History in the making. He took one last look at the wheels of his teeming clockwork empire and stepped back inside to dress himself. There was still a great deal of personal preparation to be done before the official reception for the visitor in the Great Room of the Blue Mosque.
Surely today, he thought, gazing at his powerful naked body in a full-length mirror flanked by flaming torches, was the beginning of the most important period of his life. As such, it was a kind of birth. And a man must dress accordingly for such triumphant moments.
Top was a man of oversize features. There was the great head from which gazed his deep-set dark eyes, steady and penetrating. His eyes radiated power and intellect and when they rested upon something or someone, it was as if they could possess all of it, devour it. His skin was dark and yellowish, taut and shiny, like something that had just popped to the surface after some weeks in the river. His head was entirely hairless. There were neither eyebrows nor eyelashes. The lips below the long wide nose were mottled and thick.
His lips opened only when he spoke and then they flared wide, revealing strong, feral white teeth and baby- pink gums. When he spoke in anger, his eyes bulged, more animal than human, and they seemed to blaze with some kind of otherworldly fire.
His great head rested upon a wide and thickly cordoned neck supported by heavy shoulders of epic proportions, the shoulders of a giant. He had no idea how much he weighed and he didn’t care. He knew there was not an ounce of fat to be found. He took care of himself. He drank his cup of bull’s blood every night before retiring. This had been his habit for the years he’d spent in the jungle. He was soon going into battle after all.
He chose a black burka woven with golden thread. He had seen a drawing of such a one in a dog-eared book on the life of Genghis Khan. He’d had his seamstresses copy it exactly. He saw that it draped perfectly over his bulging shoulders. Yes. It was perfection. Now. He would need a covering for his head. A turban of gold? No. Not today. Something far less obvious. Nothing in his wardrobe would do, he feared, until something caught his eye.
Under one window of Papa Top’s spartan room stood a large black wooden cross. A death’s head was painted in white near the base of the thing and over the crossbar were pulled the sleeves of a ragged and torn morning coat, its black tails trailing on the simple wooden floor. Adorning the cross was a battered bowler hat, the top of the cross projecting through a tear in the crown. Around the base the cross, a ring of white and black candles had been burning all night.
This totem, seldom found in the homes of the sons of Islam, was Papa Top’s secret weapon. He had carried it with him all his life. The bizarre effigy had been passed down from his all-powerful mother, a powerful Haitian Voodoo priestess named Mama Top. This totem represented the God of the Cemeteries, the Chief of the Legion of the Dead, embodied on earth in the human figure of Papa Top. In this part of the Amazon, Top was a figure paramount in all matters related to the grave. He was the dark Voodoo god who had long ago conquered the indigenous inhabitants of the jungle, and he still held them in his sway.
Muhammad Top was, of course, a true believer in the all-powerful rule of Allah. He depended on Allah’s guidance in all things. But, being prudent and practical, Top had always thought a man should have a backup religion. The fear inspired by Voodoo served his purposes well. After all, he lived surrounded by noble savages who bowed only to Papa Top.
He placed Papa Top’s perforated black bowler atop his head and gazed into his mirror. Unsatisfied, he cocked it to a more flattering angle, and saw that it was good. He showed his teeth. Flashed his eyes.
Let kingdom come, he thought, and be damned.
Soon, together with powerful brethren from abroad who would be arriving shortly, Papa Top would set in motion the irrevocable doomsday clock of the future.
He would set the clock for January 20 at noon.
High noon, he thought, chuckling to himself, a joke the cowboy in the White House might appreciate.
The Day of Reckoning.
24
MADRE DE DIOS, BRAZIL
H arry Brock woke up in a bed he did not recognize with a girl whose name he could not recall. She had a gun in his mouth. She was starkly naked, sitting astride his chest, her pendulous breasts glistening with sweat in the hot buggy light of morning. He found that none of these things made it any easier to think straight. She was very pretty this girl, and somehow during the night she’d managed to handcuff his wrists to the painted iron bedposts he was now banging against the plaster wall in a valiant effort to free himself.
He vaguely remembered she’d told him she was a nurse in Manaus. That explained a lot. Harry had a thing for nurses.
After a while, he stopped whipping his head from side to side and banging his wrists against the bed-frame because (A) it hurt, (B) it wasn’t doing him any damn good at all, and (C) it felt so good when you stopped. Harry was so happy about being relatively pain-free he tried to smile but found that it was tough to do with the muzzle of an oily snub-nosed .357 scraping the roof of your mouth.
Relax, Harry told himself. Be professional about this for crissakes. It wasn’t the end of the world. It was another of life’s endless lessons. Today’s lesson: stay the hell out of backstreet bars in towns where life was exceedingly cheap and you had a huge price on your head. Stay sober and avoid strange women at all costs, even gorgeous ones.
He took a few deep breaths like he was trained to do, holding each for a count of six, and tried to stabilize his heart, slow everything way down.
Get your bearings, Harry. He was going to say get the lay of the land but he’d already done that. She was sitting right on top of him. Christ, what a woman. He would kill to know her name but he felt at this point introductions would be awkward. Even if she removed the gun from his mouth, what was he going to say?
Focus, Harry. Okay. He had to be somewhere in the little shitburg town of Madre de Dios. Yeah. He’d wandered into this Brazilian backwater yesterday afternoon because a hungry, pushing forty-year-old guy with back problems just gets tired of not eating and sleeping out in the rain under a different tree every night. It had been a week since he’d taken shelter under an actual tin roof, and the last real bed he’d actually slept in, he had gotten out of about two minutes before Las Medianoches rapped on his door and knocked it down.
What finally happened was, how he came to be here in Madre de Dios, about a week ago he’d started seeing a bad Xerox of his face plastered all over the charming town of Barcelos on the Rio Negro. Printed under his mug was a rather large round number calculated in both pesos and dollars. He’d been deeply depressed with how little he was worth until he remembered that in this part of Brazil you could buy a Mercedes E55 AMG with a sticker price of $81,000 for less than $10,000. Dom Perignon was three bucks a magnum, and you could snag a fresh pair of Nike Air Jordans (he had) for a dollar.
Hell, that meant his life was only worth about a thousand pairs of Michael Jordan sneakers. Seemed a little on the low side.
This was a tiny spot on the map, but it was the central city in what is known as the Mato Grosso, where about $12 billion, that’s billion with a B, worth of cocaine passed through every year. Harry had asked around, dropping a few names and discreet amounts of cash here and there, and managed to hook up with a big time guy named Osvaldo Sanchez.
Osvaldo, who was president of one of fifty-five international bank slash laundries operating here in town, liked to siphon off a hundred million or so every now and then to buy bargain basement surface-to-air missiles for the glorious pan-American revolucion Hugo and Fidel were dreaming about. Because Harry was pretty savvy about the illegal arms business and both men knew the names of a lot of heavy hitters, he and Osvaldo had hit it off and actually developed a good working relationship.
Good enough for he and Senor Sanchez to arrange a confidential meeting where they would talk turkey and Harry would find out who some of the key players were in what was shaping up as the major drama currently unfolding down here south of the border. Rumors were rampant. Massive terrorist armies moving north to invade Central America. Stuff like that.
But, wouldn’t you know it, at the last minute Harry had had to cancel due to a prior commitment (staying
