“Marisa, it’s Kathy Cooke.”
“Madam Director,” Marisa acknowledged. “We have a situation developing down here, ma’am . . . a serious mob outside the embassy. They’ve already assaulted one of the state officers downstairs as he was trying to get in to work. It’s not a riot yet, but it’s close. They’re calling the rest of the staff, telling them to stay home. An hour ago there was nobody out there. Then the sun came up and now I’m looking at a thousand people.”
“You think Avila organized it?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me, ma’am,” Marisa replied. “Probably some Bolívars, maybe some of those gangbangers the government lets run loose. I can’t see any guns from my office window, but that doesn’t mean anything and could change in a hurry anyway. Whoever they are, we’re locked down here. The Marines aren’t letting anyone in or out.”
“So our friends can’t get back?” Cooke asked.
“They’re probably safer hunkered down in the woods right now. They couldn’t reach the gate, and even if they could the Marines wouldn’t open it now. Some idiot could make a run through it and we’d have Tehran ’79 all over again,” Marisa said.
“Can you get the team to a safe house?” Cooke asked.
“I don’t know,” Marisa replied. “Ma’am, it’s not just here. I’m holding a report from the ambassador. His people are getting calls from AmCits all over the place. People are getting roughed up, threatened, and a lot are calling to find out whether they should get out of the country. It’s not on the news back home?”
“Not yet,” Cooke told her. “I’ll check with SecState and see what he wants to do.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Marisa replied. “But if the SecState decides to evacuate the embassy, we’ll have to find another way out of the country for our friends.”
“We’re already thinking about that,” Cooke reassured her. “If all else fails, I have some good friends in a five-sided building who might want to give their people a chance to stretch their legs. Anyway, stay safe, keep your staff inside and we’ll get back to you ASAP.”
Cooke disconnected from the other end and Marisa cradled the receiver. Out at the fence, a young man determined to prove his machismo tried to scale the gate and a Marine moved forward, ready to bash the protester’s fingers with the butt of his rifle. The caraqueño protester jumped back and his friends screamed at the yanqui Marine, hands waving wildly in the air as another pyre of flags lit up behind them.
A mob is only as smart as the dumbest guy in it, Marisa thought. And there’s no shortage of dumb guys out there today.
CIA Director’s Office
Cooke hung up her own phone and leaned back. She hadn’t slept the night before . . . in fact, hadn’t slept in two days now and the fatigue was catching up with her. She’d done this before, but she wasn’t a young woman anymore. Discipline could only carry her so far, caffeine a little farther, and neither as far as they once did.
“Ma’am?” Drescher was at the door with one of his team behind him, but she couldn’t remember the younger man’s name.
“Come in?” Cooke asked, sounding more tired than she’d intended.
“Ma’am, this is Marcus Holland,” Drescher said. “He’s got something you should see.”
Holland looked up at Drescher, who just nodded his head at the CIA director. The young analyst swallowed, nervous. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, ma’am,” he said. “I work down in the Counterproliferation Center and I’m the primary analyst who’s been following Hossein Ahmadi. I’m the one who ID’d him on the video. I mean, I know his face. You should see my cube downstairs, ma’am. I’ve got so many pictures of him pinned up it looks like a shrine. All I need is some candles,” he stammered. “Anyway, I’ve been on that account for almost eleven years now—”
“That’s a long time to work one target, Mr. Holland,” Cooke observed, politely interrupting his narrative.
“He’s a big target, ma’am. He needs to go down, ma’am.”
“I agree. What do you have to show me?” Cooke asked. Her patience was fading along with her mental faculties.
The young analyst laid a folder down on the desk. “We always suspected Ahmadi was dealing with the Venezuelans but we’ve never had any evidence. But once we found that ship, I figured that he must have some other front companies that we don’t know about yet. So I started looking for them.” He pointed at the top sheet. “The MV Markarid is owned by IRISL. If we assume that Ahmadi has been shipping supplies and equipment using IRISL vessels, there have been five vessels that made the same trip in the last year. All of them sailed directly from Iran, some with no stops, some with just one or two. I tracked down which companies contracted those vessels to see whether there was a connection and found that they all secured bonds for those trips through one bank.”
“Which suggests that they could be front companies acting in collusion,” Cooke observed.
“Yes, ma’am,” Holland said, clearly pleased that the director had reached the same conclusion as he had. “I’m still trying to figure out where they fit into Ahmadi’s network, but I believe he probably created them just for this one series of operations. That would fit with his known method of operation. He compartmentalizes his operations pretty much like we do . . . pretty good tradecraft. Anyway, if we can get the bank records for some of those companies, I think we might be able to identify some of the accounts that Ahmadi is using to finance his proliferation network. We probably can’t get anything on the ones incorporated in Iran—”
“But two of them are incorporated in Venezuela,” Cooke said, reading off the report.
“Yes, ma’am. Joint companies, running their money through the Iran-Venezuela Joint Bank, another one of those pet partnerships that Hugo Chávez set up with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in the day.”
Cooke smiled, feeling a new rush of energy surge out of her bones into her body. “What do you need?”
It was Drescher who spoke up. “A call to the secretary of the treasury.”
“That, I can do.” Cooke picked up her phone again.
CAVIM Explosives Factory
Elham knelt down by the crude shelter on the hilltop. The shooter was here, he thought. How long was he watching? That a sniper had been in position long enough to build a shelter worried him. The Iranian had built such shelters himself, but only when he was planning on staying in place for days at a time. Once he had waited in a single spot for two weeks for his target to arrive. Patience was a sniper’s tool every bit as much as his rifle.
His squad was inside the tree line below, where the hill began to slope down sharply, but there was a good break in the trees here. He could see the entire facility in the valley below, including the chemical factory and the security hub a half mile to the south. He must have watched from here, Elham thought. In every other spot on the hill there were trees obstructing the view.
The soldier looked to his right, moved some of the grass with his hand, and found the spent brass he’d hoped the shooter had left behind. Sloppy, not to clean up. Or he had to leave in a hurry? Probably the latter, he decided. Once his partner’s security breach had been detected, he would have had to flee the site as soon as she was in the woods and he could no longer see her to provide cover fire.
Elham lifted the shell. It was very large, a .50-caliber, like his own Steyr. That was not a surprise. The shooter had killed several vehicles with his gun and nothing smaller would have done the job reliably at this distance.
But he didn’t kill anyone, Elham considered. Because he wasn’t skilled enough? Or he didn’t want to? A human would have presented a smaller target, but even hitting the front of a moving jeep at this distance took considerable skill. I think you didn’t want to hit anyone. Why? Elham wondered. Political considerations? Or personal? It had to be the former. A sniper who wouldn’t kill? That made no sense to him.
He must have lain pro
ne, the soldier thought. He pulled his Steyr rifle over his back, then laid himself into the dirt, pushing the weapon’s stock against his shoulder. Yes, here, like this, he thought. It was the most stable position to make an accurate shot over that distance. The angle is right. The berm was the rest for his gun. Elham raised his head, then rested his hand atop the stock and his chin on that. The feeling that swirled inside him was strange, like he understood this shooter, a man he’d never met. It told him nothing about where the other sniper was now, but he knew this other soldier had skills that he could respect.
One of the other soldiers came jogging up the hill, the incline steep enough that he covered the distance no faster than he could have done walking. The man was carrying some piece of metal in his hands. Elham pushed himself back onto his knees and stood, slinging the Steyr back over his shoulder. “What do you have?”
“An antenna.” The man handed over the equipment, a long, slender rod with several more rods screwed onto it at right angles down its length. “I recognize the type. The Americans used them in Iraq and Afghanistan during the wars.”
“Yes, I’ve seen them,” Elham agreed. “Did you find any other equipment?”
“A military pack with some survival equipment and a cell phone, halfway down the hill, that direction.” The soldier pointed away from the facility. “It’s a common model, available at any number of stores. It’s fairly new, no rust, so it’s not been there long enough for the rain or humidity to corrode it. We suspect the shooter lost it when he fled.”
“A common cell phone wouldn’t have worked with this,” Elham said, hefting the antenna. “You found no other communications gear?”
“No, sir. The cable connected to this was cut, and it looked like the antenna had been thrown down the hill, so he probably took any radio he had with him.”
Elham shrugged. “Probably right.”
“First the warehouse, now this,” the soldier remarked. “This entire operation is penetrated. The Americans or the Israelis could have an insider in the chemical factory.”
Elham considered the suggestion, broke it down in his mind. “I don’t think so. If they had someone that close, they wouldn’t have needed to send an operative into the base to the security hub. No, if they have an asset inside the program, it’s not someone that close. But there has been a serious breach, that much is true.”
“Do you think setting that pirate adrift somehow led them to this site?”
Elham considered the question. “I can’t imagine how anyone could have connected the two, but stranger things have happened before.”
The soldier scanned the hilltop. “I can’t believe the SEBIN didn’t patrol up here. You can see the entire valley floor from here.”
“Yes,” Elham replied. “They probably suspected that the trees provided enough cover to make it unsuitable as a surveillance site.”
“Fools,” the soldier spat. “They have no one who thinks like a real sniper. I’d sleep in the trees if I had to.”
“Agreed,” Elham told him. “Finish the sweep and let’s start down. It’ll be growing dark soon.”
“Yes, sir.”
Puerto Cabello, Venezuela
Kyra sat in the truck cab, the iPad on her lap and plugged into the truck’s charger. The video file seemed endless. There had been thirty-two cameras and it turned out that twenty-five of them were positioned in the facility’s interior . . . the SEBIN had mounted more cameras inside the various buildings than out. They were more worried about their own people than they were about anyone coming in from the outside, she realized.
Kyra looked at the digital clock on the truck radio. It was late in the afternoon now, Jon was trying to get a cellular signal long enough to make a call and had been working on that task on and off since breakfast, muttering to himself most of the time. Some of his ramblings had contained a few choice profanities that Kyra swore to remember and deploy at some appropriate future moment.
She turned back to the iPad. She’d scrubbed through more than half the footage now. Most of it was mundane, images of offices and entranceways, many of which were empty. Other cameras had captured large industrial spaces, filled with valves and pumps with workers milling around the machines.
After another hour of tedium, Kyra reached the end of yet another camera’s feed, the twenty-first, and she began to fear that she’d captured nothing useful. Maybe they didn’t have a camera on the cargo? she thought. It was possible that the cargo was so sensitive that Carreño and his masters didn’t want any record at all—
The next clip of footage began to play out on the iPad screen.
That’s it.
“Jon?” she called, her voice quavering.
Jon clambered out of the back and took his place in the driver’s seat. Kyra handed him the iPad. He stared at the screen, no expression on his face.
“What now?” she asked.
“We find a phone,” Jon said.
• • •
Kyra reached up and tested the ledge. It didn’t move and she carefully put her entire weight on it, lest Jon’s ascent had weakened it. The stone held and she looked down for a toehold large enough for her boot. “When we were in China, I seem to recall that you told me that going out on the street was a stupid idea,” Kyra offered. “How’s this any different?”
“When we were in China, you didn’t speak the language and there were actual streets with people on them,” Jon answered.
Kyra only grunted in response, shifted her satchel to the other shoulder, and took his hand so he could help her clamber up the outcropping. The trees had finally given way to a steep hillside whose surface was rocky enough that only weeds could grow on it. She turned back and saw the abandoned string of buildings where they had left the truck, at least two miles away now. They had stayed inside the woods, where the canopy of the trees would give them cover from an air search. Only one helicopter had flown over and that at least a mile to the east. She had questioned the wisdom of leaving on foot, but Jon worried that their truck would be identifiable. It would also restrict their travel to roads where the SEBIN were more likely to be looking. Kyra had found no serious problems with his logic but her body was arguing the decision now all the same.
Another ten minutes’ climb brought them to the summit. Puerto Cabello appeared to the north, maybe five miles distant. “Try it now,” Jon suggested.
Kyra pulled her phone, turned it on, and stared at the screen. “One bar,” she advised. “Better than none.” She pressed a button. The unit dialed but the call refused to connect the first time, then the second, finally getting through on the third.
“This is Quiver.” The encryption almost hid the anxious tone in Marisa’s voice.
“Quiver, this is Arrowhead.”
“Good to hear from you, Arrowhead. A lot of people are worried about you two.”
“We’re good,” Kyra said. “We also have the intel from the facility and think we’ve identified the cargo.”
“Can you transmit it from your location?”
“Unlikely,” Kyra told her. “The signal here is weak and it was a two-hour hike to reach this position. I’ll be surprised if the signal holds long enough to transmit the whole file.”
“Where’s your comms gear?” Marisa asked.
“Back at the CAVIM site. We didn’t have to time to recover it before we had to bug out.”
“Understood. Can you get me anything useful?” Marisa asked.
“Maybe some screen shots?” Kyra offered the phone to Jon, then dug the iPad out of her satchel.
“What did you find?” Marisa asked.
“Quiver, Sherlock. It’s a nuke,” Jon said. “One warhead, partially disassembled.”
U.S. Embassy
Caracas, Venezuela
Marisa stared at the monitor on her desk as the image from Kyra’s iPad resolved itself slowly in he
r browser. The CAVIM security camera had been mounted high in the corner of the room, facing toward the center of a large machine shop stocked with drill presses and lathes and other advanced tools she couldn’t identify. In the room’s middle was a large stainless-steel table mounted on wheels. The table was clear except for a conical device, partially assembled, parts lying around it in organized fashion.
Dear God in heaven, she thought; whether this was the start of a prayer she wasn’t sure.
Puerto Cabello, Venezuela
“We’ll still need the full video,” Marisa finally advised after more than a minute’s wait. “Otherwise Avila will just claim that we photoshopped the images.”
“We’re sitting on twenty gigabytes of security footage from the CAVIM site,” Kyra said, taking the phone back from Jon. “Maybe we can load up and head into Puerto Cabello or some other town . . . find an Internet café—”
“I’d advise against that,” Marisa said. “I don’t think a pair of Anglos are going to get a warm welcome in any major city at the moment and I don’t want to risk losing the footage to a street mob.”
“I guess the word got out about the op,” Jon remarked, leaning in to listen on the small speaker.
“Not the op you’re thinking,” Marisa corrected him. “The White House leaked the footage that Arrowhead recorded in the warehouse and CNN put it on the national news. You can thank the national security adviser for the chaos at the facility last night.”
Kyra snarled, too angry to even utter a proper curse. “Any chance we can make it back to the embassy?”
“Don’t even try and that’s an order. The barbarians are at the gates. There’s a mob outside that’s already assaulted one Foreign Service officer and the Marines are looking for a fight. The ambassador is going to order nonessential embassy personnel back to the States if it gets any worse, but the mob isn’t letting anyone out so the DoD is prepping to evacuate everyone by helicopter if the order comes down. The rest of us are banned from leaving the compound. We’re sleeping on couches here. All other AmCits have been advised to leave the country and more than a few tourists are sitting in holding cells. Avila’s people have even arrested some journalists. So I don’t think it’ll end well if you show your faces out there. Just hold your position and check back every four hours. We’ll figure something out. You still have enough gear to last for a while?”
Cold Shot: A Novel Page 22
