Cold Shot: A Novel Page 14
“Yeah, that was some good porn,” Feldman agreed. “If the Iranians are moving nuclear material down there, it would be the Cuban Missile Crisis all over again. Nobody’s going to stand for the mullahs smuggling radioactive material over here. The world almost blew up the last time someone tried to move nukes into Latin America. Nobody wants a replay of that.”
“We can’t prove that’s what they’re doing.”
“Maybe we don’t need to,” Feldman offered. “Saddam didn’t have any WMD in ’03, but he refused to play ball, so everyone assumed he did and the entire country lined behind George Bush for war. We just have to do the same thing here but we don’t invade. The longer Avila holds out and refuses to play ball, the worse he looks.”
Rostow heaved himself to his feet, wandered back to the Resolute desk and sat on it, dropping the iPad on top. He began swinging his legs as he thought, gently hitting the antique with his shoes on the backswing. “Avila wouldn’t want a war with us. Castro at least had the Russians backing him and Krushchev had ICBMs and the whole Soviet Navy. The Iranians don’t have a fraction of that firepower. They couldn’t back up Avila even if they wanted to.” Rostow smiled and hit the iPad with the flat of his hand. “It’s perfect . . . all the political upside of the ’62 crisis with none of the risk.”
“And everyone on the Hill lines up behind you or they end up looking weak on national security.” Feldman stared at the Oval Office ceiling, running the possibilities through his head. “You’d have to call Avila out in public,” he said finally. “Demand that he give up the cargo and Ahmadi. You get both of those and your political capital would go through the roof. We’d be able to push Congress on everything, not just foreign policy. This could break the dam open, grease the skids for everything we want to do in the first term. And nobody will be able to touch you on the national security issue during the reelection campaign,” Feldman said. He slapped the table with his hands like it was a drum.
“But we’d need some real proof if we’re going to force Avila’s hand,” Rostow said. “Kennedy had pictures of the actual missiles and Adlai Stevenson used them to pin Krushchev’s boy to the wall in the UN Security Council. Zorin couldn’t wriggle out of it . . . ‘Don’t wait for the translation, yes or no’ and all that.”
Feldman thought for a minute, then shook his head. “Forget it, it’s a pipe dream. Cooke’s people will never get into that factory. But you’ve still got proof that Ahmadi is down there and video footage of him at the site when they executed those workers. That’s juicy stuff.”
“And maybe we get him to cough up Ahmadi to save his own hide. We take down the ‘next AQ Khan.’ They’d be showing that on the History Channel for the next ten years,” Rostow said.
“Yeah,” Feldman agreed. “But that video’s classified, so we can’t just release it to the press corps.”
“How do you want to handle it?”
“You don’t need to know,” Feldman advised. “I’ll take care of it.”
• • •
The George Washington Parkway was the most beautiful drive in the District and Cooke watched the scene without seeing as it passed to her right. Getting lost in thought was one of the luxuries that having a driver afforded her. In her younger days, she’d spent hours at a time in Moscow watching for surveillance, which amounted to looking in the rearview mirror more than at the road ahead while memorizing license plates. It had made her wish that she’d been there during the Cold War when fewer Muscovites had owned cars. After the Soviet Union had fallen, the number of cars on the Moscow roads had climbed steadily, making life tougher for U.S. intelligence officers trying to ply their trade. She’d been skilled at surveillance detection years ago but it was one skill that she had allowed to atrophy with no regrets.
Cooke lifted the handset to the portable STU-3 mounted between the front seats. She dialed and encrypted the call. “It’s Cooke,” she said without preamble. “I’m ten minutes out. The president has given us forty-eight hours to figure out whether the Markarid cargo is at the CAVIM factory.”
“Well, that’s unfortunate.” Drescher’s sense of humor was dry for Cooke’s taste but it seemed to fit the situation now.
“I want a task force on this . . . all of the directorates at the table, and I want you to run it. The first meeting is in twenty minutes, my conference room.”
“Roger that. See you soon.” Of all his traits, Cooke liked most that Drescher knew when a conversation was finished.
“Thanks.” She hung up the phone.
Palacio de Miraflores
Caracas, Venezuela
The Miraflores Palace had begun its long life as the family residence of Joaquín Crespo, one of Venzuela’s past presidents who knew not Bolívar, or so Diego Avila thought the Bible might have phrased it. Crespo was a warlord, a member of a corrupt elite who had either forgotten or ignored Bolívar’s legacy and tried to extend his betrayal by installing an ally in the president’s office as his successor through a fixed election. The masses had rebelled, Crespo had moved to put down their uprisings, and some righteous mobber had used a rifle to put an end to his perfidy and his life at the town of Cojedes.
A righteous end for an oppressor, Avila thought, but the man knew how to build a house. It was a shame that it was only the president’s official workplace and not his residence, but Avila would not break the traditions that Chávez had laid down. The edifice was a piece of exceptional workmanship, white brick, red-tiled roofs, immaculate, with a Japanese garden. The neoclassical building stood out in the surrounding sea of gray apartment buildings that looked like they belonged in old Soviet Moscow. Avila had been a carpenter before Chávez’s revolution, which skill let him appreciate the expert work of the palace builders. It was the finest house he would ever work in, though the fortune he was amassing in office would provide him an excellent residence in which to retire in Ciudad Bolívar, the home of his youth. But that was years away and he had no plans to leave Miraflores despite what his political opponents were promising their followers about the next election. Venezuela belonged to the Chavistas, now and forever. They would not allow the moneyed elites to take control again and bring their corruption back. The revolution was eternal.
Avila strode across the courtyard, pausing to light a small cigarillo, a cheap brand that he’d favored since his teenage years and had never found wanting, though his other tastes had matured since his youth. Lunch today would be pabellón criollo with shrimp and scallops and a bottle of Pessac-Léognan, all waiting for him in the Boyacá room.
And it would wait longer still for him. A functionary ran up to him with a secure cell phone in hand, holding it out. Avila took it, stared at the screen, then held it to his face. “Andrés, amigo mio, what is the good news?”
“The dockyard has been sanitized,” Carreño told him, a bit of anger seeping through his voice. “The Markarid will sail as soon as our friend can arrange for his government to send another crew.”
“That was unfortunate, but it’s done now. All else proceeds as planned? No other security issues?”
“None,” Carreño said.
“And there is still no sign that the Americans or some other intelligence service has been tipped to the operation?”
“None,” Carreño said. “After their station was gutted last year, I don’t think they’re in any position to give us such trouble.”
More good news. This conversation might have a good end after all, Avila told himself. “And I presume the American embassy is being watched?”
“As always.”
“Good,” Avila said, finally satisfied. “Where are those unfortunates now?”
“At the CAVIM facility. They will be buried behind the tree line of the ordnance test field. I have given orders to have the job complete by morning.”
“Good. That is good,” Avila said. “Stay well, my friend.” He disconnected the call, then dragge
d on the cigarillo and resumed his walk to lunch.
Posada Santa Margarita Hotel
Puerto Cabello
Carabobo, Venezuela
200 km west of Caracas
Kyra had no idea whether the hotel room cost more than the Agency per diem allowed and, for the moment, didn’t care. The bed was soft, the room as modern as any hotel back in the States, and she hadn’t slept on the plane. The adrenaline and caffeine pills had kept her going through the night but she’d faded as soon as she’d laid her head on the mattress.
Her smartphone sounded and Kyra slept through it. It sounded again, then a third time before the noise finally penetrated her dreams. She turned, half conscious, and managed to wrap her hand around the device.
Kyra looked at the clock on the wall opposite her bed: 1100 hours. Still, she’d slept less than six hours and could’ve slept six more. But the Venezuelans had impressive coffee and she decided that she was going to find some before she went out to wherever Jon and Marisa wanted to send her next.
She deactivated the lock screen, then stared at the phone until her vision finally focused. She tapped the link embedded in the decrypted e-mail and a map appeared with a location indicator standing out in the center. She zoomed the map out and ordered the handheld computer to show her the route and distance. It was less than twenty minutes away, but the phone was assuming she would be driving the entire route. That wasn’t going to happen. She spent ten minutes staring at the satellite view. The marked facility was surrounded by high hills and a dense forest that went for miles.
“You suck, Jon.” She dropped the phone on the bed. She was at least going to do herself the courtesy of a shower and a decent lunch before marching off into the trees again.
U.S. Embassy
Caracas, Venezuela
“Do you think she took it well when she woke up?” Marisa asked.
“Doubtful,” Jon replied.
“How do you know?”
“Not because I’ve ever been with her in the morning, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” Jon said, a tinge of annoyance in his tone.
“So you always skipped out before she woke up?” Marisa teased. She suppressed a laugh when she saw the murderous look that crossed Jon’s face. “C’mon, Jon, she’s a pretty girl. You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”
“No, and not your business,” he warned.
“Lighten up, Jon. You never could figure out when I was teasing you.”
“I figured it out. I just didn’t care for it,” he said, his voice cold.
Marisa’s smile died. She opened a file folder and laid the contents on his desk . . . satellite photos. “Maybe this’ll make you happy.”
“The CAVIM facility?” he asked, picking them up.
Marisa nodded. “They came in five minutes ago, about the same time you were sending your partner on a hike through the woods. And it gets better.” She walked around behind him and leaned in close over his shoulder, pointing to a line of dark squares on one photograph. “Five-ton cargo trucks. Same type and number as the ones at the dock by the Markarid. There’s no way to tell whether they’re the same cargo trucks, but it’s something.”
“It’s not inconsistent,” Jon said. “Theories are difficult to prove but easy to disprove. Too many analysts get invested in their theories, so they latch on to the data that backs up their ideas and downplay or ignore the information that contradicts them . . . confirmation bias. That doesn’t happen when they look for evidence that disproves the theory. And this”—he held up the photo—“doesn’t disprove the theory.”
“So what’s the next step?”
“Gather more data,” Jon said. “Analysts can never have too much data.”
CAVIM Explosives Factory
Morón, Carabobo, Venezuela
220 km west of Caracas
The hike was well over a mile, closer to two, from the back road where Kyra had hidden the truck. The undergrowth there was thick, a double blessing. The weeds hadn’t been run down, suggesting that no one had driven down that path in weeks at least, and the taller biomass had given her more than enough material to camouflage the truck, hiding it behind a woven wall of branches, leaves, and other greenery. Her vehicle would be unrecognizable to anyone passing by on the larger road a hundred yards east. She’d walked the distance and stared at her work to be sure. That task done, Kyra had entered the cab one last time and pulled out a panel in the floor. She extracted a Hechler & Koch HK416 and some extra magazines and sealed them up in the scabbard of a larger backpack, an Eberlestock, which held some Meals-Ready-to-Eat, an evasion map and compass, a survival blanket and medical kit, a change of clothes and other supplies. The Glock she hid in a holster in the small of her back under the tail of her khaki shirt. Then she loaded a Canon camera with a high-power telephoto lens, strapped on the pack, and started off to the west.
It took her over two hours to reach the hilltop, stopping every few hundred yards for a minute or two to listen and observe. She was a mile from the closest road and the sun was dropping fast now. There was no question she would be sheltering underneath the trees tonight. She couldn’t have made it back to the truck before dark and didn’t want to try. The pack wasn’t overly heavy and she was in very good shape, but her legs burned anyway from the constant need to shift her balance on the uneven terrain. The HK and its ammunition added eight pounds to her load, but she didn’t begrudge herself that. If there was a security patrol in these woods and she had to lose everything else to run, the rifle was staying with her. The camera and commo equipment were a different story.
Scouting around the summit, just below the brow, she found a small depression with a decent opening through the forest that promised a good view looking out and down. She took another hour to erect a cover over the dip and a shallow trench around it, giving her a low ceiling of branches and leaves over her head for the inevitable rain that would come if she had to stay long enough. Anyone in the valley looking up wouldn’t see it, either with eyes or with optics.
The CAVIM factory was not a single building, but a string of small complexes spread out over a square mile. Each set of smaller buildings was connected to the rest by several roads that twisted through the forest. Jon had updated her map by the time she’d gotten out of the morning shower, marking a clutch of warehouses where the SEBIN had parked the cargo trucks. It was the largest assemblage in the area and the one closest to a chemical processing plant, its nature obvious even to her untrained eye. Her phone had a theodolite app and Kyra had put it to use, marking waypoints on the topographic map.
She imagined there had to be some kind of security cordon, certainly patrols, but how far out they would go, she didn’t know. The map said that the hilltop she’d chosen would be just under a mile on foot from the target building if she had to work her way down the hillside, half that as the crow would fly, and it would be a steep climb. So she hoped that whatever security guards went out would find it too troublesome to climb to the summit.
The sun would be down in less than a half hour and she turned to the real business. She pulled out the Canon, affixed the telephoto lens, and set up her pack as a rest for it. Kyra laid herself prone and stared through the camera to get her first good look.
The convoy was there, unmoved since the satellite photo had been taken that morning. She couldn’t see into the trucks but they were surely empty. The enemy, as she’d long since come to think of them, hadn’t shipped the cargo this far just to leave it out in the open. She pressed the shutter and recorded the moment, then moved the camera and stared down at the factory, comparing the buildings to the imagery on her phone.
Kyra panned left, then froze as she saw movement. By one of the warehouses, north of the trucks, a dozen men were milling around on the ground, some sitting, all carrying bullpup rifles like the one she had seen the night before. Iranian Quds. That was worth a call and sharing
a bit of live video.
She pulled out her smartphone and unlocked the unit. The cell signal was surprisingly strong. They have their own cell tower here? That seemed likely and made her smartphone unsafe to use—if the SEBIN were here, they might detect an unexpected call routed through the tower.
For this, we have a solution. Kyra pulled the LST-5 satellite radio from her pack. It had added more than its fair share of the weight in her pack, almost nine pounds. It didn’t seem that heavy, but one of her Farm instructors had once told her that anything gets heavy in the mountains . . . ounces equaled pounds and pounds equaled pain. The Agency had newer, lighter comms gear. This was an old model, not even classified tech anymore, War on Terror surplus. Kyra had seen one like it in the Agency museum, where any uncleared visitor could study it. She supposed that this was another case of the Clandestine Service trying to prevent any more technology from falling into the wrong hands while Caracas station was rebuilding.
Setting up the radio was simple, programming the crypto a bit harder. “This is Arrowhead.”
“This is Quiver,” Marisa replied, her voice distorted.
“I’m at checkpoint Apple.”
“Roger that. Any trouble?”
“Trouble no. Something interesting, yes.” Kyra connected the Canon to the data buffer, plugged it into the transceiver, turned on the camera’s video feed, and the camera obediently began streaming its picture to the embassy.
U.S. Embassy
Caracas, Venezuela
“There are those rifles again,” Marisa observed. “Quds Force. Congratulations.”
Jon ignored the compliment. “Convoy, incoming,” Kyra’s voice announced. Somewhere more than a hundred miles away, the field officer moved the camera to the left and the picture shifted.
A trio of dark SUVs turned off the highway to the warehouse road. The darkened window by the driver of the lead car rolled down as it approached the line of soldiers holding out their hands, signaling it to stop. The guards held it at the cordon for less than a minute before scrambling to let it through and the vehicles all rolled slowly past smaller buildings before stopping in front of the chemical factory. The doors opened and more armed soldiers crawled out of the first and last cars. The driver of the middle SUV stepped out, then opened the rear door and held it for the passengers inside.