24 Declassified: Storm Force 2d-7

by David S. Jacobs

  Paz's shell company had the electric power switched on, paying the monthly bills.

  He'd also fitted the site with some extras.

  He swilled another long pull of rum, crossed to the left wall of the office, the one adjacent to the garage. Bottle in one hand and machine pistol in the other, he crossed to the left wall of the office, where a door stood, and opened it. No tricky mechanism involved here; he turned the knob and the door opened. The smell of oil and stale grease hung heavy in the air.

  He switched on the overhead fluorescent lights. The garage was rigged like the office, windows blacked out to prevent the escape of a single beam of light. A precaution that mattered little during the day but would be important after dark.

  The bay nearest the office featured a late-model Explorer SUV. "The SUV of Death," as he liked to call it. It was parked facing the closed bay door. Its plates were legal, as was its registration.

  Standing in a rear corner of the garage was an old air compressor, a bulky and ancient hulk of disused machinery set in a housing whose base was bolted to the floor. Paz went to one knee beside it, turning two of the heads of the bolts. The bolts turned easily, unlocking a concealed mechanism.

  He gripped the edges of the housing, putting his shoulder to it. The base with its flaring metal flanges was mounted on a hidden axle, pivoting easily enough under his efforts. He pushed it to one side, out of the way, revealing an oblong space cut into the floor. It contained several suitcases. Paz hauled them out and opened them up.

  They contained weapons: a Kalashnikov assault rifle complete with grenade launcher, a half-dozen grenades, an Uzi-style machine gun, a number of big-bore handguns (revolvers and semi-automatics), plus plenty of boxes of ammunition and spare clips for each.

  Paz selected a pair of 9mm pistols, Berettas, loading each with full magazines. He stuck the pistols in his waistband at his hips, Wild West style. He stuffed some more magazines into the side pockets of his tattered sports coat.

  Now that he had some more firepower to fall back on, he felt physically relieved, able to cope. It was like a shot of dope.

  Other pressing needs demanded his immediate attention. The stolen car, for one. He couldn't leave it out in the open, for fear that a cruising police helicopter might spot it.

  He unlocked and opened the front door of the empty garage bay and raised it, the segmented sliding door rising and refracting along the curved tracks overhead. Light filled the cavelike garage space; heat poured out of it.

  Paz stepped through the open bay door and went around to the back of the building. He started up the tan coupe, circling around to the front, and backing the machine into the bay.

  He stood in the open bay doorway, scanning the scene. Vehicles continued to roll past in both directions, none showing any sign of interest or even notice of the activity at the station. He pulled down the sliding door, closed and locked it. So much for the stolen car, putting it out of sight.

  He turned his attention to the assault rifle, quickly assembling and loading it. His touch was sure, betraying no slightest trace of hesitation of clumsiness. Guns, he knew. They'd been an integral part of his life since early boyhood days.

  Addressing an invisible foe, he said, "You want a fight, you can have one!"

  * * *

  Martello Paz first saw the light of day in a Caracas slum, one of ten children by as many different fathers. An unattractive youth, lumpish-featured and thick-bodied, he early on demonstrated a penchant for lawlessness and a flair for violence. Law-abiding citizens, such few as there were in his crime-ridden barrio, marked him out as "a bad one."

  He possessed the virtues of strength, cunning, and endurance. He was a fierce brawler and street fighter, traits that served him well in the street gangs which he'd joined as soon as he was able.

  At thirteen he was as self-possessed and independent as a grown man — a hard, dour one. He smoked, drank, took drugs, and had sex with women and girls whenever he could get it. Two kills were already under his belt: a fifteen-year-old bully he'd stabbed to death; and an adult, a middle-aged shopkeeper who'd threatened to inform on Paz for stealing and had had his brains bashed out by a lead pipe wielded by the youngster.

  At this point, he experienced a life-changing event.

  The street gang he ran with was so full of itself that it valued hell-raising more than moneymaking, a sure sign of madness. They were rabid, and there's only one thing to be done with rabid dogs, and that's to put them down.

  Sheer chance saved Martello from the kill-off. The night it came, by sheer chance he'd gotten drunk by himself and passed out in a clearing on a hillside.

  He was awakened from a sodden stupor by the sound of shots and screams. The clamor came from the village below. Gunfire popped and rattled, punctuated by the explosive boom of shotguns.

  Smoke clouds rose, underlit by red firelight. The blaze was coming from an old shack that the gang used as a clubhouse. Inside, the one-story structure was a mass of flames. The light spilling from it revealed several dark forms — bodies, dead bodies — sprawled on the ground in front of the structure.

  A couple of jeeps were parked along one end of the plaza, headlights on, illuminating the town's central square. Figures were chasing down other figures and shooting them dead. The shooters were strangers; the ones they were shooting down were Martello's fellow gang members. The strangers were grown men, wielding handguns and shotguns.

  A death squad.

  The victims were teen gang members. Most of the killing had been done by the time Martello awoke. The square was littered with bodies. A heap of corpses lay at the foot of an adobe wall that had served as the backdrop for a firing squad. The executioners manhandled the ever-mounting pile of bodies, delivering the coup de grace of a bullet in the brain to the wounded.

  Hot night. Hot work! When the job was done, one of the shooters, a leader from the way the others deferred to him, took off his cap and used a bandana to mop the sweat from his face. His visage was revealed in the firelight, a face Martello would never forget. The killers climbed into their jeeps and drove away.

  At dawn, the villagers emerged from their huts to examine the carnage. In the main, they were able to control their grief. One or two heartrending cries sounded from mothers and sisters when they recognized their own flesh and blood among the bodies, but such unseemly displays were quickly shushed and silenced by their stoical menfolk.

  Martello Paz took advantage of the opportunity to sneak into one or two houses, stealing food and water and anything else of value he could find. He sneaked back into the hills, deeming it best to maintain a low profile for the moment.

  Later that day, the police arrived to deal with the mess. The "investigation" was a desultory effort at best, police and villagers being equally unenthusiastic about solving the slaughter.

  Martello Paz watched the cleanup effort from a hiding place in the brush bordering the outskirts of the town square. He particularly took note of the police official heading the operation.

  It was the man who'd been leading the executioners the night before, whose face Martello had seen in the firelight.

  The solution to the case was simple. The local shopkeepers and vendors had scraped up what little money they had, until they had enough to commission the services of a death squad. A police death squad.

  Such arrangements were common, a way for ill-paid lawmen to combine extracurricular profit and justice. They'd taken the contract and come by night to eliminate the gang. Summary executions. No gang, no problem.

  Investigation? No such animal — what were the police going to do, investigate themselves?

  Martello Paz knelt in the bush, fascinated, watching the entire show. The last body was loaded in the back of a dump truck; the cleanup crew and the cops went away.

  The entire experience had been a revelation to young Paz. He felt no resentment toward the executioners who'd wiped out the gang and would have done the same to him if fate hadn't spared him.

&nbs
p; He was instead inspired with a profound sense of admiration and envy. Gangs made the world go round. His world, anyway, and that of his fellow slum dwellers, dwellers in one of scores, if not hundreds, of similar districts scattered in and around Caracas and its outlying districts.

  The police were just another gang, better armed and more efficient than most.

  Young Paz now had a role model: the police officer who'd bossed the death squad. The police, that was where the real power lay.

  From that moment on, Paz resolved to become like them. One of them. A policeman.

  Fortunately, this ambition did not require in him any notions or moves toward reform. Quite the contrary. An honest policeman in his society was doomed to, if not an early grave, then a miserable existence of poverty and ridicule.

  So it began.

  Paz surfaced in another part of Caracas, one far enough away from his old haunts to insulate him against comebacks for his former misdeeds. Crime remained his means of livelihood. He certainly wasn't going to go to work for a living, he'd starve to death!

  He quickly attached himself to a drug gang. He was a prize acquisition, a youngster who was already a stone killer. Not for him the menial tasks of gofer and runner; he held the prestige of the life taker, mixed with the novelty of his youth. That tender age proved invaluable when it came to assassinating rival gang members, none of whom imagined that the short, squat, unattractive kid — often in the guise of shoeshine boy, newspaper vendor, or errand boy — would empty a revolver into their faces to achieve their deaths.

  At the same time, he was learning all he could about the interface between the gangs and the law, and began playing a dangerous double game. He became a police informant, fingering and setting up those gangs and independent operators who'd failed to pay off the police for the privilege of operating. Building solid contacts.

  The gang bosses pushed the idea of Paz joining the cops as their inside man, not knowing that he'd manipulated them toward this very end. The same attributes of fearlessness, amorality, and ultraviolence served him as well in the ranks of the police force as they had in the criminal gangs.

  Inevitably, inexorably, he followed an irresistible rise to the top of the city police establishment, then the regional, and finally the national police establishment.

  After three decades, Martello Paz was simultaneously at the top of the secret police corps and the Venezuelan drug cartels.

  It was at this point that Colonel Hugo Chavez began his own rise to supreme power. Chavez came out of the Army ranks, a fiery speechmaker and demagogic radical.

  At first he'd masked his true beliefs behind a facade of populism, appealing to the masses by promising them that they'd get their rightful share and more of the riches that had been stolen from them by the oligarchy and its American capitalist masters.

  Paz sensed in Chavez a kindred spirit. Paz was a bandit in a police uniform; Chavez was a bandit in Army fatigues. Paz operated behind the scenes to consolidate his power; Chavez operated at center stage, brandishing a bold, fiery rhetoric of "economic justice for the masses" and "due process of law." Chavez was using a front of socialist ideology to steal a country. He and Paz were a natural fit.

  Chavez was a strongman; the Venezuelan oligarchy was weak. The ruling class had long ago lost the taste for blood so necessary to secure and maintain absolute power.

  They were shortsighted, too. They'd bought the generals but not the rest of the Army. The generals were too stupid and greedy to share the wealth, alienating the colonels and all other ranks down. Chavez had the Army and the masses.

  Paz threw in with Chavez early, putting his formidable police apparatus to work for the promising presidential candidate. Anything from providing police presence for crowd control and security at Chavez political rallies; supplying intelligence on all the dirty secrets of the opposition — vital blackmail material to make the most recalcitrant foes fall in line; guarding the person of the candidate; harassing dissidents and political foes; breaking up opposition efforts, smashing their printing presses — and their heads, if they failed to get the message.

  Paz's position at the top of the national police hierarchy proved invaluable in collecting massive campaign fund "donations" from gang bosses and drug lords. As did his clout with the caudillos, the powerful political bosses in every city, town and village, with their ability to get out the vote (not once, but often), facilitated by their election day workers, poll watchers, vote thieves, and ballot box staffers.

  No less important was the use of the caudillos' goon squads, comprising thugs, enforcers, and gunmen. The really important political murders were the province of Colonel Paz himself. He oversaw the murder of intractable political foes, including clerics, labor bosses, newspaper owners, editors and reporters, political dissidents, and others whose timely removal was judged necessary for the success of Chavez's political campaign.

  The other side did it, too; unlike previous elections, though, this time out they lacked the inestimable services of Martello Paz, who did it better.

  Chavez was elected president, and duly appointed Paz as the head of his secret police apparatus. Soon after election, Chavez was seized by a rebel cadre of high-ranking Army officers in a coup attempt. Paz was unable to forestall the seizure, but his behind-the-scenes efforts, including the taking of key hostages from among the plot's oligarchic sponsors, was instrumental in Chavez's quick release and triumphant return to office.

  * * *

  Most recently, Paz's services had won for him the coveted post of top military attache to the Venezuelan Consulate in New Orleans. A post that also placed him at the head of Caracas's espionage efforts in the U.S. Gulf Coast.

  Now, sitting in the safe house of the Jiffy Pump gas station, cradling an assembled and fully loaded Kalash across his knees, Paz lit up a cigar. He puffed away, aromatic smoke clouds wreathing his head, the orange-colored tip of the cigar flashing like an emergency beacon.

  President Chavez was really high on his alliance with communist Cuba. He idolized Castro for having kept his Marxist-Leninist regime a going concern for a half century, despite the intractable hostility and diabolical machinations of the Norte Americano arch-capitalists. He saw himself as the new Fidel; no, beyond that, the new Bolivar, near-future liberator of all Latin America.

  The result of their newfound entente was that Cuba got much-needed oil from Venezuela; Venezuela got much-needed intelligence from Cuba. Colonel Paz's key Cuban contact and ally in the United States was the formidable, elusive General Beltran himself.

  The cigar that Paz now smoked was one from a humidor with which Beltran had gifted him, claiming that their quality was beyond that even of Cuba's superb Monte Cristo variety: "These are from a blend specially made for Fidel himself!"

  Yet there was trouble in the workers' paradise, the new Latin American Socialist Internationale. For Beltran was the one who'd tried to have Paz hit.

  Beltran had inadvertently betrayed his authorship of the attempt by using the female shooter, an exotic, deep-cover operative whom Paz knew without doubt was one of Beltran's creatures. Beltran thought his association with her was a closely held secret, but Paz was not without confidential sources himself and had undoubted proof of the connection. The Cuban wasn't the only spymaster in the game; Paz had been playing, too.

  Whether or not Beltran had been acting on his own or following orders from Havana was a question purely academic. In either case, the answer was the same: Beltran must die.

  Still, in all honesty, Paz had to admit that it really was a superior brand of cigar. He promised himself he'd smoke one over Beltran's dead body. Soon.

  "There will be blood."

  6. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 10 A.M. AND 11 A.M. CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME

  Jack Bauer and Pete Malo prowled around in their SUV, trying to pick up Colonel Paz's trail. Pete drove, Jack riding shotgun in the passenger seat.

  Valuable time was eaten up pursuing false leads. A complicating fa
ctor was that, as in any other major U.S. city, carjackings and auto thefts in New Orleans were a routine, round-the-clock daily occurrence. The number of incidents was spiking dramatically higher due to the approach of Hurricane Everette, which caused an already understaffed police force to be spread ever thinner, creating a climate of rising anarchy that encouraged the criminal element to take advantage of the opportunities it offered.

  Jack and Pete crisscrossed the New Orleans area, receiving a steady stream of information and updates via their secure comm link with CTU Center across the river in Algiers.

  No sooner had one new lead developed than it was quickly shot down. There were plenty of carjackings taking place, but they all turned out to be common, garden-variety auto thefts, none of which could be laid to Colonel Paz.

  NOPD traffic cameras monitoring key intersections, squares, and thoroughfares for moving violations registered a blank when it came to sightings of the tan coupe stolen by Paz. The same went for cameras covering bridge approaches and entrance ramps to the major highways out of town.

  Results: negative.

  Jack said, "I see a pattern here. Paz grabbed his first car within a few blocks of the Golden Pole in the heart of the city. His second car was stolen out in the boondocks. He knows what he's doing. He's moving away from the urban hub where surveillance is heaviest and out into the outlying districts where coverage is lightest."

  Pete nodded, his face glum. "He may have switched cars again and the reports haven't reached us. Or he's in the same car but cruising along the outskirts where the cameras and the cops are few and far between. Or he's gone to ground and is laying low."

  Jack said, "Looks like the trail's gone cold for now."

  * * *

  The Garden District is one of the oldest and wealthiest neighborhoods in New Orleans, an opulent domain of palatial mansions and parklike estates. Located on high ground, it had escaped most of the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, and what damage could not be avoided had been quickly repaired and made right.