The Venezuelan Read online

  “There was a serious attack on one of my officers yesterday,” said Lima, setting an empty demitasse cup on the wooden table. “A young boy—he claims to be fifteen, but of course, he has no identity papers—stabbed him in the chest. My officer shot the boy once in the leg afterwards.”

  “How is your officer?”

  “He’ll survive, although I had to evacuate him back down to Boa Vista for medical care. He was one of my company commanders, so now I have a lieutenant as acting commander for at least the next week or two.”

  “That’s good that he’ll be okay,” said Sanchez, blowing smoke through his nose. He spit out a fleck of tobacco from the unfiltered cigarette that had gotten stuck to one of his front teeth. “This is no kind of duty for men of action like us.”

  “Yes, but we are soldiers and we do whatever our nations ask of us,” said Lima. “We—the armed forces— are the guarantors of the nation.”

  “Politicians come and politicians go,” said the Venezuelan, who was now absentmindedly blowing smoke rings. “The military is the only constant.”

  Something is definitely on his mind, thought Lima.

  “Tell me about it,” said Lima, laughing softly to himself as he slowly shook his head back and forth. “My country has just recently swung from one side of the ideological spectrum to the other, and I’ll have to be honest, most of us in the military prefer the current situation over the rampant corruption of the past couple of decades.”

  Sanchez said nothing, even though Lima could sense that he wanted to. Perhaps he was sensitive because the Venezuelan military was on the receiving end of the corruption this time. As a result, many of them were now able to afford a much more comfortable lifestyle than before.

  “Just between us two old soldiers, do you ever see a slowdown in the number of refugees coming down the road into Brazil?”

  “I wish I could say that I did, but I would be lying,” said Sanchez, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “The current situation just rips my guts out…to see my once proud nation, a leader in the world, the founder of OPEC, reduced to such poverty and misery.”

  “Why doesn’t the military do something about it?” asked Lima.

  Military intervention into politics has a longstanding tradition throughout much of the world and Latin America is certainly no exception.

  “Why didn’t the Brazilian military just step in and overthrow Lula?” asked the Venezuelan colonel, looking hard at his Brazilian counterpart, as if searching for insight from a fellow soldier who had been in the Venezuelan’ shoes not too long ago. “You understand as well as I do that it’s never as simple as it may appear to an outsider. Merely talking about the subject, as we are here, could be very dangerous for a military officer, even without taking a position, one way or the other, on the wisdom of such a proposition.”

  Lima was silent for a few moments while he considered the truth of what he had just heard. Just about every one of his colleagues these days said he was in favor, at the time, of forcibly removing Lula from the presidency. Were that actually true, though, it would have happened. It didn’t, so it clearly wasn’t true.

  “You are right, my friend. It’s not an easy decision to make, even when everything going on all around you screams for you to step in…for the good of your country.”

  “Well, let’s leave talk of politics to the generals,” said Sanchez, dropping his cigarette butt on the ground and grinding it with his boot. “You and I are still five or ten years too young to play around in that arena.”

  Of course, neither man really believed that. Not even for an instant.

  ◆◆◆

  Chapter 15

  Brasilia, Brazil

  “Ryan, you have a visitor,” said Grant, the chief of station’s administrative assistant, a young man in his twenties with closely clipped blonde hair. He stood to one side as a well-tanned man strode briskly past him and into Carpenter’s office.

  He was wearing a crisply starched white linen shirt, open at the collar, with short sleeves. It was loose-fitting and designed to be worn untucked.

  “Mister Carpenter, my name is Dominic D’Angelo,” said the man, whose olive complexion and New York accent was reminiscent of a Mafia consigliere as cast by a Hollywood studio. He noted the puzzled look on Ryan’s face. “I assume Maggie Donovan alerted you to be expecting me.”

  Carpenter rose from his desk and walked around the shake hands with his unexpected visitor. He had not figured their initial meeting would be in person, but heck, this was the Agency, so nothing really surprised him anymore.

  “Yes, Mister D’Angelo…“

  “Please, call me Dominic, since we’ll be working together for the near future, albeit at a distance,” he said, a broad smile on his face. He set his expensive-looking leather briefcase down next to the leather sofa and sat down.

  “Of course, Dominic, Mrs. Donovan told me you would be in contact. I just wasn’t expecting it to be unannounced and in person.” He shrugged his shoulders and returned to his chair behind his colonial rosewood desk.

  “Well, Ryan…you don’t mind if I call you Ryan, do you?” he said, crossing his left leg over his right as he sat, his left ankle resting on his right knee. He was not wearing socks. “I could tell you that I just happened to be in the neighborhood and decided to stop by, but you know that would be a lie and I don’t lie to the people I work with. Maybe to everyone else, but not to my working colleagues. You can take that to the bank.”

  The man’s eyes were piercing as he stared at the station chief, as if he was waiting for acknowledgement of what he had just said. Carpenter finally nodded his head.

  “Good. Anyway, you’ll find that, while I will never lie to you, I tend to be unpredictable from time to time, just to gauge a person’s reaction. Call it probing. Some people find it annoying. Hopefully, you’re not one of them.”

  Carpenter looked at the man. He appeared to be somewhere in his late forties and obviously very fit, although his arms and neck did not make him out to be a workout warrior. There were no bulging muscles, no exaggerated veins. Most likely a distance runner, Carpenter thought to himself, perhaps a triathlete. Swimming, running and cycling didn’t require regular trips to a well-equipped gym, and were ideally suited for a busy person like him with an irregular travel schedule.

  “Yes, Mrs. Donovan called last night to let me know that you would be her contact in this matter,” said Carpenter. He glanced down at the small screen of the iPad on his desk. “She also sent me a photo of you, along with your biometrics for confirmation. My administrative assistant has just confirmed that you are who you say you are.”

  “How so?”

  “The ballpoint pen you used to sign in on the register in the outer office takes a small DNA sample, as well as recording your fingerprint. But of course, you already knew that.”

  “Well, this ain’t my first rodeo,” said the New Yorker, mimicking a Texas accent and causing Carpenter to laugh. This broke the awkward tension that had virtually suffocated the room for the past two minutes.

  “So, Dominic, why don’t you lay out the parameters for our working relationship and tell me how I can help,” said Carpenter, absentmindedly using the pencil in his hand as a drumstick. “I assume face-to-face will not be our usual way of communicating.”

  “Ideally, this will be the last time we meet in person, Ryan. And for obvious reasons, we will not be communicating through normal Agency comms. This op is strictly off the books for all but a very select few people, the overwhelming percentage of whom are currently sitting right here in this room, if you catch my drift.”

  Carpenter nodded his head almost imperceptibly but said nothing. He had been involved in a couple of covert operations in the past, but mostly just on the periphery. This time, it looked like he might be smack dab in the middle of one.

  He was excited. He had waited years for an opportunity like this. His career might again be on an upward track. Hope springs eternal, he thought to himself.<
br />
  “One last thing,” said D’Angelo. “Don’t you have a deputy down here? Clarice Robideaux, I believe her name is?”

  “Yes, but she’s not here at the moment. She flew back to the States to visit her family. She had some vacation days she needed to burn.”

  “With that name, I assume she’s from Louisiana?”

  “Yeah, a town called Breaux Bridge, right outside of Lafayette.”

  D’Angelo grunted.

  “Well, I hope I get a chance to meet her,” he said as he stood up to leave.

  ◆◆◆

  “Well, Jack, it’s been quite a while, hasn’t it?” said Clarice Robideaux, a broad smile on her face as she recognized Jack Gonçalves entering the room. She and Cortez were still in the JTTF’s SCIF on the fifth floor of the FBI building in northwest Houston, having called the SSA five minutes earlier and asking him to join them.

  The two hugged for a few seconds, as long-lost friends were wont to do. They had worked together several years earlier while Gonçalves was working undercover in Miami. An argument could be made that at least one of them, if not both, might have been operating outside the legal parameters of their respective organizational charters, but internal legal opinion at the time had assured the powers that be that the operation was still within permissible guidelines.

  “Tell me, Clarice, what brings you to Houston?” he asked, knowing it almost certainly had something to do with Mateo Calderón and the mysterious Marco.

  Robideaux proceeded to fill him in on what she and Cortez had just spoken about, adding a few more details she had not thought to tell Cortez earlier.

  “So let me see if I’ve got this right,” he said once she had finished. “You also think the Agency might have been involved in springing their own prisoner from a black site deep within the Amazon rainforest?”

  It sounded ridiculous to hear someone else say it out loud.

  “Trust me, Jack, I don’t want to believe it, but the more I think about it, the more inescapable it appears that the Agency arranged for it to happen.”

  “But why? And mind you, I’m not necessarily saying that I disagree with your theory.”

  “That I don’t know yet, but it must be something really big if they’re willing to murder half a dozen people in their employ just to hide their own involvement,” she said reluctantly. “Why would they spring a foreign terrorist under their control? Especially one who was apprehended while attempting to detonate a nuclear explosion in the heart of a major American population center.”

  She and Cortez remained silent while Gonçalves mulled over what he had just heard.

  “I might have an idea, maybe a little farfetched, but hear me out,” he said finally. He had hesitated to say anything for fear of exposing one of his sources but decided to trust her discretion. “I was speaking with an old friend of mine with the Portuguese Judicial Police the other day. He told me they recently began hearing reports of a potential coup in Venezuela, with support from the Brazilian military.”

  “Those wild rumors have been floating around for the past hundred years,” she replied.

  “Yes, but that’s what they always were in the past…wild rumors,” said Cortez. “Now, suddenly, we have a charismatic Venezuelan terrorist, the leader of the notorious M-28 revolutionary group, inexplicably sprung from captivity. I believe they are related.”

  “As do I,” said Gonçalves. The two men looked at Robideaux, waiting for her reaction.

  “It pains me to say this, but perhaps you’re on to something,” she said, leaning forward. “After all, there’s a new sheriff in town in Brazil nowadays. The old guard, the ones who tended to be more sympathetic to Chavez and Maduro in the past, are no longer in power. Things we once thought impossible only a short time ago now seem entirely possible.”

  “Normally, I wouldn’t give a rat’s behind about any of this stuff, even if it does involve Venezuela,” said Cortez, looking directly at Robideaux. “Politics in the Latin world have always been chaotic. There’s nothing new there. Besides, that’s the Agency’s bailiwick. But I do care that the man we stopped from killing millions of Americans has been freed by fellow Americans.”

  “Look, each of us has operated in the covert world in the past,” said Gonçalves somberly. “If whoever is behind this was willing to kill their own people in order to hide their involvement, it stands to reason that they’d also be willing to kill anyone else who threatened them with exposure.”

  ◆◆◆

  The flight from Georgetown to Tomás de Heres Airport, just outside of Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela, took just under ninety minutes in the white Piper Seneca V. When Marco emerged from the aircraft, two men in military uniforms were already walking toward him. Both appeared to be in their forties. One was slightly overweight, while the other was trim and fit.

  “Señor, welcome to Ciudad Bolivar,” said the pudgy looking man in Spanish. The rank on his uniform indicated that he was a colonel. “My sedan is right over here.” He pointed toward the white SUV parked on the concrete apron about fifty yards behind them.

  The three men walked over to the vehicle and got in. As the SUV pulled away, the Venezuelan colonel turned to Marco, who was sitting in the back seat next to him.

  “Have you deposited the money?”

  “No, colonel, not yet,” Marco replied, smiling. “That will depend on how our meeting goes. If I am satisfied, I will transmit a message and the money will be placed into the agreed upon account within five minutes. You’ll be able to confirm its receipt before my plane takes off.”

  “Excellent.”

  The fact that he brought up the subject of money so soon into their conversation—like in the first minute—was a warning to Marco that the colonel’s loyalties were probably pretty fluid, depending upon where the most recent bribe came from.

  “So tell me, colonel, is there any truth to the rumors of a Venezuelan military movement against the Essequibo region of Guyana?” asked the American, knowing full well that, under current circumstances, the Venezuelans didn’t have the resources to pull off something so audacious, even despite the relatively small size of the Guyana Defense Force.

  The Essequibo River runs north-south through the country of Guyana, emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. The region west of the river, which encompasses roughly the western two-thirds of present-day Guyana, has long been claimed by the Venezuelans.

  The discovery of sizeable oil reserves in 2015 by Exxon Mobil did nothing to diminish Venezuela’s fervent desire to establish national sovereignty over the disputed region.

  “Why do you ask, Señor?” he asked, playing along with the banter since he already knew that was the whole point of their meeting. “Is your government willing to assist us…or at least to stay neutral if we do decide to make a move?”

  Even though Marco was traveling on a Brazilian passport under a false name, the Venezuelan knew full well that he was an American. The fact that he did not know the man’s real name didn’t bother him, though. The Americans are so duplicitous that he felt confident that, while his identity documents may well be authentic, any name written on those documents would almost certainly be fictitious.

  “That all depends on what you’re willing to do for us in return.”

  The colonel smiled, a bead of sweat forming on his upper lip.

  “Well, then, let’s get down to business.”

  ◆◆◆

  When Olivier Gauthier checked out of his hotel on Interstate 29, midway between St. Joseph and Kansas City, he noticed, as expected, that his blue Ford Focus sedan had been swapped for a black Jeep Cherokee with Texas plates. He smiled. The vehicle he had driven across the border two days earlier was now nowhere to be seen.

  No question about it, his current employer ran a tight operation, he thought to himself as he depressed the key fob button that had been left in an envelope for him at the front desk when he checked in the night before.

  The rear door of the Jeep rose automatically. He reached
inside and raised the carpeted floorboard, finding a Glock 19 pistol tucked inside a Blackhawk Serpa polymer holster. Just as he had requested. Tucked beside the weapon were four fifteen-round magazines and four boxes of Speer 147-grain nine-millimeter hollow point ammunition. If I need that much ammo, thought the Canadian, I’m almost certainly a goner.

  Gauthier lowered the floorboard back down and placed his suitcase on top of it. He pushed the red button inside the doorframe and stepped back as the door automatically lowered before eventually clicking shut. He reached into his pocket, took out the fob, and depressed the auto-start button. The vehicle engine sprang to life.

  The Canadian walked around to the driver’s side and opened the door, where he found a small ice scraper. He turned up the front and rear window defrosters full blast and climbed back out of the vehicle. It took about two or three minutes to scrape off the frost and ice from the windshield, whereupon he got back into the driver’s seat and tossed the ice scraper into the back seat.

  The temperature inside was now at least bearable. I’ll let the heater defrost the rest, he thought to himself.

  He shifted the transmission into reverse and slowly backed out of the parking space. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was seven-thirty. He’d be in Houston by nightfall.

  He slipped the transmission into drive and headed for the interstate.

  ◆◆◆

  Olivier Gauthier was sitting in a cramped booth at a small diner just off the interstate in Fort Smith, Arkansas, eating lunch, when he heard a beep from his mobile phone, which began to vibrate on the table in front of him.

  He set his Reuben sandwich down on his plate and picked up the phone.

  The incoming WhatsApp message informed him that he needed to make a quick detour to Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. The message also stated that he would receive more details within the hour.