The Venezuelan by Bill King

Author:Bill King
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2020-06-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

Katy, Texas

“Pete, come on in,” said Carlos Briceño, who was standing in the doorway to his home and motioning for Cortez to come inside. “Let me grab my keys and the tickets and we’ll be on our way.

It was late Tuesday afternoon and the two were driving up to College Station for an early evening basketball game between the Aggies and the LSU Tigers. Normally, Cortez would have taken a pass on the game since he had a long flight ahead of him the following morning, but this matchup would determine the regular season conference championship, a not too common occurrence for Aggie basketball.

Briceño had attended LSU as an undergraduate before earning his master’s degree in petroleum engineering at Texas A&M. He was a basketball junkie and the two men had season tickets next to each other—lower level, midcourt, about ten rows up.

“Don’t forget your parking pass this time,” Cortez called down the hall. “Otherwise, we’ll have to park in the outer reaches of civilization.”

Reed Arena, where the Aggies play basketball, only seats about thirteen thousand, a far cry from nearby Kyle Field, which regularly crams more than one hundred thousand rabid fans inside for football games. Outer reaches for a basketball game meant a ten-minute walk, as opposed to the half-hour trudge common for most football games, especially the conference games.

The two climbed into Carlos’ BMW sedan and they headed out on the eighty-mile drive north to College Station. Fortunately, Katy is on the western outskirts of Houston, so they were able to hop onto the toll road and miss most of the heavy traffic.

“We’re going to need to head right back to Houston after the game,” said Cortez. “I’ve got an early morning flight to catch.”

“Where to this time?”

“Back down to Brazil.”

“Doesn’t the Bureau realize the people down there speak Portuguese, not Spanish?”

“Well, I guess they figure that’s close enough for government work, as the old saying goes,” said Cortez, who like Briceño was wearing a white, long-sleeve Aggie basketball tee-shirt because the game was a “white out.”

“I had an unusual conversation yesterday with someone I had not seen since you and I were teenagers,” said Carlos, guiding his vehicle north on state highway 99 toward US-290. The game didn’t start for another two hours, so there was no need to run the risk of a speeding ticket. “Do you remember an American foreign service officer named Dominic D’Angelo? He’s probably about twenty years older than us, so he would have been in his early thirties back then.”

“No, I can’t say that I do,” said Cortez, pursing his lips and shaking his head.

“Well, he seemed to be testing the temperature of the waters in the Venezuelan émigré community here in Houston.”

“What do you mean, testing the temperature of the waters?”

“He didn’t get into any detail, but I gather he represents some people interested in getting rid of the current government down there.”

Cortez, who had been concentrating on finding Willie’s Country Roadhouse channel on the car’s satellite radio, immediately stopped what he was doing.

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