He signaled the waiter and ordered another beer, then looked at the city. Tall palms swayed in the breeze, and from up here Caracas looked good. He could see how Venezuela used to be a major international tourist destination in decades past, competing with the Caribbean islands, and calling itself “The Country in the Caribbean.” Those days were over and he didn’t think they would return in his lifetime—which actually might be shorter than that shown in a life-expectancy chart.
Taylor climbed out of the pool and ran her hand through her slicked-back blonde hair. The sun was behind her and cast her in a gold-hued glow. Brodie suddenly felt that he was in a James Bond movie and that Maggie Taylor, like all of Bond’s femmes fatales, was going to be his downfall. But first, he had to sleep with her.
A pool boy handed her a towel and she dried herself as she walked toward the cabana. She stood in the sunlight, soaking up the rays on her perfect body. Brodie, remembering a Bond film, said to her, “Something big has come up.”
She toweled her hair. “What?”
“I called Dick Worley—”
“Brendan Worley.”
“Right. We have a meeting with him. To discuss our transportation out of here.”
“Okay. Good. Where and when?”
“He’s at a yacht club. We need to cut short our R&R.”
“So I don’t get to see you in your Speedo?”
Brodie smiled.
The waiter returned with Brodie’s beer and Taylor sat at the edge of her lounge chair and finished her Mojito. “Can I have yours?”
“Sure.” He drank his beer out of the bottle. They sat in silence, enjoying the moment. A big blue heron landed on the terrace and began strutting between the lounge chairs, maybe looking for food, like those trash scavengers they’d seen yesterday. He said, “What’s the difference between a tropical paradise and hell on earth?”
“Not much, apparently.”
“Right. Every society comes to a Y in the road… the road to hell is downhill and looks easier than the uphill road. Until you get to the end.”
She looked at him. “Is that you talking? Or the beer?”
“It’s me talking to the beer.”
“Old bad joke.”
They exchanged smiles and she looked at the blue heron, giving Brodie an opportunity to look at her, sitting a few feet from him, nearly naked—and maybe still pissed off at him for excluding her from the two Dombroski calls.
He now noticed pockmarked shrapnel scars running along the right side of her waist and hip and down the length of her right quad. Taylor, he reminded himself, was more than his subordinate officer in the CID. They shared the bond of surviving combat. And of having friends who didn’t.
So he—or the beer—decided to share some information with her. Not the info about her being involved with a CIA guy, but the info about Crenshaw. He said, “Do you remember the murder of Robert Crenshaw in Peshawar?”
She looked at him. “I do. Why?”
“Well, in my first phone call to Dombroski, he told me that Crenshaw was not a diplomat—he was actually a CIA officer—and that he had been stationed in Kabul before Peshawar.”
Taylor kept looking at him, but didn’t respond.
Brodie related his conversation with Dombroski regarding the timeline and geographic connection between Captain Mercer’s escape from the Taliban and Crenshaw’s torture and murder.
Taylor listened, then said, “That’s a stretch. But even if it were true, we don’t know why Mercer would want to torture and murder a CIA officer. Or what that has to do with why Mercer deserted. Or why he came to Caracas.”
“Correct. But now we also know that Colonel Worley was in Kabul.”
“We don’t knowwhenhe was there.”
“Correct. But maybe we’ll ask him later.”
“Okay… but Afghanistan is a seventeen-year-old war, and thousands of Intel officers have served there.”
