Angels of Vengeance

‘I think we’ve both met our fair share of those bastards,’ Maive said in a quiet voice.

She surprised him. It was almost unheard of for her to curse. Miguel hurried on, not wanting her to return to thoughts of Texas and the road agents.

‘True,’ he agreed. ‘But they are not worth thinking of. I have known two famous people in my life, did you know?’ He could tell by Maive’s smile that she was more than a little curious.

‘Really?’

‘Well, I suppose I did not know Mr Norman when we took his boat. But not many people can say they have sailed on the yacht of such a famous person, can they?’

‘No, they can’t, Miguel,’ she conceded with good humour. ‘And the other famous person?’

He paused for dramatic effect. ‘Roberto,’ he said. ‘That’s President Morales of the South American Federation to you, worthless gringo lady!’

She’d been about to blow another snowflake from the tip of her nose, but laughed instead. ‘I don’t know that that’s something I’d be bragging about if I were you, Mr Pieraro. How on earth did you meet such a creature?’

‘In Acapulco. In the very first days of la colapso, I was caught up there, just before I met Miss Julianne and Miss Fifi. I was running a small security crew for one of the hotels - well, more like a bunch of thugs than a crew. But the hotel employed them to keep the other thugs away from the guests, and they employed me to keep them in line. Roberto was one of those thugs, my second-in-command. He was a terrible man even then.’

They picked up their pace by unspoken agreement as the snow fell heavier, pushed along by a sharp southerly wind. Miguel was glad he had worn his hat. It stopped most of the snowflakes that would have fallen onto his face. Maive had to keep wiping her eyes clear with her upper arm because of the two bags she was carrying.

‘What happened?’ She sounded like a child being told an exciting bedtime story.

‘Between Roberto and I? Not much. We did not like each other, and I suppose, had I not left him to it, there would have been blood between us in the end.’

‘Maybe it would’ve been better for a lot of people if there had been, Miguel,’ she replied. ‘Have you ever considered how many people’s lives you might have saved if you had, I don’t know … dealt with him, back then?’

‘I had never thought of it like that,’ he said, meaning it. ‘You may be right. For some people, that would almost certainly be true. Hugo Chavez might still be with us.’

‘Ah. Snap.’

He wasn’t quite sure what Maive meant by that, but she seemed to be conceding this point, that speculating about what might have been was foolish.

‘If it had not been Roberto, it would have been someone else,’ Miguel continued. ‘Some general, some gangster, somebody was always going to take over down there when it fell apart. I was very surprised when I found out it was him, and yet, not at all. He has a political background. Maybe even military. He had the stink of the death squads about him. But yes, for a few days I stood on a barricade with el Presidente, protecting the clothes and jewellery of wealthy holiday-makers without the sense to realise they were not wealthy anymore and they really should have got out of Acapulco.’

‘That is a very good story, Miguel,’ she said. ‘And now I have bragging rights because I know someone who knew someone who became a real-life dictator.’

They were just two blocks from Maive’s home and crossing at an intersection when Miguel saw him. The thin streak of misery and madness; the unhinged Mormon witness he had thrown from Maive Aronson’s front porch that morning. Visibility had dropped so badly, and the man was dressed in a light grey hooded jacket, which served to camouflage him inside the flurries and swirls of snow, but Miguel had laid hands on the loco and recognised him immediately. The strange angular way he held his body, the tension in his neck and back, the way he focused intently when he saw the two of them.

The vaquero burned with a righteous anger. He struggled to maintain a tight grip on the hot gust of rage that welled up inside his breast. Maive appeared not to have noticed her tormentor, even though she stood closer to the man. He looked to be talking on a cell phone, which surprised Miguel. He had not thought that a crazy man - and the witness was most assuredly crazy - would have access to such technology, or know how to use it.

Did Kansas City even have a cell phone service? This madman was the first person he’d seen using a cellular phone in a long time. Only government people seemed to use them now.

Miguel let Maive chatter on while he skewered her stalker with a malevolent glare. No matter how disconnected from reality this maniac might have been, there could be no mistaking the malignant intent with which the Mexican was fixing him. Miguel wished he could hear what the man was saying on the phone. Almost certainly gibberish, but if he was talking about Maive, that might be important to know, to gauge the depth of his obsession. Unfortunately, the thickness of the snowfall was deadening all sound, even her voice, just an arm’s length away.

Miguel shook his head and scolded himself. This fool is no threat. He probably believes he is talking directly to God himself.

If he had been somewhere else, out on the range, say, picking his way through a forest, breaking trail on horseback, he might have recognised the ambush a few seconds earlier. Perhaps he would’ve been able to do something about it.

But Miguel Pieraro, father, widower, a vaquero‘s vaquero, was not a man of city streets and built-up places. He was most at home in the saddle. Not shuffling along a footpath, his arms loaded down with groceries, carried for a woman who was making him feel more and more every day that he might move beyond the horror and loss he had sustained down in east Texas.

The car that hit Miguel and Maive as they crossed the intersection, while his attention was focused entirely on the tall, rake-thin fanatic, was travelling at over sixty miles an hour. A dangerous speed on potholed streets under the best of conditions. Calculated insanity during a heavy snowstorm.

It was a quiet car, chosen for that very reason. Solid-iron bull bars recently affixed to the front of the vehicle absorbed most of the damage when it struck them. Investigators examining the burnt-out hulk of the vehicle - the murder weapon - after it was found not long afterwards, would make a note of that detail. It implied a good deal of planning and preparation.

The police officers who would come to visit Sofia Pieraro on that terrible Thursday, to tell her of her father’s death, were not investigators. They were just beat cops. They couldn’t do much for her. The only solace they had to offer was the assurance that her papa had died instantly, and that his friend, Mrs Aronson, had not suffered. She was in a coma when the paramedics arrived.

8

FORMER URUGUAYAN-ARGENTINIAN BORDER REGION, SOUTH AMERICAN FEDERATION

The rough path she’d earlier cut through the forest sped her return to the crossroads. Caitlin took up a position where she could fire on the entrance to the building without easily being fired upon. She placed herself so that the heavy mud-brick columns supporting the roof of the portico blocked any line of sight to her from inside.

Then she waited.

They wouldn’t come charging through the door, guns out, the minute their colleagues were overdue. Facility 183 did not impress as a model of world’s best practice for secret detention and torture camps. Unless the tobacco or pornography supply had run out, it would probably be thirty or forty minutes before anyone even noticed the men she had killed hadn’t returned.

Caitlin sought a meditative frame of mind she had learned in Japan, during her eleven months of intensive aikido training on the Senshusei course, at the Yoshinkan Hombu Dojo. It had been an unusual time in her early career. Strangely restful, yet gruelling. Every day of that short year she had spent in pain of one form or another. Not only from combat training, in which broken bones, concussions and voluminous bloodshed were a common occurrence, but also from the insanely repetitive and punishing minutiae of dojo life. The agonies of