We arrived at the end of a rainfall, in a modern city located between steeply rising slopes, between which the clouds form easily and get trapped there at night. The man of the conference staff told us that Caracas is strung out for many miles along the valley floor, like a sparkling jewel. None of that, of course, was apparent at the street level.



      The heat at the airport had quickly given way to the cool of the mountains on our way up to the city. We had passed through low clouds and patches of fog. By the time we reached the hotel the rain had stopped, the air was fresh and aromatic. The man even invited us to a beer. His name is Carlo, a well-dressed man in his thirties. Tony and I accepted his offer. The others did not. So, we chatted with him in the bar for nearly another hour until Tony fell asleep in his chair.

      I felt as tired when I finally got to bed, as if I hadn't slept for a month. The hotel had looked marvelous, then, my bed so inviting. Suddenly the noise started.

      It seemed to me that I had barely put my head down when I was roused by this noise to discover that our hotel room window was no more then twenty feet from the edge of the freeway pavement. Tony joked while he was still yawning, that we had the most sweeping view of rolling rubber that one could possibly hope for, all eight lanes deep.

      "Terrific!" grumbled Fred and tried to sleep again, which turned out be an impossible endeavor. It wasn't that we weren't tired enough. Apart from the noise, the place turned out to be rather uncomfortable. The six of us were cramped into a tiny double room suite. Fred, Ross, Heather, Tony and Sylvia had all come, and the hardest part was that the conference opened at noon. How could we participate in anything, in the shape we were in, or ever hope to accomplish anything that would shake the world? No one can imagine how agonizing it became that day just to stay awake for six hours listening to speeches.

     

      It took some fighting that night, pleading, bribing, hoping, and praying to get the six of us relocated to the top floor of the hotel, and as far away from the freeway as could be arranged. Fortunately this happened just in time before a part of the hotel was demolished by a terrorist blast in protest of the American participation at the conference. A bomb had gone off in the lobby below the very room that we had been in before. Thirty-five people were killed that day, thirty-three Venezuelans, a woman from India, and a boy from Columbia whose dad belonged to the FARC terrorist organization that claimed responsibility for the blast.

      Fred took the attack the hardest since we had evidently been the target. He was a nervous wreck for two days. Eventually he made a speech about it that shook the assembly. He presented hard evidence that he had gathered earlier, linking international terrorist activity with London and elsewhere. He spoke of organized networks financed from the West, operating out of centers in Syria, Iran, Libya, Italy, Cuba, Chile, Columbia, out of central Asia, out of the Caucuses, out of the Balkans, and he said that all of them had one thing in common, that their lines of communication converged at London. Their headquarters were all based in London. Their financing came through London. He emphasized again and again in his speech that London had been the world capital for organized terrorism. He charged that London had traditionally been creating wars through the bureaus of its institutions, and that this had evidently not changed.

      Actually, Fred didn't present anything new. He merely said out loud and clear what most of the delegates already knew. Many of the terrorist organizations had made no bones about their linkage to London, or to Moscow in earlier times. Many were even proud of the fact that they had the royal stamp of approval, whatever royalty they might have meant. Some had even advertised their London and Moscow affiliation, like the Italian Red Army, the West German Red Army, or the Japanese Red Army, etc. London, of course, has always defended its role in harboring terrorism, by telling the world that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. The officials said it was all a matter of perception. They should have added that the whole slew of terrorist organizations was financed out of essentially the same coffers, anyway.

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Novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche