Butterfly Stomp Waltz

Chapter 20

20

Once the innkeeper and his family have gone to bed, when the clear blue sky surrenders to cavern-black night and the smear of stars that is the Milky Way, we move half a kilometer up the road to our penetration point.

I’m in tough but loose-fitting pants and shirt and sturdy steel-lined boots with high-traction soles. Everything’s mottled in shades of dark green and gray, to disappear against the night. It’s way too warm for a balaclava, but I’m wearing streaks of green and black paint on my face and ultra-thin black gloves. A throat mike and a minuscule earpiece. Plus a belt of tools and my small pack, of course. Everything’s arranged exactly right so it won’t clank.

Rob and Jacka have similar outfits. Bradley doesn’t have a pack, but she lugs a duffel bag big enough for a body but which is full of destructive hardware instead. In the darkness they look like shadows cast by the moon’s thin smile, shifting with the wind.

Everything smells dusty. The wilds of Portugal are a hard place to make a life. The broad-leaved grass along the road has gone brown and dormant, driven into a crunchy mat by the wind. The trees are mostly like overgrown bushes, domes of greenery maybe ten feet tall. They must have roots that go down forever. Houses are far apart and huddle far back from the road. Most are completely dark, but a few have a single light at the porch or patio casting a feeble pool of illumination. There’s a few desperate shops, with dim flickering lights from coolers or displays casting angular shadows against plate glass windows. The wind tastes of dry dust and the Atlantic, only a few miles over the hills.

I have this itch to stop and look at the stars. With only a little light pollution, and that only around half the horizon, I have better visibility than any time in months. The stars are what got me into all this, after all. I grew up staring at the sky. I went to college when I was fifteen to understand the sky. At twenty-three, I finished my doctorate so I could poke at the stars.

And I’d hardly started when everything went wrong.

But if that mayhem at the Large Hadron Collider hadn’t happened, if Doctor Kamp hadn’t stolen my work and tried to cover it up with my corpse, I’d be in a lab somewhere. Doing math. I never would have had this life.

I would have never met Deke.

And I would’ve never lost Deke.

I’d still won, though. I’d had five years with Deke. Five years of learning to how to use life beyond the bell curve.

The stars still itched.

But I’d scratch that itch when someone paid me to steal them.

And right now, the best way I could think of to pay Deke back was to avenge his death.

Which means focusing on here and now. Ignore my rattling heart and short breath, and get on with the job.

At the predetermined spot, we cross the neglected tarmac road and approach the wall surrounding Noah’s estate.

Southern Portugal is full of walls separating every scrap of property from each other and the roads. Most of them are crumbling clay over brick, painted this brilliant reflective white. During the day you’ll need sunglasses just to look at them. At night, though, when the stars are the only light, they’re barely visible gray against the darkness.

Noah’s wall is not clay. Nor is it crumbling. It’s cinderblocks, tightly fitted against each other. I stand on tiptoe and can almost peer over it. It has no fancy top that might hold a trap, no posts every few feet where detectors might lie. Still, none of us touch it.

I pull my night vision goggles over my eyes and work the dial on the edge, scanning the wall throughout the red end of the spectrum. “Infra-red all clear.”

“Microwave clear,” Jacka says.

“No sign of pressure plates,” Bradley says.

Instantly, tension oozes out of me. My heartbeat slows. The warm night is suddenly comfortable. We’re doing the job. We have the plan—or script, as Rob says. Rob is maybe the best in the business, and he’s leading us.

All we have to do is follow the script.

I just hope Noah knows his lines.

“Go,” Rob says.

Bradley seizes the top of the wall and heaves herself up to balance on straight arms. I grimace—sticking your head up like that is a good way to catch a sniper’s bullet. In a flash she swings her legs up to pivot over the top and drops out of sight. I hold my breath, but in a second she says “Bag.”

Jacka heaves Bradley’s heavy duffel bag over the wall. It gives a dull clank when she catches it. Every rolled-up T-shirt in the world as padding can’t silence that much hardware.

Another second and Bradley’s voice says “Clear” in my earpiece.

Unlike Bradley, I pull myself up onto the wall but keep my profile low, laying across the top with my face almost on the brick. The wall feels gravelly through my gloves, and my touch releases an aluminum smell from the dusty paint.

I swing off the wall. The mat of dormant grass crunches beneath my boots and I automatically sink into a crouch. Darkness saturates this side of the wall, with short round trees visible only as silhouettes against the blanket of stars.

I flip the night vision goggles back on. The world is suddenly lit in a dozen shades of green. Bradley’s a few feet in front of me, a bright green shape beside the green-black of a twisted scrub tree. Carefully lifting and placing my feet to minimize the noise of crackling grass, I move up to her. “Clear.”

Rob is next. He swings himself up onto the wall and gives this tiny little “huff.” Sudden concern flashes through me. A year ago, Rob would have bounced over that wall without effort. Tonight, just getting up it cost him something. Then he’s down, his green-limned shape coming up to join us.

Jacka crosses the wall with all the style and grace of a stoned chimpanzee, but at least he’s silent. He never claimed to be anyone but a driver and a fixer, and I should be glad for any third body. It would make sense for him to lug Bradley’s kit, but the bag weighs more than he does.

Then we set out through the trees towards the plantation.

Just like the satellite photos said, the randomly scattered trees are thick enough to offer some cover but thin enough to walk between. I place each step carefully to minimize the sound. Every step raises a noxious cloud of tiny bugs, mites and midges and mosquitoes and who knows what all, that batter at our exposed faces. Insects creak and buzz from every direction. The only sound is Bradley huffing as she hauls that ridiculous duffel and negotiates our path. When flickers of bright light begin shooting through the foliage, I turn off night vision and we slowly sneak up on the plantation.

And “plantation” is the word.

This place belongs in Architecture with Too Much Money Magazine. Pole lamps completely surround the building, creating a little ring of daylight in the Portugese night. Thick clouds of insects assault the lights, and neon blue bug zappers everywhere crackle constantly. The trees surrounding the house, placed with rigid discipline, are manicured into perfect spheres of greenery. The house’s exterior walls are all one-way glass, mirroring the extravagant in-ground pool and the rectangular gazebo big enough for a mob wedding and a vast patio with half a dozen wire-frame tables and matching chairs. A mock Polynesian shack looks like it holds a bar.

The house itself is blocky and rectangular, a single floor with a mirrored square tower rising from the center. The blueprints filed eight years ago with the local government said that the bottom of the tower made a raised ceiling for the main gallery, and the top contains one really expansive bedroom with a full circle view of the countryside.

Bedroom. On top of this great big tower sticking up out of the house.

The “compensating for something” joke writes itself.

No lights shine behind any of the windows.

A split second of anger flashes through me. I can imagine Noah up there in that isolated bedroom, probably under thin silky sheets on a better bed than I’d slept on the night before. The man who had set up Deke and I, peaceably asleep.

I squash the feeling. Yes, I could have brought a rocket launcher back and blown the penthouse apart. But I don’t want to just kill Noah. I want him to hurt. The idea of seeing that moment of terror on his face before I blow him away has its satisfactions. But the idea of him friendless, broke, and alone, forever, feels far more viciously satisfying.

So I hold and examine Noah’s home. Blueprints and satellite photos never convey the reality of, well, anything. I let the way it feels of too much money sink into my bones.

Our first problem is entering the house. From here I can see the double doors off the pool deck. The blueprints showed a front door around the side, another door on the other side near the free-standing garage, and a kitchen door. It’s a balmy sixty-some degrees, but none of the windows in this “house” open. The place uses only ten tons of air conditioning, so there’s no convenient air shaft for anyone to crawl through.

We can go in the door or cut through a window. Either way, I’ll need to disarm the alarm.

Jacka’s muffled voice comes through my earpiece. “Pool door is open.”

I unclip a tiny set of binoculars from my belt. The pool door is in an alcove, recessed maybe ten feet into the building. Jacka’s right—the glass door is halfway open, with only a screen door separating the bug-laden night from the interior. By the sliding door, the alarm keypad has a tiny green LED. I toggle my radio and whisper, “Main alarm appears not set.”

All this preparation, and we could just sashay into Noah’s home?

I clench my jaw. Too easy.

But if Noah wasn’t here, if his security detail had gone with him, maybe one of the staff had left the alarm off. I could easily imagine the housekeeper and the cook sitting out in that little cabana, drinking the boss’s fancy Portuguese beer and watching the sunset. Staggering back inside to bed, maybe together, and forgetting to set the alarm. What did it matter? The boss was away.

If Noah was here, if he’d arranged snipers to kill Pillock and Daft, if he knew we were coming—that un-alarmed door was a trap.

But trap or not, I was going in.