Blood of Paradise (31 page)

The way Malvasio had told it, saving Jude would require some precision shooting, and none of the snipers to be found down here could be trusted—they'd turn their allegiance to the men in charge. Malvasio realized he was in a bind and had to come up with a plan of his own. He depended on these men for his safekeeping—they'd turn on him in a heartbeat if he voiced any objections. He had to follow through, make the thing look okay. But it couldn't succeed. And all that depended on the Candyman, which Strock found appealing. He could see Laugh Master Bill getting cornered like this and needing an old pal he'd screwed to bail him out. It had a certain moral symmetry to it. And yet Bill hadn't begged. If he had, Strock would have grown suspicious. He just laid it out, let Strock think it through, ask his questions and decide. And the longer Strock had the weapon in his hands, the more certain he became.

He put these musings aside as Malvasio began pointing and naming. In a dark tangle of mangrove roots, a pale blue
garza
stood sentry, resembling a flamingo with its slender body and long curved neck, but smaller, delicate. Schools of sardine-size
cuatro ojos
, four-eyed fish, darted to and fro—two eyes below water, trained for food, the other two pointed skyward, looking for predators—and the flickering mass of bodies created silvery green trails in the shallows. An eagle—stark white head and body, pitch black wings—perched high above the impenetrable mangroves in a stately
conacaste
tree.

Malvasio steered the
lancha
into a narrow inlet on a thickly forested sand spit. Wild parakeets darted branch to branch in the thick foliage overhead. The deep, humid shade smelled of moss and rot. Fifty yards in, he cut the outboard, drifted the last few feet, then tied up to a mangrove root.

“This is the spot,” he told Strock.

They scrambled out and headed for a clearing just beyond a rim of trees. Once they broke through the tree line, Strock slipped the rifle off his shoulder.

“What the hell …?”

The clearing was maybe sixty-by-forty yards, obviously manmade, but to what end? As though reading Strock's mind, Malvasio said, “Used to be a soccer field here. A group of
zacateros
from La Herradura on the other end of the estuary built it, cleared away the trees, put up goals, painted boundary lines. But after Hurricane Mitch and the earthquakes the thing just got forgotten. The swamp's already reclaimed most of it.” He pointed to the mangrove roots sprouting everywhere in the loosening sand. “And the goalposts got pilfered for lumber or firewood.”

Sixty yards created a shorter zero point than Strock would have liked. The Redfield scope was three to nine, so he cranked the power down to four to get some background in his field of vision. Malvasio had shooting range targets, a human silhouette circled with white rings, that he tacked up to a tree. He didn't mention where he got the targets and Strock chose not to ask.

That wasn't all Malvasio had brought along. From his rucksack he withdrew a Larand sound suppressor and handed it to Strock, saying, “An ounce of precaution. So we don't make what we're doing out here any more obvious than it needs to be.”

Strock took the device from him, studied it briefly. He'd used one before, target work, never in a SWAT situation. It wasn't the kind of thing cops needed normally. A combat sniper, maybe. Or an assassin. It was made of copper mesh discs, perhaps two hundred, packed tight inside the black steel cylinder, decent enough though hardly state of the art. He screwed the silencer onto the end of the rifle barrel, saying, “I've heard some guys say you're more accurate with one of these on your piece than you are without.”

Malvasio said, “You think that's true?”

Strock shrugged, eyeing the target sixty yards away. “I guess we'll find out.”

He spent the next hour acquainting himself with the weapon. They were deep enough within the swamp that the wind wasn't a factor, so he didn't have to dope the scope. He did have to fuss with eye relief, though, until he could sight through cleanly the instant he had the stock shouldered, the target jumping to life in the crosshairs. The trigger pad felt natural, the action was a standard two-and-a-half pounds, smooth and clean—he could hold a dime on the barrel on dry fires. The rounds were light—fifty-five-grain boattails—tapered to minimize wind drag. Recoil was negligible. By midafternoon he was shooting half-inch groups of five, sitting, standing, prone. His chops were rusty, not lost; it all came back like an old habit—a little like sex, actually, a rhythm you never have to learn and never really forget. Just need practice. The pain in his knee flared up every now and then, but he could focus through it if he just relaxed. His cold shots—first rounds fired before the barrel heated up—were high right a quarter inch. Normal. As for whether he was more or less accurate with the silencer, it seemed a moot point—Strock had a pretty good idea the thing was staying on regardless.

He logged his shot placements and the atmospheric variables in his notepad, already bored.

Given he was using the silencer, the parakeets in the branches overhead seldom scattered when he fired, and when they did, they settled down again quickly. The humid air was thick with their chirps and trills. Hitting one square would prove an interesting challenge, he thought.

Following his glance, Malvasio said, “You want to shoot birds, go for the big black jobs. They're called
zanates
. They raid other birds' nests and eat their eggs, which is why you see them damn near everywhere.”

“Yeah, but they're bigger and slower. I wasn't thinking of it in terms of pest control.”

“Whatever. I'm just saying—killing them would be God's work.”

“Then let God do it.” He handed the gun out to Malvasio. “You want to take a few swings at the bat?”

Malvasio considered it, looked at his watch, then said, “We've got a while. Sure.” He took the gun and lay down on the sand and settled in, not rushing as he fired off his first group of five. Watching him, Strock spotted several errors in technique right off.

“You tend to look up after every shot, know that? Stay married to the weapon. Keep your eye trained through the scope.”

“I tried that. Things go in and out. Sometimes I can see, other times it's all black.”

“That's because I've adjusted it to my eye relief, not yours. We can fix that easy. After that it's just practice.”

A devilish glint rose in Malvasio's eye. “What'll I need you for, then?”

“To hit something that moves.” Strock took the rifle from him and ejected the magazine for reload. “Or that's more than sixty yards away.”

29

In the capital, men Axel had arranged to meet during the week found themselves unexpectedly engaged. Follow-up meetings would have to be scheduled at an always unspecified later date. Various excuses were made, each less credible than the one before, though it seemed apparent the embezzlement scandal was at least partially to blame. Few officials, it soon became clear, welcomed the prospect of outsiders asking questions in the charged climate the criminal inquiry created, no matter how far afield those questions might be. Even men unaffiliated with ANDA seemed hopelessly elusive, not that gathering information hadn't been a challenge before. An alphabet soup of twenty-five disconnected but stubbornly territorial and ultimately toothless agencies oversaw water issues around the country, ANDA being the dominant player but other outfits possessing critical data of their own, data they guarded jealously: You had hydrologists at ASPAGUA, social workers with FIS, environmentalists from SALUD, engineers on behalf of EYCO, businessmen representing CEDES, and so on. They coordinated poorly even during the best of times, and arranging meetings typically resembled herding cats. Getting even four men together at a single time and place bordered on the miraculous, and Axel had wasted the better part of numerous visits during the past year trying to correlate data obtained from competing authorities. Now, just as he was trying to finalize his analysis, the flow of information virtually stopped.

Compounding the problem was the strange tendency of agency lackeys to abscond with government files when they left their jobs, doing so with the hope of launching second careers as consultants. The rumors of ANDA's imminent privatization only accelerated that trend—and no one was ever punished for the thefts—meaning Axel all too often had to chase down these freelancers and pay a fee for the privilege of reviewing documents that should have been public record. Now, with the embezzlement scandal a daily headline, these characters apparently decided it was unwise to push their luck, and most refused to so much as return calls.

But not even that was the worst of it. Charts and data Axel knew to be on hand not just at ANDA but at other entities in the capital—materials he'd reviewed cursorily only weeks before, and needed for his final follow-up—now could not be found or were delivered to him ridiculously piecemeal. Streamflow records for the Río Conacastal—data already frustratingly spotty due to destruction of river gauges during the twelve-year civil war—were suddenly missing or in suspicious disarray. The only recharge and groundwater yield analyses now available for the alluvial plain bordering the river had puzzling gaps, most notably the drought of 2002. Geological maps of the fractured basalt formations running through the area, suggestive of large-yield aquifers, were maddeningly incomplete. It made the task of confirming his prior analyses all but impossible.

Meanwhile, traveling about the city became more problematic as the protests in the streets escalated. Archbishop Saenz, a member of Opus Dei, the right-wing Catholic brotherhood, addressed a crowd of
areneros
in the cathedral plaza, exhorting them to stand firm against terrorists and to support the heroic troops in Iraq. Unfortunately for the archbishop, a jury in Fresno, California, had just awarded a multimillion-dollar verdict against Álvaro Saravia, a former air force colonel responsible for hiring the gunman who'd martyred the much-loved Archbishop Romero in 1980. When
efemelenistas
at the rally waved placards accusing Archbishop Saenz of complicity with his predecessor's assassins, the predictable melee broke out. Dozens were injured, one woman blinded. Revenge assaults flared up throughout the city.

Intent on keeping order around the cathedral, the police cracked down on street vendors in the nearby Mercado Central. The vendors responded by throwing rocks, but the PNC claimed shots were fired too. The police answered with bullets of their own, then tear gas, killing one man and sending two dozen others to intensive care.

As though that weren't bad enough, a riot broke out in La Esperanza, the hellish overcrowded penitentiary in Mariona near the capital. Homemade grenades exploded in fireballs along one wing of the prison, creating a stampede as inmates fled for their lives to escape the fires and blinding smoke. Battles in the yard broke out almost instantly between members of Mara Salvatrucha and Mara Dieciocho. They went at each other with homemade pipe guns called
chimbas
as well as shanks fashioned from broken chapel benches and steel bed frames. Thirty-one inmates were dead, some scalped, some burned to scorched meat in the fires. Dozens of others were wounded. Rumors of retaliatory atrocities were already circulating as prison guards fought to reassert control of the prison.

Word of the riot scarcely leaked out before a patrol car was bombed in Ilopango. Police patrols in Zacatecoluca and Sonsonate took fire. Gang-on-gang violence erupted in the capital and smaller cities in the countryside, compounded by a sudden surge in gunpoint robberies and carjackings. Curfews were enforced nationwide.

The Mercedes seemed too easy a target in that environment; Jude imposed a house arrest of his own, restricting Axel to his room at the Hotel Camino Real unless travel outside was absolutely necessary. Not that it mattered. Only two of the dozen contacts Axel had arranged to meet that week followed through, joining him for lunch at the hotel. They responded to all his inquiries with vague assurances that the information he needed would be available once all the disruptions died down—the civil unrest, the embezzlement inquiry. “But that could take ages,” Axel protested, to which his luncheon companions could only shrug.

Then, late in the week, an American was killed. A Teamster of Salvadoran descent named Gilberto Soto had come back to visit family and meet with cargo drivers in Acajutla to discuss unionizing. While having dinner at his mother's house in a working-class barrio in Usulután, he stepped outside to take a call on his cell phone. Alerted by an accomplice on bicycle, three men walked up and opened fire, then ran off.

The union called it a death squad hit, but the port authorities and truck companies were parroting uncredited accounts that the crime was drug related. Some, given the recent mayhem in the wake of the riots at La Esperanza, blamed the gangs. Back in the States, the Teamsters were burning up phone lines, pressuring everyone from trade representatives to congressmen to the ambassador, demanding a credible inquiry from the PNC. But the police said only that the investigation was in progress. They had, as yet, no suspects.

As Jude passed this news along, Axel gazed from his balcony down the Boulevard de los Héroes, his hands folded, fingertips tapping against his chin. “They're not going to beef up your protection detail,” Jude said, “since this killing looks like an isolated incident. That means we just have to take even greater precautions than we have already until things settle down. That may happen overnight or it could take a week. Maybe longer.”

Axel seemed distracted, his gaze unfocused. “Consuela called this morning,” he said finally. “She's coming here tomorrow, to the hotel, to stay with me.” Almost imperceptibly, he blushed, despite the sobriety in his voice. “I trust she'll be safe. All things being relative, I realize.”

Thursday evening, working by candlelight, Strock lashed two pieces of driftwood into a cross and dressed it in a spare shirt and trousers, stuffed the clothes with palm fronds, cinched the cuffs with twine, then fashioned a head from an empty coconut, drawing in googly eyes and a knucklehead smile with burnt cork.