And there was a dire shortage of greenbacks in Venezuela to support this demand, so much so that Venezuelans paid exorbitant sums for plane fare to foreign countries with fully-stocked ATMs. They’d empty their life savings to pull out a few thousand dollars at the official – and artificially low – exchange rate, then fly back home to Venezuela to sell their dollars on the street for a huge profit.
Finding weapons to protect themselves would be a problem as well. While everyone had a gun in Caracas, nobody was allowed to own one. At least not legally.
“I wish we’d been able to check a bag on our flight down here,” Brock said. “You could have brought a couple of pistols.”
Sam shook her head. “They’d never have cleared customs.”
“So what are our options, then?” Brock asked.
“I think we’re going to have to go old school,” Sam said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll show you. Head south toward downtown.”
Venezuelan pawn shops didn’t look like the pawn shops Americans were used to seeing. In fact, almost every shop was a pawn shop of sorts, as unofficial barter economies sprung up everywhere in response to the pervasive, grinding poverty endemic to the region.
They stopped at a jewelry store, which sold a few new pieces, but was mostly stocked with consignment items.
Sam knew the jewelry industry was one of the most heavily gang-infested businesses in the city. How could it not be? No legitimate jewelry business could stand up to repeated gang attacks and robberies. Smart owners capitulated early; dumb ones died.
They didn’t relish walking into this environment as a pair of bright-eyed gringos, but they needed to solve their currency problem.
They planned to use a five-thousand-year-old currency to get what they needed.
Sam used her Tricia Leavens credit card to buy two gold necklaces. It was enough gold to be meaningful, but she hoped the quantity would be small enough not enough to mark her as a juicy target for a mugging.
Brock bought a couple of gold pieces as well, and they moved on to the next jewelry store.
“This is going to take all day,” Brock observed as they made their way back to the stolen Toyota.
“Probably. But I don’t have any better ideas,” Sam said.
The second jewelry store was equally uneventful, and the third.
They grew increasingly wary with each stop. Because there was no practical way for them to lock their stolen car, it made no sense to store the gold anywhere but in their pockets.
By the time they left the fourth jewelry store of the day, finally loaded down with what they figured was enough gold to secure private passage back to the States, they had grown downright worried.
Their fears weren’t unwarranted. Word had evidently gotten around. The thugs were aware of the two gold-hungry gringos, and two toughs stopped them just a few steps from their car. One brandished a baseball bat. The other wore a jacket despite the warm, muggy weather, and held his hand in his pocket. Sam assumed he had a gun.
Baseball Bat spoke in Spanish. Sam pretended not to understand.
Jacket spoke more loudly in Spanish, with the same result.
It’s the same everywhere, Sam thought. If the foreigners don’t understand you, just talk louder.
“Empty your pockets!” Jacket was suddenly red-faced, and spittle flew from his mouth.
Sam started sobbing.
Brock looked at her in amazement. She was the toughest person he’d ever met. He’d never seen her wilt in the face of a challenge, particularly not one like this.
He was even more bewildered when she began pleading with the two goons.
“Please, don’t hurt us! We’ll give you anything you want!” Sam said between sobs. She doubled over in fear.
What the hell is happening? Brock wondered. This isn’t the Sam I know. He felt the responsibility of solving the situation fall on him, but he knew he didn’t have the martial arts skills to handle it.
Jacket stepped forward, hatred in his eyes, one hand reaching for Sam while the other fidgeted in his pocket.
“Listen, asshole–” Brock started to say.
A blur of motion and a sickening crack interrupted him.
In an instant, Jacket fell in a heap, clutching his crushed trachea. Sam’s fist had destroyed his voice box and collapsed his airway. He had moments to live, and they would be miserable, painful, panicked moments.
The blur continued, and Brock saw Sam’s arm swing in a narrow arc, connecting with the side of Baseball Bat’s neck. Sam’s blow knocked the goon off-balance. She took one step toward him, planted her left foot, and swung her right foot. It flew with lightning speed toward the young gangster’s nose. The top of her foot crushed his face. Brock heard the bones crack. Blood erupted everywhere.
But she wasn’t finished. She wrenched the bat free from his slack grip as he fell to the street, unconscious.
“Wait, Sam!” Brock yelled.
But she didn’t wait. She swung the bat down on the gangster’s head. Brock averted his eyes, but heard another sickening thud, then a gurgling sound.
Two dead gangsters.
“My God,” he said, stunned and sickened. “You’re a fucking animal.”
“Hardly,” she said. “They’re obviously foot soldiers. We’d never make it out of here if we left them alive to talk. Help me throw them in the trunk. No use leaving evidence behind.”
“Jesus, Sam,” Brock repeated. “I don’t know what I think about this.”
“Think later,” Sam said, using the driver’s side lever to open the stolen car’s trunk. “There was no choice. Help me deal with the situation right now.”
They loaded the two corpses into the sedan’s trunk, retrieved a 10mm pistol from Jacket’s front pocket, and made their way out of the city.
Sam drove. It looked to Brock like she was lost, but she was merely taking precautions to avoid being followed. She’d have preferred to swap cars again, but time wasn’t on their side.
The gangs wouldn’t be sophisticated enough to organize a disciplined multi-car surveillance procedure, of course. But Sam knew that they weren’t running from just the street thugs.
They were also running from at least one state security agency, and maybe two. And if Jarvis wasn’t yet under arrest, then the number might be as high as three. CIA, VSS, and Homeland.
Brock rode along silently, white as a sheet.
“Not always a friendly business,” Sam said.
“You killed those two dudes. One of them with your bare hands,” he said, still incredulous. “You didn’t just knock them out. You smoked them.”
She nodded grimly.
“Was it really necessary?” he asked.
“Only if we wanted to survive.”
21
Hector Yosue Alejandro Javier Mendoza – El Jerga, The Shiv – was unaccustomed to failure.
He took it personally.
Against his wishes, he had been ordered to kill the woman in broad daylight, and to kill the man whenever possible.
But she was quick, much quicker than she should have been. She squirmed away. His stroke had connected, and he had felt the familiar sensation of flesh resisting the glorious tearing and slicing of his blade, but he had missed. Instead of dying a nearly instantaneous death, as she would have done if his blade had found her heart, she had broken free, broken his nose in the process, and dashed to safety somewhere.
He had been forced to deal with all of the repercussions of a public, daylight assault. But he hadn’t achieved his objective. She had run away.
El Jerga had narrowly escaped arrest. Indeed, he had narrowly escaped further bodily injury trying to break free from the bus full of angry passengers. He’d been forced to brandish his blades to get them to back off. Even then, it was a close thing. There was a lot of latent anger in DC, and the passengers seemed willing to take it out on him, an armed assailant.
El Jerga’s conversation with the gringo go-between
was not a pleasant one. Neither would the chat with El Grande be congenial.
Both of El Jerga’s handlers knew the risks of a public, daylight assault on the redhead and her boy-toy. It was far too difficult to control circumstances in a situation like that, and the probability of failure was high.
Still, they had insisted. So El Jerga had demanded payment for the attempt on her life, not just for successful completion of the assignment, which had mitigated his financial risk.
But the personal risk was now extremely high. He would no longer have the same freedom of movement throughout the gringo city, because surveillance cameras had undoubtedly caught his assault on the bus. The gringo security agencies wouldn’t likely be after him, he knew, but the local police certainly would be. We didn’t buy every Metro officer, he thought. Some of them are still on the job.
These things would complicate his job considerably. He would mention this to El Grande, of course, and he wouldn’t be shy about the impact of the added risk on the price of his services.
El Jerga would also place another demand on them: he would execute the pair at the time and location of his choosing, and in the manner of his choosing. No longer would he allow El Grande and his gringo shill – the bureaucrat whom El Grande had bought, the man who was stashed somewhere in the bowels of an American security agency, the name of which was still unknown to El Jerga – to exert operational or tactical control over the operation. El Jerga would demand absolute field authority.
This would produce another windfall, one that was even more important to El Jerga than money. Having control over the manner of the woman’s execution meant that he could kill her as slowly as he wished.
He could enjoy her as thoroughly as he wished.
The demon inside of him would drink its fill. This knowledge made El Jerga almost giddy with anticipation. The rush was visceral, animal, sexual, and he felt his body tingle with eagerness.
He would enjoy the real thing soon enough.
But he would need help finding her again. For this, he was beholden to El Grande, and maybe to the puta gringo. It was distasteful, but unavoidable.
He sat down in the coffee shop in the subterranean shopping mall, carved beneath the Crystal City office complexes full of bureaucrats, contractors, and other supplicants to the state. He impatiently awaited the arrival of his contact with an update on the woman’s whereabouts.
El Jerga’s broken nose throbbed painfully, and he adjusted the sunglasses to a more comfortable position. He felt silly wearing them in an underground shop, but they served an important purpose: hiding the two black eyes that the woman’s blow had caused.
She will suffer tenfold for this indignation, he vowed as he watched his contact order a medium Americano and amble nonchalantly toward his table.
The Metro DC policeman sat down across from him, with his coffee in hand and a slightly obsequious smile on his face.
This had better be good news, El Jerga thought to himself as the cop delivered the predetermined opening line.
El Jerga croaked his response, then listened intently to the cop’s whispered update.
22
Sam took an offshoot from the main access road to El Avila National Park, then took a sharp left onto a jeep trail a few miles inside the nature preserve. The stolen sedan wasn’t designed to navigate trails with deep, muddy ruts, and it wasn’t long before Sam concluded that she’d driven as far as possible into the woods.
She parked at the base of Mount Avila, the large mass of vegetation-covered rock that separated Caracas from the Caribbean, and popped the trunk.
With a grim set of his jaw, Brock helped her remove the two dead gangsters from the car, carry them to a thicket of dense underbrush, and wedge them as deeply into the vegetation as possible. With any luck, the wildlife would find them before the park rangers did.
They threw handfuls of dirt and mud into the trunk of the car to absorb and obscure the pooled blood from Baseball Bat’s crushed face and skull.
Lacking the space to turn around, Sam drove in reverse back toward the paved road. Brock was impressed with her driving skills. “You’re much more than just a pretty face,” he joked. “If I had to be party to manslaughter, I’m glad it was with you.”
She chuckled as she guided the car back onto the paved road of the national park. “Self defense, baby,” she said. “It was self defense.”
“I’d agree with you completely, if it wasn’t for that last swing of the baseball bat.”
She nodded, turning back onto the main road and driving toward the national park’s exit. “You would have a perfectly valid point, except that we’re not in Uncle Sugar’s America. It’s a different world down here. If we had left either of them alive, we’d never get out of Venezuela.”
Brock smiled wanly at her. “This is me, deciding to trust you on that.”
She returned his smile. “Stick with me, kid,” she teased.
She really wanted to talk to Dan Gable, to figure out what the hell was happening with Tom Jarvis and the arrest warrant, and to find out whether Jarvis had kicked up any trouble for Dan.
But it was a risk. Turning her phone on meant that Jarvis would be able to track her precisely. More importantly, the VSS thugs he was working for could track her movements, set a trap for them, and end the cat-and-mouse for good.
It was also a risk to leave the phone off. She knew that she and Brock would need some help getting out of Caracas undetected. Their aliases would undoubtedly be blown, and Jarvis and the VSS would certainly have alerted every monkey in a uniform at passenger embarkation points all throughout Venezuela.
Sam took a deep breath and hit the phone’s power button.
A voice message awaited her, from a number she didn’t recognize. She hit the speakerphone option and listened.
Dan Gable’s voice crackled over the cheap headset. He’d bought a burner, too, his message said.
Smart, Sam thought. They’re all over your other phone lines.
He said that the arrest warrant for Tom Jarvis had been signed, and an FBI team was being dispatched to take him into custody.
That’s one fewer bastard running around, Sam thought.
Dan also said that there had been an attempt on his own life, by a DC Metro cop, who’d pulled even with his car and drawn a pistol.
It’s the wild west.
“Sam, I think you need to get out of Caracas,” Dan entreated. “You’re not going to learn anything more down there. And you’re a canary dancing on the cat’s tongue.”
Sam rolled her eyes. Dan had an annoying penchant for dramatic metaphor.
But he wasn’t wrong. Sam had come to the same conclusion.
But how? Booking an airline flight would be suicidal. They’d be rolled up by the VSS instantly.
As usual, Dan had a plan. “Freedom Air Charter International,” his message said. “Their business is illicit air traffic to and from North America. Cash plays, and no questions asked. I found them on our watch list; you’ll have to make a stop somewhere else down there to launder the flight plan, but you’ll be back Stateside in no time. They’ll be expecting you. Good luck, and I gotta run.”
“That dude’s worth his weight in gold,” Brock said after Dan’s message ended.
Sam nodded her assent.
“Let’s get the hell out of this miserable country,” she said.
Simon Bolivar International Airport wasn’t much to look at. The passenger terminal building was relatively modern, certainly by South American standards, but to practiced North American eyes, it had a distinct not-quite-right vibe to it. Plus, it was a terrific place for a corrupt customs official to detain two gringos and hand them over to the highest bidder.
Sam figured there’d be no shortage of bidders.
Fortunately, they weren’t headed to the passenger terminal.
They drove around the long arc to the south and west of El Avila National Park, turned north along the park’s western border, and made their way to the co
astal region.
The Autopista, Venezuela’s Interstate Highway equivalent, bypassed the difficult mountainous terrain on El Avila’s western slope, then curved lazily to the northeast, exiting the park at the southeast corner of the airport.
Sam got off the highway, entered the airport’s grounds, and turned in the opposite direction from the majority of the Saturday afternoon airport traffic. She headed east toward the private hangars, and kept a weather eye peeled for a particular hangar belonging to Freedom Air Charter International.
Sam hoped the gold in their pockets would be sufficient to secure their passage.
The Bureau had sent a team to arrest Jarvis, but it was clear that he’d already set things in motion. He’d intimated during their eerie phone call that he wanted Sam to head to the American embassy, but that was surely a head fake. Every American embassy was a CIA stronghold, and if Sam’s reckoning was correct, Jarvis was soon to be persona non grata in Agency circles. His covert association with the VSS had suddenly become extremely overt, likely in response to the Agency’s Operation Bolero investigation coming ever closer to exposing his duplicity.
He was in a desperate situation, but he wasn’t a desperate man, Sam reflected. He’d use every one of the resources available to him.
Those resources undoubtedly included the Caracas heavies who had assassinated Ekman twelve hours earlier. Sam was on the VSS’s home turf, and it was only a matter of time before someone from the home team caught up with her.
“This better work,” she muttered as she parked the stolen sedan across from a freshly painted hangar. The letters FACI were painted in bright gold, with a sparkling silver border.
They stepped into a posh, plush, modern lobby. “Business must be pretty good,” Brock observed.
“May I help you?” the clerk asked, in flawless English.
“I sincerely hope so,” Sam said.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 42