Commander-in-Chief

2

The good-looking Dutch couple stood out here in Caracas. They were tall, the man every inch of six-five and the woman nearly six feet herself. Both of them wore identical shades of auburn hair, his styled professionally short, while her shoulder-length curls blew in a warm fall breeze.

Even here in the upscale and exclusive neighborhood of Los Palos Grandes, where tourists and well-heeled foreign businesspeople were common, the couple turned a few heads because they were particularly attractive and stylish. They were dressed in chic business attire that bordered on extravagant: She wielded a large orange Hermès bag that cost more than the average annual income of a Venezuelan laborer, and he wore a white gold Piaget watch that sold for twice what she paid for her bag.

They might have been in their thirties, or perhaps their early forties. He appeared the elder of the two, but this was often the case with husbands and wives, and from the band on his ring finger and the massive rock on hers, they were clearly married.

They walked arm in arm along the Parque del Este on the Avenida Francisco de Miranda, and she giggled from time to time in response to a story he was telling. Then they turned to take the steps in front of the Parque Cristal, an eighteen-story cube-shaped building that looked south over Francisco de Miranda to the park, and they continued to the lobby entrance, looking up to marvel at the remarkable architecture.

Just behind them a Lincoln Navigator pulled to the curb and two men climbed out. One of them opened the door for a backseat passenger, a balding fifty-year-old in an expensive suit. He pushed his briefcase out the door in front of him and followed behind, and as the Navigator returned to follow the traffic to the west, the three men ascended the steps to the Parque Cristal, walking just feet behind the striking couple from Holland.

In the middle of this trio of Latin men was Lucio Vilar de Allende; to anyone who noticed him, he appeared to be just any other businessman with dealings here in the large office building, with the one exception being that he was shadowed closely by a pair of serious men in suits with open coats and flitting eyes.

And then they would recognize that the man in the middle wasn’t just anyone, because most people in Caracas knew bodyguards when they saw them; it’s that kind of town.

Lucio Vilar had a protection detail because he was one of Venezuela’s top federal prosecutors. He was moving light today — just the pair of bodyguards, the armored SUV, and the driver with an Uzi in his center console — because Vilar wasn’t on official business. He’d taken the afternoon off to visit his son at his school, and now he was meeting the mother of his child to discuss his boy’s grades. His ex-wife worked in a real estate office here in the Parque Cristal, and she had agreed to her ex-husband’s request that he meet her in the coffee shop on the top floor for a talk.

Vilar checked his watch and picked up his pace, and his bodyguards stayed with him, step for step.

Though Vilar had family matters on his mind as he entered the lobby, that didn’t stop him from noticing the attractive woman just in front of him. She was a head taller than he was in her heels, so she was hard to miss. He stepped to the elevator bank just behind the Caucasian couple, who, he could plainly hear, were speaking to each other in Dutch. When the elevator car arrived and opened and the tall couple stepped in, Vilar’s principal protection agent put a gentle hand on his protectee’s arm. It was a suggestion that they wait for an empty car, but Lucio Vilar ignored the hand and followed the Dutch couple inside, so his bodyguards dutifully followed.

Vilar nodded to the Dutch couple as they turned around.

“Good afternoon,” the woman said in English.

“Good afternoon,” Vilar replied. His English was not as strong as hers, but it was serviceable. “You are from Holland, I hear. I have visited Amsterdam. Very beautiful.”

“As is your country, señor,” the woman said, with a pleasant smile.

One of the two bodyguards pressed the button for the eighteenth floor, and the Dutchman pressed the button for the seventeenth. As the elevator ascended, the woman stepped into the front corner of the elevator, and her mate stood on her right, directly in front of the doors, facing forward.

“It is always wonderful to see foreigners here,” Vilar added. “Are you here on vacation?”

The woman shook her head. “Sadly, no. We are working.”

“I understand,” Lucio Vilar said, and he checked his watch again.

But Lucio Vilar did not understand at all.

Martina Jaeger glanced up to the digital floor-number readout over the door and saw they had passed the fourth-floor restaurant without stopping to pick up more passengers. This told her the odds were good they would likely go all the way to floor seventeen without stopping.

Lucio Vilar smiled up to her, and he seemed to want to use the short ride to practice his English. “May I ask what business brings you to Caracas?”

But Martina ignored him. In Dutch she said, “On eight.”

Braam Jaeger, still facing the door, replied calmly in Dutch. “Agreed.”

Lucio Vilar furrowed his brow at being ignored by the woman, but he said nothing more.

When the elevator reached the eighth floor, Martina Jaeger slipped her Hermès handbag off her shoulder and then she lifted it, raising it into the upper corner of the car.

It took the two bodyguards less than a second to realize what she was doing. The tall Dutch woman was covering the security camera.

Braam Jaeger continued to face the elevator door and did not turn around, but just as the two younger men at Vilar’s side started to react to the woman’s action, two pistol silencers appeared around the sides of his suit coat, both pointing backward toward the guards. He’d cross-drawn them from his waist inside his coat and now his left hand pointed one gun around the right side of his body, and his right hand aimed the other gun around his left. He glanced up at the reflection in the polished metal doors.

Both weapons fired as one. Even suppressed, the bark of two automatic pistols rang loudly in the small space.

The two bodyguards slammed back against the wall, then dropped to their knees, perfect holes in their foreheads. They’d both drawn their guns, so two weapons tumbled from their hands. The man on the left collapsed a second slower than the man on the right, but they both fell facedown onto the floor of the elevator car.

Lucio Vilar de Allende stood still, his briefcase in his right hand, the bodies of his protection agents crumpled on either side of him.

Braam Jaeger turned around now, reholstered the weapon in his right hand inside his coat like an expert, and raised the weapon in his left.

Vilar spoke in a hoarse whisper. “I… I do not understand.”

The statement was directed toward the man with the gun, understandably, but Martina Jaeger answered. Her handbag still covered the camera. “No? I think it should be obvious. Somebody out there doesn’t like you very much.”

And with that Braam shot Venezuela’s top federal prosecutor in the right eye. His head slammed back against the rear wall of the car and he crashed to the floor, settling perfectly between his bodyguards.

Braam fired twice more into the already still form. Control shots, just to make certain the target was dead.

With the second bark of the silenced pistol, a few drops of blood splattered up and onto Martina’s lavender Louboutin pumps.

“Verdomme!” she shouted.

“Het spijt me”—Sorry — Braam replied, then knelt and took the pulse of the prosecutor, who was clearly dead.

He scooped up spent shell casings — all of them still hot — while Martina Jaeger began unbuttoning her blouse with her free hand. She unfastened only two buttons below her breasts, then peeled up a black square of fabric held to her skin with electrical tape. She raised it up under her handbag, and she pressed it over the camera’s lens.

Once done, she lowered her purse and glanced up at the floor-number readout. “Vijftien,” she said. Fifteen. She turned, watching Braam as he stood up from collecting the casings.

She said, “One in each guard, three in the target.”

Martina said nothing else. Quickly Braam realized what she meant. He’d collected only four shell casings. He knelt again and found a fifth. It had rolled under the right forearm of the principal target. He pocketed it while Martina stepped in front of him to shield him from view of anyone waiting for the elevator when it reached their floor.

It opened at seventeen, which was undergoing renovations and therefore empty. Braam pulled a small wedge-shaped doorstopper from his coat pocket and propped the door open, then they exited and moved quickly to the stairwell, with Martina slipping off her pumps as she did so.

They hurried down the stairs and made it to the underground parking garage in less than six minutes. Martina put her shoes back on and they walked naturally through the lot, until Braam folded himself behind the wheel of their parked Audi A8, and Martina climbed in next to him.

They left the Parque Cristal one minute and four seconds before the first alarm bells rang.

They drove north along the Caracas — La Guaira highway in the direction of the airport, and most of the trip was conducted in silence. The pair had done this sort of thing before, so even though the fight-or-flight chemicals coursing through their central nervous system increased their heartbeat and blood pressure, they remained outwardly cool and calm.

The Audi pulled into the parking lot of the Playa Grande Caribe Hotel and Marina, on the shoreline of the Caribbean Sea. Braam parked and each of them grabbed a rolling duffel from the trunk, and with the luggage trailing behind them they walked through the hotel’s entrance. Passing the reception counter, they strolled through the large facility, until finally they exited the back and continued down a winding sidewalk that led them to the marina itself.

Here they climbed into a small gray dinghy, Braam started the engine, and they motored out to a forty-two-foot sailboat moored in the marina.

Braam started the engine while Martina unhooked the line from the mooring ball, and in moments they were churning out of the marina and into open water.

Braam kept one eye on the sea in front of him and the other on his laptop. Open in his browser was a weather forecast for the southern Caribbean. The conditions looked fair for the next twenty-four hours, which was crucial if they were going to make it to Curaçao by three a.m. There was a six-forty a.m. direct flight to Amsterdam the next morning, and the Jaegers had tickets and every intention of being home by tomorrow night.

Twenty minutes after setting sail, Martina stepped up to the bridge with two glasses of champagne in her hands. She passed one to Braam, seated at the helm, and with it she gave him a high five.

No one was around to see this, they were miles out to sea, and if anyone had been, they would have adjusted their show of affection to tie in better with their cover for status: that they were husband and wife.

Braam and Martina Jaeger were not, in fact, married. They were brother and sister, and they were contract killers working for Russian intelligence.