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He howled in pain and outrage even as the old man turned his attention to the youth with the bat. He was still numbed from the unexpected hit against the unyielding container, so he could do nothing to defend himself as the pistol smashed into his nose, breaking it with the kind of force even the world’s greatest plastic surgeon would have trouble repairing. He dropped to his knees, clutching at the wound. He keened like a siren, high then low. Next to him, the leader of the little duo of Amo’s sentries was out cold.
The stranger finally took the time to notice the gun wasn’t even loaded. When he’d first seen it, his instincts had been right not to try to fire it. He hadn’t thought it was empty, just that it would probably explode in his hand if he’d pulled the trigger. He pocketed the gun for later disposal and hauled the still-conscious kid to his feet.
The camera was no bigger than a tube of lipstick, and its wireless router the size of a pack of cigarettes. It was mounted part way up a telephone pole.
The stranger pulled off his ridiculous hat and held up the kid’s bloody face to the camera, saying, “I know this guy is low level and that you’ve got better guards deeper in there, but you also know they’re not going to stop me. I’ve tracked you this far and I’ll keep going until I get to you. Admit defeat and no one else needs to get hurt.”
As he let him go, the kid immediately fell back to his knees, sobbing.
The stranger moved back out onto the main street. Nothing appeared any different. Some women were in line next to a truck that had carried water into the favela for sale. Some old men were sitting on a sofa left out in the elements so long, it was moldy. Chickens tethered to a stick pecked at the stony ground near a hut. All was as it should be.
A few seconds later, a white pickup truck appeared at the head of the street. Though old and filthy, it represented real wealth in the favela. He waited as the vehicle ground its way to him. It came to a stop, and the passenger leaned out the window.
“He says to get in back. No tricks. He says you found him.”
The stranger nodded. There was an honor code at play here, one he knew he shouldn’t respect, but he felt it was better to play safe than sorry. He vaulted over the fender and squatted in the bed as the truck laboriously turned around in the constricted street and began slogging back up the hill. The truck belonged to Amo, so no one dared look at it, yet people seemed to part like a shoal of fish breaking for a shark to get out of its way. It pulled up to a three-story, cinder-block building. As soon as the stranger’s feet hit the ground, the truck drove away. Lean-tos, running three deep, had been constructed around the building’s perimeter, with the exception of the entry, so to reach it he had to walk down a tight alley of tin sheeting and sullen faces.
The building’s front door had long been torn from its hinges. The concrete floor was filthy, and the air inside the building reeked of garbage. He did not know which way to go until he looked up the stairs to his right. What he saw startled him with its incongruity. It was a woman wearing a white nurse’s uniform so crisp, it looked like she had just put it on. She was blond and attractive, at least from this distance, and her legs, in the white hosiery of her uniform, were shapely. Amid all this misery and ugliness, she was like an angel sent from heaven.
She beckoned him with a finger and he mounted the stairs.
The second floor was also concrete, but it was painted a subtle gray and was impeccably swept. The walls were also painted and clean. There was only one door on this landing, and as he walked through, an alarm chimed. A man dressed as a security guard rose from behind his desk, a hand going for his sidearm in a well-practiced motion.
“Sir,” the guard said even as the stranger raised his hands.
“In a holster behind my back,” the man said and slowly turned. “There’s another in my pocket.”
The guard nodded to the nurse, who unarmed the stranger. The man knew the routine and stepped out of the room and back into the hallway. The door’s threshold, though innocuous to look at, was a body scan
ner that had detected the taped-up revolver he’d taken off the kid and the FN Five-seveN pistol he’d been carrying. This time through, the alarm remained silent, and the guard relaxed his defensive posture. A phone on his desk rang. He listened for a moment before replacing the handset.
“Give him back his guns. He says that this one is just as deadly without them.”
The man took the automatic back from the pretty nurse and secured it in its holster. He made a dismissive gesture toward the broken-down revolver, so she kept it. The stranger finally took notice of the room. It was like the lobby of a discreet boutique hotel, one of those places in London or New York that were so exclusive, there usually wasn’t a sign out front. The floors were marble tile, the walls’ wainscoting deep mahogany, and the lighting luxurious crystal fixtures. The view out the two windows was what threw him for a moment. It should have shown the garbage-strewn streets of a Brazilian slum, but instead he was greeted by a cobbled road in what looked like an Eastern European town—the Czech Republic, maybe, or Hungary. The light streaming in appeared natural, and yet the two “windows” were flat-screen displays with curtains so the people here wouldn’t be reminded of the squalor outside. A far door opened, and another nurse, a virtual twin of the first, beckoned the newcomer farther into this surreal building.
The next rooms were even more luxurious than the reception hall. More flat-screen panels displayed views of the same street. An old woman was leading a horse on the opposite curb, and he felt as if the clip-clop of its hooves could be heard through the glass. He was finally shown into a sleek executive office with a fireplace and sofa cluster in one corner and a modernist glass desk at the far wall. In another corner were the closed doors of an elevator that would lead to an apartment on the third floor just as opulent as this room.
“Chairman,” the scarred and wheelchair-bound man behind the desk greeted.
“L’Enfant,” Cabrillo said back.
“I suppose if you had wanted me dead, you would have struck in the night and I never would have known it was coming.”
“The thought crossed my mind,” Cabrillo replied.
Two weeks had passed since the encounter with the stealth ship. The Oregon was still in Hamilton Harbour, her refit just about complete. He had given up tracking Admiral Kenin once he fled Russia. This had to have been his last big score, the one that would set him up for life. A man in that situation plans his escape down to the finest detail. He would be completely untraceable ten seconds after implementing it. He would have a new identity that was unbreakable, a new place to live, bank accounts that had been in place for years. In all, a new life that was just as real—at least, to those looking—as the one he’d left.
“I must be getting sloppy,” L’Enfant said, waving his good right hand. “First Kenin tracked me, now you.”
“The first time you were sloppy,” Juan agreed, “the second you were just in a hurry.”
So rather than waste time tracking a man they would never find, he put Murph and Stone on locating the slippery information merchant. They had the advantage of knowing that he would have run soon after Kenin contacted him to get information on the Corporation. With that starting point, it still took twelve days of data mining and fact-checking to discover another of L’Enfant’s lairs, one in a most unlikely place.
Cabrillo added, “You’re also becoming predictable.” He shot a significant glance at the attractive nurse.
“Ah,” L’Enfant said, “I wasn’t aware you knew my penchant for pretty nurses.”
“Now you’re deluding yourself. If it was just pretty ones, we never would have found you. But sisters who are also nurses are a rarer breed of cat.”
