Cold Shot (28 page)

“Was that on the video?”

“No. But it’s a logical deduction. I’ll spell it out for you when I see you. For now, just tell the folks back home. Someone there is bound to be smart enough to work backward from the conclusion to figure out my reasoning,” he replied.

“You’re not a weapons analyst. How do you know this stuff?”

“I’ve written a few Red Cell papers on proliferation,” he replied. “If the facility isn’t here, it’s at one of the other sites. And if that’s right, then all they need is a single nuclear reactor, even a small one, and they’ve got everything they need to run the nuclear fuel cycle.”

“I believe you. You were always right.”

“You always found that annoying,” he said.

“Yeah, I did, but the arguments were fun,” she admitted. “Until that day in the sandbox. You were different after that. I always hoped you were going to get over what happened, but you never did.”

“That’s the funny thing about Asperger’s. It turns out that when a memory gets dredged up, you get all of the emotions that came with it the first time . . . they don’t fade. Combine that with an eidetic memory and time doesn’t heal a thing.”

U.S. Embassy

Caracas, Venezuela

Marisa closed her eyes as that revelation sank in.
He never told me.
No, that wasn’t right.
You didn’t stay long enough to find out, did you?
“How do you get past them?” she asked quietly, trying to be careful. Words felt dangerous now, each one a weapon primed to go off if she picked wrong.

“You try hard to never think about them . . . or you replace them with something better. Whichever works,” he told her.

“Is that what you’ve been doing since I left?” Marisa asked. “Replacing them?”
Of course he was,
she thought.
How could he not?

Jon said nothing and silence filled the time, giving her the answer. “Jon, Syria was coming apart. Assad was breaking out the chemical weapons. The Special Activities Center doesn’t always let us tell families or friends where we’re going. You know that.”

“I do. But that doesn’t explain why you didn’t tell me you were coming back. I found out you were in D.C. when I read about it in an intel cable.”

She shifted the phone headset to the other side of her head, used her newly freed hand to lock the window shades open, and looked out at the city as her mind sifted through the answers she could give. Small pyres of smoke were rising in a dozen columns, from the shantytowns that covered the mountain hills to more than one spot between the residential and commercial towers surrounding the Plaza Bolívar in the city’s heart.

“I didn’t know how to help you—” she began.

“So you just left?” he asked. “That certainly didn’t help.”

“I didn’t know what else to do.” It was all she could find to say.

“Almost anything else you could have done would’ve been more helpful than leaving,” he told her.

Now it was Marisa’s silence that hung in the air. “Does it ever help when the other person says they’re sorry?” she asked finally.

“No,” Jon said, plain and fast enough to cut. “That’s the funny thing about emotions, especially the rough ones. They don’t care why they were born and they’re never in a hurry to die. All you can do is live with them until you can learn to ignore them. And all the excuses and apologies in the world don’t change that a bit.”

“I’m—”

A Marine appeared in her doorway, a member of the Embassy Security Group. “Just a second, Sherlock,” Marisa said, using his unofficial crypt again, a signal that the conversation had gone from personal to professional. She covered the phone with her hand. “What is it?” she asked the sergeant.

“The ambassador just received orders from SecState, ma’am. We’re evacuating the embassy. You and your people are to sanitize and secure your spaces, then report to the lobby in one hour. Choppers will be landing behind the building and all personnel will be relocated to the quarantine fleet, where you’ll board a transport for Washington.”

Marisa sat, stunned into silence. She finally forced herself to speak. “I have people in the field. I can’t leave them out there.”

“You can’t stay here, ma’am. You won’t do them any good if the mob comes over the fence and you get taken.”

Marisa nodded. “Understood. Tell the ambassador the rest of my people will be ready to ship out. I’m staying here until my people are safe or the situation becomes untenable.” She put the phone back to her ear. “Jon . . . SecState is closing the embassy. We’re being evacuated.”

“How long?” he asked.

“One hour . . . not enough time for you and Arrowhead to drive back, even if you could get inside the gates, which you can’t. They’re going to relocate us to the fleet. I’m staying here until they drag me out. Once I get to whichever ship we land on, I’ll talk to the captain and see if we can’t arrange a personnel recovery mission for you. If you have to move, get to a safe house.” Marisa paused. “Arrowhead knows where one is in Caracas.”

“Roger that,” Jon said. “Don’t forget about us.”


“I never have,” Marisa said. Jon disconnected. She stared at the phone, then dropped it on her desk. She started to stack the classified folders on her desk. The chief of station could already hear the industrial shredders in the next room warming up.

Puerto Cabello, Venezuela

Jon turned the phone off. The sky was full of stars now, the sun entirely gone. He could have forgotten that he was in a hostile land if not for the smoke that broke up the lights of Puerto Cabello on the horizon. He was still watching the sky an hour later when the growl of the truck’s engine finally cut through the silence.

DAY EIGHT

Palacio de Miraflores

Caracas, Venezuela

Elham watched Presidente Avila as the chief of state read the intelligence report for a third time, disbelief on his face. Carreño and Ahmadi both stood in silence on the other side of the antique desk. None of the senior men had spoken a word in five minutes. The soldier turned back to the window and stared at the manicured garden below. The sun was behind the office towers now and soon would drop below the hills to the west. Dark shadows were stretching out behind the buildings with bright sunbeams cutting through the spaces between them. Farther away, an American Sikorsky SH-60 Seahawk helicopter glided over the skyline, descending toward the embassy that sat out of sight beyond the trees that surrounded the complex. Smoke was rising out past the gates, some of it black as ink. The locals were burning tires now, some not too far from the presidential offices.

Avila had made a great show of machismo when they had finally arrived, calling them
hermanos
and boasting that matters were proceeding as planned. That last claim was a lie. Getting here had been tedious, the motorcade having to move slowly through the streets clogged with protesters. The crowds had been mixed, some among them turning on each other with their words, some with their fists and whatever weapons they could find lying about. An unhealthy number had attacked the cars, requiring the SEBIN guards to assault more than a few men to clear a path to the gates. The
presidente
was like so many other civilian leaders Elham had served over the years, assuming that the world would happily comply with their grand designs and having no contingency plan when events refused to go as they willed. If nothing else, the Americans certainly had shown themselves to be a disobedient bunch.

“They fired on our ship,” the
presidente
finally muttered. “I had not thought they would fire.”

“Actually, our ship fired first,” Carreño corrected him. “The captain claims it was an accident but the American vessel then opened up with all guns and beat her into submission. Why they didn’t put a missile in her, I have no idea. A single one would’ve finished our vessel. The
Brión
would have been sunk in short order had she not surrendered.” It was not a pleasant statement but it was an honest one, though not the kind that Avila usually liked to hear in this room. “The Americans boarded, helped the wounded and repaired the damage to the navigation system, then sent her on her way back to our naval base at Puerto Cabello.”

“There must be some way we can play this to our advantage,” Avila suggested.

His voice reeked of desperation to Elham’s ears and the soldier found his patience was exhausted. “You have nothing,” he said. Carreño and Ahmadi both turned toward him, surprised to hear the Revolutionary Guard soldier interject himself into the conversation.

“Elham—” Ahmadi started, caution in his voice.

“They have denied you victory at every level,” Elham noted. “Had they sunk her, you could have claimed American aggression had cost Venezuelan lives and there would have been no witnesses to contradict you. Had they left her adrift with wounded sailors, you could have yelled about American arrogance or cruelty. Had they seized her, you could have cursed the Americans for seizing Venezuelan property and holding your men. Now they have beaten you with both guns and charity. And the UN Security Council has agreed to their quarantine of your coast, denying you even the claim that they are acting as imperialists. I believe the Americans would say that you have no leg to stand on.”

“You speak out of turn, Elham,” Ahmadi said, his words tinged with anger.

“And when would my turn come?” Elham asked. “I have been a soldier for more than twenty years and if I have learned one thing, it is that the lowest-ranking man in the room is usually the one who sees the truth most clearly. The higher the rank, the more one is concerned with how the situation makes him look before his peers and the world instead of how to solve the problems at hand. And the problem is that we are all trapped here now with an illegal weapon of mass destruction that the world won’t tolerate.”

Avila dropped the paper and pushed it away from him. He leaned back in his chair, lifted his chin, and puffed up his chest. “No, the Russians will help us,” he began. “They are our allies too. We have conducted joint naval exercises with them—”

Are you truly that stupid?
Elham thought but didn’t say. Patience gone or not, he still had some small sense of propriety left in him. “The Russians in the Security Council abstained from the vote to cut your country off from the civilized world,” Elham pointed out. “They are happy to take whatever you give up freely but they are not prepared to risk anything for you. If they won’t even cast a vote in your favor, they certainly won’t send warships to face down the United States Navy.” He finally turned away from the window and looked to his countryman. “We are on our own here, you and I. Our hosts cannot protect us, not from the Americans and certainly not from the Israelis who will be coming. This country will be crawling with CIA and Mossad within days.”

“That is not true,” Avila protested. “The Americans have no power here! They cannot touch you so long as you are under our protection. You can stay here indefinitely. Our patience is greater than theirs—”

“Is it?” Ahmadi asked. “Even if that is true, the question is what will the Americans do when their patience runs out? And the Israelis will have no patience whatsoever in this matter.”

Avila looked up at his intelligence adviser, desperate for some good solution. “What do you think, Diego?”

Carreño scratched his beard, then pulled up a chair and lowered himself into it carefully, trying to avoid touching his tender ribs. “I think we must strengthen our position.”

Avila leaned forward, anxious. “What do you propose?”

The SEBIN director made a show of pondering the question for several long seconds before answering. “First, we must move the weapon. Clearly, it is not safe where it is. The Americans know about the facility—”

“The Americans know about all of your facilities,” Elham interrupted.

Avila leaped to his feet and pounded on the desk with a closed fist hard enough to crack a knuckle. “That is not possible!”

“It is not only possible, it is certain,” Elham corrected him. “The American shooter on the hilltop spoke to his superior as he fled, no? Yet the call was made on a common cell phone, which we found. He used no encryption. Why not? To be certain that you would intercept the call, which you did. And what did you do? Order security sweeps at every facility in the program. Do you really think the American satellites didn’t see that?” The look on Avila’s face delivered his answer. “You were outmaneuvered,
presidente,
” Elham told him.

“Even if that is true, we can still win,” Carreño said, cutting in. It never hurt to help a superior preserve his sense of machismo in the presence of allies, especially ones who were dubious and wavering. “As long as the Americans and their allies don’t know where the cargo sits, we will still have a path to victory. They can’t go about the country randomly striking at sites hoping to destroy it. Eventually the world would turn against that and the American public themselves always tire of long military operations. Uncertainty would be our greatest tool.”

“Yes. Yes!” Avila agreed. “How soon can it be moved?”

“Assuming we want to finish construction first, we could have it ready for transport by tomorrow,” Carreño said. “Do you agree?” he asked, turning to Ahmadi.

“I would,” Ahmadi said after a slight pause. Elham grunted in disgust.

“I would also suggest,” Carreño continued, “that perhaps we should consider seizing the American embassy.”

“To what end?” Elham asked, incredulous.
Madness,
he thought.

Carreño twisted in his chair to address the Iranian soldier. “Two years ago, the last
presidente
ordered me to run an operation to capture an American spy on our soil. The mission failed, but the goal was to hold up the criminal to the world as a useful diversion away from the start of this operation. We wanted to put the United States back on its heels and we need that now. We may not find these spies in the countryside, but the Americans must have any number of spies in that embassy . . . but only for a few more hours. They’re evacuating their staff and if we hesitate, they will slip past us on one of those helicopters. But even if we don’t catch their real spies, anyone we could grab could be accused of such and no one will accept American denials outright. And if we have prisoners”—Elham noted that the man declined to use the word
hostages
—“the Americans will have to proceed much more slowly.”

Elham watched Avila nod slowly, as though Carreño’s words were the wisdom of God Himself. “I think that would be good,” the
presidente
agreed.

“What do you think, doctor?” Avila said, turning to Ahmadi.

“I . . . I think it might work,” the Iranian said. “We seized the American embassy in Tehran in my youth. If their president now is as weak as their president then, it could give you some considerable leverage.”

“And if he isn’t?” Elham said.

“Do we know how many members of the embassy staff remain?” Avila asked, ignoring the question.

“No idea,” Carreño admitted.

“Then move quickly . . . tomorrow morning, I think. We want the cameras to see it . . . but kill the cellular network when the order is given. We don’t want the Americans warning their
asesinos
in the countryside,” Avila ordered. “You see, my friends,” he said, turning back to Ahmadi and Elham, “this will work itself out in our favor. Watch and see.”

You are a fool,
Elham thought. The man was choosing to believe his own fantasies instead of dealing with realities.
You want the Americans to tire of this quickly but you want to kidnap their citizens? Fool
wasn’t a strong enough word.

CIA Director’s Conference Room

Holland stuffed the last Krispy Kreme donut into his mouth, his fourth of the morning. The sugar crash would hit him before ten o’clock and it would be terrible, but for now it kept him going. The last file of bank records appeared on his screen and he started to filter through the account numbers, then stopped to rub his eyes. He’d been staring at spreadsheets throughout the night and his vision was rebelling, refusing to focus on any more of them. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them and shook his head. Finally the laptop screen sharpened and he began to scroll through the numbers again.

U.S. Embassy

Caracas, Venezuela

The morning sun was to the Marines’ backs, pouring its rays square into the faces of the mob.
Small favors,
Corporal Charlie Mansfield thought.
If I gotta stand here decked out at the crack of dawn without a cup of coffee, the least you morons can do is go blind.
He shifted his feet slightly, trying to relieve the discomfort. He and his brothers from the Corps were standing in a line, twenty feet behind the embassy’s main gate, all dressed in riot gear. The
caraqueño
mob on the other side had been mostly quiet during the night. It took a dedicated protester to shout curses at dirty Americans in the dark hours before the dawn. Many of the mobbers had stretched out on the grounds outside, finally submitting to nature’s demand for rest, but sleep had come hard as Seahawks from the U.S. Fourth Fleet descended over them at least twice an hour throughout the night. The helos had landed behind the embassy, each taking up a load of passengers, then rising over the building and passing low back over the protesters on its way out to sea. Mansfield didn’t know whether the pilots had been doing it on purpose to annoy the crowd but he couldn’t say that he disapproved.

He heard boots on the asphalt behind him and turned to see another Marine approach at a slow jog, one of the guards stationed inside the building. His fellow leatherneck slowed to a stop, dispensing with the salutes that would’ve required Mansfield’s setting his gear on the ground in order to return. He leaned in close so the corporal could hear through his riot helmet. “Last Seahawks from the fleet are prepping for launch, ETA one hour. They’ll touch down on the back field and keep the engines warm in order to evac us if it comes to that. Everything quiet?”

“No trouble so far this morning. But it’s early. That’ll change,” Mans-field replied. The other Marine nodded and jogged off back up the hill toward the embassy.

It took another fifty minutes to fulfill Mansfield’s prophecy. The mob stood quiet most of that time, a few of the younger groups singing patriotic songs and starting to wave their signs and flags, hoping to inspire some zeal in their tired comrades. It seemed too early for that yet . . .

. . . and then Mansfield felt the emotions rise in the air. Something changed in the crowd, some kind of excitement moving through them in a wave. The murmurs and Spanish curses began to rumble through the air and the sergeant could feel the anger spread like a morning fog.
This is going to be ugly,
he thought.

The Molotov cocktail came over the wall from the middle of the crowd. Mansfield couldn’t see who’d lit the bottle that landed just in front of the Marine guard line, close enough to burn. They stepped back a few feet. The next homemade munition followed a few seconds later, this one passing just over the heads and exploding behind the Marines, spreading its payload across the black asphalt.

The crowd’s yells would’ve been deafening now if not for the helmets. The Venezuelans were pressing themselves against the gates, hands and fists reaching through the bars, and Mansfield spoke more than enough Spanish to know they were screaming death threats—

It happened in an instant. A roar went up from the crowd and suddenly the men in front were grabbing at the bars, trying to shake them from their hinges again. The younger
caraqueños,
impatient with that approach, began to scale the gates and the wall.

This is it,
Mansfield told himself.
They’re coming over.
Some had tried before, ones and two. Now they were trying almost by the dozen.