Authors: Ross Sidor
There were
almost five thousand airports in the US, serving 24,000 commercial flights
carrying nearly two million passengers on a given day, and CIA had no idea
where the Viper intended to strike or how many men or cells she commanded.
Increased
security measures at and around airports offered no guarantees, because the
Viper did not need to be on airport premises to fire SA-24. An elevated space
like a rooftop or a nearby open area like a parking lot or field would suffice,
anyplace within SA-24’s four mile range that offered clear line of sight to the
planes.
But HUMINT
wasn’t something at which CIA’s Bogotá station excelled.
With terrorism,
the Middle East, Africa, Southwest Asia, and new flashpoints in Eastern Europe
demanding America’s attention, CIA had removed many operations officers from politically
stable South America. In Colombia, CIA relied almost entirely on DEA and their
Colombian allies for human source intelligence. The fact that in this part of
the world, most HUMINT sources were drug smugglers, paramilitary gangbangers,
or corrupt cops made the CIA particularly uncomfortable with old fashioned
spying.
Avery couldn’t
completely hold it against Rangel, though. He’d probably play it safe too, if
he had a wife to support, kids to put through a college, and a mortgage to pay,
while the Seventh Floor and congress micromanaged every move he made and Department
of Justice lawyers issued subpoenas to his colleagues.
“Look, Avery,”
Rangel said. “Plain and simple: I’m running the Colombian side of this
operation. If and when I need a trigger pulled, or someone to sit in the jungle
for two days, then I’ll turn to your expertise. Are we clear?”
Avery started to
respond through gritted teeth, but Culler saw the expression on Avery’s face,
knew where this was headed, and intervened.
“So what does
the Bunker have as far actionable intelligence, Vince? Avery’s not totally
wrong. You’ve gotta give us something to work with here. Any lead at all we can
run down.”
As if on cue,
Abigail Benning called out.
Rangel smiled
smugly. “Well, let’s find out.”
They made their
way back over to the NSA analyst’s station, where they were joined by Daniel.
“What’s the good
word, Abby?” Rangel asked.
“Like I said,
I’ve been searching the databases. Most of the names associated with the Viper
belong to dead people. Then there’s a few who have long since completely
dropped off the radar and are simply beyond reach; like Carlo Ibarra, a Spanish
fugitive. He’s known to be a close confidant of Arianna Moreno, but there’s
been no sighting of him in over two years. Now, I realize this isn’t exactly
cause for optimism, however there is one known Viper operative, Cesar Rivero,
presently incarcerated by the Colombian government at Bellavista Prison.”
“Rivero,” Rangel
scoffed. “I know that name.”
“Why hasn’t anyone
mentioned this guy before?” Avery directed this question to Daniel. “We could
have been on him four days ago.”
“Well, you see,
there’s a catch,” Benning replied. “ANIC has Rivero categorized as an
unreliable source that generated unproductive leads, misinformation, and
outright fabrications.”
“The bottom line
is Rivero’s a dead end,” Rangel said. “A former member of the Medellin cartel’s
terrorist cell and a known associate of Aarón Moreno. He was arrested—what was
it, Daniel, over a year ago?—in connection with the bombing of that courthouse
in Medellin.”
“Correct,”
Daniel said. “Rivero was a member of the support cell responsible for construction
and placement of the bomb. Communication intercepts indicated this was a Viper
operation, though the captured members of the cell, including Rivero, claimed
ignorance of her involvement.”
“Still sounds like
a possible lead,” Avery said, “so why are we just discussing this now?”
“You think we
don’t know how to do our job, Avery?” Rangel said. “Cesar Rivero is completely
worthless as an intelligence source, and I think even Daniel will back me up on
that.”
“Indeed,” the
Colombian said. “Our best interrogators, with assistance from our Israeli and
British partners, spent several months with him, employing physical and
psychological stress techniques and enhanced interrogation methods. He never
uttered a word about the Viper, and claimed to have never even spoken with her.”
“Even his original
interrogators became doubtful,” Rangel added. “The Medellin courthouse operation
was highly compartmentalized, and it’s possible that Rivero had no idea the
bomb he prepared was in fact for the Viper. We can’t even establish that he ever
had direct contact with her. Like I said, it’s a dead end.”
“Then you
obviously haven’t tried everything. Maybe we need to push Rivero harder,” Avery
suggested.
“My agency is
well versed in breaking terrorists, and we pushed Rivero hard, by any
definition of the word, using all legal means at our disposal,” Daniel said,
choosing his words carefully. “I will be blunt, to give you an idea of the
interrogation tactics we utilized. Rivero was specifically mentioned in an
Amnesty International report concerning my government’s treatment of prisoners.
That same report was subsequently cited by some of your legislators and
diplomats as reason to cut off military and security aid to my country.”
“Amnesty International
isn’t here, and I’m not telling congress shit,” Avery said. “I’m also confident
we can get Rivero to talk.”
But Rangel shook
his head. “Forget about Rivero. Daniel’s people can do what they want with him,
but I’m not about to become complicit in torturing prisoners in Latin America.
That’s the last thing the Agency needs right now. Give it a couple days, and
I’m confident the Bunker will pull in something worthwhile.”
“We might not
have a couple days,” Avery persisted. “We’ve already lost one plane. And
sitting around hoping the Viper makes a phone call or that some soldier in Peru
spots her isn’t going to get us anywhere.” He paused. “Fine, if we can’t find
the Viper, let’s go after her supplier.”
Rangel frowned.
“What are you talking about?”
“The details are
classified,” Culler answered before Avery could say anything. “But we have reason
to believe Iran is FARC’s source for SA-24. Or at least the middleman appears
to be an Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer covered as a diplomat in
Caracas.”
“He might also
be our best link to the Viper at the moment,” Avery said.
“Completely out
of the question,” Rangel exclaimed in disbelief. “You’re just full of brilliant
ideas, Avery, aren’t you? Let me be clear. We’re not torturing, and we are
not
making a move against an accredited Iranian diplomat on Venezuelan soil. Langley
will never authorize it. They had enough of your bullshit after Panama City.”
He paused to stare down Avery, trying to intimidate him, and failing. “I know
all about Panama. The station chief there is a good friend of mine, and they’re
still trying to identify that mysterious American shooter down there. Asked me if
I knew anything about it.”
Avery didn’t
even blink. “Good luck with that, Rangel. I’ve been at Palanquero the past two
weeks, and I’m not sure I see any relevance here to what happened in Panama.
But I do know that Vahid Kashani isn’t a diplomat. The Iranians were the
biggest troublemaker in Iraq, pulling shit like this all the time, and we called
them out on it. POTUS designated the Qods Force a terrorist organization, and
gave us free reign to go after them.”
“Forget it. This
isn’t Iraq, and we have a different commander-in-chief now. You’re talking
about a flagrant act of war against two sovereign states.”
Avery understood,
and wasn’t surprised. The White House needed to maintain good terms with Tehran
if the president was going to achieve a “deal” on the nuclear issue before he
left office.
“Benning’s
people will continue monitoring FARC chatter and follow the intelligence flow
coming in from across the country. The second we get something actionable, we
will act on it. I don’t know what else you expect.” Rangel sighed. “And I need
to get some sleep. I’ve been here way too goddamned long.”
He started to
walk away, and then stopped to add, “Oh, and Culler? You better keep this
fucking guy in line.”
He shot Avery
one last look before heading for the door.
When he was
gone, Culler turned to Avery and said, “You’ve been here less than thirty minutes,
and you’ve already managed to piss off the chief of station.”
“Yeah, well, I told
you earlier that you shouldn’t have brought me here,” Avery said. “What was
that bullshit about Panama?”
“Hey, it didn’t
come from me,” Culler said, “and Rangel never mentioned anything about it to
me. Don’t worry. His bark is worse than his bite.”
Avery wasn’t
worried about it. He knew Rangel couldn’t do shit. If he did, it would just
create a public scandal after CIA’s internal Office of Security and General
Counsel, the Justice Department, and congress started looking into the CIA’s
ops in Colombia and Panama, and the invariable leaks were made to the media, and
that would immediately put Rangel in the Seventh Floor’s crosshairs for
disturbing the waters. Innocent people died in Panama City. Nobody on the
Seventh Floor wanted word of CIA involvement getting out.
“Hey, Daniel,”
Avery said. “Think you can arrange a meeting with Rivero?”
“What are you
planning?” Culler asked Avery before the Colombian could answer.
“You probably
shouldn’t get involved, Matt, for your own good. So what do you think Daniel?
Can we get this guy talking?”
“Honestly, there
might be little my people can do, but I know someone else who may. It will not
be easy. It all depends on how far you are prepared to go.”
Avery didn’t
hesitate. “As far as it takes.”
One of the most brutal and violent
places in Colombia is Bellavista Prison, known as Hell’s Waiting Room, located
in the heart of Medellin. One hundred miles north of Bogotá, Bellavista consists
of seven housing units, each made of dilapidated red brick painted blue and
white, each comprising three floors of four hallways. The average sentence here
is thirty years.
Gun violence is common inside the prison, second only to
stabbings, with an average of fifteen murders a day. Prisoners kill each other
over petty disputes. Rival gangs are perpetually at each other’s throats. There
are sporadic prisoner revolts and frequent attacks against the guards, who rely
on guns, beatings, and the occasional extrajudicial execution to enforce
control over the populace. In the courtyard, it was once common for inmates to
play soccer with severed heads.
Originally built to accommodate 1,500 inmates, Bellavista
now houses well over 5,000. To accommodate the perpetual inflow of terrorists,
murderers, rapists, drug traffickers, and gang members, many of the already small
cells are subdivided to accommodate two or three more inmates. Most prisoners
simply sleep on the floor in the hallways or stairwells, which they share with
hundreds of other prisoners.
Prisoners with money are able to “rent” private cells.
This was an enormous luxury for Cesar Rivero, even if he did have to share
three toilets with over two hundred other men. Most days, Rivero pissed in the
corner of his cell. When he wanted to shit, he used cigarettes to buy access to
a toilet from whatever gang was in power.
He left the safety of his cell only when absolutely
necessary. He had no shortage of enemies within the prison, and there had
already been two attempts on his life since his incarceration began. Even
inside prison walls, members of the right wing vigilante groups and death
squads preyed on members of FARC and the cartels.
Cesar Rivero started out as a gunman for the Medellin
drug cartel, doing security at the cartel’s cocaine processing plants in the
jungle and eliminating the cartel’s enemies. Later, he was assigned to help
FARC establish urban terrorist cells in the city.
The cartel wanted a courthouse taken out, and FARC
assigned its best operative. Knowing he was a trusted contact of her brother,
Arianna Moreno sought Rivero out personally for the operation. Rivero provided
the logistical support and helped gather the necessary materials for the construction
of a truck bomb.
The Viper could penetrate the highest levels of
security and deliver and place the bomb, but she lacked the scientific and
technical skills necessary to engineer the weapon. Fortunately, bomb making was
something at which Rivero’s cousin was quite proficiently skilled. He’d
assembled dozens of sophisticated car bombs for the cartel and the M-19
terrorist group.
The bomb demolished the courthouse, killing over a
hundred people, and wounding over twice that number, one of the deadliest
terrorist attacks in Colombia’s history.
Unlike previous Viper hits, mistakes were made, the
result of carelessness.
Rivero’s cousin accidently cut his finger preparing
the bomb. He’d cleaned up the blood, but microscopic bits of DNA remained and
were later recovered and analyzed by the FBI forensics team sent to Medellin to
assist the Colombians in their investigation in the aftermath of the explosion.
Rivero’s cousin was a man already known to the National Police and ANIC, and
the Colombians quickly identified, arrested, and tortured him, and were
subsequently led to Cesar Rivero.
Rivero was sentenced three weeks later and hadn’t
stepped foot outside of Bellavista’s high walls since. He was the only member
of the cell to have seen or spoken with Arianna Moreno. The other two men,
Rivero’s cousin included, never even knew of her involvement. But Colombian
army SIGINT intercepts from a FARC base camp revealed the Viper’s involvement.
So ANIC tortured the three cell members.
Rivero successfully held out, to the point where his
interrogators wondered if he truly knew nothing of the Viper’s involvement. He held
out because he knew that whatever pain ANIC inflicted on him was nothing
compared to what the cartel or the Viper would do to him, even here.
The working of the lock, followed by the sound of
rusted, degraded hinges, intruded upon Rivero’s dreams, jarring him from his sleep.
He’d become acclimated to the regular nightly sounds of the prison, but his
senses reacted at once to this unusual disturbance in his external environment,
a vital survival mechanism here.
His eyes snapped open, staring into the darkness, and
he blinked several times to acclimate his vision.
The door swung open and light from the hallway spilled
over the floor of his cell.
Rivero bolted upright on his cot as human-shaped
wraiths poured silently into his cell.
A bright, white beam of light flashed in his face. Behind
the light, when he raised a hand to his brow and averted his gaze, he discerned
solid black figures, their bulky vests, gloves, and balaclava facemasks
rendering them featureless and indistinguishable.
Two of them entered Rivero’s five-by-five foot cell,
while a third figure filled the space of the open doorframe, partially blocking
the exterior light. They advanced on Rivero, towered over him, and screamed
orders and obscenities at him in Spanish, while the flashlight shined in his
face.
One of the intruders grabbed onto Rivero by his
undershirt and effortlessly hauled him out of his cot, slammed him face first
against the cement wall, landed a punch to his kidney, pushed him down onto his
knees, and forced him onto his face.
Blood dripped from his nose and from a gash in his
forehead. Sweat dripped down his face, soaked his shirt, and his heart pounded
against the inside of his chest. Laying face down on the floor, the ammonia
stench of urine reached his nostrils.
Rivero rolled over and sat up on the floor. His head
hurt, and the room spun around him.
They kicked him again, barraged him with their heavy, steel-capped
boots, and didn’t let up. He cried out and tried to cover himself with his arms,
but then the kicks came from another direction. He curled into a ball in the
corner of the cell, and the boots battered the small of his back and his spine.
Rivero was surprised at the effect the pain had on
him.
Before, he’d grown accustomed to the savagery and
brutality as a facet of daily life. Once the fuckers from ANIC, or their
right-wing proxy agents, tore out your fingernails and put burning cigarettes
out on your body, then poured salt into the open wounds, and attached
electrodes to your balls, there was no further pain they could possibly inflict
on you. You had been through the worst, knew what to expect, and could mentally
prepare yourself for the next torture session.
But after a five month reprieve, the body quickly grew
complacent and comfortable, and it was like starting over again. Rivero cowered,
flinched, and cried out. The cracked ribs and the battered liver and kidney came
as an unexpected shock to the system. Stress signals flashed throughout his
nervous system.
One of the attackers commented, in Spanish, that they
needed to get moving and shouldn’t stand around here too long. The kicking let
up, with Rivero taking one last blow hard against his ribs before he was hauled
onto his feet, and, barely able to find balance, was pushed out of his cell.
In the dimly lit corridor, there were two more men
dressed like the others and cradling submachine guns with pistols holstered at
their sides. Their uniforms lacked unit patches, insignia, or any other
identifier. Armored prison guards were positioned throughout the corridor to
keep the other prisoners at bay. Through the slits in their facemasks, Rivero
saw their eyes, dark and penetrating, contemptuous of him, and one of them
asked Rivero what he was looking at.
One of them punched Rivero in the gut. As he doubled
over and gasped for air, trying not to vomit, a black sack slipped over his
head and the drawstring tightened around his neck and was tied. His arms were
tugged behind his back, and plastic cuff-ties snapped around his wrists.
He felt hands pushing him along down the hallway, and
heard the jeers and shouts from other prisoners incited by the presence of Colombian
military or police. He felt a plastic bottle strike his head.
Rivero heard guards shout orders and threats to the
prisoners to keep them in line.
One prisoner, a man whose family was killed by FARC, charged
down the corridor, his eyes set on Rivero with hatred and rage. The man held a
piece of sharp, jagged metal low in his hand. Two guards intercepted him and
beat him down with the butts of their submachine guns, pummeling his skull,
battering him, until he stopped moving. They disarmed him and left him on the
floor of the corridor.
They guided Rivero down a narrow stairwell, pushing
him along and occasionally striking the butts of their weapons against his head
and back. At the bottom of the stairs, they directed him down a long hallway,
at the end of which he heard a door open. Hands shoved him inside.
Now he heard water dripping into a dank puddle with a
slight echo.
They stripped the clothes and underwear off his body.
He felt the cold air against his bare skin, the dirty cement floor beneath his
feet. Then he heard water running through the pipes in the wall, and seconds
later it streamed onto the floor. He felt the expanding puddle reach his feet.
They blasted him with three high pressure hoses.
Whichever direction he turned, there was more water
coming at him in an endless flow.
When he went onto the floor, one hose’s flow was
directed over his head.
He’d been water-boarded before. Although his mind
understood the process and the physiological effects, his senses still screamed
at him that he was drowning, and he fought for air. There was water in his nose,
causing his sinuses to burn painfully, and in his throat. His lungs screamed.
His body went into a panic. He gagged and choked and thrashed on the dirty
squalor of the floor. When he twisted his head to the side, and there was a brief
break in the water against his face, he sucked the air into his lungs and screamed,
pleaded for them to stop, but they said nothing.
The onslaught continued for several minutes—felt like
a lifetime—until long after the fight slowly and finally ebbed from Rivero. He
screamed, thrashed, and cried until he was too weak to do anything but curl up
on the floor and whimper.
The men took two hoses away, lowered the pressure on
the third, and left it showering over Rivero. He lay naked, wet, gasping,
freezing and shivering in a ball on the floor, hiding his shriveled genitals
behind his hands.
“Here’s the deal, Cesar,” a disembodied Spanish-speaking
voice said. Rivero did not recognize the voice from past interrogation
sessions. “I possess neither the time nor the patience to fuck about with you,
so I’ll lay it out for you in simple terms.”
Not that Rivero knew it, but the voice belonged to
Daniel, whom he had never met, and the ANIC officer was accompanied by an
American codenamed Carnivore and a squad of four specially selected special ops
troops led by a captain named Aguilar.
Like the Colombians, Avery wore a balaclava. He kept
his mouth shut the entire time, which wasn’t difficult for him. Daniel had
advised him that it be best that neither prison staff nor inmates heard an
English-speaking voice or American-accented Spanish in case there was an
investigation later.
It was never mentioned aloud, but Avery realized that
Daniel did not expect Cesar Rivero to return to his cell after tonight.
“Arianna Moreno,” Daniel continued after several
seconds. “The whore they call the Viper, we want to know where and how to find
her. We killed her nasty psychopath brother last week, shot him in the back as
he fled like a helpless, little girl into the jungle, and now we’re going to
end her life and deliver a long overdue measure of justice on behalf of the
people they’ve killed and the families they’ve destroyed.”
That caught Cesar Rivero’s attention. He stopped
gasping and writhing, fell abruptly silent and still on the floor and seemed to
forget about his physical discomfort.
“We tried this once before, didn’t we, Cesar? You
managed to hold your silence and protect the whore. But not this time. We’re
not National Police, Cesar. We can do whatever we want, and if you do not
cooperate, you’re going to an unmarked grave this time, but not before I take
you apart one miserable, worthless fucking piece at a time.”
Avery thought Daniel put on a good performance. There
was menace in his voice, and Avery didn’t doubt for a second that Daniel meant
every word of it. Avery held no sympathy for Rivero. The man was presented a
very clear and fair ultimatum, the means to escape a horrendous, excruciating
ordeal, and he was free to make his decision. Rivero’s fate was entirely in his
own hands. But part of Avery hated to see a weak, defenseless creature suffer.
A wounded, starving wolf was still a sight that warranted pity.