He groaned and mumbled something in Spanish.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Ernesto,” he muttered. “Ernesto Montilla.”
Seconds later, he passed out.
* * * *
Before entering the house, I’d called Bledsoe and asked him to find a medical facility where no one would ask too many questions.
Once we got Ernesto inside the car, I called Bledsoe again, and he gave Mitchell directions to a clinic in Heredia, a small village located on the outskirts of the city.
Mitchell drove the Jeep through the crowded streets of San José at breakneck speed; perhaps trying to compensate for his momentary freeze at the sight of Ernesto’s wound. However, I was grateful he did it without getting us killed, or even worse, stopped by the local authorities.
I sat in the backseat with Ernesto and applied pressure to his wound. After examining his abdomen, I determined someone had taken a knife and slashed him numerous times.
When we were almost to the clinic, he regained consciousness, and that’s when I noticed his lips were moving.
I whispered in his ear, “Where’s Ahmed?”
His speech came in short, breathy gasps. “Tried to ... kill me.”
“Where is he, Ernesto?” I asked. “Where’s Ahmed?”
When he didn’t reply, I thumped his face a couple of times.
He didn’t respond, and I thought he’d passed out again.
However, a few seconds later, I heard him say, “Venezuela.”
I realized the boy might simply be delirious about his home in Venezuela, so I pressed him. “Venezuela? Has Ahmed gone to Venezuela?”
He didn’t slur his words this time. “Soon. Going ... soon.”
“What’s Ahmed doing in Costa Rica?”
“Pasa ... pasa ...”
Since we were speaking Spanish, when I heard him say pasa, I thought Ernesto was trying to say they were just passing through Costa Rica the same way they’d been passing through other Central American countries.
However, that didn’t make sense because he and Ahmed had been living in the safe house for over a week. I started to press him on this, but, after struggling to get his breath, he finally completed the word.
“Pasa ... Pasaportes.”
Passports.
Ahmed was in need of a passport. That made sense.
The moment I started to question Ernesto further about the passport, his head lolled to one side. Although I could tell he was still breathing, he was out cold once again.
Two men pushing a gurney were waiting for us when we pulled up to the clinic’s emergency room. Mitchell handled everything with the staff, and I found an isolated spot in the waiting room where I could call Bledsoe.
After updating him, I requested he put a surveillance team at the airport and have them report any sightings of an old man with a cane trying to get on a flight to Venezuela.
“Carlton will have to do a rewrite of the mission now,” I told Bledsoe, “and I want you to be briefed in on the operation.”
“That only makes sense.”
“Well, I’m not going to use that as my argument.”
He laughed. “I’ll start making some inquiries about the passport angle from some of my sources.”
“We also need to get Ernesto’s vehicle off the street and have Carlton send some of our forensic guys down here to look it over.”
“I’ll see what I can do. What about the house?”
“Ben and I will head back over there in a few minutes and see what we can turn up.”
I spotted Mitchell wandering around the lobby and waved him over.
Bledsoe asked, “Anything else I can do?”
“Yes. Notify your communications officer I’ll need a video hookup with Carlton’s office later today. Set it up for three hours from now.”
“Done.”
As I was about to hang up, he added. “Be careful when you and Ben go back to the safe house. Remember the cartel has eyes everywhere.”
“Roger that.”
Just as I hung up, Mitchell walked over.
“That was Toby,” I said. “I told him we’re headed back to the house now.”
He shook his head. “He didn’t make it. Ernesto is dead.”
Chapter 6
Mitchell was quiet as we drove back into the city, and I wondered if the bravado I’d seen in him earlier in the day had been tamped down by the stark realities of death.
Death, especially a gruesome one, can shock the human organism into a kind of lethargic depression. In Afghanistan, I’d observed this behavior in operatives arriving in country straight from the Agency’s training facility at Camp Peary.
Since I knew Mitchell didn’t have much experience in the field, I regretted the arrogance I’d displayed toward him earlier in the day.
Regret wasn’t a familiar emotion to me, and after a moment’s reflection, I wondered if such remorse had anything to do with my recent conversion to Christianity.
My experience of faith had come about when I was forced to live with some Iranian Christians in a safe house in Tehran for three months. However, in my line of work, I wasn’t exactly sure what living out my faith was supposed to look like.
Now, as difficult as it was for me, I decided I needed to try and connect with Mitchell on a more personal level.
I said, “The first time I was sent to the field, Toby Bledsoe was my operations officer. This was way back before the Agency was restructured. All our handlers were on-site then, running operations from an office building or a hotel room, sometimes even a jungle hut. Toby had already been on the ground in Nicaragua for almost a year when I arrived. That’s how we knew each other this morning.”
Mitchell sounded both intrigued and surprised at my revelation. “You were with Toby in Nicaragua?”
“For a short while,” I said. “We were trying to get support for the Contras. The President hoped to use them as an oppositional force against the Sandinista regime.”
Mitchell pulled up to a stoplight and looked over at me. “I’ve heard plenty of stories about those days. One of my trainers at The Farm spent a couple of years in Nicaragua. He claimed some of the money used to train the rebel forces came from selling cocaine to the Colombian drug traffickers. Is that true?”
“Not while I was there. At that time, Congress was willing to allocate plenty of money, and our job was to spread it around. But Toby and I weren’t operating in the jungles of southern Nicaragua or Honduras, and we weren’t involved in training anti-government forces. We were stationed in the capital city of Managua. Our mission was to bribe the judges and politicians, along with some Sandinista generals. By doing so, we were hoping they would start supporting the rebel forces.”
“Sounds better than living in a tropical jungle for weeks.”
“It might sound that way, but compared to maneuvering around the bureaucracy of the capital, traipsing around the jungle was a cake walk. I was a greenhorn, so I wasn’t exactly sure how to identify the real enemy. I made an enormous error in judgment along those lines. Consequently, Toby got me kicked out of the country.”
Mitchell raised his eyebrows at my admission. “Toby refused to work with you?”
I nodded. “I’d gone against his instructions by striking up a friendship with a Sandinista general. My foolishness nearly got both of us killed, and in fact, Toby lost one of his assets when the whole episode blew up in my face.”
“Did he file a formal complaint against you?”
“No, nothing as mild as that. He pulled some strings at the Agency, and before I knew what hit me, I found myself stuck in Barranquilla, Colombia, trying to stay one step ahead of a couple of drug kingpins. There were times I didn’t think I would survive the night. It’s taken me a long time to forgive Toby for that.”
“Yet, here you are, a Level 1 agent. Somewhere back there you managed to redeem yourself.”
“The Agency pulled me out of Latin America in the early 90s when th
ey needed personnel with language abilities. They were desperate for operatives who could learn Arabic or Farsi after the first Gulf war, and I was one of them.”
“So I’m guessing you’ve been in the center of some Middle Eastern hot spots since then.”
“Pretty much.”
“Ever been to Iran?”
I hesitated, suddenly conscious of his Level 2 status. Nevertheless, I said, “That was my last assignment.”
He was passing a slow vehicle on a winding mountain curve, but he still took his eyes off the road a second and glanced over at me. There was an expression of unbelief on his face.
After he’d pulled back into his lane, he asked, “How long were you there?”
“I ran a team of six assets for almost two years.”
“By yourself?”
I had noticed his sense of excitement building with each question, and although I knew he’d just been confronted with Ernesto’s death, I decided not to spare him the awful reality of my botched mission in Tehran.
“Yeah, I was alone, but don’t get me wrong, this was no James Bond adventure. The mission was totally blown, and all my assets ended up dead, except for one.”
He stared straight ahead, nodding his head up and down as he digested this information. After a few minutes, he asked, “Was it your fault?”
I decided not to tell him what really happened; that I’d lost my assets because a division head and the DDO had been playing head games with each other. Such information might make me look good, but it might also cause him to question the reliability of the very people who would be sending him on some dangerous mission in the future.
He didn’t need that—at least not so early in his career.
“The whole situation was very complicated,” I said, “and whenever anyone dies on my watch, I always feel responsible.”
Mitchell shook his head. “That was a horrible way for Ernesto to die.”
“A knife wound to the stomach is something taught at Jihadi training camps. If it’s done correctly, a major blood vessel won’t be hit, and the victim can live for several hours, sometimes even a whole day. However, the pain becomes so excruciating, when death finally comes, the victim will open his arms and embrace it.”
“So you think Ahmed meant for Ernesto to suffer?”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“I’m guessing he caught Ernesto sending a text message to his girlfriend. When I talked to Carlton earlier, he told me they’d gotten a ping on the cell phone about two hours before we found Ernesto. I believe when Ahmed discovered what Ernesto had been doing, he saw him as a traitor—at least according to Hezbollah’s code of justice—and administered his own punishment. Under a different set of circumstances, Ernesto would have been tortured for several days in a very public forum. He could have even been beheaded. Instead, Ahmed chose to inflict a slow death on him as the next best thing.”
“Ahmed must have left the house immediately after killing him.”
I nodded. “I believe when Ahmed discovered the cell phone, he knew there was a possibility he was under surveillance, and that’s why he decided to change his appearance, take public transportation, and get away from the house as quickly as possible.”
After Mitchell had parked the car on Calle Alturas, he turned toward me and asked, “Why do you think he was traveling with Ernesto in the first place?”
I pointed toward the house where Ahmed had been staying. “I’m not sure, but maybe we’ll find some answers in there.”
* * * *
Before entering the house, Mitchell told his surveillance team to notify him immediately if they saw anyone approaching the house or poking around the Durango.
Once again, Mitchell and I entered the house through the back door. This time, though, we took our time.
I assigned Mitchell the room where we’d discovered Ernesto, and I did a thorough search of the other bedroom, because I just assumed it was the one used by Ahmed.
It didn’t take me long to verify this.
In the top drawer of an ornate bureau, I found a Lebanese passport in the name of Adnan Chehab. However, the photo inside was of Ahmed Al-Amin.
Along with the passport, I found a couple of prepaid cell phones and a man’s wallet. The only item inside the wallet was a credit card issued by a bank in Beirut. It also bore the name of Adnan Chehab.
Although there were a couple of shirts hanging in the closet, most of Ahmed’s clothes were either on the floor, on the bed, or piled in a corner of the room. After searching through them and finding nothing of interest, I pocketed the passport and the credit card and left the room to check on Mitchell.
I found him standing in the center of Ernesto’s bedroom in front of the bloodied mattress. For a moment, I thought he’d frozen up again, but, when he saw me, he turned and said, “You know, I believe you’re right about what happened here.”
He pointed to the broken parts of a cell phone lying on the floor opposite the bed where we’d found Ernesto. It appeared as if someone had flung it against the wall. The force of the impact had caused it to break apart, and the pieces were scattered along the baseboard.
When I bent down to take a look, Mitchell said, “Don’t bother. I’ve already searched. There’s no SIM card. Ahmed must have destroyed it or taken it with him to dispose of it later.”
“What else did you find?”
“That gym bag over there,” he said, pointing to a blue, nylon bag on the closet floor. “Inside it were Ernesto’s clothes, a bunch of paperback books, and some restaurant menus from the Austin area. But, this was in the bag’s side pocket along with his wallet.”
Mitchell handed me a Lebanese passport identifying Ernesto Montilla as Fadi Chehab.
“Ahmed was also traveling under a Lebanese passport.”
I showed him what I’d found in the other room.
Mitchell said, “They were using the same last name. Maybe they were passing themselves off as brothers or cousins.”
“Was there anything else in the wallet?”
“There was no money; only a credit card in his Lebanese name. However, I did find this.”
Mitchell handed me a folded newspaper clipping.
The one-column clipping from a Venezuelan newspaper contained no date. However, since the folds were still crisp, I figured Ernesto couldn’t have been carrying the snippet of paper around with him for any length of time.
The newspaper headline read, “President Recognizes Work of Trade Minister.” The story had a photo attached to it showing the president of Venezuela presenting a man with a certificate of some sort. The caption underneath the photo identified the man as Roberto Enrique Montilla.
My first impression of the award winner was that he looked a lot like Ernesto Montilla and could possibly be his father.
The article itself described an occasion when the Venezuelan president had recognized Montilla for his work as an assistant secretary in the international trade division of the Ministry of Trade and Commerce. At the event, Montilla had received a commendation for the markets he’d opened up in Syria for Venezuelan businesses. The article went on to explain how such markets benefitted Venezuela’s mining industry.
I smiled as I handed Mitchell back the newspaper clipping. “Most likely, this article is about Ernesto’s father.”
“Why does that make you smile?”
“If this guy is Ernesto’s father, then we know the Montilla family has ties to the Venezuelan government as well as ties to Syria. Remember those connect-the-dot puzzles you used to do when you were a kid? The ones that had you connect all the dots, so you could see the outline of a picture?”
Mitchell looked at me as if I were crazy. “Yeah, but what’s that got to do with anything?”
I pointed at the newspaper article in his hand. “That clipping provides me with two dots in our puzzle. In the case of Ahmed, he’s from Syria, but for some reason, he wants to go to Venezuela. That’s our first dot. This article tells me t
hat Montilla, who’s from Venezuela, has spent some time in Syria. That’s another dot. If we can connect these two dots, then maybe we’ll begin to see the bigger picture of why Ahmed is headed to Venezuela.”
“It almost sounds as if you want him to make that trip.”
I decided Mitchell was much more intelligent than he looked.
Chapter 7
After arriving back at the embassy, Mitchell and I went down to The Bubble. Five minutes later, Bledsoe lumbered through the door with his big, black briefcase.
Once we’d given him our findings from the safe house, he called in Marlow, their communications officer, who set up a video conference link for me with Carlton back at the Agency.
Bledsoe and Mitchell left the room when Marlow arrived, and once he’d completed all the hocus pocus to link me up, I also told him goodbye.
After that, I initiated the call.
When Carlton came on the line, I noticed he was using the small conference room adjacent to his office.
If he’d chosen to involve more personnel—as most division heads often did—he would have been forced to use the larger conference room on the fourth floor. However, true to his minimalist management style, only two other people were present for my Operational Field Update (OFU).
As expected, Carlton was seated at the head of the small, rectangular table. To his right sat Katherine Broward, one of the Agency’s top counterterrorism analysts. On Carlton’s left was C. J. Salazar, chief of the Latin American desk at the Agency.
Salazar and I had never worked together before, but his reputation was often the subject of gossip around the Agency. On the other hand, Katherine and I had frequently worked together, even attempting a personal relationship at one time, but nothing had ever occurred between us to generate any gossip around the Agency.
As often happened between the opposite sex and me, my extended trips around the globe served as a hindrance when it came to establishing a long-term connection. Not surprisingly, Katherine had moved on after we’d dated a few times.
I’d recently talked with Katherine, though, because she’d been on my debriefing team following my failed mission to Iran. She’d also been one of the people to witness my confrontation with the Deputy Director of Operations, Robert Ira, after I’d discovered he was the person responsible for the loss of my network in Tehran. When the DDO had forced me to go on a year’s medical leave—his way of punishing me for my hostile public exchange with him—Katherine had been very sympathetic to my plight.
Two Days in Caracas Page 4