But Canastilla’s efforts hadn’t resulted only in death. He’d saved lives too by helping the police to disrupt terrorist attacks in Colombian cities. Information Canastilla fed to ANIC also allowed the army to conduct Operation Jaque, where Special Forces, posing as members of the Central High Command, entered a FARC camp and took custody of fifteen hostages — the last bargaining chip FARC had left in its negotiations with the government — without firing a single shot.
Avery patiently listened to the story.
The details didn’t matter much as far it concerned his mission, and he wasn’t sure why Slayton bothered to relay all of this to him. Avery knew he could never go through with what Canastilla did, living a lie for that long, deeply embedded with the enemy, becoming one of them and wondering which side you were really on, all the while knowing that they could find you out at any moment and skin you alive. He thought Slayton told him the story of Pablo Muňoz to garner some sense of sympathy or solidarity, but Avery didn’t do sentimentality. He’d take the mission, but he didn’t give a shit about Pablo Muňoz.
“How do you feel about making the extraction?” Culler asked Avery.
They both knew he wouldn’t say no. Avery’s 201 file included words like “reliable” and “dependable,” traits that had gotten him into trouble more than once.
“If your agent’s at risk, I’ll bring him out.”
THREE
It rained on Arianna Moreno as she strode across the camp grounds. The coastal downpour seeped through the layered jungle canopy, drenching her, and she seemed to neither notice nor care. She passed two men on guard duty wearing ponchos with the hoods pulled up around their heads. Their eyes lingered long over the wet tank top clinging to the contours of Arianna’s breasts, betraying her choice to not wear a brassiere. She set her gaze forward, didn’t acknowledge the men, and they held their silence, knowing it would take a bold or foolish man to provoke her with crude sexual overtures.
Despite the social justice and equality FARC espoused, female recruits were often second class. The weaker ones became sex slaves, used to service the men to boost morale, receiving forced abortions if impregnated in the process, and performed demeaning tasks, like preparing meals and keeping the camps clean. Arianna Moreno was one of the rare exceptions, and most FARC men who set eyes on her recognized this immediately and made no passes toward her. Those who did, like the sergeant who had cornered her and groped her when she was a new recruit, quickly and painfully realized their mistake and became an example for others. That sergeant who assaulted Arianna had his scrotum ripped from his body when he’d dropped his pants.
She barged into the general’s hut without knocking, without caring whether she interrupted something of importance or a private moment. She thought she knew why the FARC chief of intelligence, who was a major general and a deputy of the Central High Command, the military leadership of FARC, had summoned her. Usually, it was because someone needed to be killed or something needed to be destroyed, but she sensed that this time would be different.
Of course by now she had heard of Operation Phoenix and of the government oppressors’ jubilation over slaughtering Emilio Reyes barely two days ago. The last she heard, there wasn’t yet a complete roll call of the dead, but she hadn’t heard from Aarón since before the raid — he never failed to check in with her — and she doubted the government would have left survivors after an illegal military operation in a foreign country.
Normally, a Central High Command deputy would not deal directly with a captain, the rank Arianna nominally held. In FARC, captains command columns — two companies, numbering forty-eight troops — but Arianna was assigned to a special section of the military intelligence network that performed sensitive tasks, a euphemism for assassination and terrorism, directly for the Central High Command. She answered directly and only to Flores. Informally, within the Central High Command, Andrés Flores’s colleagues referred to him as the snake charmer, because Arianna Moreno was the Viper.
She found Flores seated at an old, decrepit wooden desk, consulting a notebook computer under the glow of a burning oil lamp. Raindrops drummed against the wooden rooftop. His hut smelled of tobacco, and a bottle of aged Chivas Regal sat on his desk, next to a short glass filled with half a measure of the liquor, but his eyes remained clear and focused. He looked up over a pair of smudged, crooked glasses at Arianna Moreno’s entrance.
“Please come in and sit down.” Flores indicated the chair in front of his desk. “Make yourself comfortable.”
“I prefer to stand.”
“As you please,” Flores said, annoyed that she always seemed to feel the need to be disagreeable simply as a matter of course. “This is an informal visit. It’s a personal matter. There is no easy way to say this, I’m afraid. Your brother’s body was found in the jungle outside the Venezuelan camp.”
Arianna provided no reaction. Flores simply confirmed what she already knew, and she’d already unleashed her grief. She spent the previous night alone, crying and screaming, wanting to tear her guts out. There were fresh cuts in the exposed flesh of her arms, where she’d pressed the blade of the straight razor deep and sliced, out of the need for some outlet through which to unleash the rage surging inside her. She’d finally exhausted herself and fell asleep covered in blood and tears. The worst was waking up, the couple of seconds of peace and normalcy in the morning, followed by the realization that it hadn’t been a nightmare, and then the agony seized her again.
Aware of Flores’ eyes on the fresh wounds, she self-consciously covered her arms in front of her, internally reprimanded herself for doing so, seeing the move as a sign of weakness, and asked, “Where is the body now?”
“I have arranged for the return of your brother’s remains to Jasminia.”
This was a small hamlet in the north, the closest thing to a home Arianna ever had to return to the over past fifteen years. Now, without Aarón, the place was nothing. She didn’t she think she had any reason to return now.
“He will be given a proper military burial with full honors.”
That meant little to Arianna. Symbolic gestures were without value, and no one would care, anyway. She needed to think ahead, to the future.
“What will happen next?”
“Members of the Secretariat are in discussions with Caracas to formulate a political as well as tactical response to this provocation,” Flores said. “As far as the latter, I imagine that you would care to extract some measure of retribution on behalf of your brother. It is apparent that Emilio Reyes was betrayed. Finding the spy is our top priority.”
“You have suspicions as to the identity of the spy?”
“As far as I can tell, there are only two men who had advance knowledge of Emilio Reyes’ visit to Venezuela. One of those men is a member of the Secretariat, which means there is little I can do. But we will bait a trap for the other man. When we find the traitor, an example will be made of him, whoever he is.”
Arianna gave it thought and shook her head. “It is not enough.”
“Excuse me?”
“Aarón is dead, along with thirty of our soldiers massacred in their sleep. One spy is not enough, not for Aarón, not for the fascists’ cowardly assault in another nation. A message needs to be sent to Bogotá, and their American masters. I want more than one life, and so should the Secretariat. We’re capable of inflicting so much destruction upon them.”