War Lord (19 page)

W
e let the cab go and walked the last klick. Benicio von Weiss’s three-story mansion was in a damp valley, buried in an overgrown jungle of fleshy palm fronds and tropical plants, set behind a wall fifteen feet high. The road snaked around in front of it and climbed the side of the valley, providing a view down into the place.

‘Von Weiss got kids?’ I asked Petinski.

‘No. Why?’

‘Big house for a single guy.’

‘He’s rich. And he has staff.’

Right, that other-half thing again. One wing of this place was longer than the street I lived on. I took a pair of compact binoculars from my pocket and trained them on the premises. It was set in a corner by itself, away from other dwellings, the nearest neighbor being fifty yards up the street. There were surveillance cameras on the wall with interlocking fields of view. Wire also ran around the top of the wall – electrified from the look of it. No doubt there were other sensors – motion, heat, Doberman and so forth. Von Weiss defended his privacy like Area Two defended its weapons.

Conveniently, the gate set in the wall slid open just then and a glossy black Mercedes M-class drove slowly out, accompanied by outriders on KTM dirt bikes. The Mercedes windows were heavily tinted. Nothing to see there. I moved the binoculars back to focus on the gap in the wall provided by the open gate and saw two guys in some kind of uniform: tan shirt and black pants, combat boots and black ball cap.

I ran the binoculars around the surrounding area. On the hill above the house was a jungle of trees, vines and fleshy plants that came to an abrupt end where a slum began, a trash heap of dwellings, hovels built on hovels, no rhyme or reason to their shape or location, no planning ordinances.

‘That a favela?’ I asked Petinski.

‘It’s the one controlled by von Weiss’s people. Céu Cidade – Sky City.’

Céu Cidade, where the FedEx box sent to Alabama had been mailed from. ‘I’d like to check it out.’

‘We can’t go there, Cooper, not without your friends in the 82nd Airborne. Rio’s been cleaning up its favelas. At least trying to – getting ready for the Olympics and the World Cup – but there are still quite a few holdouts, Céu Cidade being one of them. It’s a distribution hot spot for much of Rio’s cocaine and weapons. Ask the wrong person the wrong question up there and you don’t get out alive. Perversely, the place also has one of the lowest murder rates in the whole country.’

‘Von Weiss runs a tight ship.’

‘And Hitler built the autobahns, but only so he could move his armies around easily.’

‘Okay, I get it – von Weiss is an evil prick. All the more reason to have a good snoop around. Randy could be up there somewhere.’

Petinski chewed the inside of her cheek. ‘You’re right . . . But how to get it done, that’s the problem.’

‘First things first. What’s on the other side of that wall?’ I motioned at the house.

‘Breaking in will put von Weiss on his guard.’

‘I’m sure he’s already on it. We need to see what sort of guy we’re dealing with. I’m going to give Jeb a call.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the Company has toys.’

‘What are you going to do, Cooper?’

‘Don’t know, but that’s never stopped me before.’

*

The driver had just finished making his delivery. We only had to tail him a short distance because he obligingly pulled into a side street off Copacabana Beach, walked a block and ducked into a strip joint offering happy hour – a beer and lap dance for twenty bucks. Great value. I made a mental note of the address.

Petinski and I doubled back to his truck, which was oily and smelled of baked engine grease. The vehicle was a virtual museum piece and therefore easy to steal. Best of all, behind the cabin was a bulk gasoline tank.

Petinski drove, taking direction from her iPhone. It was just after ten p.m. when we arrived in the vicinity of Castle von Weiss. We parked with a hiss of air brakes on the street’s shoulder, in an area of deep shadow, the tires sloshing through mud. The first step or two in the plan was thought out. The rest was, well, loose.

‘Get plenty of cover before you light ’er up,’ I said.

‘See you back here at ten-forty,’ Petinski replied, adjusting the seat belt. ‘Don’t be late.’

Our wristwatches were already synchronized. I had exactly thirty-one minutes to do whatever I was going to do before my partner drove off in another stolen vehicle and left me behind. I climbed out and coughed through a cloud of gritty diesel smoke blowing down from the exhaust pipe behind the cabin’s roof. Taking one of the small remote-detonated charges from the pouches on my chest webbing, I kneeled down and felt the magnet draw it onto the vehicle’s fuel tank, mating with a solid click. I flicked the switch from ‘standby’ mode to ‘armed’ and waited for the red light to flicker green, informing me that the device was receiving a signal from the remote in the cabin with Petinski. The second charge I placed on the steel chassis beneath the big gasoline tank and went through the same routine, waiting for the green light.

The gears ground together and the truck moved off, shuddering with serious clutch trouble toward its date with the scrap heap. I jogged after it, keeping to the shadows, and watched the taillights disappear round a bend. A handful of seconds later, I caught up with those lights again when they flared briefly, a hundred yards down the road, Petinski having tapped the brake pedal. Then she jumped, at least that was the plan. The tail lights appeared to skip sideways a little, indicating that the vehicle had rammed something solid, as planned. Confirming this, the muffled sound of crumpling metal panels and breaking glass tinkling onto the ground came back to me on the night air. A couple of breaths later, a small bang ignited the vehicle’s fuel tank and around forty gallons of diesel fuel burst into flame. A heartbeat later, a second explosion dwarfed the first as the truck’s gasoline storage tank went off like a massive incendiary and a huge orange and yellow ball of burning fumes rolled up into the night like a smoke ring blown by hell itself. The sound arrived next, a deep clap that smacked into my chest like a two-by-four. Then the heat rushed past, impossibly hot against my face considering the distance from the source.

The wreckage of the truck was alight and burning ferociously. The silence imposed on the immediate vicinity by the shock of a big explosion was giving way to cries of surprise as folks came to their senses, or at least to watch the show.

Still keeping to the shadows, I ran hard toward the roaring orange flames. They licked at the base of a pall of black smoke that doused the light spilling down from the favela on the hill. Coming closer, I saw the gate in von Weiss’s fifteen-foot-high wall open and several uniformed men run out. They formed a semicircle around the vehicle, probably trying to deduce whether some unfortunate soul might be cooking behind the steering wheel. Or maybe to see if someone was going to break out a pack of marshmallows to roast. Residents from the favela swarmed down the hill and were joined by their neighbors in the valley, rich mingling with poor.

I left the shadows and walked along the wall to the open gate as two guards rushed out, one carrying a bucket of water that he sloshed over himself, the other a fire extinguisher. The heat of the fire forced them back, along with the crowd, and the spectacle kept everyone entertained. I slipped inside the perimeter and flipped down the night vision goggles on my head.

Half the house was dark with no electric lights on. In the other half, it was a different story. Probably where the live-in security force bunked, I figured. Aside from money and privacy, I wondered what else this von Weiss character was so keen to keep to himself with all the security; perhaps a milk can that packed a kiloton punch, or a former Air Force pilot kept against his will. I headed for the darkened wing I believed to be unoccupied, taking a suppressed Glock borrowed from the Company out of the holster on my chest webbing. There was no point wasting time trying to finesse my way in, picking door locks that I figured were going to be top of the line. I had maybe five minutes to snoop around before the guards realized there was no one to rescue, lost interest in the truck and got back to the job of patrolling. I cocked the Glock’s slide and fired three rounds into the door at the top hinge area, the solid hardwood splintering. The hinge at about waist height was next, followed by the one around eight inches above the marble stoop. A couple more shots sputtering from the suppressor into the wood around the lock did the trick and a slight push from my shoulder finished the job, the door giving way with a crack of seasoned timber.

I dropped the Glock’s mag and exchanged it for a fresh one before inviting myself in. Out on the road, a helpful secondary explosion accompanied by several shouts and a cry from a woman reinvigorated the crowd’s interest in the tanker while I stepped into a world that smelled of rosewood and furniture polish. The guards watching the security cameras in the other wings had better be distracted. If not, I’d know about it soon enough.

Opposite the front door was a wide stairway up to the second floor – bedrooms, I guessed. I took a random left-hand turn instead and moved across a spacious lounge room where the furnishings were old and heavy and from another era. From what I could make out, the oil paintings on the wall were mostly religious scenes illustrating various impressions of either heaven or hell. Others showed children walking alone or holding an adult’s hand. There were busts, too – bronzes on marble plinths. The place felt less like a home and more like an art gallery dedicated to images that were a little on the creepy side. I kept working my way through the house – bathrooms, sitting rooms, a library and a reading room. I came to another locked door so I Glocked away its hinges. Inside was a study with a desk, a couch, a bookshelf, and a fish tank with a lamp pointed into it that flared brightly in the NVGs’ lenses and made me look away. Completing the furniture ensemble was a glass wall cabinet displaying various military automatic weapons. Oh yeah, and two large red, white and black flags with swastikas crossed over a bronze bust of Adolf Hitler raised on a plinth.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at the display, given what I knew about von Weiss’s lineage, but I was. At least my uneasiness about the decor was resolved. It paid homage to Germany of the 1930s – Hitler’s Germany. A quick inspection of the books revealed them to be mostly German-, English- and Portuguese-language natural history reference books on snakes and reptiles – no surprises there. The light caught a familiar title, the words pressed into the spine and finished with gold leaf. There were two volumes. I souvenired volume one, stuffed it into my webbing and went back to scouting the room. On the wall opposite the flags was a panoramic hand-colored photograph of a Nazi rally, Hitler in jackboots facing a bank of microphones. He was addressing what could easily have been half a million men in uniform. Above and behind Hitler a huge eagle perched on top of a swastika like it was squatting on an egg.

The room was part study, part private shrine. There were other photographs on the walls of Nazi officers and officials. I recognized Himmler and Göring in separate pictures, in the company of another officer from the SS who didn’t look so familiar. But I’d seen one of the buildings in the pictures many times over the years – railway tracks leading to an archway beneath an observation tower in a broad front of red-brown brick. I didn’t have to read the caption to know this was the main gate to Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi extermination camp. Handwriting on the white mat around the photo confirmed it: ‘Hauptsturmführer Mengele. Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Frühling, 1943.’ In the photo, a line of around twenty sallow, skeletal male camp inmates dressed in black and gray striped pajamas stared at the ground. Two SS guards accompanied them, one of them a dog handler leashed to an animal with a sloping hyena-like spine. The caption fingered Mengele as the unknown officer in the other Kodak moments. In this one he was smiling at the prisoners, enjoying a moment of benevolence. Or maybe he was considering what he could do to them back in his surgery.

A shadow momentarily flickered in the small amount of light coming through the door. I had time to lift a hand to protect my head from the object swinging toward it. Something heavy gave my forearm a glancing blow and sent a bolt of pain shooting through the bone, and I backed away from the shadow, which was in fact a medium-sized guy with a flat, bearded face. He had a holster on his hip – empty. Maybe he was off duty when he saw the damage to the front door and came to investigate the reason for the excessive elbow grease applied to open it. He swung again before I could show him the Glock, but he misjudged the distance in the dark. Unless of course he was gunning for the fish tank, in which case he got plenty of wood on the ball. The glass shattered loudly, and then made even more noise when it all crashed onto the floorboards. I flinched, anticipating the rush of water, but there was none. The guard stood still, breathing hard, his eyes wide and suddenly frightened, looking at where the tank had been. He gave a scream, which strangled in his throat, dropped the brass candlestick dangling from his hand, and ran out the door. From the corner of the tunnel vision offered by the NVGs, I saw something long and black move across the floor, whippet fast, and disappear under a cabinet. Time to go before Rodriguez returned with more batters.

*

Two types of sirens approached, their interwoven wailing piercing the night. The fire brigade and the police, I figured. The crowd gathered around the burning truck had grown to about a hundred. Most of the ferocity had gone out of the flames though the bonfire was still generating plenty of heat. I stayed in the shadows as much as I could, keeping my back to the flames when I couldn’t, and made my way up the road. Three police cruisers and two fire trucks blew past in a traveling thicket of flashing electric light. Petinski met me a couple of hundred yards farther on in a stolen Hyundai, hidden from the street beneath an overhanging tree, its headlights winking. I jogged over and hopped in through the open passenger-side door.