Hey, got a steel pin in your hip? Take it out so we can check it.
What nonsense. Okay, okay. She knew she was anxious over this new trip, and she tried to cool it. But what was her country coming to? Give me your tired, your poor, your teeming masses, your fingerprints.
Signs, signs. Everywhere there were signs, as the old pop song went. Messing up the view. Messing up everyone’s mind. No cigarette lighters on the aircraft. No scissors. No knives. No booze. How about a numchuck or a Tai Chi sword?
Yeah. Long-haired freaky people didn’t need to apply, but they were actually going though the security line just fine. A woman who looked like someone’s great grandmother was being searched, however. A security person was examining her roll of lipstick. Alex sipped from a fresh bottle of cold water that she knew she was going to have to relinquish.
The fear had taken root all over America by now, planted by excessively reckless people in the government. Having been in Ukraine on the day of the RPG attacks, having had to fire lethal weapons at other human beings and shoot her way out, she knew what real fear was. She knew what it was like to be scared, to understand what a true threat feels like, to be a moment away from a painful death or perhaps permanent disfigurement if she acted wrong or was just plain unlucky. She knew what it was like to lose someone she loved in an attack that made no sense.
But on American soil, she didn’t want to live in constant fear. She resented the signs. Who the heck was going to make a bomb out of Scope and Pepsodent, anyway?
Alex took off her shoes, belt, and jacket and put them in one bin. Her computer came out of her backpack and went into another while the backpack itself went into a third. Then she dumped her wallet, change, keys, passport, and boarding pass into a fourth. Then she graduated to the hallowed grounds of a “five binner” as she dropped the black duffel bag stuffed with a week’s worth of clothes in the fifth.
A security person watched her uneasily, and she was ready for him to say something. She preempted him. “Why don’t we all just wear transparent plastic raincoats when we travel,” she said. “It would speed things up and make things much easier, wouldn’t it?”
He looked at her and muttered something about regulations. He was about to wave her through when a TSA agent stopped the screening counter.
“We’ll need to search this backpack,” he said to Alex. “Is this yours?
“What’s the problem?” she asked.
Whatever it was, it drew a second TSA person, a supervisor. They opened the bag and pulled the rest of her things off the carrier. How she longed right then to have a Federal ID, her old Treasury Department or FBI identification. But she was as naked and vulnerable as any other American.
The first agent reached in and pulled out a half-finished bottle of Diet 7-Up. He smiled, shrugged, and tossed it into a bin that was already overflowing with other half-dead plastics of liquid.
She smiled back. “Oops. Sorry,” Alex said.
“It happens all day,” the guy said. A job well done, that capture of a 7-Up bottle.
She repacked and pulled her backpack onto her shoulder.
What was the last thought of that song? Thank you, Lord, for thinking of me, but I think I’m doing fine.
Trouble was, Alex wasn’t so sure how her country was doing. Billions spent to inconvenience travelers, and where was the real fight against the real enemies of modern civilization? Just one woman’s opinion as she grabbed her duffel and hooked her backpack onto her left shoulder. She turned toward her gate.
At a newsstand on the way, she bought another drink and a paperback novel in Spanish, one of those Nobel Prize-winning South American works where the women turn into butterflies. Might as well get into the mood.
SIXTY-TWO
A few hours into the flight to Caracas, as the aircraft passed above the Caribbean, the pilot announced that passengers on the right of the plane could see Cuba. Alex glanced out her window, and sure enough, there it was, nestled in the blue water about a hundred miles to the east.
She had never been there, wished she’d be able to visit sometime, and took a long look as her plane passed. It was hard to believe the political issues at play. She felt sorry for the Cuban people, who had been under one oppressive regime or another for more than a century. When would the world again be able to celebrate the classic poetry of José Martí or the music of the modern-day Cuban trovador Silvio Rodríguez?
Christian missionaries were not allowed to visit the island, for example, even to bring clothing or medical assistance. The Cuban people deserved better, as did all the people of Central and South America. Having had a mother from Mexico, Alex felt very close to these people. She made a note to include them in her prayers.
The island passed. The jet continued its path southward over the Caribbean. Alex slipped into headphones and dozed. She missed Robert horribly. A wave of sadness remained, but at least she felt she was moving forward, starting to get a grip again on her life. She wondered how Ben was doing as well as her pals at the gym.
Note to self. Work my way back into basketball when and if I get back to Washington. She slipped off into a light nap.
She drifted. She opened her eyes. It had seemed like only a few minutes, but she had fallen asleep for the better part of an hour.
The plane was descending now into Maiquetía, Caracas’s airport. The airport was called that after the village that once stood there, rather than “Simón Bolívar International Airport,” its real name.
The aircraft went into a sharp bank as it angled in from the sea, with mountains on one side. The aisle-seat passenger in Alex’s row was an older woman who gave a nervous glance at her seatmate. She shook her head. “Scary, no?” she asked. She looked to Alex for comfort as well.
Alex smiled.
“And you haven’t flown into La Carlota,” the man in the middle seat said. He spoke with a Spanish accent.
“Where’s La Carlota?” Alex asked.
“The old downtown airport in Caracas. It’s mostly used for general aviation now. Coming in you’re almost kissing the Ávila, the mountain range that forms the southern border of Caracas. As a young man I remember coming in there in fog. You felt the pilots were just sensing where the Ávila was.”
Alex nodded and shook her head. The aircraft eased into a further descent.
“President Chávez often still flies out of there,” the other passenger said. “Hopefully one day his pilot will get it wrong.”
Moments later, they were on the ground, taxiing to the terminal.
Maiquetía airport was astonishingly modern. Alex retrieved her bags and cleared customs easily. Outside the gates, the steamy Venezuelan heat was waiting for her. She was struck by the contrast with Kiev, where everything had been frozen. The clothing she had worn from New York was already uncomfortably heavy.
She scanned a crowd waiting for arriving passengers. There was a well-dressed man with a sign that had her name on it.
Alex approached him in Spanish. “Buenas tardes. Soy Señorita LaDuca.”
“Mucho gusto,” he answered.
They continued in Spanish. Alex slipped into the flow of it with ease.
“I’m José Mardariaga of the Mardariaga limousine service,” he said. “I’ve been sent by Señor Collins to pick you up. Let me take your bags.”
The man took her to a new Lexus with air conditioning that worked. A blessing.
“Is it always this hot this time of year?” she asked, making conversation.
“Down here on the coast, sí, claro!” Señor Mardariaga said. “But not in Caracas, which is up high. The Spaniards usually built their colonial capitals in the mountains away from the coast for this reason. For instance in Chile, I’m a Chilean myself, the port is El Paraíso, but the capital of Santiago de Chile is inland, in the mountains.”