I froze. “Who are you?”
“A friend. And though I doubt the Agência has the resources of the NSA, cell phones can be tracked. If they’re looking for you, your phone will lead them straight to us.”
“I don’t have a phone,” I said. “It was in my luggage, and it didn’t have a SIM card that could work here anyway.”
The man took a step closer, holding out his hand. “Your friend’s, then. The one you used to call home.”
Celso looked back and forth between us. I nodded. Celso handed over his phone, and the man snapped the battery out in one smooth motion and threw both pieces into a bush. “Come on,” he said. He started walking south, not even looking to see if we were following him. I didn’t move.
“Who are you?” I said.
He turned back, annoyance evident on his face. “You don’t have much time. We need to get you out of here.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you until I know who you are and how you know me,” I said.
The annoyance disappeared from his face as if it had never been, and the man grinned. “Good show,” he said. “You’re not entirely stupid after all. They told me your tradecraft was nonexistent—the phone a case in point—and I wanted to see what I could expect from you.”
I crossed my arms. “Well?”
“The Major said to tell you that the next time you plan to back your car over a set of security spikes, please wait until after she leaves.”
I nodded and let my arms fall. “Good enough for me,” I said. “Let’s go.”
As we walked, he chatted in Portuguese about the weather, about that year’s World Cup, apparently about anything that came into his head. After a few blocks, we came upon a gray car with the yellow-and-green stripes of a taxi idling at the curb. “This is our ride,” he said, and opened the door for me to climb in.
I looked at Celso. “Are you coming?”
He shook his head. “This is my city. My family is here.”
“They might figure out that you helped me.”
“I’m not leaving.”
I threw my arms around him and squeezed hard. He smelled like Brasília, like my childhood. “Thank you,” I said. “Good luck.” I ducked into the back seat. The balding man slid in next to me, and the car drove away. I watched Celso’s form dwindle in the back window, and wondered if I would ever see him again.
CHAPTER 18
The taxi drove cross-country to São Paulo, an eleven-hour drive. Along the way, the two agents told me that Osvaldo Gonzaga, the Brazilian vice president—now president, at least according to the constitution—had made an official request for assistance from the United States to help him retain legal control over the country. He claimed that several attempts had been made on his life, and that César Nazif’s authority grab was nothing less than a coup. While I slept in the back seat on an endless drive through the Brazilian countryside, the United States mobilized a force to invade.
As we approached São Paulo, the traffic on the other side of the road turned ugly. It seemed everyone but us was trying to get out of the city. I didn’t know if there had been some kind of attack here already, or if everyone just assumed that this was where the fight was coming, since this was where Gonzaga had set up his provisional government. I spotted several Comanche helicopters in the distance, and once an F-22 roared overhead.
One thing about the United States military: they didn’t do anything small. By the time we reached the command center, it was clear this was a major operation. The first wave, still in the process of arriving from the United States, consisted of a battalion of Marines, a recon platoon, light armored units, combat engineers, a Marine aircraft squadron, air defense battery, an anti-terrorism team, a logistical task force, and what seemed like an army’s worth of diplomats and intelligence agents. That was just the São Paulo contingent. A larger group was headed for São Luis in the north, as a staging area to attack Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon, which was apparently in the hands of the Ligados. The second wave, which would begin arriving in several days, included two carrier battle groups, led by aircraft carriers USS Harry S. Truman and USS Abraham Lincoln, each of which could project enough power all by itself to conquer most countries. There was no question of the United States winning this fight. It was just a question of how much of Brazil would be flattened in the process.
The diplomats and agents and military staff swarmed the Palácio do Anhangabaú—São Paulo’s city hall—communicating an air of frantic busyness and importance. I wondered how many of them actually knew what was going on. To my surprise, Shaunessy Brennan was there too, waiting in the lobby to claim me. Her long braids were held back in a functional clip, and she wore jeans and a khaki shirt.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Melody has a thing about being on site. She says intelligence is crap if you don’t have the right context for it.”
She started walking, and I followed. “What actually happened?” I asked. “Do we know?”
“Complete chaos. Rumors on the street have the bombs placed by the Venezuelans, by the FARC, even by the United States. Nobody in the Brazilian government seems to know any better. We have eighty-five Americans trapped in the embassy in Brasília, at least five reports of American tourists under threat in the Amazonian states, a shifting political balance of power, and a major friendly government under threat of collapse. New crises are popping up faster than we can mobilize teams to address them.”
“What about Director Kilpatrick?”
She made a sour face. “Confirmed dead. It’s pretty certain. An agent actually saw the body herself. The bomb at the Agência seems to have been timed to take him out along with several of their high-ranking people. That or it was a coincidence, but given the precise coordination of all of these attacks, I have to assume it was intentional.”
“But why? Terrorist attacks on major leaders in three different countries? What’s the ideology? I don’t understand what they’re trying to accomplish.”
“If they’re going for destabilization, they’re succeeding,” Shaunessy said. “Every group with a grudge is coming out of the woodwork and shaking their assault rifles. Central authority is eroding. We have some military bases, mostly in the south, declaring for Gonzaga, and others in the north declaring for Nazif and the Ligados. It’s looking like a civil war.”
“Wait,” I said. “Nazif and the Ligados? Since when are they connected?”
“Nazif declared the Ligados national heroes. He said they’ve been fighting for the independent sovereignty of a supreme Brazil and protecting their national treasure—meaning the Amazon—from ‘foreign despoilment.’ So there’s your ideology, if there is one—whenever one of these guys talks, it’s always about control over the Amazon.”
“‘Despoilment?’ That’s Nazif’s word?”
“I certainly didn’t make it up.”
We entered a grand room with granite floors and an arched ceiling, filled with desks and computers and phones, that had been given over to serve as coalition headquarters. Sunlight slanted in through windows on two sides.
“It’s a complete intelligence failure,” Shaunessy said. “A guerrilla group gaining that kind of influence and power, and we barely knew about them more than six months ago. Thanks to you, we’re starting to crack their communications, but only just. We have no idea how they’re organized or who’s in charge. Their motivating ideal seems to be an environmental one, which is pretty unique as far as large terrorist organizations go. Not that we even know how many members they have. And now that Colombia and Venezuela are invading, we won’t have enough time to—”