by Jason Kasper
The officer drew his pistol and shouted, “Largue a arma!”
“Drop the gun—”
The first shot hit the driver in the head.
For a split second I was back in the car with Karma as we were ambushed. I grabbed the back of her head and threw her face down between her knees, covering her body with mine as the cop angled sideways to acquire her in his sights.
But Micah was already out of his seat, straddling the center console, his head low against the exposed ballistic glass, punching the accelerator with his left foot.
The next seconds were a pummeling gauntlet—our truck glanced off a vehicle to the left, and then smashed off another to the right, as the snare drum impact of bullets popped into the glass and pinged off the armored surfaces. We swung left a final time before the Suburban’s right side hit something with a screeching bang of crushed metal that brought us to a halt in a grinding, low-speed collision.
I leaned up, and Parvaneh flung me off her. Micah’s shoulders moved slowly. He was dazed but not shot, slumped over the dash with his left foot mashed on the accelerator, our tires spinning in place.
I grabbed his arm and shook him hard. “Can you drive?”
He let up on the gas as his head rose slowly from the dash. He mumbled, “Yeah…I…”
We’d smashed into a parked car, our Suburban frozen at a 45-degree angle at a T-intersection. With him straddling the console and the dead man in the driver’s seat, I couldn’t climb into the front without exiting the armored confines of our truck.
“Open your door,” I yelled to Micah, stumbling out of the vehicle and slamming my door shut to shield Parvaneh.
The streets were pandemonium. While the shot that killed the driver could have been mistaken for a car backfiring, those that followed it as our armored Suburban blindly careened through a stoplight had incited a wave of panic. Oncoming cars blocked by our Suburban were abandoned as terrified men and women darted to buildings, screaming amid the whizzing hisses and pops of incoming bullets from multiple shooters behind us.
I heaved open the driver’s door as Micah struggled to recover his bearings. The dead chauffeur was behind him, staring at me, his face marred by a single red dot on the bridge of his nose like a third eye. Bullets were hitting our truck, barking off the metal armor and popping into the ballistic glass. I grabbed the dead man’s shoulders to pull him out, yanking at him twice before I registered that his seatbelt was still on. Micah was still clumsily trying to right himself, oblivious to my dilemma as I shoved him away and unfastened the driver’s seatbelt by feel.
There were at least five shooters now, the closest gunfire drawing dangerously near—we’d only driven a few meters out of the kill zone. Our attackers were maneuvering to overrun us, unopposed by a stunned and defenseless quarry.
Even amid my panicked surge of adrenaline, I struggled to wrench 230 pounds of deadweight out of the driver’s seat as Micah pulled himself into the gap.
The driver’s body tilted sideways before gravity took over and he fell facedown onto the pavement, his billfold tumbling beside him. On the back of his head was a bloody, cratered exit wound the size of my fist.
I instinctively pocketed the billfold, my peripheral vision registering the spark of a round ricocheting off the pavement three feet to my left. Rolling the driver onto his back in a desperate search for the pistol Micah and I had spotted, I ripped open his suit jacket.
Beneath his left armpit, a brown leather shoulder holster pinned a Beretta 92 to his side.
I thumbed the retention snap and drew the pistol out, flicking the decocker off as I whirled toward the sound of gunfire. A human form rounded the Suburban’s rear bumper and I began squeezing the trigger as fast as I possibly could, the first assessment of my target occurring after it dropped from my sights after six rounds.
A dying cop sprawled out on the ground a few meters away, writhing in his final moments, hands clutched to a throat expelling blood like a fire hydrant.
“GET IN!” Micah yelled.
The back door was open beside me, held in place by Parvaneh’s outstretched arm.
I dove into the seat beside her as Micah reversed in a wide, curving arc. Grabbing the door handle with both hands, I hauled it shut as our Suburban came broadside to the kill zone and received a final flurry of bullet impacts.
Micah threw the transmission into drive and punched the accelerator, the engine roaring with effort as the heavy vehicle gained momentum away from the ambush. He closed the ballistic glass of the driver’s window to seal the unprotected gap in our armor, quieting the whistle of wind.
“We won’t get away,” Gabriel blurted. “David’s a cop killer.”
Micah’s voice was steel. “We stop, we die. Did you get a phone off the driver?”
“Just his wallet,” I said.
“Well we can’t use that to call the fucking helicopter, now can we?”
Gabriel’s panicked voice again. “We need to turn ourselves in and let the Handler’s lawyers deal with it. Otherwise we’ll be killed.”
Parvaneh spoke for the first time since the driver got shot.
“If you discuss surrender again, I’ll save them the trouble of killing you. Give Micah directions back to the hotel. We’re getting back to our people and calling the Outfit helicopter.”
Gabriel looked terrified, but his words came quickly.
“Two blocks ahead. Take a left.”
Micah swerved the Suburban into a parking lot to pass a row of traffic, and then crossed two lanes to cut through the intersection amidst the squealing of brakes and angry objections of car horns.
Gabriel said, “Left here.”
Micah complied and then aborted the maneuver mid-turn, speeding forward through the crosswalk instead. I looked left to see a roadblock of two stationary cop cars blocking the way in the distance.
I slid the Beretta into my waistband. “They’ve already blocked off the hotel. Go the opposite way.”
Gabriel turned to me, alarmed. “North? Why?”
“All we need is enough distance to make a phone call.”
Micah said, “He’s right—take us to the emergency landing zone at Jockey Club. We’ll dismount and find a phone there.”
“Take the next right.”
The following turn revealed sparse traffic. Micah swung the car perpendicular to our lane to cut off a car behind us, a near-crash into the adjacent building avoided as he reversed the wheel at the last second and repeated the process on the opposite side. He repeated another sharp S-turn, creating further gaps in traffic as progressively alarmed drivers braked and allowed us to gain distance.
“Five blocks to a right turn on Route Black—Jockey Club is just on the other side.”
Flashing red lights appeared in front of us as a police car braked to a halt at an intersection ahead, blocking our lane. Another joined it a moment later, parking end-to-end as the officers scrambled out and took cover behind their vehicles.
There was nowhere for us to turn.
“Seatbelts on,” Micah said evenly, buckling his as I did the same. He sped down a turn lane to cut around a trio of cars, flinging us back into our original lane as bullets began pocking the windshield. Micah slowed just before impact, and then held a steady speed as the officers dove toward the sidewalk. Our Suburban’s bumper impacted the rear quarter panel of a cop car, pivoting the vehicle around its engine block and out of our way. Micah accelerated our truck forward and out of the police perimeter.
Gabriel said, “Four more blocks till Route Black.”
We plunged forward, racing down the length of street temporarily empty from the cops’ blockage of outbound traffic. Every momentarily empty surface became an extension of Micah’s racetrack: turn lanes, sidewalks, and the opposite side of the road. He began blasting the horn as a stoplight approached, speeding through it on a green light.
“Three blocks to go.”
He used the bumper to burrow our way between two vehicles, thumping the
m aside before racing through a yellow light. A convertible making a turn ahead stopped suddenly, the sharp screech of his brakes halting his car inches from impact.
“Two more blocks.”
We were screaming along now, Micah blasting the horn as he plowed through cars with fleeting scrapes on both sides. He threw us onto the curb to pass a car, then accelerated past a red light.
“One block. Micah MICAH—”
A white car made a last-ditch attempt to speed through the intersection ahead of us, and the Suburban’s front end plummeted as Micah stomped the brakes. I threw an arm across Parvaneh’s chest, my last memory before impact a snapshot view of our Suburban reflected back at us from the sedan’s side windows.
The crash jarred me forward against the seatbelt, my head narrowly missing the seat in front of me as our rear wheels left the ground. Our back end spun left and then slammed down unevenly as we plunged into a light pole.
A sudden jolt brought us to a complete stop, scrambling my thoughts like a kick to the skull. For seconds my brain ceased to function, the first coherent thought post-crash being the repugnant chemical smell. My mind was swimming. A light pole almost touched the windshield, our truck’s hood crushed around it. Billowing white airbags deflated in the front seats. Parvaneh was beside me, tears sliding down her face, about to be run down by our pursuers and killed like Karma.
I unbuckled my seatbelt in what felt like slow motion, fumbling my hand across the door until I found the latch. Falling to the side, I slumped my shoulders across the door until my weight pushed it open.
I tumbled out of the vehicle and collapsed onto the pavement. Using the open door to pull myself up until I was shakily standing, I took in my surroundings.
Stationary headlights sliced through one another at awkward angles in the waning light as shadowy figures began to descend on the Suburban from vehicles abandoned in disarray.
The nearest man approached from his stopped Mercedes with hands extended, an apparent effort to calm me until the ambulance arrived. All sound was lost against an earsplitting ringing, my reaction occurring with the groggy detachment of seeing it through someone else’s eyes.
The Beretta was suddenly in my hand, cracking itself savagely across the man’s face before waving in a sideways arc that repelled the figures around me. The man I’d struck recoiled from the head impact, turning to retreat as I grabbed the back of his shirt and pressed my barrel into the base of his neck.
I threw him onto the hood of his car, holding him there until the rumble assured me the vehicle was still running.
“Phone,” I yelled at him. “Teléfono.”
He pulled out a flip phone, a precious lifeline to the Outfit helicopter that I shoved in my pocket with my free hand. Then I tossed him to the side, carving a wide semicircle around me with the Beretta to defend my prize, a dying scavenger desperate to claim a chance scrap.
I dropped the barrel as it crossed Parvaneh.
Her head was low, body crouched at the waist as Micah raced her toward me and into the backseat of the Mercedes. I scrambled around the hood and into the passenger seat as Micah slid behind the wheel, putting the car in drive. Forgotten in the melee, Gabriel scuttled into the backseat a second before Micah sped our new vehicle out of the chaos of the intersection.
I regained my senses and braced for another impact.
We raced down a sidewalk past the standstill traffic surrounding the crash, rumbling into the opposing lane and accelerating to a speed that seemed suicidal in an urban sprawl. Just as the lit windows and streetlights couldn’t have whizzed by any faster out my window, Micah swerved back toward the sidewalk, applied a screeching surge of brakes, and very nearly missed clipping the corner curb to complete a right turn onto a six-lane divided road.
He slammed the brakes behind a car as other vehicles closed in around us, and within seconds we had melted into the traffic crawling forward.
No cops in sight.
Retrieving the phone in my pocket, I thrust it back toward Gabriel. “Call the helicopter.”
He snatched the phone. “Take the next left off this road. Jockey Club is a few blocks away.” A pause. “David, this phone is passcode-protected.”
“Start guessing,” Micah snapped. Then, more calmly, “Parvaneh, are you hurt?”
I looked back at her, half expecting to see Karma in her final moment.
But Parvaneh’s face was tilted down, tendrils of hair hanging over eyes that stared forward, glinting with the flickering passage of streetlights. Unmistakable rage. She spoke three words.
“Was it Ribeiro?”
Her voice was dark, gritty, brimming with a visceral hatred that, even under our current circumstances, and even to me, seemed dangerous. No matter how polished and courteous she seemed in the light of day, she held a high position within a criminal organization whose magnitude and proportions I was just beginning to grasp.
Micah said, “All that matters right now is getting you back to Langley.”
I looked to him, then Parvaneh—no response, both expressionless. Apart from being a four-hour drive from my Virginia hometown, Langley was ubiquitously used as a reference to the CIA. My thoughts darted to the American flag suspended from the framework of the Complex hangar.
Who were these people?
The flickering red lights of police sirens appeared on the road in front of us, and the traffic came to a complete halt. A second later I saw police officers advancing between cars toward us, guns raised, peering inside the windows of stopped cars.
“Fuck,” Micah whispered.
I buckled my seatbelt as he spun the wheel left, mounting the median curb and cutting between two trees as traffic in the opposite lanes braked to avoid him. Our car thumped back down onto the far side of the road as Micah completed his U-turn, accelerating westbound away from the roadblock.
I turned to see the cops through the rear windshield, their figures glowing in the headlights of idling traffic. They weren’t shooting at us, though their reaction was something infinitely more dangerous—they were speaking into their radios.
Micah’s focus was consumed by driving, and I stepped in to fill the strategic gap.
“We can’t outrun police radios. Or spike strips. We’ve got to find a place where the cops won’t follow.”
Gabriel replied, “There’s nowhere they won’t follow us.”
“What about a favela?” I asked.
He fell silent, and Micah latched onto this uncertainty like a pit bull. “Goddammit, Gabriel, what about a favela?”
Turning to look at Gabriel’s stunned face, I caught sight of more police lights approaching from behind.
I said, “Gabriel, you’re going to give Micah directions to a place where the cops won’t follow us.”
“I don’t take orders from you.”
“You do now. I’ve got nine bullets left. If we get stopped, the first is yours.”
“Closest favela is Rocinha. Gangs there are worse than cops.”
I made eye contact with Parvaneh. “All we need is a phone. We can survive anywhere but here for ten minutes until the chopper arrives.”
“He’s right,” Micah said.
The next voice was hers. “Gabriel, take us there.”
“Fine. Take the next right.”
We turned onto a narrow one-way street lined with parked cars. This couldn’t be the correct road—the sidewalks were planted with ferns and trees that blocked my view of tall buildings rising into the night. Not the slightest hint of poverty to be seen.
I checked my side view mirror and saw a single cop car make the turn to follow us, joined a moment later by a second.
“Two cops in pursuit,” I said.
Gabriel shouted, “Left at the intersection.”
Micah proceeded without slowing in the least, waiting until the four-way was imminent before cutting into the far-right lane and standing up on the brakes. He ripped the wheel left, yanking the handbrake as our back end swung right. Our sidew
ays drift brought us broadside within inches of a pickup before Micah dropped the handbrake, punching the gas to shoot forward again.
We sped down a four-lane hardball, still being pursued by the two police vehicles. The road merged into two lanes, and then a single one-way channel so tight that I thought my side view mirror would clip a row of parked cars as Micah followed Gabriel’s directions.
Soon there was no longer any traffic moving forward, and I spun to gain an unobstructed view of the two cop cars keeping pace with us. Untamed vegetation closed in on us as we wound uphill.
When we crossed into the favela, I knew it at once.
The boundary between the city and the favela was more defined than any international border in the world—paved streets and lit storefronts relinquished their hold to a narrow dirt road threading into a ghostly kingdom of shanties.
Our headlights fell on graffiti-sprayed walls extending upward to multi-tiered balconies until a tangled spider web of wires suspended over the narrow street obscured the view.
The police response told me everything I needed to know about where we were entering—their collective flashing lights stopped at the threshold and then disappeared altogether as Micah threaded our car forward into the darkness.
ESCAPE
Omnia mors aequat
-Death makes all things equal
4
Micah continued piloting the Mercedes up a steep incline, the narrow road threading past more dilapidated structures. Our headlights illuminated a jumbled mess of mildew-stained concrete, sheet metal, and steel drums. Giant canvas sacks and piles of dirt leaned against walls, decrepit cars fell into decay atop streets and sidewalks, but the entire uninhabitable portrait of abject poverty was nonetheless brimming with masses of people packed into every space.
“Park as soon as you can,” Gabriel said. “Territory will become more contested between gangs the further we go.”
I asked, “You sure these people have phones?”
“Internet too. Everything is illegally siphoned from Rio. Electricity, water, everything. Look up.”
