“Indeed I am.”
How many times had he heard the standard Army lecture on responsibility, authority, and power? If you are given the responsibility, you must be given the authority to match the responsibility. Power was something else. Power came out of the muzzle of a gun. Power was what Kyle Mercer had in the bordello, and Brodie’s authority to make an arrest wasn’t worth shit there. Therefore Brodie needed the power to enforce his authority and to fulfill his responsibility to bring Captain Mercer to justice. And that power came from his gun and his guts.
“What are you thinking about?”
“A cold beer.”
“That’s easy.” She put her hand on his, which surprised him. She said, “I trust you.”
“Good.” He added, “But don’t hesitate to tell me when you don’t.”
She squeezed his hand.
They rode in silence, down from the once-pristine hills of Petare, through the man-made squalor that scarred the breast of the New World, now grown old and ugly.Poverty sucks, thought Brodie. But it was more than financial poverty here; it was a poverty of the soul, a culture that had gone terribly wrong. He suddenly thought of Kyle Mercer as a maggot, living off the rotting carcass of a dying nation. “Why is he here?”
“Ask him.”
Brodie nodded. He thought about Worley, and what Dombroski had said, and what General Hackett had not said, and he knew instinctively that he wasn’t going to like Captain Mercer’s answer.
CHAPTER 24
Luis continued along the winding roads leading out of Petare, and in fifteen minutes they were out of the barrio and back on Autopista Francisco Fajardo, heading west toward Altamira and the El Dorado Hotel.
Brodie looked in the side mirror as Petare receded in the distance. It was striking how prominent a part of the cityscape these slums which ringed the Caracas Valley were. Luis had said,You see them so much you don’t see them anymore.
Well, they’d seen them from the belly of the beast itself. And they would see them again, after sundown, which definitely went against the advice of Brodie’s guide book.
Taylor said, “When we get back to the hotel, we need to update the boss.”
“There’s nothing to report,” said Brodie.
“We found the brothel.”
Well, theythoughtthey had found the brothel. Brodie liked to hold off on his sit-reps until he had something of substance to share, like, for instance, “Kyle Mercer is hog-tied in the trunk.” Dombroski was consistently annoyed by Brodie’s infrequent updates while on assignment, but Brodie saw no reason to change his MO. “Let’s see how tonight goes.”
“You have an unhealthy disrespect for authority. I really can’t picture you as a soldier taking orders.”
“I couldn’t either. That’s why I transferred to CID.”
Luis, who was apparently listening to the conversation, asked, “You were a soldier, señor?”
“I was. Iraq. Ms. Taylor was too. She served in Afghanistan.”
“Those are dangerous places.”
“Not as dangerous as this place.”
Luis laughed, then said, “Señor Worley was also in Afghanistan.”
Brodie and Taylor shared a look. Brodie asked Luis, “How do you know that?”
Luis hesitated, realizing he was perhaps sharing privileged information. “I just hear things.” He added, “Señor Worley mentioned it once in the car.”
Brodie asked, “To you?”
Another hesitation, then: “To a gentleman we picked up at the airport… they spoke of their time together in Kabul.”
“And this man was an American?”
