The Venezuelan

by Bill King

  “Makes sense,” said Carpenter, sticking his two tennis rackets back into the bag setting next to a metal folding chair. Unlike Cortez, he had not spent any time in the military, so he took his word for it.

  Who brings two rackets to a friendly match, anyway? Cortez wondered, as he draped his sweat towel around his neck.

  “What else are your sources telling you?” Pete asked.

  “There seems to be a growing friction between the army and the national police,” said Carpenter. “A lot of tension.”

  “Normal bureaucratic rivalry, or is it something more significant?”

  “Our sources fear that they might eventually come to blows.”

  “You mean as in violence, or simply airing their dirty laundry in public?”

  “Both.”

  “Who would win?”

  “Normally, I would say the Army, but after more than a decade of rampant corruption at the top, who can say if they can even fight anymore?”

  “What about the police?” asked Pete, suspecting the answer.

  “Same thing. Both groups seem to do much better if the other side doesn’t fight back.”

  Cortez smiled knowingly. In his experience, repressive governments all seemed to share that in common. They almost always survived on fear and intimidation, and often folded when faced with a fair fight.

  “So, return fire is their Kryptonite, eh?” he said.

  “Yeah, I guess you could say that,” said Carpenter.

  “Well, that should be fun to watch,” said Cortez, grabbing his bag and heading toward the lot where Baker’s car was parked.

  ◆◆◆

  Paulo Mendes Almeida was having lunch alone on the terrace of his penthouse apartment in Rio de Janeiro, a breathtaking view of the magnificent Christ the Redeemer statue in the distant background.

  His wife, with whom he almost always had lunch whenever he was in town, was out shopping with two friends who were visiting from Argentina.

  His mobile phone, which he had placed on top of the table in front of him, began to vibrate, indicating he had an incoming message.

  He picked it up and clicked on the WhatsApp icon. The message simply read, “CANADIAN CAPTURED BY POLICE IN BRASILIA. NO FURTHER DETAILS AT THIS TIME.”

  ◆◆◆

  Chapter 35

  Brasilia, Brazil

  The video had already gone viral by the time the sun had come up. Posted on YouTube and Vimeo at just past midnight, it had more than fifty thousand views within the first hour.

  By four in the morning, it had more than a quarter of a million, and by six o’clock, it had already blown past half a million views. Fueled mostly by Twitter and Instagram, most informed observers expected it to pass the one million mark by mid-morning, Caracas time.

  The fifteen-second video showed Mateo Calderón standing in front of the house in Caracas where Simon Bolivar was born nearly two and a half centuries earlier. He was menacingly brandishing an AK-47 in his right hand while waving a Venezuelan flag in his left.

  The camera zoomed in for a closeup of his face.

  “Rise up, Venezuela,” said Fósforo in a deep, gravelly voice reminiscent of a Spanish-speaking James Earl Jones. “Rise up and throw off the yoke of oppression! Rise up and be free! The time is now! Rise up, oh Venezuela! Rise up!”

  The camera then panned back to give a wider look at Bolivar’s birthplace, while Calderón struck a defiant pose. Fifteen seconds after beginning, it faded to black.

  Everyone in the room looked at Cortez, who by now had tears in his eyes.

  “What are you laughing at, Pete?” said Clarice Robideaux, whose voice cracked as she, too, burst into laughter. They had just watched the video for the third time on one of the computers in the Legal Attaché’s offices.

  “I’m sorry,” said Cortez, wiping away the tears as he tried desperately to regain his composure. He was practically hyperventilating, gasping for breath as he covered his mouth with both hands. “I understand that a call to civil war is not supposed to be funny, but you’ve got to admit, my old buddy, Pelícano, sure has a flare for the dramatically absurd.”

  Pelícano is Spanish for pelican and was a nickname bestowed upon Calderón by his young soccer teammates to tease him about his gangly appearance, back when the terrorist and Cortez were schoolboys together in Caracas nearly a quarter century earlier.

  “Jack Gonçalves warned me about this side of your personality,” said Lucinha Baker, shaking her head in mock horror. She was nominally his boss during his temporary tour of duty in Brasilia. “You’d better get it out of your system before the ambassador or DCM see you.”

  “Yeah,” said Robideaux, who was now wiping tears from her eyes with a handkerchief. “It really calls into question your professionalism.”

  Cortez was now taking a series of deep breaths while contorting his mouth. He appeared to finally have regained his composure.

  “Rise up, Oh Venezuela,” said Robideaux suddenly in a booming Shakespearean voice, sending Cortez into another uncontrollable coughing fit.

  This time, neither Carpenter nor Baker could hold back. Eventually, after another minute or two, they managed to regain their composure enough to talk about what they had just watched.

  “So, is this the kickoff to the revolution, or whatever it is that has been percolating down here over the last couple of months?” asked Baker.

  “It’s hard to say,” said Carpenter. “The last time Calderón was on YouTube, all it seemed to do was make the Venezuelan government nervous. This could be more of the same.”

  “What do you think, Pete?” asked Baker.

  “To be honest, I’d only be guessing right now,” said Cortez. “It’s the Agency’s job to predict what they’re going to do. Mine is to catch them after they’ve done whatever it is that they’re going to do.”

  ◆◆◆

  As the morning dragged on, tens of thousands of demonstrators packed the streets of a dozen cities scattered throughout Venezuela. Armed with banners and hand-painted signs, they marched headlong toward the center of political power in each city, chanting slogans demanding freedom, justice, liberty…universal ideas that all sides could agree upon.

  Unfortunately, in most political arguments, it is almost never about the problems or the goals. Rather, the rub is always about how to achieve those goals…and who gets to do it.

  As the number of demonstrators grew, so too did the presence of armed Colectivos. Violent leftist criminals with a symbiotic relationship with the Maduro government, they waded headlong into the crowds with weapons and clubs, viciously pummeling anyone who even looked at them crossways. The death toll began to mount precipitously, with the Colectivos acting with their usual wanton disregard for human life.

  Noticeably absent from the fray were the M-28 and the National Police.

  The incident that would headline the news throughout the world, though, began shortly after one in the afternoon, as demonstrators were beginning to drift away from the crowd for a well-earned lunch break. The electricity and excitement found in the crowd several hours earlier was fading away fast.

  Like any military leader sensing a tactical advantage, the on-the-ground leader of the Colectivos in the upscale Las Mercedes district of Caracas ordered his men to pursue the departing demonstrators as they broke for lunch, sensing that what he thought to be a tactical retreat could be turned into a decisive rout.

  Instead, it brought the bulk of his men into a killing zone that was dominated by five high-rise buildings that surrounded the large open space.

  Experts later estimated that at least five hundred shots had been fired during the bloodbath, the lion’s share coming from a dozen or so elevated perches in the surrounding buildings. When the shooting stopped two minutes after it began, more than eighty people lay dead, many of them Colectivos, with three times that number wounded.

  No one would ever claim responsibility for the shootings.

  ◆◆◆

  Venezuela was not
the only South American country to experience civil unrest.

  The streets of Georgetown, Guyana, were teeming with angry protestors demanding the removal of the present government. By now, it was midday and the sun presided with all its oppressive splendor, high atop the Equatorial sky.

  The demonstration had begun two hours earlier at the National Library and had proceeded down Avenue of the Republic, past City Hall and the Magistrates Court. There, it teamed up with a group of students from St. Stanislaus College and turned right on Brickdam Street.

  Half a block later, the crowd stopped in front of the Parliament Building.

  Uniformed police, armed with submachine guns, had closed off the gate into the Parliament grounds and stood inside the black wrought iron fence that surrounded the property. A smattering of parliamentary staff gathered along the extended second-floor balcony that ran the length of the building, leaning against the railing and chatting excitedly among themselves.

  There was an almost festive mood in the air among the younger staff members. They had the best seats in the house, overlooking the dense crowd of demonstrators that was growing larger by the minute, as curious onlookers stopped to find out what was going on.

  For the most part, the demonstrators were peaceful. Well, perhaps not peaceful, but at least not violent. Not yet anyway.

  Then the counterdemonstrators showed up.

  ◆◆◆

  “Our people should be making their presence felt any moment now,” said Cedric Bostwick, who was perusing the lunch menu at the Stabroek Sports Bar across the street from the Parliament building.

  “Are you sure the government will react harshly?” asked Dominic D’Angelo, who was sitting across the small table, nursing his beer while he peered out the window at the street below.

  The Stabroek Sports Bar is located on the second floor, above the Idiho Restaurant, on Brickdam Street. This gave the two men a bird’s eye view of the tense situation unfolding in front of Parliament.

  “Oh, yes, of that, I am certain,” said Bostwick, smiling. He was dressed in civilian clothes so as not to stand out from the rest of the patrons. “They are already very nervous and this should send them over the edge.”

  The large open room at the Stabroek was dominated by a couple of rows of pool tables that were packed with rowdy players eager to let off steam before returning to work. The boisterous noise inside almost drowned out the thunderous noise coming from the street below.

  They were either unaware of the demonstration outside, or they simply didn’t care. It was probably fifty-fifty either way.

  “What do you recommend?” asked D’Angelo, holding the menu but looking out the nearby window at the activity below. “I don’t want to spend the afternoon looking for a bathroom. No offense.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” said Bostwick, a smile on his face. “I ate a cheeseburger in Miami once.”

  The sound of a single gunshot coming from outside caused the bar to go silent, It was followed by three more shots. Then nothing.

  “It sounds like your people are announcing their arrival on the scene,” said D’Angelo, looking down at his wristwatch. It was one-fifteen.

  Both men stared out the window, curious to see how the police would respond. Not surprisingly, the police on the grounds mainly appeared to be trying to figure out where the shots had come from.

  “Wait for it,” said Bostwick, placing his hand on the American’s wrist.

  As if on cue, about a dozen men began climbing the wrought iron fence. Within a few seconds, they were over and on the grounds. The men quickly sprinted across the lawn toward the Parliament Building.

  This finally snapped the police out of their momentary paralysis and into action. Two of the policemen fired shots at the fast-moving men just as they reached the center archway into the building. Three of them were hit. The rest made it inside, where they immediately ran into a dozen police reinforcements who were rushing outside to aid their comrades.

  That was when the sniper across the street made his presence felt, taking out the two guards manning the vehicle gate into the grounds.

  “The Army’s ready reaction force should be on its way by now,” said Bostwick, watching the action below as if it were a make-believe training exercise. Instead, it was real. Very real. “They were put on standby at the barracks several hours ago, as a precaution.”

  “How long until they arrive?”

  “Ten minutes at most,” said Bostwick, glancing back down at his menu. “Let’s order some lunch. It’s going to be an interesting next couple of hours.”

  ◆◆◆

  The previous day’s news of the death of his sergeant, the one who had been imbedded with the Venezuelan refugee column several weeks earlier, had not gone down well with Lieutenant Colonel Lima.

  “Something is about to happen,” said Lima, looking anxiously at the restless crowd of refugees clustered at the checkpoint separating Brazil from Venezuela. “I can feel it in my bones.”

  “We are receiving reports of violent demonstrations in Georgetown, Guyana,” said his operations officer, Major Rodrigues, who was standing next to him. Both men were carrying loaded weapons, just in case.

  “What about Venezuela? Has the violence there spread beyond Caracas?”

  “Yes, sir, the last I heard—as of about half an hour ago—they’ve had violent demonstrations break out in about a dozen cities spread across Venezuela.”

  “Do you think those people over there have heard anything about it?” asked Lima, pointing to the refugees. “Do you think they know?”

  Rodrigues laughed.

  “I seriously doubt that we were the only people to have spies imbedded in the column,” he replied. “I’m sure those people already know all about the demonstrations. In fact, I’ll bet they even know the scores of the futebol matches within an hour of final whistle. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are able to listen to the games live.”

  They watched the activity along the border for the next few minutes without saying a word.

  “Have you heard from Lieutenant Colonel Sanchez lately?” asked Rodrigues after a while. “I haven’t seen him all day.”

  “Yeah, he called me last night to tell me that he had to go to Ciudad Guayana today to meet with the General,” said Lima. “Probably has something to do with the training exercise.”

  “Remember what happened the last time he was called away to Ciudad Guayana?”

  “Unfortunately, I remember it all too well,” said Lima, a look of concern on his face. “All hell broke loose down here on the border.”

  No sooner did those words pass his lips than all hell broke loose.

  ◆◆◆

  Chapter 36

  Brasilia, Brazil

  Ryan Carpenter and Lucinha Baker had spent several hours late the previous evening huddled in an emergency meeting with the ambassador and the deputy chief of mission. The subject was the deteriorating situation in neighboring Venezuela and Guyana. By the time the meeting had finally broken up, it was already well past midnight.

  Cortez and Robideaux were waiting for them in the secure conference room when they came in to work the next morning at seven.

  “Well, we now know for sure that both countries—Venezuela and Guyana—are somehow wrapped up in all this,” said Baker, pouring herself a cup of coffee before walking around the table and offering the other three a refill. “Beyond that, what more do we know?”

  She sat down at the conference table and folded her hands in front of her.

  “The ambassador and DCM want to meet again with Lucinha and me at ten, so we’re a little pushed for time,” said Carpenter, glancing down at his wristwatch. “What does Langley say, Clarice?”

  “They believe these events are all related,” said Robideaux, taking a sip of coffee, holding her cup with both hands.

  “Yeah…but related in what way?” asked Baker. “Who is pulling the strings and what is their end goal?”

  “That’s
the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” said Carpenter, taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly.

  “I think it’s more like the six-point-four-billion-barrel question,” said Cortez, rubbing his face with the palm of his hand and realizing he had forgotten to shave that morning. He slid his chair back and crossed his legs, trying to find a comfortable position. He knew they would be in there for a while. “I still think it’s all about the oil off Essequibo.”

  “But why would they cooperate?” said Carpenter. “I mean, it’s one country versus another, each claiming the same piece of land…and by extension, territorial waters.”

  They all looked at Cortez, as if expecting a complex answer.

  “Seriously?” he said, his sarcasm unmistakable. “They say that money can’t buy love, but I can tell you it sure as heck can pay for a long-term lease. There’s more than enough money offshore for both countries.”

  “Okay, where do we go from here?” Baker asked.

  “I think Clarice and I should work it hard through Agency channels, while you and Cortez work your law enforcement contacts here in Brazil and in Guyana,” Carpenter replied, looking at each person in turn.

  “I’ll also get with Jack Gonçalves and see if he can apply some pressure on the Houston big money man, Zachery Jellico,” said Cortez, wondering what the heck ‘work it hard’ even meant. Pure bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, he thought to himself.

  “Let’s not forget about Margaret Donovan,” said Carpenter, a flash of anger in his eyes. “There’s not a doubt in my mind that her well-manicured fingerprints are all over this.”

  “I can’t help but think she had a role in the fire that destroyed my family’s hardware store,” said Clarice. “By the way, has the FBI made any progress in finding the arsonists?”

  “No, not yet,” said Cortez. “But for what it’s worth, I agree with you about Donovan. I think all of this stuff is related.”

  “What about that Canadian guy, the one with the contract to kill Pete?” asked Robideaux. “Have the Brazilians had any luck in getting him to talk?”