Conspiracy in Kiev

black duffel bag stuffed with a week’s worth of clothes in the fifth.

A security person watched her uneasily, and she was ready for him to say something. She preempted him. “Why don’t we all just wear transparent plastic raincoats when we travel,” she said. “It would speed things up and make things much easier, wouldn’t it?”

He looked at her and muttered something about regulations. He was about to wave her through when a TSA agent stopped the screening counter.

“We’ll need to search this backpack,” he said to Alex. “Is this yours?

“What’s the problem?” she asked.

Whatever it was, it drew a second TSA person, a supervisor. They opened the bag and pulled the rest of her things off the carrier. How she longed right then to have a Federal ID, her old Treasury Department or FBI identification. But she was as naked and vulnerable as any other American.

The first agent reached in and pulled out a half-finished bottle of Diet 7-Up. He smiled, shrugged, and tossed it into a bin that was already overflowing with other half-dead plastics of liquid.

She smiled back. “Oops. Sorry,” Alex said.

“It happens all day,” the guy said. A job well done, that capture of a 7-Up bottle.

She repacked and pulled her backpack onto her shoulder.

What was the last thought of that song? Thank you, Lord, for thinking of me, but I think I’m doing fine.

Trouble was, Alex wasn’t so sure how her country was doing. Billions spent to inconvenience travelers, and where was the real fight against the real enemies of modern civilization? Just one woman’s opinion as she grabbed her duffel and hooked her backpack onto her left shoulder. She turned toward her gate.

At a newsstand on the way, she bought another drink and a paperback novel in Spanish, one of those Nobel Prize-winning South American works where the women turn into butterflies. Might as well get into the mood.

SIXTY-TWO

A few hours into the flight to Caracas, as the aircraft passed above the Caribbean, the pilot announced that passengers on the right of the plane could see Cuba. Alex glanced out her window, and sure enough, there it was, nestled in the blue water about a hundred miles to the east.

She had never been there, wished she’d be able to visit sometime, and took a long look as her plane passed. It was hard to believe the political issues at play. She felt sorry for the Cuban people, who had been under one oppressive regime or another for more than a century. When would the world again be able to celebrate the classic poetry of Jose Marti or the music of the modern-day Cuban trovador Silvio Rodriguez?

Christian missionaries were not allowed to visit the island, for example, even to bring clothing or medical assistance. The Cuban people deserved better, as did all the people of Central and South America. Having had a mother from Mexico, Alex felt very close to these people. She made a note to include them in her prayers.

The island passed. The jet continued its path southward over the Caribbean. Alex slipped into headphones and dozed. She missed Robert horribly. A wave of sadness remained, but at least she felt she was moving forward, starting to get a grip again on her life. She wondered how Ben was doing as well as her pals at the gym.

Note to self. Work my way back into basketball when and if I get back to Washington. She slipped off into a light nap.

She drifted. She opened her eyes. It had seemed like only a few minutes, but she had fallen asleep for the better part of an hour.

The plane was descending now into Maiquetia, Caracas’s airport. The airport was called that after the village that once stood there, rather than “Simon Bolivar International Airport,” its real name.

The aircraft went into a sharp bank as it angled in from the sea, with mountains on one side. The aisle-seat passenger in Alex’s row was an older woman who gave a nervous glance at her seatmate. She shook her head. “Scary, no?” she asked. She looked to Alex for comfort as well.

Alex smiled.

“And you haven’t flown into La Carlota,” the man in the middle seat said. He spoke with a Spanish accent.

“Where’s La Carlota?” Alex asked.

“The old downtown airport in Caracas. It’s mostly used for general aviation now. Coming in you’re almost kissing the Avila, the mountain range that forms the southern border of Caracas. As a young man I remember coming in there in fog. You felt the pilots were just sensing where the Avila was.”

Alex nodded and shook her head. The aircraft eased into a further descent.

“President Chavez often still flies out of there,” the other passenger said. “Hopefully one day his pilot will get it wrong.”

Moments later, they were on the ground, taxiing to the terminal.

Maiquetia airport was astonishingly modern. Alex retrieved her bags and cleared customs easily. Outside the gates, the steamy Venezuelan heat was waiting for her. She was struck by the contrast with Kiev, where everything had been frozen. The clothing she had worn from New York was already uncomfortably heavy.

She scanned a crowd waiting for arriving passengers. There was a well-dressed man with a sign that had her name on it.

Alex approached him in Spanish. “Buenas tardes. Soy Senorita LaDuca.”

“Mucho gusto,” he answered.

They continued in Spanish. Alex slipped into the flow of it with ease.

“I’m Jose Mardariaga of the Mardariaga limousine service,” he said. “I’ve been sent by Senor Collins to pick you up. Let me take your bags.”

The man took her to a new Lexus with air conditioning that worked. A blessing.

“Is it always this hot this time of year?” she asked, making conversation.

“Down here on the coast, si, claro!” Senor Mardariaga said. “But not in Caracas, which is up high. The Spaniards usually built their colonial capitals in the mountains away from the coast for this reason. For instance in Chile, I’m a Chilean myself, the port is El Paraiso, but the capital of Santiago de Chile is inland, in the mountains.”

“Nice airport.”

“There’s even a TGI Friday’s,” the driver said, as if that was the height of current civilization. Perhaps it was, Alex reflected.

“Chavez’s doing?” she asked.

“Not a bit of it! The project of replacing the old airport terminal predates him.”

Hearing him, Alex thought back to her phone conversation with her friend Don Tomas, just before leaving. He had discussed attitudes toward Hugo Chavez based on social class.

Venezuelan sociologists traditionally divided society into five classes. A, B, C, D, and E. A were the rich, B were those who could have an American middle-class lifestyle, C were people what the Venezuelans called “middle class” but had an American lower-middle-class lifestyle at best. D’s were working class people with very modest income but steady work, and E’s were the people on the bottom.

Seventy percent of Venezuelans were D’s and E’s. They were Chavez’s unconditional supporters. The C’s were torn, but many were anti-Chavez, if for no other reason than the classic desire of their class to seek to distinguish itself from the classes below. The A’s and B’s loathed Chavez. The B’s were in the toughest position, because this was the country they were stuck with. The A’s, the truly wealthy, already had their bolt-holes in Miami and their assets stashed in American and Swiss banks.

Clearly, Alex thought, her driver with his own limousine service was an anti-Chavez C.

The ride to the city went quickly. Alex came out of her daydream as they went through a tunnel, and then on the other side they were on the expressway that ran the length of the long, narrow city. Before her, Alex saw high-rise office buildings and, on some of the hills, obvious condos. But on other hills there were cinderblock shacks piled one on top of the other.

“Estoy curiosa. ?Donde esta Petrare?” Alex asked, remembering Don Tomas’s description of the city. Where’s