“How did . . . ? How are . . . ?” So overwhelmed, Tamara couldn’t get a question out.
“Later” was all Juan said.
Linc carried a heavy pair of bolt cutters in a scabbard on his back. He pulled them free like a samurai drawing his katana. It didn’t take one tenth of his strength to cut the chain binding Tamara to the bed. They would remove the cuffs back on the
Oregon
.
“Have they hurt you?” Juan asked.
“Um, no. Not really. They’ve just been asking me questions about—”
“Later,” he repeated. Getting to her was the easy part of the operation. Getting them all back out was going to be tricky. “Do you know how to swim?”
She could only stare at such an apropos-to-nothing question.
“Can you?”
“Yes, why? Never mind. I know,
later
.”
Juan admired her spirit and didn’t blame Max one bit for wanting to date her. Tamara Wright had an inner core of strength that even the past few days of terror couldn’t diminish.
He tapped his comm link. “Sitrep.”
Linda’s elfin voice filled his ear. “The doorman made a call as soon as he heard the shots. I figure we’ve got a minute, tops, before the cops arrive.”
Cabrillo guessed less. “We’re on our way.”
“Mark’s ready.”
The three Americans retreated back the way Juan and Linc had assaulted the apartment. The hook hovered just outside the broken window. Linc lifted Tamara over the broken glass and set her directly atop a metal platform encircling the crane’s cable just above the hook. While it made a perfect perch for them, its purpose was to prevent rats from climbing the cable in what was a millennialong battle between rodents and mariners.
Lincoln climbed on directly behind her, shielding her body and holding her steady. “Don’t you worry. Uncle Franklin’s got you.”
“Don’t you mean Nephew Franklin?” she said.
As soon as Juan wrapped his gloved fist around the cable, Mark dropped them toward the sidewalk as smoothly as an Otis elevator. Linda had the car pulled over to the curb with the doors already opened. The windshield wipers beat furiously at the rain.
Mark jumped from the crane’s cab, and he and Linc sandwiched Tamara Wright in the backseat. The feet wells were packed with equipment, forcing Linc’s knees up by his head. Linda had slid over to the passenger’s side, leaving Juan at the wheel. Sirens sounded in the distance. He put the sedan in gear and eased away from the curb as if they didn’t have a care in the world.
Maybe the hard part is over, Juan thought, but he knew not to say it aloud.
The fates heard him anyway.
A big black town car raced into the intersection and slid to a stop a few feet from their bumper, forcing Cabrillo to jam on the brakes. Doors were thrown open, and a large bald man wearing a dress uniform erupted from the back of the Cadillac. He had a pistol in his hand and opened fire immediately.
The people in the sedan ducked as bullets cored through the windshield. Juan cranked the transmission into reverse and reached up to adjust the rearview mirror. A bullet whizzed close enough to his wrist that he could feel its hot passage, but now he could see behind them without exposing his head.
They backed up for fifty feet, beyond all but an expert’s ability with a handgun, before Juan mashed the emergency-brake pedal and spun the wheel. The wet asphalt helped him pirouette the woefully underpowered car in a slide worthy of a Hollywood chase.
He released the brake, dropped the car into first, and accelerated away. One more bullet hit the car, a wild shot that mangled one of the wing mirrors.
“Is everyone okay?” he called without taking his eyes off the road. It was like driving through a continuous waterfall.
“Yeah, we’re fine,” Mark replied. “Who was that?”
“General Philippe Espinoza, whose house we just raided. He must have been on his way back from dinner when the doorman called.”
“That was the man asking me questions,” Tamara told them, “him and the creepy Chinese guy named Sun. I could tell he was from Beijing, and I’m pretty sure he was State Security.”
“Here in Argentina on a diplomatic passport, no doubt.” The sirens were getting closer. Juan slowed. The only way out of this was to not attract attention and hope they could lose Espinoza, because the General was surely coming after them. “Mark, are you ready with our bag of tricks?”
“Say the word, Chairman.”
Juan was thinking about chain of command. Espinoza doubtlessly knew someone in the police—a chief or commissioner, most likely. Fifteen minutes would pass by the time the General called his friend, who would in turn call someone lower in the police hierarchy, and so on, until a description of their car made it to the patrols out on the streets. If they could elude Espinoza and not draw attention to themselves, they would be halfway across the city before the APB went out.
He glanced in the mirror just as the town car careened around the corner one block back. Juan was driving an overloaded Mitsubishi and had no illusions that he could outrun the big American V-8 even if the car was carrying armor, which it probably was.
Juan made two quick turns, and slowed as a police car with lights flashing went streaking past followed closely by another unmarked car.
His confidence evaporated when he saw both cars brake heavily in his mirror. It took them a few moments to turn around on this narrow street, forcing Espinoza to stop completely. Obviously, the General knew someone a lot lower down on the food chain than Cabrillo had estimated. He should have figured a man like Espinoza would know the neighborhood precinct’s commander.
In seconds, all three cars would be in pursuit, and the little Mitsubishi’s description would be on police radios all across Buenos Aires. He’d been right about one thing. Getting Tamara out of the apartment was the easy part of the night’s work.
They turned into a narrow alley, and Juan shouted, “Now,” to Mark Murphy.
Murph already had his windows down, and he began pulling pins on smoke grenades as fast as he could. These were of the Corporation’s own design and produced faster and denser smoke than even those used by the U.S. military. After the third one hit the street, Juan could see nothing behind him but a thick haze that even masked the streetlights and the illumination from second-and third-floor windows.
“Enough,” Juan said, and he made another series of random turns. His throat felt as dry as dust, but his hands remained loose on the wheel and his focus never wavered.
“Just curious,” Linc said from the backseat. “Does anyone know where we are?”
“Linda?” Cabrillo said.
She had a handheld GPS and studied the screen intently. “Yeah, I’ve got a pretty good idea. We’re heading in the general direction of the docks, but up ahead is a maze of streets. We need to cut to our left where there’s a pretty big avenue.
The town car emerged from a cross street without warning. It slid neatly behind the sedan, pressing so hard on its suspension and tires that a hubcap came loose and spun across the sidewalk like a Frisbee. The driver knew this neighborhood better than even the police who patrolled it, and had outguessed Cabrillo.
Gunfire spat from the passenger’s window, where a bodyguard leaned out with a big pistol in his hand. Linc twisted his considerable bulk and unleashed a full magazine from his machine gun. The rubber bullets were useless against the Caddie, but the psychological impact of a full-auto attack forced the chauffeur to brake hard and crank the wheel over. They scraped against a series of parked cars and set off a chain reaction of shrieking alarms and flashing lights.
Linc dropped the H&K and unholstered his Beretta. If the town car was armored, the pistol would do no more damage than rubber bullets, but it was better than nothing.
“What about more smoke?” Mark suggested.
This street was too wide to block with the grenades, so Juan said nothing and watched his mirrors. By the time the Cadillac took up the chase again, it was being tailed by the police cruiser. There would be dozens more converging on the elegant streets of the Recoleta District. They needed to ditch the car and find another.
There was a construction site to their left. The street had been torn up by large yellow excavators, and scaffolding spiderwebbed across the façade of a columned building. Juan looked closer and realized it was a large ornamental gateway. He assumed there was a park through the closed gates and turned for it, pushing the little four-cylinder for everything it had.
The car maintained traction across the muddy ground, and Juan lined up the nose.
“Brace yourselves!”
They flashed through the scaffold latticework, bounced up one low step, and slammed into the gate. Cabrillo had expected a cataclysmic impact, but the gates were being repaired and had been leaned into place at the end of the work shift. The chain holding them together stayed in place, but the ornate wrought-iron panels crashed to the ground, and the Mitsubishi roared over them. The collision didn’t even deploy the air bags.
Juan realized his mistake instantly. This wasn’t a park, and it took a few seconds to understand what it was. Laid out in neat grids like a Lilliputian city were thousands of beautiful buildings made at about one-fifth scale. They were as ornate as any they had seen all night, with marble columns, bronze statues, steepled roofs, and all manner of religious iconography.
This wasn’t a park. It was a cemetery, and those weren’t miniature buildings but, rather, grand mausoleums.
After Arlington National in Washington and Père Lachaise in Paris, the Cementerio de la Recoleta was perhaps the most famous cemetery in the world. All of the city’s most wealthy and prominent figures, including Eva Perón, were laid to rest in some of the most decorative and stunning aboveground crypts ever built. It had become a tourist destination almost as soon as it had opened.
It was also a maze too tight for a car and was walled in on all four sides.
Juan had led them into a dead end.
TWENTY-ONE
T
HEY HAD NO CHOICE BUT TO MAKE THE BEST OF HIS mistake.
“Mark, pop smoke! Everything you’ve got.”
As Murph started heaving more smoke grenades in their wake, Juan committed them to one of the wider lanes through the ranks of mausoleums. The cobbled path was tough on the car’s overtaxed suspension, and the path was so narrow that a slight miscalculation cost the Mitsubishi its remaining wing mirror.
They had gone no more than fifty feet when the footpath narrowed even further because of an oversized marble crypt. They couldn’t turn around. Juan glanced over his shoulder. Another path met this one at a diagonal. He put the car in reverse and backed into it, scraping paint off the doors against the statue of some politician or other. The only saving grace was that the rain was finally letting up a bit. Visibility was still poor, especially with the smoke drifting eerily around the tombs, but it had improved. The other consolation was neither the police car nor the Cadillac would be able to follow them.
He wondered if they would chase after them on foot and decided they probably would. The rage he had seen on Espinoza’s face could only be slaked with blood.
The car clipped a marble bust and tore it off its memorial. The stone head rolled across the cobblestones like some misshapen bowling ball. It took all of Juan’s defensive driving lessons to keep the car from caroming into the crypt on the opposite side.
He saw the path divide again and backed into the wider-looking route. It narrowed almost instantly, with a mausoleum that looked like a replica of a local church. He pulled forward and then backed down the other way. With so little light, it was next to impossible to keep straight, and again they scraped against one of the decorative monuments. He said a silent apology to the person’s ghost and kept going.
To his left flashed a larger alleyway. The turn was so tight that it took him several tries, and a lot of smashed marble and crumpled sheet metal to make it. If they somehow got out of this, Cabrillo promised himself that the Corporation would make an anonymous donation to the cemetery’s keepers.
A cat, for which this place was famous, dashed out of its hiding place right in front of the car, its fur soaked to its skin, in the glow of the only functioning headlight. Juan slammed on the brakes instinctively. The feline gave him a contemptuous look and slunk off.
The world suddenly went white. It took a second for Juan’s eyes to adjust. Overhead, an unseen helicopter had thrown on its searchlight and created an oasis of daylight in the otherwise stygian cemetery. An amplified voice echoed down from above.
Cabrillo didn’t need to translate for the others. Any order from a police chopper was pretty universal.
“Linc, do something about him, will you.”
Franklin cranked down his window and thrust his machine pistol skyward. There wasn’t enough room to lever his big torso out of the car, so he opened fire without sighting in on his target.
Seeing the tongue of flame flickering from the car was enough to convince the chopper pilot to back off, much like Espinoza’s chauffeur had done. The searchlight vanished for only a moment before the helo came back again, flying aft of them and at a greater altitude.
The trail through the tombs turned sharply, but Juan managed to scrape the car through without having to stop.
If there was any coordination between the air and ground units, the pilot would be vectoring the cops from the patrol car to their position. Juan kept a sharp eye out, craning his neck left and right, as they sped past narrow passages. He saw nothing, and was moving fast enough that even had an officer been approaching from the side he would only have time for one snap shot that would surely miss.
Then they caught a break. The path branched, and they found themselves driving on the perimeter walkway that bordered the cemetery’s exterior wall. After negotiating such close quarters, it seemed as wide as a highway.