by Noel Hynd
But on American soil, she didn’t want to live in constant fear. She resented the signs. Who the heck was going to make a bomb out of Scope and Pepsodent, anyway?
Alex took off her shoes, belt, and jacket and put them in one bin. Her computer came out of her backpack and went into another while the backpack itself went into a third. Then she dumped her wallet, change, keys, passport, and boarding pass into a fourth. Then she graduated to the hallowed grounds of a “five binner” as she dropped the black duffel bag stuffed with a week’s worth of clothes in the fifth.
A security person watched her uneasily, and she was ready for him to say something. She preempted him. “Why don’t we all just wear transparent plastic raincoats when we travel,” she said. “It would speed things up and make things much easier, wouldn’t it?”
He looked at her and muttered something about regulations. He was about to wave her through when a TSA agent stopped the screening counter.
“We’ll need to search this backpack,” he said to Alex. “Is this yours?
“What’s the problem?” she asked.
Whatever it was, it drew a second TSA person, a supervisor. They opened the bag and pulled the rest of her things off the carrier. How she longed right then to have a Federal ID, her old Treasury Department or FBI identification. But she was as naked and vulnerable as any other American.
The first agent reached in and pulled out a half-finished bottle of Diet 7-Up. He smiled, shrugged, and tossed it into a bin that was already overflowing with other half-dead plastics of liquid.
She smiled back. “Oops. Sorry,” Alex said.
“It happens all day,” the guy said. A job well done, that capture of a 7-Up bottle.
She repacked and pulled her backpack onto her shoulder.
What was the last thought of that song? Thank you, Lord, for thinking of me, but I think I’m doing fine.
Trouble was, Alex wasn’t so sure how her country was doing. Billions spent to inconvenience travelers, and where was the real fight against the real enemies of modern civilization? Just one woman’s opinion as she grabbed her duffel and hooked her backpack onto her left shoulder. She turned toward her gate.
At a newsstand on the way, she bought another drink and a paperback novel in Spanish, one of those Nobel Prize-winning South American works where the women turn into butterflies. Might as well get into the mood.
SIXTY-TWO
A few hours into the flight to Caracas, as the aircraft passed above the Caribbean, the pilot announced that passengers on the right of the plane could see Cuba. Alex glanced out her window, and sure enough, there it was, nestled in the blue water about a hundred miles to the east.
She had never been there, wished she’d be able to visit sometime, and took a long look as her plane passed. It was hard to believe the political issues at play. She felt sorry for the Cuban people, who had been under one oppressive regime or another for more than a century. When would the world again be able to celebrate the classic poetry of Jose Marti or the music of the modern-day Cuban trovador Silvio Rodriguez?
Christian missionaries were not allowed to visit the island, for example, even to bring clothing or medical assistance. The Cuban people deserved better, as did all the people of Central and South America. Having had a mother from Mexico, Alex felt very close to these people. She made a note to include them in her prayers.
The island passed. The jet continued its path southward over the Caribbean. Alex slipped into headphones and dozed. She missed Robert horribly. A wave of sadness remained, but at least she felt she was moving forward, starting to get a grip again on her life. She wondered how Ben was doing as well as her pals at the gym.
Note to self. Work my way back into basketball when and if I get back to Washington. She slipped off into a light nap.
She drifted. She opened her eyes. It had seemed like only a few minutes, but she had fallen asleep for the better part of an hour.
The plane was descending now into Maiquetia, Caracas’s airport. The airport was called that after the village that once stood there, rather than “Simon Bolivar International Airport,” its real name.
The aircraft went into a sharp bank as it angled in from the sea, with mountains on one side. The aisle-seat passenger in Alex’s row was an older woman who gave a nervous glance at her seatmate. She shook her head. “Scary, no?” she asked. She looked to Alex for comfort as well.
Alex smiled.
“And you haven’t flown into La Carlota,” the man in the middle seat said. He spoke with a Spanish accent.
“Where’s La Carlota?” Alex asked.
“The old downtown airport in Caracas. It’s mostly used for general aviation now. Coming in you’re almost kissing the Avila, the mountain range that forms the southern border of Caracas. As a young man I remember coming in there in fog. You felt the pilots were just sensing where the Avila was.”
Alex nodded and shook her head. The aircraft eased into a further descent.
“President Chavez often still flies out of there,” the other passenger said. “Hopefully one day his pilot will get it wrong.”
Moments later, they were on the ground, taxiing to the terminal.
Maiquetia airport was astonishingly modern. Alex retrieved her bags and cleared customs easily. Outside the gates, the steamy Venezuelan heat was waiting for her. She was struck by the contrast with Kiev, where everything had been frozen. The clothing she had worn from New York was already uncomfortably heavy.
She scanned a crowd waiting for arriving passengers. There was a well-dressed man with a sign that had her name on it.
Alex approached him in Spanish. “ Buenas tardes. Soy Senorita LaDuca. ”
“ Mucho gusto,” he answered.
They continued in Spanish. Alex slipped into the flow of it with ease.
“I’m Jose Mardariaga of the Mardariaga limousine service,” he said. “I’ve been sent by Senor Collins to pick you up. Let me take your bags.”
The man took her to a new Lexus with air conditioning that worked. A blessing.
“Is it always this hot this time of year?” she asked, making conversation.
“Down here on the coast, si, claro! ” Senor Mardariaga said. “But not in Caracas, which is up high. The Spaniards usually built their colonial capitals in the mountains away from the coast for this reason. For instance in Chile, I’m a Chilean myself, the port is El Paraiso, but the capital of Santiago de Chile is inland, in the mountains.”
“Nice airport.”
“There’s even a TGI Friday’s,” the driver said, as if that was the height of current civilization. Perhaps it was, Alex reflected.
“Chavez’s doing?” she asked.
“Not a bit of it! The project of replacing the old airport terminal predates him.”
Hearing him, Alex thought back to her phone conversation with her friend Don Tomas, just before leaving. He had discussed attitudes toward Hugo Chavez based on social class.
Venezuelan sociologists traditionally divided society into five classes. A, B, C, D, and E. A were the rich, B were those who could have an American middle-class lifestyle, C were people what the Venezuelans called “middle class” but had an American lower-middle-class lifestyle at best. D’s were working class people with very modest income but steady work, and E’s were the people on the bottom.
Seventy percent of Venezuelans were D’s and E’s. They were Chavez’s unconditional supporters. The C’s were torn, but many were anti-Chavez, if for no other reason than the classic desire of their class to seek to distinguish itself from the classes below. The A’s and B’s loathed Chavez. The B’s were in the toughest position, because this was the country they were stuck with. The A’s, the truly wealthy, already had their bolt-holes in Miami and their assets stashed in American and Swiss banks.
Clearly, Alex thought, her driver with his own limousine service was an anti-Chavez C.
The ride to the city went quickly. Alex came out of her daydream as they went through a tunnel
, and then on the other side they were on the expressway that ran the length of the long, narrow city. Before her, Alex saw high-rise office buildings and, on some of the hills, obvious condos. But on other hills there were cinderblock shacks piled one on top of the other.
“ Estoy curiosa.?Donde esta Petrare? ” Alex asked, remembering Don Tomas’s description of the city. Where’s Petrare?
“That hill right in front, in the distance. You won’t want to go there,” the driver said.
“I know,” she said. “A friend warned me.”
The car turned off the elevated freeway onto the parallel street running under it. The driver executed a hair-raising U-turn in the middle of traffic, then turned right up a well-manicured driveway with palms in the center strip.
The Lexus came to a plaza with a white, low-lying building and stopped at the door. “ El Tamanaco.” the driver announced. “ Su hotel , Senorita.”
Alex checked in. She found a suitcase waiting for her in her room, courtesy of Sam and his operatives. Jungle clothing and a weapon. Shirts, hiking boots, shorts, a rain slicker, and a Beretta. She tried things on. She checked the weapon. She also found a small digital camera and three extra memory cards. A thoughtful addition.
She showered, ordered a light meal from room service, and realized she was exhausted. Toward ten in the evening, she collapsed into bed and slept.
SIXTY-THREE
T he meeting at the Justice Ministry in Rome had not gone exactly the way Rizzo had planned. He had excluded his assistant DiPetri, the worthless one, because why should the worthless one be allowed to show up when the laurels were being awarded? The worthless one hadn’t done anything helpful, for example, except possibly just keeping his foolish hands out of the way. So why should he get any credit?
But twenty minutes into the meeting with the minister, Rizzo wished he had brought DiPetri along to take some of the heat. In response to the minister’s questions, Rizzo found himself giving a step-by-step recapitulation of his two investigations, from the commission of the crime, through their linkage, through trips to the obitorio, through the official meddling by the Americans in the custody of the bodies, through his Sailor Moon linkage of the crimes to Ukrainian Mafia.
Unimpressed, the minister sat at a wide desk with his eyes downcast, a secretary recording Rizzo’s explanation.
After several minutes, despite his years of professionalism, Rizzo got as jittery as a dozen scared cats. There had been much in the press recently about CIA agents embedded within the Roman police. The minister had no reason to suspect Rizzo of such collusion, of serving two masters like that, but Rizzo didn’t know whether he might come under accusation, anyway. Things like that happened sometimes.
Rizzo finally came to his conclusion. “And that is where we are today,” he finally said.
The minister looked up.
“Do you feel that any arrests are imminent?”
“Arrests, Signore?”
“Arrests,” the minister said in a tired voice. “Surely you know what arrests are because I’m certain you’ve made a few in your long career.”
“Arrests in Rome are unlikely,” Rizzo said, “as I strongly suspect that the gunmen have fled the country by now. As to identifying them and asking one of the other police agencies in Europe to effect the arrests, well, that-”
“Let’s save the wishful thinking for later, shall we?” the minister said, cutting him off. “Are there any Ukrainian or Russian gangsters in Rome now whom you feel that we could pin this upon?”
Rizzo’s eyes widened, clearly ill at ease with the notion.
“Pin?” he asked. “As in ‘frame’?”
He became conscious of a slow tapping on the table by the minister’s right hand.
“I believe that’s what you would call it.”
Rizzo stared at the political appointee in front of him. His eyes were fixed and steady. In a flash, he put much of the reasoning together and didn’t like this one bit. After spending twenty-two years with the homicide brigades in Rome, he was going to be asked to fudge evidence, to squander the case, to perjure himself before a magistrate, just to ease a politician out of some sort of squeeze. And if the whole thing backfired, well, his own career would crash down, he could go to prison, there would go his pension, and Sophie would end up in bed with some young musician punk like the ones he was in the habit of arresting.
He thought quickly. “No, signore,” he answered. “I know of no such criminal who would fit our needs so conveniently,” he said.
The minister looked at him with thinly veiled dismay. “Very well,” he finally said. “We will take another approach. How many detectives do you have working with you on this case?”
“Four of the best in Rome,” he said.
“And I assume each of them has an assistant?”
“That would be true, signore.”
“So that makes nine of you. What is your individual caseload?”
Rizzo did some quick math. “I would guess, each of us might have twenty, give or take. So somewhere between one hundred fifty and two hundred among all the detectives involved.”
“ Bene,” said the minister. “Put them all back to work on their other cases.”
“Excuse me?”
“I think you heard me, Rizzo. And I think you understood me. Reassign everyone and make no further efforts on this case yourself.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“I’m afraid you don’t either, Gian Antonio. This case will most likely conclude itself. Remain available. You will need to liaison with an American agent sometime within the very near future.”
The minister motioned to the newspaper. There was a copy of Il Messaggero on the table, the headlines blaring about Kiev.
“Do you speak English?” the minister asked. “Well enough to liaise with an American?”
“Not very well, sir. I understand a little, but-”
“Strange,” the minister said. “Your file says that your father was in an American POW camp after the war. Your father spoke it quite well.”
“The memory of spoken English was not pleasant to my father,” Rizzo said. “We spoke Italian in our home.”
“Yes. Of course. What else would Italians speak, correct?”
“Latin, maybe,” Rizzo answered.
“Your sense of humor is not appreciated right now,” the minister said.
“I do have someone in my department, an intern, who could be of service with English,” Rizzo said.
“What about French, Rizzo? Do you speak French?”
“French?”
“Yes. It’s what they speak in France.”
“ Si, signore,” Rizzo answered.
“Good. That’s all. Remain ready.”
Rizzo opened his mouth to ask for more details, more of an explanation. But the minister cut him off.
“Do you like art, Gian Antonio?” the minister asked, changing the subject.
Rizzo was perplexed. “Art?”
“Italian art! The works of Bernardo Cavallino, for example. Guido Reni. Seventeenth century. Ever heard of them?”
Rizzo had never heard of either. Nor did he care to. “Of course I have,” he said.
“If so, you’re the first policeman I’ve ever met who has. Do you think the works should be in Italy?”
“If they’re Italian, of course.”
“I agree. That is all, Rizzo. Grazie mille. ”
The double doors opened. The minister’s guards barged in to escort Rizzo out. He left without a protest.
SIXTY-FOUR
A lex had not been to the Venezuelan capital for six years. She found it much as she had remembered it, hemmed in by green forested hills that rose to each side of the city. Caracas squeezed the tremendously wealthy and the desperately poor into a single chaotic metropolis. The fascinating disorder was reflected in the gravity-defying skyscrapers at the center of the city, which were a short walk from the teetering shantytowns that covered the surround
ing hills.
In the evening, a Senor Calderon presented himself at the hotel. He was a lanky Venezuelan in his twenties. He was an emissary of Mr. Collins and worked for Collins’s foundations in South America.
They spoke Spanish. He asked her to call him by his first name, Manuel.
Manuel Calderon would be her guide to the village of Barranco Lajoya. He would pick her up the next morning at 9:00 a.m. and take her to a small private airport east of Caracas. A private helicopter would take her and Calderon to Santa Yniez, which was a small clearing in the jungle. Calderon explained that the airfield had been built by smugglers who brought cocaine into Venezuela from Colombia and Brazil. But it had then been seized by the government in the 1980s following the collapse of Pablo Escobar’s empire and had been sold to pro-Western business interests. President Chavez kept threatening to nationalize it, but so far, he hadn’t.
“Pack your jungle gear in the backpack and have your weapon accessible just in case,” Manuel said. “Dress accordingly. Temperatures will probably be a hundred, at least.”
“Will the gun be a problem at the airfield?” she asked.
Calderon laughed. “You’re in Venezuela,” he said. “Everyone has a gun.”
The next morning, Calderon led her to the airfield, which was on the edge of the city. They found their way to a rickety old helicopter, a thirty-year old Soviet SU-456. They buckled in for a flight to Canaimo. Two members of the national police joined them, needing a lift to Santa Yniez. One of them was in his forties, the younger one in his twenties.
The early morning heat was already stifling. Alex needed only a tan T-shirt and cargo shorts. She wore new hiking shoes and heavy socks. Before leaving the hotel, she had applied DEET to her neck, arms, and legs and packed her digital camera in a convenient pocket.
The two national police officers seemed perplexed, even amused, that a good-looking woman was to be on the flight. She could tell they were trying to figure her out. She engaged them in a conversation in Spanish and kept deflecting their questions about her nationality, as they waited to take off.
