The Venezuelan Read online

  “To whom do I owe a debt of gratitude for my unexpected freedom?”

  “A man you have never met, at least not yet,” said the doctor. “He sends his best wishes and says he will visit you in a week or so…as he put it, just as soon as you’re well enough to drink Irish whiskey with him.”

  Calderón looked confused. Why would a total stranger go through all this trouble to just to rescue me? And more importantly, what did the man want in return?

  ◆◆◆

  “I’d like to take a nice long, hot shower,” said Fósforo, whose nickname referred to a match, the kind you strike to spark a flame. It had been given to him by one of his soccer coaches back when he was a young schoolboy, a reflection of his quick and violent temper.

  The two black SUVs—their windows coated with a dark tint to prevent motorists and passersby from being able to see the passengers inside—pulled under the portico on the right side of a sprawling, single-story villa.

  The man in the front passenger seat was still dressed in the same black paramilitary garb he had been wearing two hours earlier when they had rescued the Venezuelan from the secret jungle compound. He quickly got out of the vehicle and opened the rear door for the Venezuelan and the doctor to get out.

  Despite his long captivity, Calderón had not lost his keen sense of observation, even at night. In fact, his night vision had grown remarkably more acute.

  He counted eight guards around the property, at least that he could see so far. He assumed that such an impressive villa would also have an elaborate, state-of-the-art electronic security system that included cameras, electronic locks, high voltage trip wires and other devices. These would deter amateurs from even attempting to enter the compound uninvited, while at the same time pissing off the professionals by making an undetected entry a risky proposition at best.

  They entered the handsomely furnished home through a small ante room that, in turn, led into a modern commercial kitchen that was highlighted by black granite countertops, Brazilian rosewood cabinetry and white Italian marble floors. The owner’s wife, a forty-year-old Italian restaurateur from Milan, had overseen the design and building of a kitchen she would only set foot in no more than five or six weeks every year.

  She had been gracious enough to offer use of the villa to Calderón’s mysterious benefactor in return for a guarantee of extended labor peace at her five gourmet restaurants located throughout northern Italy and southern France.

  The mysterious benefactor had given the owner’s domestic staff a six-week paid vacation, bringing in his own staff for the duration of the Venezuelan’s stay. The new staff had arrived two days earlier—two days before the breakout—to familiarize themselves with the property and to make sure the house was adequately provisioned. The doctor had arrived the day before, bringing with him a team of physical therapists who transformed one of the bedrooms into a rehabilitation facility that most private hospitals would envy.

  “Did you happen to think to bring a barber along with you?” asked the tall man. “I’d like for someone to chop off most of this hair before I even get into the shower.”

  “Actually, I would recommend we shave off all your hair, both the top and the beard, everything,” said the doctor. “There’s a barber waiting for you outside on the terrace. You probably have half the bugs and germs known to mankind residing in your hair and on your body right now.”

  “If you insist,” he said, slightly nauseated by an image of infestation that he would find hard to erase.

  He was not at all happy about losing his hair. He had worn it long for as long as he could remember. It would take him a while to get used to seeing an emaciated bald guy looking back at him in the mirror.

  “It’s not all bad, my friend,” said the doctor, a grin breaking out on his face. “We will also have a nurse in the shower with you to inspect and doctor the wounds and sores on your body.”

  The doctor noticed the twinkle in the Venezuelan’s eyes.

  “It was also requested by your host that I remind you the woman is a trained medical professional, so please let her do her work undisturbed.”

  The Venezuelan grinned and shook his head slightly from side to side. With my luck, the nurse is probably old enough to be my grandmother, he thought to himself.

  ◆◆◆

  By the time Cortez arrived at Jack Gonçalves’ office on the fifth floor of the Houston FBI building, the SSA was already there waiting for him. It was still only five-forty-five in the morning, but both men were eager to get on with their business. They understood that the more time that passed, the lesser the likelihood they would ever find the Venezuelan.

  Mateo Calderón, who went by the nom de guerre of Fósforo, had been taken into custody by Pete Cortez late one night eight months earlier on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. The Venezuelan and his team of M-28 terrorists were attempting to flee the United States after planting a nuclear device not far from downtown Dallas. The device had ten times the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, three-quarters of a century earlier.

  Cortez and Calderón also had a personal history.

  They had known each other since both were children growing up in Caracas, Venezuela. Cortez’s father had been an American oil company executive, while Calderón’s father was an attorney whose clients included many of the country’s rich and powerful. Despite their common backgrounds, though, the two men were as different as night and day.

  “What do you mean, Calderón has escaped?” asked Cortez, a look of bewilderment and rage on his face. “I thought our brothers in the Agency had him locked up tighter than a drum.”

  “As did I,” said Gonçalves, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “From what I understood, they smuggled him out of the country within hours after you handed him over to them that morning in Dallas eight months ago.”

  “Do we have any idea where he is now?”

  “No,” replied the SSA, taking a sip of coffee from the paper cup he had picked up at a Starbucks drive-thru on the way in to work. “From what I’ve been able to determine, they were holding him in an off-the-books secret compound buried somewhere deep within the Brazilian Amazon. Two Agency folks were onsite at the time it happened. The rest were contractors, mostly Brazilians, with a few Chileans and Argentines.”

  “How long ago did it happen?”

  “About five hours ago,” said Gonçalves, propping his feet up on top of his desk as he leaned back in his chair. He was wearing highly polished black wingtips and his blue pinstripe suit jacket was hanging from a metal coat rack standing in one of the corners of his office. “They’re two hours ahead of us down there and it took place just after three this morning, local time.”

  “That makes it about eight in the morning now in that part of Brazil,” said Cortez, looking down at his wristwatch. He wore a dark brown leather watchband because a metal band always seemed to give him a rash on his wrist whenever his arms would sweat.

  “Whoever pulled it off came in well-armed. They took out the guard towers with RPGs, killed most of the guards in the compound, and were in-and-out in less than three minutes.”

  “Did they just disappear back into the jungle?”

  “No, they came in two helicopters. One touched down and unloaded the raiders while the second apparently hovered above in armed overwatch. Very professional operation.”

  “How many survivors?”

  “Just two, both outside guards, both severely wounded. There was a third guard inside with Calderón and three other prisoners. He appears to have been executed…a bullet to the head.”

  “Any indication of a Judas goat,” asked Cortez, inhaling slowly, then exhaling loudly.

  He knew the likelihood of this being carried out without an inside man were slim, especially given the precision of the operation.

  “Maybe,” said Gonçalves. “The Agency also says that one guard is missing.”

  “Maybe he just ran away and hid in the jungle. He’ll probably show
up once he knows for certain that the coast is clear.”

  “No,” said the SSA, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “Both of the wounded guards say they saw the man jump aboard a helicopter with the rest of the raiders. They believe he was an accomplice.”

  Cortez kept silent for a moment, his scrunched mouth grimacing as he thought.

  “So, we know that it happened five hours ago, and they had a helicopter to make their getaway,” he said finally. “Hell, he could be anywhere. What do the Brazilians think?”

  Gonçalves had a peculiar look on his face as he stared Cortez straight in the eye.

  “The Agency hasn’t notified them yet.”

  “Which, in turn, tells me that they were almost certainly not aware the Agency was maintaining a black site in their sovereign territory,” said Cortez, a wry smile on his face. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

  “You haven’t heard the really good part yet.”

  “I can’t imagine what could top that news, but let me have it,” he said. Cortez had a sinking feeling that whatever was coming next, he was not going to like it.

  “The Agency intends to informally ask the Bureau for your assistance.”

  “Mine?”

  “You know the guy,” said Gonçalves. “You grew up with him, and most importantly, you’re the one who captured him in the first place.”

  “So now they’re blaming me?”

  “No, they haven’t reached that stage in the CYA process yet,” replied the SSA, a cynical smile now breaking out across on his face. CYA is the age-old acronym for cover your ass. “They think their best chance of tracking this guy down and taking him back into custody rests with you and your apparently now legendary set of special skills.”

  “Great,” said Cortez, ignoring the sarcasm of that last remark. Sheer dumb luck was his trademark skill. “Does that mean I have to go to Washington?”

  “No, even better. They want you on the ground in Brazil within the next twenty-four hours.”

  ◆◆◆

  Chapter 3

  Brasilia, Brazil

  “Damn,” said Carpenter, his face beet red with rage. “Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn.” He picked up the half-full porcelain coffee cup resting on his desk and flung it against one of the concrete walls of his office, shattering it into a thousand tiny pieces.

  Ryan Carpenter was the CIA chief of station at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia and he had just received word from Langley of an incident that had occurred several hours earlier at a black site hidden deep within the Brazilian Amazon. He was especially livid because he had never been made aware of the compound’s existence.

  Here he was, the chief of station, the Agency’s man in charge in Brazil, and yet he had no idea the Agency was operating a secret compound inside his area of responsibility. Right under his nose. Jeez.

  “How in the hell is it that I didn’t know about this place?” he asked his number two, a woman by the name of Clarice Robideaux. “Did you know about it, Clarice?”

  The woman looked down at her hands for a few awkward moments before looking up again at her boss. She had a sheepish smile on her face.

  “Yes, Ryan, I did,” she said, feeling awkward at having been caught in a secret. It was the kind of thing all of them in their business, from time to time, had to keep from their bosses. “It’s a special access program and I happen to be the only person in country with access. I’m sorry it had to come out like this, but you know how it is. Need to know.”

  He was not at all mollified. Not even a little bit.

  “How many other people are read into this program?” he asked. He was on fire.

  “As I understand it, only five,” she replied, trying to sound contrite even though she knew she had nothing to feel contrite about. Although awkward, this kind of thing happens all the time in their line of work. “And I’m not even sure the Director is one of them.”

  He now regretted his impulsive decision to smash his coffee cup against the far wall. He depressed the intercom button on his desk and said, “Another cup of coffee, Grant. Black, no sugar, please.”

  He had yet to make his peace with cafezinho, a strong, bitter Brazilian coffee served in a tiny demitasse cup, along with three or four cubes of sugar. Probably to distinguish it from road tar, he thought to himself.

  “How the hell does that happen?” he said, resuming his rant, although with a little less volume this time.

  “I don’t know, Ryan,” she said, adopting an exaggerated Cajun drawl. “I just work here.”

  Robideaux was from Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, ten miles east of Lafayette and home of the annual Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival, of which she had been named Crawfish Queen fifteen years earlier while a student at LSU. She was about two inches taller than the station chief and had been in Brasilia for fifteen months prior to his recent reassignment there.

  “Now what?” he asked. His tone of voice, by now, had returned to at least some semblance of normal.

  “I’ve been instructed to read you in on the program,” she said, brushing her auburn hair back away from her face with her left hand. “Then we have to move heaven and earth to find this Fósforo guy before anyone else knows he’s missing…or that we have him hidden away down here.”

  “I think you mean had, not have.”

  Carpenter and Robideaux went into the SCIF—short for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility—a specially constructed interior room protected by sophisticated electronic and physical security. There, she read the station chief into the special access program, codenamed HIMALAYAN VULTURE. The significance of that name was anybody’s guess, which is why they chose it.

  “Okay, Clarice, let’s start with where this compound is located.”

  “It’s midway between Manaus and Santarém, roughly sixty miles north of the Amazon River,” she said, relieved that she was no longer the only person in country shouldering the burden of this knowledge, especially now that the entire program had just gone to hell in a handbasket. “The entire compound is hidden beneath the dense jungle canopy so it can’t be seen from above.”

  “What about infrared imaging? Surely the heat source of something like that buried deep within the jungle would show up, wouldn’t it?”

  “The compound is so tiny that you’d literally have to be right above it to pick up something. At least that’s what the tech folks tell me.”

  “How many people work there?” he asked.

  “I think worked would be a much more accurate word in this case, since all but three are now dead,” she said casually, as if talking about the day’s price of oranges. “And two of the three are given no better than a fifty-fifty chance of survival at this time.”

  “I don’t want to know if you plan to tip the balance on the survival rate.”

  She nodded her head somberly but said nothing. What a tool. He watches too many movies, she thought to herself. Nobody does that anymore, and even if they did, they sure as heck wouldn’t talk about it.

  “Good,” he said, sensing she understood his message. “What about the third survivor? How did he manage to escape injury?”

  “According to the two wounded survivors, they saw one of the compound’s guards climb onto the helicopter with the armed men just before it took off,” she said. "He was probably their inside man.”

  “Were they able to tell us who he was?”

  “They said he was one of the Brazilian contractors, a guy who went by the name of Marco,” she said, knowing the answer was inadequate, but it was all she knew at the moment.

  “Jeez, Clarice, this is all really helpful information,” he said sarcastically. “What’s our next move?”

  “Langley is reaching out to the Bureau as we speak. They are requesting the loan of one of their special agents, a man named Pete Cortez, for seven days, reporting immediately.”

  “What do we know about this Cortez guy? Why do we need him?”

  “He’s the man who captured the Venezuelan whi
le thwarting a nuclear attack on Dallas eight months ago,” she said, taking a cigarette from her small purse and lighting it. Smoking had long been prohibited in government buildings, but at the moment, she didn’t care.

  She could tell she was nervous by how fast she was talking. Perhaps this would help calm her nerves.

  “That last tidbit of information—the part about the nuke—is highly classified, by the way,” she said, trying to cover her tracks in case he was not already privy to that information. “Anyway, the two of them apparently also grew up together in Caracas. Cortez’s family was American, Calderón’s was Venezuelan.”

  “Don’t you think the Amazon might be a little too rough for a suit-and-tie FBI agent?”

  She laughed lightly and slid a manila folder containing a short summary of Cortez’s bio across the table to the station chief.

  “No, I think he’ll be fine down here.”

  ◆◆◆

  “So, Jeremy, what is so important that it couldn’t wait until the start of normal business hours,” asked the woman as she took the heavy overcoat from her guest and draped it over the back of the long sofa in her living room in McLean, Virginia.

  The guest, her counterpart at the Central Intelligence Agency, unbuttoned his suit jacket and sat down in one of the comfortable armchairs. The woman poured a cup of coffee and handed it to him.

  “Help yourself to the cream and sugar,” she said, gesturing toward the silver tea service resting on top of an oversized mahogany coffee table. She poured herself a cup, adding a splash of cream. She gave it a quick stir and sat down in the armchair catty-corner to him.

  “Elinore, we have an extremely delicate situation that you could help us with,” he said, nervously rubbing his chin.