The Deceivers

by Alex Berenson

  Empty gestures seemed to be all Wells had.

  Wells had told Tarnes about the safe in the apartment in El Amparo, of course. Under normal circumstances, the agency would have sent in a safecracker. But a field op from Bogotá Station had checked out the building the day before and reported detectives were talking to residents. Asking the Colombian Ministry of the Interior directly about the killings would be a mistake. As a rule, the CIA didn’t much care about street crime in Bogotá. Showing interest in this shooting would raise unanswerable questions.

  Guerro’s death was different. He was an American citizen. The Colombians would expect the United States to be interested in what had happened to him. The Bogotá cops had told their FBI liaison they believed Guerro had been alive when he got into the taxi, but the cabdriver who dropped Guerro’s body at the hospital was not a suspect. They’d also said they believed the murder might be tied to the killings of two men in a slum nearby.

  The cops figured if the shootings were connected, they resulted from a drug deal gone wrong. Guerro had gone to El Amparo for coke, wound up in a firefight. The fact Guerro wasn’t carrying a pistol when he was delivered to the hospital didn’t bother the police. They assumed he’d ditched it before he got in the cab.

  The possible connection with Guerro meant that the cops were showing more interest in the El Amparo murders than they typically did in a slum shooting. Thus, the door-to-door interviews in the building. Still, Wells figured he was safe. As far as he knew, only three people had gotten a good look at him: the taxi driver, the third drug dealer, and Elena. The cabbie had kept his mouth shut so far, no doubt hoping for more money. The other two had their own reasons to keep quiet.

  Even so, with the cops still investigating and residents on edge, Wells and Tarnes thought trying to crack the safe would be a mistake for now. Especially since as far as they knew Frietas hadn’t been to the safe house in months. Wells and Coyle would have to look for answers in Quito first.

  Now they crossed Avenida 12 de Octubre, a wide, traffic-choked boulevard, and walked down a hilly, tree-lined street flanked by walled homes on both sides. The sidewalks were crumbling, but the neighborhood reflected Quito’s gentrification. A new apartment building rose beside a salon advertising organic facials and a vegan restaurant whose windows revealed communal tables made of driftwood.

  “Quito,” Coyle said.

  “Yeah, who knew?”

  “Frietas lives around here?”

  “Next block. But he doesn’t seem to be home.”

  Wells explained he’d arrived in Quito the afternoon before, picked up the car and a pistol from the CIA station here. He spent the morning watching the house. Frietas’s wife had left around 9 a.m. But Wells saw no evidence of Frietas. The NSA said his phones were still dark.

  “You have a plan to find him? Knock on his door tonight?”

  “Let’s wait on that. Start with the Central Bank in the morning. You call, ask for an appointment.”

  “Why would he see me? If he’s deputy director for money laundering, or whatever?”

  “Because you’re a Harvard professor researching South American central banks. His name came up as a regional expert. Everyone loves Hah-vahd.”

  “You look at me, you think Harvard professor?”

  “You meet him, great. If not, at least you find out if he’s at the office, give us a chance to follow him home or wherever. I’m gonna watch the house again in the morning. With any luck, I’ll see him. Or a chance to get inside easy. In the afternoon, we’ll knock on doors, talk to the neighbors. If he’s around, someone will know.”

  “They’ll tell us because . . . ?”

  “Because we’re investigators from New York that a nameless U.S. company has hired to find Mr. Frietas.”

  Wells handed Coyle a photo identification from Kroll, a high-end private security company. It identified him as William Coil, and it came with a New York State driver’s license to match. Wells had his own badge and license. All courtesy of Tarnes.

  Coyle flipped the identification back and forth in his hand. “Still seems like a long shot.”

  “Only takes one person who feels like talking. Anyway, if we strike out on that, we’ll maybe knock on his door, see if his wife feels like chatting. Somebody knows where he is. Or, at least, when he went missing.”

  “What’s the wife’s name?”

  “Graciela. I got a decent look at her this morning. For a woman with a missing husband, she was awfully dry-eyed. This is her, by the way.” Wells showed a photo of Graciela, a tall, hard-looking woman with a helmet of black hair and deep-set eyes.

  “I’m guessing Elena didn’t look like that. Maybe Graciela thinks Hector took off with her.”

  “Or she knows he’s laundering drug money and isn’t surprised he got hit. Their house is nice. Nicer than it should be. It’s up here, see for yourself.”

  They turned left onto Calle José Tamayo, a quiet street that sloped southwest toward the big park that held Ecuador’s national museum. Frietas’s house, number 318, was a tall two-story, set back behind an eight-foot-high brick wall topped with steel spikes. A heavy gate protected a narrow driveway along the edge of the property. A big gray Mercedes sedan was visible inside. Behind the wall, a dog barked loudly. Not the over-the-top security Wells had seen in Bogotá, but more than the other houses on the block.

  “What’s Graciela do?” Coyle said.

  “Statistician in the Ministry of Public Health.”

  “Nobody’s paying for that house on a bureaucrat’s salary. Or even two bureaucrats’.”

  Wells couldn’t disagree. Frietas depressed him before they’d ever met. The guy was an adulterer and most likely a money launderer. Fine. Wells wasn’t winning any humanitarian prizes either.

  What Frietas didn’t seem to be was a terrorist. The NSA had found no links between Frietas and Muslim terror groups. His bank accounts, at least the two the NSA and Treasury had found, had about one-point-three million dollars in them total. He was rich, but not cartel rich. He hadn’t touched the money in the last few days.

  In fact, the accounts showed no unusual cash withdrawals in the last couple years. The big expenses were his mortgage, which ran six thousand dollars a month, and two monthly automated transfers of fifteen hundred dollars each to Autolider Ecuador, which turned out to be a Mercedes dealership in northern Quito.

  Frietas wasn’t paying those bills on his Central Bank salary. Instead, every so often, he added forty or fifty thousand dollars to the account. The big exception came a year before when he’d added nine hundred fifty thousand dollars to one of them in one big cash deposit. That was by far the biggest deposit he’d ever made. Had he been paid for laundering? Skimmed from a cartel?

  In his hours watching Frietas’s house, Wells had seen no other surveillance, no black SUVs making slow loops, no drones whirring. No one cared about Hector Frietas. Aside from Frietas’s boasts to Enrique Martinez and Elena, Wells had no evidence Frietas had anything to tell the CIA. Maybe Frietas had found himself in trouble and decided his best way out was to scam the United States by blowing up the importance of some tidbit he’d overheard. A dumb move, but desperate people made dumb moves. Maybe he’d thought better of the idea and taken off.

  Or maybe whoever was after him had caught him and dumped him in the jungle.

  Coyle seemed to read Wells’s mind. “I know I’m new at this, John, but I don’t see how this guy plays.”

  If Frietas had been from Colombia, Wells could have asked Tarnes to have the FBI liaisons in Bogotá check with the Colombian intel agencies about him. But Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, was an old-school leftist who couldn’t stand the United States. When Fidel Castro died, Correa oversaw a memorial service with full color guard honors. Whatever they might know about Frietas, the Ecuadorian security forces wouldn’t do American investigators any favors.


  Wells and Coyle were stuck going door-to-door.

  The next day was a slog. At the bank, Frietas’s assistant made Coyle wait for ninety minutes, then told him that Frietas was traveling. No, she didn’t know where he’d gone. Or when he’d be back. Frietas didn’t answer emails. His work and phone voice mails were jammed and not taking messages. Back on José Tamayo, Wells watched as Frietas’s wife emerged from the house, locked up, went to work. Coyle came back around noon, and he and Wells knocked on doors.

  But the neighbors seemed unimpressed, or maybe too impressed, with the Kroll badges. The few who would talk through their gates claimed they didn’t know much about the house at 318. The dog, it barked whenever I walked by. I didn’t slow down, a middle-aged woman five houses down said.

  Did you ever see anyone visiting?

  They kept to themselves.

  Late afternoon, two blocks down, a shopkeeper at a narrow bodega left over from an older, poorer Quito nodded at Frietas’s picture.

  “You know him?” Coyle said in Spanish.

  The shopkeeper was a small man who had pale brown skin, yellowed eyes, greasy black hair. He looked away, muttered at his dusty shelves.

  “He says his memory is as empty as his pockets. Poet and he don’t even know it.” Coyle fished a five-dollar bill out of his wallet, put it on the counter.

  The man looked at the bill. “Cinco?” he said softly. Wells laid a twenty beside it. The man tucked the money into his pocket, began what was a very involved story. Coyle listened, didn’t say much. Finally, the shopkeeper petered out, and Coyle turned to Wells.

  “Frietas was a drinker. Medium-heavy. Used to come in a couple times a week and buy aguardiente, the local liquor, those down there—” Coyle pointed at the two-hundred-milliliter bottles, small enough to tuck in a coat pocket, on the bottom shelf. “The kind you buy to suck down on the walk back to your house, before your wife sees. He was usually by himself. But maybe a year ago, he came in twice with a group. Not Ecuadorian. White.”

  “Some Ecuadorians are pretty white.”

  Coyle said something. The shopkeeper interrupted, waving his hands, excited for the first time. “He knows what his people look like. These weren’t from Ecuador. Anyway, they weren’t speaking Spanish—”

  “Inglés.”

  The shopkeeper shook his head. “Not English.”

  “Could it have been Arabic?” Wells offered some Arabic to the guy, received a blank look in return. “German? Alemán? Ich bin ein Berliner?” The shopkeeper shook his head. “Russian? Ya russkiy? Privyet? Spasibo?”

  This time, the shopkeeper murmured to Coyle.

  “He says maybe the last one. It was a year, he can’t be sure.”

  “These people, how many were there?”

  The guy tapped his head even before Coyle translated. Wells handed him another twenty-dollar bill, and he started talking again.

  “Two women, he thinks, and five or six men. They looked like us.”

  “Like us?”

  “Policía.” The guy held his hands wide and apart. “Soldados.”

  “Right. How could he be sure Frietas was with them? And did he ever ask Frietas about them?”

  A short question, a very long answer, with lots of gesturing toward the store shelves.

  “They came in together, they bought liquor together, aguardiente and vodka and wine, Frietas paid for all of it. This was over a period of at least a month, maybe two. It was a lot of money, so it stuck with him. Another time, two of them came in on a run without Frietas, and Frietas paid later. He did ask Frietas about them after, he hoped they’d come back. Frietas said they’d gone. That was all he said, and it looked like he didn’t want to talk about it, so that was it.”

  “When was the last time he saw Frietas?”

  The answer came back fast.

  “Maybe two weeks ago. He seemed excited. Nothing specific, he just seemed happy.”

  “Thanks.” Wells passed him one more twenty. “Anything else?”

  “Algo más?” Coyle said.

  “Nada.”

  The sun had vanished behind the fifteen-thousand-foot volcanoes west of the city when Wells and Coyle emerged onto Calle José Tamayo.

  “You got any good reasons why an Ecuadorian banker would hang with Russian soldiers?” Coyle said.

  “And maybe get paid by them, too.” Wells explained the huge deposit Frietas had made the year before. “Time to ask his wife.” Wells was sure now that Frietas wasn’t in Quito, much less at home. Guys like him didn’t just stop drinking.

  They walked back to 318. The dog wasn’t in the yard. A fish-eye security camera watched the front gate. Through its thick grille, Wells saw lights behind barred windows. He pushed a buzzer mounted next to the gate. Inside the house, the dog went wild with deep, throaty barks.

  No answer. Wells buzzed again.

  “Yes?” A woman’s voice. In English. Accented but understandable. “What do you want?”

  “We’re investigators. Looking for your husband.”

  “Investigators from where?”

  “New York.” Wells lifted the Kroll badge to the fish-eye.

  A pause.

  “You come. The other one stays outside.”

  “Racist,” Coyle muttered under his breath.

  The gate’s deadbolt shot back, echoing on the street.

  “You heavy,” Coyle said.

  “You know I’m not.” Wells had left his new pistol in the room safe. “She’s just nervous. Wait here.” Without waiting for Coyle’s answer, Wells pushed open the gate and stepped inside.

  The yard was long and narrow, stretching eighty feet between the side walls, and twenty-five from the gate to the front door. Wells pushed the gate shut. As it locked behind him, floodlights mounted on the corners of the house clicked on, revealing a landscaped garden with what looked like a koi pond on the left and small flowering trees with beautiful purple blossoms on the right.

  Wells lifted his hands, walked slowly down the path to the front door. The dog yammered. If it was as mean as it sounded, Graciela wouldn’t need any other weapon.

  When he was ten feet away, the door swung toward him. Graciela stood just inside the door, the dog next to her, a German shepherd, ninety pounds of fur and teeth. The shepherd lunged for Wells. Graciela needed all her weight to tug it back. She said something in Spanish, and the shepherd sat. Unwillingly. Its mouth still open.

  “Are you armed?”

  “No.”

  “Sit down. Now.” Precise, careful English, from years of language training. She wore a shapeless dress, and up close her face was solid, unattractive but dignified. Look at me or don’t, I don’t care.

  Wells went to a knee, his hands still up.

  “On your bottom. With your hands on top of your head.”

  A posture that would ensure Wells couldn’t escape if she unleashed the dog. Nonetheless, he sat.

  “You okay, John?” Coyle said from the street.

  Coyle might as well have been in another galaxy, for all the good he could do. Wells ignored him. Graciela stepped out of the house. She stopped when she was five feet away, the dog a foot closer. It opened its mouth wide and ran its big pink tongue over its lips. Like an offensive tackle at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

  Career stuck in a rut? Time to try something new?

  “What’s your name?” Wells said to the dog.

  “Rosa,” Graciela said.

  Rosa grunted and sat. Wells, also sitting, could see unmistakable proof Rosa was male. “Doesn’t that mean pink?”

  “Yes. My husband thought it would be funny. What is it you want?”

  Wells made himself ignore the shepherd. “Your husband called a mutual friend a few weeks ago. Said he had information he wanted to sell. I came down to see him, but he disappeared.”

&n
bsp; “Information for your company?”

  The truth seemed like the best option. “For the U.S. government.”

  “You said you were a private investigator.”

  “In this case, I’m working for the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  She shook her head. “Why would I talk to you?”

  The usual reasons. Money and favors. “Besides the fact that we’re trying to find your husband? We can pay if you help us figure out what he wanted to tell us.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Wells needed to control this conversation. He couldn’t do it sitting on his butt with an attack dog making eyes at him. “I promise, I’m here to talk. Nothing else. I’m going to get up now. Don’t sic the dog.” Before she could argue, Wells popped to his feet, his hands still on his head.

  Rosa growled, but Graciela held his leash.

  “Beautiful house,” Wells said. “You work for the Ministry of Health, yes? Your husband works for the Banco Central?”

  Her face tightened against the implicit question: How do you pay for it? Wells couldn’t tell yet if she wanted to protect Frietas or would turn on him.

  “You said CIA business?”

  “That’s right. You know, Hector has a girlfriend. Her name’s Elena.”

  Her smile didn’t make her any prettier. “Hector has lots of girlfriends.”

  “This one, he brought her to Bogotá with him. He owns an apartment there.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, I’ve seen it.”

  A long pause. “Do you think I stayed married to him for the money?” she finally said. “I was raised to believe that divorce is a sin. A mortal sin.”

  Even the Pope doesn’t think that anymore. “Ms. Frietas. The only reason I mention Elena is that I met her last week in Bogotá.” And when I say met, I mean tied up.