Authors: Robert Browne

The Paradise Prophecy (7 page)

BOOK: The Paradise Prophecy

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She was up to
w
when she realized her hand was trembling.

Again.

Shit.

She flexed it several times, then held it out flat, studying her fingers as carefully as one might study a work of art, but with none of the appreciation or pleasure. The tremor was slight, but unmistakable. Which meant that the first time she’d noticed it had not been an anomaly.

Damn.

She flexed the hand again, wanting desperately to hide it in a pocket or something. But hiding it away wouldn’t change anything. The tremor wouldn’t magically cease once the hand disappeared from view.

She could think of a hundred different reasons for the problem—the majority of them neurological—but in strict allegiance to Occam’s razor, she figured the simplest explanation was the best one.

She’d barely had a wink of sleep in three days.

Three interminable days.

Not for lack of trying, mind you. But there it was.

And loss of sleep would also explain why she’d had so much trouble remembering which cover she was supposed to use. Not to mention the panic attack she’d had just before sunrise.

In short, she was falling apart.

“Excuse me, ma’am. Do you need some assistance?”

Startled, Callahan immediately dropped her hand to her side and turned to find a uniformed airline employee standing beside her. He was a short, stout young man who looked to be of Malaysian or Filipino ancestry, and had a pleasant, toothy smile—no hint of that tired, sourpuss expression she saw on the faces of so many airport front liners these days.

Which, of course, immediately gave him away.

Amateur.

Why did Section always use newbies as messengers? It made no sense. Here she was, trying like hell to be professional and the powers-that-be had sent in some lightweight to blow her cover.

Then again, maybe she was being too critical. And maybe there actually
were
airline employees who sported genuine smiles. Surely she’d seen a few in all her years of travel, hadn’t she? No point in condemning an entire industry with one sweeping generalization.

But there was no doubt in her mind that, for better or worse, this young man was a colleague. And this surprised Callahan, because she’d had no indication that such a visit was forthcoming.

“Ma’am? Do you need some help?”

“I’m just punching in my name here. Trying to get a boarding pass.”

The drill was a clever one. Probably a tad elaborate, but people in the intelligence field are prone to complicate things. You found the designated kiosk at the designated airline, punched in your cover name and received a boarding pass. Until that moment, you had no idea where you were going or what the particular assignment was.

Printed on the pass was a special 3-D bar code, which, when scanned into your government-issued smartphone, connected you to one of Section’s private data servers that had enough firewalls and security traps to disappoint even the most aggressive hackers. The server held an encrypted mission dossier that could be downloaded at your leisure.

To the untrained eye, you were simply another tourist queuing up for the long slog of airline travel. Even to a
trained
set of eyeballs you were unlikely to arouse any suspicion.

But apparently today’s drill had been revised.

And that troubled Callahan. Even more than her tremors.

She didn’t like revisions.

“I’m afraid this machine is out of order,” the young man said, still smiling away. “I think kiosk number seven is free. Just touch the screen and type in your confirmation number.”

By “confirmation number” he really meant her classified federal ID, a six-digit code that was given to every Section field agent the moment she or he came on board. It also meant that she’d be traveling under her real identity, as an official representative of the United States Government.

Highly unusual. And not something she felt comfortable with. “Are you sure you aren’t making a mis—”

“Move along, ma’am.” The smile had abruptly disappeared. “I have to close this thing down.”

Mission aborted, just like that.

Callahan furrowed her brow at him, then turned on her heels, scanning the lobby for kiosk number seven, which was located near a set of sliding glass doors that led to another section of the terminal. A beleaguered-looking woman with two small kids approached it, so Callahan sprang forward and quickly cut in front of her.

It was a rude, insensitive move, but she was in no mood to be polite.

The woman gave Callahan her deepest, most sincere scowl, then went away muttering, as her two kids tugged at her blouse, whining and crying for more Gummi bears. Callahan had no idea where they’d be traveling to, but she felt great sympathy for the passengers on that plane.

Turning to the kiosk, she touched the screen, went through the menu selections until she found the appropriate entry box and hesitated only a moment before keying in her code. A split second later the screen showed her true name—Bernadette I. Callahan—and next to this was the time, flight number and destination. An all-night trip from MIA to GIG, then on to GRU.

Surprised, Callahan pressed the button to print her boarding pass. And despite the troubling nature of this entire enterprise, she could think of worse places to go.

She was headed to São Paulo, Brazil.

T
here wasn’t much to the mission dossier.

A short overview of the assignment, a few police reports, some photos of a body, but nothing Callahan could really sink her teeth into.

What surprised her, however, was the number assigned to each of the downloaded files. They all ended in -078, which, for reasons Section had never fully explained to her, meant that this assignment was a balls-out, take-no-prisoners top-of-the-totem-pole priority.

Rumor had it that such assignments came directly from the White House.

Callahan had only been given a -078 once before in her career—a particularly sketchy op conceived by the previous administration. She’d been instructed to pose as a British millionaire’s mistress, vacationing in the south of France, where she cozied up to a local businesswoman believed to be having an affair with a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

No pun intended.

Callahan’s objective was to gather embarrassing evidence against the senator, to help secure what would be the deciding vote on a highly controversial defense bill. In other words, pure politics of the most underhanded, self-serving kind. The kind Callahan despised, even if the idiot
was
cheating on his wife.

At least she hadn’t had to kill anyone.

Killing always complicated things.

This current -078 was a puzzler, however. It was disconcerting enough that she was going in with very little cover, using her own name instead of an alias. She’d be representing herself as a State Department investigator, which, according to government payroll records, was technically true, although she had never once stepped foot inside the building on C Street or any of its branches.

But even more disconcerting was the nature of the incident she’d be sticking her nose into. According to the dossier, that incident was currently being referred to by Brazilian authorities as a
morte de minha desventura
or death by misadventure.

This could mean a dozen different things, of course, but the local
polícia
had decided that the victim’s demise was either accidental or, more likely, a suicide.

So why on earth did Section give a damn about it?

Especially in São Paulo, of all places?

It made only slightly more sense when you considered who the victim was.

Gabriela Maria Abrino Zuada.

Normally, Callahan didn’t know a pop star from a New Jersey car salesman. Her musical tastes leaned toward indie rock and euro-punk with a side of alternative jazz. And her interest in bubble-gum-smacking, coke-snorting, drunk-driving, party-loving, viral-video-making, IQCHALLENGED, Twitter-happy twentysomething pop icons had reached its peak somewhere south of the Britney Spears head shave.

But Gabriela Maria Abrino Zuada—or simply Gabriela to her fans—was something altogether different. At twenty-three years old, the Brazilian native had established herself as a worldwide phenomenon, the highest charting no-apologies Christian pop diva in the known universe. And even Callahan, who had long ago shed her Irish Catholic roots, knew who she was.

The announcement of Gabriela’s death—which was wisely being delayed as long as humanly possible—would undoubtedly send a tsunamisize shockwave around the world, à la Michael Jackson. But as far as Callahan knew, nobody in the president’s inner circle had sent a black ops emissary to check out Jackson’s corpse.

So what exactly was going on here?

Callahan had no idea. And she hated like hell being kept in the dark.

She also had to wonder why her talents weren’t being utilized more productively. Thanks to a tanking economy and a series of natural and not-so-natural disasters that had plagued the U.S. and the world of late, the international mood was about as sour as moldy rice. The world seemed to be going to hell in a hand basket and nobody knew quite what to do about it. People from all walks of life were scared and frustrated.

And, as always, the power brokers used that fear as a tool. Hysterical politicians were shouting fire at every opportunity, and those who shouted the loudest seemed to be getting most of the votes.

Countries that were normally fairly docile threatened aggression against their nearest neighbors and those who wanted a slice of the ever-shrinking economic pie—which, of course, was
everyone—
were starting to make Armageddon-like noises.

Such noises were what prompted the fearful to flock to people like Gabriela. Rather than look for real solutions to their problems they simply wrapped themselves in the cloak of faith and abdicated all responsibility for their actions to false prophets and the Great Holy Whoever.

To each his own. None of that much mattered to Callahan.

All she cared about was the job.

But to her mind, she should be out in the field helping hunt down terrorists and the frighteningly high number of missing nuclear warheads that were floating around out there.

Instead, she was stuck on a plane headed to São Paulo, staring at a dossier on a dead pop star.

Which made no sense at all.

At the moment, however, she was too fried to try to figure it all out. She was only four hours into her flight and all she wanted was to forget about pop divas and politics and -078 file codes, and simply sleep for a while.

She had tried closing her eyes a few times at the beginning of the flight, had managed to doze once or twice, had even thought she’d made it all the way home for a moment there. But then a baby started crying back in the economy compartment, and Callahan had bolted awake as if she’d been slapped squarely across the face.

Before boarding the plane, she had taken a moment to Google sleep deprivation, and the news wasn’t good. Not only did lack of sleep cause a myriad of health problems, including hypertension, heart disease and slower reaction times,
severe
deprivation could often lead to death.

Looking up from her smartphone, Callahan held out a hand again and checked for the tremor. Not only was it still there, it had gotten worse.

The guy on the seat next to hers was passed out, snoring slightly, a small bubble of spit in the corner of his mouth.

Callahan envied him. Spit and all.

T
he crime-scene photos were pretty grisly, even on the smartphone’s screen. The pop star looked like a crispy piece of bacon. She had been found in an empty storage room by her manager and bodyguards after the manager had smelled gasoline and heard her screaming.

Unfortunately, they’d found her too late.

It looked to Callahan like a case of self-immolation, and judging by the condition of the body, the victim had used a lot of gas to do the job.

But this bothered Callahan.

Self-immolation wasn’t unheard of in Brazil, but it wasn’t exactly commonplace either. Had Gabriela been an abused wife in Afghanistan, the scenario might make more sense. Afghan burn hospitals were full of such victims.

But given Gabriela’s profile, this particular method of suicide raised a big red flag.

An even bigger one, however, had nothing to do with the victim at all.

These photos could only tell Callahan half the story, and she’d have to take a look at the room and body herself before coming to any definitive conclusions—assuming she ever could.

But what she saw here was strange.

Very strange.

BOOK: The Paradise Prophecy

7.15Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

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