Perilous Skies (Stony Man) Read online

  Enthusiasm was running high, as it always did at the start of the party, and by the time it wore itself down in the next hour and a half, the dinner entertainment would start. The two chefs would go head-to-head with the secret ingredient that would be unveiled by Adan Neruda personally, only at the last moment. Then the two chefs and their teams would have an hour to create culinary masterpieces. It was a grand contest that mimicked an American television show, and every party guest would get to taste the dishes and help serve as judge by voting for their favorite. Adan had in fact tipped off the cooking teams to what their secret ingredient would be, just so that they would be able to plan in advance and produce the best possible dishes. It wouldn’t do to have one of them crack under the pressure and put out something subpar. Not at Adan Neruda’s party. So he had let them know, secretly, that he had flown in several hundred pounds of Norwegian Ruby Red Trout, which would be live in holding tanks when he unveiled it as the secret ingredient. A live ingredient was always more dramatic than a bunch of protein on ice.

  In fact, the Norwegian trout would still be alive at midnight. There would be no one around at that point to prepare them.

  * * *

  AS QUIET AS THE QUARTET behind the planters was playing, it was still loud enough to mask the noise of the attack aircraft. It was only when the players ended a song, several conversations stalled and a momentary lull fell across much of the open-air garden that the rush of the engines was heard. Several guests glanced up, curious, not yet alarmed—until they saw the aircraft diving on the rooftop.

  It was a small, barely visible jet flying low in the thin air over the city and apparently headed directly at the Hotel Europa. A few women screamed. Adan Neruda turned to see what the commotion was about. For a fraction of a second he was thinking that the screams were delight over some part of his entertainment. Then he saw the aircraft.

  The aircraft was clearly a jet, but it was small and slow, moving at the speed of a single-engine plane and with almost no noise at all. It passed low over the top of the Hotel Europa, so close that Adan Neruda could’ve hit the thing with a rock if only he’d had time to grab one from the decorative planters. A hatch opened near the tail and tiny objects rained down on the party. Several partygoers panicked and ran for cover with their hands over their heads. Adan Neruda glared at the objects as they tumbled end over end and clattered to the floor of the garden.

  He snatched one of the objects before it even stopped moving on the stone tile. It was a piece of varnished bamboo, just a few inches long, hollow, with no markings. He was mystified until he realized that there was a roll of paper inside. He tapped it out quickly and unrolled it. It was printed with a brief message.

  Party’s over, Adan,

  and payback is a bitch.

  Your old friend,

  Soros

  Adan Neruda shook his head in disbelief. He’d once known a man named Soros. He’d ended the man’s career twenty years ago. The man had been a nothing, nobody, a local Bolivian official with grandiose dreams of power. His ambition and his intelligence had taken him far, moving him up the ladder quickly, consolidating power in much the same way Adan Neruda was consolidating power. Adan Neruda was smarter, and more aggressive, and Soros had put himself in Neruda’s way. Neruda attempted to come to terms with Soros, but Soros balked at compromising his own career for the sake of Neruda’s. So Neruda ended Soros’s career, creatively framing the man for murder and extortion.

  In Bolivia, a public official commonly got away with murder and extortion, unless the people he murdered or the people he tried to extort were more powerful than he was. Neruda had made it look as if Soros had killed family members of a local governor, and made it look as if Soros had attempted to extort money from the same governor. Soros’s career had gone down in flames. Adan Neruda heard years later that Soros had joined the drug trade and made a reasonably good living at it—in southern Brazil. So everything worked out in the end.

  But now it appeared that Soros held a grudge and was about to do something about it.

  But that seemed impossible. It was too long ago. Soros was too weak to touch Adan Neruda now. He was too dim-witted to have held a grudge for that long. At least that’s what Adan Neruda had thought...

  Because now he could see another jet, a twin to the first, which had been following behind the first and was now diving toward the penthouse courtyard of the Hotel Europa.

  Neruda watched, fascinated, for all of five seconds. This one was moving much faster than the first, its engines hissing angrily, aggressively. Neruda knew he was in trouble and broke out of his fugue and bolted for cover. But the aircraft opened up. There was a clatter of angry machine-gun fire and flashes from the nose of the jet, the rounds slamming into the stone tile of the penthouse garden.

  Adan Neruda crouched behind a column, breathing hard, his attention drawn suddenly to a grunt and a thump. A staggering man fell to his face, with half his shoulder missing. He’d taken a machine-gun round in the upper body and was now dying on the broken stone tiles. A woman dressed in lace and bling grabbed his hand, shouting at him, and tried to drag him to cover, and then froze. She dropped his hand. She stared at the man, now seeming to realize that it was only a body. She shrieked and fled.

  There were others running all over the rooftop. They all went in different directions; none of them seemed to know where they were headed. It was chaos.

  There were angry shouts and a desperate pounding. When Neruda bolted inside, he spotted men scrabbling frantically at the elevator. They were jamming their fingernails in the seam and trying to drag the doors open. The indicator above the elevator was flashing red.

  The attack was planned well enough. Their first targets were the exterior elevator shafts. They were pretty, but they were also vulnerable to the outside. It would only have taken a quick barrage to crack open the glass and damage the components inside, which would put the thing into emergency shutdown.

  They were thirty floors up. It was a long walk down. That would keep victims on hand in case they wanted to attack again.

  And Neruda knew that they were going to attack again. His quick assessment of the courtyard had showed five or six bodies, and maybe fifteen injuries. If the attacker really was his old friend Soros, and he really wanted his revenge, he would want to do a lot better than that.

  He was playing with Neruda. He was determined to make him suffer for a while.

  Adan Neruda had no intention of sticking around to be audience to whatever theatrics Soros had in mind. He headed for the nearest emergency exit, to the stairs. There were already others streaming through the steel fire doors, but he moved quickly among them, descending half a floor when he heard cries from above. “They’re coming back! Move fast.”

  “No!” somebody else shouted. “They’re trying to cut us off.”

  Neruda didn’t like the sound of that, but he was already at the doors to the twenty-ninth floor. He looked through the doors. The spa/nightclub was dark tonight in deference to the Neruda party. Neruda had no line of sight to the outside. And those planes were so damn quiet—they could be attacking at this moment and he wouldn’t even know it until the barrage began.

  There was a scream from up above, and he tried to make sense of the words, but then the barrage did begin again. Heavy machine-gun fire ripped through the walls around him, as if seeking him out. As if somehow the pilots of those planes knew where to target him. That was impossible, and he realized that they were in fact simply trying to cut off escape routes.

  They had not counted on how fast Adan Neruda could make his escape. He scrambled down the next flight of stairs, and the next, and panicking hotel guests were flooding into the stairs along with the party guests. Neruda shouldered all of them out of his way, until the crowd became too dense to penetrate. A large man in a bellhop uniform turned on him with a glare when Neruda tried to get past. The bellhop elbowed him in the jaw. It was powerful, and Neruda nearly lost consciousness—but it convinced him to sta
y in line with the rest of the crowd.

  But not before he had memorized the face of the bellhop. When this was over he would have the man fired, and then he would have the man killed.

  If he could manage to avoid being killed himself. He tried to make sense of the chatter of the panicking guests around him, but nobody seemed to know what was going on. There were distant crashes. Windows were breaking on the twenty-ninth and twenty-eighth floors above. But the escaping crowds were in fact leaving the devastation behind.

  Already, as his sense of security returned, he was thinking ahead. Once he extricated himself from this herd of cows, and once his safety was assured, he would dedicate all his resources to a new project: hunt down Soros and ruin him utterly.

  There was a heavy thump that shook the building. It seemed nearby—as if one of the tiny planes had flown itself into the building at Neruda’s level. Women began to scream again around him. Neruda stopped and grabbed on to the handrail and would move no further, despite the curses and shoves of the people around him desperately streaming down the stairs.

  He dragged on the handrail, pulling himself upstream against the descending crowds.

  Suddenly he was second-guessing himself. And he was a man who never second-guessed himself. He was proud of his ability to make a decision and stick to it and trust it was the right decision. But not now. And now he was making the most important decisions he had ever made. The decisions that might or might not save his life.

  His mind spun with the realization that these attacks were aimed at humiliating him, but ultimately, certainly, to kill him. He had to think about that. He had to decide what his attackers had in mind. What they would assume he would do once the attack started. He would have to deduce their strategy and come up with an effective counterstrategy, and he had only seconds to do it.

  He assumed that they would be certain of killing him by killing everyone in the building.

  The only way to accomplish that was to be certain that no one in the building escaped. At least no one who was attending his party.

  Even to a man who had murdered casually, the thought of wiping out so many people at once—so many important, high-ranking, wealthy people—was staggering. Who could do it and live with themselves? Who would risk that kind of political blowback?

  It didn’t matter, he firmly insisted to himself. He could consider such matters later. If he lived, he would have plenty of time to think about what had happened, why it had happened and what rationale had been used by this forgotten enemy.

  This man Soros. Neruda could not remember enough about him. Could not remember what he was like, or how he had behaved, or what motivated him. He could not remember if the man was meticulous in his planning, or impulsive, or foolish, or intelligent.

  That was twenty years ago. And he had considered himself disposed of that problem. The details had been filed away long ago.

  He must assume that the planes would continue their waves of attack, and would strike the lower floors, far down enough that they could be assured of damaging the building and trapping all the partygoers in the floors above. That would be the only way to trap them, keep them in place—keep him specifically in place—then they could wipe everyone out.

  That is what he would do, if he were making this attack. If he had planes such as these, if he had guts enough to commit mass murder on this scale, all for the sake of petty vengeance, all to settle scores that had been forgotten in the 1990s.

  The crowds were in a panic, and when he looked into the eyes of the people streaming down the stairs, he saw glassy gazes and people who moved with a lack of focus. Scared stupid.

  He found himself face-to-face with the mayor of the small town where one of his companies was building a retreat. It was something of a combination resort and guesthouse, and was costing him millions. He expected the payback to be ten times the construction costs. He would have his own golf course, world-class, where he could entertain dignitaries and businessmen from all over the world. The mayor of this town had been personally installed by Neruda to help him get the cooperation of the town, to get everything he needed to make his guesthouse a reality. This man was becoming wealthy because of his association with Neruda, but now the man’s eyes were rolling white and unfocused, and he barely recognized Neruda when they came face-to-face.

  “My God, where are you going?” the man demanded, and he grabbed Neruda’s sleeve to pull him with the crowd toward escape.

  “Come on, you have got to get out of this building!” the mayor exclaimed.

  Neruda didn’t answer him. He felt disdain for the man, for his horrified stupidity. The tide of people dragged the mayor away, and Neruda held on to the handrail with a death grip. Let the mayor get dragged down to the lower floors, and see what good it did him. Neruda knew what was coming. Logic told him what the enemy would do. The enemy would hit the building hard, maybe at the twentieth floor. That would be enough to stop the people from escaping. Only then would they unleash their killing weapon. The weapon that would exterminate everyone on these top floors. In that way they could assure themselves that they had wiped out Neruda along with everybody else.

  He exited into the near-empty twenty-seventh floor and didn’t know where to go next. He heard a thump and another rattle of showering glass. The long shower of the breaking windows started up one side of the building, maybe two floors down, and he could hear the sound travel across the entire floor, unbelievably slowly considering that it was the result of gunfire from the jet.

  And how amazing was it that the jet was not only flying so slowly but was flying so quietly that some of the glass and the sound of the machine-gun fire itself completely masked the sounds of the aircraft engines.

  Neruda recalled hearing about these stealth aircraft being sold around the world, illegally, to smugglers and gun-running crime families. It seemed like a strange joke to him that there be a need for such hardware. What good could they do? What benefit would they offer?

  Obviously Soros did not see it that way. Soros had taken advantage of this new technology. He’d bought himself a couple.

  These things were cheap by aircraft standards—less than one million dollars each. If a man could come up with two million dollars to buy two of these aircraft, surely he was doing well enough that he didn’t need to take revenge on such a magnificent scale against Adan Neruda. Why would he go to such lengths? You cannot kill seventy-five or one hundred of the top power players in a South American country and expect to get away with it. If Soros had a power base now, it would come crashing down when the government and the rich families of Bolivia discovered who it was that had wiped out so many of their people.

  Then a new picture popped into Neruda’s head.

  Soros was out for revenge, but Soros probably wasn’t insane—and not insane enough to wipe out everyone at Adan Neruda’s party. He would know the repercussions. He wouldn’t risk that—unless he was insane.

  So maybe Soros had no intention of wiping out everyone at the party or even of killing Adan Neruda. What he was doing was ruining Adan Neruda. Neruda, who had carefully and methodically built, brick by brick, his foundation of power, for all these years, might not survive a blow to his power base like the one that was being delivered this very moment.

  * * *

  HE FELT HIS PHONE VIBRATE against his chest. He snatched it out of his jacket pocket. It was a number he didn’t recognize.

  He answered the call.

  “Yes?”

  “Happy day, Adan.”

  “Is this Soros?” Neruda demanded.

  “Soros died thirteen years ago, Adan.”

  Of course! Neruda saw it now. Whoever was behind these attacks would not be stupid enough to leave his calling card in the form of hundreds of little taunting messages dropped on the rooftop party. It was a red herring.

  “So who is this, then?” Neruda demanded

  “It’s your old friend Encina.”

  Yes. Nicolas Encina. That did make sense, and Ad
an Neruda felt almost relieved. It had been too mystifying that an old adversary from two decades ago had come after him in such a ludicrous and ostentatious fashion. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t fit into what he knew and understood about how people operated.

  But this did make sense. It was Encina. Encina had framed an old, minor adversary named Soros for the chaos and the killing. And when the people of Bolivia, the power players of La Paz, discovered that Soros was long-ago dead, there would be no one to blame except Neruda himself.

  “Are you still with me, Adan?” Encina demanded.

  “Still here.”

  “You are destroyed,” Encina declared matter-of-factly.

  Adan Neruda could not argue with that. “You are a pathetic coward,” Neruda snarled.

  “Call me what you wish,” Encina responded. “You are the one who’s going to look like a coward by tomorrow morning. The coward or the most hated man in the country. All your money cannot save you from the downfall that is coming to you. You will have no more parties, no more women, no more real estate. All of that will be gone. You know what they will do to you? They will arrest you, they will humiliate you, they will confiscate your holdings, strip you of everything you own and you’ll have nothing left. You will be hated and feared and reviled. If I were you, I would flee the country tonight. Right now.”

  “Is that what you want me to do? Flee down the stairs, where your aircraft can get their sights on me and cut me down?”

  “Don’t you understand, Neruda? I could’ve killed you a long time ago. My new toys give me access wherever I want. I’ve had your car bugged with a GPS tracker for months. Anytime I wanted, I could’ve flown one of my planes over, while you’re on Mountain Road, on your weekly Tuesday dalliance with the whore at the beach house, and taken you out. I could’ve cut you down while you were talking on the phone in front of your apartment picture windows while meeting with Perez. Or on your trips to the lake. I could’ve got you at any time I wanted. But that is too good for you. Dead would be unsatisfying. Ruined, that will make me happy. To see you utterly ruined.”