This mission to Venezuela emerged as something different than anything she had ever done in her life, exactly the type of thing she wanted to do. Against what she had expected, she was interested. An open mind could be dangerous.
She skipped ahead to a photo section. She scanned through several dozen photos of the village of Barranco Lajoya and its people; smiling faces of barefoot children, a classroom bringing literacy, a medical clinic set up, a joint Episcopal-Methodist-Baptist service in a small church. Kids playing soccer.
There were before-and-after shots of people who had received care from Collins’s medical people. She was impressed. The man was doing good in corners of the world that badly needed benefactors. In return, he asked for nothing.
She waded through a background section on their village culture, then ran smack into an assessment of current-day Venezuela and its government.
The government of Venezuela was headed by President Hugo Chavez. His fanatically anti-American policies didn’t make life any easier for Collins or his missionaries. Collins had had the foresight to send Christian workers with supposedly neutral passports-there were three Canadians, two Hondurans, and one English nurse there at the time that Alex read the dossier-all of whom spoke good-to-native-speaker Spanish. But the activities of foreigners in a village in the jungle aroused the ire and suspicion of paranoid rulers in Caracas.
Chavez, Alex knew, was a former paratrooper who staged an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1992. He was a latter-day blend of the populist Juan Peron and the totalitarian Fidel Castro. Chavez had assumed office of president democratically in 1998 after winning an election in which he ran on a populist platform. Chavez had long been convinced-not necessarily incorrectly and not that he hadn’t brought it on himself-that the United States government had a hand in an unsuccessful coup attempt against him in 2002.
He remained obsessed with the idea that the US wanted to assassinate him. Given the long history of CIA involvement in almost all left-leaning countries in Latin America, there was a real rationale behind his fears. Castro had survived an exploding cigar, a booby-trapped conch shell, and a poisoned milk shake among numerous other “gifts” from the enterprising souls at various workshops in Langley, Virginia.
Further, as Chavez had already survived two attempts on his life, there was possibly something imminent to his assassination fears.
Chavez not only made no secret of his concern, but also paraded it regularly on his highly popular radio talk show, Alo Presidente, which was aimed at his power base, the poor and working-class people of Venezuela. Further, his overt hostility to the US, open admiration for Fidel Castro, close ties with the FARC-las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-guerrillas in neighboring Colombia, and tight control over the huge Venezuelan oil industry, had made him a thorn in Washington’s side.
Alex read carefully. The dossier continued.
Chavez recently seemed to have made overtures of toning down the anti-American rhetoric and making Venezuelan oil more accessible to North America. But he would do this only if the new US administration would cease both its efforts to undermine him and to isolate him from other Latin American countries.
The author of the document wrote: “The United States government is anxious for a shot at a more ready access to Venezuelan oil. We are ready to reconcile with him.”
Yet next Alex ran into a set of political contradictions. While a US-Venezuelan rapprochement was in the offing, it still appeared that there were powers attempting to run the Indians off their land. Considering the mood of the two governments, who could have been behind that?
Chavez? Washington?
The international petroleum cartels?
Business interests would not have wanted to antagonize either government, and the local Indians didn’t seem to have anything worth taking. They had no other tribes in the area that they were at war with, and there were no guerrilla activities in the area.
Applying what she knew about the area, the land, the political climate, and the geography, it was unlikely that there was any “spill over” activity from Colombia or Brazil. Was it just the proposition that Christianity was being spread to a native people that had antagonized someone?
Something was missing from the overall picture. As Joseph Collins had described it, it didn’t make sense. She was forty pages into a forty-six page document and increasingly drawn to the assignment. After all, as Collins had suggested, her assignment was to go and observe.
To troubleshoot. To report back and not get involved.
She turned the page to the final section. And then suddenly, almost out of nowhere, she was smacked in the face by what she was reading.
An eerie series of events and associations began to come together.
A visit of the US secretary of state to Caracas was currently being planned for sometime in the following year.
Alex cringed and felt like slamming the file shut right there. The president had not left the United States since the bloody debacle in Kiev. The mission of the US secretary of state in Caracas was a test to see if potentially a US president could make a safe visit to a foreign country. American foreign policy had been so unpopular around the world in the last decade-the residual legacy of one particular US administration-that conventional wisdom suggested that the American president could no longer travel abroad. The catastrophe in Kiev was the event that was viewed as proof of this theory.
Yet despite Kiev, the new administration in Washington was pushing hard to distance itself from its predecessor. What influence did America have around the world if its heads of state couldn’t make state visits? A successful visit by the secretary of state would be a key step toward reestablishing that position, just as new the administrations of Sarkozy in France and Brown in Britain had renewed French and British influence respectively, at least until the new leaders could muddy their own waters.
Alexandra’s old instincts and skills started to kick in, even though she was in a “civilian” role now. To her it was obvious: in Venezuela, a massive security and diplomatic mess would confront the secretary of state.
And then another terrifying discovery presented itself.
As noted, Chavez had long been suspected of having ties to the FARC, the Marxist rebels in Colombia who finance themselves through the cocaine business. But Alex now read a short paper citing that these rebels, through major drug dealers, also had ties to the extensive Ukrainian Mafia. She thought back on how Federov had brokered a deal for a mothballed submarine to go to Colombian narcotics dealers.
She closed the file, shuddered, and wondered if her fears would keep her away from Venezuela. She hated to be intimidated by thinking a task was beyond her. And Mr. Collins was right: she did need to sink her teeth into something new.
And yet, there were two Kiev connections: a state visit and activity by the Ukrainian Mafia. In her line of work, there were no coincidences.
Were there?
She spent several moments in thought, then reached for her cell phone. She called Mr. Collins to confirm the meeting with Sam for eleven the next morning at a plush venue on New York’s Central Park South.
Then she broke a beer out of the refrigerator, kicked back with some music, and phoned Ben in Washington, just to say hi and tell him, in vague terms, what was up and to hear a friendly reassuring voice.
It was only after she hung up, knowing herself as well as she did, that she realized there was yet another reason she had made the call. She was trying to get Kiev off her mind once again.
FIFTY-SEVEN
In Rome, Mimi had been doing excellent work.
Lt. Rizzo wrangled her some extra salary. He set her loose across the universe of cyberspace for hours. She hacked into much of the known information about the Ukrainian Mafia in Italy and even discovered that some of those missing weapons from the US Navy may have been trafficked by a shadowy outfit known as The Caspian Group.
As she was using the money to further her art studies, the dough came in handy. Rizzo used the young
