“Now then,” Patrick O’Malley continued, reaching for his glass of Perrier, which he always drank with plenty of ice and a twist of lime, “if you’d be so kind as to turn to page five of the report, we can begin discussing the new security measures I trust all of you will enact and cooperate with.”
The sounds of pages ruffling filled the conference room. O’Malley took a hefty sip from his Perrier and felt the ice cubes brush against his lips. “First off,” he began in the instant before his eyes went glassy. “First off…”
Patrick O’Malley tried to grab the conference table for support; when that failed, he groped for the arms of the chair behind him. He managed to find them, but crumpled before his purchase was firm. He hit the floor, kicking and twitching, before the horrified eyes of his executive staff.
“Call 911!”
“He’s having a heart attack!”
“CPR! Now! Fast!”
O’Malley was dead before they could even get started, dead before the conference room doors burst open to allow a pair of security guards to rush through. Heart attack was indeed the initial diagnosis by the medical examiner, one later confirmed under autopsy.
Jonathan Weetz did not learn of the death until the following morning’s New York Times. He had injected an incredibly potent and quick-dissolving form of taxine poison into the six limes present in O’Malley’s office refrigerator. No way to tell how long it would be before he used a slice. The specifics, though, didn’t matter.
O’Malley’s death meant three down and thirteen to go, and thirteen was his lucky number.
Chapter 4
“Well, look what we have here….” McCracken had seen the burly figure in the Caesar Park Hotel lobby an instant before the voice assaulted him. Now it was too late to turn away.
“Hello, Ben.”
“Always said you meet people in the strangest places.”
Colonel Ben Norseman was wearing the ugliest Hawaiian shirt Blaine had ever seen, a pair of monstrous forearms sticking out from the baggy sleeves.
“I’d like to say you were a sight for sore eyes, Ben, but mine didn’t hurt until they saw you. Who’s handling your wardrobe these days?”
Norseman plucked at the awful red floral pattern. “Hey, when in Rome…”
“I doubt you’re down here as a tourist.”
“Nope. Business. Usual stuff. Right up your alley, if you’re available.”
Blaine shook his head. “Sorry.”
“Hey, what are the odds, the two of us meeting in the same place after so long? Call it coincidence.”
“Call it unfortunate.”
“Hey, fuck you, McCrackenballs. I was trying to be sociable.”
“Hardly your style, Ben.”
The two men regarded each other distantly from a yard apart. Norseman had changed as little in appearance over the years as McCracken. A few inches taller than Blaine at six-four, Norseman’s neck was still creased with knobby muscle that pulsed with each breath. His mustache showed its share of gray, and his dome was now completely bald. It gave a harder edge to the colonel’s face, as if he needed it.
Ben Norseman had been part of the Phoenix Project in Vietnam as well, a Green Beret who’d already put in five years in the jungle when Blaine arrived in 1969. Norseman stayed because he liked it, liked everything about it. He fed off the killing. When the war ended, interested parties in the government made sure it was still there for him. Last McCracken had heard, he and a small elite troop he was running were handling deep cover, strictly top drawer stuff. They were little more than hired killers, but they did their job exceptionally well.
So what was Ben Norseman doing down here? What “usual stuff” had brought him down to Brazil?
“Hey, asshole, our styles are more alike than different. I’ve been keeping up with ya. Heard about what you pulled off in Tehran. Damn good work. You get a mind to it, you know there’s always a place in my bunch.”
“Sorry, Ben. Kicking kittens and steering old ladies into moving traffic was never my cup of tea.”
Norseman’s lips puckered and the veins bulged in his knobby neck. “Anytime you want to settle what we’ve got between us, just let me know.”
“Now would suit me fine. I’d ask you to step outside, but I’m afraid you might use a couple of kids for a shield.”
The bigger man backed off a bit. “I’m on business, like I said. I wasn’t, the two of us could dance right now.” Norseman came close enough for Blaine to smell the spearmint gum on his breath. “Our day’s coming, McCrackenballs. High time somebody gave yours a squeeze. Show you what it feels like.”
“Your hands aren’t big enough, Ben,” Blaine said, and backed slightly away. He waited to see if Norseman was going to move on him. When he didn’t, McCracken slid toward the front desk. “Be seeing ya.”
“I’ll be looking forward to it.”
McCracken watched Norseman move through the hotel doors and approach a white van parked directly outside. Only the driver was visible, but Blaine knew there would be another five of Ben Norseman’s men in the back. Killing machines born too late for Nam and making up for it now, all trained and hardened in the image of their fearless leader. Blaine was thankful for the fact that whatever they were down here for had nothing to do with him. If it had, Norseman never would have initiated the conversation. He was too dumb to play stupid, but he was as fearsome a soldier as Blaine had ever known.
McCracken had other things on his mind now in any event. Johnny Wareagle had supplied the precise location of his cell, along with all the information he had been able to gather about the jail complex itself. Blaine wasn’t worried. This wasn’t a prison, after all, it was a regular jail. Though well fortified, people came and went regularly, and there wasn’t a lot of perimeter security.
He would still require explosives to get the job done, but elaborate charges were a luxury he would have to do without, which left him with no choice other than to utilize those of a homemade variety. A brief discussion in English with the hotel concierge provided him with the locations of area stores where the required supplies might be obtained. After a quick shower and lunch, he was off with shopping list in hand.
It took all of two hours to obtain the goods he needed. Purchases from a pair of markets, a hardware store, and the toy section of a large department store filled his needs admirably. Just before four o’clock, he and his four shopping bags returned to the Caesar Park for the more difficult task of assembling the charges.
Blaine emptied the contents of his shopping bags onto the large single bed and separated them into four piles. His first task was to combine all of the packages of children’s clay he had bought into a single lump and then work the heavy steel roofing nails into the mass by pushing, sliding, and squeezing. The single irregular bulk then had to be separated into the proper shapes, as equally symmetrical as he could manage with only his eyes to guide him. Next he combined his store-bought chemicals and cleaners in the proper proportions, using three standard hotel ice buckets as pots. When this was completed, he poured the contents of all three into the plugged sink. Then he began easing the steel-laiden clay shapes in under the surface, one at a time.
It took nearly two minutes for each to absorb the proper amount of liquid. Blaine set the finished products to dry on towels laid over the double bed and turned his attention to the timing devices. He much preferred working with transmitter detonated charges in such cases, but no such luck — or technology — here. He’d have to rely on the guts of simple travel clocks, all wired to the same moment. The alarm activator would serve as the trigger, set with intervals of just seconds between each blast to maximize confusion.