SEAL Team Six Hunt the Falcon(38)

Neto explained, “We have an office not far from where you are. Go to Las Mercedes Avenue and turn right. You’ll see a tall Banco Popular building halfway down the street. Go up to the ninth floor and look for Global Partners Investments.”

“What time?” Crocker asked.

“ASAP. We’re here now.”

“You want me to come alone?” Crocker asked.

“Let me check,” Neto said, then put the phone on hold.

Crocker and his men had returned shortly after 0400, napped, and had ordered breakfast from room service. Now the two hours they had spent after they had left the slum of Petare replayed in his head, a movie of Caracas side streets, back alleys, byways and highways. Neto and Sanchez had made sure to shake off any SEBIN or Venezuelan police tails before dropping them off at their hotel.

Neto’s deep voice came back on the line. “Bring your deputy.”

“Mancini and I will be there in ten.”

Crocker didn’t have time to change his clothes or shave. He limped down Avenida Principal de las Mercedes in his dirty black pants and T-shirt, with Mancini by his side talking about the recent announcement that President Chávez had slipped into a coma.

“Any chance he’ll recover?” Crocker asked, scanning the street for plainclothes police and seeing men in brown uniforms throwing plastic bags of garbage into a large green truck.

“Unlikely,” Mancini answered. “Apparently he’s got stage-four colon cancer. He had a baseball-sized tumor removed several years ago, along with chemotherapy. During the recent election campaign he claimed he was cancer free, which turned out to be a lie.”

Another kind of cancer—lung cancer—had afflicted Crocker’s mother. But before it had taken her, she had died in a freak accident. Crocker’s sister hypothesized that maybe the accident was a blessing, which angered Crocker at the time. But now, as he pushed through the revolving doors of the modern Banco Popular building, he thought maybe his sister had been right.

He and Mancini rode up in the elevator with a group of men in business suits, then walked down the carpeted hall to the door at the end of the corridor. Crocker hit the buzzer on the call box and waited.

“Quién es?”

“It’s Tom Mansfield and his associate from Balzac Expeditions.”

A Hispanic woman in a tight black skirt and heels led them to a waiting room with a view of the city bathed in yellow sunlight. A tired-looking Ernesto Navarro shuffled in holding a stack of papers.

“This way, gentlemen,” he said.

They entered a generic conference room. The shades were pulled over the windows. Two men sat at the table, which was crowded with papers and coffee cups.

The thinner of the two looked up and said, “Gentlemen, my name is Chase Rappaport. I’m the chief of station here.” He pointed to a swarthier, thicker-built man seated across from him. “This is my deputy, Hal Melkasian.”

Melkasian looked over his shoulder at the SEALs. “Welcome.”

“Which one of you two is Warrant Officer Crocker?” Rappaport asked. He had a sharp, mean face and piercing blue eyes.

“That’s me.”

“Take a seat. Neto here will pour you some coffee. Melky and I, along with a number of analysts back at Langley, have been reviewing the packet of documents you recovered last night.”

“Yeah?” Crocker said, sipping the bitter coffee and running a hand through his thinning, close-cropped hair. “What’d you find?”

Rappaport pushed his chair back, placed his shoes on the edge of the table, then glanced at some papers in his lap. “You hear about the president’s condition?”

“Critical, right? My teammate and I were just talking about that,” Crocker said with a nod.

“It might seem unrelated, but I can assure you that it underlies everything we’re dealing with here,” Rappaport said ominously.

Crocker shifted his weight in the leather-covered swivel chair and fought off the feeling of fatigue. “I’m not sure what that means.”

Rappaport turned his Doberman pinscher–shaped face toward him. “It means that this program will be accelerated,” he intoned, pointing to the documents on his lap. “When Chávez dies, Maduro will take over. They’ll hold a special election, but the vote will be rigged. Maduro isn’t Chávez. He has none of his charisma. He’s a leftist labor organizer who never finished high school, loves Led Zeppelin, and worships a dead guru named Sai Baba. So nobody knows how long before the opposition rises and kicks his ass out.”

“What program are you referring to?” Crocker asked.

“The Iranian-Venezuelan program. Unit 5000. What did you think? Now that we know—”