think they were injecting him.
And that was another mystery, the time he’d been in the cell. He had no way of knowing, no way of keeping track. They’d kept his watch. The single lamp in the ceiling never went off, so there was no way of distinguishing when it might be day and when it might be night.
The lamp was enclosed in a steel cage, so the prisoners couldn’t get at it. Not that he would have bothered. The light was so dim that he had no problem falling asleep.
And that’s about all he wanted to do. Sleep.
So, maybe that was the way they were doing it. Waiting until he was asleep, and then sneaking in and putting a mask over his face or a needle in his arm. Or maybe they were pump-ing in some kind of gas through the vent up near the light. Or maybe it was in the water. He doubted it was the water. There was just the one tap and it looked like a normal tap. They hadn’t given him a glass. To drink he had to bend over the sink.
But drugging him they were. He was sure they were get-ting it into him in one fashion or another. There was no other explanation for the way he felt. He was dazed and dis-oriented. And he was in no condition to put up a fight when the two of them finally came for him.
It wasn’t the carioca. It was a man and a woman. The woman appeared to be in her early thirties and the man maybe a decade older. Both were wearing green medical scrubs. The gurney they’d brought was equipped with leather restraints that buckled around his upper torso, wrists, thighs, and shins. By the time they’d finished, he was all but immo-bile. The ride down the hall took only a few seconds. They wheeled him into a tile-walled room smelling of hospital and positioned the gurney next to a metal table surmounted by an immense surgical light.
“Your doctor will be with you in a moment,” the guy in green scrubs said.
And laughed.
Hector Costa stared into the mirror and rubbed the bristles on his chin. He didn’t like the idea of being in the office unshaven. The bags under his eyes made him look as if he’d had a long night of drinking behind him. He splashed some water on his face, dried it with a paper towel, and returned to where his uncle was still working the phone.
“I’m going down to the padaria for breakfast and a razor. Want anything?”
“Coffee with milk and a buttered roll,” Silva said, and started dialing the next number on his list.
HECTOR WAS sitting at the counter, reading the morning paper, and sipping
“We’ve got him,” Silva said.
“Ribeiro?”
“He was trying to board a flight to Paraguay. They’re hold-ing him at Guarulhos. Come on.”
There was a car waiting in front of the office, Babyface Goncalves behind the wheel. Babyface started rolling even before Hector had fastened his seat belt.
Sao Paulo shares with Bangkok the distinction of having the most serious traffic gridlocks in the world. Isolated inci-dents make those gridlocks even worse.
The isolated incident du jour was a tractor trailer whose driver had misread the height of a viaduct over the
The driver, who hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, had been propelled out of his cab by inertia. He’d flown through the windshield and come to rest on the other side of the dividing island, where he’d been promptly run over by a delivery van.
The driver of the van, in a desperate attempt to avoid the collision, had stood on his brakes and been rear- ended by another tractor trailer that had jackknifed over the entire road, blocking it in both directions.
When Babyface rolled to a stop, they had almost five kilo-meters of stalled vehicles in front of them. The traffic behind them was bumper to bumper, so they were effectively trapped. Television helicopters were converging at a distant point directly ahead. Silva, seated in front next to Babyface, switched on the radio. The accident was on all of the traffic reports:
“. . expected to impede the free flow of traffic for at least the next four hours,” the announcer said. “Drivers are advised to avoid the belt road at all costs. Seek alternative routes.”
That was all Silva had to hear. He punched the button to shut the radio off, and he didn’t do it gently. “Call for a god-damned helicopter,” he said.
Babyface did. But it took almost thirty-five minutes to get there and find a suitable place to land. The spot chosen by the pilot was a construction site about three hundred meters from their car. Babyface stayed behind the wheel while Hector and Silva transferred to the aircraft.
After that, it was easy sailing. A ten-minute flight brought them to Guarulhos. A golf cart was waiting on the tarmac. They were met by a female agent with a federal police badge pinned to her black blazer. She brought them to the interro-gation room, one level down from the arrival hall.
It was a windowless space with a television camera mounted high in one corner, a steel table, and four wooden chairs, all bolted down. There were two other federal agents in the room, both in suits, both with badges pinned to their lapels, both leaning against the wall, and both looking down at Ribeiro.
One of the federal agents was Antonio Moreira, the guy who headed the federal police assigned to Guarulhos. He was one of the first people Silva had spoken to after sending out the advisory e-mail. The other agent was a young guy who looked like he could have been Babyface’s younger brother. If it hadn’t been for the badge, Silva might have taken him for a teenage bystander.
“You got the wrong guy,” Ribeiro was saying when Silva and Hector entered the room. He’d shaved off his mustache, streaked his black hair with gray, and ditched the Flamengo medallion, but it was him, no doubt about that.
He was seated at the table, sweating profusely, and shak-ing his head. It wasn’t that hot in the room, but he was blot-ting his forehead with a handkerchief clutched in a meaty left hand about the size of a boxing glove. His other hand was cuffed at the wrist. A chain ran from the cuff to an eye-bolt welded into the top of the table.
“Crap,” Delegado Moreira said, “You’re Ribeiro. Stop denying it.”
Ribeiro kept shaking his head.
“No way,” he said.
Moreira looked up and smiled at Silva. He introduced the young guy as Renato Wagner, the man who’d spotted Ribeiro.
“Good work,” Silva said, “but now I think it would be bet-ter if you left us alone.”
Wagner frowned, but Moreira winked knowingly at Silva.
“I think we’ll take a stroll down the hall,” Moreira said. “You can’t hear a damned thing from down there. The door to this room is steel. It has a way of dampening anything that happens inside.”
He took Wagner firmly by the arm and led him into the corridor. Hector closed the door and leaned against it. Silva sat down at the table.
“Now,” he said, “let’s talk.”
CLAUDIA WAS laying out her instruments when Bittler hurried into the operating suite. He wasn’t wearing scrubs, a mask, or gloves. That alone was enough to tell her that some-thing was terribly wrong.
“Teobaldo,” he snapped to the anesthesiologist, “Leave us.
I haven’t got him completely stabilized,” Teobaldo said, pointing at an unconscious Arnaldo.
“I don’t care,” Bittler said. “Go. I’ll call you when we need you.”
Once the door had closed behind Teobaldo, Bittler came around to her side of the operating table, leaned forward, and spoke in a harsh whisper.
“They’re onto Roberto.”
Claudia went to the double door and opened it. Teobaldo was bending over, his ear to the crack.
He looked up at her sheepishly.
“Go to your office,” she said. “I’ll call you there.”
“And if the guy on the table dies?”
“He dies. Go.”
