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  ‘What was the digital instrument reading?’

  ‘We don’t know. There was no flight data recorder, and the fuel system’s processing units were also destroyed in the crash, so we can’t reconstruct with any certainty the information the pilot was getting. There’s speculation, though, that the digital instrument might have been rigged to fail, so that all the pilot had to go on fuel-wise was the analog instrument you see there.’

  ‘So you think the pilot believed he had plenty of gas up his sleeve when there was actually nothing left?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  I knew where Petinski was going with this – sabotage. But I wasn’t seeing it, not yet. Fuel starvation through poor fuel load calculation was a common killer in civil aviation. Some people just forget to fill ’er up. ‘And then . . . ?’ I said.

  ‘If you remember, Carol gave us a copy of the flight plan, which also included the fuel planning log, weather en route and so forth.’

  I remembered.

  ‘Moresby to Darwin was one of the shorter legs. And each leg required different combinations of fuel tanks to be filled to allow for the best flight characteristics. According to the fuel planning, the pilot should have had enough to reach Darwin with plenty in reserve. The fuel gauges were doctored to overread.’

  ‘Who’s we, again?’ I asked.

  ‘I said I’ll get to that. We’ve modeled the fuel calculations with the aircraft’s actual fuel burn recorded in the pilot’s log, compared the performance achieved with the forecast weather conditions factored in, and then compared the outcomes with the actual weather conditions experienced.’

  ‘You’re losing me.’

  ‘Too many three-syllable words?’

  ‘I think you want me to get lost.’

  ‘We reach an understanding at last, Cooper,’ she said. ‘The modeling tells us that, based on the forecast weather conditions, and with the actual fuel load in the King Air’s tanks, it should’ve ditched at least two hundred miles off the coast of Australia. However, there was an unforecast tailwind of a hundred and ten miles per hour. It took the plane farther than expected – over dry land.’

  ‘If it had ditched at sea, it never would’ve been found,’ I said, some of the tumblers lining up for me. ‘He’d be pronounced missing, presumed dead. Except that he’s not, is he?’

  ‘No. At least, we hope not.’

  There was that we again. ‘You going to tell me what’s really going on here, Petinski – if that’s what your real name is?’

  ‘Stu Forrest, the NAB guy who took off in a hurry to Acapulco, did the fuel planning for the flight. He hasn’t landed in Tucson, by the way. And, as you know, he can cross the Mexican border any number of places and evade detection.’

  ‘Who exactly do you work for again?’ I asked her.

  ‘Maybe now might be the opportune time to bring your supervisor in on the conversation.’ Petinski leaned across Bozey’s desk and spun the computer monitor around one-eighty degrees. Arlen’s face was on the screen.

  ‘Hey, Vin,’ he said. ‘How do?’

  ‘Colonel Wayne,’ I replied, keeping it official. ‘How long you been online, sir?’

  ‘Just got here and Arlen will do fine, Vin. We’re among friends.’

  He could have fooled me. ‘I thought you were in St Barts.’

  ‘I was,’ he said, rubbing the back of his neck. ‘And I’d like to go back there once we’re done here.’

  ‘You got recalled because of this?’

  ‘Because of what I’m about to tell you, yes.’

  ‘Sounds serious. That was a hell of a nice bikini you left behind.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  Petinski sucked in a breath that sounded like, ‘Can we please get the hell on with it?’

  Arlen got the hint and cleared his throat. ‘Vin, I’ve only just been brought in on this myself, so don’t blame me for you being kept in the dark.’

  ‘No promises,’ I said.

  ‘Off you go, Kim,’ Arlen told her.

  ‘My name is Kim Petinski but I’m not NTSB, though I was formerly with that organization. These days I’m with DCIS.’

  The Defense Criminal Investigative Service. ‘You’re a spook.’

  ‘Randy was my partner. He was working undercover at Nevada Aircraft Brokers. The Drug Enforcement Administration, under the Proceeds of Crime Act—’

  ‘Sweetwater was also a spook?’

  ‘DCIS,’ said Petinski. ‘Same as me.’

  ‘So the discharge from the Air Force, the court martial, the plea bargain – that was part of his cover story?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘What does Alabama know?’

  ‘Nothing. As I was saying, the—’

  ‘What am I doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘Can you let me finish?’ said Petinski, the tiniest vertical stress line between her eyes.

  I stretched my legs out in front of me and settled in for the long haul.

  ‘As I was saying, Randy, my partner, was working undercover at NAB. The Drug Enforcement Administration, under the Proceeds of Crime Act, has impounded three out of nine aircraft sold by NAB over the last twelve months. Its biggest customer – through several dummy companies – happens to be a Brazilian crime baron wanted by the FBI, CIA, Interpol and half a dozen other organizations and governments for drug smuggling and illegal arms trading. Things got extra complicated when Randy somehow managed to infiltrate this crime boss’s inner circle. From what we can piece together, we believe his cover was about to be blown unless he could be two places at once – create some internal confusion by flying that plane to Australia while also hanging out with this crime boss in Rio.’

  ‘You lost track of your own partner. Is that what’s going on here?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Things were getting complicated.’ She stood up and went to the window.

  ‘DCIS couldn’t run an egg and spoon race.’

  ‘Don’t confuse us with CIA.’

  ‘I’m not – CIA hasn’t learned how to tie its shoelaces, so it wouldn’t even make the starting line.’

  ‘Just like the OSI.’

  ‘Oh, we can tie ’em just fine, or we could if our hands weren’t tied behind our backs by agencies like yours.’

  ‘Children – please,’ said Arlen, interjecting. ‘Vin, as of now, you’re off vacation. You’re working with Special Investigator Petinski as her partner.’

  ‘Oh, c’mon . . .’

  ‘It’s been cleared all the way to the top.’

  ‘Meaning Wynngate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does the general know I’m an ESFJ – an extroverted, sensing, feeling, judgmental kinda guy? I mean, I’d have to know what Petinski is before I’m comfortable with it, going forward.’

  ‘Vin, we both know you’ve got no say in this. And as for your Myers-Briggs profile, you ticked box A for every single question, so who knows what you are,’ said Arlen.

  ‘I’ve got a pretty good idea,’ said Petinski.

  ‘See,’ Arlen concluded, ‘Ms Petinski has figured you out all on her own. It’s a perfect match.’

  ‘I’m an ESTJ,’ said Petinski. ‘The T makes all the difference. He’s oil, I’m water.’

  ‘I get the picture,’ said Arlen. ‘Nevertheless . . .’

  ‘Who was flying the plane?’ I asked her. ‘Who’d they cut out of those sharks?’

  ‘One of ours,’ said Petinski. ‘Low level. A Brazilian native – an enabler with our South American desk.’

  ‘And you didn’t know that when you were in Australia?’ I said.

  ‘If I did, I wouldn’t have needed to go there, would I?’

  From memory, Petinski had been far from comfortable around the human morsels reclaimed from the Aussie wildlife. Now I understood why – she had a personal connection to them, believing the remains really could have been her partner. The discovery of Sweetwater’s personal effects would have hardened up the identification of those remains, so the c
oroner’s conclusion at the end of our stay about them not being Randy’s must have taken her emotions on a rollercoaster ride.

  Okay, so I found myself having some sympathy for Petinski’s situation, but not enough to go quietly into partnership with her. ‘The pilot was one of yours, but you didn’t know it? Are you sure you’re not CIA?’

  Petinski flared. ‘Sometimes when you’re deep undercover, Cooper, you can’t just pick up the phone. And I think you know what it’s like to lose a partner, right?’

  Raw heat bloomed in my face.

  ‘Whoa, let’s just back it off a notch or two,’ Arlen said, and no one spoke for a few seconds.

  ‘So, Vin,’ he said quietly when he felt things had cooled a little, ‘the name of this crime boss in Rio de Janeiro, one of the guys we want a piece of, is Falco White. His brother is one Charles White, the arms dealer you came up against in the Congo. You remember him?’

  The name penetrated my anger. Charles White – big, black and dangerous – delivered US-made weapons and ammunition to all comers in the Congo, regardless of which side they were on, who then used them to kill and maim each other. Working with a few Special Forces soldiers, we’d managed to relieve White of enough arms to take on a company-sized force, freeing hostages being held for ransom. That was, in fact, my last case, the one that had ended with me up on a charge for assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. White had slipped through my fingers in the Congo, flying off in a chopper a few hours before the attack on the turds holding our hostages had been launched. I figured I had a score to settle with the guy. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘He’s a hard guy to forget.’

  ‘The White brothers are working with an even bigger fish, a man by the name of Benicio von Weiss,’ said Petinski.

  ‘Never heard of him,’ I said.

  Petinski played with her iPad and handed it to me again. ‘He’s not exactly a public figure.’

  I scrolled through half a dozen pictures of a man of around thirty-five to forty years of age, all pastel sweaters tied around his shoulders and boats and blond hair. ‘What’s this guy selling, besides poor color choices?’ I asked.

  ‘Among other things, the American weapons you found in Afghanistan and Africa – the ones with and without their numbers filed off,’ said Arlen.

  ‘This guy was responsible for them?’

  ‘White’s middle management. Von Weiss is your man,’ Arlen confirmed.

  ‘Vast caches of everything from M26 hand grenades and mortars to M16s and laser targeting systems are flooding the market,’ added Petinski. ‘We believe Benicio von Weiss is the guy masterminding the operation. He uses Falco and Charles White as intermediaries. Von Weiss is an arms dealer and one of the world’s wealthiest men – certainly one of the top three wealthiest men in Brazil. He even runs the favela in Rio responsible for a big slice of the city’s weapons and drug trade.’

  ‘Favela – sounds like something you dip in guacamole,’ I said.

  I distinctly heard Petinski tsk. ‘A favela is a slum.’

  Arlen glanced at the investigator. ‘Vin, you fell into this operation because of Anna’s friendship with Randy,’ he said. ‘The Department of Defense took OSI off the case, but you’ve put us back in the game.’

  ‘What game?’ I asked.

  ‘An organized crime ring operating within US bases is stealing arms for von Weiss and causing a lot of worldwide mayhem. We’ve got weapons in inventory that terrorists would love to get their hands on: Barrett rifles, Stingers – standoff weapons capable of bringing down aircraft.’

  ‘So where does Sweetwater fit into all of this?’

  ‘Kim?’ said Arlen giving her the floor.

  ‘As I’ve already told you, Cooper, Randy went undercover at NAB. We followed the ownership trail of those aircraft impounded by the DEA to companies owned by Falco and Charles White. Randy managed to get close to them, joined their organization, found the connection to Benicio von Weiss. And then, about three weeks ago, we lost him – lost Randy. We thought he’d surfaced, flying that King Air to Australia, but that turned out not to be the case. Somehow, he’d managed to make contact with the CIA operative and convince him to stand in on that flight to Australia.’

  ‘He used him as a decoy?’ asked Arlen. ‘That’s rough.’

  Petinski pushed on. ‘Cooper, it was only after you told me about the severed hand and ransom note business that another avenue of investigation opened up.’

  ‘And which avenue is that?’ I asked.

  Petinski shifted a folder and picked up a number of pages stapled together, handing them to me. The letterhead informed me that the forensic lab of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police had compiled it.

  ‘You seen this?’ I asked Arlen.

  ‘I’m half an hour ahead of you,’ he said, lifting his copy into view. ‘But that’s all.’

  It was the report Bozey said would have to wait its turn in the queue. Someone had leaned on the system heavily to have our case jump to the head – the detective, I figured. I read through the report, taking it for a short walk around Bozey’s office. It began with a bunch of disclaimers, which basically said the tests on the hand, note and packaging were incomplete and that more time was required to reach definitive conclusions on each item, and so forth. I flipped the page and read some more. In the limited time available most attention had thus far been given to examining Thing. The report said that the hand belonged to a male of mixed racial origin between the ages of forty and fifty. Every knuckle was separated, and all the fingers as well as the thumb had been broken. Badly bruised skin in the areas of the breaks indicated that the damage was done while the victim was alive.

  Maybe the guy had won a few too many games of pool . . .

  According to the report, the manner in which the bones in the wrist had been cut indicated that a surgical saw of the highest quality had been used to do the job. There was no vital reaction in the soft tissue around the cut at the time of the amputation – no bleeding – meaning that the hand was amputated post-mortem. Whoever he was, this guy had pissed someone off pretty bad. I turned another page and kept reading, and what I read made me read it again. A snake’s fang had been found embedded in the webbing between the first and second finger. Toxicology tests revealed a lethal amount of snake venom in the blood. It was the view of the pathologist that snake venom had killed the man who belonged to the amputated hand. In fact, there was so much venom in the blood and tissue that the pathologist who performed the tests believed the victim had been bitten many times prior to death. DNA analysis of the venom revealed that it had come from one of the world’s most lethal serpents, the golden lancehead viper, found exclusively on the island of Queimada Grande, which apparently lay off the coast of Brazil, not far from Rio de Janeiro.

  Rio. Plenty of roads seemed to be leading there.

  I flipped over another page and saw the subhead Air Force Academy Ring.

  ‘I’ll save you the trouble reading,’ said Petinski. ‘The ring’s the real deal.’

  ‘Randy’s,’ I said.

  ‘No question.’

  The following page dealt with the FedEx packaging. I skimmed the findings, which were no more or less disappointing than I thought they’d be. The paper, plastic and packing tape were all covered in fingerprints, hairs, skin cells and other biological material, but all of it was next to useless as evidence, or even identification. According to the analyst’s assessment, the box had simply gone through countless hands and environments, and identifying which fingerprint, hair and/or skin cells were salient to building a case was impossible. The FedEx box itself was standard issue and the address was not a house or apartment but a post office somewhere in Rio, at a place called Céu Cidade. Whoever posted the package could have driven across town to that post office. That lead was probably a dead end.

  I dropped the paperwork back on the desk. ‘So what does all this tell you?’

  ‘Benicio von Weiss is a herpetologist, an expert on snakes. He’s one of the wor
ld’s foremost authorities on venomous South American vipers, and has written several definitive papers on the effects of venom on human flesh.’

  ‘So he’s an expert on snakes, and the guy missing a hand died from snakebite. What’s the connection beyond the circumstantial one? And what’s that got to do with Randy’s ring?’

  ‘You don’t believe in coincidences, Cooper, so why don’t you tell me what it means?’

  ‘I’m just asking,’ I said, opening my hands out, Mr Innocent.

  Petinski’s head was lowered, her eyes on me like a bull about to charge – a very small blonde bull that could possibly do the splits.

  ‘C’mon,’ I said. ‘I’m the one who’s blindfolded here. Just tell me what this is all about.’

  ‘I can’t give you the full picture, Cooper, not in the presence of the colonel, because he isn’t cleared for it. This is as secret as it comes.’

  ‘The lady speaks the truth, Vin,’ Arlen confirmed.

  I leaned back against the door. ‘Then I’ll take a down payment – tell me whatever you can in my supervisor’s presence.’

  ‘Okay, well . . .’ she began, eyes flicking to Arlen and then back to me, ‘as I said, Randy went undercover to keep an eye on Ty Morrow, who picked him up to fly guns and drugs out of South America, once Randy passed the audition. Randy flew legal for three months until the bad guys were happy. They stepped it up sharply after that – deliveries of weapons and drugs throughout South America, and sometimes also into North America. Randy finally came into contact with Mr Big – Benicio von Weiss – after more than fourteen months of flying, on a run to São Paulo, Brazil. He hit it off with the boss straight away. But then the DEA got too enthusiastic on a tip-off from Randy and raided a secret drugs-manufacturing plant in the north of Brazil, in concert with Brazilian government troops, and that set off alarm bells in von Weiss’s camp. Von Weiss, or one of his people, figured that the leak could have come from limited sources, one of them being Randy. So they put a watch on him around the clock. We think Von Weiss ultimately decided not to wait till the songbird broke cover and had all suspects whacked simultaneously. We think Randy might have got word that he was a target at around the time he had to do the run to Australia. One of our people piloted that plane in Randy’s stead to give him some breathing space, and you know the rest about that.’