Jackal: Barrett Mason Book 3

by Stewart Matthews

  Julio Diaz instantly reeled away, holding his ear, and trying to put some space between him and Carolina. And just as quickly, she launched herself forward.

  Her hands dove and pitched through the air like rabid vampire bats, looking for any piece of uncovered skin on his body. I let her smack him a few times. Thought she could use a little bit of an outlet, after the morning she’d had. Plus, she seemed to be able to really work him over—maybe better than I could if I choked him again. At least her slapping and kicking him wouldn’t stop him from talking.

  Then, when she had worked Julio into a screaming little ball, crammed against the corner on the far side of the bed, I figured I had to intervene.

  “Okay,” I said, getting up from the chair. “I think he’s had enough.”

  Carolina didn’t hear me. Or didn’t care. I finally had to stop her by taking hold of her wrists and pulling her off him, but she fought me every inch of the way.

  “You’ve made your point. Now let’s see if we can get him to tell us something constructive.” I said as I sat her down in the chair.

  “I told you to stay inside!” Julio yelled. He was still tucked in the corner, rubbing a bleeding ear.

  I glared at him, and he shuddered.

  “Carolina, I’m sorry but once you saw Vance Greer, he made up his mind. I tried to talk him out of killing you. I swear it!”

  “But you didn’t!” She tried to launch from the chair, but I stepped in the way, playing referee. “You didn’t try to save me or warn me. You were going to let him do it. And for what? For money? Was the money worth it? Was it?”

  She was heating up. I had to step in before she blew. Didn’t want to get too far off the subject of Greer again.

  “Carolina,” I said gently as I could. “We’ll deal with that. Right now, our only chance out of this whole mess might be what he knows about Greer. If we can play this right, we can trade information for a ticket to safety.”

  And a ticket back to my family. Carolina seemed to get it. She still looked mad as a banded bull, but, for now, I had a few moments to get what I could out of Julio Diaz.

  So, I left her in the chair. I walked past the bed, over to Diaz’s side of the room. He was all elbows and knees under his nice, but dirty, clothes. He had his hands up over his head, and his legs pulled to his chest. He was in the fetal position on the floor, thinking. I could see his eyes moving side to side as if he were reading something only he could see. Maybe an instruction manual on how to deal with the pissed off girlfriend you failed to kill and her large friend, the government assassin.

  I squatted near his feet, beside the bed. He didn’t seem to notice me until I slapped the bottom of his foot.

  Then, I don’t think he could have taken his eyes off me if he wanted to. He looked terrified.

  “Look,” I said, “we’re all in a mess now, but it’s a mess we can get out of if you start to cooperate with Carolina and I.”

  “No,” he said. And that was all.

  I cocked my head at him. “No, what?”

  “Greer won’t allow it,” he said. “He won’t let any of us walk away from this.”

  “You realize Greer sent me to do his dirty work, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he answered, but he didn’t sound too sure of himself.

  “Then you know I’ve got a skill set uniquely suited for dealing with assholes like Vance Greer. Truth is, I’ve been dealing with them for a good while longer than I care to remember. So, why don’t you be a good boy and tell me exactly what you know about Greer’s plan? How did you factor into it?”

  I seemed to be getting to him. He pushed himself up and sat. The man looked shell-shocked. I didn’t know if that was from me, or Carolina, or something else. Probably a combination of all three.

  “That’s the problem,” Julio said. “The plan we made has fallen apart.”

  “Is that right?” I wasn’t sure if he was trying to feed me another line. But I decided to play along to see if I could catch him in a lie. “What was that plan, exactly? Set up for an invasion by US forces? Fake a humanitarian crisis with all the riots and starving? Plant some WMDs?”

  “Mr. Greer was helping a group of businessmen who called themselves Los Chacales,” Julio said. “They wanted to start a coup—overthrow the socialists and take power for themselves.”

  “How did you get in on that?” I asked. “Were you a member of that group?”

  “Los Chacales?” He brushed his hair back from his eyes, shifted his eyes in Carolina’s direction, then back to me. “Yes.”

  “And Greer turned on you, I gather? Or else, you wouldn’t be holed up in this fine establishment.”

  He shook his head. “It was another member of the group. A general named Barrios. He wants to seat himself as the head of the government.”

  “General Barrios?” Carolina’s anger shifted into surprise. “How can you be sure?”

  “You seem like you know him,” I said to her.

  “Of course, I do,” she said. “Everyone knows him. He fought the Colombian-backed militias in the jungles. He helped Hugo Chavez regain control of the government during the failed coup in 2002. He wouldn’t go against the party. He a socialist all the way through—there’s simply no way.”

  I looked at Julio.

  “I didn’t believe it either, Carolina,” he said. “And I think he counted on that very thing—that no one in Los Chacales would suspect him of being a traitor. But... well, I have my sources.”

  “And Carolina and I have ours,” I said, looking back at her. “Mainly that a bunch of Venezuelan commandos tried to kill us at your house this morning.”

  “Tried to kill you?” Julio knitted his brow. “You’re saying you escaped somehow? Did they not see you?”

  “My face is about two steps removed from ground beef,” I said. “That didn’t happen because I walked into a door.”

  “You fought the General’s men?”

  I looked at him like he had to be kidding me. “Guess you didn’t see the truck we drove over here.”

  At that, he sprung up. He leaped over the bed, then ran to the big window to the right of the door. Julio tossed the curtains aside and looked into the parking lot.

  “You stole their truck?” he said as he gawked at it.

  “Actually, that was your girlfriend.”

  “Ex-girlfriend,” Carolina corrected.

  He turned his head to her, clearly not expecting her to say that. For a second, he appeared to want to argue the point, but he must’ve realized how fruitless that would’ve been. So he closed the window, looking a little more deflated, and walked back to the bed.

  “Let’s stay focused,” I said. “Your ass is obviously on the line, Julio. So’s mine, and so’s Carolina’s. And I’m guessing Greer ain’t too happy about the turn things have taken, either. So he’s probably out. What’s our next play?”

  Julio flopped backward on the bed. At first, I thought he was just being pouty about Carolina breaking up with him, but I caught something else in his expression. A subtle tic. The hint of something more.

  Then a thought hit me: Greer. He wouldn’t quit that easy. Vance Greer was every bit as stubborn as me. I think that’s why we butted heads so hard, and why neither of us let go of what happened in London all those years ago.

  “Greer isn’t out,” I said slowly, “is he?”

  Julio’s eyes flicked to me.

  “You’ve been in contact with him since everything went belly-up, haven’t you?” I loomed over the bed, planting my hands next to Julio, reminding him of what they had already done to him once. “You’ve got an angle with him.”

  He didn’t want to say. I read that all over his face.

  “You don’t want to test me twice,” I said.

  The skin over Julio’s jaw rippled as the muscles beneath tensed. He wasn’t going to test me twice.

  “Do you know what my job was?” he asked.

  “No,” I said at a growl. “But you’re sure as hell goin
g to tell me.” I backed off him, gave him a little room to breathe.

  “I was CTO of PDVSA—I ran the company’s computer systems.”

  “What’s that mean for me?” I asked.

  “It means that I’ve got a way out. When the coup started, Greer and I worked out an insurance policy—a way to control what happens with the PDVSA.” He sat up on his elbows. “Did you know there’s only one refinery in the entire company?”

  I shrugged. What did I care?

  “There is,” he said. “And the night Los Chacales enacted their plan, I encrypted its computer systems—every last machine. That means there isn’t an operable computer in the entire refinery. And those computers won’t become operable until the encryption key is entered at the terminal in the master control office.”

  Not a bad insurance policy. Whoever wanted the kingdom had to get the key master to open the gate.

  “And you’ve got the encryption key,” I said.

  “Only half of it,” he grinned at me. “Your friend, Mr. Greer, has the other half. And in order to unlock the refinery’s computer systems, he has to come use his half of the key at the same time I use my half. And he’s coming tonight.”

  Of course. The end of my 72-hour mission.

  “What happens after you unlock the computer systems?” I asked.

  “I’ve worked out an amnesty with Mr. Greer. He’s taking me on a boat back to America. I’m sure there’s extra room.” Julio looked past me—at Carolina. “Would you like to come with me, darling?”

  If he knew what was good for him, he’d make sure I had a spot on the ride back too. Because I was going to that meeting tonight, and it’d take a thousand Venezuelan commandos to stop me.

  Chapter 28

  WE HUNG AROUND THE motel room until sundown. I took the time to clean my new AK-103 as best I could, and clean myself up too.

  Neither job was very pretty, but I made it work.

  Then, on Julio’s say-so, we took his car north. We traveled around the mountains, to the north coast of Venezuela, then headed east once we hit the coast on the Caribbean Sea.

  We drove another hour in that direction until I thought we were surrounded by wilderness. Turns out, we weren’t far from the refinery. Maybe a mile off, maybe less. I just couldn’t see it, because, like Julio said, everything had been shut down. All the lights were off and nobody was home.

  With Julio at the wheel, we turned down an access road, and finally hit the edge of the refinery. There, I could barely pick out the silhouette of a huge cooling tower in the middle of the campus. Looked like a dark triangle, stretching a hundred feet up, back dropped by an even darker sky.

  And around the tower, my eyes felt the tall, narrow shapes of dozens of cooling tanks and smokestacks in the darkness. The endless networks of pipes going every which direction. Almost felt like I was back home in Houston.

  But my trip down memory lane was cut short. Julio stopped the car and cut the engine.

  “This is us,” he said, opening his door. Carolina and I followed him out. I kept my rifle in hand.

  He took a second to fish around in his trunk, looking for a flashlight. Then, he closed the trunk and clicked the light on.

  Julio noticed the rifle in my hands.

  “I wouldn’t bother bringing that along,” he said. “You won’t need it anymore.”

  “We’ll see once Greer shows up,” I said.

  He turned and started walking. Didn’t seem happy with my refusal. Too bad.

  I didn’t realize how my eyes had adjusted so keenly to the dark. The beam from Julio’s little flashlight seemed to shine on everything around us. Apparently, we’d stopped in a gravel lot. I saw the light pass over a metal staircase ahead of us.

  The staircase was our destination. Julio led us toward it, then up. Until we were stopped by a steel door.

  He shined his light on a silver keypad near the door’s handle.

  “We still have auxiliary power for the door locks,” he said as he punched in a code. The lock buzzed, then clicked. Julio pushed the door open.

  I walked in behind him, clutching my rifle.

  Inside, the room was dark. Julio’s flashlight gleamed off a multitude of different things. Coffee cups, metal desks, the windows running in an unbroken line across at least three of the room’s walls. I realized then that this was only one room. An open space occupying a structure looking out over the rest of the refinery.

  “I’m going to turn on the backup power for the computer network,” Julio said. He went left, the beam from his flashlight disappearing somewhere in the back of the room, where there were no windows.

  As soon as he disappeared, I became too aware of how exposed I felt, standing here in the near dark.

  I wouldn’t have been shocked to find Greer was already in here, getting an angle on me from some blackened corner. I wasn’t going to get my brains blown out now. Not when I’d come this far. I could almost hear Libby’s voice in my ears, feel her soft hands on mine.

  My fingers drummed on the front stock of my AK.

  “Do you think we can trust him?” I asked Carolina, quietly. I couldn’t see her, but I figured she was somewhere nearby.

  “I thought I could once.” Her voice came from my right. I saw her outlined against the starry sky past the windows. “Now, I’m sure I can’t.”

  “That’s not exactly reassuring.”

  “I know,” she said. “But at least you have your gun.”

  At least I had that.

  I carefully walked toward her. Wasn’t sure if I’d trip over a cable or a chair or something else, but I managed not to. I stopped beside her.

  “I don’t know how to say sorry to you,” I said. “At least, not in the way you deserve. I was evil to you from the start. And I...” I trailed off. I wasn’t lying. I really didn’t know what to say. And I wasn’t sure why she stuck by me.

  “I’ve been where you are,” she said. “Desperate to do anything to save the last family I had. When the communists took my father, I did everything I could to get him back. But none of it worked. I know I would have killed anyone they asked me to if they said they’d let him out of that prison.” I felt her eyes on me. “I don’t think I’d have anything near the restraint you showed.”

  A lot of things went through my head at that moment. All of them trying to, in some way, thank Carolina, but none of them felt like they quite paid the entire bill.

  “Thank you.” So I kept it simple. Genuine. And I promised myself I’d do anything it took to get Carolina out of Venezuela alive.

  Suddenly, there was a sound behind us like something snapping in place. The computers whirred to life around us. A couple lights clicked on, casting the room in a dim, yellow glow.

  I blinked until my eyes adjusted. Julio came out of a small room in the back. It looked barely bigger than a supply closet.

  “And now we’re in business.” He beamed as he clicked off his flashlight, looking like he’d dropped a thousand pounds of his back.

  Relief didn’t hit me the way it did him. If anything, I felt more anxious. We were up high, with big windows on three sides of us, and the lights on. The only light for miles. We were exposed, with enemies on all sides sitting in the middle of Venezuela’s sole oil refinery. Even if I hadn’t seen anyone on the way here, this place was too damn valuable to ignore for long.

  And if I, a clueless American. A man crashing around Venezuela not more than three days knew that General Barrios, the man making a play for leadership of the country, had to have been aware of it too.

  “I don’t like this.” I turned from Julio and mumbled to Carolina. “Anyone can see us from any number of directions. We may as well throw out a big neon ‘Welcome!’ sign.”

  Her clenched fists told me she felt the same. But what was there to say? Yes, I agree. And then what? We run? Leaving our only chance of getting out of this country. Her only chance to live. My only chance of seeing my family again.

  She and I both knew how muc
h of a risk this was. But it was the best risk we had.

  I tried to work the tension out of my chest. Steadied my breathing and closed my eyes. Looked out the window ahead of me, trying to see the gentle waves of the Caribbean Ocean through the darkness.

  But all I saw were more backup lights popping on. Pairs of them running parallel into the sea like a runway.

  “Why are those lights on?” I asked Julio.

  He glanced up from the computer screen.

  “That’s the dock,” he said. “Those lights are considered critical, so they’re hooked into the same backup power relay as the computer systems. Hard for anyone to find the refinery without them.”

  “Can you turn them off?”

  His eyes sank back down to the computer screen. His fingers clicked at the keys. “No.”

  “Great.” I held my rifle a little closer.

  At least I’d be able to spot somebody trying to come at us from the docks. Turned out, I didn’t have to wait very long.

  A small boat crept alongside the lights. It was only half illuminated, but it couldn’t have been much bigger than the cabin cruiser I’d ridden in when I left Puerto Rico.

  “Someone’s here.” I shouldered the rifle on instinct. Then remembered, all I had were the iron sights. Still, being ready for a fight made me feel a little better.

  “You can put the gun down,” Julio said. “That would be your friend, Mr. Greer.”

  I exchanged an uneasy glance with Carolina.

  “He’s not my friend,” I said. “So I think I’ll keep this rifle up.”

  “Whatever makes you feel better,” Julio said. “Just don’t shoot him until he’s put his half of the encryption key into the computer system.”

  Sounded reasonable. But reason had a tendency to step out when a few guns popped in to say hello.

  Down near the dock, Greer hopped over the side of his boat. In his black suit and with his dark hair slicked back, he looked like an ink blot against the pier. He started toward us. I followed him as best I could, but lost him when he stepped out of the emergency lights. Not once did he look up at us.