“To make Venezuela strong once more, she cannot be yoked under American imperialism. I’m sorry Mr. Perez, but you are not the man who will lead Venezuela through this new journey.” General Barrios pressed the gun to Perez’s forehead.
“Wait!” Perez actually managed to get a word out.
“Yes, Cristobal?” The General took the pistol from Perez’s head. He was going to hear Perez out. Milares would’ve simply shot him.
“I—I... don’t want to die.” Perez started to cry. Never a more pathetic man.
“I’m sorry, but we can’t both live.” Barrios put the gun to Perez’s head and squeezed the trigger.
The shot sent Perez tumbling backward, still tied to his chair. His wife screamed in the next room over. The girls cried.
Milares wished the General would’ve let him take them outside. He could barely stand their screaming.
“What are we going to do with the wife and daughters?” Milares asked.
General Barrios re-engaged the safety on the pistol and returned it to the man who’d given it to him.
“I know you won’t like this answer, Nestor, but they cannot survive.”
Milares felt his whole body turn hot. His arms and his legs locked up. It took his full effort to unlock his jaw.
“You never said anything about killing the families.”
“I know. But we cannot let them warn the others that we’re coming.” Barrios cupped his hand around the back of Colonel Milares’ neck. “It is a hard time we’ve been born into. And the only way we’ll make it through is to become even harder men.”
He looked at the two men standing over Perez. He motioned at them, and one of them popped three more rounds into Perez’s body.
“Please see to the family, too,” Barrios said.
They marched toward the next room over without the slightest hesitation. The pair of them stopped in front of that big, arched entryway. Barrios turned his back, but Colonel Milares forced himself to watch. He would not lie to himself about the reality of his actions.
“Pedro, this isn’t right,” Colonel Milares said just loud enough for Barrios to hear.
“I know, my friend,” Barrios replied. “It’s what is necessary.”
Barrios’ men opened fire into the living room. And Milares wondered what he had let himself become.
Chapter 18
SEVENTY-TWO HOURS DIDN't leave much time to pick through the finer details of Carolina Ortiz's life. I had to trust the background research in the dossier was right. Like her home address—which I was on my way to.
The girl at the front desk called a cab for me. I gave her a buck, and her eyes lit up like a shined nickel. I stepped out of the hotel and tried not to hack on the smoky, wet air, while I waited for my cab to come rolling by.
In the few minutes I stood there I saw maybe a dozen cars pass—mostly European imports. Saw probably twice as many people. Almost every one of them gave me a wide berth.
Judging on what I'd seen so far of Caracas, they were right to think I might crack their skulls open. Not that I would, but you didn't take chances when you saw a large man in paramilitary clothes standing on the sidewalk, looking like he had a bee buzzing inside his pants. That goes double when it looks like, at any moment, the fronts of buildings around would peel up like sardine cans and rioters, stuffed in shoulder-to-shoulder, would come screaming out.
While I stood in front of the hotel, the only person to come within arm's reach of me was a lady with a half-full grocery sack. I don't know what she was carrying, but it stunk to high heaven. I was downwind from her and caught a whiff of rotting meat when she was still twenty feet off. The stink only got worse as she wobbled toward me.
As she got closer, I saw the halo of flies around the bag. The wet, greasy spots on the brown paper.
For a minute, I wondered why she was carrying that grocery sack around—then I remembered what Marquez told me when I left the docks. People were starving in this city. That rotten food could very well be dinner for the rest of the week.
She passed by me, and I only watched her go. I should've slipped her a twenty.
But before I could think on it anymore, a cab turned the corner to my left and came for me. It stopped at the curb.
The window rolled down, and a man with a flat nose and a belly pressing up against the bottom of his steering wheel smiled out at me. “Yates?”
My cover name. Ronald Yates.
I nodded at him. He unlocked the back door, and I got in.
“Did they tell you where I'm going?” I asked.
“Cristobal Rojas and Reynaldo Hahn,” he said, referring to the intersection of two streets. “About ten minutes away.”
“That's right,” I said. “Green Peak Apartments.”
He put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb. On the way, I decided to look over the dossier on my phone one more time. See if there was anything I could use to get leverage on Carolina Ortiz and get at the truth of why the CIA wanted me to kill her.
The Agency thought she was a personal secretary for a Venezuelan oil executive. She lived alone in her apartment. All the CIA had figured out about her family was that her father was an inmate at Vargas Federal Prison since 2004. They didn't have her mother's name, which should have been easy to find.
Made me think they slapped this dossier together in a hurry. Which was a damn silly thing to do, considering the order they gave me.
I read as much of the dossier as I could before the car stopped in front of a peach-colored building, about twenty stories high. I thanked the cabbie and got out.
Now, on the street again, the first thing I did was take the lay of the land. Didn’t look like this town was hit as hard as the other part I’d been in. There were murals painted on walls. Of Cesar Chavez and Simon Bolivar and Venezuelan flags, but only a couple had been defaced or worn down from being exposed to weather.
No blackened remains of cars either. And I saw people outside—a pair of old men playing cards on a folding table on the sidewalk. A woman and her three young kids drawing with chalk on the front of a building.
I wondered if things really were that quiet in this part of the city, or if all these people would scurry back inside when the sun went down.
Guess it didn’t matter. Not for me, anyway. I had a job to do.
I pulled open the front door of Carolina’s Ortiz’s apartment building. Inside, a staircase went up, and a hallway went back with four or five apartment doors. On the wall to my left, a section of brass mailboxes, each marked with an apartment number and a name.
My finger dragged over them until I got to the third row. Box 517, C. Ortiz printed in an impatient scribble.
I went up the stairs. Every time I hit a landing, I looked down the hall, noting the fire exits, where a bike was chained outside an apartment door, a mattress at the end of the hall on the third floor, an old easy-chair sitting on the fifth-floor landing.
Paying attention to things like that might seem trivial. But, I was marching into unfamiliar territory. It paid to know the lay of the land. Could be my hunch about Carolina Ortiz was pretty damn far off, and she’d try to blast a hole through me before she saw the whites of my eyes.
In which case, my life might depend on knowing I had an unobstructed path to the fourth-floor fire exit. Or that the old easy chair sitting near the stairs on the fifth floor could buy me a few seconds of obstruction if my target chased after me.
Before I set my jaw and marched down to door 517, I checked behind me. Anyone coming up the steps or trying to get the drop on me? No. But I had to keep that in my head. This whole mission could still turn out to be a way for Greer to erase me.
I moved down the hall. Music boomed out of the first door on the right—some kind of bassy Latin music. Salsa maybe.
Carolina’s door was the third on the left. I watched it as I came closer, trying to move cautiously, but not suspiciously. Never know when somebody might poke out of their apartment door to drop a bag of ga
rbage down the chute.
As I went closer to door 517, I became aware of the Glock tucked in the back of my pants. Got heavier with every step. Dragged behind me like an anchor trying to keep me from drifting away from civilization.
By the time I got to the door and pressed my body against the wall beside it, I felt like both Libby and Kejal were hanging off the grip of my pistol, trying to keep me from drawing it.
But, God help me, I drew it anyhow. Sweat began to ball on my nose. I wish I could say I didn’t know why I was so jumpy, but I knew exactly why. This whole thing stunk to high heaven.
I knocked on the door. Politely. Like a neighbor coming to ask Carolina Ortiz out for a cheap drink and even cheaper live music.
“Carolina?” I asked.
No answer. I waited. Counted my heartbeats slapping like a conga drum in my ribcage.
“Carolina are you there?”
Nothing.
Shit. I was going to have to go in. Bust through a door, knowing nothing of what was on the other side. Not a great prospect when there was a good chance a lady was burying her face behind the sights of a shotgun pointed at the door.
The music at the front of the hall swelled. I decided to make my move.
Still to the right of the door, and facing outward from it, I reared my knee up, and stomped on the door with the flat of my boot. Then, almost as soon as I had, I rolled right—away from the door.
I waited for a gun blast. For the door to hurl splinters into the wall. But nothing came.
In fact, nothing came from behind the door. No screams, no sounds of kitchen knives being ripped out of a drawer or of a gun being readied.
So, either Carolina Ortiz was disciplined and didn’t scare easily, or she wasn’t home.
I hoped on the latter, but I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t fear the former.
I turned and stepped in front of the door, held the Glock out—ready to fire—and kicked the door right next to the knob.
The door swung backward, opening on a darkened apartment. I rushed in, a twitch away from pulling the trigger. I hit her living room first. Swept the muzzle of my Glock across the room. Saw everything I expected to see inside a 20-something woman’s apartment.
Before I cleared the next room, I went back to the door. I peeked through the hall. That salsa music still thundered two doors down. Nobody seemed to hear Carolina’s doorframe crack.
So, I shut the door and cleared the rest of the apartment. Only one bedroom, so it didn’t take me long. I checked all the closets, under the bed, behind the shower curtain—the works.
Carolina Ortiz wasn’t home. So, I went back to the living room and sat down in an armchair beside a window overlooking a small terrace. I cracked the window open and listened to the sounds of Caracas. Hot, humid wind slipped through the opening and wrapped the thin curtains around my leg.
It almost reminded me of being a kid, sitting in a little cabin on a piece of land owned by one of the ranches I worked at, letting the damp, late spring air stick to my skin.
If I lived through this and somehow reunited with my family, I’d do everything in my power to get back the peaceful life I once took for granted.
But there was a river of grime between that life and where I stood now.
My only choice was to wade through it. God willing, I’d get to the other side someday.
For now, I’d have to keep my Glock sitting on my lap and stare at Carolina Ortiz’s busted apartment door.
Chapter 19
CAROLINA ORTIZ BARGED through her front door just after sunset. She didn’t see me. Just groaned and softly swore to herself when she noticed the door had been kicked in. Then, she marched into her darkened apartment, bags hanging off her arms.
She cut across the living room, into the kitchen. Her purse clunked on the floor somewhere along the way. I heard keys hit the counter. The light in the kitchen flipped on, spilling from the doorway, touching the toe of my boot. The fridge door opened. Plastic bags swished, glasses clinked, and then the fridge door shut.
Then, I heard her footsteps, softened by the cheap carpet, coming back toward the living room.
I should’ve realized she wasn’t a threat right then and there. Hell, she walked right past me. All the same, I squeezed a sweaty palm against the grip of my Glock.
She entered the room. A lamp clicked on, throwing pale orange light. Carolina took two steps before she stopped.
I practically saw her hair standing on end. She spun her eyes onto me, then gasped.
Carolina Ortiz was prettier than the picture in the CIA’s dossier. They must’ve nabbed a work photo where she looked tired and world-weary. The girl I saw in front of me was tall—probably about six feet—with straight, dark hair cut just past her chin, full lips, a pinched nose and big brown eyes shimmering like twin moons.
Granted, her eyes looked twice as big as they probably were normally. She certainly wasn’t expecting me.
She shrunk against the wall across from me, unable to look away.
“Are you Carolina Ortiz?” I willed my voice to stay even. But, honestly, I felt about as rocked as she looked. This woman wasn’t a national security threat—at least not one that needed to be shot in her apartment.
Carolina didn’t move. Fear had struck her dumb.
“Ms. Ortiz,” I repeated. “I just need you to confirm who you are.”
Her throat bobbed. She blinked, finally. Her eyes twitched to my gun, then back up to my face.
“Is your name Carolina Ortiz?”
She nodded. I almost wish she hadn’t. I wish I could’ve played this off as a case of mistaken identity, even though Greer probably wouldn’t accept that.
“Could you tell me what your job is? Where do you work and what, exactly, do you do?”
I moved my lips slowly. Let my Spanish come out like an American tourist who’d practiced all his life, but was only getting out of the states now. In truth, I learned Spanish from Mexican ranchers and Central American migrants since I was eight, and took classes in school since I was thirteen.
Dad made sure I stuck with it when he was still alive, and, now, more than ever, I was damned glad he did.
“I’m an administrative assistant.” She felt out each word. Like a fox checking the ground with each step, careful not to put her weight on a trap.
“Where?”
“The PDVSA.” I was vaguely aware of the Venezuelan state oil company. Her dossier mentioned that it wasn’t doing well and that it was the single, largest company in Venezuela, oil being their country’s biggest export. Which made sense, considering Venezuela sat on the largest known oil reserve in the world.
She turned her head. Behind her eyes, I could almost see her brain begin to churn again. “You aren’t from here, are you?”
“No,” I said. “But I’m not here to answer questions. You are.”
“I’m in my home,” she said.
“You’re pretty brave for having a gun pointed at you,” I said.
“After a while, you get used to it,” she answered.
“You didn’t seem used to it when you noticed me.”
She let out a quick, silent laugh. “You’re the first one to break into my apartment. Or, at least, the first one to sit around and wait for me.”
“Why is that?” Carolina gave me a look that could’ve poisoned me. “Did I not have enough good things to steal here? Did you want to take me too?”
“That’s not who I am,” I said.
“Oh, yes? You only break into women’s apartments and hold them at gunpoint? Is raping them going one step too far?”
“Yes,” I said, trying to cut off this topic of conversation before it went any further. I didn’t want things to escalate, because I knew they’d end with me pulling the trigger and Carolina Ortiz dead. “You said you’re an assistant. Whose assistant?”
“Julio Diaz.”
“He works at the PDVSA?”
She laughed again. “He’s on the board.” She started to
say something, but then looked away from me. Her expression changed like she was working through a problem in her head, making a decision.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re from America.” It wasn’t a statement. But wasn’t quite a question.
“I am,” I said. “Did my accent give me away?”
“Yes. And that you didn’t know who my boss was.”
“You’ll have to look past my American ignorance,” I said. “They don’t teach us about Venezuelan Oil barons in school.”
Suddenly, things came together for me. She worked for an oil baron, and Greer sent me here to kill her. Not because of anything she’d done. He wanted to send a message to her boss, a powerful man sitting on the corporate board of a company that controlled the world’s largest known oil reserves. A company tied very closely to a failing South American government.
I wasn’t a genius. That much was obvious to just about anybody. But I knew the States had a long history of playing with South American countries. A lot of governments overthrown and people killed in US-backed insurgencies and revolutions in service of taking advantage of cheap natural resources and shipping them north.
So where did that put Greer’s order to have Carolina Ortiz murdered?
He wanted to send a message. I can reach you wherever you are. I can touch the people closest to you. I can be a powerful enemy or a powerful ally.
Oil. That’s why Carolina had to die. And if I wanted to see my family again, I had to be the trigger man. The back of my neck went hot with shame.
“What are you thinking about?” Carolina said cautiously. She didn’t want to anger the man with the gun, but the question must’ve been burning inside her head. I’m sure I didn’t look very pleased in that moment.
“I’m thinking I want to talk to your boss,” I said. “Can you take me to him?”
The sound of a siren cut through the room. An ambulance went speeding down the street outside the window. I smelled a faint whiff of smoke on the air.
“Now?” she asked.
Jackal: Barrett Mason Book 3 Page 10