Buried Strangers

“You mean I gotta sit around a fucking hotel room for three or four days?”

“Maybe longer.”

“Goddamn it! Where am I going?”

“Paraguay.”

“Paraguay? Fuck me.”

Silva leaned over the photos on Hector’s desk. The one from the national identity card showed Ribeiro as a teenager. The mug shot e-mailed by the police in Rio was more recent, only twelve years old. According to the paperwork, Ribeiro was now forty-one.

A police artist had taken the two photographs as a point of departure, spoken to the Portellas and Senhor Goldman, and done a likeness of how Ribeiro currently might look. He’d had to add a mustache and move Ribeiro’s hairline up toward the top of his head. Then he’d made another version with shorter hair and without the mustache. Silva figured that the first thing Roberto would do was lose the mustache.

Just to be safe, the artist had also made a version with Roberto’s hair tinged blond. They probably wouldn’t need that one. The carioca’s skin was swarthy. Blond hair would have made him more noticeable.

“What about his driver’s license?” Silva asked.

Hector shook his head. “He’s had it for years,” he said. “It’s like yours and mine. No photograph. The state of Sao Paulo didn’t require them until 1998. He’s kept renewing it with-out one.”

“Alright,” Silva said. “How soon can we get the flyer out?

You want to use this one?” He pointed at the version without a mustache and with the cropped hair.

“Hell, no. Use all of them. And add this headline: Wanted for the kidnapping and possible murder of one of our own. That should get everyone’s attention. How soon?”

“We can distribute to the field offices, airports, seaports, and border crossings within an hour.”

“Thank God for e-mail. How about the local cops?”

“Only sure way is to use paper flyers and distribute them by courier service. Two days, minimum.”

“TV stations?”

“It’ll be on the national news at eight tonight.”

“Good. Okay, I think we’re covered on Ribeiro. Let’s get back to Arnaldo. What about that travel agency?”

“We tossed it. There’s nothing useful in their paperwork. Rivas is looking at their computer as we speak. We still have the building covered.”

“And Arnaldo’s cell phone?”

“Hasn’t been switched on since the last time you spoke to him.”

Passports and visas are not checked only upon arrival in Brazil, but also upon departure. The people who do the checking are the federal police, so Silva was in a position to exercise a certain degree of control.

He followed up the e-mails by initiating a series of tele-phone calls to the delegados responsible for monitoring Brazil’s borders. He could have let Babyface, or Hector, or someone else do it, but he knew the personal touch, his own voice on the line, would have more impact.

He started with Sao Paulo’s three international airports, moved on to the seaports of Santos and Sao Sebastiao, and then continued the process in an ever-widening circle. He took a break, and caught five hours of sleep on the couch in the reception area, but he was up again at seven in the morning, calling people at home when he couldn’t get them anywhere else.

By nine thirty, he’d gotten as far as Manaus, the self-styled capital of the Amazon and most definitely not one of his favorite places. Manaus was a cesspool, dirty, hot, foul smelling, with one of the highest indices of childhood pros-titution in the country and administered by corrupt and indolent officials. Corruption and indolence had a way of affecting almost everyone transferred there, including mem-bers of the federal police.

“Who the hell is this?” the sleepy delegado said when Silva awoke him at home.

It was an hour earlier up there, but Silva still thought the lazy bastard should have been behind his desk, or at least on the way to the office.

“Chief Inspector Silva, calling from Sao Paulo.”

“Oh.” There was a rustle of bedclothes and a muffled com-plaint from a female somewhere in the background.

“What can I do for you, Chief Inspector?”

Silva explained the situation, told the delegado to check his e-mail, and moved on to the next number on his list.

Chapter Forty-three

While Silva was speaking to the people in charge of border checkpoints, Denise Ramiro, a medical technician at Dr. Bittler’s clinic, was gently sucking air out of a pipette she’d inserted into a test tube of blood.

A thin column of the red liquid arose. Swiftly, with a ges-ture she’d performed a thousand times, Denise removed the pipette from her mouth, covered the tiny hole with the tip of one latex-gloved finger, and then lifted it, allowing a small quantity of the blood to dribble into another test tube on the opposite end of the same rack.

Denise had no inkling of the origin of the blood in the first tube, no idea that it had been drawn from an Indian baby snatched from the Xingu reservation. She knew only that the blood in the second tube was that of Raul Oliveira, one of Dr. Bittler’s patients.

Denise, like most of the employees at the clinic, was a thor-oughly honest person with an impeccable record. And, like them, she was wholly unaware of how Dr. Bittler sourced the organs he used for transplants. In fact, the only people on his staff privy to that information were Bittler himself, Claudia Andrade, Roberto Ribeiro, Gretchen Furtwangler, Bittler’s longtime secretary, and the anesthesiologist, Teobaldo Vargas.

Harvesting organs was not a simple procedure, but it was a good deal simpler than implanting them. It required fewer people, less expertise, and less time. And it was performed in one of two secret operating rooms, located under the build-ing, accessible only from the parking lot.

Denise had no knowledge of those operating rooms, or of the adjoining oven used for cremating human remains, or of the holding cells that were used to keep the unwilling donors until their time came.

She was aware that the clinic seemed to have an almost unending supply of organs, but as far as she was concerned, the organs were obtained in ways common to the profession, if not strictly legal. She assumed it was a simple matter of her boss giving money to the families of the recently deceased.

No, it wasn’t supposed to be that way, but this was Brazil. People with money had always enjoyed special privilege. That’s just the way it was. It had been going on for so long that Denise, and most of her compatriots, didn’t even think of questioning it.

The procedure she was performing that day was called a crossmatch. The objective was to determine an organ’s com-patibility. A so-called positive crossmatch was, in fact, a neg-ative result for the patient. It meant that the available organ would probably be rejected by the body of the person who needed it. Each test was carried out with samples of refriger-ated blood and each took about forty-five minutes.

The result of the first test had been positive. It appeared that the young patient, Raul Oliveira, had a shot at only two organs. He would have been out of luck if the second cross-match had turned out the same way as the first.

But it didn’t.

“Bingo,” Denise said, irreverently, leaning back from her microscope. She peeled off her latex gloves, stretched her back, and picked up the telephone to report the result to Claudia Andrade.

Arnaldo awoke to the sound of music.

He had a pain in his head that surpassed any hangover he’d ever known. His mouth was dry, his lips were cracked, and his vision was blurry. He sat up. It took some effort. He felt weak as a kitten.

When the area around him came into focus, it turned out to be a prison cell. At least that’s what it looked