Cold Shot: A Novel Page 20

  Palacio de Miraflores

  Caracas, Venezuela

  Avila pushed the phone away from him on the ornate desk and slumped in his chair. Carreño was again proving to be a disappointment and the president wished again that the man didn’t have such close connections with the Castros. Venezuela had few partners and fewer patrons in the world and could spare none of them. The Cubans certainly would not sever their ties if he removed the SEBIN director, but they had other, more subtle ways of expressing their displeasure. And now that the American media had played that tape, all of Venezuela’s allies would be exercising caution—

  Avila turned at the sound of frantic pounding behind him. He nodded at one of the security guards standing watch and the man opened the door. An aide hurried inside.

  “Pardon my interruption, Señor Presidente—”

  “What is it?” Avila snapped.

  “The crowds,” the man said. “Some crowds have formed up—”

  “I know,” Avila told him. “I ordered it. The Tupamaros—”

  “No, sir.” The aide shook his head. “It’s not as you think, sir. These are not Tupamaros or any of the revolutionary militia.”

  Avila gaped, walked to the window, and looked through the blinds. A small mob had formed outside the palacio, signs in hand. He couldn’t hear them but they were clearly yelling at the soldiers holding them away from the gates. “Who are they?”

  “Civilians. Locals.” The worry in the aide’s voice was infectious. “And they’re not just here. We have reports from Maracaibo, Puerto Cabello, Ciudad Bolívar in the southeast, and several other port towns. They emerged after the American broadcast.”

  “What are you saying?” Avila asked, perplexed.

  “Sir . . . they are protesting you.”

  Avila turned his head and looked at the bureaucrat, murder on his face. “How large are the mobs?”

  “Not large yet,” the aide replied. “A few hundred in the larger towns.”

  Avila nodded. “Contact the television stations. I want no coverage of this at all. None. There will be no ‘Arab Spring’ here . . . do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir. But what about the foreign media? We cannot control them.”

  “If you find anyone with a camera on the street, find a reason to arrest them. I don’t care, but smash the camera,” Avila ordered. “I don’t want these people organizing. And make sure the Tupamaros take their place at the American embassy. I want that nest of spies cordoned off. Contain this.”

  “Yes, sir,” the aide said, not at all convincing, as he fled the room.

  Embassy Suites Hotel

  Valencia, Carabobo, Venezuela

  32 km south of Puerto Cabello

  Hossein Ahmadi watched the television replay the warehouse video again. He’d lost count of the times the American news network had shown it. He thought his anger couldn’t rise any higher in his chest and found that he was wrong. Each viewing fed his rage until he could hardly control his hands every time the scene came on the television screen.

  Someone rapped the door. “Come,” he said through clenched teeth. It could only be Elham. He’d summoned the sargord, who was the only soldier with standing permission to disturb him anyway.

  Elham entered and closed the door behind him. “You’ve seen this?” Ahmadi said.

  “Yes,” the sargord answered.

  “How did the Americans film this?” Ahmadi knew the answer but his mind didn’t want to accept it.

  “They had someone in the warehouse, obviously. Not twenty meters from where we stood,” Elham replied.

  “How could you not see such a person?” Ahmadi demanded.

  “The question applies to you as well,” he answered, turning the question back on the civilian.

  “But you are in charge of security for this operation!” Ahmadi said.

  “No, I am not,” Elham corrected him. “My men and I were not privy to any of this until we were pulled from our beds to retrieve your ship and ordered to bring it here, despite the fact that we are not sailors. You allowed the Markarid to be taken over by a pirate crew by refusing to assign an armed crew when she sailed. The Venezuelans took charge after the ship arrived and Carreño was in charge of protecting the dockyard and the ammunition factory. But the security on your operation has been poor from the start.”

  “You cannot speak to me that way!”

  “I can speak to you any way that I wish, provided that I am prepared to accept the consequences of my choices. And given that your poor choices are heaping consequences on me that I didn’t choose, I am quite prepared to tell you what I think.” He pointed at the television. “My face is in that video as well. Neither of us will escape this unscathed. We will both find ourselves answering unpleasant questions when we return to Tehran, but you more than me, I think.”

  Ahmadi clenched his fists and his teeth, breathing hard. He needed a target for his rage and the sargord wasn’t providing a good one. He cursed in Farsi, then took his phone from the hotel room desk, set the speaker, and furiously dialed. The call rang numerous times before someone finally picked up.

  “This is Avila,” the other man answered.

  “Your man’s incompetence has endangered us,” Ahmadi said without preamble.

  “We are dealing with it,” Avila said, defensive. “I will be making a statement later today—”

  “This is going to take far more than a statement to correct!”

  “Surely, but our dear comandante, God rest his soul, showed us how to deal with American spies. Trust me now, brother. Don’t fear this. God gives us opportunities from adversity. With this, we will finish the revolution that our leader began almost twenty years ago.”

  I don’t care about your fool revolution! Ahmadi raged silently. The Venezuelans were infidels, the same as the Americans. “Useful idiots,” as Saddam had once phrased it. “We must move the cargo,” was what Ahmadi finally told him.

  “I agree, but we cannot yet. The cargo has been opened, so we must finish the job there first and only then will it be safe to move, I’m told.”

  “How long?” Ahmadi asked.

  “Two days.”

  “Get this done,” Ahmadi said. “Or my superiors in Tehran will have to reassess our alliance.” He turned off the phone.

  Elham wondered whether Ahmadi truly had the influence to carry through on the threat. Probably, the soldier thought. The other man was a narcissist but he had no reputation back home for making idle threats.

  National Security Adviser’s Office

  West Wing, the White House

  Washington, D.C.

  The size of Gerry Feldman’s office belied the power of his position. The national security adviser’s work space sat in the corner opposite the Oval Office and was larger than most in the West Wing, but there were interns on Wall Street with more space and better views. The furniture was government traditional, the desk of average size, fake wood over particleboard and buried under a landfill of paper. Feldman preferred to hold his meetings in one of the conference rooms or even the Oval Office itself, where the surroundings lent themselves to intimidation. But some conversations needed to go unnoticed by the staff and this was one of them.

  Feldman had braced himself to see righteous wrath all over Kathy Cooke’s face, but the CIA director was calm and he was sure that should worry him far more. She was sitting to the side of the couch, legs crossed, an iPad resting on her lap. Cyrus Marshall was doing all the talking. There was no frustration on her face, no fidgeting, no attempts to break into the conversation. The woman was picking her moment and Feldman felt himself growing more tense every second the moment didn’t come.

  “You should have run it by us, Gerry,” the DNI said. “You can’t go public like that without warning. There’s damage control—”

  “We didn’t leak it—” Feldman began.
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  “Don’t give me that, Gerry!” Marshall protested. “That video wasn’t twenty-four hours old. How many people do you think even know it existed, much less had access to it?”

  “Cy, I’m telling—”

  “It was you,” Cooke interrupted.

  “Excuse me?” Feldman retorted.

  “Before we delivered the video, I had one of our video specialists insert a unique numerical code on a single frame of each copy of the video so we could trace it in the case of a leak,” Cooke said. “We recorded the footage televised last night and identified that code. It matched the one we delivered on your iPad.”

  Feldman glared at the woman and let out an exasperated breath. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “That would have defeated the purpose,” Cooke replied.

  “My staff—” Feldman started.

  “The captain of the ship is responsible for the conduct of his crew,” Cooke answered before he could complete the sentence. “So whether you released it personally or gave explicit or implicit directions to one of your staffers, the responsibility still lies with you.”

  “You are not seriously trying to threaten me,” Feldman said, anger creeping into his voice.

  “Mr. Feldman, you released that tape last night because you and President Rostow expected that the CIA was going to fail to carry out your order to locate and identify the Markarid cargo,” Cooke said. “You’re looking to squeeze some political capital out of this and given your assumption that we would fail, you saw no point in waiting to start.”

  Cooke took the iPad off her lap and laid it on the table, folding back the brown Corinthian leather cover. “Your assumption was wrong. Our officer penetrated the CAVIM facility. But your broadcast triggered a security lockdown and we lost contact with her during the escape. We’re trying to reestablish contact now and retrieve her intel. But you have your crisis and now we all have to manage it,” Cooke continued. “And I’m going to lay down some ground rules for exactly how we’re going to do that.”

  “Now you wait a minute!” Feldman ordered. “You don’t get to dictate terms—”

  “Yes, sir, in this instance I do,” Cooke warned, her voice rising in anger. “You didn’t clear the release of that information with us—”

  “The president gets to decide whether to declassify—”

  “Yes, he does. But your reckless advice that he do it without talking to me first endangered our officer!” Cooke slapped his desk in anger. “While the networks were busy last night telling the Venezuelans that we had penetrated their program and had an officer within a hundred feet of their team, that same officer was inside the CAVIM facility trying to retrieve the intel that you and the president demanded. She was attacked and escaped only because a second officer arrived and used a sniper rifle to pin down the entire security contingent long enough for her to get away.”

  “You did not fire on foreign nationals on their own soil!” Feldman protested.

  “Yes, we did,” Cooke said, calm as the morning. “And you’re not going to issue so much as a reprimand for it because that team recovered video footage from CAVIM that might identify the Markarid cargo. And if that senior officer hadn’t used that rifle, not only would the operation have failed, the team might now be in a SEBIN detention facility with President Avila using them as propaganda tools against you. So if you attempt to punish those officers or my agency, I will be forced to plead our case to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and use the embedded code on the footage in support. Given that they weren’t told about the covert action at the warehouse before it occurred, I suspect the committees weren’t very happy to hear about it from cable news.”

  “No, they weren’t,” Feldman admitted. He’d been avoiding calls since the broadcast. “But the law allows us to inform them after the fact in exigent circumstances—”

  “I’m sure they’ll be excited to hear why these were exigent circumstances. I have to go to the Hill later today to talk about that,” Cooke advised, pointing at the tablet. “Just as I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to hear about how an ill-advised White House leak almost cost a decorated CIA officer her life and possibly the intel needed to stop Iranian proliferation of who-knows-what into our half of the world. Details like that tend to leak to the Post too. And before you threaten me with jail, I won’t have to do that. The Hill will do it for me and you know it.”

  Feldman leaned forward, anger in his own eyes. “So what are you asking for?” he finally said.

  “I’m not asking for anything,” Cooke told him. “I’m telling you that if another shred of classified information about this operation leaks, Congress will hear every gory detail about last night’s operation before the next broadcast is done. I have people in harm’s way down there, two people who I happen to know personally and care about, and it will be hard enough to get the job done and get them home without you”—she pointed her finger at the spot between his eyes—“trying to sacrifice them in exchange for a few points in the president’s next approval poll.”

  “You don’t dictate terms to the president of the United States,” Feldman told her.

  “I’m just laying out the consequences of a particular choice you might choose to make, sir,” Cooke said. “And I will fall on my sword for this one if necessary,” she finished. Cooke stood and walked out, not caring whether Marshall followed.

  • • •

  The DNI had shared his car with his subordinate, so Cooke’s exit from Feldman’s office had been fine theatrics but she could hardly leave the White House without him. Marshall found her waiting for him inside the West Wing entrance foyer, just past the Secret Service desk. “You didn’t mention that the broadcast gave your people an opening to figure out where the Iranians have the rest of their covert infrastructure down there,” he said.

  “If I told him that, he would’ve used it to justify the whole thing, never mind that they had nothing to do with it,” she replied. “It was just fast thinking on the part of a very creative officer.” Good job, Jon.

  “That never stopped a politician from taking credit for an accomplishment before,” Marshall noted.

  “No, it didn’t,” Cooke agreed. “But they can’t take credit without going public, so I’m not sure they wouldn’t leak that part too.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  The Oval Office

  The White House

  “You said there was no way her people could pull off something like this.”

  “No, you said that. I just thought you were right,” Feldman admitted. “We’re going to have to step a little more carefully with Cooke after this. She’s thinking ahead.”

  “Yeah. I cut her loose now and the Hill really will start asking some hard questions.” The president shook his head, cursing. “We’ll tackle that later. Has Avila said anything about the broadcast?”

  “He did,” Feldman confirmed. He opened a folder and pulled out a pair of typewritten pages. “State sent this over through the Situation Room an hour ago. Avila delivered his rant on that show of his, Aló Presidente.” Feldman botched the accent badly but Rostow didn’t know the difference. He picked up the papers, leaned back in his chair, set his legs up on the Resolute desk, and scanned the translation.

  Jefes de estado, jefes de gobierno que pueden estar escuchando, estimados ciudadonos de nuestro patria amado. Muy buenos días a todos y a todas. (Heads of state, heads of government who may be listening, and esteemed citizens of our beloved homeland, good morning.)

  Ladies and gentlemen, yesterday the American media showed you a video that they said proved we were murderers. Was there anything to indicate where it was filmed? No. Was there anything to indicate when it was filmed? No. And why not? Because this video that they showed is a fabrication, a lie from the first to the last moment. They say the CIA filmed it. I say the CIA staged it. They are the killers, with a long history of trying
to overthrow the governments of Latin America. They have tried to topple this government since the first days when our beloved commander took it away from the corrupt imperialist puppets who had held it for so many years. And they are still trying now.

  The United States government has launched an open attack, an immoral attack, against the nation of Venezuela.

  Those who did this were CIA killers, terrorists. But Venezuela is fully committed to combating violence. We are one of the people who are fighting for peace and an equal world.

  We want to save the planet from the imperialist threat. And hopefully in this very century, in not too long a time, we will see this, we will see this new era, and for our children and our grandchildren a world of peace.

  Dios está con nosotros. Un buen abrazo y que Dios nos bendiga a todos. Muy buenos días. (God is with us. I embrace you all, and may God bless us all. Good day.)

  • • •

  “I guess that’s a ‘no,’ as far as giving up Ahmadi,” Rostow said.

  “You expected anything different?” Feldman asked.

  “Not really. But we’ve got to crank up the pressure on Avila now. He’s not playing ball. We need to crucify him,” Rostow said.

  “We can’t let him move that cargo or Ahmadi out of the country. We lose track of them and he’ll squirm out of this.”

  “Yeah,” Rostow agreed. “Call the SecDef. Then call the ambassador to the UN and tell her to get the Security Council to call a special session.”

  Feldman grinned. “You want to play Adlai Stevenson?”

  Rostow just smiled. “Tell Kathy Cooke that I want her there too. If we have to keep her around, she might as well be useful for something.”

  Puerto Cabello, Venezuela

  The morning light finally reached into Jon’s sleep and he opened his eyes. The humid air was reaching under his shirt, turning his skin clammy, and he knew there would be no more rest now. The sun was already well above the horizon and approaching the higher branches of the trees that he could see through the shack’s broken windows. The stress of the previous night had driven him to sleep far longer than was usual.