There was nowhere to go. Jaguaribe backed away from the path. There was a flash of movement in the corner of his eye – golden lightning. A viper sank its fangs into the soft flesh of his cheek, then dropped to the ground, disappearing into the leaf litter. Jaguaribe shrieked. The poison – it was as if someone had whipped his face with a length of barbed wire. Running forward now, Jaguaribe brought his wrecked hands to his head, which was on fire, the venom moving through his blood vessels like boiling acid. He staggered, falling into a bush, and felt the needlepoints of another snake’s fangs puncturing his lips. He screamed again. The pain, excruciating.
Jaguaribe’s panic overwhelmed him. He crawled farther into the bushes, feeling as though his skin was being peeled away from his skull. A large snake dropped down from a low tree bough and sank its fangs into the soft padding around his waist. As he struggled to his feet it got caught up in his shirt and bit him over and over, emptying its venom glands into the flesh around his ribs.
When the poison hit his brain Jaguaribe dropped to his knees, the pain like slashing knives inside his head. In the small part of his mind still functioning, he was aware that he was shaking uncontrollably. And then the last vestige of consciousness that was Diogo Jaguaribe blew out like a small candle, leaving only nothingness.
*
‘He didn’t survive long,’ said Salvadore, walking behind von Weiss up the track toward the body prostrate on the ground. The skin on the dead man’s face was purple and the tongue swollen, filling his mouth.
‘No,’ von Weiss replied. ‘Not long. Exciting, yes?’ He glanced over his shoulder at Salvadore and snapped, ‘Be careful! You nearly stepped on one!’
Salvadore hopped over the snake as it struck at his boot, its head glancing off the plastic. ‘I am sorry, O Magnifico,’ said Salvadore uneasily. The boss’s passion for these vile creatures was something he found unsettling. It was an obsession, perhaps even a weakness. He pointed at the leaf litter just off the path. ‘There’s one there on the ground, see?’
Von Weiss deftly scooped the adolescent golden snake into the bend of the hook and deposited it in a bag.
And then the body on the ground moved.
‘Did you see that? Is it possible he is not dead?’ asked Salvadore, eyes wide.
Von Weiss lifted a corner of Jaguaribe’s shirt with the hook, revealing half a dozen snakes coiled on the corpse’s back, soaking up the remaining heat. Another viper made its way out from inside the dead man’s pants. Salvadore shivered.
‘They’re pit vipers, drawn to warm blood. Nothing attracts them like the heat of live flesh,’ said von Weiss, handing the sack to Salvadore. ‘Hold this.’ Von Weiss dropped two snakes into it.
‘The Navy will find him,’ Salvadore said. ‘There will be an investigation.’
‘We’re taking him back with us. I would like to see what the venom does to muscle tissue.’
‘Yes, O Magnifico,’ said Salvadore, his skin crawling as he watched another snake wriggle its way out from inside Jaguaribe’s pants.
A
s the crowd packing the theater applauded the lavish production, Alabama and several other girls made their way quickly to the back of the stage, deftly avoiding the many holes in the floor where other sets had their anchor points.
Alabama noticed that her nipples were standing out like pacifier teats. All the topless ‘talls’ had their headlights on tonight, she noticed. She didn’t think anyone out in the audience would be concerned about it. Something must be in the air.
The costume Alabama wore for this scene was no more than a bikini bottom and a skimpy sarong open at the front, both items dripping with blue cut glass, green Swarovski crystal, and gold and silver sequins. And the headdress was enormous. She called it ‘the dodo’. It weighed more than a large Thanksgiving turkey, was covered in more cut glass and Swarovski crystals, and sprouted alternating blue and black bands of ostrich feathers. The effort required to keep the dodo perched on her head kept her warm, and though Alabama knew how heavy it was, she was damned if the audience was going to be aware of the discipline it took to manage it.
Alabama was just over six feet tall with auburn hair, blue eyes, a perfect thirty-six-inch C-cup, and large, eye-catching pink nipples that were the envy of the other ‘talls’. She’d come to Vegas three years ago from Omaha, looking for work as a dancer, which wasn’t easy when you towered over almost everyone including most of the male partners. But employment had been found eventually, in the cast of the famous Donn Arden’s Jubilee Showgirls, and she’d managed to hold on to it despite the competition from new girls turning up on a weekly basis hoping to break in.
Alabama hadn’t intended to stay long. Her plan had been to get some experience and move on after a season or two. But that had all changed after she’d met Randy Sweetwater, a pilot just out of the Air Force, who’d been stationed at nearby Nellis Air Force Base. Meeting him had sealed her commitment to Vegas and the Showgirls – at least for the foreseeable future. They had planned for Randy to get a job with the airlines, but right now he was making incredible money ferrying private planes around the country, and sometimes to other parts of the world, for a local Las Vegas aviation broker.
When she reached the change rooms, heat laced with suggestions of physical exertion and lavender soap billowed from the doorway. One of the stagehands passed Alabama a bottle of water. ‘Thanks,’ she told him, taking a swig as two of the dressmakers lifted the dodo off her head so that she could enter the room. Most of the other topless talls were already sitting at their mirrors, touching up makeup, re-gluing an eyelash or two, gossiping, joking, hurrying through their between-scenes routines, preparing for the show’s finale.
Alabama picked up a small battery-operated fan and held it in front of her face for a few moments before giving her underarms a turn. She took another long drink of water then changed out of her blue and green costume and into the briefest of bikinis covered almost entirely in white crystal and gold sequins, and a matching choker. The headdress that went with this ensemble was a yellow number and would be lowered onto her head and shoulders by three stagehands just prior to her appearance on stage.
‘Three minutes!’ called the stage manager.
‘’Bama, honey,’ said Sugar, a black girl from New Orleans with a Cajun father, ‘a package come for y’all. It’s at yo’ station.’ Sugar was new to the show and she was also currently the girl all the straight males in the cast were trying to screw. She was short by the talls’ standards – barely five eleven – but her proportions were perfect and her glossy milk-coffee skin had the warm sheen of silk. Sugar swung her hips as she walked, which made her butt and breasts jiggle. Yep, thought Alabama, Sugar was ridiculously cute and deserved all the attention she got. The black girl glanced over her shoulder and caught Alabama admiring her, which caused a hint of mischief to raise the corners of Sugar’s full lips. Alabama had joked with Randy that maybe
he
should be jealous of Sugar. He might come home one day and find the Cajun beauty in bed with her, taking his place. This conversation had ended up where talk like that usually did – with them fucking, the bedroom windows open to the desert heat, their sweat soaking the sheets and the taste of each other in their mouths. The memory of his last night before taking off for Australia came back to Alabama as she dressed, and a shiver ran up her back as a warm wetness bloomed between her legs.
‘Is it hot in here?’ she asked aloud, snatching up the fan for another cooling blast.
The package Sugar mentioned was indeed on her chair: a FedEx bag. Who would have sent it? Randy would still be in the air, so it couldn’t be from him. Intriguing, she thought.
‘Two minutes!’ came the call.
Several of the girls left the room to get their headdresses fitted. Alabama glanced in the mirror. Her makeup was fine. You’ve got plenty of time, she told herself. Reaching for a pair of dressmaker’s scissors, she sliced off one end of the bag and found a Styrofoam box inside.
Styrofoam?
Now even more curious, she cut the tape securing the lid on the box and opened it.
What the . . . ?
Dry-ice vapor surged out and rolled around the rim of the box, onto the seat of the chair and then onto the floor, and she felt the coldness of it on her feet and toes. Alabama turned the portable fan onto the box to clear away the white mist and get a better view of whatever was inside. A few chunks of dry ice sat on top of what appeared to be a sheet of clear plastic wrap frosted up with the cold.
Now running out of time, Alabama picked up the box and tipped it out on the floor. A black plastic container came out upside down, along with more chunks of dry ice. It was the sort of container steak or ground beef bought from the supermarket came packaged in. Was this some kind of practical joke? She turned the container over and wiped away the frost on the plastic, and a scream strangled in her throat. Inside the container was a human hand. On one of its fingers was an Air Force Academy ring. She recognized it. Randy’s
.
I
stood in the doorway of the room I shared with two other agents at the Office of Special Investigations, Andrews Air Force Base in DC, both of whom were currently away working cases. No one had moved in to claim the space I’d vacated, so it was a time capsule of sorts. My chair was pushed up to the desk, which was spotlessly clean and tidy – so clean and tidy, in fact, that it looked like someone else’s desk. On the wall was one of those gray felt-covered pin boards seen all around here. Typically, it was covered with notes pinned to other notes, several layers of paper: Post-its, bills of lading, consignment notes, printed-out emails, newspaper and magazine clippings, photographs and identikits. On this board, though, none of the papers was current or even relevant, all of them referring to cases long since concluded, favorably or otherwise. The board reminded me of a photo I saw in
Time
of the anonymous sheets of paper lying in a dust-blown Manhattan avenue the day the Towers came down.
Noticing a photo frame on my spotless desk, I wondered how it had found its way there. It showed my uncle and a few of his buddies standing around a 105mm battery in ’Nam in ’71, shirts off, runt-like chests on display, shell casings scattered on the mud all around them. There was nothing else of a personal nature in the office, except for a half-size promotional Redskins football on the floor. A stack of mail bound with a thick red elastic band was rolled beside the computer keyboard, just begging to be left unattended for another month or two. In front of the keyboard was a small stack of loose papers, a Post-it note with the words
Do these first
stuck on the top sheet.
I sighed. The hardest thing about leaving is coming back, even when the place you went to had folks shooting at you or trying to put you in the slammer. I pulled out the chair and sat. The sooner I could get a skin of mold growing on a half-empty mug of coffee or two the more comfortable I’d feel about sitting here.
I glanced at the stack of papers. The top one was a handwritten note on the commander’s personal stationery,
BRIGADIER GENERAL JAMES WYNNGATE
embossed in black at the top of the page. In fountain pen he’d written,
Glad to have you back in the fold, Vin. The place would have been too quiet without you, going forward. And congratulations!
Hmm . . . the boss liked it quiet, so maybe he wasn’t altogether glad. And the congratulations bit – congrats for what, exactly? Beating the Article 128 charge – assault with a deadly weapon occasioning grievous bodily harm? That was last week’s news. And surely it wasn’t because I’d reached number twelve in
People
magazine’s list of the ‘World’s Sexiest People’, either, an achievement that had more to do with the PR machine of a certain celebrity whose ass I’d helped pull out of the fire than any genuine sexiness on my account.
I pushed the general’s message to the side and moved on. Second note of the day answered one of the questions raised by the first. Here I was looking at a letter from the Secretary of the Air Force, officially informing me that I’d won the Silver Star for bravery under fire in Afghanistan, and that the medal would be awarded in a month’s time.
I put that letter aside too. Next on the stack was a third note from Wynngate, a copy of an all-staff email. The subject line read,
Guaranteeing positive outcomes during personal interactions going forward.
This, in fact, was far more like the sort of bonhomie I’d come to expect from the boss. The guy was a stickler for political correctness, applying it like a tourniquet around any ‘personal interactions’ here at Andrews, in the hope that they’d all turn gangrenous and drop off. General Wynngate was the master of bureau-babble, the mindless double-speak of the desk-bound management set. Mostly, no one had a clue what the guy was on about, which meant that he could never be accused of getting it wrong – probably an asset when you spent most of your time buddying up to folks on the Hill, which he did. Wynngate’s sentences were as long as the human genome and just as complicated. It also struck me that he managed to work the phrase ‘going forward’ into just about everything. I reread the email: the general required everyone at OSI to do the accompanying test to determine each individual’s strengths and weakness in the compatibility department, or something. I flicked over to the test, which was attached, and caught the words ‘Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Assessment’.
‘You done it yet?’ Lieutenant Colonel Wayne asked, leaning on the doorjamb behind me.
I swung around. Arlen Wayne. I guess I’d call the guy my wingman. He was also my supervisor. A year ago we were both majors, but he’d since climbed a rung higher than me. And his reward was that he got to push even more paper around a desk. These days he was running a large chunk of the operation here at OSI HQ, Andrews Air Force Base. He was older than me by a couple of years, his brown hair starting to lighten at the temples and a few extra pounds gathering around his gut. Nothing a bottle of Just For Men and a week in the sack with a nymphomaniac wouldn’t fix. ‘Done what?’ I asked him.
‘The personality test.’
‘Yep, scored a hundred percent.’
‘It’s not that kind of test, Vin. You don’t
score
anything. There are no wrong answers.’
‘Doesn’t that mean there are no
right
answers? And if there are no right or wrong answers, wouldn’t it also follow that said test is a complete waste of time?’
Arlen came in and took a chair belonging to one of the absent agents. ‘We’ve all taken it. It’s gonna tell the Man what pigeonhole you fit into.’
‘Going forward,’ I said.
‘Going forward, what?’
‘Forget it.’
‘Y’know, Vin, I think you need to absquatulate.’
‘Is that something you do one-handed?’
‘No.
Absquatulate
,’ he said. ‘According to Google, absquatulate is the most ridiculous word in the English language. I looked it up. It means to run away, and it usually also means to take someone with you.’
‘You feeling okay, bud?’
‘Think about it at least. You’re owed a few weeks. Afghanistan Command has released you back to OSI. You were off active duty for quite a while, pending the court martial, and your place at Security Ops there has been filled since you left. I know you’ll be disappointed to hear that.’
‘Heartbroken,’ I said, mentally pumping my fist in the air at this news. I was over Afghanistan and I was thrilled to hear that the fucked-up joint was over me. I tapped the photo of my uncle. ‘Where’d you find this?’
‘In one of your drawers after you left. Thought it might add a little welcome-home warmth to the place,’ he said, glancing around at the mostly bare walls.
‘What’s a type indicator?’ I asked.
‘You heard of Myers and Briggs?’
‘Nope.’
‘They were psychologists – a mother–daughter team. They developed a psychometric test to identify various personality types, based on theories proposed by psychiatrist Carl Jung. He—’
‘Can you see my eyes glazing over?’
‘You asked. The test is supposed to work out how you process the world around you. Myers and Briggs believed that there were four opposite pairs of psychological differences in people, or sixteen different psychological types – type indicators.’
‘You’re sounding like Wynngate.’
Arlen grinned. ‘Maybe just take the test and we’ll see what comes out.’
‘Which pigeonhole do
you
belong in?’
‘The general thinks that we’ll all get on better and work more efficiently – you know, “enhance team dynamics” – if we understand each other’s psychological differences.’
‘Nuts.’
‘It’s called the modern workplace.’
‘Again, what did the test reveal about
you
?’ I asked.
‘That I’m popular, easygoing and know how to get the best out of people,’ said Arlen.
‘So basically: nice guy, but a little sly.’
‘It’s going on the bottom of all my emails.’
‘What is?’
‘My type indicators are ENTP – extraversion, intuition, thinking, perception. The general wants everyone to put their type indicators on their emails so that the receiver knows what kind of person the sender is. Though in your case I think the word is already out.’
‘Does this test have to be done now?’
‘No hurry. Before you leave for the day will do.’
‘Right.’ I put it aside.
‘Seriously, why don’t you just take it easy for a couple of days?’ said Arlen. ‘You’ve been through a lot with the court martial.’
In fact, the wringer was what I’d just been through, and mostly because I was guilty of exactly what they said I’d done, which was pistol-whipping a Department of Defense contractor by the name of Beau Lockhart at a US training base in Rwanda. Worse, I’d entertained twenty witnesses while doing it. But the asshole deserved it, and luckily for me some photographic evidence of the contractor’s involvement in murder and human trafficking came to light just in time to save me from doing eight years in Leavenworth with guys who get hard-ons looking at a hair-clogged drain hole. ‘Which reminds me, how’s the investigation into Lockhart coming along?’
‘The prosecution’s case is rock-solid. He’ll go away for several lifetimes,’ said Arlen, leaning down to pick up the Redskins football on the floor. He tossed it over. I caught it, lobbed it back.
‘What about Charles White? Anything new on him?’ White was Lockhart’s gun-smuggling partner, providing the weapons for the bloodbath going on in a nasty little part of the eastern Congo. Arlen had debriefed me on the guy shortly after the conclusion of my court martial.
‘Nothing I haven’t already told you,’ Arlen said, firing the ball back at me.
What he’d told me was that Charles White was former Marine Recon, honorably discharged three years ago with the rank of sergeant. He was then employed by FN Herstal and lasted six months there, after which he fell off the radar for a time. Interpol believed he was involved in the illegal weapons trade, which I could confirm. Arlen also told me that White had plenty of contacts within the US military, was believed to now be living in Rio de Janeiro and was moving around on false passports. ‘What about the M16s with their numbers removed that we recovered from the Congo? Any news on them?’
‘Other than they were manufactured by FN Herstal? Nothing, except that it suggests a possible connection to White, given that FN once employed him. As for the numbers, professionals removed them and we still don’t even know what batch the rifles came from or what the manufacturing date was. For all we know they were pilfered right off the assembly line.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Right now, I’m not sure what I think. Some solid evidence would be handy.’
‘Or even a lead, by the sound of things.’ I tossed him the Redskins ball overhand, imparting a spin to it. Arlen caught it, and spun it right back. ‘So what’s the next move?’
‘There isn’t one,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We’re off the case.’
I dropped the ball. ‘Who says?’
‘The DoD.’
‘Why?’
‘This one’s too big for OSI – it goes across service lines and happened overseas.’
‘When were you told to stand down?’
‘An hour ago.’
‘So who’s on it?’
‘CIA.’
‘You’re kidding,’ I said.
‘I wish I was.’
The Company shot itself in the foot so often it had no toes left. But aside from that, picking up the threads of that case was the only work I was interested in doing. ‘So what now?’
‘For you? We’ve got a couple of deserters from Lackland AFB to chase down. We think they’re involved in the drug trade, possibly with a Mexican cartel. Thought you might like to take it on. Mexico . . . beaches . . .’
I flicked him the ball and sucked a little air between my front teeth.
Arlen shrugged at the lack of traction he seemed to be getting. ‘We haven’t had a chance to talk about the report. You’ve read it, right? You want to talk about it?’
‘I read it. And let’s skip it.’
‘Okay . . .’
The report Arlen was referring to concerned the death of the late Special Agent Anna Masters. Masters and I had been close – partners and, well,
partners
. She died in a shootout. There was a lot of lead flying around at the time and some of it was mine. I’d gone a ways down the road thinking it was my bullet that killed her, but a forensic report just completed a week ago – many months after her death – confirmed otherwise. Whether it was my bullet or not, I’d always carry the guilt. She was gone. Nothing could change that.
‘Vin, it’s been eight months. Time to move on.’
I didn’t respond. Arlen juggled the ball back and forth between his hands. ‘You don’t want to go to Mexico on a case? Your call, I can accept that. How about instead I make it easy and fill out a 988 for you? All you’d have to do is sign it.’
I nodded.
‘Take some time, buddy,’ he continued. ‘You need it,
and
you deserve it.’
The 988, or more correctly the AFF 988, was the request leave/authorization form. I couldn’t skip Dodge unless it was properly filled out and countersigned by my supervisor, which happened to be Lieutenant Colonel Arlen Wayne here. ‘All right, you win. Put me down for a week or two,’ I said.
‘There you go . . . So, what you gonna do?’
Before she was killed, Anna had said she was headed to her sister’s scuba-diving business in the West Indies. She’d told me she was leaving the Air Force to get her diving instructor’s license and work on her all-over tan. The memory of that conversation came with a picture of her bronze body lying in the sunshine, naked. ‘Maybe I’ll go to the West Indies – get in some diving,’ I said.
‘The West Indies. That’s not so far. Maybe I could come for a few days, stitch it onto a weekend.’
‘Satchquatch.’
‘Absquatulate.’
‘Yeah, you need a holiday too,’ I told him. ‘Give all those paper cuts time to heal.’
Arlen managed a smile, but only just. ‘Why don’t I come over to your place later? We can talk about it and maybe go out for a drink.’ He let the ball drop to the floor and tapped it into the corner with his toe. ‘A new bar’s opened over your way. They get a young crowd. Maybe we could go there and cut a couple out of the herd. What do you say, Hopalong?’