Cold Shot: A Novel

by Henshaw, Mark

  “We got close. I became an analyst and she took a job at headquarters. Then she left. Nothing more to tell.”

  Kyra studied her partner with an odd expression. “That might be what happened, but it’s not what happened.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “For an analyst, there are times you suck at it,” Kyra told him. “Women can read each other. You know that moment when you’re in a crowded room with a woman and you finally figure out that she might be trying to send you signals?”

  “Yes.” His tone said otherwise.

  “By the time that moment comes, the woman’s been throwing herself at you and humiliating herself in front of every other girl in the place for at least a half hour. I’ve spent less than that around Mills and I can tell you that she cares what you think about her . . . and she’s scared.” Kyra grinned, a wicked smile that unnerved the man.

  “That makes no sense at all,” Jon said, frowning.

  Kyra shook her head, amazed that he couldn’t see signs that were so simple. “I know I just blew up your mental model for dealing with Mills, so I’ll just say this—she’s that girl who always had a date in high school anytime she wanted one, so she never learned to appreciate any single relationship. Everything came easy because she was pretty so she ended up with no self-confidence and she’s been spending her life ever since trying to prove she’s more than what people see. You probably treated her different, the way she always wanted, and she didn’t realize it until it was gone. Now she’s wondering whether she screwed up.”

  Jon nodded, clearly not understanding what he’d just heard. “You’re heading out?” he finally asked, almost desperate to turn the conversation. He looked out the window. The sun was getting low in the sky now.

  “I wanted to say good-bye before I left,” she said, confirming his suspicion.

  “This is still—”

  “—not a good idea, I know,” Kyra told him, finishing his sentence for him. “You said the same thing about China and Pioneer last year. That turned out okay.”

  “Just because something turns out okay doesn’t mean it wasn’t a stupid plan.”

  “Maybe,” she conceded. “But have faith. I do.”

  “Faith in what?”

  Kyra held up an earpiece headset for him to see. “That you’ll be here if something does go wrong.” She leaned down and kissed him on the cheek before he could pull back, something she had never tried. “Thanks for caring,” she said quietly into his ear. Then she made for the door and was gone before he could protest.

  Puerto Cabello

  Carabobo, Venezuela

  75 km west of Caracas

  Of those men, only a very small group of officers knew what we were going to do that night, the troops didn’t know a thing. In other words, their superiors had decided these men would risk their lives for a political enterprise about which they knew nothing.

  Hugo Chávez said those words. He had been talking about the night he had tried to overthrow the government by force in ’92, but Carreño thought it odd how they could have applied to what had just happened on the dock. El comandante truly had been a prophet even if God had struck him down too early.

  The truck bounced under him as Carreño sliced into the Cohiba with a stainless-steel cutter, put the tobacco roll to his mouth, and lit it off with a small torch. All three objects were gifts from the Castros, which was fitting. Venezuela had kept Cuba’s economy afloat on a sea of free oil for almost two decades. Free cigars and the tools to properly enjoy them were all they could offer their patrons in return for financial salvation.

  His friendship with the revolutionary brothers had paid Carreño other dividends over the years. The Cuban intelligence service had performed the occasional service, improved his standing with his superiors, at least the ones who weren’t rivals. He had cleared those lesser men out of his path, sweeping them aside through brazen operations against the Americans that had made his political enemies look like fools.

  His operational record had been perfect until that single failure, that one exception that still rankled. His influence in the government now would be second only to Avila’s had that little operation gone right. That fool Rhead had been drunk on his own ego and swallowed the information that Carreño had fed him without question. He had led the CIA station chief like a chicken to the axman’s stump. Avila had wanted an American intelligence officer in custody . . . no more randomly accusing Americans who worked at the embassy of espionage as a public distraction from the government’s failures or to earn a bit of momentary support from the masses. A live CIA officer, provably a spy, in jail, undergoing a trial that would have lasted months would have given Avila a more lasting card to play.

  What had gone wrong that night, Carreño still wasn’t sure. Rhead hadn’t shown for the meeting on the bridge over the Guaire River and the Venezuelan had no idea who the woman was who had come in his place. She’d stood under the streetlamp where he couldn’t see her face. It had unnerved him for the briefest moment and in an instant he’d made a single error, waving the woman over instead of giving her the appropriate signal. She’d caught it and she had run faster than anyone Carreño had ever seen in his life. Two dozen men hadn’t been able to catch her on foot and a dozen more in cars had lost her in the Caracas streets.

  The operation had revealed Carreño for the double agent he’d played for more than a year. Rhead was a fool but his CIA superiors were not. They recalled him a few months later, and most of his staff were gone by the summer. The SEBIN lost their window into the CIA’s operations in the country. They went totally, utterly blind and even the Cubans hadn’t been able to help them change that for the last year. He didn’t know who was running CIA operations in his country now but whoever had taken charge was very, very good. His people were watching the embassy, using every resource they had but the Americans were making no mistakes. An entire year’s work and Carreño was no closer to prying open the CIA’s networks now than he had been at the beginning.

  Avila was still angry with him for that failure and that wouldn’t change until he could show el presidente something that satisfied him. Close ties with the Castros kept Avila from firing him, but not from assigning him the occasional duty like this one, which was beneath him. This operation with the Iranians—this could give him that success he needed to squelch Avila’s anger, but he should have been overseeing it from a distance, staying just close enough to move the pieces but far enough away that he could blame failure on some junior officer. Instead, he’d had to stand there watching dockworkers unload cargoes of scrap metal, fertilizer, and tractor parts, all legitimate goods that happened to be in the way of the containers he actually cared about. A recruit could’ve done it but Avila justified the assignment by claiming the national interest was far too important to entrust to anyone but his chief spy.

  He took another long drag on the Cohiba and let the smoke mix with the anger in his chest. They were minutes from the facility now and the real work could begin. Ahmadi had been right about one thing—if this operation came off well, this truly would end up the most important cargo ever unloaded onto a Venezuelan dock. And as the Iranian had predicted, Avila had approved using Venezuelan men and tools to unload the cargo without question. Carreño wasn’t entirely unsympathetic to how the operation would end for them, but perhaps Chávez was speaking to him now, telling him that every man had his role to play. For some, they would do their part, never really knowing why they had been called to give their lives in the service of their country. Perhaps that gave their sacrifice some noblility . . . they fulfilled their duties through faith alone and not for any sure knowledge of what the purpose of their lives really was. Didn’t God ask the same? Perhaps that’s why he had taken Chávez too young, so the man’s words could come back to Carreño this very day, to help him endure to the end and teach him patience at the same time.

  The Venezu
elan intelligence chief would have to ponder that. He didn’t believe that the Iranians really worshipped the same God, doubted they believed it either, but someone above had blessed this operation. Despite the mistakes Ahmadi’s people had made, letting their ship get taken by savages, they were still so very close to the end. He had just a few more days to endure; this unpleasant business would be short, and in his pocket there was no shortage of Cohibas to help him pass the time. Then Avila would have no more reason to ever assign him such duties again despite his position . . . and perhaps one day he would replace Avila in the Palacio de Miraflores. That alone would make this all worth it.

  Autopista Valencia/Route 1

  Puerto Cabello

  Carabobo, Venezuela

  200 km west of Caracas

  Three hours behind the wheel revealed more of the country than Kyra had seen during the six months of her first tour and she felt the resentment toward her former station chief rising with each mile. This was a beautiful land, with large stretches that looked so much like the James River Valley, where she’d spent her childhood. Only the small shantytowns that stood every few miles along the roadside reminded her that this was not home.

  The freeway turned north at the town of Valencia and carried her toward the ocean for twenty miles, then turned east, bending back toward Puerto Cabello. The Atlantic met the shoreline only a few hundred yards to her left and the port town finally opened up before her five minutes after the eastward bend.

  The architecture of the city was unremarkable, mostly low buildings of old concrete and brick with no semblance of any coherent design to the whole. A few high-rise buildings towered above the rest in the northern district that jutted out into the bay on an angular delta. The twilight sun did nothing to improve the look, with harsh shadows and darkening faces on the buildings giving the scene a threatening look . . . or maybe she was just projecting her own thoughts on what was an average town. There was no doubt that the bullet that had torn up Kyra’s arm had stripped away the love she’d once felt for this country. She had no trouble believing that the cities, the actual buildings themselves hated her as much as the people seemed to in her mind.

  Kyra used one hand to extract a smartphone from the military pack she’d confiscated in the garage. She placed the Bluetooth headset in her ear and told the phone to call Mills’s office.

  U.S. Embassy

  Caracas, Venezuela

  The phone took its own good time connecting the call and encrypting the feed, long enough that Jon was sure Kyra would be getting impatient. “You’re not there yet,” he finally said without preamble.

  “Are you tracking me?” Kyra asked

  “Of course. There’s not a phone made these days that doesn’t have GPS.”

  “How’s the scenery?” Marisa asked, leaning close over Jon’s shoulder. He didn’t move.

  “Jon thought Caracas was ugly,” Kyra said. “This is worse.” She held up her phone and switched on the video, streaming the feed to him for several seconds, then turned off the camera.

  “I’ve slept in worse places. You’ll survive,” he assured her.

  “We’ve scoped out some possible sites for you to leave the truck and sent them to your phone,” Marisa cut in. “The freeway should take you around the docks to the south, then curve back to the northeast. Imagery says the Markarid is docked at a quay in the port’s north end. Stay on the highway after you pass the port and you’ll go north past a fuel storage field. There’s a delta on the other side of that where you can park. Don’t go past it if you don’t find a good spot . . . there’s a naval base just up the road.”

  “Marvelous.” She’d be within spitting distance of the Venezuelan military. Kyra pressed another button and the phone displayed an overhead map, her location marked by a moving blue dot. “What’s the distance to the target?” Kyra asked.

  “About a half mile across the water,” Marisa said. “Walking around the beach, probably twice that.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Kyra agreed.

  “Don’t be afraid to bag it and come home,” Jon offered.

  “It’s a little late for that, Jon.”

  “It’s never too late to walk away from stupid,” he said.

  Embassy Suites Hotel

  Valencia, Carabobo, Venezuela

  32 km south of Puerto Cabello

  “Enter.”

  Elham pulled the door open and walked past the SEBIN guards who had kept him in the hall for the last ten minutes. He felt no contempt for those men. He had stood a post his share of times for men not worth protecting and he was sure the soldiers outside felt the same about Ahmadi.

  Ahmadi’s suite was the largest in the hotel and at least as large as Elham’s home at the military base back in Tehran. The decor was suited to Western tastes, of course, but Ahmadi hid his distaste masterfully if he felt any. The doctor sat at a square dining table, moving sausages onto a plate already filled with pastries and polenta. He had forgone water for wine to drink and a small bowl of quesillo flan sat by his plate. The civilian was a man at ease in these surroundings.

  “Asr be kheyr, Sargord Elham. Or perhaps sobh be kheyr?” Ahmadi welcomed him.

  Elham looked at his watch. “Sobh be kheyr. It is past midnight.”

  “Yes. The jet lag never seems to work in our favor, does it? We’ll pay for that come the morning,” Ahmadi mused. “Would you care for some breakfast?” He waved his knife over the food.

  “No, thank you.” He and his men had finished the last of the lavash bread, feta cheese, and quince jam they’d found in the Markarid’s small mess hall before leaving the dockyard a few hours before. It was a small meal, the last one they’d have before having to inflict Venezuelan food on their stomachs. He was in no hurry to do that.

  “I presume the convoy has arrived?” Ahmadi asked.

  “On schedule,” Elham confirmed. “Carreño’s men are surprisingly efficient, if unhappy about working under our guidance.”

  “‘Our guidance,’” Ahmadi said, smiling as he pronounced each word, sarcasm in his tone. “I was not aware that soldiers had such talents for diplomatic words.”

  “It’s a necessity. The Quds Force spends much of its time training foreign fighters,” Elham told him. “Teaching requires a certain skill with language. Students learn best when they feel valued and respected.”

  “Indeed,” Ahmadi replied. “You finished your review of the security of the operation?”

  “Unbreached,” Elham said. Except for your order to throw that pirate overboard. Ahmadi’s cruelty repulsed him. Elham had done some repellent things in his time, but out of duty alone. The civilian’s choice to torture the Somali had been pure indulgence. What do you truly care for security? Only that you’re not embarrassed. He didn’t say it . . . that need for diplomatic language again. “The cargo arrived at the facility. I watched them secure it before leaving to come to you. The Markarid has a nominal security detail aboard and the dock has been emptied. Carreño has refused to let any of the longshoreman near the ship until we can guarantee there is no residual danger to his countrymen. That will require some diplomacy of its own.”

  “Irrelevant,” Ahmadi replied. “I could not care less what happens to the rest of the cargo. But I will have another crew flown here and they can take the Markarid home again. What did you do with your unwanted guests?”

  “We loaded them into a cargo container and moved it into the warehouse by the dock. Our hosts are arranging a train to carry the container to a suitable site for disposal, far from here. Carreño has promised to wrap up that detail, not by choice of course,” Elham replied. “But we have another problem.”

  “Oh?”

  “Some of the longshoremen are sick. Some of my men suffered the same problem during the voyage but they recovered. I can’t say whether the same will be true for these men.”

  “You think
they should be eliminated?” Ahmadi asked.

  “Security hinges on the details. The best way to manage some risks is simply to never take them.” Like throwing sick pirates overboard in life rafts, he thought but decided not to say. “Others are easily solved, if one is prepared to take steps from which other men shrink. The longshoremen need to be secured for the long term, certainly. Of course, it’s possible that their medical condition might solve the problem for us. If not, their executions might be necessary.”

  “You sound unhappy about that,” Ahmadi observed.

  “I do what duty requires,” Elham answered him. “Whether I enjoy it is unimportant.”

  “And Carreño is unwilling, no doubt. You need me to come.”

  Elham nodded. “Carreño will be unpleasant to manage on this. We secured his people with the rest of our guests, and I warn you that the smell is both quite impressive and unmistakable. We got to enjoy it for most of the voyage. I will not be sorry to see this particular problem behind us.”

  “On that we agree.” Ahmadi wiped his mouth with the napkin and tossed it onto the emptied plate. “Very well. Tell the guards to bring the car.”

  The Puerto Cabello Dockyard

  “That’s it,” Kyra said. She was lying prone behind the tree line, looking though a Leupold spotter’s scope from her bag mounted on a small tripod. The Markarid was surprisingly large given the distance, a testament to how long the cargo ship truly was. Half of the space between her and the vessel was Atlantic water, the other half sand and scrub, nothing to obstruct the view. Kyra held her phone up so she could see the screen next to the ship docked in the far distance and flipped through the color photographs, swiping through them with her finger. The vessel matched the pictures down to the rust pattern on the hull.

  An adaptor cable connected the scope with her phone, which was streaming the video to Jon. “The name in big English letters is kind of a giveaway,” Jon said in her ear.

  “The international language of commerce. Convenient,” she said. Staring through the optic, she panned from the ship’s fo’c’sle aft, then stopped and swore quietly. “Check out the ship’s island. You see that?”