Threatcon Delta (19 page)

C
oming into the capital by air, the impression Phair had was that someone had opened a box full of pearls, with the brown velvet lid open on one side. The brown was the Avila, a 2,600-meter-high mountain, whose peak was hidden in clouds as the plane dropped below them. The pearls were the walls and windows and tile rooftops of the city, luminous despite the overcast day.

It wasn’t the worst flight the major had ever endured. The C-130 that had ferried him to and from Iraq all those years apart—possibly the same plane, given the threadbare seat and rattling superstructure he’d endured on the ride home—was colder, louder, and bumpier.

Kealey and Phair were traveling as Foreign Service Specialists with the State Department. That meant flying coach, row 33.

“I thought high-ranking officials flew business class,” Phair had asked.

“They do,” Kealey replied. “And the Dirección de Contrainteligencia Militar scans business class for government employees to harass when they disembark. I’d just as soon avoid the bugged hotel room and hookers who knock on the door with, ‘Oh! This isn’t my room! But, say, you’re cute!’ ”

“Has that happened to you?”

Kealey shook his head once. “I’m unmarried and straight, not much of a target for blackmail. You would be, though, being a priest. That’s the real reason the DoD never wanted gays in the military. They weren’t afraid they’d consort with other soldiers. They were afraid the boys would be compromised.”

They’d been airborne for a total of eight hours, with a two-hour layover in Miami. Phair slept for some of it and read up on the Heiliges Geheimnisvoll Produktprogramm for the rest. He did not require government files for that; he had printed public Internet files. It was a wonderful thing, the World Wide Web. Like a Library of Alexandria that no Caesar could destroy.

Some of the information he knew but most he did not. Hitler was a devout believer in the supernatural. That much was evident from his selection of the swastika as the emblem of his movement—a symbol of religious power formed by the ends of the arms of a Greek cross being bent at right angles. Phair had known that Hitler possessed what was believed to be the Spear of Destiny, which had been used by the Romans to pierce the side of the crucified Jesus. It was said that he who owned it would control the fate of civilization. Hitler personally took the spearhead, which was all that survived, from the Hofsburg Museum in Vienna in 1938. Certain that the fall of Austria and his acquisition of the spear was an omen for future conquests, he charged Himmler, the head of the Gestapo, with organizing a group of his most devoted soldiers to find other holy and occult relics. Several units fanned across the world searching for items that ranged from the Holy Grail to the lost prophecies of Nostradamus.

The fact that Hitler was defeated did not, in the minds of his followers, diminish their belief in the Spear or the occult. Hitler’s suicide was regarded as a blood sacrifice, an acknowledgment of his own failure and not that of the supernatural. April 30th, the day he took his life, was the eve of
Walpurgisnacht,
which celebrated the Canaanite deity Baal—the most sacred day of the supernatural calendar.

There was no record of the Nazis ever finding anything as significant as the Spear of Destiny. Most of their discoveries were at the level of a few saintly skulls from Rome and witches’ brooms from the Black Forest.

“How could they have reconciled finding a Jewish artifact?” Kealey asked, looking over Phair’s shoulder as they made their final approach.

“You mean the jawbone wielded by Samson to slay his enemies or David’s slingshot?”

“That’s right.”

“I believe the desire for power would have trumped any other consideration,” Phair said. “Jewish, Hindu, Chinese, Eskimo—I don’t think they would have made a public display of it, of any of these items, but they would have studied them to learn their secrets.”

“Do you believe any of these objects had special powers?”

“I don’t know,” Phair said thoughtfully. “I think if I were holding a piece of the True Cross, nothing would frighten me. I might not believe it would stop a bullet, but I wouldn’t be afraid to die.”

“You think you would know if it wasn’t just a splinter of wood?”

“I’m not sure,” Phair admitted. “I can tell you this, though. I’d be out there in the desert with the other pilgrims, eager to have a look.”

The plane touched down at Simón Bolívar Airport in the seaside city of Maiquetía. It was a modern, nondescript facility of plain, ivory-white stone and girders. Inside, it reminded Phair of Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, where his father would occasionally take him to Phillies games. People were hurrying here and there on different levels, each the center of their own cosmos, but overlapping and interrelated. He had lost that vertical scale in Iraq, where it was all about the individual in a single spot, on a single mission. He was finding it difficult to readjust.

They had only one carry-on bag each and went to the curb where they waited in line for a taxi. They took one to the Hotel Humboldt, where Kealey went to the information desk, selected a flyer for the cable car trip up the mountain, then went to a wheel of armchairs arranged around a table. Kealey sat down to read.

“Aren’t we checking in?” Phair asked, taking the chair to his right.

“No,” Kealey answered without looking up. “We’re being met.”

“On top of the mountain?” Phair asked.

Kealey shook his head.

Phair did not press for further information, nor would there have been time to provide it. A few seconds later someone sat in the chair to Kealey’s left. The newcomer was in his early thirties, with a frowning and intense expression. He took off his sunglasses. That appeared to be a signal of some sort, since Kealey leaned toward him and held out the brochure.

“Have you been here?” Kealey asked.

“Often,” the man replied.

“Mr. Aguirre?” Kealey said.

The other shifted the weight to his right elbow. “Mr. Kealey,” he replied, while looking at the brochure.

Contrary to those complex, non sequitur phrases Phair remembered from spy movies—“The bird has flown the coop,” to which the response might be, “I hear the view from the clouds is intoxicating”—this was apparently the extent of the validating password exchange. With people moving all around them, talking into cell phones or to each other, and music playing from overhead speakers, it would be difficult for anyone to eavesdrop. Phair could barely hear them himself, though he did not lean over to join in their discussion.

“We checked the granddaughter’s house in Alto Hatillo,” the newcomer said, pointing to a photograph as though he were discussing something in the brochure. “An elderly gentleman does live there. We saw him sunning on a porch in the back this morning.”

“Did he seem alert?”

“He was reading a book, eating toast, applying sunscreen.”

“The granddaughter?”

“Carla is a fitness trainer,” Aguirre informed him. “She was home. We have a flyer she left at a local gym. She holds classes four days and three nights a week.”

“Do you have a German interpreter?”

“Marta will be on a two-wheeler down the block but you may not need her. We found a newspaper article about Carla Montilla. She became interested in diet and fitness while studying languages at the Universidad Central de Venezuela—probably to please her father, the career diplomat.”

“Nice job,” Kealey said. “Thanks.”

“I assume this is talk and not take?”

“For now,” Kealey answered.

“We’re prepared for the other,” Aguirre assured him. “There’s a forty-one-foot yacht in the harbor with a CAT 3126 engine. She’ll outrun anything. We have a navy frigate out of Aruba on drug patrol, ready to assist if necessary. Ironic, no?”

Kealey didn’t laugh. “We’ll go over to the house after I use the restroom,” he said. “Keep watching the place. If I come out walking ahead of my companion—this is Major Phair, by the way,” he said without pointing, “we’re going back tonight.”

Aguirre did not look at Phair, who did not acknowledge him, either. He gathered the man worked for the embassy. He guessed that the reference to “talk or take” meant they were prepared to kidnap Durst, if necessary.

Now this is more like a spy film,
he thought.

Kealey thanked the man again and rose. Phair followed him across the lobby to the public lavatory.

“I’m confused,” Phair said quietly. “Why didn’t this fellow just meet us at the airport?”

“Embassy employees are watched as they go to and from the airport,” Phair said. “I didn’t want any surveillance video of us getting into a car with him. That would have put our faces in a database that is shared around the world.”

The men entered the restroom. They were silent inside. Phair was surprised that Kealey really did have to go. When they left, Aguirre was talking on the house phone. To no one, Phair surmised.

“What if he was followed here?” Phair asked.

“If anyone questions him or me, all I did was ask if he spoke English and if he’d ever been on the cable cars and when they were least crowded,” Kealey said. “He told me a little about the best time to go and how long we should allow.”

“And what if someone
is
watching him, saw us talking, and sees us head in another direction?”

“Our destination could be interpreted as being on the way,” Kealey replied. “That’s why we agreed before we left to select that particular brochure. It’ll all look kosher.”

“One more thing,” Phair asked. “Why couldn’t he have just given you this information on your cell phone? Then we could have gone directly to the house. Less exposure, no?

“Pickpocketing is the number one crime at this particular airport, with over five hundred cell phones lifted in the last year,” Kealey replied. “I didn’t bring it. Too much sensitive data on mine . . . and a new one, with no data, would be suspicious, even to a pickpocket. He might turn it, and me, over to the airport police. We’re accepting the hospitality of someone who would not appreciate our attracting the attention of the police.”

Phair felt as though his skull was going to explode. He didn’t know how Kealey kept all of this straight and how he appeared so unperturbed by it. He forgave the man’s little outbursts even more. He needed a vent or his head would burst, too.

They got into a waiting cab, and Kealey gave the driver the address. They pulled into the early-morning traffic. Phair felt comforted by Kealey’s attention to detail, but he still couldn’t relax and enjoy the new scenery. They were still on a dangerous assignment, and Phair knew from experience that the most deadly bombs were often those hidden underfoot, where they couldn’t be seen, imagined, or planned for.

I
n 1997, a group of Shiite radicals opposed to the rule of Saddam Hussein planned to attack an oil pipeline in Basra, the first of a series of disruptions designed to weaken the tyrant’s finances, his prestige, and ultimately his hold on power. They were being provided with funding and technical assistance by members of the French ecological activists PDT, Protecteurs de la Terre, which opposed the exploitation of natural resources.

James Phair was not yet fluent in any Arab tongues, but he knew enough French from school to understand the intent of the group with which he found himself resting during a trek from Baghdad to Basra. When he came to understand their plans he tried to discourage them, insisting that reprisals would be severe and that violence was not the best way to effect change. He left before their attack, but not before the Mukhabarat
—
Saddam’s secret police—had infiltrated the group and taken pictures of everyone in and around the camp. Most of them were imprisoned over the next few days, and the attacks never occurred. Copies of the photographs were sent to the police of other oil-producing nations in an effort to stem petro-terror as a means of protest and destabilization.

Venezuela’s Dirección de Contrainteligencia Militar received copies of the photographs, which were tagged
Prioridad Una
—Priority One. They were sent to every police station in the country. The nation’s economy was driven by oil, and no effort was spared to protect that resource. In 2007, the photographs became part of a database linked to facial-recognition technology that was deployed at the country’s international airports. The face of everyone who disembarked was scanned at the gate and compared to images in the library. A flagged individual was not apprehended at the airport but followed, in the hope that he or she would lead authorities to any cells operating within the country.

When he landed at Simon Bolivar Airport, James Phair’s face caused a computer alarm to sound. Before he left the airport, a security guard was following him to the street. The number of the taxi he entered was noted, its destination was obtained from the dispatcher, and hotel security was told to watch the man. The plainclothes guard saw him as he was leaving the lobby and watched him get into another taxi, whose destination was obtained in a similar fashion.

Operatives with the Metropolitan Police Force were dispatched to Alto Hatillo to intercept what they presumed was an American undercover plot against their oil. As if to ensure their guilt, the occupants of the taxi had not provided a specific address. They asked to be left off at the end of the street.

While two cars headed for the street, desk officers looked up the records of all the houses on the street. They informed the mobile unit they would have to reconnoiter before taking any action, since there were no likely candidates for anarchy—in fact, quite the opposite. Ricardo Ramirez was a fan of the oil economy; some of his biggest clients were oil tycoons. He had also been known to be opinionated about the decisions of local, national, and international police forces.