by Matthew Hall
‘For God’s sake, let him have it,’ Kennedy said.
‘But surely we need to observe the tailing off –’
‘Give it to him. I can’t stand the noise.’
Bellman pushed the plastic bear back into the cage. The macaque grabbed it and instantly fell silent, wrapping it once again in a tight embrace. What she observed in the monkey’s expression was the closest thing to a state of ecstasy that she had ever seen. Its eyes were closed, its face fixed in an expression of bliss.
This result was both shocking and thrilling and far beyond anything they had anticipated. But as soon as her initial amazement had passed, Bellman was gripped by an overwhelming sense of terror at the possibilities it unlocked.
‘What have we done?’ she said.
Kennedy replied in a flat monotone. ‘We made a monkey like a plastic toy.’
She turned to look at him. There was no need for words – they understood each other perfectly.
Somehow, this had to be stopped.
40
The British Airways Boeing 747 was cruising at 40,000 feet over the mid-Atlantic. After a brief stop at Madrid it was now en route for Caracas. Black settled back into his cattle-class seat and closed his eyes, hoping that the two miniatures of whisky he had downed would be enough to send him to sleep. It was eight hours until touchdown and he knew he could do with all the rest he could get. Across the aisle, Riley and Fallon were already dozing. He envied their ability to shut down at will. As a younger man, he, too, had been able to sleep anywhere, any time. It was part of the make-up of the active soldier. The body adopted the rhythms of a wild animal: it was either hyper-alert or switched off and recharging itself.
The nine days since his first meeting with his new comrades had passed in a blur and produced far from satisfactory results, which was no doubt the reason he couldn’t sleep. The office in Credenhill had become the headquarters for their off-the-books operation. Cooped up together for ten hours a day, the four of them had attempted to stitch together a plan that stood an outside chance of success. They had been thwarted at almost every turn.
Their original intention had been to arrange a shipment of arms to the friendly, English-speaking country of Guyana, where they would charter an aircraft from which they would parachute at night into Platanal. Towers pulled all the strings available to him in the Foreign Office, but word came back that Guyana was not prepared to sanction any action that might place it at odds with its South American neighbours. Less still was it prepared to act quickly. It was a small country determined to shake off its colonial past. Jumping when London said jump was no longer something it was prepared to do.
With Guyana’s rejection Towers’ capital at the Foreign Office was exhausted and he was politely reminded by the Committee that his remit was to operate insofar as he could without assistance from the normal channels. He had licence and a budget, but he was to retreat as far back into the shadows as possible and take care to stay there.
The team had two problems to crack: arms and transport. Caracas was roughly six hundred miles from Platanal across inhospitable country, much of it jungle. The only feasible way in was by air. Chartering a local aircraft from Britain was an impossibility. Venezuela was a bankrupt and unstable state that nevertheless maintained a large intelligence network loyal to the government. No one who was still managing to run a business wanted to risk doing a deal over the phone with an unknown foreigner. They all gave the same reply: come and speak to us in person, and bring cash.
Acquiring arms was an even tougher proposition. Despite the fact that Venezuela was swimming with them – underpaid soldiers and police officers had flooded the black market with weapons which were bought by the criminal gangs that roamed the Caracas slums – the problem was finding a reliable source. Where to begin? Three gringos with a fistful of dollars stood little chance of emerging from the lawless barrios with much more than empty pockets and their lives. If they were lucky.
They had reached a dead end and for a period of twenty-four hours came close to abandoning the mission. Every angle had been exhausted. Then Towers had woken in the middle of the night with the bright idea of playing the enemy at its own game. In typically impulsive fashion, he drove to London before dawn and spent the day touring the city’s private security companies in search of someone who could get him a line into the Venezuelan arms trade. By close of business he had a result. A former Scotland Yard commander, now working for a company named Impel that specialized in safeguarding corporate assets in hazardous territories, came up with a trusted contact in Caracas. His man had helped arm British and American personnel assigned to protect Canadian mining executives setting up shop in the city. Impel collected £20,000 for a name and an email address, and Towers had the excuse he had been longing for to book three plane tickets.
In the following days of furious activity Towers had organized three clean passports with assistance and had pored over maps and satellite photographs, plotting routes through the jungle to the last yard. It was all a fine distraction from the principal challenges, which, in his customary way, he had managed to relegate to the level of mere details to be overcome on the ground.
Meanwhile, Black, Riley and Fallon had refreshed their jungle survival skills with help from a resident expert, Sergeant Jimmy ‘Sasquatch’ Fletcher. In a Nissen hut in Pontrilas, he took them through the techniques they would need to survive alone in the rainforest equipped with nothing more than a knife and a stomach strong enough to hold down a meal of grubs and roots. When Fletcher made them dig for worms and swallow them still alive and squirming, Black was transported back to his earliest days of basic training. The Sasquatch parroted precisely the same words the Company Sergeant Major had barked at new recruits in the early nineties: ‘If you puke, I want to see you scoop it up and eat it again!’
Returning to his vomit had seemed an appropriate metaphor while on his hands and knees in a muddy field, trying to stop his lurching stomach from spewing its contents. But Black hadn’t puked. He had held it down. Riley and Fallon, though, had both heaved repeatedly.
Black may have had the stronger stomach, but the two younger men had both got the better of him in the ring. Sparring in the gym at Credenhill, Black discovered that while he still had the muscle memory, the whip and snap had gone from his limbs. He was strong enough, but at close quarters his fractionally slower reflexes rendered him clumsy by comparison. The answer, he learned, after collecting several bruised ribs, was to compensate for lack of speed with brutality. If he engaged, it had to be with lethal intent. Feint to the head, heel to the groin, sweep to the ground, boot to the skull. Not pretty, but effective. When they had switched the rules of the game from first man down to kill or be killed, Black had more than held his own.
‘You’re a proper evil fucker,’ Riley had said with grudging admiration, as he picked himself off the canvas for the fifth time, Black’s foot having stopped an inch short of his temple.
Black had enjoyed the praise but reminded himself that Riley’s choice of words was quite wrong. There was nothing evil in wanting to live more than the other man. Survival was always the main objective. In over two decades of combat it had been his credo and it was why he was still drawing breath.
The intense preparations – the training, planning and anticipation – had been all-consuming, occupying every inch of his mental space except for one small quarter: he hadn’t been in touch with Karen since they parted on an angry note. He felt guilty at leaving her alone and ashamed at his necessary lack of communication. And secretly, hardly even daring to admit it to himself, he was frightened that he wouldn’t see her again, that he might never have the chance to feel her touch.
The aircraft shuddered as they entered a patch of turbulence. The seat-belt sign illuminated. Black glanced out of the window and saw lightning fork across the night sky. The plane dipped suddenly through a pocket of warm air, causing the hull to shake then thud as firmly as if they had landed on solid ground. A number of pas
sengers exclaimed in alarm. On the seat-back screen in front of him, a graphic of the aircraft’s progress showed that they were still two thousand miles from land. As far out over the ocean as it was possible to be. The pilot’s smoothly understated voice came over the loudspeakers. He warned them that they would be skirting a storm and that the ride might be a little bumpy for a while. The couple occupying the two seats to Black’s right held hands, and in whispered Spanish the wife muttered a prayer.
Black pulled down the blind and finally felt the welcome pull of sleep. With an image of Karen’s face playing behind his eyes he let the movement of the plane rock him like a baby.
Black woke, refreshed, to the sound of the undercarriage descending and locking into position. He lifted the blind and looked out to see that they were flying parallel to the Venezuelan coast on their approach to Simón Bolívar International Airport. Large-scale industrial units were spread along the inland plain to the south, and columns of white smoke rose from the chimneys of a power station. The coastal strip resembled that of any other modern country – a product of Chavez’s brief oil-fuelled miracle – but only a few miles beyond the wooded mountains with their summits lost in halos of cloud were a reminder that this was a country whose precarious pockets of civilization had only recently been carved from wilderness.
The cabin crew took their seats for landing. Black glanced across the aisle and saw that Riley and Fallon were awake and already in character. Both had their noses buried in tourist guidebooks. To avoid unnecessary complications, and because Venezuela required no visas for British tourists, all three were travelling under their own names with their passports declaring them to be civil servants. They had reservations for accommodation in Cainama National Park and rucksacks filled with hiking equipment to back up their cover story: they were three colleagues from the Birmingham tax office who had come on a charity hike and to visit the world-famous Angel Falls.
Black turned his gaze out of the window and watched the ground come slowly up to meet them. There were palm trees at the airport’s margins. Traffic was moving to and fro along the wide approach roads and the whole scene basked in brilliant tropical sun. The murder capital of the world couldn’t have looked more inviting.
The plane touched down and taxied to the stand. Minutes later Black, Riley and Fallon were queuing along with the other weary passengers in the line for passport control. In the airport, at least, there was a glossy illusion of normality. The walls were decorated with colourful advertisements for luxury brands and posters depicting the country’s famous sites. But despite the atmosphere of friendly welcome there was little sign of genuine tourists among their fellow passengers. Most were locals returning from trips to Europe. Of those that weren’t, the majority were business travellers – middle-aged men already checking their phones and calling drivers who would whisk them away to homes in one of the capital’s gated and fortified communities.
Black was the first of the three to step up to the passport officer’s booth. The poker-faced female official, one of the same breed that exist at border crossings the world over, glanced from Black’s tired, unshaven face to the image in the passport, then swept it under a reader. Tense seconds elapsed while the computer digested the information.
‘The reason for your visit?’ she asked in English.
‘My friends and I are going hiking. We hope to see the Angel Falls.’
The official looked at him dubiously, but the computer had come up with no reason not to let him pass.
‘Enjoy your trip.’
Black smiled amiably. ‘Thank you.’ He carried on through to the baggage reclaim.
Fallon followed soon after him. Riley, who had chosen to queue at the alternate booth, presented his passport to an older male officer, who regarded him with a lizard eye.
‘You’re going to Cainama, eh?’
‘That’s right.’
The officer nodded. ‘Your government advises tourists to avoid our country.’
Riley shrugged. ‘We did our research. We thought it was safe enough in the east.’
The officer nodded, keeping his thoughts on the subject to himself. He waved Riley through, but before dealing with the next passenger lifted the phone and dialled the extension number for the desk of the SEBIN, the Bolivian National Intelligence Service.
The call was answered by a bored male voice, thickened by too many cheap cigarettes.
‘This is passport control,’ the officer said. ‘Three Englishmen just came through claiming to be tourists on their way to the Falls. Male fifty, dark hair; male thirties, light brown hair; male thirties, shaved head. Just a feeling. They’re in baggage reclaim.’
‘I’ll take a look.’
In his windowless office next door to the Customs zone, the SEBIN officer, Luis Romero, lit another Belmont and ran his eye across an array of monitors relaying images from security cameras positioned around the airport. He settled on the feeds from the international baggage reclaim area and spotted the three pale-skinned men. He zoomed in to take a close look at them. Business travellers were invariably impatient and on edge while waiting for their luggage to arrive and tourists to Venezuela were usually nervous, given to checking their passports and patting their wallets zipped inside their clothes. There was nothing twitchy about these three. They joked and chatted like three friends on an adventure would, but they were a touch too calm for Romero’s liking. Prospectors working for some international conglomerate perhaps? Usually, they were Americans or Canadians eager to extend their rape of Central America down into the southern landmass – if you were foolhardy enough, Venezuela was a cheap place to do business. British tourists were rare but not unknown, particularly adventurous sorts heading out to the national parks like these claimed to be.
Romero vacillated, then decided to have them followed. If they turned out not to be tourists, perhaps they might be heading to an office in Caracas where he might net some even bigger fish.
Meanwhile, Black, Riley and Fallon passed through Customs and made their way to the car rental desk. The booking had been made online in the local currency, bolivars. Five days’ hire of a Toyota Hilux SUV was the equivalent of £1,700. Most of the cost went to insurance. The odds of a rental car being hijacked currently ran at one in two hundred. It was a small miracle that an international company bothered to operate a concession at all.
The desk clerk, an immaculately made-up and well-spoken young woman, checked the reservation and looked up at Black apologetically. ‘My apologies, sir. We no longer have any SUVs available. Only compacts.’
Black glanced at the others. A compact was out of the question. ‘Then perhaps you’d be good enough to cancel the booking and direct me to somewhere where we can get one.’
‘No one has an SUV, sir. Compacts only.’
‘We made this reservation forty-eight hours ago.’
‘Again, my apologies. Unfortunately, I have no control over what is advertised on the website. Would you like the compact?’
‘Hold on.’ Fallon went over to the plate-glass window and looked out to the car park. Identical rental vehicles were parked side by side in order of size. Compacts, intermediates, sedans and SUVs. He strolled back. ‘They’ve got ten of them out there.’
Black turned back to the girl. ‘Would you call your manager? I’d like to speak to whoever is in charge.’
Her pleasant expression faded and her eyes hardened. ‘He will ask you for five hundred dollars. I will take three hundred. Cash.’
‘And if I don’t want to pay you three hundred?’
‘Is this your first time in Caracas?’ Black didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. She already knew. ‘We all have to eat. On the plus side gasoline is cheaper than water. Five cents a gallon.’ She shrugged. ‘My country.’
Black reached into his jacket and brought out his wallet. He peeled off six $50 bills and pushed them across the desk.
The girl tucked them into a drawer and found her smile again. ‘Automatic or stick shif
t?’
They stepped out from the cool of the airport’s air-conditioned interior into a humid wall of heat and sunlight so sharp it hurt their eyes. By the time they had walked thirty yards to the car Black’s shirt was already glued to his back by a thick film of perspiration. The black Hilux had a four-door cab in the front and a covered pick-up bed in which they stowed their rucksacks. Riley was the appointed driver and Fallon the navigator. Black had the privilege of being the back-seat passenger. They headed out of the airport and on to the Avenida La Armada, then navigated the junction that filtered them on to the Autopista Caracas, the main road to the capital, which sat in a steep-sided valley fifteen miles inland.
The modern highway, paid for by the petro-boom of the previous decade, was identical to any in the richest countries, but that was where all similarity with the First World ended. Cars clung on to each other’s tails, swerved in and out of lanes without warning, horns honking and all at terrifying speed. It reminded Black of the lawless frenzy of Libya or Nigeria, where to be caught in a jam or marooned at the side of the highway was a sure invitation to robbery or kidnap. If the neurosis of a country could be judged by its traffic, Venezuela was on the edge of a breakdown.
Riley stuck to the inside lane, his eyes flicking by professional instinct between the mirrors, while Fallon called out every landmark and bend in the road in advance. He was a good advertisement for his training: he had studied the maps and committed every detail of the route to memory. Leaving them to their tasks, Black began the process of making contact with their local fixer, whom Towers had assured him was primed and ready to assist with their two necessities. He took out his phone and dialled his number.
After several rings the call connected to a generic voicemail message. He waited for the tone. ‘Good morning, Mr Cordero. Leo Black speaking. I look forward to meeting you later today. Perhaps you would be kind enough to call me back on this number?’