"Van Lustbader, Eric - Angel Eyes(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)
Explosions from the shotguns. At that instant Estilo stepped hard on the brakes and, its rear wheels sluing back and forth, the Renault screeched to a halt. While it was still rocking on its shocks. Tori had opened her curbside door and, using it as a shield, whipped her arms up in the classic marksman's pose.
The motorcycles had meanwhile overshot their prey and were obliged to make sharp U-turns. This maneuver meant that the sicarios riding shotgun could neither aim nor shoot until the motorcycles had swung around and were heading back toward the stopped Renault. They fired.
Tori was holding some kind of long-barreled pistol that Russell was unfamiliar with. She squeezed off two shots, and the sicarios in the leading motorcycle were slammed backward off the bike. It roared erratically, running off the road and smashing into the underbrush. A gush of oily smoke rose into the flower-scented air.
The second motorcycle came on.
Russell could see that their driver, the man Tori had called Estilo, was either unarmed or was making no attempt to draw his weapon. Perhaps he had frozen. Russell was in no such position. He might be a desk jockey, as Tori had said, but he got only firsts on the target range, and he worked out in the unarmed combat dojo three times a week.
He raised his pistol, went to lean out his window. But Estilo whirled in the front seat and, putting his hand over the hammer of the pistol, pushed it down out of sight. "Orders," he said laconically.
"But the sicarios-"
"Paciencia," he said. "Wait and see."
Tori broke from the cover of the Renault and, slamming her door behind her, took off down the verge of the road, back the way they had come.
"What?" Russell twisted in his seat. "Tori, where the hell d'you-" He tried to get the pistol out of Estilo's grip, but failed.
He heard the blast of a shotgun firing. ''Goddamnit, let go, you sonuvabitch! She'll be killed!"
Because now the remaining motorcycle had swerved off the center of the road and was traveling down the right verge in direct line with Tori's flight. The MAC-10 was chattering.
The motorcycle was almost upon them. In a moment it would zip right by their right side, and then it would be too late to do anything to help Tori. Russell redoubled his efforts to free his pistol, but it was like battling an octopus, and he was unused to unarmed combat in such restricted quarters. The intervening back of the seat prevented him from using the throws and holds he had learned.
He could see the faces of the sicarios, long hair streaming, huge grins splitting their faces as they rode the wind, the high their speed and their power brought them. They ignored the Renault and its occupants, focused as they were on the woman who had killed their compatriots. The MAC-10 resumed its thunder.
Just as the sicarios were about to draw abreast of the Renault, Estilo squeezed off one round through the open side window and, at the same instant, kicked his door open wide.
The motorcycle was far too close to avoid the obstruction, and there was a wailing scream as it plowed into the steel door, tearing it straight off its hinges. At the same time, the motorcycle rose into the air like a bronco spitting the bit. The vehicle squealed as if wounded, hurled itself over on its side.
Estilo was out of the Renault in a flash, and Russell saw Tori racing back. Estilo kicked the MAC-10 from the dead driver's hand.
As he got out of the car, Russell could see the bullet hole in the side of me sicario's head, a clean hit, and he thought, Jesus, what a shot!
Estilo placed his left foot across the remaining sicario's wrist, preventing him from getting to his shotgun. There was blood running from his nose and one ear. Nobody said a word until Tori came up. Russell noticed that she was not even out of breath.
Tori knelt down beside the last remaining sicario and said, "Who sent you?"
The sicario spat in her face, and she put the muzzle of her odd pistol against his right kneecap. She pulled the trigger. The sicario jumped as if speared. His face went white and his eyes rolled crazily in their sockets. Tears of pain streamed down his sweat- and dust-streaked cheeks.
Tori bent closer. "The next time I pull the trigger," she said, moving the pistol to his crotch, "it won't be your kneecap that won't work."
The sicario said one word, ''Cruz.'' The bull. Then he began to shake as if he had contracted malaria.
The corrida was full by the time they got there. They had missed the drug lords and their shotgun-toting bodyguards lustily, patriotically singing the Colombian and Medellin anthems, but the first blood had not yet been spilled, and that was a good sign.
"Can you tell me why the hell we're here?" Russell said to Tori as the three of them settled onto the backless bench.
"When Ariel and I were in the tunnels," she said, "we overheard a fragment of conversation between the two Japanese Yakuza. This was before they discovered we were there. They had just finished killing a man named Rega, who had seemed to be their local contact. It occurred to me, after the briefing you gave me, that this would be a good place to start. Who was Rega? That's why I called Estilo."
Russell glanced over at the silver-haired man. "Who is he?"
"Estilo is a friend of mine," Tori said. "That's all you need to know."
"It most assuredly is not," Russell said. "He hasn't been vetted, they aren't under discipline. I don't know him from a hole in the wall."
"But I do."
"Tori, I'm warning you," Russell said. "If this mission deteriorates into another one of your personal-"
"Go home, Russ," Tori said disgustedly. "I was wrong. You don't belong out here. Go back to your desk in Virginia and let me do my job."
The bull made a run at the matador, who turned a magnificent veronica three inches from the beast's left horn.
"I 'm here for the duration,'' Russell said grimly. ''You're not running me out of here. But this person-"
"Estilo saved your life and mine back there on the road to the airport.'' Tori glared at him. ''If you thought for a moment, you'd see that that was a far better test of his loyalty than any of your electronic vetting machines."
A roar went up from the crowd as the bull made another run at the matador, who this time stuck a lance into the powerful muscles of its neck.
"This is barbaric," Russell said. "Like something from the dark ages."
"It's the art of death, Senor Slade," Estilo said. "Beauty and death is what Medellin is known for. There is no violence here in the corrida, only grace and an honorable way to die. This is why the people come; this is what captures their fancy."
Russell shook his head. "I don't understand."
"Estilo told me who Rega was," Tori said, continuing their conversation. "A paisa runner who worked for one of the Machine-Gun City drug cartels. These are all family run, very powerful. Estilo can't understand-and neither do I-why the Japanese Yakuza terminated Rega. The Japanese need the real stuff in order to manufacture their supercoke, so why cut off their supply? It doesn't make sense, and until it does, we won't be on our way."
''But the corrida?''
"We have to find out who Rega worked for-Cruz, the most powerful of the Medellin family cartels, or the Cali-based Or-olas, their rivals," Tori said. "We'll start with Cruz because he was the one who sent the four sicarios after us. We've got to talk to him, and this is where he is." She pointed to a fat man sitting in the section of the arena almost directly across from them, in the border between sun and shade. He was surrounded by sicarios wielding shotguns. Next to him was a beautiful woman with heavy-lidded eyes who kept checking her makeup in a compact mirror.
Estilo turned to Tori and, indicating the woman next to Cruz, said, "Medellin may turn out the most deadly men, but Cali, where Cruz's woman, Sonia, was born, creates the most beautiful women, don't you agree? It is said that when Cruz has that Cali-born body beneath him, he thinks only of his enemies, the Orolas."
"Considering what's happened,'' Russell said, ''I don't think this Cruz wants anything to do with us."
"Sure he does,'' Tori said, watching Cruz and his party. ''He just doesn't know it yet."
Below them, in the corrida, the bull's energy was finally nagging. It ran at the matador, but its head was lowered, and in triumph the thin man slid his blade as delicately and precisely as a surgeon just behind the back of the exhausted beast's skull, piercing its heart. The bull's eyes rolled, its forelegs collapsed, and it went down. The crowd was on its feet, screaming in delight and appreciation. Flowers rained down upon the matador, who pirouetted slowly, hands to the cloudless sky.
During this tumult, Tori kept her eyes on Cruz's woman. There was something odd about the way she kept looking in her mirror. Now she adjusted herself a little, and Tori saw a flash of reflected light, a spotlight brighter even than the sun, that illuminated the face of a dark-skinned man.
Tori leaned over, spoke briefly in Estilo's ear. Russell could see Estilo look in the direction Tori indicated. He nodded, said something to Tori that Russell couldn't make out.
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