The John Milton Series Boxset 4

by Mark Dawson

  “Sit on the bed,” the man ordered.

  Paulo did. The man stepped closer and frisked him; his hands moved skilfully, and he quickly located and removed Paulo’s phone and keys.

  “How much English do you speak?”

  “I speak it okay.”

  “Good.” The man took a wooden chair, moved it so that it was in front of the bed, and sat down. He had the gun in his hand, holding it with the easy confidence of someone who had used it before. “Are you scared?”

  Paulo nodded.

  “You’re right to be,” the man said. “I would be if I were you.”

  The words came quickly now. “I didn’t want anything to do with this,” Paulo said.

  “You’re bound to say that now,” the man said. “Do you think that’ll persuade me to let you go?”

  “You said if I helped…” He didn’t know what to say; the fear felt like ice in his brain.

  “I know what I said,” the man said. “It’s up to you what happens next. I have a few questions. You’re going to answer them. You’re going to be truthful and helpful. If you think you have information that might help me, even if I don’t ask for it, you’re going to volunteer it. And then, if I think you’ve been truthful and helpful, maybe I’ll give some thought to you walking out of here in one piece. If I don’t think that? Think about what I just did to your friends.” The man let the sentence hang, leaving Paulo to join the dots. “Do we have an understanding?”

  “Yes,” Paulo said.

  “Let’s start with your friends,” he said.

  “They’re not my friends,” he insisted.

  “What, then? Just two men you worked with?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Really? What is it like?”

  “I’m in a lot of trouble,” Paulo said.

  The man raised the gun a little so that Paulo could see it and tapped his index finger against the barrel. “We can agree on that.” The man paused. “Look at me.”

  Paulo looked from the gun to the man’s face. He had the palest blue eyes that he had ever seen; they were almost limpid.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  Paulo found that he couldn’t look away; the man’s gaze was magnetic, and chilling. He thought of the calmness with which he held the pistol, and the shots that he had heard from inside the house. The man had killed Junior and Alessandro just an hour ago, and it seemingly had had no effect on him at all.

  “I asked you a question, Paulo. Do you remember me?”

  “I don’t remember you.”

  “I was there when Alícia Saverin was taken. I was one of the men who was supposed to make sure she was safe. And then, when I tried to get her back, you ran me off the road. You nearly killed me.” The man stared at him, his eyes even colder than before. “Do you remember now?”

  “I’m sorry,” Paulo said, because he didn’t know what else to say. “I didn’t know that was going to happen. He tricked me.”

  “Who did?”

  “Garanhão,” he replied, struggling to avoid being overwhelmed by the panic that he felt. “I owe him a lot of money. If I told him that I didn’t want to work for him anymore, he’d take it out on my family. There’s nothing I can do. I’ve been stupid, I know I have, but I’m trapped.”

  Paulo watched the man’s reaction; his face was stern, and his expression didn’t change.

  “Who’s Garanhão?”

  “You don’t know?” The question spurted out before he could tamp down his incredulity, and it was rewarded by another cold stare. “He runs the Hill. Antonio Rodrigues. He’s the don.”

  “And how did he trick you?”

  “He said I would just be driving for him. But he sent me with Alessandro and Junior—”

  “Who?” the man cut in.

  “The men—from today.”

  “The men who came into the house? One of them had a tattoo across his face.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s Junior. The other is Alessandro. Garanhão said I just had to take them to Ipanema. It was simple: we were just down there to pick someone up. And then they start shooting and they take the girl. I had no idea. I would never have done it if I had known. But I didn’t know, I swear.”

  The man kept his eyes on Paulo as he spoke. “Where is the girl?”

  “At the top of the Hill.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Garanhão told me that I had to look after her. She is little. I have a girl the same age as her. I’ve made sure she has what she needs. I try to keep her safe. She shouldn’t be there. She should be with her family. If I could get her away, I would. But it is Garanhão. What can I do?”

  The man listened quietly and then reached onto the desk and picked Paulo’s phone up and handed it to him. “Unlock it.”

  Paulo tapped in the passcode and handed it back. The man was silent for a moment, his finger swiping across the screen as he flicked through Paulo’s photos. He turned the phone around and held it up so that he could see the photograph that he had stopped on. It was one of his favourites: Rafaela and Eloá on the beach at Ipanema, their happy smiles a reminder of how perfect their life had been before the diagnosis.

  “Your family?” the man said.

  Paulo nodded. “My wife and my daughter. Eloá is six. She is sick. She has cancer. We needed money for her treatment—I raced cars to try to get what we needed, but then that went wrong, and the only choice I had was to go to Garanhão. He gave me the money and said I had to work for him. And now, if I say no to him…” He stopped and then said, “You don’t say no to Garanhão.”

  “You said the Hill,” the man said. “You mean Rocinha?”

  Paulo nodded. “Garanhão runs it. He lives at the top—everyone there works for him. He has warehouses there for his drugs business. They have Alícia in the basement.”

  The man stared at him again. “How much do you want to make this good?”

  “Very much,” Paulo said. “But how can I—”

  “Can you show me where she is?”

  “Yes,” Paulo said. “But why? The police won’t be able to help. Garanhão owns the police. They wouldn’t even dare to go up there.”

  “The police aren’t going up there,” the man said. “I am.”

  Paulo wasn’t immediately sure that he had heard him correctly. “You want to go to the top of the Hill?”

  “Yes,” the man said.

  “But why?”

  “Because I’m going to go and get her, and then I’m going to bring her down.”

  61

  Milton interrogated Paulo for another twenty minutes. The young man was terrified, with good reason, and once Milton got him started with a series of simple questions, the words flowed out of him. It would have been an exaggeration to suggest that Milton started to warm to him—Milton warmed to practically no one—but, as the story poured out, he did, at least, come to understand why Paulo had done what he had done. Milton was not prepared to absolve him, but he understood what it was like to be caught in a situation from which it appeared dangerous, if not impossible, to extract oneself. After all, Milton had once been in a similar situation himself.

  More important than that, Milton started to believe that de Almeida meant what he said about wanting to help Alícia Saverin. He evidently felt guilty about his role in the affair, and, even though he said he was doing what he could to make the girl comfortable, he did not mistake his role for other than what it was: he was her jailor.

  Milton had started to formulate the rough lines of a plan when he heard the sound of a car pulling up outside. He went to the window and pulled the edge of the curtain back so that he could look out. It was Harry Marks’s old BMW.

  Milton opened the door so that Marks could come inside.

  “Who’s this?” the old man said.

  “This is Paulo de Almeida,” Milton said. “He’s the man I told you about.”

  Marks looked at de Almeida with undisguised disdain.
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  “He’s going to help me,” Milton said. “Isn’t that right, Paulo?”

  De Almeida nodded, caught somewhere between the need to display enthusiasm for Milton’s benefit and his wariness at Marks.

  Milton gestured to Paulo. “Go and wait in the bathroom. I need to speak to my friend in private.”

  Paulo did as he was told. Milton had already checked that there was no way that he could get out from back there. He followed the young man as he went inside and pulled the door shut after him. He went back to Marks and quickly summarised the information that Paulo had given him. Marks listened intently, punctuating each new piece of intelligence with a nod of his head.

  “What’s next?” he asked when Milton was finished.

  He gestured to the bathroom door. “He wants to make up for what he’s done, and I’m going to give him a chance. He’s going to go back to Rocinha, go to where Alícia is being held, and get me the information I need to plan an extraction. Do you have a camera he could use? Something very discreet.”

  “I have something,” Marks said. “But it’s been a while since it was updated.”

  “Does it transmit?”

  “No. Just records.”

  “It’ll have to do.”

  Marks took out a notebook and scribbled into it. “What else?”

  “You need to go back to our friends in Cheltenham. I want a full workup on Antonio Rodrigues. His nom de guerre is Garanhão. I want to know who he is, where he lives, his known associates, criminal history.”

  “I’ll get them on it today.”

  Milton thanked him.

  Marks scratched his head with the end of the pencil. “Are you sure about this? Going up there?”

  “What else am I going to do? You think I can trust the police?”

  “No,” he said with a grim shake of his head.

  “So?”

  “There must be another way. You were in bed with a severe concussion two days ago. You—”

  “It’s personal now, Harry,” Milton said, cutting him off. “I came to stay here with a friend.”

  “You said.”

  “His name’s Shawn Drake. It turns out he’s not what I thought he was. He’s been working for Garanhão. He sold the girl and her mother out—I’m guessing Garanhão, or someone who’s paying him, wants to lean on Alícia’s father. A man and a woman who worked for Drake were killed when they took her. And then he tried to kill me—he was there this morning.”

  “At the house?”

  Milton nodded. “Three of them. I took his friends out, but he got away. But not before we had a nice cosy chat.”

  “You have a poor choice in friends,” Marks observed.

  Milton allowed himself a grim smile. “We made a lot of noise this morning—the police are going to find the bodies of Garanhão’s men and the man who was working for Drake. Tell GCHQ to monitor their investigation. I want to know if they start looking in the right direction.”

  Marks noted that down. “Understood.”

  Milton had taken quick snaps of the two dead men. He took out his phone, navigated to the pictures, and handed it to Marks. The old man looked at the photograph of the man with the tattooed face. “Not a looker, was he?”

  “That’s Junior.”

  Marks swiped left.

  “His friend is Alessandro,” Milton said. He took the phone back again. “I’ll email these to you. I want Cheltenham to do full workups on both these men, too, and on Drake. Shawn Drake, spelled S-H-A-W-N. He was in the SAS at the same time as me, and then he came over here to work.” Milton paused, wondering how thorough he needed to be; he decided, as usual, that more was much better than less. He swiped through the pictures until he found a selfie that he had taken at the festival. “This is him,” he said, pointing. “And this is Sophia Lopes. She’s involved with Drake. She told me that she’s training to be a lawyer, but I’m not sure how much of that I believe now. I want a full workup on her, too. If there’s anything interesting, I want to know it.”

  Marks scribbled in his book. “And what about you?”

  “This traficante—Garanhão—he’s going to find out what happened this morning pretty soon. He might know already.” He nodded to the bathroom door. “It’ll look better for the kid if he goes back up there now. The longer he’s not up there, the better the chances Garanhão thinks he’s involved or compromised.”

  “It’s already been hours. He’s going to need an excuse.”

  “Can you think of something?”

  “Should be able to.” Marks stood up. “So he just needs a camera? I can take him to get fixed up now. The kit’s back at the cache.”

  Milton went to the door and opened it. “Get in here.”

  Paulo did as he was asked.

  “You’re going to go with my friend. He’s going to fit you with a camera—a very small one that no one will notice. I want you to go back to Garanhão. You need to tell him that you heard shooting, you panicked, and then you drove. Nothing else.”

  The young man was pale with fear and didn’t say anything.

  Milton continued. “And then I want you to go to the warehouse and walk around. I want you to show me the guards, where they’re posted, how many of them there are, the weapons they use. And then I want you to show me the building: how I get in, and then the way I’d need to go to find Alícia and get her out again.”

  “They’ll see me,” Paulo blurted. “The camera—they’ll see it.”

  “It’s very small,” Marks said. “It looks just like a button. They won’t even know it’s there.”

  “No. No way. You don’t know what—”

  “This isn’t a negotiation,” Milton said sternly, cutting him off. “You said you wanted to help Alícia.”

  “I do.”

  “So this is how you do it.”

  “But you don’t know what he’s like.”

  “This is your chance to make good on what you’ve done. You decided to work for him—you didn’t have to. Getting involved with men like him is dangerous. But crossing men like me is dangerous, too. Understand?”

  “Yes,” Paulo said quietly.

  “Go with my friend. He’ll fit you with the camera and tell you what to do. Get what I asked for and bring it to me this afternoon. And don’t make me come and find you.”

  Milton opened the door and led Paulo to the Mercedes Benz that he had been driving. Marks joined them outside as the young man opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat.

  Marks shut the door to the room. “I’ve rented it for a week,” he said as he came down from the veranda. “Thought it might be useful.”

  Milton closed the car door. “What do you think?” he asked Marks.

  “You trust him?”

  “No. But he’s scared.”

  “He’s definitely scared.”

  “And I think he wants to do the right thing.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “All we lose is surprise. His boss finds out that someone who killed two of his men is coming for the girl. He doesn’t know my name or where he can find me. If that happens, I’ll find another way. But I don’t think it will. And the intel could be valuable. I think it’s worth the risk to get it.”

  Marks nodded. “I can get him sorted from here,” he said. “I’ll call when it’s done.”

  “Thanks, Harry. There’s one other thing I need you to get for me.”

  “What?”

  “You got any bugs at the cache?”

  “Some,” he said. “Nothing fancy. Old stuff.”

  “It’ll do. Can I have them?”

  “Now?”

  Milton nodded.

  “I’ll give you a ride. What are you going to do with them?”

  “A little digging,” Milton said.

  62

  Paulo drove east, following the old man in his beaten-up BMW. He was terrified. He had promised to do something that filled him with horror. The idea of spying on Garanhão was so frightening that the only
way he could drive was to put it right at the back of his mind. He focussed on Alícia instead and told himself that he was going to do right by her, just as he ought to have done right at the start.

  The old man indicated that he was turning off. Paulo did the same and turned into the forecourt of a Shell gas station next to a large derelict warehouse. The old man parked the BMW and got out. The man with the blue eyes waited in the passenger seat. The old man came over to Paulo. He opened the door and told him to step out.

  “You need to wait here,” the man said to him.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Wait,” the man repeated, not bothering to hide his impatience. “There’s a diner around the back of the station. Go and get a cup of coffee and wait for me. I’ll be half an hour.”

  The old man got back into his BMW, started the engine, and rejoined the traffic.

  Paulo walked across to the diner, ordered a coffee, and took it to an empty table by the window. He sat down to wait.

  It was nearer to an hour by the time the old man returned to the gas station. Paulo was on his third coffee; he finished it, left a note on the table to settle the bill, and went back outside. The old man parked the BMW next to the warehouse and got out; he was alone, with no sign of the man with the blue eyes. He was holding a polo shirt in one hand and a small leather satchel in the other. There was a toilet block behind the gas station, and the old man started toward it, beckoning that Paulo should follow him.

  The toilets were unpleasant and hadn’t been cleaned for some time. There was a line of three stalls, three sinks on the wall—one of them had been smashed—and a cracked mirror above them. The old man checked that the stalls were empty and then tossed the shirt to Paulo.

  “Put it on.”

  Paulo took the shirt and held it up. It was pale blue, with a collar, a three-button placket and an Yves Saint Laurent logo over the right breast.

  “You need me to help dress you?” the old man said sharply. “Put it on.”

  Paulo took off his own shirt, put his arms through the new one, and tugged it over his head.