SEVEN
San Antonio de Los Altos is a hilly, green residential suburb of Caracas, lying just south of the sprawling metropolis and full of upper-class properties laid out among the thick trees and brush, connected with narrow and steeply winding roads.
At two a.m. Court squatted in the thick foliage halfway up one of the hills, smelled the oranges in the trees around him, sweetening the pungent scent emanating from the rotting flora of the rainy season. He wore a uniform of tiger camouflage and a backpack along with black combat boots, and high-tech ear buds that both muffled loud noises and enhanced soft noises. He held binoculars to his eyes as he looked up at a whitewashed Colonial mansion high above him on the sheer hillside.
The large house appeared simultaneously regal and dilapidated, the white walls covered in mold and thick vines, but Court evaluated the building as structurally sound. He had just completed a twenty-minute 360-degree reconnaissance of the property, exhausting himself as he did so. Then he’d settled into this hide to scan the home on the hill from the rear.
This hide was some hundred feet below the building, but he was able to make out a portion of the large, wraparound, tile-floored veranda on the second level, and the big windows there, and he realized there were a lot of good ways to access the interior of the property undetected.
But he wouldn’t be using any of them, because he was worried that climbing the foliage-covered gradient would be too much for him in his weakened state, especially because he needed to be ready for anything once inside the building.
He wiped a heavy sheen of sweat from his brow. San Antonio de Los Altos sat at a mile in elevation, so the air was cool, but Court’s forehead poured perspiration and his hairline ejected thick steam.
The evening might have been mild, but his infection raged inside him.
Court wasn’t in the mood for this shit. He was no fool, he knew he was sick, and his shoulder wound felt like he’d had surgery that morning instead of the previous week. He could function, he could move quickly in short bursts if he absolutely had to, but it was like he was operating underwater.
After another minute in his hide evaluating his options, Court decided his best course of action would be to walk around to the front of the residence, head up the steep winding driveway, and enter through the front door.
Not his regular modus operandi; in fact, it was roughly the opposite of how he liked to do business. Stealth was his specialty. Forgoing stealth today was a necessity; it was not a preference.
He rose and moved through thick brush, almost tripping over tufted vines, and then made his way back out onto the winding street. He walked around towards the driveway to Drummond’s house, his eyes peering at the scene ahead through a small night vision monocular because there were no streetlights to light the way.
Drummond was thought to have security, and Court certainly wasn’t looking to get into anything hand-to-hand tonight. This meant that, if it came down to it, he’d be reaching for a gun. He had two choices on him: a .22 caliber suppressed Walther pistol snapped into a shoulder holster under his left armpit, and a larger Glock 19 that he carried on his hip, which, while also suppressed, was still a hell of a lot louder than the .22.
Hanley had ordered Court to make certain his operation went off quietly and cleanly. Well, Court said to himself, I might be able to give him quiet. But this wasn’t going to be clean, at all.
Clean was too much effort.
At the foot of the drive, he lowered himself to his kneepads and put his eye back in the thermal monocular. Scanning the scene ahead, he registered a lone man, obviously part of the protection force, sitting on a chair with his feet on a small table on the whitewashed stone front porch.
A continued scan showed no one else around, although Court was certain he’d run into others before long.
One dude asleep at the front? That can’t be it, can it?
Court waited a minute more, searching for any heat signatures and listening through his hearing enhancers for any threat. He heard nothing alarming other than a few bats racing by in the sky, and he saw nothing through his glass save the thermal register of the guard and a single, small monkey, high in an araguaney tree near the home.
He rose and began climbing the steep driveway.
Court had spent two decades learning how to walk silently as if his life depended on it, because his life had actually depended on it. He made his way into the grasses to the side of the drive, avoiding the gravel, moving slowly with no light to guide him, measuring his footfalls as he neared the Colonial mansion.
Looking through his thermal as he climbed, he saw that the man at the front door hadn’t moved at all. Court pocketed the device because it did give off a small amount of light, and then he crept forward, slowly and carefully.
When he was just twenty yards from the sentry in the chair, he thought he detected the faint sounds of classical music coming from the open second-story windows of the house ahead. This surprised him—it was past two a.m., after all—but he told himself he’d use the sound as additional cover for his approach.
It was clear to Court that, despite the fact that whoever Drummond had helping him had only two days earlier captured a man going after their protectee, they were utterly unprepared for someone else to make a similar attempt. It made no sense to him, unless of course they’d had some sort of advance warning of Hightower along with the CIA Caracas station officers before they appeared.
At the foot of the stairs to the porch, he kept one hand hovering over his Walther while with the other he pulled an eight-inch-long stainless steel cylindrical device from his chest rig, one of three held by the webbing there.
It was a Dermojet needleless automatic injector, capable of pushing a dose of whatever medicine had been loaded into it through bare skin via a quick, high-pressure blast of air.
Court eyed his victim, sleeping soundly in front of him, as he readied the device in his left hand.
Clean and quiet, Hanley had instructed. Maybe he could do clean after all, he told himself, but then his rational brain took back over.
Surely to God it’s not going to be this easy.
Clark Drummond had become a cynical and bitter man in the past few years, and he no longer loved much in this world, but his love for Schubert had proved to be undying. The Austrian composer’s 1816 work, Symphony no. 5, played over the speakers as the American milled about the second-floor library of the old Colonial mansion, perusing the shelves full of books. He brushed his fingers across old tomes that he had no interest in reading, his head moving gently with the subdued music.
He liked the look of this room, the feel of these books. Even though this mansion was in utter disrepair and he worried about breathing in an excessive amount of the heavy mold he smelled, he enjoyed his evenings in the place, thinking about the luxury of the property that had been sullied only by the hands of time.
But though this place did have its charms, he wasn’t happy here.
Venezuela, he thought as he stepped back over to his desk in the corner. Why the hell am I in Venezuela?
This old house was not his. Venezuelan intelligence had put him up here, and they would continue to do so as long as he continued to help them. If he stopped, if he left, then he had no idea what lengths the regime might go to in order to bring him back or to make him pay for his defiance.
So he had decided to make the best of the situation, and he did what he could to enjoy himself, like staying up most evenings until the first glows of morning, working on his computer at his desk here in the library, or simply drinking gin and tonics and listening to music.
This was an arrangement of convenience between himself and the Venezuelan regime, and Drummond took advantage of the conveniences extended to him. Like this massive library that, while creaky and dusty and moldy and gloomy, gave off an unmistakable air of importance.
He also took advantage of the old stereo and the wide array of classical vinyl on the shelves among the books, even if many of the records were scratched or hopelessly warped from the warm, wet tropical air.
And there was one more positive aspect of his life here in hiding.
The woman.
Drummond had started to go back to his desk, but he stopped himself and turned back around when he heard the sound of footsteps in the hallway, shuffling over the music. As the Fifth Symphony’s menuetto began, an attractive brunette in her forties entered the library, a fresh gin and tonic in her hand. Wearing a short skirt and a blouse that gave no hint she would be going to bed any earlier than Drummond, she kissed him as she handed him his sixth cocktail of the evening. She kissed him again, turned, and left to the sound of strings pouring out of the bassy old speakers like running water.
Alejandra was Drummond’s girlfriend, or at least that was what he liked to call her. He was no fool; he knew she was actually “on the job.” She wasn’t a prostitute but an intelligence operative of some sort. She’d appeared in his life, a “chance” encounter in a grocery store, the day after he agreed to terms with the regime to provide technical assistance to SEBIN.
Clark Drummond had been in the spy game too long to believe in such coincidences.
Still, Alejandra was smart and interesting and always there for him, and though Drummond himself was no great prize, the good-looking Venezuelan woman never met his annoyed countenance with anything other than a pleasant demeanor.
She was working him, this he knew, but the truth was, he liked it.
He sipped the gin as he left the desk area in the corner and sat down in a worn leather chair in the middle of the room, facing both the open French doors leading to the rear balcony and the pair of large speakers against the wall. He closed his eyes now, a slight and rare smile across his lips. He allowed himself this moment of peace. After the problems he’d encountered the past year, at least it was good to finally be safe.
And he was safe, of this he was certain. He didn’t think much of the guards provided to him by Venezuelan intelligence, but he wasn’t worried. He’d been notified well in advance of that goon Zack Hightower’s arrival, and he’d been notified in advance when those foolish officers from CIA’s Caracas station had tried to tail him before that. Since capturing Hightower two days earlier, he’d gotten no wind of anyone else being sent into the area, so he felt comfortable that tonight would be nothing more than an enjoyable time relaxing to classical music.
He waved a hand in the air in time with the symphony, as if he were the conductor of the orchestra, and he waited for the fourth movement to begin.