21

Planted on oil reserves more bountiful than those beneath most OPEC states, Venezuela had, by the early twenty-first century, failed to lift more than a token percentage of its people from abject poverty. The oil revenues were routed through the government-owned Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., with profits promised to the poor but usually distributed only according to the whim of the nation’s chief politician. So despite the black gold mined from beneath it, for each of its six decades of independence from Spanish territorial status, the Bolívarian Republic of Venezuela remained a nation of high-profile leaders, sleek, modern city centers, and-mostly-shantytown barrios.

The latest chief politician was Hugo Chávez, a man imprisoned for leading a failed military coup before he went on to win a pair of presidential elections. Along the way, he managed to snuff out the standard South American sort of political challenges-a referendum seeking his ouster, a successful but short-lived coup, a few assassination attempts. Chávez routinely conducted a number of foreign-affairs initiatives geared solely, it seemed, toward alienating U.S. officials, with considerable success. Americans consumed the majority of Venezuela’s oil, and probably always would-but the discord resulting from Chávez’s anti-American bravado was enough to make a visit to Venezuela by any American citizen a tremendous pain in the ass.

Cooper circumvented the would-be four-hour customs detainment of American tourists by buying his ticket at the Copa Airlines counter in San Juan with a MasterCard under the name of Armando Guttierez-which name the ticket agent also found printed alongside Cooper’s picture on the Colombian passport he was breaking in today.

He rented a car, and after a stroll through the soupy heat to the vehicle, found his way to the autopista and headed south for Caracas. It took him about an hour in the gridlocked traffic to reach the exit he’d pinned down as the correct choice in an online atlas search from the porch of his bungalow.

He’d pinned down some other things too with a phone call or three, namely that Ernesto Borrego, aka El Oso Blanco, was, in fact, as Po Keeler had claimed, into a lot of shit. Borrego’s businesses, operating under the Borrego Industries banner, included trucking, intermodal shipping, home electronics and personal computer importing and exporting, wholesale distribution, and order fulfillment. This according to the backgrounder Cooper had ordered up from Langley, which he presumed to be far from comprehensive.

He’d called some other people and learned that Borrego liked to hunker down in his rat-trap of an office within the confines of the Borrego Industries distribution center south of the city. Apparently Borrego rarely left the place, and instead preferred to all but live out of the facility. It was from the Caracas distribution center that he took his meetings-of which there were few-while logging fourteen or fifteen hours of phone calls a day. He was said to hold frequent video teleconferences, the man’s preferred meeting format.

It was also well known locally that Borrego consumed massive quantities of takeout. Rarely leaving the windowless office space in his massive warehouse building, he cycled through a set delivery rotation of offerings from local eateries, his favorite being the two-foot hoagies stacked high with meat that a nearby deli ordinarily made for birthday parties and corporate events.

Once he found the distribution center, Cooper drove around the perimeter of the place for a look around. It was a massive facility that made Cooper think suddenly of New Jersey-a vast, sprawling campus of one-story buildings equipped with loading docks, surrounded by what had to be ten square miles of parking lot. The place appeared to be accessible, from the road anyway, via two secure entrances, each equipped with a guard booth and gate. One was much bigger than the other, the larger serving as the egress point for tractor-trailers, Cooper losing count at 237 rigs being loaded or unloaded behind the sea of buildings. He saw a couple of the semis leave, and a couple others come in. The guards granting this access didn’t seem too diligent, but Cooper didn’t have an eighteen-wheeler on hand.

The second gate was your standard corporate-campus security booth, same in any country-swipe your pass card across the black panel on the post astride the guard booth and the gate would open to let you in. While Cooper watched, he saw the guard manning the booth wave to or otherwise greet every driver coming in. That was the nature of the second entrance-it was the administrative parking lot, all cars and no rigs, the autos lined up outside the only building on the lot that lacked loading docks.

This would be where Borrego kept his office.

Cooper had some trouble devising a painless way in, but on his ninth loop around the complex, he noticed the trains. There was a switching engine pulling container cars in and out of the facility, five or six at a time. Even Cooper, beach denizen though he was, could admire the intermodal transportation system Borrego had going: rail cars held the shipping containers today, but a truck or ship might hold them tomorrow. The switching locomotive was busy plucking select cars from a pair of mile-long trains parked on a set of spurs, set off to the side of the main rail thoroughfare. The tracks may well have served other facilities in the area, but the main stop appeared to be Borrego Industries.

Cooper ditched his rental car on a dusty shoulder between a roadside junkyard and a service station. Locking it with the remote, he strolled around the back of the service station as though headed for the restroom, but kept going until he hit the switching track behind. He doubled back a couple hundred yards so that he could hide behind the junkyard, then waited there until the switching engine came rumbling along, the rhythmic bong bong of its klaxon announcing its passage. The engineer had four of the container cars hooked up this time around.

He stayed hidden behind a stack of punctured tires until the locomotive passed-Cooper making sure the engineer couldn’t clock him-then stepped out and jogged alongside the slow-moving train until he found a good handle and pulled himself aboard. He clung to a ladder beneath two towering twin-stack shipping containers while the train pulled onto the property, waited for the hydraulic hiss of the train’s brakes, jumped off, walked around the side of the building, found his way to the sidewalk lining the administrative building, and strolled through the glass doors and into the main lobby.

Coming in, he saw it did not appear there was much pomp or circumstance here. Judging from the number of cars in the lot, there couldn’t have been more than twenty-five people working in the business wing to begin with-none of them, apparently, working in particularly luxurious digs.

He approached a stern-cheeked receptionist. She sat behind a fold-out desk that might have been a card table in another life.

“Afternoon,” he said, going with English for no particular reason.

There was little life in the look she shot back at him.

Cooper added, “I’m here to see the Polar Bear.”

“Pardona me?” she said, struggling even with the two-word foray into English.

“El Oso Blanco,” Cooper said, grinning as though he were a salesman here to hawk business-to-business long-distance telephone service. “Good old Ernie.”

Appearing mildly relieved by his use of Spanish, she returned to the comfort zone of her native tongue. “Security hadn’t told us-”

“Sí,” Cooper answered, “they were pretty busy up front.”

“I don’t have you on Mr. Borrego’s calendar.”

They were sticking with Spanish now. Cooper noted where her eyes went as she dropped Borrego’s name: the double doors at the end of the hallway to Cooper’s right. Not that he couldn’t have guessed which office belonged to the main man upon entering the otherwise Spartan complex.