the scent in Punta Arenas.
Until Rio, and a lucky break. A visiting jujitsu student from Denmark had seen an Interpol Wanted poster while in his embassy to file for a lost passport. He’d run into another white student at a dojo in the favelas. Nothing to that, but the Dane knew his art, and the white man’s fighting style showed hints of other disciplines—hard, brutal, warrior tendencies that he tried to hide from those around him. The Dane recalled the Wanted poster. It was no obvious match, but he felt compelled to contact the authorities. Something about the man in the dojo had uneased him. A look, an edge, a recognition by the white student that the Dane was sizing him up through his peripheral vision.
The man hunter got word of the sighting, arrived on a private jet mere hours later. The suspect did not show for class that day, nor the next. The man hunter brought in local reinforcements for the legwork, dozens of men combed the favelas with photos and cash. Many of the crew were roughed up or threatened on the mean streets of the lawless slums, one man even relieved of his wallet and knifed in the arm. But the canvass paid off, someone talked, someone pointed a finger, someone whispered an address.
The man hunter went to have a look. He was not a wet boy, he hadn’t fired a weapon since his days in the Royal Netherlands Army, fighting the Angolans in the 1970s. But he did not want to spin up his gunmen-in-waiting on another wild-goose chase, so he left three armed men up the street as he went on alone. A horrid, run-down neighborhood, a shit-stained building, a piss-scented third-floor hall with a darkened doorway at the end of it. The man hunter’s hands shook as he used another boarder’s key and crept inside.
A dormitory, a human form moved in a blur off a top bunk bed, the man hunter’s life flashed before his eyes. Then a backpack heaved upon the blur’s shoulder and the blur was out a window, a full two stories down. The man hunter rushed behind him, watched his target land and roll onto another rooftop, float across an alleyway to another building like a flying squirrel, and then another leap and roll down to ground level.
The man hunter called down to his gunners, but they had seen nothing.
The target was gone, the bunk he’d vacated left no clues but the warmth on his tattered blanket.
That was ten weeks ago.
Last Sunday a call came from Fonte Boa, hundreds of miles north on the Amazon River. The man hunter had made lists of possible professions in which the target might find work. There were hundreds, from sheet metal worker to Legionnaire. Somewhere down the list marine salvage had been noted, due to his experience in diving and his raw courage. A small operation along a remote Amazonian tributary had employed a walk-up foreign white man, a queer occurrence in the Brazilian jungle to be sure. So the man hunter had flown to Fonte Boa and showed a photo to the boatman who delivered dry goods downriver to the settlements.
And now the man hunter was here.
He fingered the radio between his knees. One call and two fat helicopters full of gunmen would descend and fan out; they’d planned their attack with satellite photos and a grease board in the watcher’s hotel room in Fonte Boa. One call would turn the pristine jungle to fire, and end the target the Dutch man hunter had been after for these seven long months.
But first the man hunter had to make certain.
A howler monkey on the bank splashed from a tree into the water, scampered back onto the bank and disappeared into the thick growth.
Seconds later, the launch slowed and bumped against the rubber tires tied at dockside. The canoe’s owner made to turn off the outboard.
“No,” said the man hunter. “Leave it running. I will only be a moment.”
“Wastes gas, sir,” said the local. Some sort of Indian savage. “I can start it again in five seconds.”
“I said leave it running.” The white man climbed ashore, started up the dirt hill towards a man idling by a shack raised on narrow stilts. He’d get some verification that this was the place, and then the Dutchman would not wait around for the fireworks. He carried an ancient Webley top-break revolver in a shoulder holster, but that was really just for show out here amongst the savages of the jungle. Killing was not his job. He’d use his radio, and then his job would be done; he’d head back upriver to Fonte Boa to wait at the hotel.
Mauro sat in the shade, waiting for his father to return with the morning’s catch. At ten years old Mauro normally went out with his father to collect the nets, but today he’d stayed behind to help his uncle with some chores, and had only just arrived at the dock when the canoe with the white man appeared. He watched the old man make his way up the hill, stop in front of the drunkard, and engage the man in conversation. He pulled a white paper from his breast pocket and showed it to the man, then handed him some cash.
Mauro stood slowly. Hesitated.
The white man nodded, headed back to the canoe, and pulled a radio up to his mouth.
Young Mauro walked towards a narrow trail that led away from the docks, away from his village. Once inside the dark protection of the jungle canopy, the boy began to run as fast as his calloused bare feet would take him.
TWO
Court Gentry pulled on his umbilical line for a bit more slack, then turned back to the wreckage in front of him. He reached out with a gloved hand and felt his way forward to the hulking iron wheelhouse of the sunken steamboat. Visibility in the murky river was right at twelve inches at this time of late morning, and it was the best he could hope for thirty feet below the ochre surface of the warm water. Finding his place, he adjusted the angle of the flashlight on his helmet, lifted his cutting torch back up, and narrowed the flame to little more than a glowing spike. Then he slowly applied the white-hot fire to the iron to begin a new cut.
A series of three strong tugs to his line pulled him off his mark.
“Dammit,” he said aloud, his voice reverberated in his brass helmet. Three tugs meant “surface immediately,” which meant it would take him, at a minimum, ten minutes to get back down here through the algae and oily film to find his spot again.
But he did not wait. “Surface immediately” wasn’t a message to ignore. It could be nothing, but it also could mean there was a problem with the equipment, which could be dangerous, or it could also mean snakes or crocs or a school of piranha had been spotted close to his dive site, which could be downright deadly.
He broke the surface four minutes later, his gear and his weights made it impossible to tread water so he pulled himself along his line towards the shore. When he made it waist-deep he wiped green goo off the acrylic faceplate of his helmet, but only when he unfastened the latches and lifted off the heavy headgear could he see his way forward through the thick reeds and tall grasses on the riverside. Above him stood his two coworkers, Thiago and Davi; both men were experienced salvage divers, but neither was fitted to go down today. Only one compressor line was operational, so they’d split the time between the three of them. One man on the bottom, and two men on crocodile/anaconda/piranha watch.
“What is it?” Court called out to them. His Portuguese was not half as good as his Spanish, but it was functional. One jerked a thumb to the other side of a tiny lagoon that pushed off of the river like a tumor, and Court saw young Mauro standing there on the trail that led towards the dock. The boy wore a red and black Barcelona soccer jersey emblazoned with the name of a Bulgarian player who had not taken the pitch since the mid-nineties, and he was barefoot. Court had never once seen the dark-skinned kid in shoes.
Gentry was surprised that he’d been called to the surface to talk to the boy—still he waved and smiled. But his smile dropped in an instant. The kid’s eyes were wide and his body was tight.
Something was wrong.
Court trudged along the marshy bank that rimmed the lagoon, his feet sucked down by mud. He climbed up to the young Brazilian, led him down a trail a few yards before asking, “What’s up?”
“You told me to come if I ever saw a white man.”
“Yes, I did.” Court’s own body stiffened.
“An old man. Alone. At the dock.”
“Did he talk to any—”
“Yes, he asked Amado a question. Showed him a sheet of paper. Gave him some money. Then he talked into his radio.”
