by Marton, Dana
The sprawling desk held an older model computer, a stack of loose papers, and a pile of green folders. She tried to scan the tabs without being too obvious, but the labels seemed to be code words, except for the one on top. The top folder was marked “Transport Log” in Spanish.
The colonel caught her looking and pushed the folders aside. He picked up Glenn’s photo, examined it, then lifted his gaze to hers, his expression unchanged. “Your information is incorrect.”
Okay, here came the stonewalling. She’d expected it. “Can I ask if you keep an arrest log?”
“Certainly, señorita.”
“Could you double-check for March first? Just in case.” She smiled. “Then if he’s not there, I can cross this off my list of things to check and move on to the next item. I’d really appreciate the help.”
The man turned to the outdated computer in front of him, his eyes on the small, gray monitor that extended a foot in the back. His fingers picked out the keys on the keyboard one by one.
When the computer beeped, he turned the bulky monitor toward her. “See for yourself.”
She ran down the list of names. A Hitler Ramírez, a Mussolini Contreras, a Kennedy Briceño, and two Elvises, among other names of historical figures and pop cultural icons, made her do a double take. Apparently, Venezuelan naming conventions leaned toward the famous and exotic instead of the traditional.
But the name she’d hoped to see wasn’t there.
“Perhaps he was processed on the following day?” Since he’d been picked up in the evening, after dinner.
The colonel began another search. He didn’t turn the monitor back toward him, so she could watch. He was running a general search for “Danning, Glenn” for all dates. She didn’t understand the full error message when it popped up in the middle of the screen, but she did understand the most important word: ilocalizable. Unable to locate.
The man leaned back in his chair. “I’m sorry, señorita. I wish I could help. We value tourists. My job is to keep everyone safe. Perhaps Mr. Danning left the country to continue his vacation in Brazil or on one of the islands?”
She held back a groan. The islands seemed to be everyone’s hobbyhorse, pushing the problems outside the borders. But before she could ask the colonel why Glenn would have decided to travel on without his luggage, without checking out of his hotel, a knock on the door interrupted them.
When a guardsman stepped inside, the colonel strode over to talk to him. They exchanged words in hushed, rapid Spanish.
Her language skills weren’t good enough to catch any of it, but Roberto watched them closely, even leaning toward them a little. Maybe he would share with her later.
She half turned, as if still looking at the computer screen, but reached for the stack of folders on the desk and opened the one on top, the transport log. She surreptitiously snapped a picture with her phone then turned the page and snapped another photo, but she didn’t get to page three. She had to close the folder and turn back as the colonel headed back to them.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, señorita?” He stepped back behind his desk.
Tell me the truth. But since the National Guard refused to acknowledge ever having seen Glenn, she couldn’t do much here for now. She thanked the man for his help, then walked out with Roberto.
“Did you catch any of what he was talking about with the guardsman?”
“An issue with some upcoming military parade.”
All right, so they weren’t going to gain much useful information here today. She’d just have to push on another front. She was going to find Glenn—wherever he was, whatever shape he was in. She refused to think that she might be too late.
“I think I’d like to see those parking garage security videos, after all,” she told Roberto as they drove out of the guarded parking lot.
“Not a problem.”
And it wasn’t. In less than half an hour, they were sitting in a small meeting room at Salazar Security Services.
Miranda watched the grainy footage on a wall monitor. Her heart rate picked up as Glenn stepped out of his rental car, tall, wide-shouldered, confident, and impeccably dressed. He looked very different from how she remembered him. Instead of an endearing nerd, he looked every inch the successful businessman.
He checked his phone on his way to the elevator, his posture relaxed. He didn’t look like he was expecting trouble. The camera outside the building recorded him walking down the sidewalk toward the restaurant. He didn’t meet anyone, at least not within camera range.
He returned an hour later, on his phone again as he walked. He was sending a message. That had to be his last communication, the email to his secretary.
He shoved the phone into his pocket when he finished, then he passed out of range of the first outside camera. Between that moment and when the second camera could have picked him up, he disappeared.
The car with the men who’d picked him up, according to Rami, hadn’t been recorded. Almost as if they’d known the exact spot to pull over to avoid surveillance.
“Could you please rewind?”
The security manager obliged her without a word.
She watched the footage again, this time looking at the traffic. “There,” she pointed at an unmarked black van, excitement surging through her.
Traffic flowed. The cars that appeared on the first exterior camera moved into the view of the second a moment later. But there was a delay with the van. It must have stopped for a couple of seconds in the blind spot between the two cameras.
She leaned forward. “Can you enlarge that?”
The manager did. Sadly, the image was too grainy to make out the faces in the front, or the license plate.
“It doesn’t look like an official National Guard vehicle,” Roberto observed.
“Could be an undercover car.”
“Could be,” he agreed. Then he added, “The colonel had no record of Danning in the system.”
“It’s possible that a couple of guardsmen picked him up to extort money, as you said. Off the books.”
Roberto didn’t respond.
She stared at the frozen image on the screen. Glenn had been taken by whoever was in the black van. Possibly the National Guard, who handily denied everything. She had no authority to conduct a search of their building complex in Caracas. She had no authority to request any documents.
This is what a dead end looked like, she thought, and wanted to kick the table leg in frustration. Instead, she asked the manager to save a still shot of the van and send it to her phone, which the man did without argument. Once again, she had a strong suspicion that she wouldn’t have seen anywhere near this level of cooperation without Roberto being present.
On the way down in the elevator, he asked her to lunch again. She agreed, insisting that they’d go back to Especiero.
But she didn’t find any new clues at the restaurant, no matter how carefully she observed the place and how many questions she asked the waitstaff.
After lunch, she talked Roberto into staking out the corner by the parking garage and talking to every single panhandler within view, which ate up the rest of the day. She was hoping for more information, more detail, but nobody seemed to know anything, not even for money, and neither Juan nor Rami had come back.
When Roberto returned her to the hotel at last, he asked to come up for a chat once again.
“I’m really tired.”
He raised a dark eyebrow. “There’s someone else.” His sexy lips pulled into a pout. “You’re a beautiful, intelligent woman. He’s a lucky man.”
“I’ve recently lost my husband.” She rolled the tightening muscles in her shoulders. Probably nobody else would think that two years ago was recently, but that was how she felt. Matthew, Abby, then the army incident—the last two years had been rough. Romance wasn’t on her radar. Not even, if she wanted to be hone
st with herself, no-strings-attached sex with a stranger.
“I’m sorry,” she said, then fled to the elevators, leaving Roberto staring after her.
After a long, hot shower relaxed her, Miranda ordered room service and downloaded the day’s photos from her phone to her laptop while she ate. As she’d suspected, the picture of the black van was unusable, no matter how much she played with contrast and brightness.
The photos she took of the National Guard transportation log weren’t much better quality. She’d held the phone at the wrong angle.
But maybe with some expert help . . .
She attached her three image files to an email and sent them to Bjorn, the in-house IT specialist at CPRU. Let’s see what the guy is made of. Time for a test.
Next she called Tyler Danning. After she identified herself, she began with an apology, “I’m sorry for calling this late.”
“Have you found my brother?”
She hesitated, then plowed ahead with the thought that had been swirling around in her head all day. “Are you familiar with the term forced disappearance?”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s an international human rights term for when someone is secretly kidnapped or imprisoned by a state or by someone with state authorization.”
A pause on the other end, then, “You mean like the CIA?”
“I meant the Venezuelan government.”
“But why?”
“Usually it’s done to place the abducted person outside of the law. If the government wants to question or even kill a member of the opposition or a foreign national with impunity, they make the person disappear. Then they claim no knowledge of the person’s whereabouts, so they can do whatever they mean to do in secret.”
Another long pause on the line. “It sounds like a spy novel.”
Maybe. But— “Can you think of any reason why the Venezuelan government would be interested in your brother?”
“Absolutely not.”
Frustration tightened her jaw. “Your brother’s life could depend on me having all available information.”
She could hear the deep breath Tyler drew before he came back with, “His disappearance has nothing to do with why he went there. People disappear in foreign countries all the time. Just find him.”
“I think he came here to do business.” His credit card had been used mostly in the industrial district and the business district, he’d been dressed for business, there was no record of him doing anything touristy. “Was he meeting heads of oil companies here? Why? Trying to sell them your products? For a collaboration?”
“That kind of information getting out and reaching the competition would kill the entire project,” Tyler snapped on the other end. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t repeat anything like that.”
“Is the project worth more than your brother’s life?” she pushed back, running out of patience.
“Look,” Tyler snarled, “the Venezuelan government is paranoid about US businesses interfering in their country. They think the US is trying to overthrow their government so US energy conglomerates can get their hands on Venezuelan oil. The energy industry is government controlled down there. The last thing they want is capitalist foreign companies grabbing their natural resources.”
A picture was beginning to emerge in Miranda’s head. “But if Glenn traveled as a tourist, how would the government know that he was here on a business trip?”
“They wouldn’t,” Tyler assured her with a dramatic sigh. “He set up his appointments very carefully. This was just a scouting trip, putting feelers out. Nobody knew why he went to Caracas except for executive-level management here at home, and the three people he was meeting there.”
“Do you have their names?”
“I contacted them already. The meetings had gone smoothly. Nothing unusual. None of them even knew that Glenn disappeared, until I called.”
“I want names, Tyler.”
“They stuck their necks out to meet with us. I don’t want to cause trouble for them.”
Maybe he was being thoughtful, or maybe he thought the project could be still salvaged. She couldn’t say he wasn’t right to be cautious. She did have Roberto shadowing her every step.
After a few more questions, including asking about Glenn’s returned personal effects, and receiving only the vaguest of answers, Miranda ended the call and, swallowing her frustration with the lack of progress, went to bed.
She slept restlessly, all her old nightmares coming back—Matthew dying on the battlefield, Abby, the other little girl, then herself, pulling the trigger. She woke to her laptop pinging at eight a.m., grateful for the end of the gruesome movie reel in her brain.
She rubbed a hand over her face, shook the last of the images from her head, then focused on the screen. Incoming email from Bjorn. He sent back her three photos digitally enhanced.
Miranda brought up the van photo. Still unusable.
The transport log from the National Guard popped up on her screen next. She scanned the first page, ran down the names. Another odd list: Bieber Gonzales, Leonardo Ruiz, a couple of Josés, an odd mixture of traditional and celebrity names. The second page was more of the same.
Except for the very last line.
The last person they identified only as Prisoner #786. Next to that, the transport log had one printed word: Guri. After that, somebody had handwritten Strictly Confidential.
She touched her fingertip to that last line on her screen. Prisoner #786 had been transported to Guri under heavy guard on March second. Excitement surged through her.
Prisoner #786 had to be Glenn.
She dressed in a hurry, packed her suitcase, and sailed downstairs.
Roberto was waiting for her in the lobby, leaning against the reception desk and flirting with the young woman behind it.
The smile slid off his face as he glanced at Miranda and the suitcase she was dragging. “Are you leaving?”
“Just the hotel.” She stepped up to the counter to check out. “I want to see more of your beautiful country. How do you feel about visiting the Guri Dam?”
He raised an eyebrow. “The dam is close to seven hundred kilometers from here.”
Sounded doable. “What does that mean in drive time?”
“Over ten hours, depending on road conditions.”
“I can go alone. I don’t want to waste your time.”
“Nonsense. I promised to help.” He reached up to rub his chin as he watched her. “Why don’t you walk back to the restaurant and have breakfast. I’ll grab an overnight bag for myself. I’ll be back by the time you’re finished.”
She hesitated. She was pretty sure he’d been assigned to her to keep an eye on her. But he was helpful, knew the language better than she did, definitely knew the roads better. He had a badge that could come in handy with getting answers at Guri. He hadn’t tried to impede her investigation yet. She could find no reason to refuse him.
She let her face relax into a smile. “All right. Breakfast would be great.” She paused for a second. “You wouldn’t know by any chance if there’s a National Guard outpost at Guri, would you?”
He had this look on his face, as if he was impressed with her for some reason. “Just a small outpost. The dam provides more than a third of the country’s power needs. It’s a strategic installation.”
Meaning, any damage to it would be a national security threat, so it needed protection. “I thought Venezuela was big on oil and gas.”
“The more hydroelectric energy we make for our own consumption, the more of the oil and the gas we can sell on the international market.”
That made sense.
While she had breakfast, she brought up the map again on her laptop and zoomed in as much as possible, using satellite images to scan Guri Lake and the dam. The area didn’t look like much, as far a
s population went, maybe a hundred houses altogether.
She kept coming back to the same small compound over and over. That had to be the National Guard outpost.
Once she found Glenn, she could contact the home office and the US government could exert pressure on the Venezuelan government to have him released. She refused to think of the alternative, that the only thing she’d find at Guri would be Glenn’s body.
Chapter 6
GLENN WASN’T AT Guri.
The commander denied any knowledge of him. While Falcon went off to make some phone calls, the commander personally escorted Miranda through the compound to show her that no Americans were being held there. He let her go wherever she wanted, seemingly a man with nothing to hide, yet the way he watched her made her skin crawl.
His men, on the other hand, gave her wide berth, avoiding eye contact as if instructed. If she tried to question them, they claimed not to know English, or not to understand her Spanish accent.
Every instinct she had said that the whole garrison was lying.
“What do you think?” Roberto asked as they left the outpost. “Back to Caracas?”
“No. I’m sure Glenn was here.”
“He’s not here now.”
“Which means they either killed him or he escaped.” She thought for a minute. “If he was killed, I’m not going to find him without cadaver dogs and a CSI team.” Her heart twisted. She pushed any thought of defeat away and looked up and down the road, her gaze settling on the dam.
Other than Guri Dam and the lake there wasn’t much here—forests and mountains in the distance. Most of the country’s population seemed to be concentrated in the north, the central and southern states kind of a no-man’s-land, save a few cities and towns here and there. “If he escaped, where did he go?”
“Toward the nearest airport?”
“They’d be looking for him at the airports. He’d know that. How far are we from Brazil?”
Roberto shrugged. “Another six hundred kilometers. The only major road between here and there is Route 10. It goes to Santa Elena de Uairén, right on the border.”
