Authors: Russell Blake
Then again, after an aircraft had been shot down in Argentina’s capital city and gun battles waged in front of one of the nation’s most prestigious banks, being low profile was hardly an issue. He just hoped the killer would accept the assignment and succeed in tracking Matt down, diamonds or no diamonds, and punch his ticket once and for all.
Chapter 4
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The Rio de Janeiro state secretary of security stood at the base of the infamous Favela do Cantagalo only a few short blocks from the sparkling blue water and white sand of world-renowned Copacabana beach. Several television news trucks were parked nearby, their crews nervously looking up the hill at the myriad red-brick tenements that clung to the side of the mountain like cancerous lesions as the huddle of bureaucrats prepared to address the press. The sun had risen from the eastern expanse of ocean like an angry god, its rays spangling the surface of the nearby surf in a dazzling display of luminous pyrotechnics, all gold and yellow and orange.
At first light, a retinue of heavily armed police in blue combat gear and bulletproof vests had emptied from a line of vans and taken up positions along the lower perimeter of the slum – one of the dangerous neighborhoods under the full control of the drug warlords who ruled whole tracts of the city and whose enforcers were often better outfitted than their law-enforcement counterparts. Illegal power lines draped from utility poles like black tentacles, hundreds of cables bootlegging electricity in plain view; no utility employees were willing to risk their lives trying to disconnect them.
Gun battles were a daily, sometimes hourly, occurrence in the larger favelas like Vila Cruzeiro, Manguinhos, and Jacarezinho, the latter two known to the locals as “Gaza” and considered a war zone by the authorities and residents alike. Favela Cantagalo was positively peaceful by those standards – the last shootout on the hill had been thirty-six hours earlier, a lifetime by Rio slum standards.
One of the TV reporters took up a position with the favela in the background to get her establishing shot of the location before the functionaries began their hopefully brief speeches. The event was to commemorate a major offensive by the police to reclaim the lawless ghettos, where drug dealing was endemic. The favelas rivaled war zones for mortality rates and were a constant source of embarrassment for Rio, which had spent considerable sums to attract high-profile events like the World Cup and the Olympics.
Traversing high-risk corridors of open warfare to get from the international airport to the soccer stadium or downtown was a considerable blemish on the city’s public face, so the latest of endless attempts to clean up the worst of the favelas was to begin shortly, which would cut into the drug warlords’ profits while underway, as well as open up costly territorial disputes in the vacuum left by armed troops and tanks.
The cameraman peered through the lens at the comely anchorwoman and then zoomed out to frame her against the backdrop of the slum. Narrow alleys and walkways cut into the side of the mountain’s steep slope, the squalid dwellings defying gravity, perched one atop the other in rows of brick shanties that snaked up toward the summit. Graffiti marred many of the surfaces rival gangs had tagged, and the barred windows that stretched up the reach were filled with the dark faces of curious inhabitants watching the display of force below.
~ ~ ~
Fernanda swept the tense countenances of the police with the Schmidt & Bender PM II telescopic sight. Their jaws were set in determination as their eyes roved over the favela, including her invisible position inside the darkened interior of one of the dwellings near the top of the hill. She’d chosen the location carefully – the maximum distance she could put between herself and the gathering given the layout of the slum. Her laser rangefinder showed the distance as three hundred meters, which was an easy shot for her, all things considered.
She inched forward until the crosshairs of the scope were aligned on the back of the secretary of security’s skull, noting the ridges and indentations on his balding pate. She made a small adjustment to the scope, compensating for the ten-knot breeze, and returned her attention to the man’s head, which was the size of a breadbox in the scope.
The SAKO TRG sniper rifle felt warm in her hands, like an old friend, and she hated that she’d have to abandon it once it had done its job. She’d already wiped it down, as well as the five .338 Lapua Magnum cartridges she’d loaded, and now wore latex gloves to avoid leaving any prints. Her lush ebony hair was pulled into a ponytail beneath a black baseball cap, and she brushed an errant smudge of loose dirt from her chocolate long-sleeved man’s shirt, her jeans loose to enable maximum ease of movement.
The quiet putter of a motorcycle engine greeted her through the empty doorway. The tenement was abandoned; piles of debris and garbage littered the interior along with broken syringes and used condoms. Music rose from somewhere below, a tinny radio blaring funk carioca. The infectious beat echoed off the rooftops, and Fernanda hummed along as she watched her target begin what would be his most memorable public appearance.
~ ~ ~
Gustavo Ferreira cleared his throat and raised the microphone to his lips, noting with satisfaction that there were nine cameramen filming – an auspicious sign for his media profile. He hesitated, waiting for the small crowd of supporters that had gathered to quiet, and began speaking with a polished cadence.
“For too many years, our beautiful city has been the victim of criminal gangs that terrorize the residents and spread misery wherever they go. The favelas are not playgrounds for miscreants, nor should they be havens for drug peddlers and pimps. People – hardworking common people lacking options – live in them, children grow up in them, and those people deserve to be safe.”
The crowd gave a halfhearted round of obligatory applause.
“In the past, we’ve tried a number of things, but the only one that has worked is to go in with the army, take possession of the favela, and then set up police outposts so we can respond swiftly and decisively when the gangs return and try to restart their criminal enterprises. While that is our least appealing choice, we will be going in with our colleagues in the armed forces and cleaning out the rats that have infested our city for too long.”
Ferreira smiled for the cameras and pointed over his shoulder at the slum.
“But we need the public’s help. Too many believe that the drug lords are like Robin Hood, robbing the rich and distributing to the poor. They aren’t. They’re parasites, preying on the weak, spreading misery wherever they go. And like all parasites, they must be stamped out, not glorified!”
The top of Ferreira’s skull vaporized, and his brains blew onto the street in front of him as he tumbled forward, dead even as the microphone raced his body to the pavement. The sharp crack of a rifle shot reverberated off the buildings a split second later, and a kit of pigeons alighted from the hillside, startled into flight by the gunshot. The officers opened fire with their automatic weapons as the residents of the favela took cover, and the commander pointed at the shamble of brick high above where he thought the shot had originated as he screamed orders. His lieutenant barked into his handheld radio as the shooting from the police continued. The commander drew his pistol and stood by the fallen bureaucrat, facing the cameras, yelling for everyone to stay back as two officers knelt by Ferreira’s fallen form.
One of the men looked up at his superior and shook his head. The remaining dignitaries had scrambled for cover behind cars, and the commander instructed several of his men to protect them, a sinking feeling in his stomach as he did so. Whoever had assassinated the secretary of security had done so for maximum effect, on live television, and the message was obvious: take on the drug lords and no matter who you were, you weren’t safe. He seriously doubted, given the single shot to the head at considerable distance, that the execution had been entrusted to a sixteen-year-old. This had all the earmarks of one of Rio’s professional hits, and he had slim hope that his men would find the shooter once they made it to the top of the hill.
The lieutenant approached, radio to his ear. “Helicopter’s on its way. Three minutes,” he said.
“Get the press out of here along with the suits. Prepare the men to move. I want to set a record for climbing that hill.”
~ ~ ~
By the time the shooting from the police started, Fernanda had dropped the rifle and was almost to the doorway on the far side of the little room. With any luck, one of the enterprising residents would abscond with the rifle before the police got there, and it would have been sold five times by sunset.
Her husband, Igor, was waiting astride a Suzuki DR-Z400S motorcycle, a black helmet with darkened visor in place. As she stuffed the baseball cap in her back pocket, he tossed her a dark blue helmet. She pulled it on, swung a long leg over the seat, and then put her arms around his waist.
“Let’s get out of here.”
Igor twisted the throttle, and they roared off down the three-foot-wide unpaved passageway in a spray of dirt. The motorcycle bounced over a rut where sewage had carved an indentation in the trail and zipped horizontally before he rolled to a stop by a concrete stairway.
“Hang on. Going down.”
The bike’s shocks cushioned only part of the impact as they rattled to the next level, where Igor veered south down a narrow alley. A startled woman dumping a pail of cloudy water jumped back as they brushed past, her face radiating the fear that all the inhabitants felt when a motorcycle raced down one of the connecting paths. The drug gangs favored motorbikes for their maneuverability and their ability to disappear into the favelas – which meant any motorized conveyance could be transporting death just as easily as a neighbor returning home from a menial job.
The pair reached the southernmost reaches of the slum, and Igor killed the engine. They dismounted and tossed their helmets down the hill onto a small pile of accumulated trash. The stink of the garbage was almost overpowering, but they ignored it and were halfway down the hillside when Fernanda paused.
“Listen. You hear that?”
Igor nodded. “Helicopter. But too late.”
They resumed their descent, ignoring the two teenagers with pistols at the bottom of the hill, and made their way to the street forty meters away, the keening of sirens from the far side of the mountain as distant as the Caribbean as far as they were concerned.
That night, the news programs were filled with the horrifying image of Ferreira losing his head for the cameras, and Igor toasted Fernanda with an icy-cold beer in their contemporary Ipanema loft as they watched the coverage.
“Another long day at the office over,” he said, a smile on his handsome face.
“Who do you think contracted for the hit?” she asked, taking an appreciative sip.
“Probably the Red Command. But we’re better off not knowing,” Igor said, naming one of the largest and most violent of Rio’s numerous drug gangs.
They’d received the sanction from their agent, who handled the money and acted as a buffer between the contractor and the client – a prudent setup that had served them well for the six years they’d been Brazil’s most expensive hit team.
“Well, let’s hope that the police pacification program continues. So far it’s been one of our best years, and we’re not done yet.”
“Nice to be in a growth industry, that’s for sure.”
Fernanda slid closer to Igor and put a hand on his bare chest, noting his washboard abs with approval. Their eyes met, he set his beer down, and they silently made their way upstairs to their bedroom, pleasure their only earthly concern for the rest of the evening.
Chapter 5
San Felipe, Chile
Jet started awake, groggy for a second before she remembered where she was. Sunlight streamed between the curtains as she rolled toward where Hannah lay next to her, still asleep.
Jet froze when she saw a black form scuttling along her daughter’s bare arm, its eight legs moving with mechanical precision. Her breath caught in her throat as she reached over and flicked the spider onto the floor with her finger. She leapt to her feet and smashed the arachnid with the sole of her shoe as Hannah opened her eyes. The little girl stared at her mother, shoe in hand, and then closed her eyes again and rolled over.
Matt came out of the bathroom and, seeing Jet awake, rounded the beds and kissed her. Jet whispered to him about the spider, and he shook his head.
“Well, we sort of got what we paid for, didn’t we?” he said. “Maybe you two should wash up, and we can figure out what we’re going to do next over a late breakfast?”
“What time is it? I’m starved.”
He looked at his watch. “Almost eleven. Maybe an early lunch…”
Jet got Hannah into the shower with her, and they scrubbed away. When they’d toweled off, Jet inspected the scab on her cheek from her fight with Tara – it would come off in another day or so. Hannah struggled with the hairbrush until Jet took it from her and pulled it through her tangles after running it across her own head.
By the time their ablutions were done, a half hour had gone by. Matt was sitting at the table, a good-natured smile on his face. “I killed two more you-know-whats while you bathing beauties were splashing around.”
“That’s reassuring. I hope they’ve got better restaurants in this town than hotels.”
“Call it a hunch, but I wouldn’t expect gourmet cuisine.”
“That’s fine. I’d settle for some coffee.”
“Then I think we can accommodate you.”
They debated leaving their things in the room, and Matt voted to do so. Checkout wasn’t until one o’clock, so they had plenty of time and no clear destination or schedule. They drove around town until they found a clean-looking restaurant with a number of locals dining at tables on the sidewalk, and then parked around the corner before making their way inside.