The Venezuelan Read online

  The Venezuelan

  Bill King

  Copyright © 2020 Bill King

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity and are used fictitiously. All other names, characters and places, as well as all dialogue and incidents portrayed in this book, are the product of the author’s imagination.

  Cover design and artwork by Joann Bittel

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  Principal Characters

  Federal Bureau of Investigation:

  Morris Applebaum: FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge, Houston, & Jack Gonçalves' boss

  Lucinha Baker: FBI Legal Attaché, U.S. Embassy, Brasilia

  Pete Cortez: FBI Special Agent, Houston

  Jack Gonçalves: Supervisory Special Agent, Houston & Cortez's boss

  Elinore Lawrence: Senior FBI official, Washington, DC

  Central Intelligence Agency:

  Ryan Carpenter: CIA Chief of Station, U.S. Embassy, Brasilia

  Dominic D'Angelo: Security Consultant often used by senior CIA officials

  Margaret Donovan: Senior CIA official, Langley, VA

  Veronica Enfield: Senior CIA official, Langley; friend of Jack Goncalves

  Martin Leonard: CIA Chief of Station, U.S. Embassy, Guyana

  Marco (aka Bud Smallwood): Former CIA covert operative

  Clarice Robideaux: CIA Deputy Chief of Station, U.S. Embassy, Brasilia

  The Venezuelans:

  Mateo Calderón (aka Fósforo): Leader of revolutionary group, M-28

  Colonel Antonio Cuellar: Venezuelan Army, Ciudad Guayana

  Ernesto: Calderón’s trusted deputy in M-28

  Lt. Col. Arturo Sanchez: Venezuelan Army, Santa Elena de Uairén

  Major General Alberto Trujillo Escobar: Commander, REDI Guayana

  Brazilian Army:

  Lt. Col. Roberto Lima: Commander, 25th Jungle Infantry Battalion

  Major Rodrigues: Operations Officer, 25th Jungle Infantry Battalion

  The Guyanese:

  Lt. Col. Cedric Bostwick: Guyana Defense Force

  Jessica Carruthers: Member of Parliament, Guyana

  Major Rafael Perez: Cuban Army Intelligence, assigned to Guyana

  Ashok Persaud: Member of Parliament, Guyana

  Ted Schmidt: Chief of Security, Flat Range Energy, Georgetown

  Timothy Wilson: Senior Member of Parliament, Guyana

  Other Characters:

  Paulo Mendes Almeida (aka Corcovado): wealthy Brazilian businessman

  João Carvalho: senior officer, Portuguese Judicial Police (PJ), Lisbon

  Olivier Gauthier: Canadian contract killer

  Zachery Jellico: wealthy Houston businessman

  Zhang Wei: CEO, Shanghai Petroleum

  Tri-Border Map

  To my wife, Linda, and my children,

  Alex, Tim, Ben and Maggie

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Join my Mailing List

  Principal Characters

  Tri-Border Map

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  PART TWO

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  PART THREE

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgement

  Books In This Series

  About the Author

  Sign Up for my Email List

  PART ONE

  The Brazilian Amazon

  Chapter 1

  Amazon Rainforest of Brazil

  Falcão checked the man’s cage every hour on the hour.

  He knew little about the man imprisoned inside, except that he was a very dangerous man that the people in charge wanted to break. He didn’t know why. He was only a guard, recruited by a Brazilian firm with a polysyllabic acronym for a name. He had been hired on a one-year contract to do security work at an off-the-books compound hidden somewhere deep within the Amazon rainforest.

  He was not permitted to talk to the prisoner, except to give him basic orders—stand back from the door, stick your arms through the opening in the door, that sort of thing—the kind of commands that required no verbal response. Only obedience. Immediate and absolute obedience.

  Even though it was rumored that the Americans were the real owners of the compound, he had never actually seen an American onsite during his six months there. At least not that he knew of, that is.

  Everyone he encountered at the camp spoke Portuguese and a few even spoke the native dialect of one of the various indigenous tribes that, until recently, were lost to the modern world, hidden deep within the thick, impenetrable jungle.

  He assumed they were all Brazilians, but he really had no way of knowing short of asking, and idle questions were frowned upon. Seriously frowned upon.

  The man in the cage looked like a wild animal. They had not allowed him, not even once, to shave or cut his hair during the entire time he had been held there. Eight months. The jailer couldn’t even tell the man’s age. He might have been in his thirties or he might have been in his fifties. He had no idea. The cramped cell made it difficult for the man to do much of anything except sit, stand, or lie down in a fetal position.

  Even though he had seen the man at least ten times a day, every day, for the past six months, Falcão—pronounced fall-COW—probably would not be able to pick him out of a two-person police lineup if the man ever cut his hair or shaved. He suspected that was the whole point, that no one should ever know who the man was.

  Still, Falcão could not help but wonder.

  The prisoner’s hair was a light, mocha brown color, while his eyes were dark as coal. That matched him with about seventy-five percent of the population in the world. He did not get down on his knees to pray five times a day, so he probably wasn’t a Muslim. That at least eliminated a couple billion people from the mystery surrounding his identity…at least, he thought it did.

  His long, filthy beard made it impossible to distinguish his facial features. He could be Asian, but Falcão didn’t really think so. No, the ma
n was almost certainly a Westerner, whatever the heck that meant these days. Culture and ethnicity were not necessarily the same.

  He had once walked in on one of the man’s interrogations, which was being conducted in Spanish, so he assumed the prisoner was either a Spaniard or a South American. Maybe even a Mexican or a Central American. He didn’t know for sure, though. He could even have been an American. He had heard that lots of people in the United States speak Spanish.

  The only real distinguishable characteristic of the man in the cage was that he was tall, very tall, at least a foot taller than Falcão.

  The man was sleeping, or at least pretending to sleep. He was curled up in a fetal position because the cramped bed of lice-infected straw was at least a foot too short to accommodate his lanky frame. His body faced away from the door, toward the cinderblock wall, his only movement coming from his steady, rhythmic breathing.

  He glanced down at the luminescent dial on his cheap Chinese wristwatch. It was just past three in the morning and everyone else in the camp, perhaps even the other guards, was sound asleep. Everyone, apparently, except Falcão.

  Who was this man? he wondered, and why is he being singled out for such harsh treatment?

  There were only four prisoners currently in the compound, which had the space and staff to handle at least thirty people. One of the prisoners had died a few days earlier. Falcão and two of the other guards had buried the man’s body in a shallow grave about a hundred yards outside the compound fence.

  Each of the other prisoners was permitted two hours a day of exercise time outdoors in the inner courtyard, one in the early morning and one in the late afternoon. They were given decent food to eat—basically, it was the same food the guards and the rest of the staff ate—and were permitted to bathe and shave once a week.

  Not the tall man, though. He smelled worse than the wild animals Falcão encountered during his periodic hunting forays into the jungle in search of meat to eat. His body was almost certainly wracked with open sores underneath the filthy rags he wore.

  Falcão angrily slapped his bare leg, killing an ant that had just inflicted an exceedingly painful bite. He hated all the bugs in this Godforsaken hell hole, but especially the ants.

  During his first three or four months at the compound, he had not felt sorry for the mysterious prisoner. Only indifference. Gradually, that indifference turned to grudging admiration. Anyone who could so stoically endure the abuse and privation the tall man received must be a man of tremendous inner strength, he often thought to himself.

  He began treating the man with kindness, or at least as much as he could get away with. Perhaps the absence of cruelty was a better description. Something in his gut told him that it might one day save his life.

  After all, kindness begets kindness.

  ◆◆◆

  Treachery is a great equalizer and human beings, by their very nature, are treacherous animals. Nearly every great fortress that ever fell in battle throughout history had suffered betrayal from within.

  The secret compound hidden deep within the Amazon was to be only the latest example.

  It all started when the master control for the perimeter lights suddenly cut off. The thick tree canopy above prevented any light from the moon from penetrating, leaving the compound in total darkness. Pitch black. Three seconds later, a rocket-propelled grenade took out one of the guard towers, sending it up in a ball of flame that filled the compound in bright light. A moment later, a second RPG took out the second tower.

  That’s when all hell broke loose.

  Marco, one of the contracted security guards, silently opened the door to the staff dormitory—an open bay Quonset hut that contained ten bunkbeds—and tossed in a flash-bang grenade before quickly closing the door. Two seconds later, on the heels of the explosion, he burst through the door. His weapon on full-automatic, he sprayed the room with bullets, pausing only to nonchalantly switch out magazines.

  Using the spotlight on his weapon, he quickly checked each of the seven bodies, firing a round into the head of each, just to make sure they were dead.

  While that was going on, an unmarked UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter landed in an open clearing about fifty meters from the compound, kicking up debris and anything not tied down in the process. Eight men, each dressed in black, sprinted from the copter to the building where the prisoner was now sitting up on the bed inside his cage, his back pressed against the wall.

  For the first time in six months, Falcão heard him speak, as the armed men burst through the door.

  “Soy Fósforo,” he called out to them in Spanish. He pronounced it FOS-four-oh.

  He looked down at the whimpering Falcão, who was now curled in a ball on the dirt floor, making sounds like a frightened animal.

  “Pathetic, cowardly dog,” said the prisoner with disdain, spitting in the cowering guard’s direction before putting to rest the notion that kindness begets kindness. “Put him out of his misery…then get me the hell out of here.”

  ◆◆◆

  Chapter 2

  Houston, Texas

  The sound of his ringtone blaring “The Aggie War Hymn” jarred Pete Cortez from a deep sleep. DAH-DAH-DAH-DAH…DAH-DAH…DAH-DAH. That was about as far as the ringtone got before he was able to snatch the phone from his nightstand and hit the talk button.

  “Cortez here,” he said, groggily. He rubbed his eyes with his left hand while he held the mobile phone in his right.

  “Special Agent Cortez, this is the operations desk at the JTTF. The SSA wanted me to call to let you know that the Venezuelan known as Fósforo has just been broken out of a secret compound located somewhere outside of the United States. He wants to see you in his office at six this morning.” The SSA was Jack Gonçalves, a supervisory special agent with the Houston Joint Terrorism Task Force. He was also Pete Cortez’s boss.

  He glanced at his mobile phone to check the time. It was only three o’clock in the morning and he had only been asleep for a couple of hours.

  Now that he was well into his thirties, the bachelor life was starting to wear him down. He figured he could still catch another ninety minutes of sleep before hopping in the shower and grabbing a bagel and coffee before heading in to work…and he’d still beat the traffic, although just barely.

  “Anything else you can tell me?”

  “Not that I can say over the phone.”

  “Then I’ll see you all at six.”

  ◆◆◆

  It was a little past four in the morning, local time, when the helicopter carrying the Venezuelan and his rescuers set down on a grassy soccer field in Santarém, a river port at the confluence of the Amazon and the Tapajós rivers. Founded by Portuguese colonists in the mid-1600s, the jungle city now boasts a population of a quarter of a million people and is located five-hundred miles inland from the river’s mouth at the Atlantic Ocean, deep within the heart of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest.

  It had been a forty-five-minute flight from the remote jungle compound where the Venezuelan, whose real name was Mateo Calderón, had been held prisoner for the past eight months.

  Two large, black SUVs were waiting to take them to the nearby town of Alter do Chão, a freshwater beach resort along the Tapajós River, just half an hour’s drive from Santarém. Sunrise would not be for another two hours, so they would arrive at their destination while still under the cover of darkness.

  Even so, the visibility outside was a major improvement from the near total darkness of the jungle compound.

  “I’m looking forward to seeing the sun again,” said Calderón to the man sitting next to him in the back seat of the vehicle. “The tree canopy blocked out the light for most of the day and they kept me in locked a cage inside a cinderblock building for the entire time I was there. One never fully appreciates sunlight until one is deprived of it.”

  Even though the vehicle’s air conditioning was turned on full blast, they had rolled down all four windows an inch or so to allow for the stench emanatin
g from the Venezuelan to escape.

  “We’ll have to reintroduce you gradually to the sun and to the light,” said the man beside him, a medical doctor who had been flown in from France to oversee his recovery. “The same with your food. Just a little at a time, all bland in the beginning. By the second week, we hope to have you acclimated enough for you to seriously begin regaining your strength.”

  The plan was for him to remain in seclusion for a couple of weeks while he recovered from his long captivity.

  “Where exactly are we?” Calderón asked.

  “We’re still in Brazil, in the middle of the Amazon,” said the doctor. “The city we flew into is called Santarém. It’s the largest city between Manaus and Belém, on the Atlantic coast.” He pronounced it sahn-tar-AIM.

  Despite the fact that his native Venezuela bordered on the Amazon region, his preconceived notions of the Amazon were informed by television and movies and rather than by personal experience. He had always assumed it was just one big uninhabited jungle…and most of it is. However, the Amazon is also home to a fair number of isolated cities—cities with populations in the five- and six-figure range—that are sprinkled throughout the region.

  Most are accessible primarily by boat or plane.

  “Where are we going?” asked Calderón, as he stared out the side window into the moonlit darkness as the SUV picked up speed. “It looks like we’ve left the city and are out in the countryside.”

  “We have leased a secluded villa with a private beach overlooking the Rio Tapajós,” said the doctor in a calm, soothing voice, as if he was conversing with one of his affluent patients in his swank offices in Paris, rather than with one of the world’s most notorious terrorists. “You’re going to need a good bit of rest and physical therapy before we can get you back to normal. I’ll be staying here with you in order to oversee your recovery.”