Mirage by Clive Cussler
One such slum spilled off a hill like so much trash flung from a giant’s hand. It was home to thirty thousand people crammed into a space not much larger than three city blocks. Dogs and half-naked children meandered the dirt paths that wound around the buildings. There were only a few of any permanence, cinder-block structures erected by one aid agency or other, with the intent of housing a few hundred people in tiny apartments. Instead, several thousand called each one home, many living in staircases or hallways or in tin and plywood shacks atop the roof.
Sewage ran in channels along the roads, and only occasionally would one of the cars lining the streets move. Most had been stolen and abandoned here and were stripped down to their shells, like the carapaces of dead beetles eaten by ants. The stink and squalor were appalling. It was a place of gray hopelessness where even Rio’s perfect weather could not give joy to the inhabitants. It was also a place of oppressive fear of the drug gang that ran the favela with an iron fist. The police never ventured into the slum, and not once had the government tried to intervene in the region’s internal affairs. Its leader was called Amo, which meant “boss.” Nothing happened in his territory that he didn’t know about.
The stranger looked like any of the thousands of peasants who flocked into the city from the countryside searching for work. He wore frayed tan pants and a simple cotton shirt. His sandals were soled with the tread of a truck tire. On his head he wore a hat made from woven palm leaves. No one paid him any attention as he moved slowly up the hill, weaving between heaps of trash and kids roughhousing in the streets.
Finally, two young men with slicked-back hair and predatory eyes lifted themselves from the five-gallon buckets they were using as stools. One adjusted his shirt so the taped butt of an ancient revolver was visible. His partner hefted a baseball bat.
They approached the stranger and called out, “What’s your business here?”
They could see the man was in his sixties and had a dim look in his eyes. He muttered a response that neither man understood.
“I think you should head back down the mountain, old man,” the leader of the two thugs suggested. “There is nothing but trouble for you here.”
It was obvious the old man had nothing of value, so there was no sense robbing him, and letting him linger would mean one more beggar clogging the streets. Better to send him packing now than disposing of his corpse later when he died of starvation or dysentery.
“I want no trouble,” the man said in Spanish.
“He ain’t even Brazilian, man,” the young thug complained. “We can’t feed ourselves, and some Bolivian expects to live off our charity.”
The kid with the gun spat angrily. “Not your lucky day, pal.”
He grabbed the old man by the arm while his partner got him by the other, and they quickly marshaled him into a tight alley between two shipping containers that served as homes for dozens. A cat had been sunning itself on a tire pile at the entrance of the alley, but its primal sense of trouble sent it fleeing. The ground was oil soaked and packed as hard as cement.
They tossed the man into the side of one of the containers, but he turned so that he hit it with his back and not his face as they had intended. If either street tough realized how deftly the old man had moved, things might have ended differently. The space was too narrow to swing the bat properly, so the thug used its butt end like a ram aimed at the old man’s stomach. He wasn’t a big kid, and perpetual hunger did little to give him superior strength, but the blow would be enough to drop the old man to the ground with his lungs emptied of air.
The wooden bat hit the side of the container with an echoing thump. The man had dodged the bat, and then he went on the offense. He snatched the gun out of the leader’s waistband before the man realized he’d moved and used it like a pair of brass knuckles. His punch broke the kid’s cheekbone and flayed open the skin so that blood poured from the wound.
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
“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.”
L’Enfant’s single eye glittered as he looked at the nurse. “My last ones were actually twins. Not identical, mind you, but twins nonetheless.” He clapped his right hand into the claw-like pincer of his disfigured left. “Leave us, my dear.” When the nurse had gone, L’Enfant said, “You have not tracked me here to discuss my medical staff, I presume.”
“You presume correctly.” Cabrillo waited for the shadowy man to figure out why he’d come.
L’Enfant studied him for a moment and finally asked, “Why the disguise?”
“I needed to cross through some nasty neighborhoods to get here. I didn’t want to look like an attractive target for a mugger.”
“You always were a careful planner. Okay, what else may I presume? I have wronged you by speaking of the Corporation to Kenin, something for which I must atone.”
Juan nodded while L’Enfant adjusted the oxygen cannula under the ruin of his burned nose.
“I presume that my atonement comes in the form of tracking down Admiral Kenin for you.”
“Correct.”
“And you came to me in person rather than reaching me through more conventional ways in order for me to understand that if I fail to find him, my life is then forfeit.”
“Four for four. You should go into the soothsaying business. Do you know where Kenin went to ground?”
The man shook his reptilian head. “No. Don’t think I don’t have feelers out there, but he knew what he was doing when he rabbited.”
“‘Rabbited,’ really?” Juan said with a smile. “Last time I read someone ‘rabbiting’ was an old spy novel.”
“You prefer ‘on the lam’?”
“I prefer to know where he is,” Juan said sharply to remind the information broker that this wasn’t idle banter.
“I will find him.”
“Now call Amo and have him send the pickup. I’d rather not walk all the way back to where I can find a working bus that will eventually take me to a part of the city that has taxis.” It might have sounded like a joke, but Cabrillo had had to traverse ten miles of urban jungle on foot to get here because buses, let alone cabs, never ventured into this part of the city.
“I will do you one better. I have an old Mercedes that doesn’t attract too much attention. Where are you staying?”
“The Fasano,” he lied.
“I figured a guy like you would go for nostalgia and stay at the Copa Palace.”
Had Juan not been a better poker player, he would have given away that L’Enfant had guessed where he was actually staying. He loved the stately deco-style Copacabana Palace Hotel and stayed there whenever he was in Rio.
“No matter. I will have my man drop you at the Fasano. No buses or taxis. It is the least I can do.”
Juan put a little menace in his voice. “The least you can do is lead me to Pytor Kenin.”
The Container was in play.
That’s what it was called, The Container. Capital T, capital C. The. Container.
That it was finally in play had sent bells ringing at the CIA, FBI, Homeland, Treasury, NSA, and just about every other acronymic entity in Washington, D.C. Cabrillo wouldn’t have been surprised to know his old friend Dirk Pitt and NUMA had been read in on The Container.
The rumors swirling around it were the stuff of legend and myth. No one was certain how or why The Container came into being or who was behind it, but from every souk and bazaar, from one end of the Middle East to the farthest island of Muslim Indonesia, word of its contents had spread.
In the first years of America’s invasion of Iraq, massive amounts of cash were used to buy loyalty, as was custom in many parts of the region, though loyalty ran out when the money did or someone had a better offer. That left Washington in the position of having to pour unimaginable streams of cash into Baghdad, Başrah, and every hamlet up to the Kurdish border with Turkey.
Oversight of this bounty was thought to be foolproof but in actuality was an utter joke. Vast sums of cash were siphoned off by yet another layer of corruption in a corrupted society. The problem for those partaking of Uncle Sam’s largesse wasn’t how to get the money but how to get it out of the country. Sure, individuals could smuggle a few bundles of hundre
So that’s what happened to it. It went into a conex shipping container and then it sat in a warehouse because those who stole it also knew the Americans would never stop looking for it. So they did what Arabs were especially good at. They outwaited their enemies. It took years, but eventually the U.S. drew down its forces. Patrols no longer guarded every street corner and intersection. Tanks and up-armored Humvees disappeared. Black Hawks and Cobras no longer buzzed over the cities in multitudes that rivaled a hornet swarm. After a decade, the Americans wound down their presence in Iraq until the crime bosses decided it was finally safe enough to move the cash. It would need to be laundered, of course, and a deal was struck with several banks in the Far East. To do it locally would set off alarm bells among the international monetary watchdogs.
So The Container would have to be shipped to Jakarta. The question arose as to who would smuggle it out of Iraq. American and other NATO warships still patrolled the Gulf and boarded vessels with disturbing frequency. They needed a smuggler. Several names were discussed in a heated exchange between the crime bosses who’d amassed the fortune until one was finally selected: Ali Mohamed. He was Saudi but could be trusted. He and his ship were away from the Gulf when the decision was made to finally move The Container, so there was a delay of two weeks before he could do their bidding. And then the day arrived when his ship docked in Iraq.
The Container was in play.
There was only one slight problem with their plan. They had underestimated their enemy’s patience.
The Americans never forgot the money that had slipped through their fingers. Over time, they began to learn of the existence of The Container and made several logical deductions about its dispensation. They knew too that it couldn’t be laundered in Iraq or any neighboring country. It would need to be shipped overseas.