The Omicron Legion (17 page)

“All is proceeding as planned, in spite of the setbacks we have suffered,” Pierce responded.

“No,” Benjamin said vehemently. “The final phase has been enacted without proper safeguards, without the very precautions that have dominated our lives.”

“And what choice did we have?” Pierce shot back at him. “I thought we had gotten them all.”

“We all did,” acknowledged Nathan. “But Benjamin is right on that point. The fact is, we didn’t.”

“Could we find him now?” Benjamin asked.

“Eliminating him would not keep the killers from finishing their work. Besides, we have used that very strategy to our own benefit.”

“And how long do you think it is before they realize the truth?”

“Long enough.”

“And in the meantime we stay here. Waiting.” Benjamin looked furtively out the window again.

“We move to our final destination tomorrow.”

“That is supposed to reassure me?”

“I don’t really care whether it does or not.”

Benjamin stormed back from the window. “And what about the door left open back down in Brazil? Are we to feel safe in spite of that, too?”

“On the contrary, we have enlisted the services of a most reliable ally to help us close it.”

“Really?”

“Blaine McCracken.”

Benjamin stood very still and waited for Pierce to explain.

Johnny Wareagle knelt barechested in the cold late autumn air. There may have been a time long past when the chill would have raised goose bumps on his flesh. He actually thought he remembered the last instance. It was a night in the hellfire, when the cold and rain were so bad that the team had to camp for the night. Wareagle took the first guard duty with his waterlogged poncho for company. The cold wetness had brought the gooseflesh.

Then the Black Hearts had come, and the gooseflesh had vanished.

He had never felt it again, he supposed, because his mind associated its rising with the coming of the ambush party that night. Johnny had killed them all himself, before the rest of the unit awoke. Whenever the gooseflesh should have come, his mind retreated into the heat of the battle, and the chill vanished.

The muscles of Wareagle’s massive upper body tensed and relaxed in the breeze. He sought comfort from the trees and brush, from nature, but nature refused him. This was his land, his home, where he came to ground, where the spirits could hold the demons of the past out so he could sample a peace he knew didn’t belong to him. Today, though, the spirits had deserted him, just as they had in Brazil.

Why? Johnny wondered.

The question did not frustrate or perturb him. Their absence implied a lesson he needed to learn. A host of birds landed at the edge of the clearing, and Johnny reached into his pouch for the feed he carried with him whenever he ventured into the woods. He filled his palm and extended it outward, waiting for them to approach and eat from his hand as they always did.

The birds waddled a bit nearer, testing the air, then stopped as if struck by an invisible barrier. They came no closer. Still Johnny held the feed out in his usual way, waiting patiently.

They’re afraid of me.

The realization struck him like a burst from a jackhammer. He was no longer the person the birds knew and trusted. The essence of his manitou had changed.

First the spirits had stopped speaking to him. And now this.

The connection was inarguable. Yet the spirits had not deserted him. Their silence was counsel in itself. They had helped him reconcile himself to the past. But the future they would leave to him. Johnny could see it in all its obscurity, had seen it since first setting foot in Brazil.

Somewhere there was an enemy he had to face, an enemy who would test the very foundations on which he had built his life. All else, from the hellfire on, had been merely the proving ground leading up to this final rite of passage. The guidance of the spirits had taken him this far, but now he must face his
Hanbelachia,
his vision quest, alone.

He was changing and evolving. Soon he would face an enemy who would determine whether the rest of his days would be spent as a true warrior or with his ancestors. The enemy was vast and powerful, as black as the heart of a moonless night with an ice storm for a soul.

Out there now waiting.

Waiting for him.

Sal Belamo got Patty set up in her own personal office. She had always loved computers. She had never set out to sea without a portable along. This computer was simple enough to use, but it was powerful enough to analyze data coming in from an incredible number of government sources. Sal knew all the right access codes and passed them along.

Patty had started by calling up every bit of information available on the list of victims she already had. There were fifteen now with the names McCracken had added. She read everything on them she could find, much of the information classified.

The first part of the answer came to her quite by surprise. She was simply staring dreamily at the frozen screen when an item caught her eye. A simple fact and nothing more that made her think of her father. But it reminded her of something else, and she scanned fast to another entry.

A chill moved up her spine.

She spent the next hour rechecking seven more of the victims. Here was a connection.

Incredible. But what did it mean?

She resisted the urge to call Sal right now. She was on a roll and she knew it. This clue would lead her to others. The truth was within her grasp.

Chapter 18

“YOU ASK ME,
chief, be a good idea if you let me ride shotgun with you back to the jungle,” Sal Belamo offered stubbornly. They had stopped outside Dulles Airport in the predawn hours of Saturday, where a government jet was waiting to fly Blaine McCracken to Rio de Janeiro.

“I don’t want Patty left alone, Sal. It’s as simple as that.”

“You don’t trust Maxie’s people to do the job?”

“I don’t trust anyone right now besides you and Johnny. Something about this whole business smells wrong to me, but I can’t pin down where it’s coming from. You and I go to Rio together, there’s no one up here to pick up the pieces.”

“How ’bout the Indian?”

“Johnny’s got his own stake in this.”

“You guys seem to read each other clear as the morning paper.”

“I carried him through a mine field once, and he’s been carrying me ever since.”

When Sal frowned, his twisted nose pointed to the right. He reached into his pocket and came out with a pair of clips for Blaine’s Heckler and Koch 9-mm pistol.

“Well, if you don’t want me tagging along, how about I give you a little going away present?”

“I’ve got plenty of bullets.”

“Not like these, you don’t. Got a friend who makes ’em up special. Puts a glass capsule inside each with a mixture of ground glass and picric acid.”

“Potent stuff.”

“Extremely shock sensitive, he would say. Anyway, mixing it with the ground glass makes it less sensitive and allows it to be fired from a gun. Once it goes bang, the bullet distorts, which breaks the glass capsule and allows the acid to mix with lead.”

“Forming lead picric,” Blaine concluded.

“Big boom when it hits its target. I call ’em Splats, since that’s what happens to whatever they hit.”

McCracken accepted the clips, noticing they were stored in clear plastic, which was carefully molded over their contours.

“Oh, yeah,” Sal added. “Thing is, you don’t want to get them wet. My friend says it undermines the explosives’ stability. Point is, you don’t load Splats until you’re near sure you’re gonna need them.”

Blaine ran his fingers over the plastic. “What kind of firepower we talking about?”

Belamo winked. “Fire one of these into a watermelon and you won’t even have any seeds left to plant.”

“I’m not hunting fruit, Sal.”

“Splats don’t discriminate, chief. They’ll turn anything into paste.”

They parted right after that, and Blaine’s thoughts turned to tracking down the only man he knew of who could shed light on what had gone on at the installation in the Amazon: Jonas Parker. For some reason, Parker had been absent during the time of the massacre. After it, he would have known he was a marked man in grave need of protection. Assuming he had been successful in that quest, he would still be in hiding now. The trick would be finding him.

Toward that end, McCracken called Carlos Salomao, the man who had drawn both him and Johnny Wareagle to Brazil in the first place.

“If you were in Brazil and needed to disappear fast, who would you go to, Carlos?”

“That is simple, amigo. Fernando Da Sa. Ever hear of him?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

Fernando Da Sa, Carlos explained, was the most powerful crime lord in Rio—and thus the entire country. As head of the
Commando Vermelho,
or Red Command, he controlled narcotics, weapons, gambling, prostitution, even the lotteries in the Rio mountainside slums. The Brazilian police were far more corruptible than their American counterparts and, as a result, Da Sa operated virtually untouched.

“Can you set up a meeting for me?” McCracken asked.

He could feel Salomao’s reluctance over the phone. “Da Sa is not fond of foreigners, amigo.”

“We’ll get along just fine.”

So McCracken flew to Rio determined to reach Da Sa himself if Carlos’ efforts failed. From Galeão Airport, a thirty-minute taxi ride brought him to the São Conrado district, where he would await the call from Carlos at the Rio Sheraton. Blaine chose to stay in American-style hotels wherever possible when he traveled. Ease and comfort were important to him, when danger was always right around the corner.

He checked in at two on Saturday afternoon, and fifteen minutes later he was drinking a virgin guarãna on his room’s terrace. His fourth-floor room offered a magnificent view of the private Vigidal Beach below. It was almost summer, and the temperature in the upper eighties was made pleasant by the breeze off the sea. With his feet propped up on the plastic terrace table, Blaine felt himself starting to slip off to sleep when the phone jarred him. He answered it, expecting to hear Carlos Salomao on the other end.

“I trust your trip went well, Mr. McCracken.” It was a heavily accented voice.

“Fernando Da Sa,” Blaine said.

“I am honored that you have graced my humble surroundings. You require a meeting, no doubt.”

“It won’t take much time.”

“It will take what it must. Come to the Copacabana Beach directly in front of the Hotel Meridien in exactly one hour. My guards will be waiting.”

“How will I know them?”

“They will know you.”

Da Sa hung up without saying any more. He didn’t have to. His people had been watching McCracken since the moment he emerged from the jetway, and they would watch him all the way to the meeting.

Blaine changed into shorts and a loose-fitting shirt, then took a hotel cab the fifteen-minute stretch to the Meridien Hotel at Copacabana Beach. Cars were parked diagonally across the stone walkway separating the street from the sand, and the cab pulled into an open slot. Blaine paid the fee in the Brazilian cruzeiros he had obtained at the Sheraton and stepped out. The beach before him was enormous and, since it was Saturday, crammed with people fighting for every inch of sand. Some boys battled for soccer balls in the sand; others played volleyball.

Blaine strode toward the beach between two of the many thatch-roofed stands along the street. Native fruits and foods were available, as well as Coca-Cola. Nearby a marimba band played. McCracken was about to step out onto the beach as instructed when a pair of strikingly beautiful Brazilian women in bikinis closed in on him from either side. One was black, the other looked more Latin.

“This way,” the black woman said, and moved forward to take the lead. The other woman brought up the rear. He had expected to be met by the typical muscle-bound thugs and found the surprise quite pleasant indeed.

The women escorted him onto the fine sand of the beach. They walked carefully to avoid the cluttered patches of blankets and towels and to avoid soccer balls in flight. Blaine watched as a kicked ball rolled to a stop in front of the first guard. The young players froze. No one made a move or said a word until she had kicked it back at them.

“
Obrigado
,” one muttered.

“
De nada
,” she answered.

Close to the sea, they swung left toward a section of the beach that appeared strangely vacant. There seemed to be only a single cluster of beach chairs under a canopy. Four tall, beautiful women were going through patterned dance steps in two pairs. The moves possessed a balletlike grace, but the daring near-misses with hands and feet, along with lightning responses, suggested martial arts
kata.
As he got closer, Blaine could see the women’s bodies were layered with well-defined muscles. Sweat glistened off their washboard abdominals and bulging bronzed shoulders. In addition to these four, he now noticed three more sunbathing off to the right of the canopy.

A single clap of hands brought the quartet of female practitioners to rigid attention, chests heaving from their exertion under the hot Rio sun. Beyond them Blaine glimpsed a single figure beneath the canopy. He was seated in a half-lounge chair that seemed buried in the sand, and he made no effort to rise as Blaine drew closer.

“Step into my office, McCrackenballs,” Fernando Da Sa said.

He stretched out his long legs and clasped his hands comfortably behind his head. He wore a white shirt unbuttoned to reveal a firm midsection that protruded slightly over his bathing trunks. The flesh was the same dark bronze color as his face, accentuated further by his jet-black hair, which showed gray only at the temples. A thin, shiny mustache graced his upper lip.

McCracken stopped at the entrance to the crime lord’s canopy. A nod from Da Sa, and one of his female guards placed a beach chair directly facing his.

“Please, make yourself comfortable.”

The chair had been placed so Blaine’s shoulders remained in the sun, but the front of his body was shaded by the canopy. “You like my girls, eh, McCrackenballs?”