down to midnight. Nine days, maybe less, and we were still going nowhere.

‘That you in there, Cooper?’ a voice called out. Petinski’s.

‘No, it’s George Clooney,’ I said. ‘Cooper had to go out. You mind coming in and passing me a fresh bar of soap?’

‘Breakfast is here and it’s getting cold,’ she said.

If I wasn’t mistaken, we were sounding like an old married couple. And given that we weren’t having sex, behaving like one too. If the woman down at reception got the hotel detective to check on our sheets, we’d be bounced out of here on false pretenses. Somehow I didn’t think that line of reasoning would make Petinski any more accommodating. I toweled off and threw on the robe hanging from a gold-plated hook on the door.

Petinski’s idea of breakfast wasn’t mine. Where were the scrambled eggs, bacon and pancakes? All I could see on the tray was muesli and fresh fruit salad. Nothing here was gonna go cold, unless she was referring to my appetite.

‘I’m having a swim first,’ I said.

‘After a shower?’

‘Shower first, swim second. House rule.’

Petinski shrugged. ‘Hurry, we have to get going.’

‘Get going where?’ I wondered. It was occurring to me that maybe I was being a little too managed. Spoon fed, even. I had no proper briefing, no resources, no intel beyond what Petinski chose to pass on.

‘CIA has a lead on Randy’s whereabouts. They’ve had a tip-off. They believe he could be in one of von Weiss’s safe houses. You and I have been volunteered to help ABIN close the cordon. We have to roll out of here in an hour to make the rendezvous at eleven.’ My partner was almost perky.

I picked up a handful of clothes, my wallet and the spare passkey. ‘What’s ABIN again?’

‘Brazil’s national intelligence agency – counter terror, et cetera.’ I knew that . . . ‘See you in twenty minutes,’ she concluded.

‘Okay,’ I said, though I had other plans. My gut told me the safe house would be a waste of time. If nothing else, it seemed odd that the type of operation the Brazilians wanted us in on wasn’t happening at dawn when most folks were dopey. This one was going down at brunch, a far more civilized time. My interest was in Céu Cidade, von Weiss’s favela and Rio’s mainline for drugs and guns patrolled by his private army. The place was a rat’s nest and we’d only scratched the surface. If I was von Weiss and had something to hide, that’s where I’d hide it. ‘Have you checked the camera? Are we receiving?’

‘The Mercedes left twenty-seven minutes after we did, a tall man driving – not our subject. The resolution isn’t great. Other than that, nothing of interest. Check the file after your swim. Just make it quick, will you?’

‘Yes, boss,’ I said as I walked out, a comment that earned me a good lip pursing.

The elevator was pulling into my floor so I decided to ride it instead of taking the stairs. The doors slid back. The box was pretty full, occupied by five large African males, all of whom were wearing sunglasses. I walked in, turned, and stood as the doors shut, the air reeking of sour animal, testosterone and Abercrombie & Fitch cologne. The way the men carried themselves – a kind of nervous aggression – was familiar. A sideways glance in the mirror confirmed that four of the men were bodyguards for piggy in the middle, a tall weasel-thin
hombre
with dusty matte-black skin wearing a cream-and-orange-striped knitted shirt and cream-colored pants, an ensemble that looked as natural on him as lipstick on a tarantula. Dime-sized diamonds were punched into the lobes of both ears. The four men at four points of the close protection box around him were heavy-set, bearded and needed a bath real bad.

The doors opened on the first floor and I offered to let the Africans out first. The bodyguards hesitated and looked me up and down. My own training told me that they were nervous about letting a stranger wander around behind them.

‘Beautiful morning, isn’t it?’ I said complete with goofy smile.

I got four frowns in return, but they decided I was harmless and moved out. Their principal ignored me completely – no eye contact at all. Keeping the box formation the men turned right, heading for the pool, taking up as much room as possible so that other hotel guests had to walk in single file, hugging the wall to get past. I wondered who the veep was and what his story might be, because they moved like men used to ambush, almost as if they expected one to appear and cut them down at any moment. Housemaids, maybe, bursting out of the laundry and attacking them with boxes of Tide.

I gave a mental shrug. They were none of my business and I was none of theirs. I detoured to the pool shop and bought a pair of swim trunks because my undershorts, aside from being undershorts, had a hole in them. After changing, I strolled out onto the pool deck and saw that there was a casual restaurant facing the beach on one front and the pool on the other, where a breakfast crowd had gathered. The Africans had taken one of the larger tables out in the open, closer to the pool. A waiter was speaking with them, his notebook open. The bodyguards appeared to be more focused on the space they found themselves in than on ordering breakfast. I recognized the body language. They were getting their lines of fire worked out, noting the exits and so forth, in case of an emergency that had nothing to do with a burnt side order of sourdough toast. Again, I wondered who these guys were.

I grabbed a towel from the cabana boy and claimed a lounge chair, dumping my clothes and towel on it. Several guests were in the pool doing slow languid laps. That was about my speed, so I joined the queue flopping back and forth. After around ten minutes of this I came to a stop to catch my breath and blow the watery snot out of my nose.

Meanwhile, the situation at the restaurant had changed somewhat. To start with, there were a few more guests now and, at one large table in particular – the one occupied by the African party – the mood was rowdy. I did another lap underwater, coming up for breath at the shallow end, then pushed off the wall to do a lap in the silence at the bottom of the pool. I came up and hooked my elbows over the tiled ledge as a second party of Africans swaggered across the courtyard, heading for the tarantula and his pals, all of whom stood to welcome the new arrivals with various gangsta handshakes.

At the sight of all this, my heart rate soared and rang the bell at the top of the scale because
I recognized one of the new arrivals
. Jesus, last time I saw this guy in the flesh it was nighttime in a clearing on the top of a hill in the east Congo rainforest where he was touting the killing power of the claymore anti-personnel mine to a bunch of rapists and butchers. And shortly after, the thing almost blew my head off. Some faces you don’t forget. Especially when you’ve taken the time to look at all available Interpol shots of that face in the hope that you’ll meet it one day in a dark alley and you’ll have a baseball bat in your hand.

The face’s name: Charles White, arms dealer, killer and most recently the middleman who, according to Petinski, had somehow managed to get a W80 nuclear warhead out of continental USA and into the hands of this Nazi-loving von Weiss we were stalking. And now here he was, about to sit down to eggs Benedict. Only it was broad daylight, and where was my Louisville Slugger?

*

On closer inspection, I also recognized Falco, Charles White’s older brother. And now that I thought about it, two more of the party – a couple of the bodyguards accompanying Charles White – also looked pretty familiar: muscle that had accompanied him in the DRC.

I glanced up at my balcony. The door was open, the curtain pulled aside, the room behind it a dark rectangle. I scanned the other balconies facing the pool: several other rooms also had their doors open and the curtains drawn back. Was ABIN up in one or more of those rooms, watching proceedings? Or maybe CIA? Or MI6? I scoped the restaurant. All I could see were waiters and guests behaving like waiters and guests. Where was the guy sitting on his own, reading the newspaper with the hole cut in the masthead? Or the nonchalant couple taking their newborn child for a walk in a stroller? If Charles and Falco were under observation, whoever was doing it knew their stuff.

I got out of the pool, walked to my lounge chair and toweled off. Bundling up my clothes, I wandered over to the hotel door without showing any apparent interest in the breakfast club. The casual act ended when I reached the hallway, where I broke into a sprint for the elevator. A couple of minutes later, I fell into my room on the fifth floor.

‘Petinski!’

‘Shhh, quiet,’ she hissed from somewhere inside. I found her sitting cross-legged up on the TV cabinet with her camera, lining up the Africans through the open balcony doors. ‘Charles and Falco White,’ she told me without lowering the viewfinder.

Old news. ‘Who’s the guy with the close protection?’ I asked.

‘Don’t know.’

I joined her in the shadows.

‘We shouldn’t be so surprised those two would turn up here,’ she continued, her digital Canon peeling off rapid-fire shots. ‘They’ve got money, the Palace is one of Rio’s finest hotels, and this city’s where they live.’

‘I’m staying on these guys,’ I said. ‘ABIN can plug its own holes.’

‘You don’t like following orders, do you, Cooper?’ Petinski said quietly.

‘Orders I like just fine. It’s stupidity I’m not down with.’

She climbed off the cabinet, removed the micro memory card from the camera and fiddled around with her iPad while I watched the tables down in the courtyard. A few minutes later she joined me at the cabinet as a woman entered the restaurant area, her back to Petinski and me. She wore a short bright-blue dress cut low at the back, and walked on low heels toward the focus of our attention. It was the kind of walk that makes men lick their lips – I licked mine.

‘Look, the entertainment has arrived,’ said Petinski.

When the woman was close enough, Charles White grabbed her, lifted her clean off her feet and sat her on his lap, side-saddle. She threw her head back and laughed, maybe a little too hard.

‘Jesus,’ I said under my breath.

‘What’s up?’ Petinski asked.

‘That woman down there. Her name’s Sugar.’

‘You know her?’

‘She worked at Jubilee. She was involved with Randy and Alabama.’

It took Petinski a few moments to get around to asking the obvious question. ‘Intimately?’

There was no way to soften it. ‘Yeah, I believe so.’

‘Both of them?’

‘Unconfirmed on that score. And there have been other connections.’
Me, for example.
I took out my cell and showed her the picture of Sugar sitting with Ty Morrow in the Green Room several hours after he’d supposedly fled from creditors in his jet.

‘Men are such fucking idiots,’ she murmured.

T
he party was breaking up. The bodyguards stood first and formed a loose diamond around the table where their principals sat. Falco put his arm around the tarantula guy while Charles played the gentleman and saw to Sugar’s chair, pulling it out for her. The four of them, surrounded by the muscle, strolled toward the lobby, laughing and chatting like they were off to a little league game.

‘They’re on the move,’ I informed Petinski, who was hurriedly stuffing various items into a shoulder bag.

‘Let’s go.’

I was still wearing the robe, the swimming costume beneath it, and my feet squelched in a puddle of water on the carpet. I slipped the robe and dropped the trunks to the floor and suddenly realized that Petinski was staring at me. Man, I’d forgotten about her completely. ‘Nothing you haven’t seen before, right?’ I said, toughing it out, turning to rummage through my clothes for clean undershorts.

‘Excuse me?’

There was no way I was going to stand around blushing. ‘Or maybe you haven’t.’ I stood up straight and square. ‘Petinski, meet Little Coop. Little Coop, Petinski.’

Her eye line took an excursion. ‘This is
totally
inappropriate behavior. There are rules, Cooper.’

‘It’s a he-said-she-said thing unless you have proof. You want me to vogue for your camera?’

Petinski glanced at her Canon as if considering it, then turned her back on me and walked to the door. ‘Just hurry the fuck up, would you?’ She snatched her bag, tucked it under an arm and stomped out.

I shrugged. It was easier to dress without an audience anyway and a minute later I caught up with her at the bottom of the fire stairs in the lobby.

‘Evidence or not, Cooper, the bullshit you just pulled is in my report,’ she snapped.

Down in reception, Gracia smiled at us as we crossed to the front entrance. I gave her a veiled thumbs-up and she returned it with excited silent clapping.

*

I waved down a cab while the stretch Hummer eased out of the hotel’s forecourt, a Hyundai SUV following. A few moments later Petinski and I were heading through the tunnel separating Ipanema and Copacabana from the rest of Rio, tailing the Hyundai.

‘What about ABIN and its cordon?’ I asked, testing her.

Petinski’s eyes were glued to the traffic in front. ‘A bird in the hand, right?’

I realized I was sitting on a newspaper, and pulled it out.
O Dia
, read the masthead.
The Day
, I figured. An ad on the front page for women’s underwear caught my eye. Then I clocked the main story of the morning, which included a photo of a burning vehicle outside a familiar home. There was an inset photo of von Weiss, and another of a snake with its black mouth open, fangs bared. I showed the paper to Petinski.

‘Underwear, Cooper?’

‘The house, Petinski . . .’

‘Oh, sorry. It’s just that I . . . I sometimes think you’re, y’know, preoccupied.’

I passed her the paper. ‘My mind is always totally focused on the job at hand.’

‘Yes, it’s just that I’m not sure what you think your job is,’ Petinski countered as she examined the photos. ‘That’s a mean-looking snake.’ She read the caption out loud, ‘
Preta de Mamba
,’ then double-tapped an app on her iPhone, opening a translator
.

We drove for several minutes, slicing through the traffic, catching several amber streetlights and running one red to keep the Hyundai in view.

‘It’s a black mamba,’ Petinski announced. ‘A venomous snake, it says here, found in central Africa. It’s aggressive, and has been known to attack and even chase its victims. It’s the world’s fastest snake, apparently.’

I leaned forward and asked the cabbie, ‘Can you read, translate and drive?’

He nodded so I passed the paper forward and tapped the story. Glancing at the front page he said, ‘I have read this,
já
. A man who keep snakes at his house – he was robbed. The thief, he burn a truck to distract people and stole some valuable thing. This snake, it got loose and kill two people who work in the house. But now it has been caught. The man who owns the snake is rich and powerful. He offer reward for anyone who can give
policia
informações
on the thief.’

I recalled the glass case being smashed, and seeing the thin black shadow whipping across the floorboards, too quick to identify before it vanished under a cabinet. A black mamba. A killer. Now I understood the cause of the fear I saw in the face of the guard who ran screaming from the room. He must have known what had slithered into the night.

The driver’s eyes darted into the rear-view mirror several times, checking us out. We were paying him to follow someone, and now we were asking about a front-page crime. I didn’t want him feeding anything to the police, concerned bystander–style.

‘Journalists,’ I told him, gesturing at Petinski and myself.

‘Ah,
journalistas
,’ he said. That seemed to do the trick and he went back to keeping track of the road ahead instead of his nosy passengers.

‘Are you going to call someone?’ I asked Petinski, opening the window to let in the traffic noise.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You don’t think you should inform whoever it is you really work for that we’re tailing the criminals who stole the nuke?’

‘I made a brief report when I uploaded photos taken at the pool. What do you expect should happen here, Cooper? You think we should just spirit them off to Gitmo? Think it through. We don’t know where the weapon is and these people won’t hand us a road map to its location.’

‘Then we might as well sit on our hands, ’cause they ain’t gonna lead us to it either.’

‘No, but despite all the smiles and backslapping we’ve seen these people carry on with, they
have
to be feeling the pressure. A nuke is a long way from a case of M16s with erased serial numbers. Someone will cave, make a mistake, and when they do, we’ll be there to exploit it.’

‘Call in the 82nd like I suggested, Petinski, because if they don’t crack and the weapon is used, the White brothers, von Weiss and everyone else connected with this will go to ground and we’ll have nothing.’

‘There’s nowhere on earth they can hide where we can’t find them.’

‘Right, just like we knew where to lay our hands on bin Laden for all those years.’

Petinski refused to be diverted. ‘I’ve been told to tail them and not lose sight of them. And that’s what I’m going to do.’

‘And what’s my role in all this? To hold your purse?’

‘If that’s what it takes.’

‘You want them to break, Petinski? Apply pressure.’

‘You do
nothing
unless you clear it with me, Cooper.’

Over his shoulder, the driver informed us, ‘Yes – to Pão de Açúcar. That is where they go.’

The road soon opened out into a circular area with a packed parking lot, far too many tourist buses for the available spaces clogging the place. Thick cables angled up from a terminal toward a vertical face of brown rock towering above the parking lot. I spotted Chas and Falco White trotting up the crowded stairs of the terminus with their unidentified friend and Sugar, the bodyguards in the loose diamond formation around them, a parting made for them through the sea of tourists by several uniformed police. There was a buzz in the throng, the kind brought on by the presence of celebrities. People held up their phones to get photos.

Our cab driver took us to the edge of the crush. Petinski paid the fare while I attempted to force a path through the mass, but it closed in solid behind the Whites and almost seemed to lift them up and deposit them at the doors of a cable car on the verge of departing. Eventually, when I reached the ticket office, I had to wait my turn behind a short, round, sweating tour guide with hair plugs who was having his book of ticket stubs checked by a meticulous young woman determined to find fault.

A buzzer sounded and a rotating orange warning light lit up in the platform area. The door closed on the cable car carrying our persons of interest. The car then slid slowly out of its bay and accelerated into a climb toward the rock face, a massive granite formation that seemed to burst out of the flat ground. Petinski caught up to me in time to miss the next cable car, and we only just managed to squeeze into the one after that.

Looking around, I figured either everyone in the confined space was CIA or MI6 or ABIN, or no one was. Cameras clicked and the atmosphere filled with
oohs
and
ahhs
as the rapidly increasing elevation provided views of several golden sand beaches lapped by blue water. And maybe in a few short days all that sand would be turned to glass as a minor sun burst from a milk can and bloomed over it.

The cable car docked on the crown of the hill and the load of tourists or secret agents, I wasn’t sure which, followed the signs down to another terminal where a second car was to hoist us to the peak of Sugarloaf Mountain. Petinski and I had lost sight of White and the rest, but there was no place else to go other than up, so we joined the queue and waited for the second leg of the journey.

‘I know we’re not here for the view,’ said Petinski, ‘but that’s a heck of a view.’

She was right; this was some panorama. The cream colors of Rio wrapped themselves around countless beaches and bays of blue-green water at the bases of what I could only describe as perky, surgically enhanced bumps poking up all over the place.

The cable car eventually docked on the top of Sugarloaf. Petinski and I threaded our way through the crowds milling about, and set off to locate the White brothers. The view was hard to ignore, but we did our best and concentrated on casing the small numbers of bars, fast-food joints and junk shops catering to the steady stream of tourists. But the White brothers and the rest of their party were nowhere to be seen.

‘They have to be here somewhere,’ muttered Petinski, hands on her hips, scoping out the vicinity.

Several tourists pointed at a Boeing passenger jet away in the middle distance as it banked and headed straight for Sugarloaf. It banked steeply again, just as I was getting nervous that it might land on top of us, and headed for a frighteningly short runway across the bay. The vultures wheeled on the air currents, moms and dads took photographs, and kids ate ice cream. I could have been on vacation. A helicopter suddenly shot around the side of the mountain and filled the air with the snarl of jet engines and rotor thump. Kids ran to the fence for a closer look as the chopper came to a hover abeam a heliport a little down the side of the mountain before the incline dropped vertically away. It was a large civilian job painted silver with thick blue and red stripes that ran from nose to tail rotor. I was familiar with the type, a French-made Eurocopter EC225, the civilian version of the military Super Puma. Aircraft like this ferried workers to oil rigs. It drifted toward the landing pad, wowing everyone who’d never fallen out of the sky in one of the fuckers, and sat in midair twenty feet or so over the pad before settling gradually onto its wheels with an eardrum-rupturing noise that cleared the sky of vultures.

I turned my back on the racket and was about to set off on another tour of the facilities to try to locate our suspects, when Petinski nudged me in the arm. Whadaya know . . . It was von Weiss stepping out of the aircraft behind a pair of bodyguards in expensive suits. He jogged slightly hunched over beyond the rotor downwash and shook hands like a visiting dignitary with the party that stepped into view: Falco and Charles White. So that’s where they’d been lurking. Petinski took pictures, just one of many people doing so. A small crowd followed von Weiss out of the aircraft – no one I recognized. One of them was a girl in a short white dress, with shoulder-length golden hair and skin. She joined von Weiss’s side and both were introduced to the tarantula in the cream and orange knit. I wondered how von Weiss – a neo-Nazi and probably also a believer in the master-race crap – felt about shaking hands with a black man. He seemed okay with it from this distance. Sugar was down there, too, I saw. Von Weiss didn’t shake hands with her, I noticed, but she scored an air kiss from his girlfriend, the buttery blonde.

A four-man security team that had spilled from the Eurocopter, all of them fair-haired and well over six five, formed an Aryan diamond pattern around the party. The Whites’ security team formed a looser, outer ring, and all of them moved slowly to the stairs that would bring them up to the main viewing area. I looked around for other helicopters. Good move on von Weiss’s part. Arriving by chopper he could spot the tail; and indeed two other choppers were standing off a mile away in a stationary hover.

The turbines on the Eurocopter spooled up. It lifted thirty feet off the platform and pivoted slowly through ninety degrees. Petinski kept snapping away at it as it backed away from the heliport and then spiraled into the sky. One of the choppers holding station in midair started to move also.

‘I think you got it,’ I said to Petinski, who was still snapping. ‘C’mon.’

The crowd’s interest in the new arrivals evaporated once the aircraft had departed. Petinski and I drifted along, acting innocent, keeping the party in view. They moved to a bar, one of von Weiss’s stormtroopers performing a quick site inspection before the principals ventured in. I noticed the bodyguard palming the bartender something, which resulted in two tourist couples being shown the exit. Von Weiss didn’t care to share. Meanwhile a waiter organized a single large table from smaller ones for the group, and everyone sat. Drinks came next. Petinski anchored herself in some shade under a tree and took more photos. I wondered what they were talking about. It would’ve been good to have a microphone in there. The muscle lined up across the front of the bar facing the viewing area and suggested seeking other venues to the rare tourist game enough to approach and ask if the place was open for a drink.

‘We just gonna sit here until they leave?’ I asked Petinski.

‘We’ve got the Whites and von Weiss in the one place. This is where the action is.’

From what I could see, the only action was sitting up there in the bar with von Weiss and the Whites in the form of Sugar and the sleek blonde. ‘Meeting out in the open like this? Von Weiss is thumbing his nose at us. Showing us he can’t be touched.’