best option, he decided, was to wait for her to leave, alone. He’d look for an opportunity to snatch her, and then he would take her to a dark and quiet place.
He caught himself wishing Zack were here. There was no one on earth better at interrogating intelligence away from a wily prisoner.
FIFTY-TWO
El Helicoide prison in central Caracas had originally been designed as a shopping mall, in a time when the Venezuelan government felt shopping malls were more important than prisons. That time had long passed, so the massive three-sided, pyramid-shaped structure had been converted into a detention and interrogation facility, some one hundred thousand square meters in size.
Venezuela had a lot of political prisoners, after all, and the numbers were growing all the time.
On a sweltering-hot morning a car pulled up to the entrance on Nueva Granada, and an attractive blonde with a large Coach purse climbed out. She headed for the outer-perimeter fence on foot and spoke poor Spanish to the guard, but he found it good enough for him to confirm that her name, or at least her alias, was on the day’s visitors list.
He had her step through an X-ray scanner while her purse was placed on a conveyor belt so they could get their own scan.
On the other side of the gate, more guards took her purse over to a table, and the woman strolled over after a quick pat-down.
The contents of the purse were checked carefully, a phone was taken and placed in a small locker, and the woman’s passport and visa were looked over for a moment. A large manila folder was pulled from the purse; it was stuffed full of something, so the guard unfastened and opened it.
He found stacks of twenty-euro notes, wrapped in bundles of one hundred notes each.
The man glanced up at the woman, but almost immediately a guard refastened the folder and placed it back in the purse.
Bribes passed through this security checkpoint all day long.
Zoya Zakharova was welcome here at Helicoide under the alias Tatiana Pankova. She’d been here a few times over the years while working with SVR, and there were still some people in the intelligence circles who owed her favors.
Or at least she thought they did.
She’d find out soon enough if her clout remained, even after her work with Russia’s foreign intelligence service had ended. She was betting that her alias had not been burned in the few months she’d been out.
She wasn’t trying to pass herself off as a current SVR employee—she wouldn’t have been able to pull that off—but rather as a former SVR employee, here to collect on a favor.
And it certainly didn’t hurt that she’d brought a manila envelope full of cash.
Zoya was escorted into the building proper; she walked through the halls to a staircase, since the elevator bank had an Out of Order sign on it, and with her minders she made it up to an office on the fourth floor.
The common areas of the entire building had a shopping mall feel to them, but the anteroom she entered gave off a typical developing-world government-installation vibe. Everything was metal and pressboard, file cabinets looked like they’d last been dusted in the 1980s, and other than a pair of large, cheaply framed photos of Venezuela’s president and some general Zoya didn’t recognize, the paneled walls were unadorned.
Her minders opened a door to a similarly shoddy office, and she went inside. They shut the door behind her, and she stood alone for a moment before she heard the flush of a toilet and then, thankfully, a sink running. Soon a middle-aged man with a big gut entered the room from a small side door. He wore the uniform of the Fuerzas Terrestres, the Venezuelan army, and carried the rank of colonel.
In English he said, “Colonel Hector Salerno, at your service.” The two shook hands, but Zoya felt no warmth from the man.
“Tatiana.” She didn’t bother with a last name, because this man would know it wasn’t real.
“Tatiana,” he repeated. And then, in an almost bored and disinterested voice, he said, “I was told to extend you every courtesy.”
Zoya only nodded curtly. Let’s get on with it, she thought. This man clearly didn’t like that he’d been told to do this woman’s bidding, and for her part, this woman did not give a shit.
Salerno said, “I was also told you wanted us to release one of our prisoners into your custody.” He stepped over to his desk and made a show