"Van Lustbader, Eric - Angel Eyes(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

Russell felt an overwhelming desire to look at Tori, but instinctively knew that even making eye contact with her now would make the paranoid Cruz suspect they were working some kind of scam on him. his mind was racing. "There was a Soviet agent. I interrogated him until he dropped. That took nearly thirty straight hours, but in the end the mole broke and gave us everything we wanted to know."
"Like what?" Cruz said suspiciously.
"Like everything he knew about the operations of his own organization."
Cruz shrugged. "I already know much of what is happening inside the Orola cartel. But it would be beneficial to know everything." Now it was Cruz who was parading in front of his lieutenants, scowling, fingering an enormous hunting knife. "And just how did you discover this mole, Senor Slade?"
"Not any one thing," Russell said, "but many tiny mistakes. They build up, especially during an interrogation. There are signs I am trained to see."
Cruz nodded. "It is now almost four months since I executed Ruben Orola. Since then, his brothers have tried three times to kill me, the last one being today." He turned to Russell. "Therefore, I need you, the mole hunter, to track mine down for me. Here. Now."
Tori stood beside Cruz, whispered in his ear.
Russell went down me line of Cruz's lieutenants. He hadn't the slightest idea what to look for, but he found it peculiarly exciting to pretend this expertise. Moment by moment he could feel the power slipping into his hands, just as he could feel the tension and anxiety mounting as he spoke to each lieutenant in turn, watched the cast of his eye, the tic of a facial muscle, the thin sheen of sweat on upper lip or forehead.
He came at length to the last lieutenant and knew that he would soon have to give Cruz a name. Further, it had to be the same name that Tori had whispered in Cruz's ear. How was he to do that?
Russell stood at an angle to the last lieutenant, ostensibly to observe him better. But at the same time he could now see Tori out of the corner of his eye. Russell saw her left hand down by her side. Then he saw it move marginally. Her forefinger and middle fingers were extended, the others curled into her palm. Like a baseball catcher calling for a curveball, Russell thought. The second lieutenant.
Russell completed his interrogation, moved back up the line until he was behind the second lieutenant. "This is the mole," he said without hesitation. "Jorge," Tori said. "You see?"
"Lavaperro!" Dogwasher! Cruz screamed, and grabbing the man both Tori and Russell had indicted, slammed him back against the wall. Jorge was babbling his innocence, but Cruz was clearly not listening. Cocaine, whether as an addiction or a product in which to traffic, bred paranoia.
"Knife," Cruz said, holding out his hand. Another lieutenant stepped forward, slipped him a U.S. Marine KA-BAR. Cruz took it, slashed the blade laterally across Jorge's throat. While the blood gushed onto him, Cruz pried open Jorge's jaws, cut out his tongue. The body slid to the floor.
Cruz held up the tongue like a trophy. Tori could see that he felt like the matador in the corrida as he withdrew the killing sword from the bull's heart. He said, "Send this to the Orolas. And make sure you pack it good in dry ice. I want them to get it fresh, like at the best restaurant." He erupted in a savage laugh. "I'm only sorry I won't be there to see their faces when they get it."
He turned to Estilo. "You feel more secure now?" He had begun to strut again, his old bravado returning. He turned to Russell and grinned. "I am grateful for your assistance. What would you consider proper payment? Money? Cocaine? A boat? Helicopter? A plane, perhaps? This is Medellin, gringo. Nothing is impossible here." His grin widened. "You are about to learn, Senor Slade, that here in Machine-Gun City our shopping malls are open twenty-four hours a day. And the price is always right."
"We want none of these things," Russell said, "though we are grateful for the offer. We need, instead, some information."
"Oh?" Cruz's expression showed that he was not pleased with the sudden turn in the conversation. "What kind of information? I am not an informer. I don't deal information."
Before his face darkened too much, Sonia stepped between the two men. She stood very close to Cruz, and reaching between her breasts, she drew out a stone on a gold chain. She took his hand gently in hers, squeezed it into a fist around the stone. "Listen to me, ????zo?," she said. "These people are lucky for us. I can feel it. Can you feel it, too, now? The stench of the Orolas is gone. And the sour taste of business since you sent Rega to Buenos Aires, since he was murdered, is about to end. These people are a sign of that change. Can you feel it, ?????o?? Feel it now. The rich taste of money is coming, coming back."
Tori, who was the only one close enough to Cruz and Sonia to hear this exchange, was both fascinated and repelled. The tone of Sonia's voice, the look in her eyes as they searched his, was so intimate, so blatantly sexual, that Tori could almost imagine they were making love right here in front of everyone.
But now she had one piece of the puzzle. Rega had been working for Cruz. Then why did the Yakuza kill him? What had one of them said? His use was at an end.
"When the Orolas killed Rega," Cruz said, "the war began in earnest. And war is profitable only for the armament suppliers."
"Cruz," Tori said, "the Orolas did not kill Rega." He scowled at her. "What could you know of it?" "I ran into Rega's killers in Buenos Aires. In fact, they almost killed me, as well. They were Japanese gangsters."
"Japanese?" Cruz laughed in her face, then his scowl got deeper. "Are you trying to make a fool of me?"
"I'm sure she isn't," Sonia said, keeping his hand around her amulet. "Think. Rega had a rich source, a buyer flooding us with money. That's why you sent him-a lieutenant, not a mule-to Buenos Aires. She's telling the truth, corazon. Don't you see how it makes sense?"
"But the Japanese?" Cruz said. "Why would they want so much coke?"
"That's what we've come here to find out," Tori said.
"You see, ??razo?," Sonia said excitedly to Cruz, "they are good luck for you.''
Russell said, "The question now is to find out why the Japanese killed Rega. He was their connection."
Cruz considered this. "Only two answers are possible," he said. "One, they don't need supply anymore; two, they found a better connection."
"They still need the cocaine," Russell said. "We're certain of that."
"Could the Orolas be giving the Japanese a better deal?" Tori asked.
"All that product?" Cruz shook his head. "I'd know about it right away. If they have a new connection, it's not the Cali cartel."
"Then who?" Russell asked.
Cruz shrugged. "It may be nothing, you know how rumors are, especially here. But . . . over the last several months there has been talk of a major new cocaine factory establishing itself in the llanos of Meta Province, east of here, just past the Manacacias River. It's very wild there, difficult to track even rumors. Like I said, we had all dismissed the stories."
"Whose territory is that?" Russell asked. Cruz shrugged. "Not Orola's, not mine. The Colombian army is in and out of there all the time. So is the DAS." He meant the Colombian Department of Administrative Security, charged with keeping the cartels and the shipments from the Bolivian cocaleros under control. "They do a shit job, but they can be dangerous nonetheless."
"No-man's-land," Estilo said.
"Llano negro. "Black jungle. Cruz nodded. "A land of only shadows. One of the stories, more persistent than most, says that the army and the DAS patrol this area not to find this factory, but to protect it." He shrugged again. "But these rumors have a way of growing out of all proportion. There is no way to tell the truth from the fiction."
But, of course, there was one way. Tori, Russell, Estilo, and Sonia all looked at one another. Without saying a word, they had communicated everything they needed to know. It was to this llano negro they would have to go to find the beginning of the bizarre Yakuza cocaine trail.
Less than twenty-four hours later the three of them were lifting off from Machine-Gun City in one of Cruz's Bell JetRanger III helicopters.
Just before they left, Sonia took Tori aside without anyone seeing and said, "Remember your promise to me. You must help me destroy Cruz."
"I won't forget," Tori said. "When we get back."
"When you get back." Sonia nodded.
Sonia said something else, but the wind was already in Tori's ears. Was it her imagination or did Sonia have a doubtful look on her face?
They were all dressed in tropical paramilitary camouflage suits. Among the armament each carried was a machete, a Marine KA-BAR knife, a .45 handgun, and an Uzi machine pistol with three extra loads.
It was dark inside the helicopter, and the heavy vibrations penetrated to their bones. Russell was up front, quizzing Cruz's pilot, who was set to pick them up twenty-four hours after he set them down. If they didn't make the first rendezvous, he'd return the same time the day after. Estilo was stretched out, asleep, on the bench on the opposite side of the cabin. Tori put her head back against cold steel and closed her eyes.
''Don't look so worried, Senor Slade,'' Estilo said some hours later. "We Argentines have a saying, 'When Satan tries to walk on ice, he falls on his face. Ice is not his milieu.' "
Who is he kidding? Tori thought, as the JetRanger set them down in a minuscule clearing in the llanos of Meta Province. She had a clear sense of foreboding.
Llano negro. The black jungle, where only shadows dwelled, where maybe the good guys rode shotgun for the bad guys. She thought, This territory isn't controlled by Cruz, or by the Orolas. So who does it belong to?