“What else did Flores say?”
“He said you were a threat to any chance our nation has of ever achieving true political reconciliation and a peaceful settlement after all these decades, but that’s okay with me. My heart is with the revolution. Whatever the Secretariat decides, the 34th Front is not going to sell out.”
“In the coming weeks, you’ll hear word of what I’ve done, Dios. Expect a strong military response from the Americans and their whores in Bogotá, probably unlike anything we’ve seen before. Be prepared and stay strong. It may be best for you to save the missiles until then.”
“My men are prepared to fight,” Commander Dios assured her. “And what will you do?”
“I will kill as many of them as I can until they find me.”
The Viper linked up with the Iranian’s operative four days later in Bogotá. During that time span, she and her men acquired civilian vehicles and made a stop in Cali, where, for a sizeable amount of cash, nine of the missiles were to begin their journey north. She retained the tenth missile.
She arrived early to first run a countersurveillance sweep through Simón Bolívar Park, the arranged meet site, located in the center of the city with a lake, children’s museum, waterpark, and a stadium capable of holding over a 100,000 people.
It was late afternoon, the weather pleasant, and people were everywhere, playing soccer on the open fields, picnicking near the lake, and filling the trails. The single woman wearing jeans and a long-sleeve shirt with her hair tied back didn’t garner a second glance from anyone. Trujillo and Ibarra shadowed her from a distance, and nobody would have made a connection between the three disparate individuals taking a leisurely stroll.
The sight of Flores struggling on the ground, like a fish out of water, was permanently branded into Arianna’s mind, having been one of the rare instances where she derived genuine pleasure from the suffering of her victim. She didn’t think of herself as a sadist, but she thought she would enjoy the same sensation when and if she plied her blade to the throat of the man codenamed Carnivore. Imagining the feel of his warm blood on her flesh sent quivers of anticipatory pleasure throughout her body.
The Viper looked out for her contact.
Very little was capable of surprising her, but she definitely did not expect the fit European-looking man sitting at the park where Kashani had said to find him. She’d anticipated a Middle Easterner or one of the Latino converts to Islam Iran recruited in South America. After first spotting the man, she walked past him and then doubled back, thinking that this was not possibly the Iranian agent. But it was. The rolled-up copy of the City Paper Bogotá in the man’s left hand and the backpack resting on the ground near his left foot provided confirmation.
Despite the recognition signals, it was his eyes that gave him away. They were light blue and focused, highly aware, and attuned to his surroundings. He was dressed casually in tan pants and a blue polo shirt that was just loose enough to conceal his well-built shoulders and chest.
He remained seated where he was and made no move until she approached him and initiated contact by stating the pass number, seven. A pass number is the same as confirmation statements, which most people knew from bad spy movies, but numbers were simpler, easier to remember, and less idiotic.
On cue, the man provided the appropriate response, “thirteen,” and their identities were established to their mutual satisfaction.
He grabbed his backpack and accompanied the Viper down the path leading out of the park. Trujillo stayed with them, and Ibarra went ahead to start the car.
“What should I call you?” the Viper asked, knowing she would never know his real name, but it was easier to have something to call him.
“David.”
This was the name on his forged Canadian passport, Social Insurance card, and driver’s license, but his birth name, known only to a select few, was Mirsad Sidran. It had been several years since he’d heard anyone use that name, and the last had been his mother, who died shortly before he left his native Bosnia for the last time.
He was one of Quds Force’s most highly valued assets and one of the West’s greatest fears, an invisible. Sidran was a Muslim veteran of the war against the Serbs and had subsequently assisted Iranian intelligence operations in Western Europe. Not once in his life had he ever stepped foot within the Islamic Republic of Iran or entered any of its embassies. American security agencies would never be able to establish any ties between him and Iran or its terrorist affiliates.
Presently assigned to Quds Force’s North American branch, Mirsad Sidran had been dispatched to the United States and Canada for intelligence collection and to perform security assessments of potential targets in American cities for retaliation against American or Israeli first strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. One of his proposals to his superiors was a series of coordinated strikes against American airliners with shoulder-fired missiles.
Able to discard his accent or adopt an American or German accent at will, and fluent in American colloquiums, Mirsad Sidran could freely travel the United States and live amongst Americans without drawing the scrutiny from law enforcement agencies and the suspicions from civilians that inevitably faced Arabs, Iranians, or Pakistanis. He understood American society — or at least he understood how it functioned, as American social behavior and values still mystified him — and he knew how to avoid catching the attention of an observant police officer on routine patrol or a nosey neighbor. He could drink a beer at a local bar and talk baseball, or he could talk to a stranger on a subway train about what it was like growing up outside Toronto.
He’d entered Colombia the previous day from a secret Iranian base in Venezuela, where he received his briefing from Kashani, who carefully outlined Mirsad Sidran’s mission. He wasn’t there so much to assist the Viper, as he was to ensure that she was not taken alive by the Americans or their allies, as well as see to it that, however events played out, she did not live past the end of Plan Estragos.
The Viper selected an Avianca flight as her first target. Aerovías Nacionales de Colombia, or National Airways of Colombia, is the country’s flag carrier, as well as the second largest airline in South America. It was an impulsive decision on the Viper’s part, to hit a target of opportunity, but she was well familiar with El Dorado International Airport from previous target reconnaissance and assessments, and she had contacts there that had helped her smuggle weapons out of the country in the past.
So the first thing she did upon arriving in Bogotá was leave a note in a shared airport locker that was used as a dead drop to exchange messages with Martin Garcia, an operating engineer. The note simply indicated the time and location for a meeting. Later that afternoon, face to face, the Viper explained to Garcia what she required.
Mirsad Sidran objected to the deviation from plan and the impulsivity and lack of discipline the Viper’s decision demonstrated. Before planting a bomb at an American army barracks in Iraq or assassinating an Israeli diplomat, Hezbollah or Qods Force spent months in the planning stages, learning everything they could about the target and its environment, and leaving nothing to chance.
But Sidran kept his concerns to himself, knowing the Viper was too insecure and defensive to take anything he said into consideration. So he stayed out of the way and observed. Besides, it was far better for the whole operation to unravel here rather than later in the United States.
At the safe house, Sidran gave the Viper agents a primer on SA-24. The weapon was simple to use and almost fired itself. The Viper once used an earlier Russian-model missile to bring down an American drug eradication plane, and Benito Trujillo had experience on similar weapons from his time in the Peruvian army.