¿
Quién es?
” one of them asked. Who are you?
She assessed quickly. On their chests they wore nameplates, on their lapels and shoulders, they wore ranks. Militias didn’t do that. On their heads, they wore the floppy hats of regular army units assigned to the mountains.
They were soldiers of the Venezuelan army. The leader was a trim
comandante
named Ramírez, equivalent to a major. His two men appeared to be privates.
The leader held her at gunpoint and one of the others took her knife away. Then they started patting her down, a frisk and a grope at the same time. Across her body, across her breasts, between her legs. She cringed and pushed back. In return, the groper held her arm tightly, shook her and threatened her with worse if she didn’t cooperate.
She refused to answer them.
The indignities continued. One of the men pushed his hand within her T-shirt and continued to explore. She pulled back angrily, throwing an elbow.
“
¡Párense!
” she snapped. Stop! “
Soy norteamericana
,” she said. “I was in the village when it was raided. I fled.”
Ramírez looked her in the eye. The other two studied her up and down.
“¿
Cuál pueblito?
” the comandante asked. What village?
“Barranco Lajoya.”
They looked at each other.
“Barranco Lajoya was destroyed,” he said in Spanish. “There was a massacre.”
She felt her spirits plummet, her heart going with them. Her friends. The missionaries. More than ever she was conscious of the pendant she wore around her neck. But was it doing anything, protecting anyone? Where was God when she needed God?
“How bad was it? The massacre?” she asked.
“If you’re an American, why is your Spanish so good?” Ramírez asked, ignoring the question. “Americans don’t speak Spanish without an accent.”
“My mother was
mexicana
. What happened to the village? I was with the missionaries. How bad was the attack?”
The soldiers relaxed very slightly. “Prove that you’re American,” the leader said.
She reached slowly to the side pocket of her shorts. She pulled out her passport and handed it to them.
One of the younger soldiers took it and gave it to the major. They kept their guns trained on her. She had no chance to run, she knew. She would have been cut down within a few feet if they chose to kill her.
Major Ramírez looked at the passport and looked at her. Then he examined the passport again and stared at Alex’s face. He closed the passport and handed it back to her. He told his private to return her weapons.
“
Venga con nostros
,” the captain said. Come with us. We’re very sorry.
They led her through several thickets, the young soldiers hacking their way with machetes. They came to a path and fell in with other soldiers. Other people from the village had been rounded up too. The sad tragic trek through the forest took half an hour. Then they came to a clearing and then what remained of Barranco Lajoya.
Nothing in her experience could have prepared Alex for what she saw, not even the violence and obscenities from her experience in Ukraine.
There were bodies still lying on the ground, men and women and children, awaiting body bags. The straw roofs of several buildings had been torn off, cement and concrete buildings had been smashed. The raiding party had shown no mercy. Walls were down on almost all buildings, the generator had been smashed into oblivion, and the muddy unpaved streets of the town were strewn with the shattered remnants of the buildings. The village looked as if it had been bombed.
The soldiers led Alex into a small littered clearing behind another hut, and there on the floor were several sheets and canvas coverings. It was a makeshift morgue. There were so many bodies that Alex didn’t think to count them.
Major Ramírez removed his hat and led Alex to a viewing area, which was no different from any other area except it was a small cleared patch of ground.
The
comandante
looked at her with sorrow in his eyes. Then he reached down to one of the sheets.
She braced herself. Ramírez lifted the first of several gray blankets so that she could see. Against her will, against all the training she had received at the FBI Academy, against even the horror of what she had witnessed in Kiev, she gasped and retched.
On the ground were the bullet smashed corpses of the six missionaries who had served in this village, four men and two women. These were the people she had known personally and worked with. Their bodies were caked in blood, their limbs and heads twisted at impossible angles and folded back together.
Some of their faces had been hammered into pulp by the force of the bullets. One woman’s head, the one closest to Alex, had star fractures in both eyes and a lower jaw blown off. One man’s upper torso had been hit by so many bullets that the soldiers had had to tie it closed with rope and canvas.
The executions, she could tell, had taken place at close range and without the slightest sign of mercy. This was the earthly reward that these kind people had received for trying to bring some good to this small tough patch of the world.
Alex stared at the obscenity before her. She wondered: had the invaders come for the missionaries? Or could she have been the ultimate target? But if the raiders had known she was among them, why had she been the only foreigner to defend herself and to have escaped?
Plenty of questions. No answers.
“
Ya está bien
,” she said softly to Ramírez. “
Más que suficiente.
” More than enough. Enough for the moment. Enough for a lifetime.
Ramírez gave a terse signal to his soldiers. They covered the bodies again. Alex turned away and left the room. A few feet away, she sat down on the ground, too shocked to even cry. Insects buzzed around her and the heat was relentless. She no longer cared.
On the morning of the next day, she oversaw the simple funerals of the people of the village. A military chaplain presided. The dead were interred beneath wooden crosses on a mountainside that overlooked the valley. The missionaries who had lived with them were buried with them and, presumably, would remain with them for eternity. How long, Alex wondered, would the ghosts of those slain haunt this place?
That afternoon, Alex watched as Venezuelan Red Cross workers came in and led a long march of survivors down the mountainside to waiting vans. The village was no more. The survivors were to be relocated.
That same evening, Major Ramírez appeared and spoke to her. “I have my further orders,” he said. “You are to leave the country immediately.”
“It’s not like I was planning to stay after what happened,” she said sullenly.
“Your contact will find you in Caracas,” he said.
“What contact?” she demanded.
“I only know my instructions,” he said, “and I’ve just related them to you.” He paused. “And if I were you,” he said, “I would leave quickly, before the government of Venezuela changes its mind.”
That evening before sunset, she returned to La Paragua and flew back to Caracas by army helicopter. Three soldiers accompanied her, obviously under orders, saying nothing, only staring. The personal items she had left at the hotel had been safely stored for her. She retrieved them easily upon her return to Caracas.
The horrors of Barranco Lajoya hung heavily on her. She phoned Joseph Collins in New York with the intention of relating what had happened. But word had already reached him. He inquired only about her safety. She assured him that the Venezuelan army had treated her properly.
They agreed to meet in New York as soon as possible. Then, that evening, she found a Methodist church not far from her hotel and spent time in prayer and meditation—seeking answers and guidance and not finding much of either—until an elderly pastor appeared and closed the doors to the church at midnight.
A
lex walked the few blocks back to her hotel from the church.
The blocks were quiet and shadowy, South American cities being lit at night nowhere as well as North American ones. She had her Beretta with her and examined every shadow as she approached it.
She returned safely to her hotel. But in her room, there was a man waiting, a visitor. She was not altogether shocked to see him. She had almost been expecting his reappearance. In the darkest corners of her mind, things were starting to fall into place, no matter how much she wished to reject the meaning of recent events.
“I wouldn’t get too comfortable here,” the visitor said, standing as she entered her own room. “We have a long trip ahead of us.”
“Go to hell, Michael!” She glared at him and suppressed an even more violent and profane run of obscenities.
“No, really,” Michael Cerny said evenly. “I know what you’ve been through. I know what you’re thinking. But we’re going to iron everything out by the end of the day.”
“What I’m thinking is that there’s a black cloud following me around. And you’re it. I ought to shoot you.”
“That doesn’t sound very Christian to me,” he said, “nor very charitable.”
“Then I ought to shoot you twice,” she said.
“Let’s go,” Cerny said. “We’re on our way to Paris.”
“Not a chance!” she answered.
“You might want to change your mind,” he said. “Don’t you realize what the militia attack on Barranco Lajoya was about?”
“No, I don’t,” she answered. “Mr. Collins sent me there to troubleshoot. To find out what someone had against these people. So why don’t you tell me? Then we’ll both know!”
“The attack on the village had nothing to do with the village itself,” he said. “But it was made to look that way. You honestly don’t understand what they were after, what they were looking for?”
She could see Father Martin being thrown to the ground again. The insistent voice of his murderer as he stood above him.
¿
Dónde, dónde, dónde?
Where, where, where?
What had they been seeking?
“It hasn’t occurred to you?” he asked.
It had. “They were looking for me,” she said.
“You,” said Cerny. “The Ukrainian Mafia sent people looking for you. They wish to kill you or kidnap you and take you back to Ukraine.”
“
What?
”
“Don’t be so surprised. The Ukrainian underworld has a million dollar contract out on your life. They followed you to Venezuela but the people in Barranco Lajoya wouldn’t give you up.”
Still in shock, she asked, “How could they even have known where I was, the Ukrainians?”
Cerny shrugged. “There are all sorts of theories,” he said. “We can discuss them eventually.” He paused. “Did you ever discover why the village was being harassed in the first place?”
“All sorts of theories,” she said quietly. “Local ranchers. People who want to poach the wood from the forests. Venezuelan nationalists who don’t believe the missionaries should “pollute” local culture. The government in Caracas who thinks we’re all a bunch of imperialist agents. Plenty of theories and not one that will hold together. Not yet, anyway.”
“We’re going to New York first,” Cerny said. “You’ll have an evening to talk to Mr. Collins. That would probably be a good idea. Then we’re headed back to Europe.”
“I thought I was finished with the Ukrainians. At least for a few years,” Alex muttered.
She felt a deep surge of fear inside her. That, and a lack of comprehension. What had she been, other than a bystander, one who lost something precious, her fiancé, and might have lost her own life too, if things had gone any differently. “How could they possibly care about me?” she asked.
“That’s what we’d like to know as well. You must have learned something, witnessed something, had access to something in Kiev. All we know is, your life is marked.”
She simmered.
“Anyway, you might want to help us get them before they get you,” he said. “Federov and his one remaining bodyguard. We’re flying Air France to Paris, you and I. Business class if it makes you feel any better.”
“I’m not going anywhere other than back to New York,” she said. “And I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Alex, don’t be foolish,” he said. “By this point, you don’t have much choice.”
This time, as it sank in, she didn’t spare him the expletives.
G
ian Antonio Rizzo was planning a trip as well. He had reassembled everything he had on the two spiked murder investigations, but as far as his bosses in Rome were concerned, he was warning everyone that he was prepared to be as difficult and obtuse as possible.
“Lousy meddlesome Americans!” he complained to anyone who would listen. “They come in and steal your work time after time. When will it end?”
Rizzo’s political distaste for the Americans was beyond discussion. He cursed them profanely whenever he could. He’d gone on and on about it so much that it wasn’t that anyone could question it any more; no one even wanted to hear about it.
Then suddenly life’s random events broke in his favor, reversing a recent trend. Sophie was back from Monte Carlo, contrite as could be, and asking her policeman to forgive her and take her back. The American actor, Billy-O, Sophie now told him, wasn’t much more than a pretty face, wasn’t even that much in private, and as a singer could barely hum a tune. Plus he was a financially askew hophead, she told him, traveling with a least a dozen illegal prescriptions in his medicine kit, including a small packet of cannabis and thousands of dollars sewn into the lining of his luggage. Sophie knew since she’d been in his hotel room for two days and saw everything.
“Why are you even telling me this?” Rizzo grumbled, sounding bored and hurt. “To incite me? To make me jealous?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “So you know how sorry I am. So you know that I made a bad mistake and that you’re a better man than he’ll ever be.”
“I don’t want to know anything about him,” Rizzo said, cutting her off with a wave of his hand. “Nothing would make me dislike Americans more than I already do.”
There was no disputing that part by anyone who had listened to Rizzo over the last several years. But Sophie would not shut up. There might have been something to those rumors that he, Billy-O, danced at the other end of the ballroom, as the English would say. In fact, Sophie had been treated wretchedly in Monte Carlo and said she wouldn’t mind at all if Gian Antonio could pull a few police strings and make life miserable for that Hollywood punk while he was on the continent.
“What can I do?” Rizzo scoffed. “What authority do I have? These Hollywood types have all the money and know all the right people. Who do I know? The minister of justice and he can’t stand me.”
In fact, Rizzo had a good idea that he might want to get out of town, lay low for a short while. He had some other things to attend to, a side business as it were. His bosses told him that he could take a week off if he wished. He wished. He had the time coming and his juice within the Roman police department was diminishing day by day, even with the recently approved sixty-day extension of his duties.
He thought about the whole situation. Sophie. The actor. The minister. What he could use, he decided, was a good reason for being out of town.
So he asked Sophie if she might want to accompany him on a business trip. He would be busy for much of the time. There was some highly confidential stuff in a neighboring European capital. She would need to let him go there for a few days, then join him. He had some work to accomplish, some people to meet. But thereafter they could get reacquainted, let bygones be bygones, and he might even be able to let the memory of that American musical nuisance fade away.
Sophie took the bait. She said yes.
So a trip to Paris for two was on, Rizzo to go ahead first, Sophie to join him in three days. They would relax and get to know each other again. Billy-O had given an entirely new meaning to the term “one hit wonder.”
Rizzo’s peers in the police department in Rome all envied him for so flagrantly going off to patch things up with his lady friend in the middle of the week. Some guys had all the luck, as Rod Stewart might have sung.
Meanwhile, Rizzo made a few phone calls to some people he knew. They would arrange for Billy-O to eventually draw the receipt he deserved.