“You have wounded his shoulder. Now, shoot his heart,” El Grande coached. Kittredge tried again, scoring a hit closer to the center of the target. “Good! More.”
The lesson continued until the heel of Kittredge’s hand felt bruised and numb. He handed the pistol back to El Grande, but the Venezuelan refused. “It is yours now. Keep it close by. Use this—” El Grande handed Kittredge a shoulder holster and strap—“and hide it with a jacket. Always loaded. Your one true friend, as we say in our business.” El Grande laughed.
El Grande motioned for Kittredge to follow him back into the canvas tent. “Food for the body, food for the mind,” he said. More Yoda shit.
Kittredge did as instructed, and discovered the nubile young lady arranging a tray of food on a makeshift table surrounded by a semicircle of camping chairs. She was still topless, and Kittredge wondered with a chuckle whether that was a clause in her employment contract.
The food was incongruously delicious, equal parts traditional Venezuelan rural cuisine and modern urban tapas. It made Kittredge wonder whether the canvas tent in the middle of the jungle was a security necessity or an act put on for his benefit. He ate in silence, still wondering whose hospitality he was enjoying.
He didn’t have to wonder for long. “So. You have questions, no?” El Grande said. “Ask.”
Kittredge considered for a second. “Who are you?” he asked.
El Grande smiled. “Si, a good question. I will answer with another question: Do you like it here in Venezuela?”
Kittredge nodded, playing along.
“So do I,” El Grande continued. “It is a beautiful country. We have beautiful jungles, beautiful beaches, and beautiful women.” He smiled at the topless nymph. “It is my desire for Venezuela to stay this way. That is who I am.”
Interesting but irrelevant, Kittredge thought. “Maybe I should ask a different way. Who pays you?”
The question brought a laugh. “Si, si. Already you think like a spy. Follow the money, no?” He lit a cigar, inhaled, and blew rings.
A Che Guevara wannabe. How perfectly cliché. All he needs is a beret.
After pondering for a moment, El Grande continued. “I am an instrument of state security. I have many resources at my disposal. Some of them you would walk right past and not think about. And others, well, I think that they would grab your attention.”
“Why all the cloak-and-dagger?”
“What do you mean?”
“Tents in the middle of the jungle and secret telephone numbers. That kind of thing.”
El Grande nodded and puffed more smoke. “Why? It is simple. Cars.”
Kittredge furrowed his brow. “I’m not following.”
“You gringos love cars. Cars drink oil. We have oil. We are simple and unsophisticated, and we are vulnerable as a result. Your bankers want to help us build, how you say, infrastructures, but we have seen what has happened to other countries when they take the loans. Loan payments will increase and soon, American companies will take our oil from under our soil. I do not want this for my country.”
“Isn’t that all political? I mean, isn’t that for men in suits to decide?”
“They have decided. We have refused the loans and turned away the oil companies. But the gringos do not like the decision, so they make, how you say, small wars. With spies and companies and embassies.”
“That really happens? It all sounds like Hollywood bullshit.”
“Bullshit, maybe. But very real. I have lost another friend this week. The one who gave you the number to dial. But you know this already, I think, no?”
Quinn had intimated that the old man in the red scarf had met an untimely end, and Kittredge had checked the online news story while waiting for his flight to Caracas. Kittredge nodded, suddenly feeling guilty, as if the old man’s death were somehow his fault.
So this is the other end of the game? he wondered. Hiding in the jungle from the Agency goons and the oil guys?
El Grande’s mien darkened, his thoughts far away. “Many others have already died in this cause. But for the moment, we are not yet your slaves.”
“I’ve never heard anything at all about this.”
“Si. Of course not. It would not sound very American to the American people. Truths and justices, no? You gringos think you are a different thing than the thing you really are. This is a big problem for small countries like mine. But it is the way of things, no?”
Was it really? Kittredge had no idea. He didn’t doubt the CIA was capable of all manner of unpleasantness, and he also didn’t doubt that US oil companies had a greedy eye on Venezuelan crude. He supposed that together, those two realities could combine to cause problems.
El Grande was right, he realized – it didn’t sound very American to show up in another country and bully people around. But El Grande had another good point: most Americans only see one side of what it means to be American. It might mean something else entirely to outsiders with resources to protect.
Kittredge certainly wasn’t surprised to hear that the pervasive commuter economy had implications outside US borders. Only a jackass would conclude that Western interest in Persian Gulf politics was anything other than oil-based. Other than sand, backwards and brutal theocracies, and an occasional camel, what the hell else was over there?
He thought about a statistic that Charley had once quoted, something about the United States having spent three dollars protecting the flow of Persian Gulf oil for every one dollar spent buying the damned Persian Gulf oil.
He remembered his offhanded reply: Only a government would do something that stupid.
Are we starting something similar here? It was a chilling thought for Kittredge. The Persian Gulf was on the opposite side of the globe. But Caracas was only a couple of hours away from Florida, and the entire East Coast was within striking distance for a determined enemy. It wouldn’t make much sense to kick over a hornet’s nest, but if what El Grande said was true, the Agency might already be doing just that.
And he knew that Venezuela was already the fourth-largest supplier of oil to the American juggernaut. The US bought twice as much Venezuelan oil as Iraqi oil. And we already annexed Iraq, he thought. Maybe El Grande and his crowd weren’t so crazy to think they had a bulls-eye on their backs.
“You are doing much thinking, no?” El Grande was looking at him.
Kittredge nodded.
“Maybe you are thinking, this is a big and dangerous thing, and maybe it’s not so good to get involved, si?” El Grande exhaled smoke while he spoke.
Kittredge nodded again. It certainly has an unhealthy vibe about it, he mused.
El Grande smiled and took another long drag of his cigar. “Of course, Señor Kittredge, you must know that you are already involved.”
He exhaled a thick cloud of smoke, and fixed a hard eye on Kittredge. “And you have already chosen sides.”
Kittredge found himself again in the passenger’s seat of a dilapidated pickup, this one a Datsun. He wouldn’t have guessed there were any operational Datsun trucks left on the planet, and he was certain the one that was currently rattling his teeth loose on a jungle trail didn’t have many miles left before it too fell completely apart.
El Grande drove, and treated the travel time back to Caracas as an indoctrination opportunity. “You must learn a new mentality,” he was saying. “It is not a pleasant thing, but your life is not the same any more. You must be careful about everything. Everything that you say, everything that you do, it must be done carefully. Otherwise?” He squeezed his hand into a fist. “They will squash your cojones.”
“You talk as if I’ve decided something,” Kittredge said. “I haven’t.”
El Grande laughed. “You are young, no? Maybe you have not seen the world in this way before. Let me assure you, you have most definitely made decisions.”
He stopped speaking to negotiate a particularly tricky rut in the road, then continued. “You are having confusion, I think. You must choose a way fo
rward, but you think that going backward is also a choice.”
El Grande shook his head. “There is no going backward for you. You cannot make unseen what you have already seen.”
Yes, Jedi Master. Kittredge didn’t appreciate being patronized.
But he was also aware that he lacked perspective on El Grande’s world.
And he knew that he was in a very precarious position. Quinn and Fredericks had already demonstrated a surprising degree of ruthlessness; El Grande and his people had already demonstrated a surprising degree of organized opposition. Kittredge got the sense that he had stepped into a mature conflict. It was not yet large, but it certainly wasn’t new.
And he wasn’t particularly enthused about joining either side. Jungles and campfires were tolerable in small doses, but Kittredge knew that he wasn’t cut out for life as a guerrilla, even part-time.
On the other hand, Fredericks and Quinn had crawled so far up his ass that they could undoubtedly see daylight, and Kittredge’s resentment had only grown deeper over the past day.
He had signed the immunity agreement, naked and shackled to the cement in the Virginia safe house, and he had understood in an abstract sense that he had merely exchanged one type of prison sentence for another. But over the past few days, he had glimpsed the nature and extent of his indenture, and also the extent of the Agency’s brutality.
The iconoclast in Kittredge rooted for El Grande and his ragged band of little guys against the giant, grinding American machine.
The pragmatist in him recognized that El Grande didn’t stand a chance. Big Oil would summon its military and political servants, and it would win. Just like always.
He couldn’t really make up his mind to cast his lot with either side, but he couldn’t easily hedge his bets, either. He wasn’t a fool, and he knew that he lacked the skill and subtlety to play one side against the other.
And, as El Grande had annoyingly spelled out, there was no going back.
In the end, Kittredge tentatively decided on a middle course, at least until a better option presented itself. He knew that a friendship with El Grande could be very helpful, maybe even life-saving. But he also knew that it wasn’t possible to walk away from the deal he had made with the Agency.
But wouldn’t it be great to cause a bit of pain for Fredericks and Quinn?
He still had some pride, some gumption, and Kittredge vowed not to roll over and take a beating without dishing out a little punishment himself.
Quinn watched the tired, dusty pickup truck pull up to the Santa Marta station on the Red Line, and watched the passenger climb out. He adjusted the focus on his binoculars, and scanned back and forth between the truck’s driver and his quarry.
“You’re sure?” Fredericks’ voice crackled in Quinn’s phone earpiece.
“Of course not. I’m staring through 1950’s binoculars from a hundred yards. I called you because I’m pretty sure. Kittredge and a VSS guy, most likely.”
“El Grande?”
“Maybe. Hard to say. But I picked them up coming in on the road from the boonies. I don’t think there’s much out that direction that doesn’t belong to either the Venezuelan Special Services or the cocaine cartels.”
“Either way, it’s a situation.”
“How so? You want access to the VSS crowd. Kittredge has obviously made friends with them. Done.” Idiot, Quinn didn’t add. How is it that I work for this guy, and not the other way around?
“I like where your head’s at,” Fredericks said.
“You should.”
“Stick with him for the moment.”
“Did you think of that all by yourself?”
“I’ll call you in a while,” Fredericks said. “I have bigger fish for you to fry, and your replacement should be arriving soon to keep tabs on Kittredge.”
30
Special Agent Sam Jameson sat on a bench at the edge of the greenbelt, in view of her house. It appeared from a distance that the cleanup and reconstruction from the weekend’s bombing was progressing well. The dumpster in her drive was rapidly filling, and she anticipated that within a few days, the crews would transition to rebuilding the exterior wall that had been largely demolished by the military-style bomb that had exploded in her front yard just after three a.m. on Sunday morning.
Sam hoped Brock was still staying at their house. If not, there was no one to keep tabs on things, and Sam didn’t dare risk a trip home to speak with the construction crew.
On the way back from the FAA, Sam had stopped by the Shirlington parking garage in the hope that she would be able to collect her car, but a bright orange wheel boot had dashed her hopes. The Metro guys were apparently still interested in smoking her out, and they would undoubtedly have her house under surveillance, too.
She wondered how long the Homeland and Internal Affairs people would take to build a case against the group of rogue cops. She would have thought that Everett Cooper’s outrageous actions over the weekend would have forced the authorities’ hand, and they’d have swooped in to arrest the remaining players in what was apparently a gang of crooked Metro cops, working for some sort of Venezuelan concern.
But if the previous day’s encounter on I-395 was any indication, when yet another Metro cruiser had followed her briefly en route to Quartermain’s house, not much had changed.
Perhaps Internal Affairs and DHS needed more evidence for an indictment. If so, it meant that Ekman and Jarvis were using Sam as bait.
Those bastards. They would never endanger a private citizen in order to gather more evidence, but they evidently felt little compunction about leaving Sam in harm’s way.
Another thought struck: Was Brock now a target, too? There was no way to know, especially since she still had no idea why she had been targeted in the first place.
But she clearly had been targeted – her name and address had shown up at John Abrams’ house, and her photo was in the music box containing Abrams’ and Coopers’ fingerprints. Whoever they were, they certainly had her in their crosshairs.
She adjusted the burka she had purchased from the specialty shop a couple of blocks south of the Mall. DC’s Muslim population, especially of North African descent, had exploded over the past decade, and it wasn’t unusual to see women clad in traditional garb throughout the city. She was certain that her unusual attire attracted more than a few stares, but it would be a disorienting change of context for anyone looking specifically for a tall redhead. It was a clever way to hide in plain sight.
The late afternoon traffic picked up, and Sam glanced at her watch. If Brock had gone to work today, he would be returning home soon. A part of her hoped that she would find something of interest, some piece of information that would explain his dishonesty and his apparent association with Arturo Dibiaso.
A different part of her just wanted to see him, if even from a distance.
It was weakness, she knew, and there was no place for weakness when a group of very bad people seemed to be bearing down on her, but she was still reeling from what she felt was a death blow to her relationship with Brock.
He was everything she had wanted – handsome, brilliant, mature, fun, funny, big heart, big johnson, big sense of humor. . .
And honest.
That was the kicker. She had declared her life a no-bullshit zone, and Brock had professed to have done the same, so it felt like a match made in heaven. Everything was easy between them. Sure, they had their share of problems to work through, but they were always external problems. No difficulty ever arose between them that they couldn’t resolve within seconds.
Until now.
Sam shook her head, still incredulous. She tried to think of a reason that Brock might have been compelled to keep the Dibiaso connection from her, but she failed.
They both had security clearances for their work, and they both had things they weren’t allowed to discuss with each other because of need-to-know restrictions. But they had always been honest about them. Some programs had “cover stories
,” or officially-sanctioned lies that those with access were supposed to tell their spouses in order to keep unwanted attention away from secret information, but Brock and Sam had explicitly agreed not to use any cover stories with each other. If they couldn’t talk about something, they simply said so. In addition to keeping them out of trouble at work, it kept their hearts and consciences clean.
She felt the now-familiar lump form in her throat, and battled tears for what felt like the thousandth time.
One of her burner phones buzzed, and Sam fumbled to remove it from the folds of the burka. She recognized Dan Gable’s office number. “Hi Dan.”
“Everything okay? Your voice sounds muffled, like you’re gagged,” Dan said.
“I’m wearing a burka.”
“The Muslim thingy? Did you lose a bet?”
“I sure as hell did. A big one, apparently. So what’s up?”
As Dan started talking, Brock’s car drove up and parked in front of their house. Sam’s insides stirred as she saw him climb out and walk toward the flurry of construction activity. More tears tried to work their way out.
“Did you hear what I said?” Dan’s question snapped her back to their phone conversation.
“Sorry, no.”
“I said, I got that information on Executive Strategies. They’re like Blackwater, only not yet on steroids.”
“Shit.” Blackwater was an American contracting company that employed mercenaries, usually ex-military guys. They were paid incredible amounts of money by the US government, and their primary business was to do the things that international law and public scrutiny prevented the US military from doing itself. Those were usually very unsavory things.
A gaggle of me-too companies had also sprung up around the same business model, and, apparently, Executive Strategies was one of them.
“Who received all those payments?” Sam asked, referring to the long list of financial transactions contained on the CD ROM inside the music box.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 17
