‘You’re not an executioner, Vin.’
I looked at him and sucked something from between my teeth.
‘Excuse me, gentlemen.’ It was the gunnery sergeant who’d accompanied me to the room earlier, standing in the doorway.
‘What’s up, Gunny?’ Arlen replied.
‘Sir, Commander Beale asked if you would both please join him on the flight deck.’
We followed the Marine and came out of the island into warm sunshine, into the teeth of a steady forty-knot wind. Two Seahawks were coming in to land, angling in over the whitecaps. Commander Beale and several officers were standing by with a large unit of armed Marines. The choppers touched down and the Marines marched across the deck to meet them.
‘Thought you might like to see this,’ Beale shouted at us over the wind and the rotor noise as he approached.
The doors of the choppers opened, disgorging a cargo of more armed Marines accompanying a group of around twenty males – the Somalis and Iranians off the
African Spirit
– their wrists cuff-locked in front of them. Last out of the lead chopper were the familiar faces of Abdul-Jabbar, Ali-Bakr al Mohammed and Falco White with his bodyguards.
‘The
Leyte Gulf
picked them up,’ the commander explained. ‘They were out in the middle of nowhere, squawking on the radio for assistance. Their boat was foundering.’
Three members of the Marine unit that had taken the motley crew into custody stopped to have a quiet word with Beale. The Somalis, the Iranians and White all hung their heads, utterly beaten.
‘Beale finished talking with the Marine.
‘Where’d they find ’em?’ Arlen asked him.
‘On a launch. Strangest thing. Their engines were dead, fouled by Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. They found a whole tub of the stuff sloshing around in the auxiliary fuel tank.’
I
had an official debriefing session with Arlen and Beale, followed by one with Naval Criminal Investigation Service and then another with CIA. When it was all done, I told Arlen I was heading back to South America on the next available. He wasn’t happy about it, but he swung it anyway, organizing a C-2 to take me to Mombasa, the nearest international airport. From there I hopped international flights back to Rio.
Connections were better flying west to east and only twenty-one hours later I met Jeb Delaney as the sun came up at airport arrivals, Galeão International.
‘You look like a chilli dog left on the griddle too long,’ he said when he saw me.
‘I tan weird.’ I debriefed him on what I was permitted to say, which wasn’t much, before asking the question uppermost on my mind. ‘What you got on von Weiss?’
‘To be honest with you, Vin – nothin’. And Adauto Robredo has even less, though he’s been crackin’ heads all over the place tryin’ to get us some leads. But he does have a theory.’
‘He agrees with us that von Weiss is in-country?’
‘He does.’
‘The profilers back home think he’s holed up somewhere in Euro Disney.’
Delaney grinned.
‘Did I tell you when von Weiss met Petinski, he gave her a condom?’ I said.
‘A condom . . .’
‘Maybe he was out of flowers.’
‘That’s fucked up. You think he kidnapped her?’ Delaney wondered.
‘I hope so.’
‘Not a pleasant thought.’
‘It’s a better one than outright murder.’
‘What’s to say she’s not dead? He kidnaps her, does whatever he’s gonna do,
then
kills her.’
‘That’s what my boss thinks. And meanwhile, we’ve got nothing on von Weiss.’
‘Same problem here,’ said Delaney. ‘The authorities couldn’t prove he was behind the shit that went down in Céu Cidade. He’s a crafty SOB.’
‘What about the black Mercedes SUV? I saw von Weiss’s number two – whatshisname, Dolph Lundgren, the big blond guy – driving it.’
‘Salvadore?’
‘Yeah, him.’
‘The vehicle was found dumped in the sea. It was registered to a little ol’ lady in the ’burbs with no connection to anything. Forensics got nothin’ from it.’
‘And nothing from the surveillance hard drives at the favela?’
‘We’ve got some frames of Salvadore escortin’ a woman from the vehicle at the main entrance to von Weiss’s citadel. We thought it was Shilling. Turns out it was a dancer from a nightclub, a decoy. The whole fuckin’ thing was a setup played out for your camera. Authorities got nada.’
I gave my face a vigorous rub.
‘I know how you feel,’ Delaney said. ‘So do Robredo and his men. He’s gonna meet us at your hotel to work through what we do next.’
‘Where am I staying?’
‘This time around, a few rungs down from the Palace. Our station doesn’t have much of a slush fund.’
‘Yeah, sure.’
A short drive later, we pulled up at a bargain hotel off Copacabana Beach, two doors down from the strip joint I’d seen on my last visit that offered a beer and lap dance for twenty bucks. I was too late – the offer had expired. I signed in at the hotel, dumped my overnight bag in a small room that had the stale sweaty protein smell of a porn theater about it, and met Delaney back down on the street. The mid-morning crowds were heading to and from the beach in a steady stream, the Havaianas flip-flops on their feet making scuffing sounds on the sand-sprinkled sidewalks. The CIA agent was on his cell, looking around. He spotted what he was hunting for, stepped out on the street and waved at a blue Hyundai SUV idling along.
‘Robredo,’ Delaney told me when I arrived beside him.
The sergeant pulled up, a man in a BOPE uniform in the passenger seat beside him – a pale rope-thin guy sporting a pencil moustache. He looked like a carney, the type that rode the dodgem cars and carried a switchblade in his shoe.
We got in and Robredo turned and said hello, along with a bunch of other things in Portuguese I didn’t understand. He introduced the carnie beside him as Officer Pedro. More handshakes. Delaney and the two Brazilians then went into another lengthy discussion before Robredo sped off carelessly down the street, weaving through the flip-flop traffic.
‘What was all that about?’ I asked Delaney.
‘Pedro here has a number of strings to his bow. He’s a BOPE tactician as well as being a profiler.’
‘A shrink.’
‘Be nice. Anyway, Pedro and his colleagues think von Weiss is gonna know we’re strugglin’ to come at him with the law because, one, he’s planned it that way and, two, we’re sure he would’ve had the word confirmed from the street that we’re spinnin’ our wheels.’
‘If he knows that, what’s he hiding for?’ I asked.
‘Because he’s afraid.’
‘Of what?’
‘In this part of the world, the rules of the game can get bent out of shape to favor the authorities. There’s that, and he’s worried that if he shows his face someplace like Berlin . . .’
‘His ass will get redacted and he’ll find himself waking up on the Gitmo express.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So now what?’
‘BOPE has its own unofficial intelligence network of snitches. And because no one has seen von Weiss or any of his people on the street, they’ve come to the conclusion that he’s not
on
the street.’
‘Then where is he?’ I asked.
‘On the water.’
I remembered discussing this very possibility with Petinski the last time von Weiss vanished, right after the encounter with the black mamba in my hotel suite had put me in hospital.
Brazil has a million uninhabited rivers and tributaries to hide it in.
Petinski hadn’t thought much of this suggestion at the time; I wasn’t sure I thought much of it now, but it seemed somehow vaguely ironic that it was the only straw we had left.
The Hyundai turned onto a pontoon bridge, the end of which disappeared into the haze a mile or two away across the water. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘The naval station over on Niteröi. Pedro was a lieutenant in the Brazilian Navy before he joined BOPE. He has contacts.’
Ten minutes later, we pulled up at a guard station. Robredo showed his ID to a man in an unfamiliar uniform, and the officer, Pedro, leaned across to have a word. The guard stuck his head in through the driver’s window for a look-see and Delaney and I both gave him a nod. The boom came up and we were waved through. Pedro gave directions left, right and then straight ahead. We eventually stopped outside a long whitewashed building that had the look of a dormitory about it, within sight of the bay. A Brazilian Navy officer jogged over, chatted to Pedro, made a vaguely welcoming hand gesture at the rest of us, and then led us to a small airless briefing room where the temperature was sitting on a hundred degrees with no intention of moving. The walls were covered in maps – some old, some new – as well as photos of various Brazilian Navy ships. A digital projector hung from the ceiling. There were three tables, two computer workstations on all but one of the tables where maps were opened out.
Pedro, Robredo, Delaney and the new guy, whose nametag told me I should call him Marchèse, went into a huddle while I went to the wall and got a hint of the enormity of the task ahead. There was well over a thousand miles of coastline to look at, puckered by the delta of the Amazon River.
‘We’ve got a patrol boat for two days,’ said Delaney.
‘Great. Who’s got the beers?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Might as well get something out of it.’ I gestured at the map detailing the coastline south of Rio. ‘He could be
anywhere
.’
‘Von Weiss has villas at several spots south of Rio and São Paulo. Angra dos Reis
,
for example. There are plenty of deserted inlets and bays all along this area. He could disappear quite easily around here and still feel close to home.’
I didn’t have a better idea and Angra dos Reis sounded familiar. Shilling had mentioned the place.
*
The
Grajaú
wasn’t a big ship – a little over forty meters long, a crew of around thirty, a Bofors 40mm cannon up front and a 20mm cannon facing aft behind the superstructure. A brass plate in the wheelhouse said she’d been commissioned in ’93, none of which interested Delaney in the slightest as he was violently seasick from the moment we left the dock. We motored down the coastline, stopping occasionally to investigate any large expensive vessels that looked like they might be on the lam.
The town of Angra dos Reis was located in a bay surrounded by soaring granite peaks covered in green jungle, and was a picturesque playground for the rich. I joined the crew scanning the shore with powerful binoculars, most of which appeared to be focused on finding topless babes sunning themselves on the beaches or boat decks. I was thus diverted once or twice myself. Okay, maybe three times.
Von Weiss’s villa was located a mile south of town in a private bay, its own golden sand beach and a private impenetrable backyard jungle. The rigid-hulled inflatable boat was launched and Robredo, Delaney, Pedro and I went with an armed party of sailors to have a closer look at it. The villa itself was an ultra-modern concrete box floating on a single stressed concrete beam in the center. The place was locked up tight. It presented like no one had been there for some time, the utilities all turned off at their mains. The inspection was a complete waste of time. We piled back into the RHIB and motored out to the mothership, and kept heading south to waste even more of it. I found myself wishing Pedro was ex-Air Force with contacts in a helicopter squadron. A Super Puma could investigate in an hour what the
Grajaú
could cover in a day.
We called it quits at nightfall, the
Grajaú
’s commander taking the boat out to sea for more general duties. I stayed up for a while, out on the deck, and spent the time going over in my mind conversations I’d had with Emma Shilling and Petinski, one dead and the other almost certainly dead. I wanted the opportunity to give their deaths some meaning. I wanted von Weiss. I wanted to find him and I wanted to spend some time watching him crap his pants while he faced his own mortality. But I probably had more chance of winning the New Jersey lottery, a lottery I never entered.
The ship’s first sergeant found Delaney and me bunks in a closet the size of an overgrown footlocker, where there wasn’t enough room for me to lie on my side. Sleep didn’t come easy, due partly to the cramped quarters, partly to Delaney, who was in the bunk above heaving loudly into a bucket, and partly to the burns on my arms, legs and neck throbbing in time with the ship’s diesels.
The search of the coastline resumed at first light. Delaney didn’t look so great, but everything in his stomach had long since been expelled so at least the hurling had stopped.
‘You look like they just pulled you from a trash compactor,’ I told him when he joined me on the rolling deck.
‘I wish I felt that good,’ he said, the rancid meat-like green tinge nevertheless gone from his face.
The sun blazed up over the cloudless horizon like it was expecting a fanfare. We rolled slowly through the swell and resumed the search, scanning the line of jungle meeting the water, interest increasing with the occasional sighting of a luxury cruiser, which inevitably came to nothing.
It was a quarter to ten, the heat from the morning sun almost crushing, when I took a break and went down to the mess to rustle up a paper cup of ice water. On the way back I stopped in what was probably the officers’ wardroom to have a look at a framed map on the wall of the coastline around São Paulo and see if I could place the ship in relation to it. The name on a speck of rock more or less adjacent to São Paulo caught my attention. I went back outside and found Delaney. Everyone up on deck seemed pretty happy, and then I saw why. We’d pulled around a headland and a big pleasure boat was moored in the protective nook of a little bay. Three oiled-up women – two black, one white – were lying naked on the deck just behind the bow. They were young, maybe twenty-three. A couple of the seamen were waving at them. One of the black women stood up and waved back, her shining breasts wobbling back and forth.
‘Queimada Grande. Ring a bell with you at all?’ I asked Delaney.
‘What?’ said Delaney, distracted, a big smile on his face. The black woman turned around and showed us her ass. It was a nice ass. Nice legs, too. The sailors whooped. An officer made an appearance and snapped at the crew, and the feeling that we were on a pleasure cruise evaporated.
‘Queimada Grande,’ I repeated. ‘Have you heard of it?’
‘Yeah. It’s an island crawlin’ with poisonous snakes. What of it?’
Jeb Delaney hadn’t seen the autopsy report on the hand sent to Alabama, which mentioned the venom detected in its veins. He didn’t know about Fruit Fly, alias Diogo Jaguaribe, and how he’d died; he hadn’t been briefed about Randy Sweetwater’s ring on the amputated hand’s finger; or where and how Roy Rogers’s horse fit into the picture.
‘Do you know where the island is?’ I asked.
‘Off the coast of São Paulo, I think.’
‘It’s close. We have to go there.’
‘It’s off limits. No one goes there.’
I looked at Delaney and watched the tumblers line up in slow motion.
‘Oh, shit,’ he said.
*
It took three hours of motoring along at the
Grajaú’s
maximum speed, the bow peeling white curls out of the blue water, to bring us within a few miles of the island. The captain took his ship over the horizon so that the only indication of land was a line of thin cloud. It was explained to Robredo and Pedro, who passed it on to Delaney, who passed it on to me, that if there was a vessel moored at Queimada Grande, it would most likely have dropped anchor on the western side of the island, sheltered from the Atlantic groundswell. That meant there was a good chance we could sneak up on it, the landmass obscuring the
Grajaú
from radar.
The island was a weathered haunch of rock in the middle of nowhere, covered mostly in grass and jungle. A tiny white lighthouse was visible at one end of the island’s spine. Waves pounded the rocky shore and flocks of birds wheeled around it. The horizon was utterly empty in every direction, and certainly no boats were visible. The
Grajaú
’s commander changed course, cut the throttle, and an announcement came over the ship’s speakers. An armed party of sailors ran up on deck.