by Dan Pollock
“Oh, for God’s sakes, Ray! You don’t know anything about me or my sympathies. I’m not Patty Hearst. I don’t condone bombing, any more than I condone back-stabbing a lifelong friend or bulldozing historic artifacts.”
“Okay, so I’m way off base there. But you could be Patty Hearst, and you know what I’m talking about. The fact is, as D.W.’s daughter, you’re a prime target now—for political terrorists, or just plain criminals. You know damn well your father worries about this all the time, and has ever since you went off to nursery school. And I can tell you, we’ve all been especially aware of it from the instant we heard you were going with him to Latin America. We’ve taken many steps to safeguard you, Jacqueline. A lot of them you’re not even aware of. And now, with what’s happened down here last night—” Ray shook his head at the enormity of the situation.
“I mean, we’re talking about highly skilled terrorists, eluding our perimeter security, stealing high explosives out of our own construction shed, then infiltrating several work sites and blowing up heavy equipment, setting petrol fires, spraying terrorist graffiti around—”
“I’m well aware of what was done, Ray. I’ve been photographing it.”
“Then for God’s sakes, Jacqueline, let’s not suggest we’re any of us overreacting here. Your dad and Owen and I, we’d be criminally negligent if we didn’t take immediate and drastic steps to protect you—and ourselves, and everyone in the Proteus family.”
Jacqueline realized that, during Ray’s speech, Owen Meade had drifted closer on her other side. An over-the-shoulder glance showed her the two federal cops leaning on their Buick thirty feet away, smoking and looking bored. She began to back away from the Proteus triumvirate.
“Don’t you dare!” she warned them all.
“Jacqueline,” D.W. growled, “no one’s doing anything to you.”
But she took another backward step and glance—and was relieved to see the Casa Grande’s front door open. Enrico stepped out, settling his ranch hat on his head, followed closely by Arquimedeo. She turned and began walking toward them.
“Enrico!”
He paused, waiting for her. She heard her father and his men moving behind her on the gravel, but she didn’t turn around.
“Enrico, it seems we have more company. My dear papa has come to take me away. The problem is, I don’t want to go. He says I have no say in the matter. I’m to be taken into custody, just like Dr. Laya. So now, as your guest, and as Sam’s guest, I ask you a personal favor, Enrico. Please don’t let him do this.”
But the ranch foreman could not sustain her imploring gaze. He looked uncomfortably beyond her—at her father.
“Enrico, please! I have work to do here!”
D.W.’s now-hear-this voice boomed behind her. “Señor Tosto, I believe you have received a telephone call from your employer in the past few hours. Is this so?”
Jake saw Enrico nod slowly. She whirled on her father: “Sam called here?”
“I had Hardesty Eason notify him this morning of the terrorist attack, and Sam promised he would telephone Señor Tosto and ask him to ensure your safety until you could be evacuated from the area. He also promised to tell Señor Tosto to cooperate fully with me.”
“Enrico, is this true?”
Once again he nodded. “Samuel called while we were out. He spoke to Romalda. It is just as your father says.”
“Well, damn him then, and damn you! All of you!” Jacqueline tried to back away again, but found herself encircled by enemies, all of the masculine persuasion. She was livid, and when she felt a touch on her arm, she wrenched it free—then swung around to find that it was Arquimedeo who had dared to approach her.
“Jacqueline,” the archaeologist said, blinking owlishly behind his lenses, “you must not blame Enrico. Whoever these Bandera Roja people are—Oscar and his Indians, or others—and whatever they are seeking, this is not a place for you to be now. In this respect, you must listen to your father.”
“Oh, well, thank you for that! How wonderful and protective everyone is! Let’s all go off into protective custody and let other people run the world.”
“But I did not intend an insult.”
“Well, I’m insulted. Sorry, Arqui. You can go trotting off like a good boy with your federales, if you like, but I’m not going to be dragged away without bitching to high heaven.” She turned on Enrico: “Arqui’s right, I mustn’t blame you, Enrico. But you can tell your jefe in Oklahoma that I won’t be patronized. Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I’m going to pack.”
Inside, in the corridor leading to her guest room, she came upon Bernardo, looking vaguely furtive. “We’re going to Puerto Ordaz, Nardo. I’m not sure if I’m being kidnapped or kicked out. Amounts to the same thing. You better pack your bag.”
“I was watching.” He put something into her hand. She looked down at a 36-exposure roll of Kodachrome 64.
“What’s this?”
“I took pictures—through the window—of those men in the Buick talking to you, and then of your father and Señor Meade and Señor Arrillaga.” In his other hand she now saw the little Olympus Auto Zoom she’d let him use. “You always say, ‘Shoot everything, edit later,’ right?”
She stared at the roll, then at his ardent expression, and threw her arms around him. “Thank you, Nardo. You’ve got the instincts of a real photojournalist. And right now, you’re about the only dude around here I can trust.”
She turned at footsteps behind her. Enrico was standing near. “I am sorry for what has happened, Jacqueline. But after what we saw this afternoon, I was afraid for you. I am glad they came for you, truly.”
“It’s okay, Enrico.” She went to him and hugged him. “You’ve been wonderful, and I had no right to let my anger at my dad and Sam spill over onto you. Can you forgive me?”
“It is for you to forgive me. Romalda and I want you to come back, as soon as all these crazy people are put in prison, and stay as long as you like. You will always be welcome at La Promesa.”
“I accept. Now, dare I ask one last favor?”
A moment later she handed him a plastic bag containing a dozen eight-millimeter cassettes, two and a half hours each—all her Venezuelan footage—plus Bernardo’s little roll of Kodachrome. “Enrico, will you keep these hidden until I telephone you where to send them? Right now, I can’t trust my father or any of his employees.”
He nodded solemnly.
Ten minutes later, after emotional good-byes to Enrico’s wife and several of her sisters, Jacqueline found herself bouncing down the ranch road by herself in the back of the Proteus Land Cruiser. Owen Meade was driving, with D.W. on his right. They also had a couple of shotguns up there, she’d noticed. Just ahead, Ray Arrillaga was driving the unmarked Toyota pickup with Bernardo. As they swung out onto the north-south road toward Puerto Ordaz, she glanced back through the back window and caught a last glimpse of Cerro Calvario receding under threatening skies.
Chapter Thirty-Five
A few kilometers north of the ranch turnoff, the Proteus convoy passed a Venezuelan phone truck off on the shoulder, with a lineman halfway up a power pole. Before the vehicles were out of sight, the lineman began descending the pole with his safety belt and climbing irons, unharnessing to drop the last meter to the ground.
Then, giving a tug to his baggy coveralls and adjusting an oversized hard-hat, the elfin-faced lineman approached the service truck, where the passenger window was already winding down. A mournful, gray-bearded face appeared. Like the lineman, the seated man wore coveralls with a CANTV logo, but neither was an employee of the Compania Anónima Nacional Teléfonos de Venezuela.
“Boss,” the undersized lineman said, “you saw the rich girl?”
“No. She must have been in the back of the rear truck. Chucho, get your brother, and let’s get out of here,”“
As Oscar Azarias scooted over behind the wheel, Chucho unbuckled the climbing irons and slung them into the truck. Then he hiked a short distance into the b
rush, where his younger and larger half-brother, Angel, knelt beside a freshly turned mound of earth. Angel was still brooding. The brothers exchanged some words and gestures, then Chucho returned to the CANTV truck.
“So where’s Angel?” Oscar asked.
“He prays still for the spirit of the telephone man. Angel is not happy about leaving this man in the earth.”
“What the hell does he want us to do with him?”
“It is a matter of tradition, Boss. Angel wishes to burn the body, then grind the bones and collect the ashes in a small gourd. When the time is right, he will mix these ashes with some fruit paste and eat it.”
“Chucho, tell your brother he gets his ass in the truck, or we leave without him. He can come back later and take care of etiquette.”
Chucho scurried off again. Oscar started the engine and revved up, hoping the urgent noise would shock the big Indian out of his mystic funk.
It turned out that the scary-looking Kamarakota, who had boasted of having been an enforcer for the Medellín Cartel, had never killed a man before this morning. The victim was a CANTV serviceman they’d ambushed on a side road. Angel had snuck up from behind and clubbed him on the hard hat with his huge fist. The CANTV man had dropped like a rock, head lolling, a cervical vertebra obviously snapped. Angel had slumped beside the body, inconsolable and mostly useless from that point on. Oscar and Chucho, meanwhile, had busied themselves stripping off boots and coveralls, then locating a second uniform in the truck.
Only when Oscar had finally resorted to bullying had Angel helped them stuff the dead lineman into the back of the panel truck. While Angel attended to burial rites nearby, they’d spent hours parked beside various power poles near the La Promesa turnoff. The stakeout had allowed them to monitor all traffic entering or leaving the ranch, and incidentally to admire some of their previous night’s sabotage. Two burned-out earthmovers were quite visible from the road.
Both Chucho and Angel had performed remarkably on that assignment, Oscar thought. Incendiary and demolition work was tricky enough, but to do it well, while also avoiding detection, especially exfiltrating security areas with pyrotechnics in progress, required rare skills. And the brothers seemed especially proficient in night operations. Frankly, Oscar had no business complaining about the big Kamarakota’s funerary superstitions.
And Chucho had proved surprisingly adept today with the pole-climbing apparatus, even with boots and coveralls several sizes too large. But as Chucho had modestly explained, Kamarakotas and other forest tribes had long fashioned their own climbing slings of ropes and palmwood, with which they shinnied up tall plantain trees or scaled the smooth-boled moriche and the thorny trunk of the pijigua.
Finally, as Oscar gunned the engine for the tenth or dozenth time, Chucho appeared with his large and morose brother in tow. When both had squeezed inside, Oscar let out the clutch and pulled the phone truck onto the road. The little convoy from the cattle ranch was long gone, of course, and the afternoon darkening under dense rain clouds. But there was no need for undue haste. From his snooping at the Cerro Calvario camp and chatting with the volunteers, Oscar knew exactly where father and daughter must have gone. And after last night’s successful rehearsal, he felt his little team was ready to tackle something truly big.
*
Félix Rosales had filled the short bed of his Mazda pickup with electronic gear and other valuable items left behind by Arquimedeo and the rest of the crew. There were several microscopes, a canister vacuum, a metal detector, the single-sideband radio, two Polaroid cameras, TV, VCR, the Tandy laptop Félix had inherited when Arqui got his Toshiba, two camp stoves, binoculars, even a compact refrigerator and small Honda generator.
The decision to clear out had been made in the middle of the night. Félix had been jolted out of postcoital stupor by a distant concussion, a rumble that shook the earth under his sleeping tent. He told himself it was only a Venezuelan Air Force F-16 or Mirage jet streaking low over the savanna. Then he smelled smoke. He’d had to shake Marta awake, then practically shove her out of the sleeping bag to escape her clutches. Finally he’d grabbed up his 12-gauge over-under and hustled out. Immediately he’d heard a roaring, climbed a rock and saw a bulldozer a half-mile away in fireball silhouette, canopied by oily smoke. That was altogether enough night reconnoitering for Félix. He sat up till dawn in a camp chair outside the tent, the shotgun in his lap.
In the morning he’d gone prowling again, very carefully. He’d encountered two incinerated Caterpillar hulks, an untorched flatbed sprayed with Bandera Roja graffiti—then walked right into the assault-rifle sights of a National Guardsman. Félix had dropped his shotgun, thrown up his hands and shouted his innocence. Fortunately, old Jaime, one of the Proteus guards, had been just a step behind the Guardia man, and quickly vouched for Félix.
Jaime also had a message to deliver—one Félix had already figured out for himself. The Proteus folks had phoned the guardhouse to say they wouldn’t be arriving today to inspect archaeological trenches or artifacts. The company obviously had more pressing problems. The real import of the message, for Félix, was that there would be no more Proteus money trickling his way. The bogus excavation, like the real one, was now history. It was finally time to pack up and get the hell off this godforsaken piece of rock.
Félix was furious—yet secretly relieved. On the way down to his tent, he booted over a wet-sieving barrel, then grabbed a shovel and, whirling like a hammer thrower, flung it far out into the brush.
“A la chingada!” he cried, then listened to the flat echo off the rocks: “A la chingada...”
Marta Mendes was quickly beside him, eyes blinking in concern. “Félix, what’s happening? What did you find out?”
He told her tersely.
“So what are you going to do now?”
“Get the fuck out of here, chica, that’s what I’m going to do now.”
She didn’t ask her next question, but he read it in her eyes: What about me?
He struck his tent, inventoried his pitiful possessions at a glance. Rage and relief gave way now to well-worn despair. He was walking away with nothing to show for his whole archaeological career. Which put him right back where he’d been after the collapse of his bodybuilding career, before he’d first gone to work as a digger for Arquimedeo.
Another futile episode in the life of Félix Rosales. Only this time he’d run out of relatives to bail him out. In fact, thanks to Arqui’s academic contacts, it was likely Félix would never again be hired by any university archaeology department. And there was worse to contemplate. He’d already spent the entire crummy advance he’d gotten from Jake’s father and still owed six payments on his beat-up truck.
Damn, he had to make out some way! One answer, of course, had been staring him in the face for days, not fifty paces off—two work tents crammed with equipment that had been trucked down from Cerro Calvario by Proteus crews. Most of it belonged to Arquimedeo or Simón Bolívar University—or, in some cases, to the foundations that had loaned it. If it was missing, there’d be no particular mystery about who’d run off with it.
But, supposing he left all the hefty, specialized stuff—the soil-resistivity meters and photon magnetometers—and just swiped consumer items? He could head for the nearest city, sell the stuff piece by piece, then vanish. He could even fix up a new identity. Félix was a silly-ass name anyway, more suited to some mincing maricón—a fag. While this plan was taking shape in his mind, and he was mulling over aliases, Marta finally made her approach:
“I was thinking, Félix.”
“What about?”
“That you and me could go back to Cumaná together. I know my brothers would give you a job.”
He stared at her, momentarily at a loss for a sufficiently scathing comeback. Did she actually think he’d agree to haul slimy nets and take orders from her stinking brothers—all for the privilege of sticking it to her at night? Or was she even more delusional? Did she imagine he’d want to marry her and
learn to fish and talk Portuguese? Was that the pathetic dream that seemed to shine now out of her homely face?
But then he thought, why not? Why not take off to Cumaná with Señorita Mendes? That was one sure way to keep her from ratting to the authorities. Once there, he could lie low, even do a short stint on one of the damn boats, till he was sure nobody was looking for him anymore. He’d sell stuff, stash the cash. When he was ready, he’d just take off, head for some other beach city—and better-looking chicks.
He pretended to study her thoughtfully. “Do you really think they’d give me a job, Marta?”
She leaned against him, hugged him tight. “Of course!”
“Then let’s go.”
In her jubilation, she squeezed most of the air out of his solar plexus. When Félix regained his voice, he explained there was a lot of work to do before they could actually leave. They spent the next several hours combing through equipment, sorting and selecting and packing. Félix didn’t explain what he intended to do with it all exactly, only that it was too valuable to leave on the mountain with terrorist crazies running around.
Now, late in the afternoon, there was just enough space left in the back of the Mazda to wedge in their own backpacks and sleeping bags. And they were finishing just in time. As Marta helped him spread a tarpaulin over the bed and tuck it in, the rain clouds seemed ready at any moment to open their bellies. Marta suggested punching grommets along the edges of the tarp and lashing it down to make it watertight—the way her brothers had taught her. Félix only laughed and told her to get her little buns in the truck.
“We’re not expecting storm waves out here, Marta, just a good hard rain. Mostly, I’m worried about covering everything so at the gate Jaime can’t see what the hell we got back there.”
He started the engine, then the wipers, as the first fat drops began splashing the windshield and drumming across the roof. Then they were off, thumping along the rough track for the last time. But just this side of the Proteus gatehouse, Félix braked and turned to Marta.