Two Days in Caracas

by Luana Ehrlich

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 33

  Sunday, June 10

  The moment I stepped off the plane in Porlamar, I felt a twinge of anxiety. Such worry was unfamiliar to me, so I wondered if it was because Mitchell was my partner on this run.

  However, part of me wasn’t buying that explanation because Olivia and Mitchell had taken a later flight, and when I disembarked from the plane onto the tarmac at Del Caribe International Airport, I was all by my lonesome.

  If having Mitchell along as my partner wasn’t the reason for my apprehension, then having Olivia as my handler might have been the cause of it. The two of us hadn’t talked since the briefing, but I expected we’d have an opportunity for a one-on-one in the days ahead, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

  For one thing, I knew I needed to ask her forgiveness for the things I’d said to her in the past, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to do that. Praying about it seemed like a good idea, but I suddenly found myself hesitant to ask for guidance on the issue.

  That feeling of reluctance bothered me.

  The second reason I was experiencing uneasiness about Olivia was that I wasn’t sure she could handle the task of being the field operations officer, the FO, for this mission. However, it had nothing to do with the fact she was a woman, even though she would probably think so. On the other hand, it had everything to do with her inexperience in the field and her bulldozer attitude.

  Sometimes, in order to unearth a solution to a problem, it’s more appropriate to use a shovel than it is to use a bulldozer.

  I’d never seen any evidence Olivia understood that.

  * * * *

  Although the island’s main airport had a modern-looking terminal, passengers still had to deplane onto the tarmac and make their way inside on their own. The plane had been full, and I’d chosen to disembark last, so that meant I was slow getting into the building.

  Once inside, though, I quickly cleared through customs posing as David Awerbuch, a prestigious member of the U.S. Trade Delegation, who, along with his staff, was attending the Caribbean States International Trade Conference.

  My business card didn’t actually say I was prestigious. However, that’s the way Arnold, a member of Support Services, had described my persona when he had briefed us on the phony identities we’d be using while we were in Venezuela.

  I was the prestigious one in the bunch and Olivia and Mitchell were my lackeys. In reality, Arnold had described Olivia and Mitchell as my assistants, but the meaning was the same.

  At least to me.

  I could tell Olivia was not pleased by the role Legends had fashioned for her. She loved authority and couldn’t stand the thought of acting as if she didn’t have any—even temporarily.

  As I wandered through the terminal, I was tempted to remain at the airport until ten o’clock when Roberto Montilla was due to arrive on his flight from Caracas. I was anxious to get a firsthand look at the man and to get a feel for his personality.

  However, there was a real possibility he could be one of those people who could sense he was under surveillance, so I decided against it. Besides that, Sam Wylie had already arranged for a couple of Agency people to be with him on the plane.

  As I scanned the crowds looking for the driver I’d been promised, I also kept my eye out for any Arabic-looking faces among the government officials arriving for the trade conference.

  My last refresher course at Camp Peary had emphasized a little known or simply overlooked consequence of working as a long-term covert intelligence officer—the possibility of being recognized from a previous mission.

  My trainers had warned me that since I’d been working in the Middle East for so long, there existed the real possibility I could run into someone who knew me when I was wearing a different skin. I knew I needed to be especially wary of any government officials from Syria, because I’d once posed as an arms dealer working out of Damascus, and in that role, I’d mingled regularly with ministry staff.

  I saw a few Middle Eastern faces in the crowd, but, as far as I could tell, no one looked familiar to me. However, in the midst of my scrutiny, I spotted a driver holding up a placard with the name David Awerbuch on it.

  I waved him over.

  A few minutes later, I was in the backseat of a late model Cadillac traveling down Avenida Juan Bautista toward the world-renowned Wyndham Hotel. The Agency had booked David Awerbuch, along with his two lackeys, into a suite of rooms there, and I was sure such lodgings would be luxurious and well-appointed surroundings that befitted a prestigious member of the U.S. Trade Delegation.

  It was a beautiful day on Margarita Island. The temperature was a perfect seventy-four degrees, the skies were clear, and the sun was shining. To top it off, I was being taken to a plush five-star hotel, and outside my car window, I had an incredible view of the blue waters of the Caribbean.

  What more could a man want?

  A little peace of mind would do.

  * * * *

  The Wyndham Hotel managed to live up to its reputation. It was an upscale hotel with deluxe accommodations, and the Agency had booked the three of us into one of their executive suites.

  As soon as I entered the room on the seventeenth floor, I understood why the desk clerk had used the word “exclusive” to describe its features. The view of the ocean from the balcony was breathtaking, like a priceless piece of artwork.

  The suite consisted of three bedrooms and a living area, with a tiny alcove kitchen at the end of the living room opposite the balcony. The eager bellhop pointed out all the amenities, every last one of them, including the limited-edition apple-scented shampoo in the bathroom.

  I tipped him generously with Uncle Sam’s money, and that was when he mentioned he’d recently applied for a visa to enter the United States. Any help I might give him would be appreciated.

  His name was Mateo Santiago.

  I had him write it down for me.

  I took the largest bedroom, the one with the king-sized bed, because the prestigious David Awerbuch would have been expected to do so.

  And, just in case someone might be tempted to think the room belonged to them, I took some clothes out of my suitcase and placed them on the bed. As I did so, I realized Uncle Harold would have preferred for me to hang them in the closet instead.

  As soon I opened the refrigerator door to get a can of soda, there was a knock at the door.

  Three short raps. Pause. One rap. Pause. One rap.

  Since I didn’t have a weapon at my disposal, and I certainly wasn’t about to look through the peephole—Neal Fredrick had lost an eye in Budapest doing that—I slid open the glass door leading out to the balcony.

  If push came to shove—so to speak—I could at least give an unwelcomed guest a quick exit from the seventeenth floor.

  However, as expected, when I opened the door, Sam Wylie was there.

  “Hey, Cowboy,” I said. “Come on in. Put your feet up.”

  “Cut the cowboy talk, Titus. It ain’t you.”

  Wylie sauntered into the room carrying a worn messenger bag in the shape of a saddlebag and sat down on one of the modern Danish sofas. Once he’d laid aside the messenger bag, he promptly put his feet up on the glass-topped coffee table. I wasn’t surprised to see he was wearing a pair of scuffed leather cowboy boots.

  Sam Wylie was a Texan, and although he’d been living in Latin America for many years, he still refused to let anyone forget he was from the great state of Texas. Indeed, he looked the part of a native son from the Lone Star state.

  He was a couple of inches over six feet tall, broad-shouldered with a narrow waist and hands as big as baseball gloves. His long, dirty blond hair was tied back in a ponytail.

  Evidently, he’d left his cowboy hat in his room.

  Today, he was wearing a pair of sharply creased, starched jeans, cinched at the waist by an expensive-looking leather belt—with a buckle made in the shape of Texas—and a short-sleeved dark blue cotton shirt. Attached to his b
elt was a gun holster.

  I had no doubt the pistol inside it was fully loaded, meticulously maintained, and easily retrievable.

  Although Wylie was the Agency’s chief of station in Venezuela, his position at the American Embassy in Caracas was listed as Embassy Security Chief. Because of this title, he was able to carry the loaded pistol wherever he went.

  Wylie pointed at my drink. “Got another one of those?”

  I retrieved another can of soda from the kitchen and sat down opposite him on a matching sofa.

  He popped the lid on the can, took a swig, and said, “Nice digs you got here. It’s me and two other guys in a room half this size down on the tenth floor overlooking the cooling unit.”

  “It can’t be as bad as that flea-infested hotel back in Managua. I stayed in that hole for over a year.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I remember that place. You forgot to mention the rats, though. Don’t forget those rats. Those rats were as big as cats.”

  I hated small talk. Always had.

  It just never made any sense to me.

  I decided not to do any more back and forth with him, hoping he’d get the hint and just give me the operational update. We could reminisce some other time.

  If at all.

  Wylie and I didn’t have much to talk about when it came to reminiscing about Nicaragua. I’d worked with Toby Bledsoe when I’d been in Managua years ago, and Wylie had been paired up with Colin Standsford. Since then, we’d occasionally run into each other at Agency headquarters whenever our down times had coincided, but we’d never worked together on the same mission since our time in Nicaragua.

  However, I liked Wylie—despite his weird Texas talk—and I’d found his field reports in the Agency archives to be insightful. I wasn’t exactly sure what he thought about me, but someone once told me he sometimes referred to me as “that Yankee dude from Michigan.”

  I’d always preferred to think of myself as someone from America’s Heartland.

  And never as a dude.

  I didn’t reply to Wylie’s comment about the rats, and after a few moments of silence, he picked up the messenger bag he’d brought in with him.

  “First things first,” he said, reaching inside the bag and pulling out a Glock pistol. “If you’d prefer something else, let me know.”

  He handed the weapon over to me, and then he watched as I did a quick inspection.

  “I’m not picky,” I said. “This will do.”

  “The rest of your gear is inside the bag.”

  He tossed it over to me, and I took a quick peek inside. “I presume you’ve got a similar delivery for Mitchell?”

  “Yeah, I’ll bring it up when he gets here. Your FO also requested a weapon.”

  “Olivia? She’s strictly the handler for our mission; not really active operational.”

  He quickly dismissed my remark. “She said she wanted a weapons package, and I got her one. She was pretty insistent about it.”

  While most handlers preferred to run an operation from a command and control location away from the action, I’d known a few who wanted a more hands-on approach. Evidently, Olivia was of the latter persuasion.

  I decided I might try and persuade her otherwise.

  Wylie began his operational update by describing the surveillance he’d put in place at the Concorde Marina where El Mano Fierro would be berthed. After that, he gave me the names and phone numbers of the watchers he had on site at the dock and told me they were prepared to follow Ahmed and Flores once the yacht made port. He also mentioned the address of the operation’s safe house on the island where the communications equipment had been installed.

  He said, “If you should need any extra weapons, you can pick them up at that location.”

  Wylie was a veteran of the game. Only an operative who had been burned before would have realized the importance of disseminating every tidbit about the operation’s setup to an incoming principal. Now, should something unforeseen happen to Wylie, I’d have all the info I needed to complete the mission without him.

  “It’s a good protocol, Sam, and I appreciate the fact you’ve covered all the bases with me. I usually have to ask for this stuff.”

  “Yeah, well, I remembered what a stickler you were for details.”

  “Funny, I remember the same thing about you. We’re both still alive, so that must mean something.”

  As soon as the remark was out of my mouth, I thought of Toby Bledsoe. Then, I saw Wylie’s face, and I realized both of us had been thinking the same thing.

  “Sorry to hear about Toby,” he said, shaking his head. “We lost a good man there.”

  I agreed with him, and then I filled him in on the details of how Bledsoe had met his untimely death. These were details I knew he hadn’t received in the Agency’s daily COS briefing. When I finished, we sat there without saying a word, caught up in our own personal grief over Bledsoe’s murder.

  It was Wylie who broke the silence.

  “There’s one more thing I should mention.”

  Wylie’s cell phone started to vibrate.

  “The training camp—”

  Suddenly, he cut himself off in mid-sentence when he glanced down at the caller ID.

  “Wylie here. What’s up?”

  After listening to the caller for a few minutes, he got up and walked out to the balcony. During the conversation, I noticed he was flexing his free hand, and I tensed up just watching him.

  However, as he walked back inside, he sounded calm. “Keep the team in place. I’ll get back to you.”

  “Trouble?” I asked, when he ended the conversation.

  “Roberto Montilla didn’t make his flight from Caracas.”

  Before I could respond, there was a knock at the door.

  I grabbed the Glock from the couch and stuck it in the back of my pants.

  “Who is it?” I yelled.

  “El botones Mateo.”

  “It’s just the bellhop,” I said to Wylie.

  When I opened the door, I found Mateo Santiago in the hallway, along with Olivia McConnell and Ben Mitchell.

  * * * *

  After reassuring Mateo I’d be happy to explain the room’s amenities to my colleagues, I quickly ushered him out of the room.

  As soon as I closed the door, Wylie started telling Olivia about Roberto’s disappearance. However, instead of having him immediately give her the full details of the report, she told him to wait until she’d brewed herself a cup of coffee.

  Wylie shrugged and resumed his place on the sofa, putting his cell phone directly in front of him on the coffee table. A few seconds later, I saw him pick it up again, as if keeping tabs on it would help him discover Roberto’s whereabouts.

  Meanwhile, I took a seat in a corner of the room, because the spot offered me a full view of the room and the people in it, while Mitchell pulled out his iPad and sat down on the sofa opposite Wylie.

  Olivia was in the kitchen filling the coffee pot with water, and for some reason, this struck me as ironic.

  Here she was—a woman who absolutely despised being treated differently than a man—puttering around in the kitchen, while the men sat around doing nothing.

  I wanted to point this out to her.

  I decided not to do so.

  When the coffee was ready, she took her mug over to a bar, which separated the kitchen from the living area. Placing her mug on the countertop, she pulled out a leather barstool and perched herself on it like a judge at a tennis match.

  “Okay, Sam,” she said, sipping her coffee, “tell me about Roberto.”

  Wylie laid his cell phone back down on the coffee table and looked up at her.

  “As I said before, the surveillance team outside the Montilla residence saw Roberto, along with his wife and daughter, put their luggage in a taxi and head for the airport around seven o’clock this morning. About twenty minutes later, they lost them in heavy traffic, but, since they thought he was headed for the airport, they simply notified the te
am at the terminal to keep an eye out for his arrival.”

  Olivia looked down at her watch. “That was nearly three hours ago. Why wasn’t I told about this sooner?”

  Wylie clinched his jaw. “Well, ma’am, I didn’t get this information myself until a few minutes ago.”

  Olivia’s face registered disapproval.

  However, I couldn’t tell if she disliked Wylie’s answer or just his way of addressing her.

  She waved her hand at him. “Go on.”

  He sighed. “It’s pretty simple. Montilla never arrived at the airport and the plane took off without him.”

  “That’s unacceptable. Someone from your surveillance crew should have called you as soon as Roberto was out of sight.”

  “I’m not one of those ... what do you call them? ... micro managers. The boys thought they had it covered.”

  “Well, the boys—”

  “Maybe he just got stuck in traffic,” Mitchell said. He pointed down at his iPad. “This map shows it’s over an hour’s drive from Roberto’s house out to the airport. With heavy traffic, it could take even longer. Maybe he simply got stuck in traffic and missed his flight.”

  Wylie shook his head. “There are flights to Porlamar every hour. It’s been over three hours now and he still hasn’t checked in. That scenario doesn’t seem likely.”

  I spoke up, “Roberto’s wife and daughter weren’t scheduled to come with him. He was attending the conference alone.”

  Wylie looked surprised. “Is that right?”

  Olivia jumped in before I had a chance to answer. “That’s right. He only reserved a room for one person.”

  “So you think he’s skedaddled?” Wylie asked.

  Olivia and I looked at each other, but neither of us said a word.

  Wylie asked, “What’s going on?”

  Although she addressed Wylie’s question, Olivia kept her eyes on me the whole time. “Well, Sam, the reason he’s gone missing is that we rocked his boat. We created confusion in his world.”

  It was hard for me to read how Olivia felt about Montilla not showing up in Porlamar, but I was happy at this turn of events.