“Blanco,” Caesare whispered.
It took time for the eyes to focus on Caesare. When they did, the recognition came quickly. They opened wider in disbelief.
Caesare managed to refrain from smiling at Blanco and vindictively muttering the word “surpresa.” Instead he rose and turned toward the phone. He had picked up the handset when Blanco blurted something behind him.
“Não!” A moment later he mumbled again, switching to English. “Don’t call.”
“I’m calling for help.”
Blanco’s eyes dropped to his arm, where a small drop of blood was drying over the remains of an insertion point. “There is… no help… for me,” he said weakly.
Caesare knelt in front of him. “Who did it?”
“Otero,” he whispered.
Caesare knelt down next to him. “What did he want?”
“Please.” Blanco’s voice grew fainter. “Please… save them.”
Caesare glanced around the room. “Save who?”
Blanco was now struggling just to make his lips move. “My family.”
1
Admiral Langford looked up as John Clay opened the wide door to his office with Wil Borger standing behind him. The Admiral quickly waved them in as he pushed a button on his phone and dropped the handset back onto the cradle.
“Okay, Clay and Borger are here. Go ahead, Steve.”
“Bom dia, gents,” Caesare called through the speaker. “You’re missing some beautiful weather down here. Sweltering and muggy.”
Clay smiled. “Sounds lovely.”
“Yeah, unfortunately it’s not all sunshine and roses.”
“Did you find Blanco?”
“Oh, I found him all right. But I’m afraid he’s not in the best of moods. He’s dead.”
Clay and Borger looked at Langford with surprise.
“Dead?” Borger repeated, confused. “But we traced that call he made right before he turned his cell off just an hour ago.”
“Yeah well, I don’t think he was the one who turned it off. I found him in his room beaten to a pulp. The Sosa woman was already gone and Blanco was just minutes away. I couldn’t do anything.”
“Was he conscious?”
“Barely. I got a little out of him, but it was brief.”
Clay noticed an echo in Caesare’s voice. “Where are you?”
On the other end, Caesare scanned up and down the metal stairs, working quickly to get his stolen uniform off. “I’m in a stairwell, at the hotel.”
Langford looked at the phone. “Any idea who did it?”
“Someone named Otero. Ring a bell with anyone?”
They all shook their heads. “No.”
Caesare nodded on his end. “I suspect he was someone involved with Mateus Alves.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because that’s what they were after,” replied Caesare.
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is, they weren’t after the money. They wanted answers.”
“What kind of answers?”
“As far as I can tell, answers about Alves. Whoever this Otero is, he was looking for something specific. Money is easy to trace, but Blanco and his girlfriend looked like they were subjected to some serious narco-interrogation, followed by a lethal cocktail. Either way, I’m sure Otero didn’t expect someone like me to show up before Blanco was dead.”
Langford’s brows remained furrowed as he leaned in closer to the speakerphone. “So what did you get out of Blanco?”
“Not much,” Caesare replied. “He was pretty far gone. But one of his last words was clear: macaco.”
“Macaco?”
Caesare peeled off the last of the uniform. “It’s Portuguese for monkey, Admiral. Otero knows about Alves’ preserve in Brazil, and he knows about the monkey.”
Langford watched Clay and Borger exchange looks. The monkey was a small capuchin discovered by a team of “researchers” who had been employed by the old man before he was murdered. In actuality, they were all poachers, except one. One was a genuine researcher and had stumbled upon a very special capuchin monkey almost entirely by accident — a monkey very different from the others they had caught.
This particular one was highly intelligent and while the average lifespan of most wild capuchins was roughly twenty-five years, this one was discovered to be profoundly older. So much older, in fact, that the billionaire Mateus Alves threw every resource he had into two goals: finding out where the monkey had come from and doing it as quietly as possible.
Langford could see the gears turning in Clay’s head. “Clay?”
He glanced up at the Admiral before turning back to the speakerphone. “How did this Otero know about the monkey? Or even that Alves was searching for it?”
“Or why someone like Alves would voluntarily abandon a billion dollar empire and completely disappear from public view.”
“Otero must have known something,” Clay mused. “But how?”
“Blanco had been talking to a lot of people,” said Caesare. “Maybe he was trying to capitalize on what Alves had already discovered. And maybe he finally found someone crazy enough to listen.”
Clay nodded absently. It was certainly plausible. Except for the crazy part. They all knew that what Alves was after wasn’t crazy at all. Tracing the origins of the capuchin was one thing, but what Alves really wanted was its DNA. Some primate DNA was almost 99 % identical to humans. If a primate could live more than four times its normal life span, it wasn’t much of a stretch for that DNA to be isolated, and potentially applied to humans.
Alves was old, in his eighties, and wanted more than anything to extend his own life. And he believed he’d finally found just the miracle to help him do it.
Clay continued thinking. “But someone wouldn’t just murder Blanco on a whim… over the word ‘monkey.’ They’d have to have gotten more. Maybe a lot more. And maybe enough to justify killing Blanco on the spot, to shut him up.”
Langford rubbed his chin. “Then we have to assume that this Otero now knows everything.” After a deep breath, he leaned forward again. “Let’s table that for the moment. It seems we have an even bigger problem to deal with. I just received a report from the salvage team near Guyana. They have recovered fragments of the torpedo and enough of its Comp-B explosive signature for a positive identification.” Langford paused, looking at Clay and Borger. “The Bowditch wasn’t sunk by the Russians like we thought. It was sunk by the Chinese.”
Clay and Borger may have been visibly surprised at the news over Blanco being dead, but now they were absolutely stunned.
Two weeks before, the sinking of one of the Navy’s most modern research ships had seemed to be a completely separate event. But it wasn’t. It was connected to the billionaire Alves’ death in a way that none of them could have foreseen. The U.S.S. Bowditch was investigating a Chinese warship quietly docked along the northern coast of South America, in the small country of Guyana.
However, what they discovered next was a revelation. The ship’s Chinese crew was making mysterious trips into the jungle under the cover of darkness. The Chinese had made a startling discovery on the very same mountain to which Mateus Alves had traced the capuchin monkey’s origins.
Over the speaker, Caesare was the first to reply. “Admiral, did you say the Bowditch was sunk by the Chinese?”
“That’s right.”
“But the only sub in the area was Russian.”
“The only one we were aware of.”
“Wait a minute.” Clay suddenly looked at Langford. “That means a Chinese sub may have been there all along.”
“It looks that way.”
“And it waited to attack the Bowditch until their warship was leaving with its cargo.”