‘What do you want to do, Cooper, go up there and accuse von Weiss of stealing a WMD?’
She had a point. And she was right about me wanting to do
something
, but what? My mind was a blank.
‘Look, we’re not the only people on this, Cooper,’ she again reassured me. ‘But we’re the only people on this
here
. We play it by the book and do what we can.’ She motioned at her camera. ‘Most importantly, we stay in the background and don’t blow our cover. Fate has put us in the box seat. Let’s just see what happens.’
I didn’t like it, but I had no alternative.
Petinski removed the chip from her camera and thumbed in a fresh one. I glanced around. There wasn’t much for me to do. ‘You want a Coke or something?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, it’s hot,’ she said, glad to give her trophy partner a task.
‘Back in a minute.’ I brushed a wasp out of my face and went off in the direction of the vendor. Along the way I saw a sign pointing to the washrooms and decided to make a detour there first. I found them eventually on the side of the mountain, roughly below the bar occupied by von Weiss and company. According to a traffic cone, the women’s was closed for cleaning but the men’s was still open. A kid appeared in the doorway, struggling with his fly. His mother, loitering nearby, berated him for dawdling, their cable car on the verge of departure. I went around behind them into the dimly lit cinderblock structure. There wasn’t a lot of ventilation inside, so I breathed through my mouth, leaned over the urinal and thought of running water. Halfway through the business, a man came and stood beside me, grunted, then exhaled loudly with relief. Neither of us acknowledged the other, both of us willing a veil of privacy around our personal space as we answered the call of nature.
Finished, and with a sense of being pleasantly unburdened, I zipped my fly, drew back from the urinal and washed my hands under a tap in a putrid basin. No towels in the wall dispenser. I shook the water off as the other guy arrived to take his turn at the basin. He came into the light: a heavy-set black man with meaty shoulders and traps so pumped up that he didn’t appear to have a neck, except that his expensive pink-and-white-striped tie had to be looped around something. On his black cheeks the stubble was short, coarse, sharp as iron filings and uniformly arranged as if aligned by a magnet under his skin. A mid-length ’fro stood out on his head a couple of inches. He glanced sideways at me and our eyes met for less than a second – more than enough time for us to realize that we had met once before, and that I had to kill him before he killed me. He roared and charged at my midsection, buried the point of his shoulder into my solar plexus and drove me into the wall. My head slammed into the empty paper towel dispenser and I felt the box crumple with the impact. He then tossed me hard into the concrete-block wall and I dropped like an old suitcase with a broken handle. A kick to the ribs came next; the kick was his and the ribs were mine – I’d have preferred it the other way round. The air rushed out of my lungs and wouldn’t come back. I couldn’t breathe. He bent over me to smash his elbow into my face. I moved and he missed, which opened up the angle to his nutsack making it fair game for the toe of my boot. So I drove it up, burying it between his legs, using the last of my strength. The man cried out and slumped to the floor beside me, curled into a ball, groaning.
Air started to work its way back into my lungs. I managed to suck down a breath, then another. The man came unsteadily to his feet, standing over me. Maybe he had small nuts and my kick had missed the spot.
‘Get up,’ he panted.
I came to my feet slow, using the wall.
‘Show me your hands.’
I showed them – empty.
His weren’t, not entirely. A dull black Walther fitted with a suppressor the size of a pork sausage occupied his right.
He put the gun in his jacket pocket with some difficulty, the sausage making it tricky, and poked it at me. I didn’t know this goon by name, but I never forget a face. And neither did he, it seemed. Around six months ago I’d laid eyes on him a couple of times in Cyangugu, a small town on the Rwandan side of the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. US advisors were on the ground there training a force of former insurgents, preparing them for integration into the DRC’s army. At the time, I was in-country on close protection duties, babysitting a pair of touring celebrities entertaining our advisors. This asshole was there riding shotgun for Charles White, who was selling stolen US-made weapons to all takers, including claymores like the one that almost gave me a haircut. I guessed he was aware that Chuck and I weren’t on the best of terms.
‘What now?’ I asked him.
‘We go for walk,’ he replied with a heavy French accent.
‘Then what?’
‘You know what. Turn around.’
As I began to do as he asked, the metal hand-towel dispenser remodeled by my head pivoted off its bracket, dropped off the wall and fell with a ringing clatter onto the concrete floor. The suit with the gun flinched a little, blinked and half turned, taking the gun in his pocket offline. I had maybe half a second. I used it to grab his tasteful silk tie, and yanked it as hard as I could, pulling it toward me. His body was twisted slightly and the force came from an odd direction. He teetered on his front foot, off balance, which I compounded by pulling down one side of his jacket, pinning an arm. I aimed a right cross at his chin and shortened the blow an inch or two so that the point of my elbow crashed into his nose. His hands went to his face and he reeled back. I helped him on his way, grabbing a handful of ’fro and bouncing his head off the wall. There was a loud
clink
as his teeth came into contact with the water pipes running down to the basin, and a couple of them flew out of his mouth and dropped into it, rattling like glass marbles against the porcelain. The pipe also caught his forehead, dazing him, and he slumped to the ground, the Walther clattering out of his hand.
I looked around, panting, unsure what to do, my heart working overtime. I couldn’t leave this ape in the toilet block, and I didn’t want him raising any alarm bells with the White brothers and von Weiss. I had to get him out of here and dispose of him somewhere, somehow.
I picked up the Walther and stuffed it in the back of my pants, then frisked him. His wallet and three magazines of what looked to be armor-piercing rounds became mine. Obviously, this guy wasn’t going to let a little body armor stand in the way of a kill.
‘Hey, you in there . . .’
It came from outside. A woman’s voice. It was a whisper, a hoarse whisper meant for me. It didn’t sound like Petinski. I wondered if maybe it was police. If so, how’d they know to address me in English rather than Portuguese? Maybe it wasn’t police . . .
A woman appeared at the entrance, blonde and attractive. I’d seen her before.
‘I’m armed and dangerous, honey,’ I said.
‘That makes two of us.’
She showed it to me. Small, .22 caliber, gold plated, pearl handle.
Unsure about what to do, I propped the unconscious brute against the wall, leaned on him and checked the Walther in case I needed to use it in a hurry. ‘What do you want?’ I asked her, stalling, taking the Walther off safety.
‘You’re CIA, formerly OSI. Your name’s Cooper. I saw a picture of you walking into the tailoring shop over the CIA station downtown.’
‘And you’re von Weiss’s toy.’
‘More accurately, I’m Emma Shilling, MI6. We’ve got three minutes, perhaps less, before someone comes looking for me. And in the meantime you’re going to need help dealing with that.’
I figured she meant the sack of shit propped up like a drunk against the wall. ‘Put your costume jewelry away and come in with your hands where I can see them.’ MI6. I couldn’t check that the woman was who she said she was, but I figured she’d’ve shot me if she wasn’t.
Slipping the weapon into a gold mesh purse, she clickety-clacked into the lavatory block on strappy heels. ‘What happened?’
‘He splashed on my shoes.’
‘You’re fucking crazy. He’s got friends just around the corner.’
‘The guy jumped me. We’d met before – another time and place. My cover was blown in a heartbeat.’
‘We have to get rid of him.’
‘He’s too big to flush. I tried.’
The MI6 agent – if that’s what she was – wasn’t exactly outfitted for body disposal. Her dress was a white pleated fabric only slightly heavier than air, and it floated as if in slow motion around her slim, fit body. The unconscious sack of shit had blood oozing down his chin. I took my jacket off and handed it to her. ‘If you’re gonna help, put this on.’
She took the jacket. ‘Wash his face.’
She spoke with a clipped English voice, like any moment she was going to ask me if I liked fox hunting. It was an upper-class public-school accent. I’ve hung out with enough Brit SAS guys to recognize one when I heard it. Turning on the tap in the sink, I cupped some water onto his nose and mouth and rinsed off most of the blood. Two teeth had been trapped by the grate over the drain hole. I pocketed them. When I was done, the woman threw on my jacket, turned inside out and worn wrong way round like a smock, and hooked her arms under his.
‘We’re between cable cars,’ she said. ‘As soon as a fresh load of tourists arrives, a queue will form here, so we don’t have long. There’s a path down there, a kind of nature walk. Out the door, down some stairs and veer left.’
I shouldered most of the guy’s weight and made for the door, his feet taking one step for every three of mine. The woman acted like a rudder, guiding him from behind. A middle-aged Asian male heading for the john cut across our path with his wife, a short, thickset woman wearing jeans and a tourist t-shirt with the statue of Christ on it, arms outstretched. Both stopped and gaped at us disapprovingly as if thinking surely it was a little early in the day to be falling down drunk.
‘Something he ate. Too much iron,’ I explained to them as we stumbled past.
The man hurried his wife out of our way and pointed her toward the lavatory block.
‘Down there,’ directed the nicely dressed British agent.
I half fell down the steps and dragged our now semi-conscious captive with me. He was a heavy fuck. I wasn’t going to be able to haul him too much farther.
‘Left,’ said the woman.
The path cut a tunnel through heavy jungle. Beyond the leaves and scrub were glimpses of another part of Rio across the bay, rising whitely from more turquoise shoreline.
‘How much farther?’ I grunted.
‘Thirty yards or so.’
The heavily concussed man staggering between us was regaining more control over his limbs with every step. He was going to snap out of it properly any moment and I wanted him down on the ground with a gun in his face when that moment arrived.
‘To the right,’ the woman said as a fork in the path appeared. We followed it to the right until the fence came to an end at a signpost warning of danger ahead.
‘I need to ask him some questions,’ I said.
‘No, we have to get rid of him
now
.
I
need to get back to von Weiss, and you have to vacate the area as soon as possible, because this man is going to be missed and they’ll come looking. We’re stopping here.’
Gladly. I stopped, panting, sweating heavily. His legs might have been moving, but I was still more or less carrying him. I rolled the man off my shoulder, into some low shrubs, insects chirping unseen in the bushes around us.
The woman parted a branch, which revealed a sheer drop and an unobstructed view of the ocean and sky. Black vultures wheeled on the air currents rising around the rock. ‘We do what the locals here do when they want to get rid of a body.’
‘And that is . . . ?’
‘Feed the birds.’
Kneeling down, she grabbed a handful of his coat and tried to roll him toward the edge. He rolled some, but not enough.
The man groaned, on the edge of consciousness. I lifted his arm, pushed him over onto his side and then shoved him with my boot toward the void. He rolled onto his front and then his side. Another shove and the incline took over, momentum gathering, and then he tumbled off into the sky, gone without further sound.
T
he woman who’d identified herself as Emma Shilling had dropped my coat on the path. I recovered it and caught up with her power-walking back toward the lavatory block, checking her watch, agitated. ‘I’ve been away ten minutes. That’s too long.’
‘The facility was closed – you had to wait.’
‘The people I’m with are
very
tense. Paranoia levels are high.’
‘They seem pretty relaxed.’
‘Trust me, they’re not.’
‘Serves ’em right for using fake passports,’ I said.
‘You and I both know that’s not what this is all about.’
‘Really? What’s it about?’
‘Nice try. You’re with the Company. Ask your people at Langley.’
‘CIA? We’ve just met and already you’re insulting me.’
‘If you’re not CIA, then what are you? You bloody Yanks have more bloody secret agencies than I’ve had sodding boyfriends.’
‘I take it you get around.’ She ignored that so I cut to the chase. Or a small part of it at least. ‘Randy Sweetwater. The name ring any bells with you?’
We were close to the block and could observe it clearly through the trees. There were more people milling around – the cable car must’ve arrived. The cleaner’s cone was now in front of the men’s section, closing it to the public, but a giant of a man nevertheless walked out of it and went straight into the women’s without a moment’s hesitation. I’d seen this guy earlier getting out of the chopper, directing the security: one of von Weiss’s men.
‘Shit,’ the Brit muttered when she saw him and drew back into deeper cover.
‘Who’s Dolph Lundgren?’
She knew who I meant. ‘His name is Julio Salvadore. He’s a sociopath from Paraguay and he’s von Weiss’s right-hand man. He’s come looking for me. This is not good.’
‘Like I said, the facility was closed, and you went on a hunt to find another.’
She took a second to process the excuse before nodding, accepting it. Meanwhile, I wondered what the cleaners would make of the blood spatter. I hoped they got to it before Dolph did. Speaking of whom, he exited the women’s toilet, a perplexed female tourist trailing in his wake, binoculars around her neck. She checked the signage on the wall, evidently wondering whether it was she who was in the right section, while the Paraguayan looked around the area, hands on hips. Yep, he was a big motherfucker: six five and maybe two hundred and fifty pounds.
The British agent opened her purse, took out a black Chanel tube and used it to paint her pink lips a shade pinker. ‘How do I look?’
In fact, nothing like a woman who’d just helped wrangle a gorilla off a mountaintop. I picked a leaf out of her golden hair, which was dead straight and cut Cleopatra-style. Dark makeup accentuated pale blue eyes that shone like there was a light source somewhere behind them. Her skin was olive, smooth and free of lines or blemishes of any kind. I pegged her age at maybe twenty-five. She was a nice juicy goat staked out by MI6 to catch a lion. ‘You’ll pass,’ I told her.
‘Okay, here goes.’ She turned to go down the path to work her way back to the bar from another direction.
I stopped her. ‘Randy Sweetwater was a pilot. He worked for von Weiss. Firecracker coloring . . . good with women.’
The tiniest of lines formed between her eyebrows. ‘American, right? Yes, I think I’ve met him. He was around a lot, but not lately. He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?’ Shilling must have seen something in my face. ‘Von Weiss has a sensitive nose for double agents. If he suspected him, even a hint, he’d have been disappeared.’ She took a card from her purse and gave it to me.
I already knew that von Weiss believed someone in his inner circle was a double agent. Did he know there were at least two? ‘What about you?’
‘I didn’t come into this without skills.’
‘Neither did Randy.’
‘This is how I pay the rent, okay? What do
you
do?’
I looked into her bright blue-gray eyes and was reminded of sunlight on stainless steel. She’d handled the disposal of a body as easily as most women order cocktails. Yeah, she had skills, but she was working in an environment where they could easily get overwhelmed. I glanced at the card. A logo – silver on blue. ‘“Olympe.” What’s that?’
‘A restaurant. Von Weiss will be there tonight. You be there too, if you can promise me you won’t kill anyone.’
‘I can’t be in the same room with White – he’ll recognize me.’
‘He won’t be there. I’ll try to find out what I can about your friend.’ She started to move.
‘Not so fast,’ I said.
‘I have to go
now
, okay?’
‘The guy in the orange knit – who’s he?’
‘A business associate of von Weiss’s. He’s representing another interest – I don’t know whose. An important customer. That’s all I know. I’ve never seen him before today.’
‘Find out who he is.’
‘You’re giving the orders now?’ she asked.
‘Find out who he is,
please
. And watch out for the girl on his knee.’
‘Sugar?’
‘Yeah. I think you’re her type.’
*
I went back to the ledge to make doubly sure there was no evidence left behind. A little crushed foliage, but that was it. I leaned out over the ledge. The drop was sheer all the way to the bottom five hundred feet below. A steep incline of scree, clear of suspicious-looking lumps of clothing, rose to meet the rock face from a bed of dense, dark green jungle. It was as if the mountain had opened up and swallowed the body whole. Convenient. Not even the vultures seemed especially interested in anything other than working the updrafts. That would change when the body – wherever it was down there – began to decompose. In this wet heat, I gave it a few hours. My fingers found the teeth in my pocket. I took them out and tossed them at the wind.
A couple of kids were chasing each other along the path when I rejoined it. I took the steps three at a time, up to the populated section of the lookout where the concessions were clustered. And a few minutes later I rendezvoused with Petinski and her camera in the shade of her tree.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked.
‘The head,’ I replied.
She glanced at my empty hands. ‘Weren’t you getting me a Coke?’
I took the card from my pocket and handed it to her. ‘I picked this up instead – an invitation to dinner. It’s where von Weiss will be this evening.’
‘What? How . . . ? Who gave it to you?’
‘Emma Shilling.’
‘Who?’
‘The blonde number snuggling up to our chief suspect over there. She’s MI6, so she says.’ I motioned at the bar where Shilling had rejoined the table. The man named Salvadore came in a few seconds behind her, but from another entrance.
‘Jesus, Cooper . . .’ said Petinski as she snapped off some more frames of the changing situation at the bar.
I noted von Weiss leaning toward Shilling for an exchange of words. She smiled, adding a shrug, laughed vivaciously, put on a show. The man called Salvadore bent toward the boss’s other ear, and then Charles White got in on the act, beckoning one of his peeps over. The tarantula and Sugar sipped their drinks and observed. Moments later, White’s two remaining bodyguards got up from the table and strolled off in the direction of the washrooms, presumably to hunt for their missing colleague.
They’d find no trace of him. The cleaning detail was an added stroke of luck. I couldn’t have planned it better if I’d planned it.
‘You want to tell me what you’ve done, Cooper?’ Petinski asked, wary as hell.
‘Applied pressure,’ I said.
‘Which means?’ Something on my forehead caught her attention and led to a closer examination of my face. She gripped my chin with her fingers and turned my head from side to side. ‘You’ve been in a fight.’
I opened my jacket and showed her the Walther’s handgrip. Then I told her about the run-in with the Whites’ bodyguard, that we recognized each other and, as a consequence, one of us had to die. I said I preferred it to be him. She said there was a hung jury on her preference. I told her about Shilling happening along at an opportune moment, and how she helped me dispose of the body. That didn’t get me anywhere with the jury, so I defended my actions further with some backstory about the slaughter the newly dead guy and his boss were promoting in Africa. Jury, still hung. I got a lecture about professional conduct, and I was about to get it all over again when von Weiss’s chopper roared around the back of the mountain and made further dressing-down impossible to hear. Giving her what little news I had about Randy Sweetwater would have to wait.
Charles White’s bodyguards came back from their search empty-handed. Something had happened to their buddy – he’d just up and disappeared. And now they were leaving in a hurry. Pressure applied. Petinski caught the departure on her Canon.
The Sugarloaf Mountain lookout lost a lot of its appeal once our persons of interest had flown away, so Petinski and I caught the next cable car to the base station, and from there made a beeline for the Palace. Petinski wanted to check in with her superiors, whoever they were, and I wanted to have a shower and wash the bodyguard’s killing off my skin. Petinski was sitting at a desk by the balcony when I came out of the bathroom wearing a towel.
‘Why would reception send us champagne?’ she asked, holding a half-bottle of Bollinger. She read from a card. ‘“From your friends at reception.”’
‘I think it had something to do with the thumbs-up I gave Gracia there this morning as we left. A little victory signal.’
‘Thanks a whole bunch, Cooper.’
‘Just maintaining our cover.’
Petinski shook her head.
‘What have you got there?’ I asked, seeing photos up on her iPad.
‘Which of these men did you throw off the cliff?’
Three photographs taken at the bar earlier were lined up on screen.
‘The guy on the right,’ I said. His face was turned three-quarters to the camera lens. High cheekbones, broad nose and dark skin with black eyes beneath a heavy brow.
‘I got us reservations at the restaurant. We were lucky – they had a cancellation.’
‘So long as it wasn’t von Weiss who canceled.’
‘Good point. That reminds me, I had Langley check out Shilling. Her real name is Amanda Shaeffer. She’s a captain in the Royal Marines. A commando – Green Berets, no less. These days she works for a counter-terror research group attached to the UK Ministry of Defence, which can mean anything, including MI6.’
Curiosity drew me back to the desk. On the iPad screen, shots of White’s henchmen were replaced by a publicity photo of a woman crawling through a muddy trench with a light machine gun in her hands. Amanda Shaeffer. I barely recognized the woman I’d met earlier. The accompanying assessment sheet said she’d graduated from the Royal Marines Commando Training Centre at Lympstone, Devon, on her first attempt – a rarity.
‘Britain doesn’t let women fight on the frontlines,’ said Petinski. ‘I guess the Ministry of Defence found a way to tap into her talents.’
‘I asked her about Randy,’ I said.
Petinski looked up. ‘And?’
‘She’s seen him around, but not for a while.’
‘How long’s “a while”?’
‘She didn’t say, and there was no time to elaborate.’
My partner scowled, well aware that pulling a disappearing act around von Weiss could mean the worst.
‘We’ll find him,’ I said, only because I couldn’t say much else.
She sat back in her chair, let her arms hang loose by her side and closed her eyes for a few long seconds. ‘I appreciate the encouragement, Vin,’ she said when she opened them. ‘But Randy knew the risks. It’s important to me that you know my concern for him isn’t about our personal relationship. That ended before this mission began. I don’t even have the right to resent Alabama. She was just next in line. If it wasn’t her it would’ve been someone else. I’m concerned because Randy was my partner, professionally speaking.’
‘Vin?’ I said, a little stunned. ‘Have we broken through something here, Kim?’
‘Is that all you took out of what I just said?’
‘Of course not.’
‘You’re not making this easy, y’know.’ She fingered the card from the restaurant. ‘You’re good at what you do, Cooper. It’s random and it’s not my way, but I have to admit it’s effective. You made contact with MI6 and now we’re going to be able to stay on von Weiss and maybe gain some intel on him in real time. I’ve been pretty uptight. I’m sorry that we haven’t worked more as a team.’
‘Is this an apology for being an abrupt, blunt, aloof, snooty, humorless, uncommunicative ice maiden?’
‘What?’
‘Apology accepted.’
‘Don’t you ever take anything seriously?’ she asked.
‘Who’s joking?’
Petinski blinked at me.
‘One thing, though. You mind if I stick with Petinski? Calling you Kim just feels like some other person.’
She stood up.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked.
‘To take a bath. That okay?’
‘You get an answer from Washington on this unknown guy with von Weiss?’
‘No,’ she snapped impatiently. ‘He’s not in our database. They’re checking with our friends and allies. There’s nothing we can do for the moment. So, if you don’t mind . . .’
‘Go right ahead. Hey, I might review the photos you took today. Where do I find ’em?’
‘There’s a folder on the desktop.’ Petinski disappeared into the bathroom and I heard the water run.
I went to her collection of Mac products, selected the laptop, opened the folder and set up the six hundred and thirty-seven photos in it to run as a slideshow. At two seconds a slide, that would be a little over twenty minutes viewing time. I poured two Glenfiddich minis into a short glass with rocks, sat back and watched. I skipped the chopper landing and went straight for the party settling into the bar. First up: Sugar. She really was as hot as I remembered her and I felt a certain tingle, the memory of our time in the Bally’s pool coming back. Her smooth coffee-colored skin, that cute button nose and a pair of full lips that could suck the shell off a boiled egg. In the photo I was looking at, the tarantula was beside her, leaning back, one arm hooked over the back of his chair. He was smirking, his other hand unseen under the table. Knowing Sugar, and from the smile on her lips, I could guess at what it was up to. ‘Lucky bastard,’ I murmured.