Redeemer (3 page)

Big Teeth couldn’t take it any more. He stood up and shouted at Weiss. ‘What the fuck does this look like to you, man? We’re just local players. Local, brother. And now you come here asking me about some out-of-town guy? Shit, I don’t even have no fucking passport.’

Weiss sat on the edge of the opposite sofa, the one with the bitch. She didn’t flinch. Not even the twitch of an eyelid. He stroked her hair.

‘Luis. I know this man is with BOPE. There’s only four hundred men in the unit, and I’ll bet you know the names and address of each of them off by heart. And I
know
you’re aware of him. You might think you’re Mr Big Shot these days, with your swimming pool and nice car, but at heart you’re still a
favelano
. You keep your ear close to the ground. So don’t fuck me about.’

‘Nestor, I swear—’

‘We can do this the easy way or the hard way. I gave you my word I would not kill you today. And I will not. But tomorrow is a new day. Maybe I’ll come again…’ The threat lingered in the air.

Big Teeth watched out of the corner of his eyes as Weiss ran a hand down the girl’s cheek. He seemed to be weighing something up in his head. ‘OK, OK,’ he said, stubbing out his Marlboro. ‘What’s his name?’

‘John Bald. He’s Scottish.’

‘Shit. Fuck.’ Big Teeth took a scrap of paper and a ballpen and scribbled something. A barrel-chested goon pressed it into Weiss’s palm. He read a name and address, scrawled in appalling handwriting. Weiss was amazed Big Teeth could even write. He looked him square in his mismatched eyes, one brown, one green.

‘This is where I can find him?’

Big Teeth shook his head. ‘This is someone might know where your guy is. I can’t guarantee shit, though. You know how it plays in the favelas, all kinds of fucked-up stuff happening all the time.’

‘I’ll check it out. Pray this does not rebound on you, my friend.’

‘It won’t,’ Big Teeth replied, finally going eye to eye with Weiss. ‘But you need to worry about watching your fucking back in Barbosa. Those kids don’t know you like we do. Shit’s all different there.’

0930 hours.

His leg muscles throbbed from the intense vibration of the Little Bird. His olive-green T-shirt, drenched with sweat, clung to his back. Thirty minutes since his insertion into the favela, Gardner was breathing out of his arsehole.

He’d exited the LZ via a maze of walkways so narrow he couldn’t even stretch his arms. A wrong turn almost saw him slip into a crater in the road filled with excrement. Unguarded rectangular holes, the best part of a metre wide and half a metre high, were fixed to the sides of each home and along public walls. From the foul smell wafting out of them, he figured they led directly into the local sewage system.

Gardner tabbed at a fast pace. He was conscious of the fact that the sooner he got to Bald, the better the chance he had of finding his old mucker in one piece. Five-eight, angular and bony, Bald was tough as old leather and built from the same granite as the houses in his native Aberdeen. With his face locked in a permanent frown, Bald looked stern and cold. Get a few jars of McEwan’s down his neck, though, and he’d soon be scrapping civvies with the best of them. But in a place like Barbosa, Bald would need all of his evasion skills to survive, because he’d stand out like a fake tit.

Same for you too, mate, Gardner realized.

He emerged into a market square. Or what once counted as a market round these parts. It wasn’t exactly fucking Lakeside.

Sunlight razed an area fifty metres deep and thirty wide. In the middle of the street was an abandoned police car, next to a fountain with a stream of clothes floating in it. Flames hissed from the roof of the police car. Gardner counted three bodies on the ground. Two weren’t moving, their legs and arms contorted, red patches the size of coffee mugs on their chests. They were wearing the beige slacks of the state police. The third man coughed, shook his head and, spotting Gardner, began crawling towards him, digging his nails into the pockmarked concrete and dragging his rag-order legs behind him.

Gardner heard voices. Shouting. Single-burst shots.

Crack! Crack! Crack!

His instinct was to help the cop. But he was unarmed and knew he wouldn’t be able to get to him in time. The shots were close, and all Gardner would achieve by rushing to the guy’s aid would be to fuck both of them.

There were so many exits out from the street Gardner needed to take five just to get his bearings straight. Fucking hell, he thought, navigating here is tougher than the jungle.

Four exits from the market square. One to his six o’clock, the one he’d emerged from. Two open stairways to his left, twenty metres away. The fourth escape route was an alleyway opposite, partially obscured behind the torched car, where the tin-roofed buildings were so tightly bunched a man on a bike would have a hard time squeezing through. All he could make out was an endless warren of stairways, pavements and dirt tracks.

He looked for a reference point. The Jesus statue poked out above the shanty huts on the horizon, atop the Corcovado mountain to the north-east.

‘My Troop times forty north. Your Troop times twenty west,’ he remembered.

Gardner headed for a north-leading alleyway. He paused a few metres into the alley mouth, edged up to a grey wall with a half-washed portrait of Pablo Escobar along its length, hunkered down by the corner and peered back down the street. Though hidden, he was north-east from the van and saw a gang of six kids, none of them looking old enough to be on the Special Brew, springing out from the far alleyway. Red scarves covered the lower halves of their faces and they brandished their squaddie-proof AK-47s like they were water pistols, pointing them at each other when they spoke and waving them in the air. Careful to stay behind cover, Gardner looked on, wishing he had a juicy .50-cal heavy machine-gun to wallop these fuckers.

One of the kids shouted excitedly in Portuguese, pointing to the wounded cop. The brats laughed as they closed in on the poor sod. He moved on his hands and knees towards the car.

The tallest kid took out a fourteen-inch machete and slashed the guy’s back with it twice, crossways, in an ‘X’.

The cop screamed and reached down to his hip for a holstered pistol. Bad move. Two of the other kids pounced on him and pinned his arm down. The tall kid went to work. Using the rusted machete he began sawing through the wrist. Gardner shuddered as he heard the blade grind against bone. Blood spewed.

With a high-pitched scream the guy begged him to stop. He cursed. He cried.

But the kid kept on hacking away.

Halfway through, the guy gave up his squealing. When the kid was done playing surgeon for the day, he taunted the man by slapping his face with his own severed wank paddle. Another kid produced an old-school sawn-off and shot up the cops arms and legs. Each time a subsonic
boom
accompanied the blast and the body spasmed, as though 10,000 volts were surging through him. The kids cheered. Then one urinated on him.

The tallest kid put the cop out of his misery. Holding a sledgehammer, he instructed the others to turn the man over so he was lying on his back. The guy tried to protest. But the kid wasn’t interested. He raised the hammer with both hands.

And swung the black metal head down.

Gardner heard the shattering of the cranium from behind the steps, thirty metres away.

Staying behind the wall, he waited. The posse marched east, playing football with the dead cop’s hand.

Keep heading north.

Get to Bald’s location – before the kids do.

He U-turned. Went to climb the steps.

Found himself face to face with the business end of an assault rifle.

0959 hours.

The rifle was a Colt Commando. It was in crap nick, the paintwork chipped and brown masking tape wrapped around the mag to stop it from falling apart. The user wore a one-piece flame-retardant Nomex 3 assault suit, of the type used by the Regiment in Close-Quarter Battle ops.

He shouted something in Portuguese. Sounded more like a Brazilian football commentator.

‘Easy, mate.’ Gardner raised his hands. Fuck knows what the bloke is banging on about, he thought. But his face summed it up: trembling lips, knife-slit eyes darting left and right, the Colt Commando shaking in his hands. An edgy man with a gun more often than not led to an AD – accidental discharge.

‘I’m not looking for any trouble,’ said Gardner.

Someone else had already given this guy plenty of the stuff, by the looks of it. His face was mashed up, as if someone had discharged a shotgun beneath his chin. A deep cut was drawn above his right eye, and when he spoke rivulets of blood trickled between his teeth. His skin was white. Though he’d been in Rio for less than six hours, Gardner just assumed everyone was more tanned than his pasty English arse. Not this guy.

‘You’re English?’ the police officer asked in a perfect English accent that put Gardner’s Manc to shame.

He nodded.

‘Go back to the beaches. This isn’t a tourist area,’ the guy snapped.

‘Says who?’

‘BOPE,’ he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. ‘Captain Rafael Falcon, Second Squad. What’s your name?’

Gardner lowered his hands to his sides, eyes on the BOPE captain. First impressions, he didn’t rate the guy. He looked tense, jaws locked, like he was pushing out a massive fucking turd. Ruperts lacked the nerves of steel they demanded from their men.

‘Heard you boys got caught in a shitstorm yesterday?’ Gardner smiled.

Falcon’s face hardened like concrete. ‘You still didn’t answer my question.’

‘Say again, mate?’

‘I asked you what your name was.’

‘Joe Gardner.’

Falcon tilted his head back, revealing a thin neck smothered in blood. ‘Gardner? That name sounds familiar.’

‘I’m a mate of John Bald’s.’

Falcon’s facial muscles relaxed into a relieved smile, the kind a man paints when he sees a friendly face in a rotten place. He lowered the Colt Commando. Gardner was tempted to rush him and box the crap out of him, but decided against it.

‘John mentioned you,’ Falcon said. ‘You were in the SAS too, yes?’

Gardner gave it the air-force shrug. ‘He’s an old friend.’

‘He said you were a good warrior. One of the best.’

On a rooftop eighty metres to the north, two kids stacked worn car tyres one on top of the other. One of them produced a jerry can and started dousing the tyres in petrol.

‘I got a call from John yesterday. He said he was in trouble. That all sorts of shit was going down, and he was stuck in this favela.’

‘What time did he call?’

‘Around five o’clock my time, so that’s – what? – one o’clock local.’

Falcon chewed on it. ‘That sounds about right. John was helping us train in explosive entry techniques up in Florida. He was out on patrol with us yesterday to put our training into action. John wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, you know. He went out on missions to the favela whenever possible.’

‘What the fuck happened?’

‘I’ll explain later,’ Falcon said dismissively. ‘We have to get out of here first. The local gangs are going crazy. My unit retreated to wait for reinforcements.’ He laughed out of the corner of his mouth, shaking his head. ‘Can you believe, we have forty-nine
caveirãos
– Big Skulls – and we’ve only got twelve in working order. I swear, if we lose the drugs war, it’s because we didn’t have enough crank shafts and gearboxes.’

Flames gushed from the rooftop tyres. Pitch-black, toxic smoke belched into the sky. Gardner smelled burning rubber in the air. Heat shimmered across the horizon in waves.

‘I don’t give a fuck about your war,’ Gardner said. ‘I just want to find my mate.’

‘All of the officers from yesterday are missing. Nine men, including our commander, Paulinho Nava. I hate to say it, but they’re probably all dead, and that includes John.’

‘Someone else told me that. All the same, I’d like to go and check for myself. He’s an old mucker of mine, you see, and I owe him big time from back in the day. So how about you put your fucking piece down and let me go about my business.’

Falcon pointed the Colt Commando at the ground, and the knots in Gardner’s stomach began to unwind. ‘I’ve been separated from my unit,’ said the BOPE captain. ‘And John was part of my team.’ He tapped Gardner on the shoulder. ‘I’ll help you find your friend. We can stick together. That way, we have a better chance against the gangs.’

‘Ain’t happening,’ Gardner said. ‘I’m a solo operator, mate.’

Squinting, Falcon said, ‘You sound like you know where you’re going.’

‘I got a hunch,’ replied Gardner.

Falcon screwed up his swollen lips. ‘OK, and let’s assume your… hunch is correct. Just where exactly are you headed?’

‘North,’ Gardner said. He nodded vaguely in the direction of the peak of the favela, several hundred metres distant and high. He didn’t want to give too much away to some bloke he’d met only a few minutes ago.

‘OK. So let’s say you’re heading north. How do you think you’ll get there?’