Buried Strangers

Ribeiro had his tongue between his teeth, a pencil in his hand, and was drawing on a clipboard. He looked up and saw Silva holding his nose, staring at him.

“It’s your fault I smell like this,” he said. “You shoulda let me go.”

“How come it’s taking you so damned long?”

“I’m finished.”

Ribeiro handed Silva the clipboard. The work was crude, none of the lines parallel to one another. It looked like it had been drawn by a five-year-old.

“Where are the hostages?” Silva said, searching for marks or numbers and not finding any.

Ribeiro leaned forward. “I couldn’t get it all on one sheet,” he said.

“Don’t do that!”

“What?”

Silva waved a hand in front of his nose to dispel the stench. “Sit back in your seat.”

Ribeiro did.

“That’s just the main floor,” he said.

Silva flipped to the next sheet.

“That’s the cellar under the building. That’s where they take out the hearts and burn the bodies.”

“They, huh? And you never did anything like that?”

“No, I told you. I never killed nobody. I swear to God.”

“Can you get to the cellar from the main floor?”

Ribeiro shook his head.

“Only from the parking lot in back. There’s a ramp that leads down to a door. You can see it right there.” He extended a finger and started to lean forward again, but then he caught Silva’s warning look and drew back. “Right there,” he repeat-ed. “Bittler made it that way on purpose, to keep it secret.”

“Look,” the pilot said.

Silva didn’t have the eyes of an aviator, and it took awhile for him to locate what the man was pointing at: a white cross in the middle of what looked like a little park and, nearby, another helicopter. When they got closer, Silva could see the cross had been made with some kind of white powder.

Seconds later they were down and the white powder was all around them, kicked up by the wash from the aircraft’s rotor. Silva disembarked, coughing and beating the powder off his gray suit. Gloria Sarmento, in black body armor and carrying a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun, was waiting for him.

“Just to get something straight before we begin, Chief Inspector.”

“Yes.”

“You outrank me, but I’m good at doing what I do, and this is my show. I don’t want you to interfere.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Silva said.

“Where are the sketches?”

“This one’s the ground floor,” Silva said, handing it over.

“How old is the guy who drew this?” Gloria said, studying Ribeiro’s work. “Five? Six?”

“Only mentally,” Silva said. He handed her the other sheet. “That’s the basement where they keep the hostages.

Access?”

“Only one way in. From the parking lot in back.”

“Steel door?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“I’d better go over there and talk to that creep,” Gloria said.

“Don’t get too close,” Silva warned. “He stinks.”

Gloria divided her people into two teams: Hammer One and Hammer Two. Hammer One was charged with breaching the perimeter and assaulting the main floor. Hammer Two, commanded by Gloria herself, would attack the complex beyond the ramp. She briefed them in the stag-ing area, and then they all piled into the vans, Silva, Hector, and Ribeiro included. The guys sitting on either side of Ribeiro wrinkled their noses and moved as far away as possi-ble on the crowded bench.

The other female member of ERR1 looked at him and said, “Phew.”

She was a perky brunette with short hair named Sarah Dimenstein. All the other members of the team were in full gear, but Sarah was wearing a skirt and blouse.

Gloria, sitting next to Silva, caught his expression and smiled. “Why shoot our way in,” she said, “if we can do it with finesse?”

The drive to Bittler’s clinic took less than a minute. They parked the vans out of sight of the guard at the main gate. The teams lined up on the sidewalk.

“You can follow us in,” Gloria said to Silva. “From what that creep said, I don’t expect them to do any shooting, but keep your head down anyway.”

“I’ll follow you around to the back,” Silva said. “Whatever is down there is my major concern at the moment.”

“Do me a favor,” she said.

“What?”

“Get that nephew of yours to cuff the creep and chain him to something downwind.”

Sarah approached the gate, carrying a small purse and wearing a microphone in her bra. The transmitter was in the small of her back. From their place of concealment, Gloria couldn’t see the guard or the gate, but she could hear every word of his exchange with Sarah. And so could Silva.

“Help you?” the guard said, his voice tinny through the intercom.

“I’m trying to find this address,” Sarah said.

They could hear the crinkle of paper. They knew she was waving a sheet from a small notepad, holding it up. A few seconds went by and there was the whir of a motor and the squeak of hinges: the sound of the electric gate being opened. Footsteps approached Sarah’s microphone.

Gloria smiled. “He’s out of his hole,” she said, “and away from the damned alarm button. We’re in.”

“Let me see,” the guard said. They could imagine him extending a hand to take the paper, imagine Sarah reaching into her purse. And then, “What the hell is this?”

“This,” Sarah said, “is a nine-millimeter pistol and this”- there was a short pause-“is my federal police ID. Turn around and face the wall.”

According to the man stationed at the gate, there were two other guards inside the building. All three were munici-pal cops, moonlighting for a security company. They were there to protect the place from thieves and to keep undesir-ables like panhandlers and salesmen from molesting the staff and patients. Federal cops with a legitimate right to be there were something else again.

One of the other two guys on his shift, the guard who’d been on the gate said, would be watching the monitors hooked up to the security cameras. He’d be doing that from a small room under the main staircase just off the reception area. The other guard would be on his break, reading, sleep-ing, or watching TV up on the second floor. Provided the man covering the monitors hadn’t seen Sarah’s gun, it should be easy enough to disarm him, and the other guy should be even easier, since he’d be taken by surprise. And as soon as they were convinced that they were dealing with federal cops, and not a band of armed robbers, the guard who’d been on the gate added, they’d be sure to cooperate.

Ribeiro, now handcuffed to one of the metal pickets in the perimeter fence, confirmed that the security men were unaware of the illicit activities that went on in the base-ment, probably not even aware that there was a basement.

Sarah strolled up the walk as if she had every right to be there. Once inside, she spoke to the guards.

The rest was, as Gloria later put it, a cakewalk. On the main floor, Hammer One found a functioning operating the-ater with a woman already anesthetized and ready to receive a new heart. Upstairs, there were patients recovering from recent operations.

The ward nurses were left to care for their charges, the remaining staff was lined up in the reception area. Ribeiro was called in to finger Teobaldo Vargas, the anesthesiologist, and Gretchen Furtwangler, Bittler’s secretary, who, he said, were complicit in Bittler’s and Andrade’s crimes.

People wrinkled their noses and turned their heads away as Ribeiro moved down the line. When he pointed