He was in trouble with Lady Dora for something, so Alex headed upstairs with the file in her hand and closed her door on the argument that ensued. It was at this moment that she made a note to phone Ben later that evening, just to vent. Calls between them were becoming more frequent. Alex appreciated the friendship more with each passing week.

  That evening, Alex settled into this cozy atmosphere on East Twenty-first Street. She spread out some yogurt and fruit on the small dining table, turned it into her evening meal, and then repaired to the sofa in the living room to read.

  Alex embarked upon her reading at a few minutes past eight in the evening.

  For years, as the file explained in detail, Collins had been quietly financing the missionaries at a village named Barranco Lajoya in a mountainous region of southeastern Venezuela. The missionaries rotated in and out. There were several teams of them who worked in shifts ranging from six months to two years.

  They had been living among a large tribe of primitive indigenous people, learning their language so that they could translate the Bible into it and bring the Christian faith to them. Some of the missionaries doing this work lived with the Indians for at least a year or two in order to learn the language and create an alphabet for it, and then translate the Bible. Some of them brought their families. Their children grew up in these remote villages. There had been considerable early success, first bringing literacy itself to these people, then bringing the Christian faith. And yet, after considerable early success, there then appeared to be an effort to destroy the missionaries’ work and force them to leave the country.

  A school built by the missionaries and the villagers had caught fire one night. Livestock had disappeared. The local streams, tributaries of the Rio Xycapo, had been polluted by industrial waste from a higher elevation. Yet there was no industry at higher elevations, and no known settlements. That meant that the waste had been brought in and dumped.

  But why? The villagers had nothing that anyone would want. They were simple people who had been self-sufficient for centuries. Why should anything change now? The people were so remote that who could care enough about them to victimize them?

  Perhaps, conjectured the writer of this document, the interest of outsiders was enough by itself to put the small tribe on someone’s list of enemies.

  Alex began making notes in the margins, observations and questions to ask Mr. Collins when she reported back to him. She started to feel a pull toward these people. It was as if this was the path now intended for her. 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 Chávez. 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.

  Chávez, Alex knew, was a former paratrooper who staged an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1992. He was a latter-day blend of the populist Juan Perón and the totalitarian Fidel Castro. Chávez had assumed office of president democratically in 1998 after winning an election in which he ran on a populist platform. Chávez 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 Chávez had already survived two attempts on his life, there was possibly something imminent to his assassination fears.

  Chávez not only made no secret of his concern, but also paraded it regularly on his highly popular radio talk show, Aló 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.

  Chávez 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?

  Chávez? 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, Chávez 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.

  Chapter LVII

  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 woman’s information to focus on any of The Caspian Group’s activities in Rome, including that of its leader and his bodyguards. Rizzo worked some theories: who was in Rome when the murders were committed? Who might have a grievance against the two couples who had been murdered? Using sources of the Roman police department, and some darker sources of his own that he had on the side, he went around to the people who had known the musician and his girlfriend.

  He showed surveillance pictures. He focused on one of Federov’s bodyguards, a man known only as Anatoli.

  Then, with an eye toward cyberspace, he went back to Mimi. He set her to work researching Anatoli. Soon she had his cell phone number and dropped a tap on it.

  One night after work, Rizzo asked Mimi if she could accompany him for a light dinner. He said the suggestion was purely professional, there was more work she could do, and it would be at a much higher salary. Rizzo also explained that he had someone he wanted her to meet, a guest from out of town.

  She shrugged her shoulders and said, “Why not?”

  An hour later, Mimi found herself with Lt. Rizzo at a dressy trat-toria a few blocks from the government buildings and popular among foreigners. Dressed in her usual colorful blouse and micro-miniskirt, she felt herself somewhat out of place among all the expensive suits and designer clothes. She was the youngest female in the place. But she quickly got used to the attention she drew and enjoyed it.

  She and Rizzo were met there by a man to whom Rizzo showed great deference, but whom Rizzo didn’t introduce by name. He spoke Italian fluently but with a trace of an accent that she couldn’t place. And there was something ominous about him.

  Mimi was nobody’s fool, so she studied the man very carefully as they engaged in conversation. She guessed that he and Rizzo underestimated her powers of everyday perception. The man’s shoes looked American and he wore one of those rings—she thought it was a high school or college thing—that Americans wore. He had a wedding band too. But Rizzo had always been so vocally anti-American. It didn’t make sense to her. So she tried something.

  “You know,” she said in English, “we could speak English if you like. My mother is American. I speak English well.”

  The stranger grinned. “Grazie, pero, non,” he said, remaining in Italian. Thank you but, no. We are in Rome, he explained, so we will speak as the Romans do.

  She didn’t press the point. Rizzo’s friend moved quickly to a proposition he had for her, a one-time task. A special assignment for which she would be well compensated in cash. Lots of cash.

  Anatoli was back in Rome, they said, and would be for another few days. They showed her a picture of him. He was a sturdy-looking Russian Ukrainian with dirty blond hair.

  “Handsome, no?” Rizzo asked.

  Mimi nodded. “You want me to seduce him?” she asked, more a routine inquiry than a opportunity to volunteer.

  No, they said quickly, it wasn’t exactly like that. It was more like a game of pin the tail on the donkey.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  The man with no name showed Mimi a small devise in a plastic case. It looked like a small needle with a flat head like a tack. They said they knew where Anatoli liked to go to party in Rome. They had a well-armed young man who would accompany her that night, but could she somehow see how close she could get to Anatoli … and maybe stick the needle into his clothing somewhere.

  She laughed.

  “So it’s a transmitting device, right?” She laughed with great enthusiasm.

  The two men looked at each other, then back to Mimi.

  “Possibly,” said Rizzo.

  “How am I supposed to get close enough to pin the device on him?” she asked.

  “You’re a pretty young woman, no?” Rizzo asked, stating the obvious. “I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

  She thought about it. “I don’t know,” she began.

  She was still thinking about it when they piled five hundred Euros on the table. “That’s just for trying,” Rizzo said. “There’s another five hundred if you’re successful.”

  “This Anatoli,” she said. “He killed someone, yes?”

  They didn’t say no.

  “Why don’t you just arrest him?” she asked.

  “Lack of evidence,” Rizzo answered swiftly. “Life is like that, Mimi. Sometimes what we know to be true is not something that we can prove to be true. Equally, sometimes what is true isn’t and what isn’t true, in reality, is.” Mimi blinked. Rizzo exited his philosophical riff almost more confused than when he had entered it, unless he wasn’t. He paused and smiled at his own verbal gymnastics as his guest looked at him strangely. “Plus,” he continued, “Anatoli and his friends are very bad men. There are other ways to take care of them other than a time-consuming and frustrating adherence to the letter of the law.”

  “What sort of ‘other ways’?” she asked.

  “Many other ways,” Rizzo said.

  Rizzo’s friend reached into his jacket and piled another three hundred Euros on the table.

  “And that’s just for listening,” he said. “Okay, Mimi?”

  She smiled. “I’m all ears,” she said, picking up the money and pocketing it. “This sounds like a blast!”

  Chapter LVIII

  Alex liked to walk in New York, watching the neighborhoods change as she moved briskly at a pace with Manhattan. She found herself at Central Park South within half an hour of leaving her apartment. Sam Deal was seated outside on a terrace at the Café de la Paix.

  Alex recognized Sam from a description Mr. Collins had given. He was a tall, thick man, gray-haired, pale-faced, with a neat moustache. He wore violet-hued wraparound sunglasses that looked far too young for him. The shades were more Brad Pitt than Tom Clancy, and Sam was definitely more of the latter than the former.

  Alex studied Sam as she approached. He was glancing at his watch. Then he turned toward her, and his eyes settled, wandering up and down. His glasses were low across a nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. His hands were on the table, unmoving, not far from a drink and a pack of smokes. A copy of the New York Daily News was open in front of him, and Sam appeared to have been immersed in the sports section, soaking up the previous evening’s boxing at Sunnyside Garden, a card of Irish and Italians against Puerto Ricans and Mexicans.

  She approached him. “I’m Alex LaDuca.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Good. Great.”

  Sam stood. He extended a big raw hand and shook hers. “I’m Sam Deal,” he said. “Call me Sam. That’s what my parents called me.”

  Alex sat down and ordered a sparkling water. From the get-go, as she sipped her drink, she didn’t like Sam. He looked and sounded like the kind of guy who, as a kid, would have stolen other kids’ lunch money in third grade.

  “So you’re going to South America, huh? For Mr. Collins?” he asked at length.

  “That’s right. Venezuela. If I take the assignment.”

  “What did you say your name was?”

 

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