Certain Jeopardy (8 page)

JAY LENO HAD JUS
T
started his monologue when Stacy Moyer heard the rattle of keys at the front door. She didn’t bother to turn on the light. She’d been sitting in the glow of the large flat-screen television for hours. She pressed the MUTE button on the remote.

The door opened slowly and a familiar, rail-thin figure slipped between the jamb and the partially opened door. The figure quickly closed the door as if the night might follow him in.

“Thanks for stopping by.”

The figure jumped a foot and spun. “Mom. What are you doing up? It’s late.”

“Ya think?” She rose from the sofa. “Last I checked, school let out at three-fifteen. Did that change without the parents being informed?”

“No.” At sixteen, Rob had already reached six-foot-one, which made him a hit on the intramural basketball team, but he lacked the skill and desire to make the varsity team. He wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with the image of a human skull wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette. His jeans were worn and one of the pockets torn, not from hard work but by an elusive fashionsense.

She waited. “‘No’? That’s it?”

“What do you want?”

“Well, let’s see, what could a mother want at eleven-forty in the evening, seven hours after her son should have been home? Hey, I know: How about an explanation?”

“I went over to Freddy’s after school. He’s starting a band and asked me to join.”

“You don’t play an instrument, unless you’ve taken up the tuba behind my back.”

“I can sing.”

“Yeah, but can you answer a cell phone?” Anger warmed her face.

“You didn’t call.” He started to move from the door.

“Yes, I did. I called at least six times and left a message every time.”

“I don’t know. Maybe I had it turned off.”

“Give it to me.” She stepped to him and held out a hand.

He stepped back. “What?”

“Your cell phone.”

“Why?”

“Have you ever seen me this angry?”

“No … no.”

“Then don’t trifle with me, son. Give me the phone.”

He pulled a small Motorola from his pocket and placed it in Stacy’s hand. Before she flipped open the clamshell device, it beeped.

“Odd, it seems to be on now. And look, it says you have several messages.”

“I guess I wasn’t paying attention.”

Stacy worked another button on the phone. “Hmm, the call history says you received several calls tonight, some of them near the times I called. It looks like you answered those.”

“You can’t tell that.”

“You’re right. I’ll just call one now and ask the caller if he or she spoke to you.” Stacy moved her thumb over the green-lit button marked SEND.

“All right, I saw your calls, but I didn’t answer because I knew you’d go ballistic on me, just like now.”

“How often have I done that … not counting tonight?”

He didn’t answer.

“I asked you a question.”

Rob shrugged. “Not often. But Dad does. You saw how out of control he was last night. Who wants to come home to that?”

“As I recall, you started it.”

“As I recall,
Dad
started it. He always starts it. He hates me because I haven’t grown into a gun-totting jock.” Before Stacy could respond, he added, “Where is Dad? I thought he’d be here to beat me down.”

“Your father has never hit you and you know it.”

“There are other kinds of beatings, Mom. Where is he?”

She lowered her voice. “He was called up this morning.”

“So he’s taken off again to who-knows-where for who-knows-how-long.”

“That’s part of his job. I knew it when I married him.”

“Too bad I didn’t know it before I was born. Can I have my phone back?”

Stacy didn’t reply. Fighting back tears took all the willpower she could muster. Finally she held the device out and Rob took it.

“What now?” Some of the defiance drained from Rob’s voice.

“Go to bed, and please don’t ever do this to me again.”

“I wasn’t trying to do anything to you. I’m not a kid anymore, Mom. I don’t need you checking up on me all the time.”

“You haven’t proved that to me yet. Adults make the effort to keep contact with their families.”

“Really? You expecting a call from Dad tonight? Because, if this ‘business trip’ is like his others, we won’t hear from him for days, maybe weeks.” He started toward his bedroom.

“Rob.”

“What now?”

She turned and when she spoke the anger was gone from her voice. “I fell asleep this afternoon. I had a bad dream—a nightmare about your father and his team.”

He shrugged. “Everybody has nightmares.”

“Rob, what I’m trying to say is that there may come a day when I need you to be more than a rebellious sixteen-year-old boy.”

Stacy watched her son stare at her for a moment. He nodded slightly and disappeared down the hall to his bedroom.

* * *

STILL CLOTHED, ROB MOYE
R
lay on his bed bathed in a light from a nightstand lamp. He thumbed through a skateboard magazine not seeing the photos, not reading the words. His emotions churned, alternating between anger, hurt, frustration, and guilt. Guilt was losing.

A soft sound pressed through the door. He closed his eyes.

His mother was down the hall. Weeping.

Rob fought back his own tears, then—did nothing.

* * *

THE BLACKNESS OF TH
E
ocean beneath them gave way to the lights of Maiquetia as the 757 banked over the shore and descended into Simon Bolivar International Airport. J.J. peered past Moyer out the window, watching the flashing running lights bounce off the runway. A second later they were wheels down and taxiing to one of the airport’s two terminals. They had made better time than expected.

The moment the aircraft came to a stop, the
clack
and
click
of seat belts releasing filled the passenger compartment. Scores of people stood as if doing so would get the exit doors open sooner. J.J. stayed in place. He saw no sense in standing in the narrow aisle pressed between strangers like salami on rye.

Ten minutes later they stood in a line, computer bags hung over their shoulders, waiting for their turn in immigration. J.J. reminded himself that nothing could go wrong here, though neither he nor Moyer carried anything suspicious. Even the bags they had checked in the U.S. contained what anyone would expect to find in the luggage of two men traveling on international business. A decade ago they might have tried to smuggle personal weaponry, broken down into its most basic parts for later reassembly, in special luggage, but not now. In August 2006 Venezuelan authorities searched and seized diplomatic cargo intended for the U.S. Embassy. The authorities claimed they found parts for a military aircraft ejector seat and 176 pounds of chicken. The U.S. lodged complaints about the improper search of diplomatic packages. J.J. wondered what the embassy needed with an ejector seat and chicken.

If diplomatic material could be searched, then certainly the luggage of two Americans could fall under close scrutiny. They had other ways of getting the equipment they needed.

“Passports, please.” The words belonged to a short, dark man with a thin mustache that hung to his lip below a heavily veined nose. He oozed contempt and boredom. “Anything to declare?”

“No.” Moyer handed over his passport.

“Nature of your visit, please?” The man studied Moyer’s documents.

“Business.”

The immigration officer squinted as he looked at Moyer’s picture and ran a thumb over the image. “Your passport looks new.” He studied the small book’s spine and fingered the other pages.

“It is.”

“Do you travel on business often?” The officer’s English was good.

“Several times a year.” J.J. saw Moyer’s shoulders tense.

“Yet your passport seems only days old.”

Moyer chuckled. “It’s my wife’s fault. She washed my other one. Let me tell you, it’s a real pain in the fanny to get a new one on short notice. If you know what I mean.”

“Do you have another form of identification, Señor?”

“Sure. Would a driver’s license do?”

J.J. could do nothing but act bored, even as his mind raced like an Indy car. His passport looked much like Moyer’s. Everything else about the documents was perfect, but no one had guessed that some civil servant would care about how new or old a passport appeared.

Moyer removed his driver’s license with the false name and address and handed it to the man.

“I can’t believe some of these people.” The voice came from behind J.J. He turned and saw the grandmother that tried to talk his ear off on the plane. “What’s the hang-up?” Her voice rose above the ambient noise of the airport.

J.J. started to warn her against irritating the immigration officer, then decided against it. Odds were that the man wouldn’t be too hard on a woman, and she might just cause enough disruption to distract the man.

The officer compared Moyer’s driver’s license photo to the one on the passport. He fingered the license. J.J. had never seen such a tactile man. “Your driver’s license also looks new. Did your wife wash that as well?”

“Are you married?” Moyer asked.

The man nodded.

“Have you ever made your wife mad? Yes, she washed my driver’s license and everything else in my wallet—my passport, my license, my credit cards. My cell phone too. I’d had a few too many the night before. She claimed it was an accident. I think it was revenge.”

The man nodded.

“Come on, mister,” the woman said. “My family is waiting for me.”

The immigration man lifted his head and frowned.

“Look,” J.J. said to the woman. “I don’t have anyone waiting on me. Why don’t you take my place?”

“Thank you.” She pushed past him, jostling J.J. with her shoulder bag. She was now one behind Moyer and much closer to the officer.

The official looked at the woman and tightened his jaw. He handed the passport and driver’s license back to Moyer, pulled a small booklet from a pile to his left, made a couple of notes and slammed a rubber stamp on one of the pages. “This is your three-week visa. Welcome to Venezuela. Enjoy your stay.” The words were delivered in robotic fashion. He waved Moyer through.

The woman was cleared in what had to be record time. J.J.’s heart picked up a few beats as he handed the man his passport. To

J.J.’s surprise he cleared immigration with no trouble. The man glanced at the passport, then at J.J.’s face. “This is your three-week visa. Welcome to Venezuela. Enjoy your stay.” The immigration officer was still working, but part of him had already checked out for the day.

J.J. made eye contact with Moyer. They had just dodged a bullet.

Customs went smoothly and minutes later they entered the main terminal. For some reason J.J. had expected a trashy building with technology just this side of the Stone Age. Instead he saw a newly remodeled structure, with colorful walls, large windows, and highly polished floors. He should have remembered: never make assumptions.

“Think you can get us a rental car?”

J.J. turned to Moyer. “I think I can manage.”
“Good. There’s the rental car counter.”
He looked at the signs over the counter.
Aco Alquiler, Amigo,
Auto 727, Avis, Budget, Hertz, Margarita Rental,
and
Rojas
. “I think I’ll go with Hertz.”

“Got a reason?”

“Yeah, I recognize the name.”

“Works for me. While you do that, I’ll take care of some otherbusiness.”

Before J.J. could ask, Moyer moved at a brisk pace to the men’s restroom.

MORNING LIGHT PUSHED T
HROUGH
a gap in the heavy draperies, falling across Moyer’s face as he lay in bed. The radio alarm-clock read 6:15. He had been awake for over an hour. For him, this was sleeping in. Still, being awake didn’t necessitate crawling from bed. Clean white sheets and a thick comforter conspired to keep him in place, and he felt content to let them do so.

After leaving the Caracas airport, he and J.J. had checked into the Palacio de Sol, an upscale business-class hotel near the center of the city. When Moyer pushed his credit card across the marble-topped check-in desk and signed the room agreement, he saw his tax dollars were paying over $300 a night for a two-week stay. They were warmly welcomed and their baggage carried to their rooms by a bellhop in a red uniform that looked as if it had been salvaged from a 1950s movie set. A twenty-dollar tip put a smile on the man’s face.

Both rooms were on the eleventh floor of the twenty-fivestory hotel. At the briefing that morning, Kinkaid had described the hotel as a step above most of the other facilities in the area, complete with luxury suites. Neither Moyer nor J.J. got a suite. They had to settle for a “standard room,” but standard proved better than he hoped. White plaster walls supported a coffered ceiling. Thick blue drapes hung over sheer inner drapes, the former being pulled back to let in the lights of downtown Caracas. A king-size bed dominated the space. A workstation of cherry-veneered wood occupied one corner. Two heavily padded chairs anchored the other corner. Photo artwork of the Venezuelan countryside hung on the walls.

Moyer had wanted nothing more than to unpack and crawl into bed. The day had been long and taxing. In less than fifteen hours he had gone from sitting in a doctor’s office, hearing how he might have colon cancer but not to worry, to being shipped to a foreign country.

Despite the lure of the bed, Moyer had more work to do, though it wouldn’t appear like work to most people. He and J.J. were to meet in half an hour and make their way to the hotel bar. Sometimes the best way to maintain low visibility was to keep a high profile. They had to assume that someone might be watching them. They had done nothing thus far to draw attention to themselves, and they wanted to keep it that way. They were traveling as businessmen, so they had to do what traveling businessmen often did—knock back a drink or two. It was all part of hiding in plain sight.

The bar looked like most bars Moyer had been in but with better furniture. Flat-screen televisions hung from the ceiling, each strategically placed to allow anyone in the bar an unencumbered view. Each television had been tuned to a sports channel. Clips of soccer and baseball games beamed from the screens.

An hour later Moyer crawled into bed, turned on the television, found ESPN Deportes, and tried to make sense of the Spanish sports news. Not that it mattered. Five minutes later he was asleep.

Now that the sun had crawled over the eastern horizon, Moyer was ready to get to work. He shaved, showered, and dressed in a pair of loose-fitting jeans and a pale yellow shirt with the words OKLACO OIL stitched over the right breast. He replaced yesterday’s black dress shoes with a scuffed pair of leather work boots.

As he retrieved his wallet and hotel key, his Nokia E61i chirped. A text message had arrived:
Lunch meeting is confirmed
. The innocuous sentence would mean nothing to anyone reading over his shoulder. To Moyer it meant Shaq and Caraway had arrived and checked into their hotel. He studied the PDA display and noticed that another text message had arrived while he was in the shower:
Hi Sweetheart. I miss you already. Junior misses his
daddy. Call when you can.

Jose and Pete were on scene. Moyer smiled. Cell phones were normally devices so open that a high school student with a little knowledge and the right equipment could intercept a call or text message. The cell phone Moyer held was different. The modified Nokia phone carried the latest encryption software. A dual-layered RSA 1024-bit/AES 256-bit military-grade encryption had been loaded into the phone. To carry on a conversation free of prying ears all he had to do was key in a single digit. Even a text message was safe once the encryption was turned on. The phones were not new; many government leaders carried them.

“So far, so good.”

Someone knocked on the door. Moyer, with phone still in hand, peered through the peephole and saw a spread of white teeth. When Moyer opened the door, he found J.J. leaning close to where the door had been a moment before, still grinning like the Cheshire cat.

“What’s with the cheesy grin? You win the lottery or something?” Moyer stepped back, letting J.J. enter. He wore a gray shirt similar to Moyer’s, as well as jeans and work boots.

“Every day a man can climb out of bed is a good day.” J.J.closed the door behind him.

“That’s how you got it figured?”

“Absolutely. Optimism is my middle name.” He looked at the phone in Moyer’s hand. “Receive any interesting calls?”

“Usual stuff.” Moyer’s cryptic response carried enough meaning for J.J. to understand. “You ready to rock?”

“And roll—just as soon as I use the latrine.”

“What? They didn’t give you a bathroom?”

“Coffee. It’s all about the coffee.”

* * *

AFTER A BREAKFAS
T OF
eggs and chorizo in the hotel restaurant, Moyer and J.J. pulled their rental car from the parking stall and started across the surface streets. Moyer drove, leaving J.J. free to take in the sights. Were it not for all the signs in Spanish, he might have confused his surroundings with any U.S. city of two million people. Like most cities, Caracas had an industrial area, a downtown business section, and numerous suburban neighborhoods. It was to one of these neighborhoods the onboard GPS led them.

The neighborhood comprised row upon row of small homes. Judging by the size of the trees near the street, J.J. figured the community to be more than thirty years old. The houses sported pale paint on hand-applied stucco. This was a working-class neighborhood, chosen because very few people would be home. Children would be at school, parents at work. The few people who might see them would be mothers of small children or the elderly.

They moved down the street slowly, though not so slow as to attract attention, and parked behind a dark green panel truck. The vehicle was ten years old if it was a day but looked well kept. Moyer pulled the sedan behind the truck and switched off the car.

He glanced at J.J. “Open the hood and fiddle around for a couple of minutes.”

“I’m not much of a mechanic.”

“You don’t have to be. Just look and touch a few things, then we’ll be on our way.”

J.J. didn’t need the explanation, but talking helped quiet his nerves. Moyer had been more somber than usual on the ride over.

They moved to the panel truck. Moyer unlocked the door and pulled the hood release. J.J. peered into the engine compartment. It was surprisingly clean for a vehicle of its age. He wiggled the radiator hose, studied the fan belts, and made certain the spark plug wires were in place. They were, of course. He expected to find nothing wrong. All of his activities were for the benefit of anyone watching. Two minutes later he stepped back and nodded to Moyer. The engine fired to life, and J.J. closed the hood.

Moyer drove off down the street, with J.J. following in the sedan.