24 Declassified: Storm Force 2d-7

by David S. Jacobs

  One of the most imposing and storied old homes in this historic area was Venable House, a majestic Neo-Georgian structure with a white-columned front and extensive, exquisitely landscaped gardens. Its grounds were bordered by an eight-foot-high, black iron spear fence.

  Venable House now served as the site of the Venezuelan Consulate.

  Because of its current owners' antagonistic stance in regard to the host country, the locale remained under constant surveillance by U.S. intelligence, most prominently by CTU and the FBI, who maintained a joint operation that used both human agents and electronic eavesdropping devices to keep a close watch on the consulate.

  Observers now reported that the consulate had gone into maximum security lockdown. Word must have finally reached its occupants of the attack on Colonel Paz and the massacre at the Golden Pole. With Paz missing in action, command of the security sector devolved to his second-in-command, Major Delaparra.

  Now the massive, motorized front gates accessing the long, curving driveway through a broad expanse of front lawn were closed and locked. A heavy-duty SUV was parked broadside just behind the gates, to serve as a further obstacle to deter and resist the onslaught of any car or truck bombs. The machine had to be moved to allow the passage of vehicles containing security teams, the only vehicles that were allowed to enter or exit the compound.

  Normally there were two guards armed with sidearms on duty at the entrance.

  That had been upped to a squad of six men, helmeted and flak-jacketed, armed with assault rifles.

  Similarly equipped teams of guards had been posted at strategic points around the grounds, stationed so they commanded a 360-degree field of fire to engage intruders from any direction in which they might try to launch an assault.

  The main building's ground-floor windows — already made of bulletproof glass — were sealed behind bombproof shutters. Except for security forces, all other consular personnel remained inside the building and out of sight.

  That included the consul himself, Professor Gabriel Vargas Obregon, his wife, and daughters, all of them occupants of the mansion's luxurious living quarters, and all of whom had been at home at the time of the lockdown.

  A plan was already in place to meet the threat of Hurricane Everette by concentrating diplomatic personnel and their families at the consulate and riding out the storm there, rather than evacuating them from the city. The building had its own generator and stocks of food and water. Since the consulate had weathered Katrina with minimal damage and disruption, it was felt that the precautions were adequate to survive whatever onslaught Everette could muster.

  A more militarized, action-oriented version of that plan was now set in motion, as members of the consular staff who resided off-site in houses and apartments around the city were notified to lock themselves in and remain at home, where they would be picked up by security squads and delivered to the Garden District mansion.

  A half-dozen armored limos similar to the one driven by Colonel Paz now conducted a ferry system, going abroad into the city to pick up staffers and their families and bring them back to the hardened strongpoint of the consulate.

  Despite the home regime's official line of a socialist system without the preferments of caste and class, it was noticeable that off-premises staffers were secured and delivered to the mansion according to their rank in the diplomatic hierarchy. Those highest in the chain of command, assistants and deputies to the consul and such, were picked up first, then middle-level bureaucrats, and lastly clerks and secretaries.

  Not only the consulate's physical but also its electronic security had been hardened. No phone messages, e-mails, cables, or faxes were allowed to go out or come in without being screened to protect against further, updated instructions being passed in either direction to potential traitors or double agents in on the conspiracy.

  U.S. electronic intelligence — ELINT — devices detected a major increase in signal traffic going into and out of the consulate's core, shielded, top secret communications center. The communiques were scrambled and encoded. They were intercepted by National Security Agency "big ear" devices and downloaded to NSA supercomputers for decrypting. Results would be transmitted to CTU as soon as available.

  U.S. government agents posted throughout the surrounding neighborhood at all critical avenues of approach continued to file updated reports stating that no potential physical threat elements to the consulate had yet been detected.

  The twin-chambered heart of the Venezuelan government's presence in New Orleans consisted of the consulate and the LAGO offices. LAGO was an overseas subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela, the state oil company. Its offices were located in a skyscraper in the urban cluster of the downtown business district.

  Like the consulate, the office building was itself a strongpoint, protected by LAGO's on-site security force, all of whose members had been personally selected and trained, and were under the command of Colonel Paz. Their leader's unexplained absence failed to affect the efficiency of the unit, which moved swiftly to defend the locale with a phalanx of cold-eyed, combat-ready troopers.

  LAGO maintained a sizable staff of high-ranking executives, mid-level managers, and rank-and-file administrators. An operation similar to that which concentrated the diplomatic staff at the consulate site was conducted by the LAGO contingent.

  It would have been impossible to succor the oil company personnel at the consulate; their numbers would have swamped the site's resources. Instead, LAGO staffers and their families were secured and delivered to the company building, which also boasted its own private generator and reserves of fresh water and food.

  They were prepared to ride out the storm; now they would also ride out any armed assault.

  * * *

  The dark green SUV manned by Jack Bauer and Pete Malo pulled over to the side of the road and stood there, idling. They had been notified of an important incoming transmission from Director Cal Randolph at CTU Center, one that would be beamed to the transceivers that were part of the vehicle's array of onboard electronic communications hardware.

  This included a monitor screen that was part of a console built into the dashboard housing. The screen was treated with a polarizing glaze process that rendered it opaque to any person or surveillance device that attempted to view it from outside the windows of the SUV. Audio was supplied by a speakerphone grid. Condenser microphones with fine-tuned pickup allowed Jack and Pete to respond directly to Cal in real-time, two-way conversation.

  Cal said, "We have a positive identification of the female shooter."

  The monitor screen imaged full-face and profile shots of the distaff member of the hit team, dead.

  These were followed by a different photo of the assassin, one taken elsewhere and earlier, when she was alive. From the look of it, it was the product of a surveillance camera whose subject was unaware that she was being photographed.

  It was an exterior shot, a street scene in an anonymous, unrecognizable urban locale. It pictured the woman standing on a street corner. She wore civilian clothes, a shortsleeved blouse and slacks, toting a handbag with a long shoulder strap. Her dark hair was much shorter than at the time of her death, a boyish pixie cut whose ends reached down to her firm jawline. She wore the same characteristic wire-rimmed spectacles with the oval lenses. Her forehead was high and smooth, almost bulbous; her mouth was a tightly compressed straight line.

  Cal Randolph's disembodied voice came loud and clear through the speaker grid.

  "This picture was taken by one of our sources eighteen months ago in Lima, Peru. The subject is Beatriz Ortiz, a Maoist, radical terrorist, and self-styled urban guerrilla."

  The name rang no bells with Jack. He'd worked some Latin American assignments, but his real area of expertise was the Middle East, South Asia, and the Balkans. He glanced at Pete Malo, whose face showed no sign of recognizing the woman.

  Cal said, "She's of Argentinean origin. Thirty years old, according to the record."

  The director
continued, "Her father was a college professor, her mother a dental technician. The father got on the wrong side of the Argentine military junta during the era of its 'Dirty War' against the left. He only signed a few human rights petitions, but that was enough to get him denounced, arrested, and sent to jail. He was never seen again and became one of the thousands of Desparacus, the Disappeared Ones. Presumably, like the others, he was tortured, executed, and buried in an anonymous mass grave.

  "This radicalized the daughter. By the time she came of age and went to university in Buenos Aires, the junta was long gone and she was able to pursue her ideological passions with a minimum of scrutiny by the authorities. She began her student days as a committed Marxist-Leninist. She was spotted by a radical professor who steered her to a Cuban communist recruiter. She dropped out of sight sometime before graduation, her whereabouts a mystery to her family and few friends.

  "We believe she was smuggled out of the country to Cuba, where she was extensively trained at a school for spies. Her training period took several years, during which she demonstrated real expertise in the clandestine arts, including demolitions and assassination.

  "She surfaced in Colombia, where she was associated with FARC, the rural-based revolutionary militia that's fought a civil war against the government for over twenty years now. The record shows that she operated with equal facility in the cities or the jungle. In the cities, she helped blow up buildings and assassinate government officials, journalists, judges, and prominent capitalists. In the jungle, her targets were landowners large and small, priests, teachers, ranchers, farmers, villagers who wanted to stay neutral, and all others she deemed 'enemies of the revolution.'

  "This experience further radicalized her, causing her to cast aside Marxism-Leninism as 'too gradualist' and embrace Maoism, specifically the most violent revolutionary excesses of the Red Guard era during the sixties, a program that was defunct years before she was born. She expressed admiration for the genocidal regime of Pol Pot's Cambodia, and was muy simpatico with the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas during their reign of terror in Peru.

  "If Havana had ever fully controlled her — and there's some doubt on that score, the late Ms. Ortiz apparently having been something of a wildcard when it came to following party directives, due to her frequent denunciation of the Fidelista ruling clique as self-serving moderates afraid to get their hands dirty — she became a fully independent free agent following her years in Colombia with FARC.

  "Since then, she's been a freelance radical terrorist and killer, working with the most extreme ultraleft elements in South and Central America and the Caribbean. She was sentenced to death in absentia in Brazil. Most recently, she's been spotted in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

  "And get this: in the last year, she's reported as having been in the Orinoco in Venezuela, allied with a radical militia group terrorizing and killing owners of big estates and plantations opposed to Chavez's socialist takeover.

  "A lot of governments will be happy to write 'Closed' on her files. Including ours. By the way, there's no record of her having entered this country legally — or any other way. It'll be tough to get a line on her. She was a pro. She went on the Paz hit job with no identifying documents, real or fake. No laundry marks in her clothes. Garments and sneakers that're mass-produced items available in hundreds of stores around the city. No leads there."

  Jack said, "How about the glasses, Cal? Maybe she had them made in New Orleans. Or the States. Maybe we could get a fix on her from the prescription of the glasses, the grinding of the lens and the house style."

  "We're checking it out," Cal said, matter-of-factly. "So there you have her, the late, unlamented — unlamented by our side, that is — Beatriz Ortiz. Make of her what you will."

  Jack asked, "Anything on the other three shooters?"

  "That's all we've got for now. We'll keep you posted on anything else that comes in."

  Cal signed off, ending the transmission. Jack and Pete sat in silence for a moment, thinking, oblivious of the throbbing rumble of the SUV's idling engine.

  Pete spoke first: "That Chavez connection makes her a natural to link up with Paz."

  Jack said, "Except that she tried to link him up with a bullet."

  "Thieves fall out. Maybe she was part of Paz's apparatus here in New Orleans until she had a change of heart and thought he was going soft and decided to purge him for 'deviationist tendencies.'"

  "It could happen," Jack conceded. "But that communist Cuba background could also tie her straight to Beltran — the joker in this deck."

  Pete pointed out, "Havana's too moderate for her liking, according to Cal."

  "She might have been able to overcome her distaste if Beltran's got something really hot cooking, something big enough and explosive enough to whet her appetite."

  Pete said, frowning, "When you put it that way, it sounds worrisome."

  Jack stroked his chin between thumb and forefinger. "Here's a puzzler: how does a hard-core Maoist urban guerrilla like Beatriz Ortiz wind up siding with a piece of neo-Nazi trash like Dixie Lee? Talk about your odd couples!"

  Pete shrugged. "Politics makes strange bedfellows, they say. Still, according to Floyd Dooley, who knows his stuff, Dixie was a money-hungry cuss who wouldn't lift a finger unless there was a dirty buck in it."

  Jack said, "While Beatriz Ortiz reads as a stone-cold ideologue and revolutionist who couldn't care less about personal gain. You couldn't buy her for anything she might consider counterrevolutionary, no matter how high the price.

  "And another thing: why would Beatriz try to hit Paz? Whatever else he is, he's a bulwark of Venezuela's 'twenty-first-century socialist' regime. By her standards, a Chavez stalwart like Paz should be the last of her targets. We know she's a committed ideologue through and through; where does the Paz hit fit in with her ideology?"

  Pete said, "Paz is dirty as hell. A big-time drug dealer. Maybe that makes him counterrevolutionary."

  "FARC's a major cocaine supplier; they move product in volume to help fund the struggle. It's revolutionary drug dealing. She stuck with them in Colombia for years. So why get squeamish about narcotics trafficking now?"

  "You're asking the questions, Jack. What's your take on it?"

  "What could bring two polar opposites like Ortiz and Dixie together in a hit on Paz?" Jack said, responding with another question and then answering it:

  "Maybe — Beltran."

  Pete made a face. "Sounds iffy."

  "Who made the try on Paz? Let's reason by process of elimination," Jack said. "Who didn't make it? Venezuela. If Caracas wanted to give Paz the chop, there was a lot easier and more discreet way of handling it. All they had to do is recall him home and execute him there. Or they could have farmed it out to someone close to him who could have carried it out with a minimum of fuss, like one of his bodyguards.

  "They sure wouldn't go gunning for him with a hit team when he's coming out of his stripper girlfriend's apartment. That's not the kind of headlines that the regime — any regime — likes. It creates a scandal. Headlines. Bad publicity. It would have made Paz look ridiculous — him, and by extension his boss, Chavez."

  Pete challenged, "Okay, Caracas didn't do it. Who pushed the button, then?"

  Jack said, "That brings us back to Beltran. We know Paz is a thief, trafficker, and killer. Beltran's more of the same, only older and more experienced. One or both of them might have gone off the reservation and gone into business for themselves. Maybe they worked up some private deal, unknown to their masters in Caracas and Havana.

  "Then, like you said, thieves fall out. Maybe Beltran discovered that Vikki contacted CTU and decided that anybody who had an indiscreet girlfriend who knew too much was too unreliable to do business with. So he decided to dissolve their partnership by dissolving Paz."

  Pete's head tilted, as if he were looking at the problem from a different angle. "I'm not saying I buy it, but just for the sake of argument, where does Dixie Lee fit in? I can see
where the Ortiz gal fits in with Beltran, but Dixie Lee?"

  Jack said, "I admit it's a loose end. But Beltran's been operating in the area for a lot longer than Paz has. He might have crossed paths with Dixie sometime in the past and decided to use him as a cutout or red herring to obscure the true sponsor of the hit."

  Pete looked as uncertain as a customer in a used-car lot. "Seems like a cowboy job for a shadowy character like Beltran who shuns the limelight."

  Jack said, "Maybe he had to act fast. Vikki's contacting us might have set a time clock ticking. A corollary to that is that some Beltran-Paz operation in the works threw a scare into her and sent her scurrying to CTU."

  Pete chewed over the idea for a minute before replying. "You know, if Beltran did try to chop Paz, that would be a hell of a situation."

  "Wouldn't it? Lots of possibilities there," Jack said.

  * * *

  Saturday was a work day at the Supremo Hat Company, a full day's work, from six in the morning until eight at night. Despite the storm threat, today it was business as usual. All employees were expected to clock in at their usual time, work their full hours, and clock out at closing time. No exceptions.

  An independent small business lacks the leeway of the bigger corporate chains. It has to hustle to outpace the bigger, better-funded competition.

  Supremo Hat was located in a single block building on the edge of a run-down area where the city's commercial business district petered out, blending into an equally run-down residential neighborhood. Most of the buildings here had gone up during the 1920s, and there had been little new construction since.

  No developers were rushing to gentrify this area. The skyline was unimposing, with few structures standing more than a few stories tall. The heart of the small business zone area was an intersection where two main thoroughfares crossed. Streets were cracked and potholed; sidewalks were uneven, with slabs of different heights. One square farther east, a block of down-at-the-heels tenements began.