“What exactly does ‘secure the area’ mean anyway?” I ask inquisitively.
“Well, like I said. I kept on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary.”
“Like what?”
“To be more specific, we would look for people that were not supposed to be in the launch area; especially those people with questionable motives, tools, implements, or weapons of destructive means.
“When I got near the area from where the light came from, I came upon a man wearing a long overcoat and a hat standing there.
“His hat was like one of those Humphrey Bogart hats they used to wear in the 1930s and 1940s.
“The man started to run, and I called to him to stop. He stopped for a moment, like he was some kind of statue.
I was still fifty or so yards away, when all at once he spiraled around, and pointed what looked like a large weapon at me. The next thing I am conscious of is waking up in a hospital bed recovering from first and second degree burns.” he unbuttons his shirt. He shows me the burn scars on his torso and neck, then rolls up his sleeves and his pant legs to show me the disfiguring damage scorched into his arms and legs.
“I guess you know Steve, you are fortunate to still be alive.”
“If you saw the jeep I was driving, you would swear that there could be no way I could have lived through that blast, or whatever it was,” he concurs.
“Tell me. Did you get close enough to see the guy that shot you?” I ask.
“I know what you’re thinking Matt that I was too far away to make a clear ID of this guy. But I’ve been an FBI agent for twenty years, and there is one thing I’ve become an expert in, the recognition of faces. I couldn’t forget that face of his if I tried. I’ll never forget that face.” He rubs his face and eyes and crosses his leg over the other, looking weary and haggard.
“Besides, I got the privilege of seeing him a second time,” he informs me.
“You did? You saw him again?” He has my full attention.
“Remember the World Trade Center explosion, the first one, the one in the parking basement?” he begins.
“Yes, I remember.”
“I was only four blocks away when that bomb went off.” He strokes his chin and goes into deep thoughtful reflection for a moment before he continues.
“After I heard the bomb go off, I instinctively ran towards the Trade Center. After I had run two blocks I saw a man about a block ahead of me, running right towards me. He looked like he was running away from something or somebody.
“Just before we met, he turned into an alley and I called out to him. He turned around for a split second and looked at me in response to my call. It was him. It was the same man that shot me at Cape Canaveral! I tried to run after him, but he turned a corner and was gone in an instant.
“The next week I received my first death threat. It was a simple piece of paper slipped under my front door.” He pauses. He stretches his neck and looks nervously out the window beside him. Satisfied at what he sees or doesn’t see, he continues.
“About one month after I received the death threat, I came home to my apartment late one night. For some reason things didn’t seem right. It gave me such a creepy feeling; I even unholstered my gun. I guess it is just my suspicious nature. I looked around the apartment for a few minutes, but everything looked in order.
“Later when I was getting ready for bed, I was taking off my watch and dropped it on the carpet. When I bent over to pick it up, I noticed wires that were no bigger than threads, running from underneath the comforter of the bed, trailing down to underneath the bed.
I looked underneath the bed and found, in the middle of the space of the bed, what looked like a wad of putty attached to a 9 Volt battery, with a blinking red light on top.”
“A bomb?” I have been taken by surprise.
“Yes, a bomb; the kind that blows a person into oblivion. If I hadn’t have seen the wire, I would have laid myself down to sleep and never woke up again.” He pauses once again and yells something to his maid, and then continues.
“I didn’t really know which wire to clip to disable the bomb, so I took a chance and just happened to clip the right wire, and the blinking stopped.
“So you see Matt, I know who is responsible for shooting down the shuttle and who is probably responsible for blowing up the basement of the World Trade Center. Our friend can’t afford to allow me to stay alive to tell others about it.
From what you have told me about your encounters with him, he really can’t afford to have you around too much longer either,” he pessimistically asserts. The maid comes in and serves each of us another beer.
“What I don’t understand is, if this guy is responsible for things like blowing up the World Trade Center basement, airline disasters, and who knows what else. How is it that someone else always seems to get the blame for it? Why is it that the media or the government has failed to pick up on the truth? Is it some kind of conspiracy, or is this guy really good at shifting the blame onto someone else?” I wonder.
“I have asked myself that same question a hundred times. I’ve seen a lot of things swept under the rug in my years with the FBI. The reason that things are covered up the way they are, is so that the public in general has the perception that everything is under control. It’s window dressing, Mr. Brooks, pure window dressing and politics.”
“What do you mean by that, exactly?”
“No government, including the United States, can afford to look weak in front of the whole world. So when you have an enemy that is too concealed or too illusive to chastise, punish, or execute retribution upon for some offense imposed against you, you may have to pick an enemy that you can more easily swat instead. You pick an enemy you can easily swat and swat good, so the world can see you swatting somebody for the offense, even though it may have had nothing to do with the offense.”
“I’m not sure I follow you, Steve.”
“Well, it’s kind of like when a big bear gets stung by a bee. Of course it hurts the bear and it makes him real mad. So the big bad bear tries to use his huge powerful paws full of claws to swat at the bee. The problem is that, that little bee is so small and illusive, so artfully dodging and evasive; the bear’s immense power has no effect upon the tiny bee.
“The big old bear stops what he is doing and notices that all the woodland creatures are watching to see what he will do next. Afraid that his reputation of being a big bad bear is at stake, he goes out to find a more docile animal that is much easier to apprehend and take out his vengeance out upon. When he finally finds one, he then attacks and destroys the creature. Then all of the woodland animals in the forest agree once again that the bear is still big and bad.”
“OK, I think I see what you’re getting at. If you are a government or government agency, and some incident creates the possibility of making you look foolish, awkward, and weak. If possible, you divert things so that you will continue to look strong, in charge, and in control.”
“That’s right. In my case, when my superiors found out that some guy with a weapon, shot a beam of light and blew up the space shuttle, they had to make up a more believable and palatable story that the public would accept.
“If someone has the power to do certain deeds in unheard of ways, they have a very good chance of accomplishing their deeds undetected. And if things are accomplished in unbelievable ways, people tend to make up more believable ways to account for them. I think our man here is very skillful. The problem is that he is very skillful in destruction and deceit. For what reason or purpose we may never know.
“So what now?” I ask.
“Try and stay alive,” he replies.
“Why Costa Rica?”
“I decided that it was a good remote place. It is a good place for working at staying alive.”
“Of course it helps to have a few bodyguards with AK-47s.”
“You’re right about that Matt.” He pauses for a moment, looks out the window, and then continues.
&
nbsp; “I have helped quite a few bad guys go to jail in the last twenty years or so. It’s not like the old days. They don’t put them away forever, like they used to. That in itself is enough to make an old FBI man wary. I want it to be a little difficult for them to visit me when they get out of the hoosegow, if you know what I mean,” he jests dryly.
“You must be tired Matt. You can bed down in there, first door to your right,” he points down a narrow hallway stippled with raw sienna stucco. If you want, I’ll take you on a little tour around the place in the morning after breakfast. This is a beautiful place. It’s not very often I am able to put on my hospitable clothes,” he offers graciously.
“Sounds good. I look forward to it.”
I lay there under the mosquito netting, watching the ceiling fan revolve slowly, sweating copiously, and dozing in and out of cognizance.
Somewhere in the middle of the lurk of night, I am awakened by a nightmarish dream. I have been cast into a cold damp deep dark dungeon, where rats and other vile flesh-eating organisms begin to feed upon my bodily tissue. I suddenly am awake, and for a moment not realizing where I am. Then I remember. I am in bed somewhere in the middle of a Costa Rican jungle.
I relax once again and try to concentrate on sleep. I hear what sounds like a beer bottle clinking in the living room. ‘The man must be afraid to go to sleep.’ I listen for few more moments, and then drift off into oblivion.
Suddenly, I am abruptly awakened by the sound of several bottles being knocked over. I hear Riker telling a bodyguard that he is gong to take a walk. The bodyguard argues with Riker that at least one of them should go with him on his walk.
“I said ‘no’. Do you know what ‘no’ means?” Riker slurs insultingly. By the sound of it, Riker is inebriated beyond reason.
“I won’t go far.” I hear him promise.
“I’m just going a hundred little yards down to the creek. I’ve got to get out of this dungeon before I go mad,” he grumbles sarcastically.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”
Some time in the early trough of morning, I am suddenly slapped awake once again by the sounds of distant machine gun fire, then the sounds of boots cobbling off of the porch.
I lay there in a state of purgatory, half of my mind in a tranquil bliss of sleep, the other half painfully and reluctantly aware of my surroundings. Off in the distance I hear men shouting something in Spanish; others respond in kind, then another round of machine gun fire.
I catapult off of the bed, my heart pumping hard. The back of my shirt is glued to my skin by the adhesion of its copious moisture. My head pounds in protest and I find that I have arisen from bed too fast, and suddenly feel as though I am about to pass out. ‘Too many cervezas,’ I complain to myself. I then hear another report of machine gun fire.
Adrenaline transforms all remnants of sleep into total cognitive readiness. I open the door just a crack and look out into the living room. I see a large stack of beer bottles next to the chair Riker had been sitting in earlier. I open the door a little wider and decide no one is there.
Far off, I hear men yelling at one another. I cautiously walk through the living room, my eyes darting everywhere as I move through the room heading towards the front screen door.
I reach the screen door and peer out beyond into the darkness of night. I open the screen door, looking left and then right, then step out onto the porch.
Suddenly one of Riker’s men appears from the dark shadow of a tree out beyond the muted diffused porch light. Startled by my unexpected emergence, he raises his weapon and aims at me. My heart skips a beat; my stomach feels as though I am helplessly falling. All I can think of saying is, “It’s me!”
For a long moment it looks as though he will shoot me. Then a look of recognition comes over his face. At last he lowers his aim and weapon to his side.
“¡Permanezca aquí, no mueva!” I lift my hands and shrug my shoulders.
“No comprenda,” I reply.
“You stay no move. You stay,” he orders, his arm outstretched, his hand emphatically pointing at me in gesture. He steps back into the darkness and disappears from my sight.
The night is still and quiet once again. Because of the earlier disturbance, all night creatures had paused their utterance. Now the sound of crickets and bullfrogs once again occupies the night.
The guard suddenly reappears from the dark once again and motions to me to come over.
I hesitate for a moment, and then move toward him. He clicks on his flashlight and I follow his lead through a field and then into a nearby woods.
Soon the flashlight projects its light upon a giant Banyan tree with its finger-like rootlet vines stringing down to the ground.
With the flashlight, the guard moves the beam of light up the trunk of the monstrous tree until it reaches one of its large bow appendages. He then follows the arm of the tree out to its middle. There, hanging from this living wooden gallows is Riker, with a one-inch knotted rope around his neck.
As I look upon the horror before me I suck in a deep gasp of shock. Riker’s eyes are peacefully closed and the slight remains of a cynical smile rest upon his mouth. It looks as if Riker is messaging to us, that even in death he finds all of this rather amusing.
After making sure that all intruders either have escaped or are no more, the other guards appear and begin the grisly job of cutting Riker down from the tree.
“Who did this?” I shout.
I look at each guard individually until one of the guards shrugs his shoulders and says, “Enemy, Riker enemy come.” The others shake their heads in agreement.
“Sí señor, Riker enemy,” they all say in unison.
Two of the men pick up Riker’s body from the ground, and we begin our return trek back to the house. One man walks out in front with a flashlight illuminating the trail, the remainder of the guards walk cautiously, with their weapons raised, ready for what might come. I walk behind them all.
A million horrifying thoughts crowd my mind, but I am too numb to analyze any of them to a conclusion, except for one. In this world, life can change or come to an end very abruptly.
With the aid of Sergio, one of Riker’s bodyguards, I make my way back to the Juan Santa Maria airport in San Jose. Sergio pulls the rusted and decomposing Datsun flatbed truck up to the curb of the departure terminal, and stomps down on the brake with his worn combat boot.
“Thank you so much for helping me get back, Sergio.” He slightly nods in the affirmative.
“Since Riker is dead, you and your friends could have easily left me high and dry. Here, I want you to have this for your trouble.” I hand over to him a fifty-dollar bill.
He looks over at the money in my hand and then into my eyes, then shakes his head.
“No señor. Riker my friend. He say, take good care of you.
Honor to help you,” he tells me proudly.
“He pay me very well too.” His mouth emerges into a large toothy grin, exposing a single gold tooth in front that resides amongst several vacant gummed spaces. I shake his hand and I am on my way, leaving the disturbing reminiscence of the past few days of Costa Rica behind me.
§
TWENTY SEVEN
On the plane back to civilization, I find I cannot get the image of Riker hanging by his neck from that jungle tree out of my head.
Do I dare suppose that the someone who murdered Riker is the same man that has threatened and sworn to kill me? It seems undeniable. Am I next? The graphic way in which Riker was killed shouts an answer of ‘yes’, with an exclamation point.
He was hung for two reasons, to get rid of a witness to crime, and to give announcement to my soon coming surmise. What can I do to dissuade him from his intentions? How can I despoil his insidious plans? Be watchful? Riker was as watchful as a sane man could have been. Maybe he was a little careless, yet still far more prepared and watchful than I could ever hope to be.
I am a doomed man, or do I have a card or two yet to play before al
l is lost? It is a game of wits, and I have got to keep my wits about me, if I am going to win this game. If I allow fear and anxiety to take over, it would be the same as taking a dive and throwing the game.
As the plane pulls up to the gate, I look at my watch. It is ten in the morning. I haven’t really slept for over twenty-four hours, except for the time on the plane when I laid my head down on the pull down tray and dozed off for a few moments. I would love to go home and sleep in my own bed for a few hours, but I’ve got work to do. I’ve got to see if I can somehow get this shadowy adversary to come out into the open and show his soft underbelly. Exhausted, I head to The Herald.
Double-takes and stares greet me as I enter the office and make a beeline to my desk. Once again, I have forgotten my outward appearance. I must look like a homeless person, I suggest to myself. I detour into the men’s room and take stock of myself. Besides the mussed up hair, the blood stains on my shirt, the dirt-smudged trousers, ripped pocket on my coat, and the award-winning sweat rings under my arms, I don’t look too bad. I decode that I perhaps should freshen up just to be on the safe side.
No matter how much I have endeavored to clean up, I still reek of someone that has slept a night in the jungle and a day on a plane. Just as I decide it would be best to go home to shower and change, Kelly sashays around the corner and spots me right away. She walks quickly up to me, her arms outstretched.
“Hello stranger,” she smiles. “You’ve been gone so long I forgot you still worked here.” She grabs a hold of me and administers a friendship hug. I respond with my arms hung open, trying not to contaminate her any more than necessary. Of all people to greet me with a hug, while reeking of the fragrance of a garbage-dump and horse stables combined.
“Whew! Matthew Brooks! You smell like an old horse, a very old horse.”
“OK let me have it. I know I should have gone home first and showered. I’m sorry, but I haven’t stopped to change or shower. I have been wallowing around in some God forsaken jungle and trying to sleep on the plane for twenty-four hours. If you’d just been through what I have, you probably wouldn’t smell like a rose either, no matter how beautiful you are.”
Wyatt, Richard Page 27
