but few of them so quickly. One brown hamster with a white belly suffered the loss of all four legs, but kept eating and drinking, and lingered for eleven days.
Finding subjects to experiment upon wasn’t difficult. After the owner of the local pet shop started getting suspi-cious, and refused to sell her any more hamsters or guinea pigs, she’d hang around outside of supermarkets, looking for families who were giving away kittens, or she’d pick up small dogs on the street, luring them into the toolshed when her great-aunt was out shopping.
After sustaining a number of bites and scratches, she took to wearing heavy workman’s gloves to protect her from the animals’ teeth and claws. She kept them, and the instru-ments she called her “surgical tools,” under a pile of firewood stacked up against the back wall of the shed.
When it came to somewhat larger animals, and the cotton and adhesive tape didn’t keep the victims quiet enough, she started cutting out their tongues. And when that proved insufficient, she went to the library, got out a book on vet-erinary science and learned how to cut vocal cords. Fortunately, Tamara was more than a little hard of hearing. She only once happened upon her great-niece while she was at work, and that was when she came into the shed to look for a pair of gardening shears. Claudia was busy with a six-week-old kitten at the time.
She blocked what she was doing with her body, folded the razor she was using as a scalpel, slipped it into her pocket, and claimed she’d found the mutilated animal on the street. She was successful in convincing the old lady that she was attempting to save its life, mostly because Tamara didn’t want to believe otherwise.
Six years later, Claudia was cutting into her first corpse at medical school. Shortly after becoming a surgeon, she met Dr. Bittler. Their relationship had been going on for almost five years, and in that time Claudia had been content.
Her employer didn’t care how she harvested organs, and as long as she did it cleanly and efficiently, he left things like the choice (or even the use) of an anesthetic to her. They’d seldom had occasion for conflict.
Until now.
Bittler put his glasses back on his nose and began out-lining the details of his plan.
“Are you familiar with the FARC?” he asked.
“They’re a gang of Colombian rebels and drug lords trying to overthrow the legitimate government in Bogota. What have they got to do with anything?”
“Roberto has found us a pilot. This pilot has his own air-craft and makes his living by supplying the rebels with arms. They pay him in cocaine. He brings it back here and sells it to the major drug dealers. According to Roberto, the man sells himself extremely cheaply and has no morals at all.”
“Two peas from the same pod, eh?”
“Exactly. Now, this pilot, whose name is Manolo Something, and Roberto, will fly into the airstrip at Posto Leonardo, the administrative center for the Xingu reservation. The pilot will be posing as a reporter and Roberto as his photographer. The two of them will ostensibly be preparing an article for the
“No one will believe that idiot Roberto is a photog-”
“I agree. No one will. But no one except Oliveira is going to have any contact with him. All flights into or out of the Xingu reservation have to be authorized by an official of the FUNAI. Oliveira has that power. He’ll meet the aircraft and immediately guide Ribeiro into the forest.”
“And then?”
“Oliveira claims there’s a river where the Indian women from various tribes come to bathe in the cool of the night. No warriors accompany them, but they bring their infants. Ribeiro waits for the right moment and-”
“When is all of this supposed to happen? The Oliveira boy’s heart-”
“-could give out at any time, I know. There is need for haste.”
“And how about the other Indians? The relatives of the children you’re planning to snatch? Doesn’t Oliveira expect them to kick up a fuss?”
“He believes they’ll blame another tribe. Apparently, it’s not uncommon to steal women and children. The Indians do it all the time when they feel their numbers are getting too small. More children and more women lead to more warriors, and more warriors lead to greater success in their little con-flicts. Anyway, that’s how Oliveira explained it.”
“And suppose they don’t blame another tribe? Suppose they play by white men’s rules and file a complaint with the authorities? What then?”
“I asked the same question. Oliveira says he’ll promise them an investigation and then destroy the paperwork. He’ll also say, if anyone asks, that the journalist and the photogra-pher couldn’t have had anything to do with it. He’ll swear he was with them all the time.”
“What happens if they’re seen boarding the aircraft with the infants?”
“Oliveira will accompany them back to Sao Paulo. If they happen to be spotted, he’ll claim the children have been exposed to a contagious disease, one that Roberto was suf-fering from, but failed to inform him about. He’ll say he has to take the children for urgent medical treatment. Then he’ll hold them for a week, return them, and try again.”
“By which time it might be too late for his son.”
“True. But it’s unlikely that anyone will see them. They’re bringing lights to illuminate the runway, and they’ll take off in the dead of night.”
“And no one will find
Bittler smiled a smile so superior that Claudia wanted to lash out and slap him across the face. “Newspapers have deadlines. They wait for no man. Such is the life of journal-ists and photographers.”
“What happens if we don’t have compatibility between Oliveira’s son and one of the infants?”
“Bad luck for the Oliveira family, but not a problem for us. As a matter of fact, I rather hope we
Chapter Thirty-nine
Manolo Nabuco dropped the nose of his ancient Cessna 310B and leveled off at nine thousand feet. It was a moonless night, with an unlimited ceiling and thousands of stars above. Below, on the black mass of the firmament, there wasn’t a single light. The pitch-blackness down there wouldn’t last much longer. Once they’d cleared the reserva-tion, there’d be the occasional glimmer of light from an iso-lated farm. And then the lights would multiply, and the illu-mination build, until they finally reached a crescendo. By then, they’d be on their final approach to Congonhas airport in Sao Paulo.
Manolo was anxious to roll into the hangar and cut the engines. He needed a snort. Not because of his nerves. His nerves were fine. Ask anybody. They’d tell you. Manolo Nabuco was a stand-up guy with nerves of steel. He wasn’t like most of the other coke smugglers, the ones that only found their courage after they’d snorted a line or two.
Yeah, okay, he snorted. Maybe he snorted a lot. But who didn’t these days? One thing about him, though: he never snorted when he was working, never got behind the controls when he was high on cocaine. Sometimes he did it when he was a little drunk, but high on the white stuff? Never.
Manolo Nabuco wasn’t addicted. Not him. Ask anybody. They’d tell you. They’d tell you Manolo Nabuco just used it because he wanted to, not because he had to. There’d been times when he was alone, high above the pitch-blackness of the Amazon rain forest, heading south with a full cargo of snow on board. It would have been easy to put the Cessna on autopilot, climb back there, cut into one of the bundles, and help himself to a healthy snort. He’d been tempted, but he’d never done it. Not once.
Hell, who wouldn’t have been tempted? Since the fucking air force got permission to shoot down unidentified aircraft, you never knew what might be coming at you. The radar coverage had gotten better, too, so no matter how low you were, there was always a chance you could show up on some-body’s screen. It was scary. But despite all that, he’d always stayed in his seat, never once taken out his knife. Not once.
