firelight.
The solution to the case was simple. The local shopkeepers and vendors had scraped up what little money they had, until they had enough to commission the services of a death squad. A police death squad.
Such arrangements were common, a way for ill-paid lawmen to combine extracurricular profit and justice. They'd taken the contract and come by night to eliminate the gang. Summary executions. No gang, no problem.
Investigation? No such animal — what were the police going to do, investigate themselves?
Martello Paz knelt in the bush, fascinated, watching the entire show. The last body was loaded in the back of a dump truck; the cleanup crew and the cops went away.
The entire experience had been a revelation to young Paz. He felt no resentment toward the executioners who'd wiped out the gang and would have done the same to him if fate hadn't spared him.
He was instead inspired with a profound sense of admiration and envy. Gangs made the world go round. His world, anyway, and that of his fellow slum dwellers, dwellers in one of scores, if not hundreds, of similar districts scattered in and around Caracas and its outlying districts.
The police were just another gang, better armed and more efficient than most.
Young Paz now had a role model: the police officer who'd bossed the death squad. The police, that was where the real power lay.
From that moment on, Paz resolved to become like them. One of them. A policeman.
Fortunately, this ambition did not require in him any notions or moves toward reform. Quite the contrary. An honest policeman in his society was doomed to, if not an early grave, then a miserable existence of poverty and ridicule.
So it began.
Paz surfaced in another part of Caracas, one far enough away from his old haunts to insulate him against comebacks for his former misdeeds. Crime remained his means of livelihood. He certainly wasn't going to go to work for a living, he'd starve to death!
He quickly attached himself to a drug gang. He was a prize acquisition, a youngster who was already a stone killer. Not for him the menial tasks of gofer and runner; he held the prestige of the life taker, mixed with the novelty of his youth. That tender age proved invaluable when it came to assassinating rival gang members, none of whom imagined that the short, squat, unattractive kid — often in the guise of shoeshine boy, newspaper vendor, or errand boy — would empty a revolver into their faces to achieve their deaths.
At the same time, he was learning all he could about the interface between the gangs and the law, and began playing a dangerous double game. He became a police informant, fingering and setting up those gangs and independent operators who'd failed to pay off the police for the privilege of operating. Building solid contacts.
The gang bosses pushed the idea of Paz joining the cops as their inside man, not knowing that he'd manipulated them toward this very end. The same attributes of fearlessness, amorality, and ultraviolence served him as well in the ranks of the police force as they had in the criminal gangs.
Inevitably, inexorably, he followed an irresistible rise to the top of the city police establishment, then the regional, and finally the national police establishment.
After three decades, Martello Paz was simultaneously at the top of the secret police corps and the Venezuelan drug cartels.
It was at this point that Colonel Hugo Chavez began his own rise to supreme power. Chavez came out of the Army ranks, a fiery speechmaker and demagogic radical.
At first he'd masked his true beliefs behind a facade of populism, appealing to the masses by promising them that they'd get their rightful share and more of the riches that had been stolen from them by the oligarchy and its American capitalist masters.
Paz sensed in Chavez a kindred spirit. Paz was a bandit in a police uniform; Chavez was a bandit in Army fatigues. Paz operated behind the scenes to consolidate his power; Chavez operated at center stage, brandishing a bold, fiery rhetoric of 'economic justice for the masses' and 'due process of law.' Chavez was using a front of socialist ideology to steal a country. He and Paz were a natural fit.
Chavez was a strongman; the Venezuelan oligarchy was weak. The ruling class had long ago lost the taste for blood so necessary to secure and maintain absolute power.
They were shortsighted, too. They'd bought the generals but not the rest of the Army. The generals were too stupid and greedy to share the wealth, alienating the colonels and all other ranks down. Chavez had the Army and the masses.
Paz threw in with Chavez early, putting his formidable police apparatus to work for the promising presidential candidate. Anything from providing police presence for crowd control and security at Chavez political rallies; supplying intelligence on all the dirty secrets of the opposition — vital blackmail material to make the most recalcitrant foes fall in line; guarding the person of the candidate; harassing dissidents and political foes; breaking up opposition efforts, smashing their printing presses — and their heads, if they failed to get the message.
Paz's position at the top of the national police hierarchy proved invaluable in collecting massive campaign fund 'donations' from gang bosses and drug lords. As did his clout with the caudillos, the powerful political bosses in every city, town and village, with their ability to get out the vote (not once, but often), facilitated by their election day workers, poll watchers, vote thieves, and ballot box staffers.
No less important was the use of the caudillos' goon squads, comprising thugs, enforcers, and gunmen. The really important political murders were the province of Colonel Paz himself. He oversaw the murder of intractable political foes, including clerics, labor bosses, newspaper owners, editors and reporters, political dissidents, and others whose timely removal was judged necessary for the success of Chavez's political campaign.
The other side did it, too; unlike previous elections, though, this time out they lacked the inestimable services of Martello Paz, who did it better.
Chavez was elected president, and duly appointed Paz as the head of his secret police apparatus. Soon after election, Chavez was seized by a rebel cadre of high-ranking Army officers in a coup attempt. Paz was unable to forestall the seizure, but his behind-the-scenes efforts, including the taking of key hostages from among the plot's oligarchic sponsors, was instrumental in Chavez's quick release and triumphant return to office.
Most recently, Paz's services had won for him the coveted post of top military attache to the Venezuelan Consulate in New Orleans. A post that also placed him at the head of Caracas's espionage efforts in the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Now, sitting in the safe house of the Jiffy Pump gas station, cradling an assembled and fully loaded Kalash across his knees, Paz lit up a cigar. He puffed away, aromatic smoke clouds wreathing his head, the orange-colored tip of the cigar flashing like an emergency beacon.
President Chavez was really high on his alliance with communist Cuba. He idolized Castro for having kept his Marxist-Leninist regime a going concern for a half century, despite the intractable hostility and diabolical machinations of the Norte Americano arch-capitalists. He saw himself as the new Fidel; no, beyond that, the new Bolivar, near-future liberator of all Latin America.
The result of their newfound entente was that Cuba got much-needed oil from Venezuela; Venezuela got much-needed intelligence from Cuba. Colonel Paz's key Cuban contact and ally in the United States was the formidable, elusive General Beltran himself.
The cigar that Paz now smoked was one from a humidor with which Beltran had gifted him, claiming that their quality was beyond that even of Cuba's superb Monte Cristo variety: 'These are from a blend specially made for Fidel himself!'
Yet there was trouble in the workers' paradise, the new Latin American Socialist Internationale. For Beltran was the one who'd tried to have Paz hit.
Beltran had inadvertently betrayed his authorship of the attempt by using the female shooter, an exotic, deep-cover operative whom Paz knew without doubt was one of Beltran's creatures. Beltran thought his association with her was a closely held secret, but Paz was not without confidential sources himself and had undoubted proof of the connection. The Cuban wasn't the only spymaster in the game; Paz had been playing, too.
Whether or not Beltran had been acting on his own or following orders from Havana was a question purely academic. In either case, the answer was the same: Beltran must die.
Still, in all honesty, Paz had to admit that it really was a superior brand of cigar. He promised himself he'd
