Locating it, he wiped the action dry with his shirttail, and clicked off the safety so it was ready to use. Hearing people above, he crawled up the embankment and hid by the lip.
He recognized Akil’s voice whispering, “Let’s look down here.”
“Akil?” he whispered back.
“Boss?”
Akil slid down with Ritchie behind him, both clutching MP5s.
“Who the fuck is he?” Akil asked, pointing at the dead man.
“Some guy who called himself Alvarez but is really IRGC.”
“You get his Iranian name?”
“Don’t worry about that now,” Crocker whispered, grimacing.
“You hurt?”
“A couple bumps and bruises, but I’m fine.”
They reached the top, where Neto informed them that the Venezuelan police would probably be arriving soon.
“Let’s go then,” Crocker said. “Get in the trucks.”
At 0705 the next morning, the six members of Black Cell were back at the hotel packing their bags when Crocker got a call from Neto.
“What’s up?” he asked, swallowing two Advils with a glass of water to help ease the pain in his lower back.
“The chief wants to see you.”
“The station chief? When?”
“Now.”
“We’re in the process of moving to another hotel,” Crocker said, assuming this summons had something to do with the previous night’s raid. He’d handed the documents he had taken from the terrorist over to Neto. Maybe the Agency had gleaned some important info from them.
“There’s been a change of plans,” Neto said.
Plans always changed. Crocker was okay with that. “No problem, Neto. Just tell me what you want me to do.”
Neto explained, “We have an office not far from where you are. Go to Las Mercedes Avenue and turn right. You’ll see a tall Banco Popular building halfway down the street. Go up to the ninth floor and look for Global Partners Investments.”
“What time?” Crocker asked.
“ASAP. We’re here now.”
“You want me to come alone?” Crocker asked.
“Let me check,” Neto said, then put the phone on hold.
Crocker and his men had returned shortly after 0400, napped, and had ordered breakfast from room service. Now the two hours they had spent after they had left the slum of Petare replayed in his head, a movie of Caracas side streets, back alleys, byways and highways. Neto and Sanchez had made sure to shake off any SEBIN or Venezuelan police tails before dropping them off at their hotel.
Neto’s deep voice came back on the line. “Bring your deputy.”
“Mancini and I will be there in ten.”
Crocker didn’t have time to change his clothes or shave. He limped down Avenida Principal de las Mercedes in his dirty black pants and T-shirt, with Mancini by his side talking about the recent announcement that President Chávez had slipped into a coma.
“Any chance he’ll recover?” Crocker asked, scanning the street for plainclothes police and seeing men in brown uniforms throwing plastic bags of garbage into a large green truck.
“Unlikely,” Mancini answered. “Apparently he’s got stage-four colon cancer. He had a baseball-sized tumor removed several years ago, along with chemotherapy. During the recent election campaign he claimed he was cancer free, which turned out to be a lie.”
Another kind of cancer-lung cancer-had afflicted Crocker’s mother. But before it had taken her, she had died in a freak accident. Crocker’s sister hypothesized that maybe the accident was a blessing, which angered Crocker at the time. But now, as he pushed through the revolving doors of the modern Banco Popular building, he thought maybe his sister had been right.
He and Mancini rode up in the elevator with a group of men in business suits, then walked down the carpeted hall to the door at the end of the corridor. Crocker hit the buzzer on the call box and waited.
“Quién es?”
“It’s Tom Mansfield and his associate from Balzac Expeditions.”
A Hispanic woman in a tight black skirt and heels led them to a waiting room with a view of the city bathed in yellow sunlight. A tired-looking Ernesto Navarro shuffled in holding a stack of papers.
“This way, gentlemen,” he said.
They entered a generic conference room. The shades were pulled over the windows. Two men sat at the table, which was crowded with papers and coffee cups.
The thinner of the two looked up and said, “Gentlemen, my name is Chase Rappaport. I’m the chief of station here.” He pointed to a swarthier, thicker-built man seated across from him. “This is my deputy, Hal Melkasian.”
Melkasian looked over his shoulder at the SEALs. “Welcome.”
“Which one of you two is Warrant Officer Crocker?” Rappaport asked. He had a sharp, mean face and piercing blue eyes.
“That’s me.”
“Take a seat. Neto here will pour you some coffee. Melky and I, along with a number of analysts back at Langley, have been reviewing the packet of documents you recovered last night.”
“Yeah?” Crocker said, sipping the bitter coffee and running a hand through his thinning, close-cropped hair. “What’d you find?”
Rappaport pushed his chair back, placed his shoes on the edge of the table, then glanced at some papers in his lap. “You hear about the president’s condition?”
“Critical, right? My teammate and I were just talking about that,” Crocker said with a nod.
“It might seem unrelated, but I can assure you that it underlies everything we’re dealing with here,” Rappaport said ominously.
Crocker shifted his weight in the leather-covered swivel chair and fought off the feeling of fatigue. “I’m not sure what that means.”
Rappaport turned his Doberman pinscher-shaped face toward him. “It means that this program will be accelerated,” he intoned, pointing to the documents on his lap. “When Chávez dies, Maduro will take over. They’ll hold a special election, but the vote will be rigged. Maduro isn’t Chávez. He has none of his charisma. He’s a leftist labor organizer who never finished high school, loves Led Zeppelin, and worships a dead guru named Sai Baba. So nobody knows how long before the opposition rises and kicks his ass out.”
“What program are you referring to?” Crocker asked.
“The Iranian-Venezuelan program. Unit 5000. What did you think? Now that we know-”
Melkasian cut him off. “Chase, I don’t believe these gentlemen had a chance to peruse the documents in question.”
Rappaport looked at Crocker, confused. “You recovered them, didn’t you?”
“I did, yes,” Crocker answered. “But I immediately handed them over to Mr. Navarro. I expected that we would be leaving our hotel first thing this morning because of the violence that took place in Petare.”
In addition to the man Crocker had killed with his bare hands, another presumed terrorist had been gunned down inside the house-something the Venezuelans wouldn’t be too pleased about, especially if they found out that the men had been offed by U.S. operatives.
“Oh,” Rappaport said, cleaning his gold-framed glasses with the tail of his shirt, then placing them back on his nose. “Then Melky, you have some filling in to do.”
“Yes,” his deputy said, arching his spine and rubbing the back of his neck. He pointed to a pile of documents on the table. “From what I’ve been able to learn so far, it looks like Unit 5000 is in the process of organizing a substantial base here in Venezuela with the help of people in the Chávez-Maduro government.”
“Colonel Torres,” Mancini muttered.
“Yes, Colonel Chavo Torres. He’s helping the Iranians build a terrorist base in Venezuela capable of delivering attacks on the U.S. and other targets. The men you killed last night were Iranian Unit 5000 functionaries who had been given new identities and Venezuelan citizenship.”
As he tried to follow Melkasian’s train of thought, Crocker’s head hurt-a result of the trauma his body had suffered and the pain medication he had taken for his back. Mancini, seated beside him, poured another cup of black coffee and downed it. The skin around his eyes was swollen and gray.