War Lord (27 page)

‘You want to keep that hand?’

I removed it and told her to wait until I gave the all clear. Shinnying up the wall, I then scooted along a top edge that stepped up several times. The window was open, a leap of three feet or so to reach it. I jumped out, my fingers finding the ledge, and pulled myself up with a grunt, re-bruising my forearm. A last effort and I was inside, panting. Petinski was inside too, sitting on a chair at a small table, waiting.

‘I found a door and used the stairs,’ she said with a shrug.

‘Thanks for telling me.’

Another shrug. ‘The place feels like a morgue. There’s no one around.’

Proving her wrong, a gun battle erupted somewhere close, a large volume of automatic fire.

‘Call Delaney,’ I said, squeezing past her into a stairwell. ‘Get him in here. I’m gonna see if I can locate the shooter’s hide.’

Around fifteen minutes later, after getting lost in this deserted rat’s nest several times, I stumbled on a circular staircase to a room with a trapdoor in its low ceiling. Using a chair I opened the door, lifted myself up and found a 7.62mm sniper rifle with a night scope set up on a table, its bipod and wood stock resting on sandbags. Half a dozen casings were on the floor. The window had a view down the hill, which was swarming with fifty or so BOPE troops, the gunfire now sporadic, a chopper roaring in a hover overhead while its spotlight quivered over the compound’s entrance.

‘Cooper,’ Petinski yelled out from somewhere below. ‘You up there?’ Her head came up through the hole in the floor. ‘Been looking for you. Come down. There’s something you need to see.’

P
etinski led the way through a series of rooms and narrow passageways, ever downward into the bowels of the place, passing BOPE personnel who were either directing the occasional sullen cuff-locked male or carrying large numbers of captured weapons. The von Weiss compound was in fact a warren of twenty or more individual homes interconnected by doorways cut through adjoining walls and trapdoors in the ceilings and floors.

Eventually Petinski led me to a large storeroom full of packaged and tinned food, sacks of grains, sugar, flour and so forth. Preparations for a siege, perhaps? One end wall appeared to be hinged at the floor and ceiling and was pushed out of alignment, revealing that it was, in effect, a secret door. Delaney and Robredo and a couple of his men loitered outside it, waiting for us.

‘How’d you find this?’ I asked Delaney.

‘There’s a control room. What’s inside this room was up on one of the screens. They just kept searching till they found it.’

‘Why? What’s inside?’

‘Take a look,’ said Delaney, patting his stomach with his hand as if he had a bad case of indigestion.

On the other side of the door was a large well-lit space, a cross between an operating theater and a forensics lab. The floor was tiled, a stainless-steel grate set in its center. A stainless-steel table stood over the grate. Along the three walls were benches with equipment, much of which I couldn’t identify other than to guess that it was medical. Placed on benches were glass cases lit from above with heat lamps, and large jars containing reptiles, animals and various unidentifiable gizzards suspended in formaldehyde. A flat-screen TV on one wall showed a dozen small windows that recycled surveillance camera views. But all this was incidental because beside the stainless-steel table was a large mass covered by a sheet of black plastic. Small rivers of red ooze ran like capillaries to the grate in the floor from whatever was under the plastic.

I had a bad feeling about what it might be, but I didn’t have too much time to ponder as one of Robredo’s men pulled the sheet away. Yeah, as I thought, a body. But not Shilling’s, and that was a relief. The sight of what had been done to it still made me catch my breath, though, because sitting strapped into a chair was a man, naked, and the state of him was just plain disturbing. His limbs, hands, fingers, feet and toes were swollen to ridiculous proportions. What I was looking at could have been a grotesque balloon animal. There were splits in the skin on his arms and legs where the swelling appeared to have exceeded the skin’s elasticity. His tongue was black and bloated, and had forced its way out of his mouth, spreading the jaw so wide apart that it appeared to have been dislocated from his skull. His eyes were hidden beneath puffy pillows of flesh. His neck had inflated to at least twice its normal size, a small pressure-split through a tattoo of a skull inked below his ear. A thin steel wire tied to the back of the chair cut deep into the skin around where his Adam’s apple would be, and blood had run from the wound. Quite possibly, as he’d puffed up like the Michelin Man the unfortunate bastard had garroted himself.

‘Who is he?’ I asked.

Delaney produced a driver’s license taken from a black leather wallet – the victim’s. ‘Accordin’ to this, Gustavo Santos. He was one of von Weiss’s security team.’

Delaney passed me the license. The photo bore almost no resemblance to the male duct-taped into the chair, except that a little of the skull tattoo was visible, an identifying mark that was as good as anything.

‘Why do you think von Weiss would do this to one of his bodyguards?’ I asked. ‘He must have had a reason.’

Delaney shuffled. ‘Um . . . Santos was the guy we separated from von Weiss during the bomb scare.’

I digested that. Shit, not good news. We already knew von Weiss was paranoid and believed his inner circle had been infiltrated. If Santos had been killed, then what about Shilling? She’d been isolated, too. ‘We saw von Weiss’s men bring Shilling to the compound earlier,’ I reminded him. ‘We’ve got it on tape. That’s what brought us here in the first place. So where is she? Why’ve we found this guy and not Shilling?’

‘Because they staged it,’ said Petinski. ‘They put on a show. They let us see them bring her here. They lured us into a trap, hoping to kill you and me. And when they were sure we were on our way, they disabled the camera.’

If that was true then Shilling’s cover was definitely blown. She was in mortal danger. The discovery also explained the shots fired at my head from the sniper rifle, the ambush in the house where the guy had his throat cut. Perhaps I’d been seen planting the camera. The facts sure pointed in that direction. Maybe, like Petinski said, we’d been played. And now Shilling was going to pay the price – or had already paid it – and if she paid it like the unfortunate individual we’d found here? Jesus . . .

I gestured at the body. ‘What would cause that kind of swelling?’

‘Anaphylactic shock,’ said Delaney.

‘You mean like nuts?’ I asked.

‘No, like snakebite. Robredo says he’s seen this kind of reaction before.’

‘Snakes,’ Petinski said. ‘The personal von Weiss touch.’

Was it my imagination or was I starting to hear thunder every time I heard this guy’s name? ‘I want to see that control room.’

Robredo, Delaney, Petinski and I arrived there five minutes later, a small, windowless air-conditioned shoebox stuffed with computers, phones and screens. Several personnel were already occupying chairs behind the equipment.

‘Everyone here BOPE personnel?’ I asked Delaney.

‘No, sir,’ said a woman with a broad Kentucky hills accent sitting in the chair in front of me, raising her hand.

‘Tyra’s on the cultural attaché’s staff,’ Delaney explained. ‘Tyra Marr – Vin Cooper and Kim Petinski,’ he said, introducing us. Delaney refrained from mentioning her sponsoring agency openly, although ‘cultural attaché staff’ was code for CIA.

‘Hi, y’all,’ the woman chirped.

‘Can you drive this boat, Tyra?’ I asked her.

‘Sure, no problem.’

‘You mind skipping through the security cameras one at a time?’

‘All hundred and seventy-three of them?’

A hundred and seventy-three? ‘We’ll make ourselves comfortable,’ I said.

‘You want to view the cameras out in the favela too?’

‘He’s got the whole place wired?’

‘Your suspect sure is a nervous bunny.’

Tyra shared a few words in Portuguese with her colleagues, and a black and white image of the familiar front entrance of the compound came up on the main screen. A view of the compound in its entirety appeared on a smaller secondary screen, a red wedge showing the camera’s direction and range, together with various digital readouts nailing the specifics.

‘The resolution is full HD and output can be provided in all the usual spectra. How do you want it served up?’

‘Infrared. How big are the cameras?’ I hadn’t seen a single one in the entire joint.

‘The lens is the diameter of a pinhead.’

That explained that.

‘How long do they keep recordings filed?’ Petinski asked.

‘How far back you wanna go, honey? They got terabytes of memory.’

The camera Petinski and I wanted turned out to be number fifty-seven. Tyra took the recording back to the previous evening, at about the time I was poised on top of the wall, surfing a mattress, and there I was in glorious thermal black and white. Petinski’s guess was right. The assholes had known about our attempt at surveillance from the beginning. Which meant that when von Weiss sent Petinski the French champagne with a side order of prophylactic, he was just toying with us. I felt like a putz – outwitted, outplayed and outsmarted. But it was Shilling who was going to get voted off the island.

‘What about the cameras down in von Weiss’s playroom?’ I asked.

Tyra pushed some buttons and moved a joystick. ‘If you’re hoping to get him on camera committing murder, babe, it ain’t gonna happen, I’m afraid. That history’s been wiped.’

Okay, so having the guy smiling for the birdie while his victim blew up like a football bladder was too much to hope for. I tried another angle. ‘Let’s see if we can get that Mercedes SUV arriving with Shilling.’

‘Nope, no good, neither,’ said Tyra, after isolating the relevant cameras and checking the recordings. ‘Wiped.’

Only straws were left. I took one. ‘Then let’s see if we can pick up the SUV coming into the favela. There are only two entrances, right?’

‘Let’s take a look,’ said Tyra as her team went to work. ‘No, wiped also,’ she said eventually.

‘They’ve been thorough,’ Petinski observed quietly.

‘What about checking the car’s departure?’ I asked. Petinski shook her head like it was a lost cause. I wasn’t ready to give up. ‘The Benz isn’t here now, so it must have left. We’re going to dot the t’s before we call it quits.’

Using as a starting point the time at which the recordings had been wiped at the compound, Tyra stayed on the camera with a view taking in the post office down in the valley. She then took a stab at the approximate time the Mercedes would have arrived at that point. Nothing moved on screen at all until a couple of dogs moseyed across the road. She rewound the view at five times the speed for the equivalent of ten minutes. Nothing. Then she did the same going forward. She was shaking her head and about to stop the show when headlights grew out of the shadows.

‘Hey, there it is.’ Petinski pointed at the screen as the SUV glided around the bend.

‘It took the car thirty-five minutes to leave the compound and arrive at that point,’ said Tyra. ‘Seems a little long.’

‘They stopped somewhere along the way,’ Petinski concluded.

Was it possible that von Weiss’s men had gotten lazy or maybe run out of time to erase
all
trace of the vehicle’s passage through the favela? ‘Check the cameras along the route. See if you can find where it stopped.’

The vehicle’s departure from the compound had been wiped, along with its journey most of the way to the post office. It took an hour, but Tyra and her team eventually found a camera picking up the car as it crawled out of a narrow lane.

‘Good hunch, Cooper,’ said Petinski. ‘You were right – they took a detour.’

‘Find the turnoff,’ I said.

Within minutes, Delaney, Petinski and I were racing in a convoy of BOPE SUVs down the main road, swerving around a stream of ambulances heading back up the hill. Overhead, the BOPE chopper worked the area we were headed to with its searchlight, looking for movement.

‘Cooper, I’ve been thinking,’ said Petinski quietly beside me. ‘Von Weiss has been one step ahead of us all the way. This could be another setup. Perhaps he
wants
us to search this area.’

I looked at her.

She shrugged. ‘It’s possible . . .’

Yeah, it was possible. I passed it along to Delaney. ‘Jeb, tell your friend Robredo to be careful. Could be another trap.’

*

Roadblocks were set up in the area and Robredo’s men began searching house to house. Petinski, Delaney and I were kept out of it, this being BOPE turf. After twenty anxious minutes, the sky to the east beginning to lighten, a BOPE officer appeared from behind a building and ran toward us. ‘Please, this way,’ the man said with a heavy accent when he reached us, out of breath, sweat soaking his forehead. We followed him at a jog along an alleyway that doubled back on itself and climbed through the chaotic stacked housing, and eventually arrived at a doorway guarded by Robredo and his men, their weapons at the ready.

‘What makes them think this is the place?’ Petinski murmured.

Delaney spoke briefly with Robredo, who answered him in a hurried whisper before snapping an order at one of his men. The officer responded, producing two large hand grenades of an unfamiliar type from his webbing.

‘They found these explosive devices rigged with tripwires at the access points to this house,’ Delaney said. ‘For our safety, the sergeant wants us to back it up a little.’

A pair of officers escorted us around the end of a wall and almost immediately a brace of flash bangs detonated, the ear-splitting racket amplified by the brick and cinderblock cavern. As the echoes subsided, screams and shouts from the people living in the vicinity increased in intensity and rained down on us from above. An empty beer bottle came down and smashed on the paving. A stream of urine followed along with a bucket of shit.

Robredo appeared from around the corner, breathing hard, his face haggard, and ignored the neighborhood anger. He motioned at us to follow him as he spoke to Delaney.

‘What did he say?’ Petinski asked.

‘He says this is the place,’ the CIA deputy confirmed as we walked toward a heavy red door. ‘There’s a body inside. It’s not good.’

I prepared myself. I had a feeling this was going to be worse than Mr Soufflé with his anaphylactic shock. The home we walked into was surprisingly modern and spacious inside with expensive light fittings, warm white marble slabs on the floor and classical bronze sculptures of naked women lining the walls. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the woman lying on a white mink rug in the center of the room, and my testicles felt light and vulnerable as I walked around her. It was Shilling. The familiar golden hair. She was on her side, naked. Splotches of blood stained the white mink rug and spattered her shoulders. Her olive skin was flawless, but for a triangle of paler skin across her buttocks where an ultra-brief bikini had prevented tanning. Shilling could have been asleep, except for a couple of obvious signs to the contrary, the lesser of the two being that she plainly wasn’t breathing. But that was far less striking than the other reason: her eyes, which were open and staring. I remembered them as being a steely blue and yet now they were a bright sulfurous yellow in color. Both oozed a trickle of blood and fluid from punctures. They stared out of her skull at nothing, grotesque. Petinski’s hand went to her throat as she turned away in horror. ‘Mengele. That’s what he did in Auschwitz,’ she said. ‘His experiments. He killed people trying to change the color of their eyes.’

I took a step toward the body, but a terse word from Robredo made me hesitate. Something moved in the shadows thrown by Shilling’s legs and torso. It was a large brown snake the thickness of my arm and at least as long as the woman’s body. The thing moved again, this time bringing its head up and over Shilling’s legs and along her side. Its forked tongue flicked from its mouth every few seconds, tasting the air as it brought a coil across her ribs and breast. The damn thing was challenging us.