The Venezuelan Read online

  Just then, an oddly familiar face appeared in the doorway. Calderón’s face turned ashen.

  “What the hell is going on here?” he shouted at the bodyguard. “This man was one of the guards at the prison compound.”

  The man continued into the room, a broad smile on his face, and walked straight over to the Venezuelan. He was much shorter than Calderón—maybe about five-eight or five-nine—and a little on the chubby side.

  “Most people call me Marco,” the man said, extending his hand in greeting. He spoke in English with a nondescript accent. “I gather from your reaction that you remember me.”

  Calderón awkwardly shook the man’s hand and motioned for him to sit in one of the chairs by the tall windows overlooking the Rio Tapajós. With one of the knuckles of his left hand, he nudged his aviator sunglasses back up to the bridge of his nose.

  “Tell me…Marco…just who the hell are you and why are you here?”

  “I work with a clandestine agency within the United States government,” he said casually, as if their previous encounter in the jungle had been perfectly innocent, even innocuous. “You and I will be seeing more of each other in the not too distant future and I wanted to get the trauma of our reunion out of the way early.”

  “Work together?” asked the Venezuelan, sensing he now had the upper hand. “Why would I work with one of my captors, especially when I can just as easily kill you?”

  Marco was not a particularly brave man, but neither was he a coward. He had killed a fair number of men in his lifetime, almost none of them face to face. That was not the kind of man he was. He took no delight in killing, even the sleeping guards at the jungle compound. It was simply part of the job.

  “Because I was also one of your rescuers,” the man said casually before turning around toward the bodyguard and saying, “Hey, big fella, how about grabbing me a cold bottle of beer? Antárctica Original, if you have it.”

  The muscular man nervously looked to Fósforo for guidance. The Venezuelan nodded his head slightly in ascent.

  “You’re not having one with me, Mateo?” he asked, grasping the bottle from the guard with his left hand and taking a healthy swig. He had managed to live as long as he had by appearing to be unthreatening. That was also when he was most dangerous. He could see in Calderón’s eyes that he was succeeding.

  “No, doctor’s orders…at least for the time being.”

  Marco wiped his lips with the back of his hand. His bushy brown mustache, which hung raggedly over his lip, was a magnet for beer foam, not to mention greasy food.

  “You don’t mind if I call you Mateo, do you?” asked the visitor, switching into Spanish, Calderón’s native tongue.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “You’ll have to forgive my Spanish,” said Marco. “I keep having to remind myself what country I’m in. Life is much simpler if you only speak one language. It’s a lot easier on the brain.”

  Of course, that was self-deprecating nonsense. He just opened his mouth and it came out without having to think about it. He was fluent in five languages…English and four Romance languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French. He had a good ear and his accent was nearly flawless.

  “You still haven’t told me why I shouldn’t just kill you right now and throw your body into the river,” said the Venezuelan, eying his visitor suspiciously. “After all, trust is a dangerous vulnerability in my line of work.”

  Marco laughed nervously, despite his outward display of fearless bravado. He knew a good question when he heard one, and that happened to be an excellent question. Were their roles reversed, he sure as hell wouldn’t trust someone like him.

  “Because you suspect, as crazy as this seems, that I’m on the level,” said the visitor, getting up from his chair. “Just look at this as our little icebreaker. Check me out with your host when he comes here next week. I certainly would if I were in your shoes. Anyway, I’ve taken enough of your time.”

  The Venezuelan started to stand up.

  “Please, keep your seat, Mateo. You need your rest. I’ll see myself out.

  ◆◆◆

  Chapter 5

  Manaus, Brazil

  Cortez and Robideaux arrived back in Manaus around noon and ate lunch at a nearby restaurant while their helicopter was being refueled and serviced for a quick turnaround.

  Their plan was to spend the next few days dropping in on the various villages and towns along the Amazon River between Manaus and Santarém, asking if anyone knew anything about the whereabouts of a half-dead man who, if he even had the strength to stand, stood six foot-six. Two meters.

  “So, how do you think they knew where to find him?” asked Cortez, taking a bite of his grilled ham and cheese sandwich—they call it a misto quente in Brazil—and chasing it down with a bottle of San Pellegrino mineral water. “That compound is in the middle of nowhere. You can’t even see the clearing from the air unless you drop down to a couple of hundred feet.”

  They were seated at a small table outside a nondescript restaurant along a busy, tree lined street. The shade from a nearby Brazilwood tree provided some much-needed protection from the noonday sun. A steady breeze from the north helped blow away most of the carbon monoxide emissions being belched by the steady stream of vehicles that passed by, all of which seemed to be in dire need of a serious tune-up.

  “I couldn’t help but notice that there was nothing in the envelope you gave me in the car last night about the guard who was last seen leaving with the assault team,” said Cortez, removing his sunglasses and hooking them over the collar of his black polo shirt.

  “Yes, I noticed that myself,” she said, taking a small bite of her feijoada, a tasty stew of black beans and pork served over white rice. Although the dish originated in Portugal, it has long been considered by most Brazilians to be their national dish, mainly because it is inexpensive to make and can feed a whole lot of people. “I talked to my boss in Brasilia and he said it was all he received from Langley. He promised to send me the rest today.”

  “I wonder why it wasn’t included in the original file?” he asked. “After all, there were only three folks who survived the breakout and he was one of them.”

  “Yeah, I wondered that myself, although even in the Agency, we have our brain farts from time to time.”

  Cortez, while agreeing with the sentiment, didn’t fully buy into that explanation. However, he let it go for the moment.

  “What do you know about this guy…Marco is his name, right?”

  “I know he was a recent hire…probably brought onboard about two months ago, if my memory serves me correctly.”

  “Is that something normal? I mean, was there a vacancy created by a turnover? Did you feel you needed more manpower? Did someone take a vacation?”

  “That’s the weird part,” she said. “The decision to bring him onboard originated from higher up and not from the compound.”

  “By whom?”

  “That I don’t know. I can ask but I’m sure whoever did it covered their tracks. After all, that’s what we do for a living and we’re pretty darn good at it…in most cases, that is.”

  “Yeah,” said Cortez, thinking about the FBI’s own brand of bureaucratic politics. “I know how that works.”

  He poured the remainder of his bottle of water into his glass and watched the bubbles fizzle to the top before taking a sip. Even though he had spent most of his life living in hot climates, Manaus still took some time to get used to. When the wind dies, it can become absolutely unbearable, and the Amazon River provides more than enough moisture to keep the humidity levels way up in the miserable range.

  “Do you read anything into that?” he asked after a few moments.

  “You mean a hire orchestrated from above, followed by a deadly raid on the compound two months later? Sure, I do. Wouldn’t you?”

  “But you’re worried about sending inquiries up the chain?” he asked, sensing the answer.

  “I don’t want to tip off whoever
it is,” she said. “You have to know that person will be watching our investigation closely, at least for the first month or so.”

  Cortez said nothing for a few moments.

  “What if I have my boss at the Houston JTTF make some discreet inquiries? He’s had a pretty interesting career and has contacts throughout the darker side of our trade.”

  “You mean Jack Gonçalves?” she asked, pronouncing his name cone-SALL-vez.

  “Yeah. Do you know him?”

  “We worked together for a month or so, back when he was in Miami.”

  That caught Cortez’s attention and he looked at her inquisitively.

  “Yeah, Pete, that’s also where I first heard of you,” she said, a mischievous smile on her face. “That’s why I asked for you by name. The whole time the other night when those customs agents were admiring your knife, I kept thinking to myself, if they only knew the history of that thing, they’d never let it into the country.”

  “It’s been a life saver over the years,” he acknowledged, now slightly embarrassed.

  “It’s also been a life taker, too, from what I understand.”

  There was an awkward moment of silence. That knife, despite saving his life on several occasions, also had caused him no end of problems with some of the more tight-laced image protectors in the Bureau. It’s like there’s some sacred rule in the Bureau that men in blue pinstriped suits shouldn’t carry lethal fighting knives, he thought to himself.

  “So, back to the topic at hand,” he said, changing the subject. “Do you have a photo of this Marco guy? Anything that I can give to Gonçalves to get him started?”

  “Just this,” she said, sliding a small photo across the table toward him. “It was taken by one of my sources here in Manaus. I use him from time to time to keep an eye on folks from the compound whenever they come here for the occasional R&R. I had my man deliver it to me at the hotel this morning before you came downstairs.”

  Cortez picked up the photo and examined it closely. It showed two men sitting at a bar in what appeared to be a modest hotel. What constitutes modest in Manaus is much different than modest in Houston. Most Americans would probably call it a dump.

  “Which one is Marco?”

  “The one on the right,” she said, pointing to the shorter man in the photo, the one wearing a light-colored tee shirt. “The other one turned out to be a local criminal…robbery, carjacking, that sort of thing. Charming man, I’m sure.”

  “When was this taken?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Let’s go find this other guy and talk to him, then,” he said, relieved to have at least something to go on.

  “Unfortunately, his body was found in the alley behind the same hotel the very next morning. Stabbed at least twenty times.”

  That sucked the life from that brief ray of hope.

  “I’m sure it was just a coincidence,” said Cortez sarcastically, a smirk on his face. He removed his mobile phone from his pants pocket and snapped a photo of the picture.

  He typed out a quick message with his right index finger and pressed send. He never had mastered the art of typing with his thumbs. He was old school in that respect.

  A minute later, he heard a single ping sound from his phone, which he had set on top of the table in front of him. He picked it up and opened his WhatsApp message app.

  “Well, Jack’s got the photo,” said Cortez, closing the app and placing his mobile phone back in his pocket. “Maybe he’ll be able to dig up something on this guy.”

  She gathered her purse from her lap and stood up.

  “We’d better head on back to the helicopter,” she said, glancing at her wristwatch. “We’ve only got a little less than six hours of daylight left.”

  ◆◆◆

  When they arrived back at the agricultural research facility, the helicopter was already warming up. The pilot was sitting in the right seat of the cockpit reading the latest issue of Veja online. A former Brazilian Army pilot, he liked to read the popular weekly magazines in order to pass the time when he wasn’t actually flying.

  Three minutes after lifting off, they were flying over the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Amazon River, where the dark waters of the Rio Negro, coming from the northwest, merged with the sandy-colored waters of the lower Amazon.

  The two rivers run side by side—black water on the north half of the river and beige on the south—for the next three or four miles until they finally blend into one uniform color. It was an extraordinary sight from the air.

  “Okay, so what’s the plan?” asked Cortez, looking down on the muddy brown waters of the Amazon. He had seen the Orinoco many times on trips with his father to the Orinoco Petroleum Belt, but the Amazon below him was wider. Much wider.

  “We’ve got a full load of fuel, so we’re going to spend rest of the daylight hours hopscotching eastward down the Amazon River, touching down at each of the cities and towns along the way,” she said into her headset mic. “Hopefully, we can pick up some talk about an unusually tall stranger in need of medical attention. Who knows, we might get lucky.”

  “Seriously? That’s our plan?” he asked incredulously. He was still trying to get a read on Robideaux and this was not exactly confidence-inspiring.

  “Our pilot spent ten years assigned to the Amazon Military Command while he was in the army,” she said, nodding her head in the direction of the pilot. “He was in intelligence most of that time and knows everyone worth knowing along the river.”

  Cortez felt a little better now. He hadn’t taken the opportunity to talk with the pilot that morning, a mistake he usually didn’t make. I’m getting sloppy in my old age, he thought to himself. I shouldn’t assume that nobody has thought something through just because I hadn’t.

  “What about refueling? We’re kind of in the middle of nowhere out here.”

  “There’s an airport in Parintins, about two-hundred-thirty miles downriver,” she said into her mic. “We’ll fuel up there and spend the night.”

  The pilot flew them on the same “milk run” route he had flown on a regular basis for more than five years while assigned to the army aviation battalion in Manaus. Cortez, for his part, was surprised at how large some of these remote “towns” were.

  After about forty minutes of flying over nothing but water and trees, they suddenly came upon the city of Itacoatiara, on the north bank of the Amazon. It was a little more than a hundred air miles east of Manaus.

  “Holy crap,” said Cortez into his headset mic. “That’s like a major city down there. How big is this place?”

  “It has about a hundred thousand people, more or less,” said the pilot, banking the helicopter off to the left and heading back toward a small airfield just west of town. “Right in the middle of nowhere…or so it seems to most foreigners. Welcome to Brazil.”

  As the pilot set down the AS-350, a man in an ill-fitting uniform got out of a dark blue SUV parked about fifty feet away. He just stood there, waiting, as the pilot powered down.

  “That’s my contact in Itacoatiara,” the pilot said. He pronounced it e-tah-co-ah-chi-ARE-ah. “He’s assigned to the navy base here.”

  The three of them climbed out of the helicopter and walked over to the awaiting man, who was even skinnier than Cortez. That’s where the similarity ended, though. The navy man was at least half a foot shorter and his arms and neck were covered with tattoos. The pilot, speaking in Portuguese, introduced everyone.

  “We’re looking for this man,” said Robideaux in Portuguese, showing him the picture of Calderón on her mobile phone. “He’s a tall man, roughly two meters in height.”

  The man looked intently at the photo, shaking his head slowly from side-to-side.

  “He’s also probably in dire need of medical attention,” said Cortez in his best “Portañol,” a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish. “A Venezuelan.”

  The navy man looked again, intently studying the photo this time. He hated Venezuelans, especially nowadays. The
y were flooding into Brazil like unwelcome ants at a picnic.

  “No,” the man said finally. “Send me a copy of the photo and I’ll check around with my sources. If he’s here in Itacoatiara, they’ll know about it.”

  Robideaux electronically passed him the photo on Air Drop and thanked him for his assistance. They all shook hands before turning around and heading back to the helicopter.

  “Next stop is Itapiranga, then Barreirinha,” said Robideaux as they climbed back onboard. “We should be able to make it to Santarém before nightfall.”

  ◆◆◆

  Mateo Calderón was sitting out on the veranda overlooking the broad expanse of the Rio Tapajós, enjoying the tranquility. Sunset was only about fifteen minutes away, as the sun gave off its final burst of rainbow-colored light before slipping below the horizon.

  He had gotten used to seeing things through the tinted lenses of the aviator sunglasses, which he had now taken to wearing around the clock.

  “Com licença, Senhor Fósforo,” said the old man dressed in white, interrupting his solitude. He was part of the domestic staff that had been flown in from São Paulo to tend to Calderón’s needs during his recuperation. “Eduardo would like a word with you.”

  Eduardo was the head of the security detail that his host had arranged for him at the house where he was staying.

  Calderón nodded almost imperceptibly and said, “Show him in.”

  A moment later, a tall muscular man wearing a black guayabera shirt appeared. A white ring of evaporated sweat was prominently visible under each armpit.

  “I hate to bother you, señor, but I just received word from one of my contacts in Itacoatiara that a couple of Americans—a man and a woman—were there several hours ago asking about you. They even have a photo of you that they are passing around.”

  Calderón thought for a moment. I suppose it would be unreasonable to think the Americans would allow me to recuperate in peace.