JET - Sanctuary

by Blake, Russell

  He strode across the scuffed concrete floor, wending around pallets of oversized wooden crates, a polystyrene cup of coffee in his left hand and a waxed paper bag of donuts in his right. He ducked around a forklift, reached the door to the administrative office, and stepped inside, reassured when he entered that there was only one other person there – Jason McDougal, one of his partners in the international drug trafficking empire Santell operated as a profitable sideline to his day job as a section head with the CIA.

  Santell sat across from McDougal, who was studying a computer monitor on his desk, and tossed the donuts to him.

  “How long do we have?” Santell asked as he removed the plastic lid from his coffee.

  “Half an hour till the first workers show up, but call it fifteen minutes if you want to be safe. What’s up?”

  “I’ve been thinking about the Buenos Aires incident – Tara’s remarkable failure and the loss of not only the target, but also the stones.”

  “And the entire team. Let’s not forget that.” McDougal had been with the agency for two decades before retiring early and opening an import-export business, the better to facilitate his trips to the heroin production centers in Afghanistan and the Golden Triangle as well as to Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru, where cocaine was the big export.

  “How could I? What a disaster. I’ve been running interference for the last two days.”

  McDougal checked his watch. “What do you want to talk about? That op’s dead, isn’t it? Time to cut our losses and move on.”

  “The bastard still probably has a bunch of our diamonds,” Santell seethed. He took a cautious sip of coffee and winced as he burned the tip of his tongue. “Damn. They superheat this stuff every time.”

  McDougal opened the bag and extracted a glistening chocolate-glazed donut. He regarded his paunch with rueful eyes and then took a massive bite out of it. “He might. Or might not. You said Tara was unclear.”

  Santell nodded. “I want to send someone in. A freelancer. I can’t have any more agency personnel involved. It’s left too large a trail.” Santell caught the bag McDougal tossed him and removed a cinnamon roll. “Who do you have in that neck of the woods?”

  McDougal sighed. “South America? Boy, it’s not like the good old days. Most of the best are long dead. And the newbies are lazy and sloppy. Butchers. If Tara couldn’t pull this off, sending any of them in is a waste of time.”

  “I’m not asking you what won’t work. I’d say I already have a pretty clear idea of what not to do,” Santell snapped.

  “The best freelancer on that continent is a name you’re not going to like. We decided to never use him again after the slaughter in Honduras, remember?”

  Santell’s face fell. “You don’t mean…”

  McDougal nodded. “I do. Drago.”

  Santell stared at the cinnamon roll like it had turned into feces, and set it on the table, his expression pained. “Shit. Who else is there?”

  “Who’s reliable and won’t just disappear if they locate the stones? Nobody. If he’s still got some, we’re talking millions. Tens of millions.” McDougal paused and munched on another chunk of doughnut. “Drago’s the best, and he’s rigorous.”

  “Drago’s a walking wrecking machine. He’s got all the subtlety of a bulldozer. And he enjoys carnage a little too much for my liking.”

  “Hey, you asked. I’d just as soon let it go. Like I said, that’s already played.”

  Santell shook his head. “It’s more than just the money. Matt knows too much. And he’s just the kind who’ll surface a year from now, or five, and pull a Snowden.”

  “Nobody would believe him.”

  “We have no idea how much he knows.”

  “Pretty fair bet he’s got the Laos details at the very least.”

  “Of course.” Santell’s eyes locked on a calendar mounted on the wall behind McDougal that featured colorful hot air balloons soaring over Albuquerque, New Mexico, at dawn. He took another pull on his coffee, ignoring the pain as his tongue protested the scalding.

  McDougal folded his hands and leaned forward. “If it’s not the money, what’s really eating at you? We’re almost out of time. Spit it out.”

  Santell’s attention returned to McDougal. “The Russians. If Matt approached them with all the data he’s carrying around in his head, they could prove we’re responsible for the huge upturn in heroin consumption in Russia as well as most of Europe. Let’s just say that if a nation with that many nukes starts rattling its saber, any story they tell will get a whole different kind of scrutiny from the Justice Department. We don’t need that kind of heat.”

  McDougal stuffed the remainder of his doughnut into his mouth and chewed appreciatively, lost in thought. He glanced at his watch again and stood. “Come on. I’ll walk you out.”

  The pair moved unhurriedly through the warehouse. When they reached the side door, Santell paused and turned to McDougal. “How much do you think Drago would want to do this?”

  “Probably half a mil before it was done. He’ll need travel expenses, documents, spread it around money…it could go north of that depending on what he finds.”

  Santell scowled and then nodded. “Budget a mil. But don’t let on how much is in the kitty. No point in being foolish with our cash.”

  “Of course. How much do you want me to tell him?”

  “You really trust him?”

  “As much as any of these freelancers.”

  “Tell him the minimum he needs to know. Don’t let on about any agency connection. And don’t get too specific about the amount of diamonds we’re looking for.”

  A flock of seagulls screeched overhead, wings stretched wide against the cold gray sky, wheeling over the industrial park on their way to the Potomac as Santell plodded back to his car. He tried to ignore the nagging feeling of dread that had lingered just beneath the surface of his every waking moment since he’d gotten the news about Tara, but it was no use. He slipped behind the wheel of the car and shook a small white oval pill from a prescription bottle with a trembling hand and dry swallowed it.

  The motor started with a purr, and Santell took several deep breaths before putting the transmission in gear. He was one of the most powerful men in the American intelligence community – a veteran of countless black ops and deniable missions, even if he’d largely directed them from the safety of a corner office. He didn’t run scared. Santell was one of the predators in the clandestine jungle, one of the hunters. Matt was a nuisance, an irritant, nothing more. He’d be squashed like a bug eventually – and while Santell didn’t like the idea of unleashing a psychopath like the contract killer known as Drago into the world, he was out of options. McDougal had been around long enough to know how to launder the funds and avoid any trail leading back to them, a prudent step. Drago’s MO was to leave a trail of bodies in his wake, drawing too much attention for Santell’s professional liking.

  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 ve
sts 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 c
oncrete 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.