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major general and a deputy of the Central High
Command, the military leadership of FARC, had summoned her. Usually, it was
because someone needed to be killed or something needed to be destroyed, but
she sensed that this time would be different.
     Of course by
now she had heard of Operation Phoenix and of the government oppressors’
jubilation over slaughtering Emilio Reyes barely two days ago. The last she
heard, there wasn’t yet a complete roll call of the dead, but she hadn’t heard
from Aarón since before the raid—he never failed to check in with her—and she doubted
the government would have left survivors after an illegal military operation in
a foreign country.  
    Normally, a
Central High Command deputy would not deal directly with a captain, the rank
Arianna nominally held. In FARC, captains command columns—two companies,
numbering forty-eight troops—but Arianna was assigned to a special section of
the military intelligence network that performed sensitive tasks, a euphemism
for assassination and terrorism, directly for the Central High Command. She answered
directly and only to Flores. Informally, within the Central High Command,
Andrés Flores’s colleagues referred to him as the snake charmer, because
Arianna Moreno was the Viper.
    She found Flores
seated at an old, decrepit wooden desk, consulting a notebook computer under
the glow of a burning oil lamp. Raindrops drummed against the wooden rooftop. His
hut smelled of tobacco, and a bottle of aged Chivas Regal sat on his desk, next
to a short glass filled with half a measure of the liquor, but his eyes
remained clear and focused. He looked up over a pair of smudged, crooked glasses
at Arianna Moreno’s entrance.
    “Please come in
and sit down.” Flores indicated the chair in front of his desk. “Make yourself
comfortable.”
    “I prefer to
stand.”
    “As you please,”
Flores said, annoyed that she always seemed to feel the need to be disagreeable
simply as a matter of course. “This is an informal visit. It’s a personal
matter. There is no easy way to say this, I’m afraid. Your brother’s body was
found in the jungle outside the Venezuelan camp.”
    Arianna provided
no reaction. Flores simply confirmed what she already knew, and she’d already
unleashed her grief. She spent the previous night alone, crying and screaming,
wanting to tear her guts out. There were fresh cuts in the exposed flesh of her
arms, where she’d pressed the blade of the straight razor deep and sliced, out
of the need for some outlet through which to unleash the rage surging inside
her. She’d finally exhausted herself and fell asleep covered in blood and tears.
The worst was waking up, the couple of seconds of peace and normalcy in the
morning, followed by the realization that it hadn’t been a nightmare, and then
the agony seized her again.
    Aware of Flores’
eyes on the fresh wounds, she self-consciously covered her arms in front of her,
internally reprimanded herself for doing so, seeing the move as a sign of
weakness, and asked, “Where is the body now?”
    “I have arranged
for the return of your brother’s remains to Jasminia.”
    This was a small
hamlet in the north, the closest thing to a home Arianna ever had to return to
the over past fifteen years. Now, without Aarón, the place was nothing. She
didn’t she think she had any reason to return now.
     “He will be
given a proper military burial with full honors.”
    That meant
little to Arianna. Symbolic gestures were without value, and no one would care,
anyway. She needed to think ahead, to the future.
    “What will
happen next?”
    “Members of the
Secretariat are in discussions with Caracas to formulate a political as well as
tactical response to this provocation,” Flores said. “As far as the latter, I
imagine that you would care to extract some measure of retribution on behalf of
your brother. It is apparent that Emilio Reyes was betrayed. Finding the spy is
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