“About forty kilometers an hour,” he said. “And it’s airborne.”
“How can you tell?”
“It’s moving out over a lake. No decrease in speed.”
“Carrier pigeon,” Arnaldo said.
Mara, entering the room, heard him.
“I’m astounded,” she said. “For once in your life, you’re right.”
Lefkowitz swiveled around in this chair and looked at her.
“What do you know that we don’t?”
“Some park ranger just called in with a message from Hector.”
Mara went on to explain, ending with, “That’s what you’ve been following, Lefkowitz-a carrier pigeon.”
“As soon as it lands,” Silva said, “the kidnappers will find the device.”
“And our teams are going to be far, far away when they do,” Lefkowitz said.
“Get them into the air immediately,” Silva said.
“It’s already happening,” Mara said. “I spoke to Gloria.
Rotors on the helicopters must be turning as we speak. Now, Nunes, tell me, how did someone with your limited cranial capacity hit on carrier pigeons?”
Arnaldo didn’t rise to the bait. “My sister’s got a neighbor, a penitentiary guard. He told me a story a while back. Some of the prisoners were raising pigeons in their cells. The warden thought it was a nice, safe hobby, Birdman of Alcatraz and all that crap. But no, turns out these birds were homing pigeons. The felons were using them to get cell phones and drugs into the prison.”
“Cell phones? Since when can a pigeon carry a cell phone?”
“They were breaking them down into components, then reassembling them within the walls.”
“Cute,” Lefkowitz said. “They start the birds off with smuggling. Next thing you know they’re carrying around tiny brass knuckles and beating up on other birds in the neighborhood. The felon’s perfect pet.”
“The way it works,” Arnaldo said, ignoring the levity, “is this: you get the birds before they learn to fly. You feed them. Bingo, they begin to think of the place as home. When you release them, they come back. They always come back. They come back even if you take them hundreds of kilometers away.”
All four of them looked at the screen, where a flashing green dot was showing the pigeon’s steady progression.
“Straight as an arrow,” Lefkowitz said. “The little dear knows exactly where she’s going.”
“If she does,” Arnaldo said, “it’s a he.”
“Shut up, Nunes.”
Silva tapped the screen with a forefinger. “What town is this?”
“Porangaba. Looks like she, or he, is going to pass right over it.”
Porangaba was about a hundred KM northeast of the cave complex.
“Let’s get Gloria and her people moving in that direction,” Silva said. “Do carrier pigeons fly at night?”
The others looked blank.
“I’ll talk to Gloria first,” Mara said, “and then I’ll find out.”
Five minutes later she was back.
“They only fly at night,” she said, “if they’re trained to do so. Otherwise, they roost and start flying again at first light. Let’s hope she-”
“He,” Arnaldo said.
“-isn’t so trained. How long has she been in the air?”
“The bird,” Lefkowitz said, remaining strictly neutral, “took off just before four. It’s flying at about forty kilometers an hour.”
“Sundown tonight will be at around eight,” Silva said. “Subtract four from eight and that gives us four hours of flying time.”
“And four hours at forty an hour,” Mara said, “means she’s likely to roost at about one hundred sixty kilometers from her take-off point.”
“Who said that thing about the best laid plans of mice and men?” Lefkowitz asked.
“A poet by the name of Robert Burns,” Silva said. “And I don’t think I’m going to like what you’re about to tell me.”
“You’re not.” Lefkowitz was fiddling with the knobs on the receiver.
“We lost the signal?”
“Just now. It went out like a light.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
The tracking device’s last known location turned out to be a cow pasture. Both helicopters were able to land, and a search was initiated. Twenty minutes later, Gloria called in by radio.
“No sign of the pigeon,” she said, “just blood and feathers. The bag is here, and so is the device, both of them all chewed up. We figure the pigeon must have been attacked by a bird of prey.”
“Of all the goddamned pigeons in the State of Sao Paulo,” Silva said, “some goddamned hawk had to pick that one?”
“Of all the goddamned pigeons,” Gloria said, “some goddamned hawk did.”
“Okay, Gloria, thanks. Stay where you are. I’ll get back to you.” Silva hung up and turned to Lefkowitz. “Work out a compass course based on the pigeon’s line of flight. We’ll give it to Gloria’s pilots, tell them to fly further along the line, see if they can spot something.”
“Spot what?”
“Hell, I don’t know. There was a whole flock of those damned pigeons. Some may still be in the air.”
“Not unless they still had a long way to go.”
“We’ll also have them look for henhouses, for chicken coops, for dovecotes, for any other place they might have gone to roost.”
“I’ve got some topographical maps downstairs. I’ll go get them.”
Lefkowitz was back in three minutes. Within a few more, he was talking to one of the helicopter pilots.
“Get Silva on the radio,” the pilot said as Lefkowitz was wrapping up, “Gloria wants to talk to him.”
“How far do you want us to go?” Gloria said when she heard Silva’s voice.
“As far as you can before dark. Then we’ll talk.”
C ORNELIO B RAGA was, by no means, the only chicken farmer to run through a scale of emotions that day. But his reaction was typical.
First, surprise at having an extremely noisy Helibras AS 350 B2 land in his front yard. Then fear, when a black-clad team wearing balaclava helmets and carrying machine pistols leapt out under swirling blades. Finally anger, when the woman in charge of the operation offered him a token apology and was getting ready to depart.
“Sorry? Sorry doesn’t cut it, Senhora. Or is it Senhorita?”
“Senhorita,” Gloria Sarmento said, struggling to be polite, a quality that didn’t come easily to her.
“If figures,” Cornelio sputtered. “What kind of a guy would be interested in a woman who jumps out of helicopters and carries a machine gun?”
Raul Franco, her number two, and Gloria’s secret heartthrob, was standing next to her at the time. Gloria’s oblique overtures in Raul’s direction had yet to be reciprocated, so Braga’s remark struck closer to home than he could possibly have imagined. It caused her to lose her temper.
“My personal life is none of your goddamned business, Senhor Braga.”
“You have any idea how many hens I got in there, Senhorita?”
Cornelio managed to make Senhorita sound like an epithet.
“No,” Gloria Sarmento said, “and I don’t-”
“Five hundred, that’s how many.” Braga stabbed a finger in the direction of his hen house. “You know what makes a hen stop laying? Stress, that’s what. You know what stresses a hen?”
“I don’t give a-”
“Too goddamned much noise for one thing. You got any idea what you people just did to my egg production with that machine of yours? Any fucking idea?”
She was opening her mouth to tell him that she didn’t fucking know, and that she didn’t fucking care, when she glanced to her right. Raul, that bastard, was smiling. He was enjoying this.
She turned to him and tapped a forefinger on his finelysculpted chest.
“From here on in,” she said, sweetly, “ you are the squad’s official liaison to chicken farmers.”
Raul stopped smiling.
“Hell, Gloria,” he said. “Give me a break. You got it wrong. I wasn’t…”
Gloria didn’t wait for the rest. She sneered at Cornelio, shouldered her MP-5 and strode back to her helicopter.
It was nice to be the boss.
As darkness fell, Lefkowitz pointed to the map and said, “The lead chopper is here, just short of Riberao Preto.”