Once they were ashore, she’d been right. No one wanted such gas hogs anymore and American dollars had immense buying power on the street. It turned out far cheaper to buy the two vehicles than even a one-week rental from the airport car rental agency. The rental agencies honored the official exchange rate of ten Venezuelan bolívars to the US dollar rather than the black market rate of three thousand. Besides which, the SUVs they purchased were battered and dinged enough that no one would look at them twice, whereas even Venezuelan rentals were relatively new and clean.
The exchange rates—other than the official one—were so bad that even at forty cents per gallon it took a stack of bolívars almost a foot high to fill the tank of each SUV. The clerk at the station hadn’t bothered to count the money, he’d weighed it. And grimaced until they’d added another inch.
Thankfully, Smith had anticipated this and equipped them with almost as many cases of money as ammunition. They paid the security guards a US fifty each to watch the boat, with the promise of another two hundred if it was untouched on their return. By the light in their eyes, there was a good chance it would be fine. If they had to exit the country another way, then they could sell the boat for all she cared.
The late afternoon trip into the city through the dragging rush hour had tested her nerves to the limit.
She sat in the back with Duane, but wasn’t comfortable speaking. Kyle and Carla were up front and Chad was in the far back. Richie and Melissa were taking the other vehicle to their fancy hotel.
Kyle circled them about through the city to get the lay of the land. All she got was a little carsick.
That was cured when they finally pulled up to the Helicoide Cama y Desayuno. The only thing that the three-story, gray block B&B had to do with El Helicoide was that it was looking right at it. When she opened the car door, she went straight from carsick to nearly gagging. The smell of the barrio—something the SUV’s air conditioning had at least mitigated—was brutal despite the mild fall temperatures. In the summer it must be unbearable. Frying onions, burnt meat, sewage, and…
Duane’s arm was around her shoulders and escorting her inside.
“Was that…”
“Yes, don’t think about it.”
“This city has the highest murder rate outside a war zone,” she knew the statistics. She couldn’t block them. The barrio didn’t reek of squalor—it reeked of death.
The B&B had a steel door. The man who opened it, after inspecting them carefully, wore a Makarov pistol and she’d wager there was a rifle or shotgun tucked somewhere close to hand. He was a lean man but addressed them kindly enough once they were inside and the door was locked again.
It was far nicer inside than out and Sofia managed to keep her dinner down.
“Turistas locos. Only craziest turistas come to here,” he said in a heavily-accented mash of Spanglish—which he insisted on using as soon as he realized they were Americans despite the whole team being fluent in Spanish. “All come to see El Helicoide. Last year they come from England. Museum of…arquitectura?”
“Architecture.”
“Sí. Sí. They want to take many pictures. Policía take cameras and smash! One man, he argue. They beat so bad he must go hospital. I warn them. But do they listen? No! You,” he poked Duane in the chest as if he didn’t tower a foot over him. “Do you listen?”
Duane smiled at him, “No.”
The man shook his head in disgust. But he gave them their keys and waved them toward the stairs. “Arriba. Para arriba. Up! Best view. It is at top floor. I give them to you.” And he disappeared through a back door.
The three rooms took up the entire top floor. Once they were all up the stairs, Duane set a squealer infrared beam that would warn them if anyone else tried to climb higher than the second story.
In minutes, Sofia had her computer up and opened a 3D map she’d downloaded of El Helicoide based on the original plans from the 1950s that they’d found in the archives of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Soon the team was standing far back from the windows, observing through their scopes, and calling out things for her to add.
“Level Three. At one-twenty degrees south. Gun emplacement. Nothing fancy. Probably a Kalashnikov RPK.”
“Level Two. Directly above the Level One entrance. A pair of Vladimirovs. Mounted to aim down, not up.”
She added the heavy machine guns to the diagram. They were more suited to anti-aircraft than building protection, but the half-inch rounds would punch easily through a car or truck.
Soon all four of them were calling out information so fast she could barely keep up. Chad was the sniper and was calling out the gunnery positions. Carla gave her structural changes, and seemed to have a real thing about wire fencing. Duane was defining weaknesses that could be exploited by the application of explosives. And Kyle was giving her patterns of movement, both of personnel and vehicles—reaction-time of gate guards and the like.
After two hours, Kyle called a break. Besides, the sun had set and there was little more to see. They kept bright lights facing out toward the barrio, which must be incredibly irritating to the residents, but only the uppermost layers of El Helicoide remained lit.
“Chad. First watch. Next door,” Kyle pointed. “Keep the lights off—don’t want them noticing us.”
Chad slipped away carrying his rifle.
“Sofia, show us what we’ve got.” He pulled the blinds down and they spent the next two hours crowded around her laptop breaking down what they’d learned.
“Who’s up for a sightseeing tour?” Duane did his best to sound chipper over breakfast but it was hard.
He’d pulled third watch, right in the middle of the night. The only activity had been someone from the barrio snooping around even their sad SUV parked on the street. Not wanting to shoot anybody, he’d used his silenced rifle to shoot another car farther down the street. He didn’t feel bad because it no longer had tires or seats, but the bullet’s impact made a very satisfying—and highly recognizable—bang as it punched through the rusted hood and pinged off the engine block. The thugs on the street might as well have evaporated for how fast they were gone.
On top of that, Richie hadn’t been kidding about the beds. They were miserable. Unable to stand it any longer, he’d gone for a morning run. The old man had been there to let him out and back in, just shaking his head at Duane’s insanity.
Thankfully, the food wasn’t as bad as Richie had predicted.
The old man pan-grilled arepas. He’d sliced the hand-sized circular maize-flour cakes in half, creating a reina pepiada sandwich filled with chicken, avocado, spring onions, and a wicked mayo-cilantro sauce. He could have eaten a trayful, if they weren’t so filling. Just one did in everyone except Chad—even he couldn’t finish the second one.
Breakfast, and completing his run to see Sofia’s smile in the window above where she stood last watch, were the two highlights that said this was going to be a very good day.
“What are we seeing?”
He’d have answered anyone other than Sofia, but for her… “It’s a surprise.”
And it was. A quarter of a mile walk along the Calle Vuelta Del Casquillo, they stepped out of the barrio and into another world. There were several tall buildings, the streets were wide and had sidewalks. In a nicely planted area stood a Metrocable station. It was a cross between a fortress on the lower stories—which the plantings did little to soften—and a fanciful forest of steel above.
“I present to you the Metrocable tramway. It provides a splendidly scenic view of the city.”
Sofia was the first to trace the line of the aerial cables and then turn back to him with that radiant smile of hers. Once they were airborne, El Helicoide would be clearly visible from the tram car from a far different perspective than their B&B.
Inside, the station was again another world from the streets. It was a study in marble and bright steel. The squeezing pressure of the city was replaced by a vast expanse that could have handled a thousand
people rather than the few dozen using it. There were signs for daycare, hotels, shopping…but they mostly pointed to chained-off stairwells and darkened storefronts.
But every thirty seconds a gondola rattled over the rails and into the station as another rattled out. State sponsored and controlled, the fares were just a few hundred bolívars, mere pennies on the black market.
With a little careful maneuvering—stepping into line after one large group and just before the arrival of another—the five of them got an eight-person car to themselves. As soon as they were locked in, Duane pulled out a sensor and ran it over the insides.
“We’re clean. The microphone isn’t engaged until we hit that ‘in case of emergency’ button.”
“Then don’t hit it, bro.”
“I won’t.”
Sofia rolled her eyes rather than adding the last note to Chad’s and his patter.
Then, as their car shot out of the building and began the steep climb toward the first pylon, they all turned to the windows.
Below lay the a single block of neat, multi-story brick houses, roofs of white or gray tin. The area was relatively flat and there were cars on the streets. At the end of the block, the terrain jolted upward. The housing changed completely from one side of the street to the other. A mixture of single-story, severely-marginal brick shacks were jumbled together worse than a pile of dumped-out jigsaw puzzle pieces. There were no roads, no straight passages. The walkways were often only a few feet wide, jogging this way and that around individual structures. The barrio, impossibly, looked even worse from above than it did on the ground. He’d done a little exploring this morning during his run.
And over it all loomed the towering edifice of El Helicoide, its upper heights quickly coming to eye level.
“What must it be like to live here?” Sofia was surreptitiously filming out the window. Her sunglasses had a built-in projection feed from the high-res camera peeking out through a hole in the purse over her shoulder. A hand tucked around the strap gave her access to the zoom controls. It was a slick piece of work that he’d enjoyed playing with while she was setting it up.
“I know,” Duane felt the same thing. “To live in poverty and look up at that thing. At least it isn’t a shopping mall anymore, that would be horrible.”
“No, it is just the SEBIN who are oppressing them. I think maybe it would be like always seeing the Death Star no matter which way you turn.”
“Aren’t we in a bright mood this morning.”
Sofia grimaced.
“Sorry.” Duane wanted to brush a hand down her back, but didn’t dare jar her camera work—that she’d never forgive. He missed their banter, but somehow it just didn’t work looking down at the mess that was central Caracas.
Kyle pulled out his satellite phone. “Richie. Meet us at the Parque Central Metrocable station…That sounds better.” And he snapped the phone closed.
The tram rattled into a station atop the hill in the center of the barrio. It was clear that buildings had simply been swept aside here to place the station. Unlike the lower San Agustín station, the El Manguito station made no qualms about being fortified. It was surrounded by high fences topped with razor wire.
Like the tourists they were, they got out and went to the viewing platform.
The two-hundred-foot geodesic dome atop of El Helicoide was at eye-level less than two football fields away. A sign warned that photography was illegal and armed guards prowled the platform to ensure it was obeyed.
Sofia rested her purse on the railing.
“There, at the north end, you can just see the planned elevator.”
Duane looked down. All he saw was a small, blocky building at the base.
“It was supposed to be a sloped elevator, six of them actually in three separate shafts buried beneath the building into the hillside. They were never installed.”
Now he could see the repeated structures up the face that would have been nine successive elevator lobbies. “Is that what the structure on the top is, beside the dome?”
Sofia made a show of looking at the skyline as she shifted her purse. “Yes. The bottom half. The top half appears to be a radio antenna. It’s pointed slightly to the west from straight up.”
Duane nodded. “Richie said that the Simon Bolívar spy satellite is in a slot at seventy-eight degrees west. Caracas is at sixty-six. So the antenna’s angle makes sense.”
She fussed with the purse’s strap. “Cable housings running on the surface into the dome. If we could get in there, I’d wager we could get the codes.”
“Oh, like that’s gonna happen. You on drugs, lady?” Chad grumbled.
Duane wondered though. There had to be some way in. The trick would be to get in and out without drawing any attention to themselves.
Chad looked at him, waiting for something.
What? Oh. His second beat.
“If she’s on any drugs, I hope I’m the drug.” A lame response, but all he had at the moment.
It was hard to believe they were in the same city. Sofia breathed in deeply and blessed the moment. Yes, she could still feel the oppressive city out there, but they were in a little bubble of normalcy.
The Metrocable whisked them over the eight lanes of the Autopista Francisco Fajardo—the freeway was an unmoving block of colorful buses, yellow taxis racking up huge fares while not moving, and cars packed so densely that even the motorcycles had trouble weaving through the gaps. They unloaded at the final Parque Central station and walked into the Parque Los Caobos. Suddenly they were crossing broad, grassy lawns beneath the shadows of ancient trees. The big-leaf mahogany trees—caobo in Spanish—had somehow survived all the regime changes, revolutions, overpopulation, and avoided depredation since Colónial times.
For five hundred years this park had survived in the heart of Caracas. It was surrounded by the national performance center for music and dance as well as museums of science and arts all around the periphery. But even that was lost beneath the trees. Here, quiet paths wandered through more shade than sunlight.
The trees were alive with other fauna as well. Green Amazonian parrots debated territorial rights with the brilliant scarlet macaws—especially when someone tossed out some leftover tortilla. Black squirrels countered the parrots’ aerial strategies with racing ground strikes—down the tree, a dash to the prize, quick grab, and the fur infantry returned to the trees before the feathered air squadrons coordinated their forays.
Sofia wanted to purchase a whole stack of tortillas so that she could toss them about in little pieces and just watch.
Sculptures awaited them in surprising locations, but the best was the Fuente Venezuela—the Venezuela fountain. The quiet two-tiered pool with small water jets quietly splashing was peopled by large stone sculptures representing the different regions of the country. Beautiful, bare-breasted women and stunningly handsome loin-clothed men lounged for all to admire. The statues were self-contained, complete in themselves, needing no others.
She had thought that embodied her—alone, independent, and all fine with that. Now she had a sister—who had e-mailed her such a hilarious account of her efforts at the Dundee Wine Festival booth that Sofia would have laughed until she cried if others hadn’t been in the room. For a moment she’d wished with all her heart that she’d been there beside Consuela.
And she had…a boyfriend? Sofia knew she had a lover, but that was physical. She strongly suspected that she now had both.
Among the couples admiring the fountain were Richie and Melissa. They looked disgustingly well rested as they approached while holding hands.
Sofia had only slept fitfully last night, despite getting no sleep at all on the boat. After she’d spent a whole night on the boat wanting to know what Duane had been about to say to her, she’d now spent another wishing he hadn’t said anything to begin with.
Then he’d jogged in the morning all bright and chipper as if life was perfect in Venezuela.
What the hell was she doing here?
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She’d abandoned her family, abandoned Consuela to return to The Activity. Except was she with them? No. She was with Delta Force.
And if she bonded with Duane—if they had one more heart-to-heart talk—she’d want to leave her own team to join his.
Somewhere in the middle of the longest night in recent history she’d decided that she was the one who was screwed up. She’d left Nana, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Consuela, and now The Activity. How long before she left Duane? She was the woman who ran away from everything good. Not that she was with Duane…but she was and—
“I should go throw myself in the fountain.”
“That dress. On you. Wet… Oh yeah. Do you want me to help you in?”
She punched Duane on the center point of his sore ribs.
“Shit!” His gasp made her feel a little better.
She shouldn’t have worn a dress. She’d thought the light, summery fabric would be the best way to blend in. How was she supposed to know that a woman’s standard Caracas attire was faded jeans and a blouse or t-shirt that showed more cleavage than she typically did except at the swimming pool or an evening-gown fundraiser.
About the time she decided that she should apologize, Chad moved in to console his buddy.
Fine! Let their bromance blossom. They could invest in a rifle range together and live out their days teasing the customers with aplomb. Good for them.
Besides, Nana always said, en boca cerrada no entran moscas—flies don't enter a closed mouth. Yes, it was sometimes best to keep her mouth shut. She would do that from now on.
There were far more locals gathered around the fountain than anywhere else in the park. Several food vendors lined the edges of the surrounding square. She purchased a guava ice cream and selected a bench with easily observable approaches and relative privacy. Soon the others were seated about her on the low curb just a step away or on the lawn. They would look like a group of close friends to the dozens of passing observers.
By making a circle, they kept an eye out in every direction while looking casual. Somehow, she’d ended up being the focus of the whole circle.
Wild Justice (Delta Force Book 3) Page 22