Mirage

Lean-tos, running three deep, had been constructed around the building’s perimeter, with the exception of the entry, so to reach it he had to walk down a tight alley of tin sheeting and sullen faces.

The building’s front door had long been torn from its hinges. The concrete floor was filthy, and the air inside the building reeked of garbage. He did not know which way to go until he looked up the stairs to his right. What he saw startled him with its incongruity. It was a woman wearing a white nurse’s uniform so crisp, it looked like she had just put it on. She was blond and attractive, at least from this distance, and her legs, in the white hosiery of her uniform, were shapely. Amid all this misery and ugliness, she was like an angel sent from heaven.

She beckoned him with a finger and he mounted the stairs.

The second floor was also concrete, but it was painted a subtle gray and was impeccably swept. The walls were also painted and clean. There was only one door on this landing, and as he walked through, an alarm chimed. A man dressed as a security guard rose from behind his desk, a hand going for his sidearm in a well- practiced motion.

“Sir,” the guard said even as the stranger raised his hands.

“In a holster behind my back,” the man said and slowly turned. “There’s another in my pocket.”

The guard nodded to the nurse, who unarmed the stranger. The man knew the routine and stepped out of the room and back into the hallway. The door’s threshold, though innocuous to look at, was a body scanner that had detected the taped-up revolver he’d taken off the kid and the FN Five-seveN pistol he’d been carrying. This time through, the alarm remained silent, and the guard relaxed his defensive posture. A phone on his desk rang. He listened for a moment before replacing the handset.

“Give him back his guns. He says that this one is just as deadly without them.”

The man took the automatic back from the pretty nurse and secured it in its holster. He made a dismissive gesture toward the broken-down revolver, so she kept it. The stranger finally took notice of the room. It was like the lobby of a discreet boutique hotel, one of those places in London or New York that were so exclusive, there usually wasn’t a sign out front. The floors were marble tile, the walls’ wainscoting deep mahogany, and the lighting luxurious crystal fixtures. The view out the two windows was what threw him for a moment. It should have shown the garbage-strewn streets of a Brazilian slum, but instead he was greeted by a cobbled road in what looked like an Eastern European town — the Czech Republic, maybe, or Hungary. The light streaming in appeared natural, and yet the two “windows” were flat-screen displays with curtains so the people here wouldn’t be reminded of the squalor outside. A far door opened, and another nurse, a virtual twin of the first, beckoned the newcomer farther into this surreal building.

The next rooms were even more luxurious than the reception hall. More flat-screen panels displayed views of the same street. An old woman was leading a horse on the opposite curb, and he felt as if the clip-clop of its hooves could be heard through the glass. He was finally shown into a sleek executive office with a fireplace and sofa cluster in one corner and a modernist glass desk at the far wall. In another corner were the closed doors of an elevator that would lead to an apartment on the third floor just as opulent as this room.

“Chairman,” the scarred and wheelchair-bound man behind the desk greeted.

“L’Enfant,” Cabrillo said back.

“I suppose if you had wanted me dead, you would have struck in the night and I never would have known it was coming.”

“The thought crossed my mind,” Cabrillo replied.

Two weeks had passed since the encounter with the stealth ship. The Oregon was still in Hamilton Harbour, her refit just about complete. He had given up tracking Admiral Kenin once he fled Russia. This had to have been his last big score, the one that would set him up for life. A man in that situation plans his escape down to the finest detail. He would be completely untraceable ten seconds after implementing it. He would have a new identity that was unbreakable, a new place to live, bank accounts that had been in place for years. In all, a new life that was just as real — at least, to those looking — as the one he’d left.

“I must be getting sloppy,” L’Enfant said, waving his good right hand. “First Kenin tracked me, now you.”

“The first time you were sloppy,” Juan agreed, “the second you were just in a hurry.”

So rather than waste time tracking a man they would never find, he put Murph and Stone on locating the slippery information merchant. They had the advantage of knowing that he would have run soon after Kenin contacted him to get information on the Corporation. With that starting point, it still took twelve days of data mining and fact-checking to discover another of L’Enfant’s lairs, one in a most unlikely place.

Cabrillo added, “You’re also becoming predictable.” He shot a significant glance at the attractive nurse.

“Ah,” L’Enfant said, “I wasn’t aware you knew my penchant for pretty nurses.”

“Now you’re deluding yourself. If it was just pretty ones, we never would have found you. But sisters who are also nurses are a rarer breed of cat.”

L’Enfant’s single eye glittered as he looked at the nurse. “My last ones were actually twins. Not identical, mind you, but twins nonetheless.” He clapped his right hand into the claw-like pincer of his disfigured left. “Leave us, my dear.” When the nurse had gone, L’Enfant said, “You have not tracked me here to discuss my medical staff, I presume.”

“You presume correctly.” Cabrillo waited for the shadowy man to figure out why he’d come.

L’Enfant studied him for a moment and finally asked, “Why the disguise?”

“I needed to cross through some nasty neighborhoods to get here. I didn’t want to look like an attractive target for a mugger.”

“You always were a careful planner. Okay, what else may I presume? I have wronged you by speaking of the Corporation to Kenin, something for which I must atone.”

Juan nodded while L’Enfant adjusted the oxygen cannula under the ruin of his burned nose.

“I presume that my atonement comes in the form of tracking down Admiral Kenin for you.”

“Correct.”

“And you came to me in person rather than reaching me through more conventional ways in order for me to understand that if I fail to find him, my life is then forfeit.”

“Four for four. You should go into the soothsaying business. Do you know where Kenin went to ground?”

The man shook his reptilian head. “No. Don’t think I don’t have feelers out there, but he knew what he was doing when he rabbited.”

“‘Rabbited,’ really?” Juan said with a smile. “Last time I read someone ‘rabbiting’ was an old spy novel.”

“You prefer ‘on the lam’?”

“I prefer to know where he is,” Juan said sharply to remind the information broker that this wasn’t idle banter.

“I will find him.”

“Now call Amo and have him send the pickup. I’d rather not walk all the way back to where I can find a working bus that will eventually take me to a part of the city that has taxis.” It might have sounded like a joke, but Cabrillo had had to traverse ten miles of urban jungle on foot to get here because buses, let alone cabs, never ventured into this part of the city.

“I will do you one better. I have an old Mercedes that doesn’t attract too much attention. Where are you staying?”

“The Fasano,” he lied.

“I figured a guy like you would go for nostalgia and stay at the Copa Palace.”

Had Juan not been a better poker player, he would have given away that L’Enfant had guessed where he was actually staying. He loved the stately deco-style Copacabana Palace Hotel and stayed there whenever he was in Rio.

“No matter. I will have my man drop you at the Fasano. No buses or taxis. It is the least I can do.”

Juan put a little menace in his voice. “The least you can do is lead me to Pytor Kenin.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO