Cold Shot: A Novel Read online

  Autopista Valencia/Route 1

  50 km west of Caracas

  Jon’s smartphone rang. “What?”

  “She’s on her way in. Already at the field and moving. Where are you?” Marisa told him.

  “I just passed Maracay, near someplace called Mariara.”

  Marisa stared at the highway map on the wall. Still ninety kilometers away. “You’re at least an hour out, not counting your time running uphill. You still in shape, old man?”

  “Good enough,” he said.

  “Hey, Jon? Nobody ever gets pulled over in this country for speeding. Ever.” Marisa hung up. Jon dropped the phone in the seat, put both hands on the wheel, and let the truck have all the gas it wanted.

  CAVIM Explosives Factory

  Kyra reached the top of the fallen tree. She was well out into the field now, at least fifty feet in, and only moving a few feet per minute. She probed the dirt gently, but didn’t expect to find anything. This wasn’t a minefield after all, or so she hoped, and she expected any unexploded ordnance to be sticking out of the ground where she could see it.

  Unto the breach, as Jon would have said. No, that wasn’t right. Jon would’ve been yelling at her to turn around. Sorry, Jon. Kyra took another breath, then slowly pushed herself out into the high grass.

  A small crater appeared just to the left. A mortar shell had hit the dirt here. If there’s a hole, it means the shell went off, right? She fought down the fight-or-flight response that rose up in her mind, crawled carefully down into the hole, then up the shallow side.

  Seventy-five yards to the fence.

  The field was missing chunks of grass, whether from the ordnance or some toxic chemicals scattered over its surface she didn’t know, but it gave her a twisting path forward. Kyra pulled her body through another narrow channel in the grass, careful not to brush it with her legs or boots, lest it wave to any guards standing at the fence. The little trail turned left, Kyra twisted her body to follow the bend—

  An 81mm mortar shell stood out of the ground, less than a foot from her face.

  Kyra stared at the metal tube. It was green, an oblong teardrop that narrowed at the tail to a set of fins, with rust growing on the skin.

  CIA Director’s Conference Room

  Cooke entered the room. It was silent now, all eyes on the wall monitor. Fifteen people sat around the room and no one dared speak. The screen was streaming a live satellite feed, a thermal image of someone crawling on their stomach toward a compound of buildings and lampposts.

  The director moved behind Drescher, who didn’t look up. “How’s she doing?” she asked.

  “Fifty yards to the fence, give or take. No patrol in the area,” he said, not taking his eyes away from the picture. “She just backed up and reversed course. I guess she saw something she didn’t like.”

  “Ordnance?” Cooke asked.

  Drescher shrugged. “Could be.”

  “Any idea if there’s a patron saint of spies?” she asked quietly.

  “Saint Joshua,” Drescher advised. “One of the twelve spies sent by Moses to explore Canaan. He’s also the patron saint of literature and reading.”

  “How do you know that? You’re a Mormon. Mormons don’t have patron saints.”

  “I was a missionary in Italy back in the day. Two years on the ground in Liguria,” Drescher said. “The Catholics kept trying to convert me, God bless ’em. They didn’t get the message that’s what I was supposed to be doing to them.”

  The secure line phone in the corner rang. He picked up the receiver. “Drescher.”

  U.S. Embassy

  Caracas, Venezuela

  Marisa enlarged the satellite picture, looking at the larger compound. A vehicle was coming down the northern fence line. “Arrowhead, hold your position. Security patrol incoming, northern road. ETA one minute.” Hurry up, Jon, she thought.

  CAVIM Explosives Factory

  Kyra slid past another intact mortar shell to her right when Marisa’s warning sounded in her ear. She turned her head and saw the incoming vehicle’s headlights streaming between the trees and shacks ahead to her left. Another blast crater was directly in front of her, within arm’s reach. She probed the dirt, found nothing, and pulled herself forward, her body descending into the shallow depression. It wasn’t deep enough to completely swallow her, but she hoped it would lower her profile in case anyone looked into the field.

  The truck rolled past and curved off onto some side road. The sound of the engine dropped in pitch as it moved away from the field.

  “All clear,” Marisa’s voice said in Kyra’s ear.

  Kyra clawed at the dirt to pull herself out of the low crater, then pushed herself forward, multitool in hand, stabbing the dirt gently every few inches. The closer she moved toward the fence, the fewer unexploded artillery shells there should be, right? She wasn’t convinced that any logic applied here. She stopped as her tool touched something metal in the loam. Shrapnel from one of the shells that had actually worked? She moved forward a few inches, and then she saw it . . . a grenade, half buried in the dirt. Couldn’t we have just stuck with the mortars? she thought. Mortar shells were easy to see. Grenades might as well be mines.

  She looked up through the grass and tried to gauge the remaining terrain between her and the fence. Twenty-five yards? Kyra pushed herself to the right, away from the grenade, and started probing the ground again.

  CIA Director’s Conference Room

  Drescher uttered something Cooke had never heard come out of a Mormon’s mouth, some strange variation of a curse that rhymed with the real thing but still qualified as family-friendly. He spun around, grabbed for a television remote, and brought up one of the cable news networks in the back of the room, the volume set low. He wanted the task force watching the operation on the big screen, not some pompous politician on the small one.

  A news anchor was talking. Cooke knew the journalist, had met most of the big ones in fact. The networks had climbed over each other two years before to score the early interviews with the first female CIA director in U.S. history. In the end, Cooke had given time to most of them, at least the ones from reputable outlets. More than a few of the interviewers barely had the brains to read their teleprompters, but this one, a late thirtysomething blonde owned dual degrees in journalism and law from Princeton and was smarter than most. She also had a reputation for being able to score interviews with Rostow almost at will, which said as much about the president’s libido as the anchor’s ambition.

  “. . . We warn our viewers that this video contains graphic footage. Viewer discretion is advised.” The camera cut away from the anchor . . . to the inside of the Puerto Cabello dockyard.

  “Oh, no,” Cooke said quietly.

  U.S. Embassy

  Caracas, Venezuela

  Almost there. Marisa looked up at the clock. Kyra had been moving through the field now for almost an hour, pushing herself ahead, one agonizing foot after another. Kyra’s path through the field had been a torturous series of turns, not a straight line more than five feet at any point. The girl couldn’t possibly have memorized the route. Any run back would be an exercise in desperation, prayer, and luck.

  CAVIM Explosives Factory

  Kyra reached out to touch the fence, then thought better of it. Was it electrified? She’d bypassed four mortar shells and a dozen grenades to get here and it wouldn’t do to grab a charged fence now.

  There was no telltale buzz. She looked for posted signs, though she didn’t trust the Venezuelans to bother with such niceties, then realized the signs would be facing into the compound, not out. Moron, she thought.

  She scanned the fence line at ground level as far as she could see. Ten feet to her right, there was a depression directly underneath the metal where some rodent had dug its way in, and the tiny invader was nowhere to be seen. Not electrified, she thought. But she had reached th
e barrier too far to the south. A cut here might get noticed the next time some soldier walked out to relieve himself.

  The first of the small corner shacks was maybe a dozen yards to her left. She pushed off again, crawling in its direction, probing the ground as she went. Kyra didn’t expect to find anything dangerous this close in, but stabbed carefully at the dirt anyway.

  She reached the fence span just a few feet from the corner where the fence turned north again. She looked up and saw the camera atop its post, looking placidly out into the woods. You just keep looking that way, she muttered inside her head. She pulled out the wire cutter in her pack.

  CIA Director’s Conference Room

  “Hostile inbound, fifty yards north,” one of the analysts commented. He didn’t need to say it. Everyone saw the infrared shape wandering south from one of the larger buildings near the top of the screen.

  Cooke ignored the quiet banter going on at the conference table. The video had finished playing and the anchor was now interviewing a talking head from the Brookings Institution, an expert on arms control and proliferation.

  “. . . Well, Jenny, one of the men in the video appears to be Dr. Hossein Ahmadi, long regarded by the CIA and other spy agencies as a key figure in Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Our analysts here at the Brookings Institution also believe one of the other men could be Andrés Carreño, the head of Venezuela’s SEBIN intelligence service,” the man said. “To see those men together at the scene of a massacre like that one could have truly disturbing implications.”

  “Like what?” the blond anchor asked, trying to project gravitas. The woman clearly didn’t know Hossein Ahmadi from Adam.

  “It could mean that Venezuela is complicit with Iran’s attempt to develop a complete nuclear fuel cycle, and possibly nuclear weapons. Both Iran and Venezuela signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968 and ratified it in 1970. And despite its revolution and change in government in 1979, Iran has never withdrawn from the treaty, but over the last two decades, Iran has repeatedly refused to comply with its treaty obligations. It has constructed nuclear facilities that it declared to the IAEA only after their existence was revealed by other means—”

  “You mean after the U.S. intelligence community found them,” the anchor said, cutting in.

  CAVIM Explosives Factory

  “Hostile inbound,” Marisa warned.

  I see him, Kyra thought. The man was in uniform and carried no rifle, but there was a pistol hanging from a holster on his belt. He reached the fence but made no move to unzip his fly. Instead, after a few seconds of stargazing, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes, extracted one with his teeth, then lit up.

  Motion always attracted the eye. There was tall grass between her and the soldier, not enough to completely hide her but enough to break up her outline. A lamppost towered above the shack to her immediate north, casting a shadow that fell on her and stretched out into the field another five yards.

  The man took a long drag, then turned when he heard feet shuffle through the gravel that passed for the road between the small cluster of buildings. A friend wandered his way.

  Great. It’s a party.

  CIA Director’s Conference Room

  “Right. This could be confirmation of old rumors that the Iranians are mining uranium from Venezuela’s Roraima Basin and shipping it home for enrichment, which would violate several UN sanctions,” the Brookings analyst replied. “Another possibility, one I think we all hope wouldn’t be the case, could be that Iran is now trying to smuggle illegal nuclear materials into the western hemisphere.”

  The room exploded.

  “Get me the NCS director now!” someone yelled. Hands fought for the few secure phones in the room while keyboards started to clatter. Drescher was on his feet, barking orders and dispensing with pleasantries as he did so.

  “Stop!” Cooke yelled. The room went dead silent as fast as it had descended into chaos moments before. “We have an officer in harm’s way right now,” she said, pointing at the monitor on the wall. “Our first priority is to get her out. If the SEBIN are watching the news, security is going to lock that facility down at any time. You work that problem first.”

  Behind them, on the larger screen, two men stood by the CAVIM fence line talking, animated, their cigarettes glowing more brightly on the infrared image every time they sucked in the smoke, giving the burning tobacco a fresh infusion of oxygen. Kyra’s thermal outline was maybe thirty feet to the left of the pair.

  CAVIM Explosives Factory

  They were standing almost where she had first reached the fence. If she had stayed there, they would certainly have seen her.

  Go back to work, she mentally ordered the men. It took fifteen minutes for them to finally obey Kyra’s command. They finished their first cigarettes and consumed a second while talking about the vulgar things they had done on their last leave, then threw their smoked-out butts onto the gravel road and walked slowly north again, passing out of her sight. The sound of their boots crunching on the small rocks finally died.

  “Charlie Mike, Arrowhead,” Marisa said quietly into her ear. Continue mission.

  Kyra cut into the fence, snipping one link after another in a perfectly vertical line. When she judged that the height of the broken line was right, she set to work cutting metal at ground level, a foot on either side of the vertical gash she’d just made. It only took a few cuts. She evaluated her work, an inverted T, then pushed herself forward on the ground. Quiet now, she thought as she pushed the severed fence to the sides.

  Then she was through.

  Kyra drew her Glock and sidestepped to the edge of the shack, the gun in both hands pointing down, and she looked around the corner.

  The next shack up the road was . . . twenty feet? “All clear?” she whispered.

  “Two hostiles one hundred yards north of your position and still walking away. The same ones who had a party by the fence while you were lounging around. Anyone else in the area must be inside a building.”

  Kyra took a deep breath, then pushed off and ran, moving as quietly as her boots would allow. The cover of the second shack seemed to arrive slowly. She reached it after a few seconds, then crouched, her back against the metal wall, and she closed her eyes to listen.

  Nothing.

  She realized she hadn’t heard Jon’s voice over her earpiece during the entire op. Where are you?

  CAVIM Explosives Factory

  Chemical Production Facility

  Andrés Carreño walked out the front door past the SEBIN guards standing their posts. Seeing them standing at attention, he held his tongue and swallowed his curses at Avila for assigning him this duty. Words spoken in anger could last long in this country and travel to the most inconvenient places.

  He hated the chemical plant. The smell always lingered in his nose for days, killing his sense of smell and affecting the taste of his food. It seemed especially noxious tonight. The Venezuelan spy chief pulled the tobacco roll from his pocket, lit it with the torch, and sucked in as much smoke as the small tube would give up in three puffs. He exhaled, looked up at the stars, then started to walk south.

  Palacio de Miraflores

  Caracas, Venezuela

  “Señor Presidente!” The pounding on the door was insistent, almost panicked. Avila dragged himself from his bed, leaving behind the young lady, not his wife, who was sharing it this evening. He stumbled over, pulling on a shirt and pants, then opened it.

  A staffer stood in the hall, a young man whose name Avila had never bothered to learn. “What is it?” The functionary thrust a piece of paper at the head of state, which Avila took. His eyes refused to make sense of the blurred words and he had to force them to function.

  What—? Avila cursed and shoved the paper back at the staffer. “Where is Carreño?”

  “We don’t know, Señor Presidente. No one can reach him. He was at the Morón f
acility within the last hour but no one can find him now,” the younger man said, afraid to be the messenger of that particular piece of news.

  “And Ahmadi?”

  “At his hotel in Valencia.”

  “He must be moved,” Avila said. “That location is no longer secure. Set the television in my office to this foreign news network, then call the defense minister. I want him here within the half hour . . . and find Carreño!”

  The young man ran off, trying to balance his dignity against the president’s anger.

  CAVIM Explosives Factory

  The door to the security hub faced the road, east, and there were no windows on the south or west side that Kyra could see. She leaned out from behind the shack, giving her cover just far enough to see that there was a padlock on the door, ten yards away. No one inside. There was a camera on the roof corner closest to her position, but it was pointed at the road. As long as she stayed close to the fence, Kyra guessed, she’d be able to stay behind, then under its field of vision. There was a series of toolsheds twenty-five yards to the north but she could see they were empty. The closest building that could have occupants was a hundred feet away, with no window looking south.

  She took a breath, expelled a prayer, and ran for the security annex, staying in the grass. There were no yells, no shots, and then Kyra was behind the building. Keep going. She crept around the south side, keeping the building between her and the two soldiers who were, doubtless, far out of earshot now, but they would be able to see farther than they could hear. She moved under the camera, staying close to the east wall, and finally stood in front of the door.

  “Quiver, Arrowhead. Door is padlocked. Trying to open it now.”

  She inserted the torsion rod, then the pick, and started to work the tumblers.

  CIA Director’s Conference Room

  On the monitor’s thermal image, several guards ran out from the CAVIM factory.

  “Oh, there we go,” Drescher said. “Someone was watching the news.”