Between Two Scorpions

by Jim Geraghty

  He chuckled the whole way home. American Chicano activists in the 1960s and 1970s had spoken of “Aztlan”—the name of the ancestral home of the Aztecs—to refer to the lands of Northern Mexico taken by the United States in the Mexican–American War. They had begun a largely fruitless movement claiming all of the American Southwest and West and either returning it to Mexico or forming an independent state. Despite leadership conferences and campus protests by groups such as MEChA, the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, not much had come of it, other than a resolution renaming the group Movimiento Estudiantil Chican@ de Aztlán, after concluding that the term “Chicano” was gender-exclusionary.

  What Jaguar saw in his vision was not Aztlán, a silly crusade of hapless activists, trying to persuade prosperous Latino Americans to secede from the world’s superpower and align themselves with a chaotic basket case of nation. What he saw was a strong, orderly, prosperous, culturally ascendant society that was the envy of its neighbors—one that would make the like-minded and – blooded to petition to join Restaurada Imperio Azteca—the Restored Aztec Empire.

  Jaguar only told a few people about his vision, and other than Esmerelda, no one believed he had seen the future—even after archaeologists discovered another, bigger rack of skulls while excavating a courtyard behind Mexico City Cathedral in 2015. In years of work, the archaeologists had uncovered thousands of skulls of men, women, and children. The accounts of the Conquistadors described towers of skulls, displaying more than 100,000 human sacrifices, but historians had concluded that those were mythical, or at most a wild exaggeration. Now the historians were not so sure.

  Jaguar had done considerable work for the Zeta cartel in recent years, finding the men they sought, and ensuring the men they wanted to disappear were never found. Working with them, he knew the best ways into the United States. He knew the drug trade inside and out and could navigate the dangerous waters of freelancing and territorial disputes. Better to remain a free agent, for hire to anyone, enjoying the fruits of a reputation as a quiet, thoroughly professional operator. The work had brought him considerable creature comforts, such as his luxury condo and boat, and now, a strikingly attractive girlfriend, Esmerelda. Everyone mistook her for a model or actress, but Jaguar knew she was like him, a survivor. Most other men were entranced by her eyes, her lips, her cleavage; it all distracted from her true nature that was more akin to a coiled cobra.

  Jaguar built up a reputation as a thorough professional, usually quiet, until an employer asked or provided an opening for his seemingly crazy ideas of bringing the United States to its knees through a drug smuggler work stoppage, or the Mexican government and Catholic Church someday being replaced by the return of the Aztec Empire and its ancient gods.

  He continually studied the art of leverage, intimidation, and interrogation. He saw what men did when exposed to 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate—the banned chemical weapon Agent 15, rumored to be available from the right unscrupulous source in either Libya or what was left of Syria. He learned “infrasound”—sounds lower in frequency than 20 hertz per second—could instill a prisoner with anxiety, dread, and fear. (One theory suggested that the sound wave hitting the cornea created false or illusory visions out the corner of the eye, leading to ghost sightings.) The discontinued drug Compazine, designed to treat schizophrenia, could induce panic attacks in certain patients.

  He learned which drugs could make a man talk and which ones could silence him forever.

  He learned his effective work using these materials had attracted the interest of someone named “Akoman.” Hezbollah vouched for him to the Zetas; the Zetas reached out to Jaguar. Akoman apparently was quite generous with his finder’s fee.

  Jaguar met him nearly a year ago. Akoman waited for him in a Mexico City café, unbothered by the early summer heat.

  Akoman was tall and lean, with a long, tan face, and black mustache and goatee. Jaguar had a hard time nailing down his age—late thirties? Forties? A well-kept fifty? He could be Turkish, Iranian, Armenian, or Azeri, Jaguar calculated. If Hezbollah had vouched for him, he had to be Iranian, he concluded.

  Akoman rose and gracefully removed a white trilby—a narrow-rimmed fedora—revealing a shaved head. He wore a collared short-sleeved shirt with a black-and-white zigzag pattern and tan khakis—just stylish enough in the café they had chosen for their meeting but not too much.

  “You come highly recommended,” Akoman said in English, and Jaguar suspected from his accent that his potential employer had been educated in a British school.

  After both men had exchanged pleasantries, Akoman asked Jaguar if, given basic health information about the target, he could engineer a dose of a drug that would quickly induce a panic attack. The pair discussed dosage and delivery methods. Jaguar didn’t ask the target’s identity, just age, body mass, known allergies, general state of health, and so on. He answered the questions honestly, pointing out that physiology and pharmacology were complicated subjects, and that even expert doctors couldn’t guarantee a particular reaction.

  Akoman had brought some of his own research—translated, Jaguar surmised from the grammar and phrasing. Akoman wanted to give a dose to a fifty-some male, Caucasian, between two hundred and two hundred fifty pounds, no known health ailments beyond potential hypertension from a stressful lifestyle. The great challenge, Akoman finally elaborated, was that this was not an interrogation. The target had to be given the drug secretly and unknowingly in a public place. There wouldn’t be a second chance.

  Their conversations continued, gradually elaborating on potential options. Akoman generously compensated Jaguar for every “consulting session.” They concluded their best chance of cooking up a drug to achieve Akoman’s goal would require a pharmacological specialist. A bit of web searching turned up an aging hippie who promoted recreational use of LSD and other hallucinogens.

  Akoman had a spectacularly simple method for secure communications. He was wary about electronic communications, e-mail, texting, even using the phone. He said he was familiar with the far-reaching methods of America’s National Security Agency and preferred the ultimate in low-tech evasion: the postage system.

  “Mail can be read,” Jaguar cautioned. “It is not unheard of in my country, or the United States for that matter, for someone to open your mail.”

  “Oh, I prefer postcards,” Akoman chuckled. “Let them read. If you seem to have nothing to hide, no one cares.”

  So they communicated by postcard, offering regular updates, using general language about “the weather,” “meetings,” “friends,” and how the “medication” was working. When things had to be more specific, they used a pictogram of doodles in the margins. Jaguar, the trained intelligence professional, marveled at the effectiveness of hiding in plain sight. As far as he could tell, their communications never metaphorically pinged the radar screens of any intelligence or law enforcement agency. Their postcards just swam in the schools of junk mail fish.

  Months later, Akoman and Jaguar acquired their pharmacological specialist, and after initial difficulties, he proved sufficiently motivated to assist them. Jaguar met Akoman’s associate—a remarkably quiet, short gentleman who went by the name Azi Dhaka. After they had acquired their “panic in a jar,” Jaguar helped Dhaka across the border, where he disappeared, as scheduled, in Houston. Jaguar offered a great deal of advice about how to operate within the United States without running into local law enforcement, and Dhaka merely listened intently, nodded, and offered a curt “thank you.” Jaguar began to suspect Akoman and Dhaka knew almost everything they needed to know already.

  CHAPTER 23

  At Langley, Acting Director Richard Mitchell had actually used the term “all hands on deck” in his first address to CIA employees. But several long days of research proved surprisingly fruitless. Every available staffer within the Agency’s walls spent the day reviewing previous intelligence files for anything resembling the actions of the group now called Atarsa. So far Atarsa seemed sui generis—
borrowing bits and pieces of ideas and methods from a wide variety of past terror groups, and then executing a spectacularly high-profile method of communicating threats to the American public.

  Much to the confusion of the analysts, Atarsa hadn’t yet followed up their initial threatening message with attacks on Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, and Jones. Some argued that this indicated that the group had an initial plan, but something had gone wrong. Others wondered if Director Peck was a target of opportunity for the group. But the Deputy Director of Analysis pointed out that a plot to successfully poison a CIA director required exceptional planning and resources. Peck’s toxicology report came back with some traces of 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, but the medical analysis suggested he had been hit by some sort of new, intense hallucinogen. The scribbled notes in Francis Neuse’s diary offered some intriguing avenues of investigation for the medical staff treating Peck, who was gradually becoming calmer and more lucid with each passing day.

  Despite their recovery of Neuse’s diary, Raquel’s group was repeatedly told by the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the International Operations Center, the Directorate of Operations, the Seventh Floor, and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force to shut up and go away. Politely.

  CHAPTER 24

  MONDAY, MARCH 22

  That night Alec dreamed he was being chased by owls and snakes that flew through the air. But sleep did the trick; the subconscious mind sorted through his chaotic visions and experiences of recent days and he awoke at four a.m., inexplicably energized and inspired.

  Alec got dressed, kissed Katrina as she slept, then hopped into his car. Within twenty minutes he was bursting through the office door.

  He found Dee sleeping in her cubicle, a windbreaker upon her chest as a blanket. Her husband must be an exceptionally patient man, he thought. Then again, a little workaholism was a small price to pay for life with a bubbly blond curvaceous genius. For about ten seconds, he watched her sleep. The excited look on his face faded a bit; he studied her closed eyes and knew she deserved rest for her relentless work in the past weeks. He departed the office, went down the hall, and returned a few minutes later with two cups of meh-at-best coffee, quickly brewed in the office machine. He gently jostled her arm.

  “Dee! Dee! Wake up! I’ve got it!” She awoke with a start, looked around in panic for a moment, then realized where she was and that it was Alec. He held up the cup of coffee.

  “I’ll get you a cappuccino when Starbucks opens in a few hours,” he apologized in advance. She sipped and winced, but the quick shot of caffeine got a few more neurons to snap into place and start connecting.

  “I’m running every search algorithm I can on the NSA intercepts for the past six months,” she began. “We’re talking an ungodly amount of data—”

  Alec held up his hands in a stop motion and grinned with pride. “We may not need all that. We’ve got the best clue of all. Neuse.”

  “What?”

  “The dead guy we found on the island. The NSA has a backdoor into Google searches, right?”

  It was if someone had flipped a switch; Dee reverted to rote public relations rhetoric. “Alec,” she said, straightening her posture. “You know that sort of baseless allegation from scurrilous foreign intelligence disinformation operations and their puppets is vehemently denied by the intelligence community. The PRISM system is operated in complete accordance with all relevant US laws—”

  Alec waived his hand. “Yeah, yeah, and there’s no Area 51, all the witnesses saw was the planet Venus and swamp gas and a weather balloon, and the secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions. Listen, we need to know anyone who googled Francis Neuse in the three months before his kidnapping.” Alec had already checked on his home laptop before heading to work; Neuse’s public profile had virtually dried up in the years since Timothy Leary died.

  She nodded. “I can do that, but … he was still a semi-public figure. You’re probably going to get, I don’t know, dozens of people, maybe hundreds.”

  “And how many people who used a particular computer to run a Google search on Neuse would also be doing similar research into pharmacology, fear-inducing drugs, that sort of thing? Maybe even looking for a remote island on Google Maps?”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Significantly fewer.”

  “And what happens if you match anything you find with the financial information we found for ‘J.C. Lopez’?”

  Dee blinked, and suddenly looked irritated. “You have no idea how embarrassed I am that you thought of this first.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Jaguar was certain he wasn’t being led into a trap. But that didn’t mean he felt particularly secure in his decision to accept Akoman’s invitation to meet, halfway across the globe.

  Turkmenistan was the North Korea of Central Asia. If it were not for the country’s enormous oil and natural gas reserves, the country’s entire paranoid kleptocracy would have come crashing down years ago. Citizens received free gasoline, and certain sectors of the economy boomed, thanks to giant contracts with Russia, China, and Iran. The country’s abundant resources reached the Caspian Sea through canals.

  But for most of the country, that free gas came at a steep price. Controlled by Moscow during the Cold War, citizens of Turkmenistan somehow missed out on any genuine liberation after the Soviet Union collapsed. Sure, independence arrived in 1991, but the country just replaced the oppression of communism with a thoroughly bonkers cult of personality. The Communist Party changed its name to the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan and maintained the same monopoly on all government power. There was no press freedom, routine oppression of activists and antigovernment speech and little to no outside scrutiny. Some argued that Turkmenistan welcomed fewer foreign visitors than any other country in the world.

  The country had just two presidents since 1985—first Saparmurat Niyazov, who guided the country from despotic Communist rule to his despotic independent rule, and his successor, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. Jaguar wondered if he had been named when a bag of Scrabble letters spilled in random order.

  Niyazov and Berdymukhamedov weren’t relentlessly barbaric or cruel, but they had some infamous moments. In 2005, Niyazov exercised his dictatorial power by closing all hospitals outside the capital and all rural libraries. Sometimes the pair were just weird, such as their shared pride that the capital city featured more white marble buildings, memorials, and sculptures than anywhere else on earth. When the sculptures weren’t marble, they were gold; an enormous golden statue of the president greeted visitors, a twisted mirror-universe version of the Statue of Liberty.

  Jaguar was on guard as a foreign national entering a country with a paranoid, unpredictable state security system. Akoman had assured him repeatedly that he would be treated with every conceivable hospitality during his visit.

  Turkmenistan practiced “permanent neutrality” in all foreign affairs—although the government was sometimes flexible in its definition of neutrality. Their most important decision in the past decades was letting the United States use Ashgabat Airport for refueling and shipping supplies into Afghanistan. But a long border with Iran ensured the regime felt the need for good relations with Tehran, as well. Jaguar increasingly suspected that Akoman had friends in high places in both Turkmenistan and Iran.

  Jaguar knew his fake passports were as good as they got—that is, authentic ones, duplicate identities he had created at CISN, meaning he legally existed under a half-dozen names in Mexico’s census. Once the border patrol officer at the visa counter checked his name, he waved over porters and treated him like a distinguished guest. A driver was waiting for him, and he was rapidly ushered into downtown on roads that seemed surprisingly empty for a capital city.

  Jaguar checked into the similarly eerily quiet luxury hotel downtown and took a lengthy nap.

  Within a few hours, Jaguar’s jet lag had passed. Akoman’s postcard had left a clear schedule for his trip out of the city. He drove in a prearranged rental car north of th
e city, into the vast Karakum Desert. Akoman’s last postcard told him to head down this road; his destination, their meeting place, was described simply, “you will know it when you see it.”

  Late afternoon turned to dusk, and then Jaguar finally saw it … on the horizon, the left side of the road seemed to be on fire.

  As he approached, he realized it was a circle of glowing fire—a giant crater. Jaguar wondered if he had somehow stumbled on a meteorite strike. As he drove closer, he realized the circle burned perfectly, with more fires burning within the crater. No smoke, though, which was strange. And then the smell hit him. Sulfur.

  No one remembered exactly how the Darvaza crater was formed, but the most common story was that a Soviet drilling team had been exploring, searching for oil, and had found a pocket of natural gas. It turned out to be a bubble, and the drilling rig sank into the hole. The Soviets saw the pit filling with methane and noxious gases and lit it to burn it off … and the crater just kept on burning. All through the night, the next day … and for the next forty years.

  The crater was massive—225 feet wide and about 100 feet deep. The heat, if one stood close enough, could cause blisters. Even at night, the area seemed surprisingly well lit, as if a thousand tiny campfires burned around the circle. As Jaguar got out of the car, he heard it—the roar, like a jet engine, all of these high-pressure gas-burning plumes burning simultaneously. Yet there was no smoke; the air shimmered with heat distortions.

  The endlessly burning crater was unique and had been, until a few years back, a bit of a tourist attraction with nicknames like “the Pit of Fire” and “the Gates of Hell.” A combination of Turkmeni government paranoia and terrorist threats against Americans traveling abroad had slowly choked off the flow of tourists. Jaguar stood, transfixed, mystified, impressed, until he sensed figures approaching the darkness beyond the crater.