“We honor our sister Avril, who was tragically lost in the battle in Lithuania. Let the oil and gas industry know that her spirit burns bright in the fight we continue in her name.”
In the last few seconds of the video the camera panned to the other side of the room. Here four men and women, all in black and all masked, raised their fists in salute. Some held automatic weapons.
Eight hours after the explosion, the body of twenty-four-year-old Avril Auclair, a French citizen and former university student, was pulled out of a thick marsh in the lagoon. She was identified quickly, almost immediately, really, because the YouTube video had mentioned “sister Avril,” and a woman with this name had been well known to authorities keeping an eye on the sometimes-violent ecoterror movement in Europe.
Auclair had made a name for herself by being kicked out of Greenpeace two years earlier for hurling a fusillade of punches at the deputy director of the Paris branch of the organization. The police report said it was an argument over tactics. Auclair had been too radical for Greenpeace, so they’d sent her packing, and she then beat up the sixty-year-old woman in charge of the Paris branch.
The director ultimately did not press charges, and Auclair disappeared from view, completely dropping off the map for the past six months.
An autopsy later determined Avril Auclair’s scuba tank had a faulty pressure gauge, and although it read that she had a full tank, her tank had run out of air. It was determined that she must have passed out underwater during the mission and then drowned, although she had been found so far away from the explosion, in the exact opposite direction from the point of entry of the divers as shown in the video, nobody understood how she could have floated to the jetty unless she had been on a completely different mission from those who attached the explosives to the hull of the ship.
It was a small mystery, however, as she had been identified in the video by her mother as the first woman speaking, and she’d led a life that made her death during an ecoterror incident no great surprise to anyone.
And video of the theft of the explosives was authenticated soon after the Independence explosion, when French authorities revealed a previously unreported theft of hundreds of pounds of C-4 and detonators from a military depot west of Montpellier.
European police and intelligence officials immediately began the hunt for an ecoterror group no one had ever heard of.
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.