Jack was moving back in until the rental was ready. Apparently, her mother was less convinced of Jack’s fidelity than Cindy was. Jack waited in his car in the driveway until Cindy came out to give him the all-clear.
His car phone rang, startling him. After the cellular swap, the car phone was his only wireless number. He answered. It was Mike Campbell.
“How’d you make out?” asked Jack.
“Well, there was a time in my life when it would have bothered me to follow a woman around for almost two hours and not even be noticed, but I guess in this context, that’s a success.”
“Nice work. Where’d she lead you?”
“Some pretty bad neighborhoods. She likes to mingle with the homeless. Especially if they’re junkies.”
“Damn. Sounds to me like she knew she was being followed. Took you on a wild goose chase.”
“Except that she didn’t seem to be wandering around aimlessly. She stopped at two places, and both times it looked to me as though it was her intended destination. As if she had some kind of business there.”
“You mean drug business?”
“No. Blood business.”
“Blood?”
“Yeah. She visited a couple of mobile blood units. You know, those big RV-looking things where people come in, let a nurse stick them in the arm, and walk out with cash.”
“What the hell’s that all about?”
“I didn’t want to give myself away by asking any questions. I was hoping it would mean something to you.”
“No,” said Jack. “Not yet.”
“The first truck was parked just off Martin Luther King Boulevard and Seventy-ninth Street. The other one was about a mile west. Both had gift of life painted on the side with a phone number underneath. You want it?”
“Yeah,” he said, then wrote it down as Mike rattled off the numbers.
“I got a name for you, too. I asked one of donors who came out of the bloodmobile after she left. Said he thinks her name’s Katrina. Didn’t get a last name.”
“That’s a good start.”
“You want me to follow up?”
“No, thanks. You go back to practicing law.”
“Aw, this is so much more fun.”
“Sorry. I’ll take it from here.”
“Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”
“Thanks.”
Jack noticed Cindy standing on the front porch. She was smiling and waving him inside.
“And Jack?” said Mike.
“Yeah?”
“Be careful with this woman, all right? Anyone who beats up my friend by night and deals with blood by day kind of worries me.”
32
•
Yuri Chesnokov was in his favorite getaway on earth, a city of two hundred thousand thieves, swindlers, whores, hit men, gangsters, kidnappers, drug runners, drug addicts, extortionists, smugglers, counterfeiters, terrorists, and well-armed revolutionaries, some with causes, most without. It was the kind of place where you could get anything you wanted, any time of day, any day of the week. You might also get a few things you didn’t want, things you wouldn’t wish on anyone. It all depended on what you were looking for.
Or who was looking for you.
Ciudad del Este is a festering urban sore in the jungle on the Paraguay side of the Parana River. It’s difficult to get there, unless you really want to get there. Amazingly, people come in droves. More than a hundred landing strips have been cut into the forests and grasslands in the “Tri-border Region,” as the area is known. All are in constant use by small airplanes, not a single flight regulated by authorities. The two-lane bridge from the Brazilian border town of Foz do Iguacu brings in thirty thousand visitors a day, serving as the principal passageway for convoys of buses, trucks, and private cars entering from neighboring Brazil and Argentina. It’s a daily ritual, shoppers leaving Rio de Janeiro and other cities late at night and arriving the next morning in the midst of the noisy, fume-filled traffic jam that is the center of Ciudad del Este. Most of the scruffy, bazaarlike shopping centers are on Avenida Monsenor Rodriguez, the main drag from which another five thousand shops fan out in all directions for a twenty-block area. Cheap electronic equipment and cigarettes are big sellers, but only to the truly unimaginative buyers. Behind the scenes is where the real money exchanges hands-cash for weapons, sex, sex slaves, pirated software, counterfeit goods, cocaine by the ton, murder for hire, and just about everything else from phony passports to human body parts for medical transplants. Miami and Hong Kong are the only two cities in the world that see a higher volume of cash transactions. In a country that boasts an official GDP of just $9 billion, Ciudad del Este has risen to a $14 billion annual industry of sleaze, Paraguay’s cesspool on the Brazilian border.
Yuri walked from his thirty-dollar-a-night room at the Hotel Munich to a Japanese restaurant on Avenida Adrian Jara, the heart of the Asian sector. An ox cart bumped along the street, maneuvering its way past a pothole large enough to swallow it whole. Mud and ruts were typical for February, when temperatures averaged a humid ninety- five degrees and summer rains were at their peak. It was better than the dry season, when red dust seemed to coat everything, though Yuri saw irony in the pervasive red grit that got in your eyes, your hair, your clothes, as if it were symbolic of the growing influence of the Russian mob, the Red
It was Yuri’s sixth trip to the city in the past three months, all successful. He was seated at his usual table in the back of the Cafe Fugaki, angled in the dark corner with a direct line of sight to the entrance. No one could approach from behind him, and he could see all who entered. At the moment, he was the only customer; a heavy downpour outside keeping away even the most loyal patrons. His beer arrived in short order, and a minute later two men joined him. Fahid was Yuri’s middleman, and he’d brought his supplier with him.
Fahid greeted him in Russian, but the pleasantries had exhausted his limited knowledge of the language. They continued in English, their common tongue. The third man, the source, introduced himself as Aman. He had cold, dark eyes-as cold as Yuri’s-and a flat scowl beneath his black mustache. Yuri offered drinks, but they declined.
“Fahid tells me you have some problem with the merchandise,” Aman said with a heavy Middle Eastern accent.
Yuri sipped his beer, then licked away the foam mustache. “Big problems, yes.”
“You asked for a virus that easily injects into the bloodstream and is fatal to people with weak immune systems. That’s exactly what we gave you.”
“That may be. But West Nile virus is too… how do you say-exotic?”
“We sold it to you for the same price as much cheaper products.”
“The price isn’t the issue.”
“If you wanted something specific, you should have said so before we filled the order.”
“Five orders you filled, not once did I get West Nile virus. The sixth order, everything changes.”
“Not a change. It was within your parameters.”
Yuri shot an angry look at Fahid. “I was told it was going to be a strand of pneumonia.”
Fahid shrugged and said, “That’s what I thought it was going to be.”
“The end result is all the same,” said Aman. “What’s the big deal?”
Yuri’s voice tightened. “I’ll tell you what the big damn deal is. We stuck a woman in Georgia. Now, instead of a routine death of an AIDS victim from any one of the million or more run-of-the-mill viruses that could have killed her, there’s going to be a full-blown investigation into how she picked up this weird virus from someplace in western
