Despite this, Nogeira had been convicted of drug trafficking, and sentenced to life without parole. But no sooner had that happened than the appeals began. It was estimated that the appeals process would not be entirely exhausted until the year 2093.
Since he had time to kill, General Nogeira announced that he had given up Voodoo, and was now a born-again Baptist. Or would be, once, as he put it, the "gringos" allowed him to be baptized.
Naturally, the prison authorities to whom he had put this unusual request had denied his petition, citing security risks.
Dipping into his seemingly limitless legal fund-the product of his voracious drug dealings, which he had managed to safeguard from confiscation by claiming it represented his income from the days when he was a CIA informer-General Nogeira enlisted the American Civil Rights Collective in his attempts to embrace his newfound religion.
It had taken nearly a year, but the ACRC had taken the issue all the way to the Florida Supreme Court. The Justice Department had caved in at that point. Not on principle, but because the appeals process was threatening to devour their entire operating budget.
General Emmanuel Nogeira had won-once again.
This time he publicly thanked Jesus Christ, whom he had claimed as his personal savior.
General Nogeira asked to be baptized in the Florida Everglades, claiming that it was the environment most like that of his native country, which he missed very much.
For the first time in nearly two years, General Emmanuel Alejandro Nogeira would be outside the walls of the maximum-security federal prison in Miami.
There were rumors that the Medellin Cartel would hit him then. There was other intelligence that they actually planned to liberate Nogeira and reinstall him in Bananama, which he had single-handedly turned into the major coke transshipping point between Colombia and the United States.
That was when Upstairs had ordered the hit on Nogeira.
"Not that I mind," Remo had said at the time, "but why? He's going to rot in prison until the next century. Why not let him rot?"
"Because," he was told, "the man is costing this country thousands of dollars a day in legal fees. He's a common criminal, yet he has been declared a prisoner of war, entitled to wear his uniform and to an allowance of seventy-five Swiss Francs a day. He has his own private cell, and two adjoining ones for his shredding machine and a safe that contains classified U.S. documents the CIA was compelled to surrender to him in the name of a fair trial." Upstairs thinned already thin lips. It was clear that Remo's superior was offended by all this. Deeply offended.
Remo had to admit that Upstairs had a point. He didn't care if there were hit teams sent out to interrupt the baptism. He just wanted to get the hit over with and get out of the Everglades.
So the question remained: Before the baptism, or after?
It was a serious dilemma. If he hit Nogeira before he was baptized, then the general would probably go straight to hell. After, and maybe the guy had a chance to do penance. Spend a few centuries in Purgatory. Remo wasn't sure about that part. He had been raised Catholic. The Baptists might as well have been Jains for all he knew of their theological rules. Did they even have confession?
Crouching on the spongy isle, Remo frowned. The frown made his cruel face harden into angular lines. He was neither handsome nor ugly. Certainly not as ugly as Emmanuel Nogeira, who looked like a comic-book depiction of the Incredible Toad Man.
Remo's eyes were set deep into his skull, and his cheekbones pronounced. His body was lean, almost skinny, and unremarkable, except for his wrists. They were as thick as door posts, as if some mad surgeon had implanted steel rods where his ulna and radius connected with his metacarpals.
Except that the wrists were Remo's own. The two decades of training in the discipline that was Sinanju, the sun-source of the martial arts, had produced this freakish side effect.
Remo tried to imagine what his mentor, the Reigning Master of Sinanju, would say about his dilemma.
He could hear the squeaky voice in his mind's ear after only a moment's reflection.
"Do the House of Sinanju proud. Leave no trace."
Not much help there. Remo thought back to his orphanage days, and Sister Mary Margaret.
Remo wasn't quite sure what Sister Mary Margaret would have said, but it probably would have entailed calling off the hit. Not an option for America's secret assassin.
Finally, Remo considered the counsel of his superior, Dr. Harold W. Smith.
It was easy to figure out Smith's hypothetical advice. "Just do it quietly," Smith would say.
That went without saying. Smith, who ran the supersecret government organization for which Remo worked, had a mania for secrecy. And with good reason. The agency officially did not exist. It was known only as CURE. CURE was no acronym. The letters had no individual meaning. CURE was the symbolic name for the agency's function. That is, a prescription for American society, which criminals such as Emmanuel Nogeira had made sick by twisting constitutional guarantees to serve their own criminal purposes.
Remo had dealt with a great many people who made a mockery of the Constitution, but few did so as blatantly as General Nogeira, who wasn't even a U.S. citizen. This, perhaps more than anything, Remo decided, had offended the proper Smith.
The more Remo thought about it, the more it offended him, too.
He made his decision.
"Screw the baptism," he murmured. "Let him burn forever."
Just then the sound of approaching air-boats sent birds fleeing, and brought on a spasm of splashing in the cypress roots. Remo counted eight splashes. The identical number of alligator heartbeats his sensitive ears had detected pumping in syncopation with reptilian lungs.
Maybe, Remo thought with a fierce grin, the gators will enjoy a nice Banamanian snack.
Remo parted a thicket of yellow-green leaves that felt like cardboard cutouts, and got a good look at the noisy procession.
There were six air-boats in all. The lead boat was choked with Federal marshals, and a few others in blue windbreakers emblazoned with the stenciled letters FBI. They brandished machine pistols.
The occupants of the second boat were too well dressed to be law-enforcement officials. Unless gold Rolexes and hand-tooled leather briefcases had become standard-issue. Remo decided that they were Nogeira's lawyers. He counted twenty. The rest must have had the day off.
There was no mistaking General Emmanuel Alejandro Nogeira, as the first two air-boats rounded a twisted oak dressed in Spanish moss, and the third came into view.
The general wore his fawn-colored military uniform, with its row of three bronze stars on black shoulder boards. His uniform was impeccable-no doubt drycleaned at U.S. taxpayer expense.
The general stood in the blunt bow of the air-boat, unfettered, because the ACRC insisted that it was unconstitutional to manacle an individual while he practiced his religion. The Florida Supreme Court had agreed to that-by a narrow margin.
He was, Remo saw, even uglier in person than on TV.
The general was short and squat, like a repulsive frog. Remo recalled reading that in his native country he was called El Sapo-the Toad-because of his bestial brown face and heavy-lidded serpent's eyes. He was also sometimes called Cara Pina, or "Pineapple Face." He had more acne scars than Tom Hayden.
Remo decided right then and there that the alligators probably would not touch the man. Unless alligators practiced cannibalism.
The first air-boat turned, and Remo saw that the three boats trailing in the rear were filled with reporters. There were a lot of reporters, burdened with minicams and camera equipment. They were busy interviewing a man and a woman. The man was dressed in minister's black. The woman he couldn't see clearly.
This presented Remo with a fresh dilemma. Since officially he no longer existed, he would have to figure out a way to take out Nogeira without getting his latest face on nationwide TV. Every time that happened, Upstairs insisted he go under the knife. Remo had had so much plastic surgery over the years the only change Upstairs hadn't made was to turn his face inside out.
There was a big hump of dry isle nearby, and one by one the air-boats throttled down and glided up to this. Their prows beached with gritty hissing sounds.
General Emmanuel Nogeira stepped off the air-boat like Napoleon onto Saint Helena.
He lifted his hands into the air, fists clenched-a gesture that would have been familiar to anyone who had watched television in the months before the U.S. intervention that had turned Nogeira into a prisoner of war. His thick, blubbery lips peeled back into a dazzling smile. It was the only thing about General Nogeira that was not inherently repulsive. The smile was dazzling. It belonged on someone else's face.
The baptist minister stepped forward, open prayer book in hand.
"Shall we begin?" he inquired.