Angel Eyes (19 page)

He could see the faces of the sicarios, long hair streaming, huge grins splitting their faces as they rode the wind, the high their speed and their power brought them. They ignored the Renault and its occupants, focused as they were on the woman who had killed their compatriots. The MAC-10 resumed its thunder.

Just as the sicarios were about to draw abreast of the Renault, Estilo squeezed off one round through the open side window and, at the same instant, kicked his door open wide.

The motorcycle was far too close to avoid the obstruction, and there was a wailing scream as it plowed into the steel door, tearing it straight off its hinges. At the same time, the motorcycle rose into the air like a bronco spitting the bit. The vehicle squealed as if wounded, hurled itself over on its side.

Estilo was out of the Renault in a flash, and Russell saw Tori racing back. Estilo kicked the MAC-10 from the dead driver's hand.

As he got out of the car, Russell could see the bullet hole in the side of me sicario's head, a clean hit, and he thought, Jesus, what a shot!

Estilo placed his left foot across the remaining sicario's wrist, preventing him from getting to his shotgun. There was blood running from his nose and one ear. Nobody said a word until Tori came up. Russell noticed that she was not even out of breath.

Tori knelt down beside the last remaining sicario and said, "Who sent you?"

The sicario spat in her face, and she put the muzzle of her odd pistol against his right kneecap. She pulled the trigger. The sicario jumped as if speared. His face went white and his eyes rolled crazily in their sockets. Tears of pain streamed down his sweat-and dust-streaked cheeks.

Tori bent closer. "The next time I pull the trigger," she said, moving the pistol to his crotch, "it won't be your kneecap that won't work."

The sicario said one word, ''Cruz.'' The bull. Then he began to shake as if he had contracted malaria.

The corrida was full by the time they got there. They had missed the drug lords and their shotgun-toting bodyguards lustily, patriotically singing the Colombian and Medellin anthems, but the first blood had not yet been spilled, and that was a good sign.

They could get seats only in the sun-drenched side of the bowl-shaped arena, and it was very hot. The place smelled of old stone, red dust, and fight frenzy. They were downwind of the red-eyed bull, currently facing a rail-thin matador.

"Can you tell me why the hell we're here?" Russell said to Tori as the three of them settled onto the backless bench.

"When Ariel and I were in the tunnels," she said, "we overheard a fragment of conversation between the two Japanese Yakuza. This was before they discovered we were there. They had just finished killing a man named Rega, who had seemed to be their local contact. It occurred to me, after the briefing you gave me, that this would be a good place to start. Who was Rega? That's why I called Estilo."

Russell glanced over at the silver-haired man. "Who is he?"

"Estilo is a friend of mine," Tori said. "That's all you need to know."

"It most assuredly is not," Russell said. "He hasn't been vetted, they aren't under discipline. I don't know him from a hole in the wall."

"But I do."

"Tori, I'm warning you," Russell said. "If this mission deteriorates into another one of your personal-"

"Go home, Russ," Tori said disgustedly. "I was wrong. You don't belong out here. Go back to your desk in Virginia and let me do my job."

The bull made a run at the matador, who turned a magnificent veronica three inches from the beast's left horn.

"I 'm here for the duration,'' Russell said grimly. ''You're not running me out of here. But this person-"

"Estilo saved your life and mine back there on the road to the airport.'' Tori glared at him. ''If you thought for a moment, you'd see that that was a far better test of his loyalty than any of your electronic vetting machines."

A roar went up from the crowd as the bull made another run at the matador, who this time stuck a lance into the powerful muscles of its neck.

"This is barbaric," Russell said. "Like something from the dark ages."

"It's the art of death, Senor Slade," Estilo said. "Beauty and death is what Medellin is known for. There is no violence here in the corrida, only grace and an honorable way to die. This is why the people come; this is what captures their fancy."

Russell shook his head. "I don't understand."

"Estilo told me who Rega was," Tori said, continuing their conversation. "A paisa runner who worked for one of the Machine-Gun City drug cartels. These are all family run, very powerful. Estilo can't understand-and neither do I-why the Japanese Yakuza terminated Rega. The Japanese need the real stuff in order to manufacture their supercoke, so why cut off their supply? It doesn't make sense, and until it does, we won't be on our way."

''But the corrida?''

"We have to find out who Rega worked for-Cruz, the most powerful of the Medellin family cartels, or the Cali-based Or-olas, their rivals," Tori said. "We'll start with Cruz because he was the one who sent the four sicarios after us. We've got to talk to him, and this is where he is." She pointed to a fat man sitting in the section of the arena almost directly across from them, in the border between sun and shade. He was surrounded by sicarios wielding shotguns. Next to him was a beautiful woman with heavy-lidded eyes who kept checking her makeup in a compact mirror.

Estilo turned to Tori and, indicating the woman next to Cruz, said, "Medellin may turn out the most deadly men, but Cali, where Cruz's woman, Sonia, was born, creates the most beautiful women, don't you agree? It is said that when Cruz has that Cali-born body beneath him, he thinks only of his enemies, the Orolas."

"Considering what's happened,'' Russell said, ''I don't think this Cruz wants anything to do with us."

"Sure he does,'' Tori said, watching Cruz and his party. ''He just doesn't know it yet."

Below them, in the corrida, the bull's energy was finally nagging. It ran at the matador, but its head was lowered, and in triumph the thin man slid his blade as delicately and precisely as a surgeon just behind the back of the exhausted beast's skull, piercing its heart. The bull's eyes rolled, its forelegs collapsed, and it went down. The crowd was on its feet, screaming in delight and appreciation. Flowers rained down upon the matador, who pirouetted slowly, hands to the cloudless sky.

During this tumult, Tori kept her eyes on Cruz's woman. There was something odd about the way she kept looking in her mirror. Now she adjusted herself a little, and Tori saw a flash of reflected light, a spotlight brighter even than the sun, that illuminated the face of a dark-skinned man.

Tori leaned over, spoke briefly in Estilo's ear. Russell could see Estilo look in the direction Tori indicated. He nodded, said something to Tori that Russell couldn't make out.

The two of them got up. "Stay here," Tori said to Russell.

"But-"

"You'll be all right as long as you don't move." Her eyes fixed his. "Do you understand me?"

Russell nodded unhappily. It was perfectly clear. He was a gringo in the middle of a hostile environment. He needed the lowest possible profile.

Tori and Estilo made their way laterally across the tiers of cheering aficionados. The man who Cruz's woman had been looking at had left his seat. Tori knew there was a need to hurry, the noise was perfect cover. But they could not afford to divert attention to themselves.

"How do you want to do this?" Estilo asked.

"You go up behind him," Tori said. "I'll try to get between him and Cruz."

Estilo nodded, and the two of them split up. Estilo made his way up the tiers, higher and higher, working through the throng, which was still on its feet, applauding the beautiful death of the bull.

Tori was now near enough to the dark-skinned man to see the death stare in his eyes. It was a look she knew well, the mark of pure concentration, when the environment narrows down to one focus point: the kill. In this case, the victim was Cruz.

Estilo had identified the dark-skinned man as a member of the Orola drug clan, Cruz's bitter rival. The Orolas were from Cali, and Estilo knew them all.

The dark-skinned man was coming not with a shotgun or a MAC-10 machine pistol, but with a small-caliber handgun. It was a suicide mission, for sure, but it was the kind of surgical strike the Orolas preferred. It was the Medellin sicarios who loved to blow away half a city block to get their job done. Moreover, there was an elegant sense of irony at work here, executing Cruz at the corrida, in the tumultuous moment after the kill, that was typical of the Orola mind. Tori admired the strategy even as she worked herself into place to foil it.

She was very near the dark-skinned man now, and she stood still, contracting her wa, allowing his concentrated energies to pass over her. He was aware of nothing but his target: Cruz. He need not even concern himself with Cruz's bodyguards, who, in any case, were trained to look for weaponry, because he did not have to think about an escape. There was no escape.

The crowd was chanting, roaring, surging as the matador ceremoniously withdrew his blade from the heart of the beast. A single line of blood ran down his sword.

Tori waited until the dark-skinned man drew his gun. He raised it, aiming at Cruz's heart. With a great kiai shout. Tori lunged forward, the hardened underedge of her hand snapping the bone in the dark-skinned man's extended forearm.

She was aware of Cruz turning in a defensive crouch, the contraction of the circle of his bodyguards, their shotguns swinging down in concert. Screams from the crowd, the beginnings of a core of panic from those bystanders nearest the incident.

There was no reason for haste now. Tori twisted the gun from the dark-skinned man's trembling hand, held him up as his legs gave way beneath him. His head fell loosely in shock. As she saw the vulnerable spot at the back of his head, she thought of the bull, lying in its own blood in the red dust of the corrida below her. In this, she thought, Estilo is wrong, there can be no beauty, no artistry in this. Death is its own realm, it is finite, and when it comes, it comes, finis.

Cruz was shouting to his bodyguards, and they nimbly stepped around the fleeing people. All of them were focused on her. Cruz moved along the are of the tier to where Tori stood, holding the dark-skinned man.

When she judged Cruz close enough. Tori grabbed a handful of the dark-skinned man's hair, jerked his head up so Cruz could see his face.

"Do you know this man?" Cruz asked her in a voice made hoarse by the proximity to death and by his innate suspicion.

"He is from Cali," Tori said. "He was to be a gift from the Orolas."

"A final gift, it would seem,'' Cruz said, taking the gun from her. He examined it, then looked full into Tori's face. "He had to get close to use this. He wasn't going to get out, was he?"

"Not today."

Cruz put the muzzle of the man's gun against the back of his head and pulled the trigger. "Not any day," he said.

Cruz lived in an enormous suite on the top floor of the Monaco Building, a glitzy apartment dwelling in El Poblado, Medellin's choicest district. His men patrolled the surrounding block, and there were two guards armed with shotguns in the hallway of his apartment. Inside, the living room was lined with bear and leopard skins, Flemish tapestries, and his lieutenants-more sicarios.

Because he had summarily executed the Orola assassin without first interrogating him, Tori had lowered her estimation of Cruz. But it would have meant a loss of face in front of all those paisas had he not killed the man immediately, and his business would no doubt have suffered as a consequence.

He was not a bad-looking sort, though he was flat-faced. His black hair came down in a widow's peak; he wore it slicked back, very long against his neck. But he scowled a great deal, he had an overactive trigger finger, and he was much feared in and around Machine-Gun City.

Certainly the Orolas found him something more than a nuisance. Just about three months ago he and ten of his sicarios had ambushed the youngest of the Orola brothers at the El Cerrito tollbooth. He had been making inquiries of Cruz's contacts with the Bolivian cocaleros-the coca farmers who grew the plant from which cocaine was ultimately refined. Cruz had not taken kindly to what he had seen as an act of war, and he had retaliated in the only true language he spoke. The five-minute hail of bullets fired from the massed MAC-10's of Cruz's sicarios had taken out not only their target, but his three bodyguards, a dozen human mules moving one hundred kilos of raw cocaine, and four bystanders, not to mention taking the concrete and tin tollbooth apart at the seams. Cruz had bragged about the kill for weeks afterward.

"This was not the first attempt on my life made by the Orolas," Cruz said as they seated themselves in his enormous living room. "But they are incompetent. They do not know how to refine the art of killing." He was bragging again, but what the hell, Tori thought, he was safe, in the center of his own turf, with the scalp of another of his enemies fresh on his fingers. He was entitled.

Tori made the introductions, and Cruz listened politely but, she thought, a bit disinterestedly. She was prepared to do something about that, but only at the right moment.

"Do you know what this country would be without me and the people like me?" Cruz said. "Fucked." He laughed. "Ask the economists, if you doubt me. The Colombian economy is so fragile, like the glass of one of my Ming vases. Without cocaine trafficking to prop it up, our country would be plunged into a recession so severe I fear there would be no end. No, no, on second thought don't ask the economists, they're a bunch of maricones. Ask the people of Colombia, they will tell you the truth. They do not want this internal war the president has pushed on the country. They are sick of their government. And I am sick of planting bombs in post offices and government buildings. In my opinion the government of Colombia is dead."

His self-promotion was like a cheap perfume, Tori thought, making everything around it reek. She already felt contaminated by his braggadocio.