I nodded. “Thanks for the omelet, Toby. I should get out of your hair now and let you get some sleep.”
He didn’t bother arguing with me. “I’ll walk you out.”
“I’ve made plans with Ben to meet him at the warehouse in the morning, and I’ll call you when we get there.”
Sadly, none of those statements proved true, and I never saw Toby Bledsoe again.
Chapter 11
Tuesday, June 5
It was after two o’clock in the morning when I returned to my hotel. Although I was tempted to take a more thorough look at the maps I’d found in the glove box of the Durango, I thought better of it and opted for sleep instead.
When I was awakened by my sat phone a few hours later, I was dreaming about a dogfight. The dream included George, the black Doberman. He was snarling and charging at a yellow Lab.
In the seconds before the phone’s vibration penetrated my consciousness, I recognized the yellow Lab was Stormy, a stray dog I’d adopted while living in Norman, Oklahoma.
Stormy wasn’t backing down from George’s aggressiveness, but I had the feeling he felt vulnerable and unsure of himself, even though he was managing to stand his ground.
I grabbed the phone off the nightstand.
“Yeah.”
“Sorry, Titus, I know it’s early.”
“It’s okay.”
It was Carlton.
“Do you have something for me?” I asked. “Did you get a hit from the warehouse photographs? Please tell me you’ve pinpointed Ahmed’s location. Toby is working on the passport angle. I found some maps in the Durango that could be useful.”
I’d never been accused of talking too much—unless I was suddenly awakened out of a deep sleep.
When that happened, whatever my sub-consciousness was processing at that exact moment would come spewing out of my mouth before I could stop it.
It had happened to me several times in Afghanistan when Skip Coleman, Art Jernigan, and I were hunting the Taliban. At that time, we were within hearing distance of the enemy, and after a couple of close calls, both guys had learned to cover my mouth before shaking me awake so my jabbering wouldn’t give away our position.
Carlton said, “I’m not calling about Ahmed. Are you awake? Do you need a minute?”
“No, no, I’m fine. What’s up?”
“There’s no way to say this except just to say it. Communications received a call through your CIS contact number. It was your sister. Your mother passed away a couple of hours ago.”
“My mother?”
Suddenly, I couldn’t find my voice.
“Yes. I’m so sorry, Titus.”
“Oh ... well, thanks. Ah ... I guess I should call Carla.”
“I’m sure she’s waiting to hear from you.”
“What ... ah ... What exactly did she say?”
“As to be expected, she thought she was leaving a message on your home voice mail. The call came in about an hour ago. If you want to hear the message for yourself, your clearance code is 4976.”
“4976. Got it.”
“Travel has you on a flight through Houston to Detroit using your cover name. It leaves San José in a couple of hours. Follow the usual procedure when you arrive.”
“Okay, sure.”
“I’ve already spoken to Toby Bledsoe. He said you’re in a waiting mode there, and you’re just passing time until he hears back from one of his assets. He also said it wouldn’t make that much difference if you were gone for a few days. I suggested bringing in another operative, but he didn’t see the need for it.”
Fully awake now, I paced back and forth across the tiny room trying to sort out my priorities, not to mention my emotions.
“No, Douglas, there’s absolutely no need to read anyone else into this operation. No need whatsoever. I can get regular updates from you and Toby while I’m gone.”
“I’ll have to do what’s best for the operation.”
Alarm bells went off inside of me when I heard him hinting at pulling me from the mission.
I tried my best to reassure him. “I won’t need to be gone for more than a couple of days, three at the most. The last time I talked to Carla, she said my mother had already planned her funeral.”
“I have you cleared for a week. That’s the usual allowance, unless circumstances warrant otherwise.”
“I won’t need that much time.”
“Again, please accept my condolences.”
The moment I disconnected the call, I felt as if a fifty-pound weight had suddenly been placed on my chest.
Without warning, the remnants of my dream came bubbling to the surface, and I immediately found myself identifying with Stormy’s emotions when he was fighting off the black dog.
Like him, I felt vulnerable and a little unsure of myself.
* * * *
A few hours later, as I sat in a departure lounge at the San José airport waiting for my flight to be called, I tried to focus in on the operation and the best means of locating Ahmed.
The synapses simply wouldn’t fire, however, and I couldn’t concentrate on the mission. Instead, my mind was flooded with memories of my mother.
She had been the exact opposite of my father. Whereas he had been totally disconnected from the family, she had engaged with her children on every level.
My mother, Sharon, was a high school science teacher, and she had taught at the same school for thirty years, retiring a few years before my father’s death. Although I knew it couldn’t possibly be true, I couldn’t remember her ever taking a sick day.
She would get up before dawn, grade some papers, do a load of laundry, and put dinner in a yellow crock-pot before heading out for work. After school, she ran errands, drove Carla and me to our after-school activities, and returned home every evening to deal with an alcoholic husband.
She made sure we did our homework, met with our teachers, and taught us how to drive. She even attended all my high school football games, and she cheered so loudly all the guys on the playing field could hear her.
However, her biggest contribution to my life was instilling in me a love for my country. She was barely a year old when her parents got out of Poland and came to America—just weeks ahead of the Nazi invasion—and they loved their new home with an intense passion and ingrained that same kind of fierce loyalty in their daughter.
The Vietnam War took her brother’s life and her husband came home from it a broken man, but my mother always believed America’s desire to bring freedom and democracy to any nation, even Vietnam, was the right thing to do.
After leaving home to attend the University of Michigan, I didn’t go back home very often, especially after I met Laura Hudson, a girl in my freshman biology class, whose parents I quickly adopted as my own.
When Laura and I got married a year after we met, my parents attended the wedding in Ann Arbor. However, I never took Laura home to Flint to spend any time with my family.
Since my father and I were barely able to be in the same room together, my mother never complained to me about my absence. Later, I realized she must have preferred peace in her household, instead of the turmoil my presence seemed to bring.
The month after I graduated from the university was the same month Laura had divorced me. It was a mutually agreeable decision after we both realized I hadn’t married her because I loved her, but because I had loved being a member of her family. Immediately after that, I went to work for the CIA. However, I told my family and friends I worked at the Consortium for International Studies, where I was a research analyst.
Even though my sister, Carla, and I had a close relationship during our childhood, when I left home, we grew apart. For one thing, I felt she resented the fact I’d broken ties with the family and moved out of the area, while she had married her high school sweetheart and settled down a few miles from where we grew up.
Immediately after my father’s funeral, Carla had cornered me in my old bedroom.
“Have you s
een the changes in our mother?” she had asked me. “I think she may have suffered a small stroke last year.”
“She seems fine,” I said. “In fact, she’s in the kitchen right now making me a big breakfast, even though I told her I’m leaving in a few minutes.”
“But, Titus, that’s my point. She loses track of time easily. She’s very forgetful, and sometimes, she even calls me by a different name.”
“Have you taken her to see a doctor?”
“No, of course not. You know she’s never sick, and for the past six months, she’s been busy taking care of Dad.”
The moment Carla mentioned my dad, I exploded. “So what do you expect me to do about it?”
“I’ve given up expecting you to do anything in this family,” she said. “Obviously, your precious consulting job is far more important than what’s happening to us back here. Forget I said anything. I’ll take care of her.”
“I’m a research analyst, not a consultant, and I’m not asking you to take care of her.”
“Well, someone has to see about her now that Dad’s gone.”
At that point, I completely lost it.
“Dad never took care of her, Carla. You know that as well as I do. It was always the other way around. He was the one needing someone to take care of him.”
Before she could answer me, I grabbed my luggage and headed out the door.
My guilty conscience went with me.
Later that week, before returning to Iraq, I sent Carla a big check and told her to use it to get our mother some medical attention.
The process of getting any kind of diagnosis on my mother took almost a year, and once it was confirmed she had Alzheimer’s disease, several years passed before she had to be placed in a nursing home. Once that happened, I had the nursing home draft her medical expenses from my bank account once a month.
A few years after that, while I was in the States for a few weeks, Carla urged me to come for a visit, and I returned to Flint for a few days.
Although she seemed to be in good health physically, I was amazed at how much her mind had deteriorated since being moved to a nursing home. Even though I spent several hours a day with her, she never seemed to recognize me as her son.
Sometimes, she thought I was her husband. At other times, she acted as if I were one of her former students. Once, she even thought I was Uncle Harold, my father’s brother.
In our conversations, she often struggled to complete her sentences or to maintain coherent reasoning, but, despite that, she always wanted to talk. The topic she wanted to discuss was religion—particularly faith.
When we were growing up, she had never discussed spiritual matters with me, and I had no basis for understanding what she was trying to articulate. After a while, I became so frustrated with her efforts to get me to understand what she wanted to say, I finally gave up listening to her altogether.
Until recently, I hadn’t given those conversations with my mother much thought. However, a few months ago, in a safe house in Tehran, I’d made my decision to follow the teachings of Christ, and the first person I’d thought of afterward was my mother and her spiritual needs. That’s when I wondered if her incoherent efforts to talk about God had been an attempt to ask forgiveness for her sins, just as I had done.
I despaired for my mother’s soul in those hours after making my decision, because I knew she was already in the latter stages of the disease and could no longer communicate with anyone around her.
I had discussed this with Javad, the Iranian Christian who had led me to faith in Christ. “I think it’s too late to talk with my mother about Christ. Perhaps she was trying to get through to me the last time I saw her, but now, I’m afraid she’s doomed for all eternity because I couldn’t help her then.”
“Hammid,” he said, calling me by my cover name, “Jesus said, ‘I am the light of the world. He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.’ If your mother was truly seeking Jesus, you can be assured he is even now shining in her soul. He is the light, and while he always wants us to share that light, he never asks us to be that light.”
Now, as I was preparing to bury my mother, those words were a great comfort to me.
* * * *
A dark-skinned man, wheeling a blue canvas suitcase, suddenly caught my attention.
He was moving from the security area toward the boarding lounge where I was seated. His profile reminded me of the photographs I’d seen of Ahmed back at Langley.
I started to leave my seat and follow him, when a young girl suddenly ran toward him from the opposite direction. When he turned to greet her, I was able see his features more clearly.
It was not Ahmed Al-Amin.
I felt relieved, because I’d finally decided the benefits of allowing Ahmed to leave Costa Rica far outweighed any intel the Agency might glean from snatching him up in San José and dropping him into Gitmo. I now believed the interrogation methods there wouldn’t yield the kind of information I might discover by letting him get to his destination and his target.
For this risky method to succeed, however, I needed to be able to track him once he arrived in Venezuela. For that to happen, I needed Bledsoe’s cartel contact to get me the name on Ahmed’s new passport.
As if on cue, my sat phone vibrated, and I saw Bledsoe’s name pop up on my caller ID.
I said, “I hope you got some sleep last night.”
“Don’t worry about me; I’m fine, but I wanted to express my condolences before you left.”
“Thanks, Toby. I appreciate that. I’m sorry Carlton had to disturb you last night. He said you discouraged him from assigning another officer to this operation, and I’m grateful for that. I owe you one.”
“I’ve got people on the ground here who can run down any leads on those photographs. And, here’s some good news. Hernando contacted me this morning. He can meet me tonight.”
“That was quick.”
Bledsoe sighed. “I know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry. Hernando hasn’t been compromised. He sounded completely normal. In fact, he let me pick the place for us to meet.”
“Do me a favor, Toby. No matter what time it is, call me and let me know what went down.”
“I’ll do that. Best of luck on your trip.”
When I hung up, Ben Mitchell entered the boarding area and walked over to where I was seated.
He addressed me by my cover name, “Mr. Arroyo, I was sorry to hear about your mother.”
“Thanks.”
I pointed at the black briefcase containing the weapon he’d given me less than twenty-four hours ago and said, “And thanks for coming all the way out here to get these materials. I didn’t want to leave them with the hotel desk clerk, and I didn’t have time to drop them off at the embassy.”
I lowered my voice and handed him a large envelope. “These are the maps I found inside the Durango. Get them off in the diplomatic pouch to Langley today, and we’ll see if our analysts can make sense out of the markings I found on several of them. Maybe Ahmed left us some bread crumbs to follow.”
“We should have more intel on Ahmed’s location by the time you get back. I have a team watching the warehouse, plus Sonya and Josué will be back at the safe house today. We’re bound to get a break soon.”
I saw Mitchell continually scanned the crowds. Yet, to any outside observer, I’m sure he appeared to be engaged in conversation with me. As I watched his behavior, I decided Bledsoe was right; Ben Mitchell had all the makings of a superb covert officer.
To make sure that actually happened I decided to confront him.
* * * *
“Sit down, Ben. We need to talk before they call my flight.”
Earlier, when I’d arrived in the boarding area, I’d chosen a four-plex of seats away from the main seating area. While waiting for Mitchell to arrive, I’d placed my carry-on bag on one of the seats and a copy of the current edition of La Nación on the other.
By doing this, I’d hop
ed to discourage any travelers from sitting near me, so Mitchell and I could talk. Now, Mitchell moved my bag to the floor and sat down in the plastic chair across from me.
“I’m not sure about the protocol while you’re gone,” he said. “Do you want me to send you updates by email?”
“No, Ben, what I want you to do is break off your relationship with Sonya.”
He looked at me as if I’d just slapped him across the face.
“Sonya? What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
He broke off eye contact with me and shifted his gaze over to the bank of windows facing the airport tarmac.
After a few moments of silence, he asked, “Have you said anything to Toby?”
“No, and I don’t plan to do so, but don’t discount Toby because he’s old. He knows how to read people, and you’re not hiding your feelings very well.”
He shifted his attention back to me. “My feelings are none of your business, and my relationship with Sonya has nothing to do with you.”
His anger had hardened the contours of his face, and he no longer appeared as youthful as when I’d first seen him at the pastry shop.
“Ben, the rules against dating a foreign national under your supervision are in place for a reason. Your relationship is putting you both in danger, and you’re jeopardizing your entire career by your behavior.”
He crossed his arms in front of his chest in a classic gesture of defiance. “How do you figure that?” he asked.
“Sonya doesn’t have any training when it comes to evading an attacker or dealing with an interrogator. Granted, she exhibited a lot of potential for fieldwork yesterday, but she was reckless and disregarded your orders because she thought it might impress you. Did you ever stop to think what might have happened to her if one of those cartel guys had seen her in the warehouse yesterday? Can you imagine what they would have done to her?”
He visibly flinched at the thought of Sonya in the hands of the cartel members.
“Yeah, that’s right. You know exactly what I’m talking about, and that’s why you were so worried about her.”
Two Days in Caracas Page 8