The next morning, I woke up early and headed off to Venezuela. I wasn’t ready to rescue Samuel or anyone else, but I needed more information and I couldn’t wait anymore. I’d left things too long with Evan and I didn’t want to make the same mistake again. I left dad a note that I’d be out all day running errands and drove my borrowed car to the airport. My R1 backpack was sitting insubstantially on my shoulders and I had filled it the morning before with prepared meals, snacks, water, and some of Howie’s gadgets.
With tensions between the United States and Venezuela running high these days, I was surprised that there were still any flights to Caracas out of Charlotte. Sure, they only had direct flight on weekends, but given all the troubles going on in Venezuela, I couldn’t understand why anyone was going there at all. Those direct flights were a lifesaver though, as they took only a little over four hours. With stopovers the travel time would have been over fifteen hours and there was no way that I could disappear from home for two days. As it was, I was going to have to hurry to make it back in time for the return flight. I had just over five hours to get to the prison, get the information I needed, and get back to the airport. Since I wasn’t on the passenger list, no one was going to hold the plane on my account.
I spent the entire flight in L1. With rock hard seats, it wasn’t comfortable, but it was quiet and I did manage to sleep for a few hours. I made a note to bring a pillow next time. The rest of the time I looked out the window and marveled at the fact that I was in a plane that to all appearance was flying itself over a world where humanity did not exist. It was still strange to me how fixed layers of reality combined to form a reality where change was possible and those changes forced change to occur in the layers. Each layer built upon the last layer until we had a world where people lived. Those people were able to move and create objects that then appeared or moved within their respective layers. L3 was a layer that had none of these objects but provided the base for them to exist. L2 contained more immovable structures, such as houses and buildings that appeared in L2, as if by magic, as they were constructed in reality. L1 had the base, the immovable structures, and the moveable elements, such as cars and buses and these would move around in tandem with the ones in reality. In practical terms that meant that I could go to a construction site in L2 and watch a building come into existence out of thin air. Every day it would just get a little taller or a little more finished. It was massively cool to watch portions of a building simply appear out of nowhere.
The plane landed safely and I shifted to R1 to follow my fellow passengers as they gathered their belongings and made their way off of the plane. I could have just stayed in L1, but I’d never been to this airport before and it was easier to simply follow the crowd to the exit, especially since my Spanish wasn’t very good and I couldn’t ask anyone for directions.
Eventually I found my way to the rental car area of the airport and after watching how the rental agencies operated for a several minutes, I used a field to shift a set of car keys to R1. The keys were to a small sedan that was schedule for pick-up in an hour and it was already gassed up and ready to go in their small lot just outside the rental office. I found the car and when no one was looking my way, I shifted the car to R1, got in and drove away. Yes, it was technically stealing, but my plan was to return the car in a few hours and leave some money behind for its use. Maybe the rental company would get the money or maybe it would go into the pocket of one of its employees. I can’t be held responsible for someone else’s theft.
As soon as I was out of sight of the rental company, I shifted myself and the car to reality. I would have liked to spend my entire time in Venezuela in one of the layers, but I couldn’t get directions from my phone if I was in one of the layers. Waze was able to get me close to the prison in less than half an hour.
With two miles of curving narrow road left until I reached the prison, I slipped back into R1. I’d been driving through a forested area for the past few minutes and I hadn’t seen any other cars for awhile. I figured that a lone car passing by a prison might attract the attention of any guards. I watched the odometer count off the miles and the prison quickly came into view.
A sixteen-foot grey stone wall, topped with razor wire and surveillance cameras, surrounded the prison. Over the edge of the wall and seemingly set at least two hundred feet inside the perimeter, I could make out the tops of a few buildings and several manned guard towers. I parked the rental (Can you still call it a ‘rental’ when you’ve stolen it? Maybe it’s a ‘stolen’.) at the main gate and shifted it to L2 while I walked past guards with machine guns. A shift to R2 and I was through the entry gates and heading across a cleared area towards a squat two story building that seemed to be the prisoner intake and administration building. The lack of bars across the windows was the best clue that it didn’t house any prisoners.
Looking around, I could see six other buildings in two neat rows of three. These long buildings were all identical to each other except for a letter over the entrance. The building were labelled A through F and were each five stories tall with steel bars across all their windows. Judging by the barred windows that were set at ground levels, each building also had a basement level. The prison had a military feel to it and I wondered if it was a repurposed army base. There were certainly an army of guards keeping watch over the place.
Spending the next few hours running from building to building and floor to floor looking for Samuel didn’t seem like a good way to spend my time. The administration building would surely have a list of all the prisoners and their locations and would probably have a record of why they were here. That’s what I was after. Those records would let my team back home figure out how many people we needed to rescue. Maybe, if I were lucky, the place would be filled solely with rapists and murderers and I’d only need to get Samuel out. Somehow though, I knew that wouldn’t be the case. The Venezuelan government had detained and imprisoned a lot of foreigners during their roundups and there was a good chance that if Samuel were here, then at least some of the others would be as well.
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Having broken into dozens of offices and a few police stations in the past, I had developed a general plan of attack. My first priority was finding the computer server and getting the administrator password. Once I had access to the server, I’d set up Howie’s miracle hard drive to start copying it and I’d let that run while I looked for any physical files that might be of use.
The prison server room was surprisingly clean and well organized. My preconceptions of Venezuela had led me to expect a rats nest of wires and cobbled equipment all held together by duct tape. I’d forgotten that Venezuela, before socialism had set in and ruined everything, had been one of the wealthiest nations in South America. The server room obviously harkened back to those days of less limited budgets. I’d seen quite a few fortune 500 companies with server rooms that didn’t compare to this one and I started to wonder what a prison would need such an impressive bank of servers for. I guess that a lot of the servers were used for the security cameras, but even then, there were far too many racks.
Putting aside those thoughts for later, I found the administrator on duty and set up my video camera to watch his every keystroke, waiting for him to enter his password. I set my phone alarm for half an hour. If he didn’t put in his password by the time the alarm went off, I’d have to take a chance and interrupt the power to his computer and force it to reboot. This would force him to put in his password and I’d get it on video. Luckily, I didn’t have to do that as the system was set to automatically prompt the user to put in a username and password every so often, probably every half hour, and I only had to wait ten minutes until the prompt came on and I had it.
I plugged Howie’s hard drive into the main server and set it to start copying. There were a lot of files and the drive let me know that it would take about two hours. That was ok. I had plenty to do.
From Shauna’s information about this prison, I already suspected that their main computer system wasn’t connected to the internet at all, but I wanted to make sure that I had a way into any of computer systems that were connected and I was sure that one office in particular would have all the access I would need.
It didn’t take long to find the warden’s office. Not only did he have corner office on the second floor, but his was the only office with a secretary desk and a guard post outside the door. With it being Sunday, the warden was not in and the area outside his office was empty. That allowed me to basically stroll in through the door and phase back to reality at his desk. I didn’t think that he wouldn’t have security cameras in his own office, but I sent out my field to make sure before I phased back in.
The warden, Senor Juan Antonio Diaz, as his desk name plate showed, had left his computer on, but not logged in. I did a quick search, but he hadn’t written his password anywhere obvious for me to find. That forced my hand a little and I had to take a chance. I took out my video camera and carefully reviewed the video of the administrator login information. When I was sure that I had the correct sequence of letters, I typed them into Senor Diaz’s computer and prayed that the system didn’t have an issue with multiple, concurrent, uses of the same administrator login. If it did, then I was so screwed. I held my breath as I pushed the enter button and waited the interminable three seconds until the password field disappeared. Relief poured over me as the system unlocked and no alarms seemed to go off. I quickly plugged in another hard drive and started copying this computer as well. I also put in one of Howie’s thumb drives that would give me remote access to this computer and would set it up so that any information that was sent to me would not be logged by the system.
As my hard drive copied it’s contents, I scanned the computer to see what it had on it. It was all in Spanish and I gave up after a few seconds. Shauna was much better suited to the task than I was and I had a few other stops to make while I waited for the drives to finish.
My trip to the security offices to see what the cameras were watching changed everything. It seemed that most of the prison housed two inmates to a cell. The exception seemed to be in two of the basement levels. Whereas four of the basement levels were configured like the floors above, with dual occupied cells, two of the basement levels had sections that were mostly open, only partially divided into sleeping, eating and recreational areas. What shocked me was seeing that one of those levels had children. What the hell were children doing in a prison?
I kept watching and slowly realized that what I was seeing in that basement level were imprisoned families. Four mothers and nine children in total. No fathers. Thirteen people to rescue. How was I going to get so many people out of here?
The problem got worse as I tore my gaze away from that building and examined the other open concept basement level. No children this time, thank God, but there were eleven adults in the large room. Most of these adults looked to be Caucasian and I figured that this was the ‘detained foreigners’ section. Now I was up to twenty-four people needing rescue! I’d need a bus to get them all out of here and even then I didn’t know where to take them to. Samuel I could bring with me, but what about all the others?
One of the men in the second buildings' basement levels had features that reminded me of Shauna and I assumed that he was Samuel. I couldn’t be sure because the picture quality wasn’t the greatest. He looked ok on the video feed, if on the emaciated side. With the food shortages in Venezuela, I didn’t figure that feeding the prison inmates properly was high on their list of priorities. Except for the children, who were running around and playing with a soccer ball, all the prisoners looked worn out and hungry. None of them looked sick though and that was good because it meant that I had time to get this information to the team back home and come up with a plan. I already knew how I’d get them all out of the prison. I just didn’t know what to do with them afterwards.