The Venezuelan Read online

  He did a quick Google search for Breaux Bridge, entered it into his phone’s GPS, and then continued eating his sandwich.

  ◆◆◆

  Chapter 16

  Houston, Texas

  “OKAY, Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” said Morris Applebaum, incredulously.

  “You want me to tell the SAC, who will then tell the Director, that we believe the CIA was involved in the escape of a violent terrorist from one of their own off-the-books black sites, killing half a dozen of their own contractors in the process, and now may be involved in a covert plot to overthrow the Venezuelan government and install in power a man we arrested less than a year ago for attempting to detonate a nuclear bomb in the Dallas metroplex? Did I pretty much sum up the past ten minutes?”

  Cortez glanced over at Robideaux and grimaced. When you sum it up that way, it does sound kind of nutty, Pete thought.

  “Uh, yes sir, that’s our current operating theory,” said Jack Gonçalves, shrugging his shoulders. Pete Cortez and Clarice Robideaux nodded their heads but said nothing. “I know it sounds crazy, but the more we talk about it, the more convinced I become that there’s actually something to it.”

  The ASAC looked over at Cortez and Robideaux. Clearly, they had come to the same conclusion.

  “Okay, the best case assumption would be that, if true, this is most likely a rogue operation,” said the ASAC, taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly. “At least I would sure hope so. On the other hand, it is also possible that this might be an operation sanctioned at the highest levels of government. If that is the case, I don’t want for us to be the ones who screw it up by nosing around in something that is clearly outside of our lane.”

  “So, what do you recommend we do, sir?” asked Cortez.

  “From the moment I first heard that the mysterious guard who escaped with the Venezuelan and his liberators was, until recently, an Agency covert operative, I’ve suspected something like this might be going on,” said Gonçalves, standing up and beginning to pace back and forth. “We can’t just ignore it and hope it will go away.”

  “You’ve been awfully quiet, Clarice,” said Applebaum, turning his head in the direction of Robideaux. “What do you think? You know these people a whole lot better than any of us do.”

  “Well, sir, I’ve dedicated the past fifteen years of my life to the Agency,” she said, measuring her words carefully. “I thought nothing we ever did could possibly surprise me, but I was wrong.”

  “About which part?”

  “Definitely not the part about making common cause with a rabidly anti-American terrorist—we do that more often than most of us would care to admit—but that we deliberately killed our own people in the process,” she said. “That’s something I never thought I’d ever see the Agency involved in.”

  Cortez slid his chair back and propped his right foot against the edge of the conference table.

  “So, what do we do about it?” he said. “I don’t particularly care if they’re plotting to overthrow the Venezuelan government. Heck, we’re probably a good twenty years overdue with that one anyway. But I certainly don’t countenance folks who kill their own.”

  The other three nodded their heads somberly but said nothing.

  “Mostly, though, what really riles me is the thought of that son of a bitch Calderón ever seeing the light of day,” Cortez continued, “and certainly not as a free man.”

  They spent the next five minutes venting and spewing venom, although not accomplishing anything beyond the cathartic cleansing of a good group scream.

  Finally, Applebaum broke it off.

  “Everybody feeling better now?” the ASAC asked, bringing a smile to Robideaux’s face. Apparently even the straight-laced FBI is not totally immune to occasional nonproductive bitch sessions. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Jack, I remember you told your Portuguese contact that you were part of a human trafficking investigation involving Brazil, right?”

  “Yeah, boss, but that was all a pretext. We just made that up.”

  “Well, now let’s make it a real thing, all nice and official,” said the ASAC. “Not some BS fake task force. Make it real. We probably should have done that a year ago anyway. Then I want you to assign Pete to it.”

  “Yes, sir. Consider it done.”

  “The Legal Attaché down in Brasilia is Lucinha Baker,” said the ASAC. “Do you know her, Clarice?”

  “Not very well,” she replied. “We’ve met a few times at embassy functions. That’s about it, though.”

  “She and I worked together at the Bureau in Washington before I was assigned to Houston,” said Applebaum, looking over at Robideaux, who nodded in understanding. “I intend to explain the real-life situation to her and ask for her personal assistance.”

  Everyone else nodded in agreement.

  “For this to work, though, I’m going to have to tell Baker everything we talked about here today,” he said, looking around the room and making eye contact with each person individually. “Does anyone have any reservations about me doing that? Last chance. Speak up.”

  No one said anything.

  “I will also ask her to officially request that Pete be temporarily assigned to her office,” the ASAC continued. “In the meantime, I want you and Baker to become social friends. She’ll be one of your communications conduits once you return to your duties down there.”

  Robideaux nodded in acknowledgement. The gears of the Bureau’s personnel bureaucracy seem to work better in response to a specific request. In this case, the request would come from Baker.

  “While you’re doing that, I’ll discreetly reach out to an old friend of mine in the Agency and tell him about our suspicions, especially about this guy, Marco,” said the ASAC.

  This time, everyone in the room nodded their understanding.

  “Good, then it’s settled,” said Applebaum. “And remember, folks, we need to play this as close to the vest as we possibly can. No mistakes.”

  ◆◆◆

  The drive from Ciudad Guayana to Ciudad Bolivar took Marco and the pudgy Venezuelan colonel about an hour in the dirty blue SUV. The two cities are river ports along the Orinoco, about sixty miles apart on federal highway nineteen.

  “Turn left up there at the next street,” said Marco, who was riding in the passenger seat so he could better focus on the GPS map on his mobile phone.

  The colonel, whose nametag read CUELLAR, was driving. He had not had time to change out of his army uniform before they left, so he had tossed his duffle bag with a spare set of clothes in the back seat. He figured he would change once they arrived at their destination.

  “Stay on this street for the next two blocks,” said Marco, pointing with his right hand while holding the GPS in his left. “Then turn right.”

  They were in middle of the dock area of Ciudad Bolivar, which was dominated by row after row of low-slung warehouse buildings with concrete loading docks. A steady stream of eighteen-wheelers pulled in and out of the area, loading and unloading cargo from the busy river port.

  The midday sun intensified the overwhelmingly pungent odor of fish coming from the river.

  “Damn, what is that godawful smell?” Marco said, his face grimacing as his hand wiped his mouth and nose. “How can you people stand it? I can barely breathe.”

  “You get used to it,” said the Cuellar, who seemed to be oblivious to the noxious odor. “It’s coming from the docks.”

  “Hopefully, the wind will pick up soon and blow it all downriver.”

  “How much farther is it to the warehouse?” the colonel asked.

  “It’s in the next block, just up ahead, on the left.”

  A few moments later, the dirty green SUV pulled up in front of a large warehouse with the number eighty-four painted on the concrete loading dock. The two men got out of the vehicle and walked up the five steps to a personnel door that was next to the oversized steel loading door. Marco removed a small ring of keys from his pants pocket
and unlocked the door.

  Cuellar followed him inside, carrying his small duffle bag with a change of clothes.

  “Catch the lights for me, would you?” said Marco. “The light switches are just to the right of the door. You can’t miss them.”

  It took the lights a minute or so to warm up. Instead of crisp white light, they began as a dirty beige and gradually improved.

  “Damn these new lights,” said Marco as his eyes adjusted to the dingy light. “I miss the old-style lighting that burned brightly from the get-go. These energy efficient lights take forever to reach full luminescence.”

  “Every little bit helps,” said the colonel. “You Americans are so wasteful…and so impatient.”

  Spread throughout the cavernous industrial building were stacks and stacks of wooden crates that took up about half the floor space.

  “They arrived on three separate barges over the past week,” said Marco.

  Cuellar whistled and smiled.

  “Do you have the bills of lading?” asked Cuellar, who had already removed his uniform and had put on a pair of blue jeans and a khaki work shirt.

  He sat down on one of the boxes and put on the pair of cowboy boots he had taken from his duffle bag. He then neatly folded his uniform and carefully placed it back inside the bag before zipping it closed.

  “They’re right here,” the American said, handing him several sheets of paper. “Five thousand AKMs and sixty thousand thirty-round magazines…twelve per rifle.”

  The AKM is a modernized version of the classic AK-47 assault rifle, which the Russians first put into service right after the second world war. These particular weapons had been shipped across the Caribbean from Cuba, along with five million rounds of seven-point-six-two ammo.

  “Outstanding,” said Cuellar, glancing over the bill of lading to make sure it contained everything he had asked for. “I see they were able to get ahold of some MP-5s, too.”

  The colonel went down the list. RPGs, shotguns, grenades, even a couple dozen M-2 fifty-caliber machine guns, just for the added oomph. However, the “ma-deuce” was about as heavy as he wanted to get. If he needed more firepower—and he hoped that he would not—he’d have to rely on disgruntled renegade military units like his own.

  “This is a good start, my friend,” said the Venezuelan colonel. “This should take care of the Orinoco region of the country. My nation is grateful to you. You’ll be remembered as one of the men who helped save Venezuela in its most dire moment of need.”

  Cuellar folded the shipping document and tucked it into his pocket before turning off the lights and resetting the building alarm.

  They would return when it was time.

  ◆◆◆

  Major Rodrigues Antonio de Melo was looking forward to his lunch meeting with the police chief of Pacaraima. During his unit’s previous deployment to the Venezuelan border, the two men had met for lunch every Thursday, as regular as clockwork. They tried to vary their location for security reasons, but truth be told, there really weren’t all that many decent restaurants in this remote border town.

  “How was your first week back in Pacaraima?” the policeman asked, shoveling a heaping load of black beans and rice into his mouth. Using his knife, he scraped the small bit of meat from a piece of pig’s tail that had probably been simmering in the feijoada for at least the past forty-eight hours. He noticed that a strand of bristly hair was still attached to it. He mixed the meat in with the black beans and ate another mouthful.

  Rodrigues, who was a notoriously fast eater, had already finished his beans and rice and was now scarfing down a grilled ham and cheese sandwich.

  “One of my company commanders, Captain Miller, was stabbed the other day by a Venezuelan boy,” he said, washing down his mouthful of sandwich with a bottle of Guaraná, a sweet, syrupy soft drink made from the guaraná fruit. “The situation up here appears to have gotten a lot worse since our last deployment. Sure, we had occasional fights in the past, but this is the first time one of my men has actually spilled blood…his own blood, that is.”

  “What ever happened to the boy?” the policeman asked, shoveling the last of the black beans and rice into his mouth. “I sort of expected you to turn him over to us after you finished questioning him.”

  “The battalion commander decided to ship him down to Boa Vista,” said Rodrigues, breaking off a piece of bread and soaking up the last remnants of juice from the beans before popping it into his mouth. “The brigade intelligence officer was very interested in interrogating him…and learning about his two traveling companions, the ones who left him behind when they took off for Boa Vista.”

  “Well, at least that’s one fewer problem for me to deal with up here.”

  Just then, they heard the unmistakable clap of gunfire coming from outside the restaurant. Both men quickly sprang to their feet and pushed their way through the lunch crowd to the doorway.

  “This is why we eat our food so fast,” said the police chief as he stepped out onto the street in front of the restaurant. “I haven’t been able to enjoy a meal in years.”

  The police chief stood in the middle of the road and looked down the narrow asphalt street that ran between two rows of dilapidated single-story buildings. Each was home to a business of some kind…garage, bakery, restaurant, even a post office. In reality, the potholes probably occupied more surface space than the asphalt.

  A dozen or so parked cars were staggered along the road in front most of the businesses, straddling the pavement and the mostly dead grass.

  Panicked men and women were now running from the street into any open doorway, trying to escape the line of fire. A heavyset woman lumbered past Rodrigues, bumping into him with her broad hips as she made her way past them and into the safety of the restaurant, causing him to momentarily lose his balance.

  The police chief keyed the mic on his portable radio.

  “What’s going on?” he asked over the radio. “I’m having lunch down on Rua Brasil and I heard gunshots.”

  “Two men just robbed the cashier at the grocery store on Rua Suapi and escaped on foot,” said the dispatcher at the police station. “We have one officer in pursuit.”

  “I’m at the churrascaria,” said the police chief. “I’ll cut them off.”

  He saw the two men running down the road toward him. An instant later, he heard shots being fired. One of the waitresses from the restaurant where they had been eating dropped to the ground, clutching her shoulder.

  She began to scream once she realized she had been shot. Blood seeped from her wound and began to saturate her dress.

  Major Rodrigues, who was standing on the opposite side of the wounded woman, calmly pointed his nine-millimeter Taurus PT-92 pistol in the direction of the two thieves and fired eight shots in rapid succession. Both thieves fell to the ground, one of them dead and the other severely wounded.

  “Porra nenhuma,” he muttered to the police chief. “This shit has gotten so much worse than it was last time I was up here. We can’t continue like this.”

  ◆◆◆

  Chapter 17

  Breaux Bridge, Louisiana

  The NEXT few days went by slowly for Clarice Robideaux, who returned home to Breaux Bridge after her meetings at the Houston FBI. However, there’s only so much crawfish a person, even a born-and-bred Cajun such as herself, could stand.

  Finally, it was time for her to return to Brasilia. She had been gone five days and was eager to get back and see if she could unravel this mystery.

  She preferred to take the “red eye” for long overseas trips, allowing her to catch a little sleep during the long flight. Unlike most trips, though, she slept fitfully during the eight-and-a-half-hour flight from Miami to São Paulo on LATAM Airlines. She had a lot on her mind and the three-hour layover in São Paulo before boarding her connecting flight to Brasilia only added to her anxiety.

  There was still much she needed to do, and she was eager to get started.

  Because travel do
wn to Brazil could eat up the better part of a day, she also typically flew over the weekend, which gave her body time to adjust. It isn’t so much the time zone change that makes it difficult because, with daylight savings time, Brasilia is only two hours ahead of New Orleans time. It is the cumulative, debilitating discomfort of being sandwiched into a cramped hard seat for hours on end.

  Airport waiting rooms are not much better on the comfort scale, either.

  It was mid-afternoon when the taxi dropped her off in front of the white, two-story house in the Lago Sul neighborhood of Brasilia, located on the eastern shore of Lake Paranoá. It was a quiet residential neighborhood, upper middle class, and the house she lived in was owned by the embassy. It was built in the modern style more reflective of Frank Lloyd Wright than Oscar Niemeyer, whose modernist buildings dominate the city of Brasilia.

  The previous occupant had been her predecessor in the station, so the security system was state of the art. He had been married and had several kids, which was typical of the previous occupants. She, on the other hand, was single. The house was much too large for her, so she converted one of the bedrooms into an office, another into a workout room and a third served as her guestroom.

  She gave the driver a hundred-Real note after he had unloaded her suitcase and set it down on the sidewalk in front of her gate.

  “Keep the change,” she said to the cab driver in Portuguese.

  As she swung open the small white-painted wrought iron gate and rolled her suitcase toward the front door to her house, she heard the ringtone from her mobile phone.

  “Yes, Ryan, what’s up?” she said after removing her phone from the back pocket of her slacks. She recognized the number on her screen as belonging to Ryan Carpenter.

  “Are you back in town yet?”

  “I just got home. In fact, I haven’t even gone inside yet.”

  “I realize it’s Sunday, but can you meet me at the office in an hour?”