Timoshenko had perhaps more at stake in the peace talks than anyone else. Without a reconciliation offering amnesty to FARC leaders, his options for the future were limited to death by Colombian government troops or life imprisonment in an American maximum security penitentiary, whichever came first.
Four hours later, after the session adjourned for the day, Lascarro and the other members of his delegation left the Palace of Conventions without stopping to make a statement and espouse the standard political rhetoric to the waiting reporters. Escorted by a uniformed police security detail, they walked the short distance to the Palco Hotel.
Lascarro called his DGI contact and said he needed to speak to him in person right away.
An hour later the Cuban intelligence officer and the FARC delegates gathered in Lascarro’s suite. He showed them the ominous note from the deputy interior minister.
The other FARC delegates knew the Viper was General Andrés Flores’s top assassin, but the DGI officer was perhaps most familiar with her. After all, his service helped create the Viper. The Cubans were likewise already aware of Iranian arms sales to FARC brokered through Caracas. But no one present in Lascarro’s suite was able to make sense of the context of the note and the Colombian government’s threats.
As Timoshenko’s personal emissary at the peace talks, Antonio Lascarro was a prime target of the American, British, and Colombian intelligence services in Havana.
Two weeks ago, during a security sweep in Lascarro’s suite, the DGI discovered covert audio surveillance gear manufactured by an American firm known to do business with the CIA.
The previous month, another member of the FARC delegation bedded an attractive young Spanish reporter, who he later caught inserting a specially modified USB drive into his laptop to spike his hard drive. The DGI quietly picked the reporter up and detained her for a couple days before declaring her persona non grata and expelling her from the country. The incident was kept quiet, but there was no doubt the woman was from Spain’s National Intelligence Center.
Consequently, Lascarro turned to the Cubans to securely transmit messages to Timoshenko, who did not use computers or cell phones. Far too often he’d seen how electronic fingerprints became the undoing of the revolutionaries in the Middle East, and it had also led to the downfall of more than one FARC commander.
Lascarro composed the text of a message to relay to Timoshenko. He coded the message using an old school method known as a book cipher. The correspondents simply substitute the plaintext of the message with the words from a book each party owns (in this case it was The Power of Blood by Miguel de Cervantes; 2005 Whitaker House expanded edition) in a pre-determined pattern known only to the correspondents. It was an additional security measure Lascarro took to prevent the Cubans from reading his communications with Timoshenko, as well as a precaution in case the courier on the ground was intercepted by Colombian agents.
Later at DGI headquarters, which houses a modern array of secure signals and electronic gear, thanks to FAPSI, Russia’s SIGINT agency, he cabled the message to the DGI station at the Cuban embassy in Bogotá.
There, the message was decrypted, leaving the actual substance of Lascarro’s message coded by book cipher and unintelligible to anyone in the world other than Timoshenko. Immediately after receiving the message, the Bogotá-based DGI officer texted his FARC contact with the code word for requesting a meeting. Upon leaving the Cuban embassy, he conducted an expertly crafted surveillance detection run, to find and then lose his separate Colombian and American tails, before completing the drive to Zipaquira, thirty miles north of Bogotá, where he transferred the coded message to the FARC courier. The message was handed off three more times before finally reaching Timoshenko at his jungle hideout on the Colombian-Venezuelan border the following night. Outraged and confused, Timoshenko immediately summoned General Andrés Flores.
TEN
Avery turned and snapped the Glock up in front of him after clearing the holster at his right hip. He leveled the sights, broke the trigger with 5.5lbs of pressure from the pad of his right index finger, and sent a searing hot round of .40 caliber S&W ammunition coring thirty-five feet through the air at 1,230 feet per second into the human shaped silhouette target hanging from the winch. The discharged brass arced through the air, to the right, and clattered against the floor, joining over two dozen more spent shell casings.
Recovering from the recoil, Avery reacquired aim and hit the trigger again. He continued firing until he’d emptied the Glock’s magazine. Within the close confines of the bay’s reinforced baffles, the concussion of the shots exploded through the plugs in his ears. He felt traces of the corrosive smoke in his nose and throat, despite the range’s ventilation system.
But he was most conscious of the dull aching sensation in his right shoulder, deep within the mass of his deltoid, from holding his extended arm up, and the discomfort was sufficient to hinder his fast draw by a second and inhibit his aim. The slightest, imperceptible movement of the barrel was enough to completely divert the bullet’s path.
Avery pressed the automatic target retrieval system’s recall button, and the rail-mounted target travelled down the length of the lane and stopped in front of him. He examined his groupings. His last three shots were slightly left off-center of the circle in the silhouette’s torso, but he was doing better, after learning how he’d need to adjust his stance and aim, and he’d already improved over two days ago.
Contrary to movies and TV shows, you can’t take hits to the shoulder, and suck it up and brush it off. The shoulder was filled with nerve endings, blood vessels, and a complex and vulnerable ball-in-socket joint, and it took a long time to heal.
Avery cleared and holstered his weapon, and collected his things before exiting the range through the airlock. He worked his jaw, trying to push air through his Eustachian tubes to clear the clogged, stuffy feeling in his ears.
After eating a fast meal of protein bars, bananas, and bottled water, he changed into shorts and a t-shirt, threw on a backpack loaded with weight plates, and headed outside. He ran at a measured pace through the wet grass and the misting rain pouring from the gray gloom overhead, along the way passing the rows of mammoth airplane hangars and a USAF C-130 Hercules just in from Tampa Bay.
After the Panama debriefing, Avery had gone straight to his bunk, closed his eyes, and went instantly to sleep. When he woke up twelve hours later, he felt recovered from the post-combat fatigue and adrenaline hangover, but the pain had become even more prevalent in his shoulder and across his upper back.
Still too sore to work out in the gym, since nearly any exercise with weights put stress on the shoulders, Avery passed the time however he could over the next three days, while waiting to hear from Culler that they had a lead — something, anything — on the Viper’s trail.
But there was nothing.
So Avery passed the time the only way he knew how; training and preparing. He obsessively read everything the Colombians had on the Viper, even though the details and insight were sparse, and then he read it again. There were dry factual details dissecting past Viper operations, and analysis laced with speculation, nothing that offered any insight into her psychological makeup or provided clues on how or where to find her. Avery still had little idea of who he was really facing.