The Harbinger of Change

by Timothy Jon Reynolds

  The EMP lab was on the first basement floor. Vera had no idea of how many basement floors there were, because all information at Conceptual was on a “need to know” basis. Workers weren’t allowed to talk about their respective projects, but that did not preclude them from talking about each other. That was how Vera had heard that the previous Project Manager was a genius named James Haberman. Apparently the man had cracked under the pressure a couple of years ago. He left and was still on sabbatical. The gossiping workers said that James Haberman was so important that Bill Westinghouse maintained his vault just in case Haberman returned.

  Of course Vera knew this information already. It was the reason Pablo had placed her at Conceptual: to steal the contents of James Haberman’s safe. The lab workers believed that Dr. Cooper had been unable to get out from Haberman’s shadow, and that was why he was such an asshole. Vera knew that one by one, Cooper had changed his staff for one reason or another (the real reason was that they had previously worked for James Haberman), until Vera got an interview for what would prove to be the last position.

  She had entered Conceptual at an entry-level position in the Laser Research Division. Pablo had special knowledge of lasers, and it was there he was sure he could get her into Conceptual. The fact their plan had progressed this far, on this track, only a mind like his could have achieved. If everything had gone right today, she would have been in Pablo’s arms by tomorrow.

  Vera looked at the dead man on the floor and started her own recalculation and tabulation. Management stopped the merry-go-round soon after she was hired. She knew she had him at the interview. She knew she had him up until the moment she plunged the knife into his heart. That look of betrayal on Danny’s face is something I will never forget, she thought to herself.

  The work on Dr. Cooper’s last three experiments was hardly a misfire by any means, and a man with less of an ego would have been very proud of himself. Instead, Dr. Cooper was constantly working in the shadow of his predecessor—not in real life because the man was gone, but in his very shallow mind, a competition was going on, and he was losing.

  Unbeknown to Conceptual Labs at this time, the design of their office was a veritable fishbowl. Vera was sure that one day they would come to the understanding that making their employees live in a glass house was what afforded her the ability to easily learn about everyone’s habits and traits.

  The two work shifts were supposed to be slightly staggered, but often that line was blurred when work ran over. Sometimes, they had everyone working all at once, depending on the deadline; but typically, there were four people working at any given time. Most days Dr. Cooper had locked his safe at seven, but sometimes they were there until as late as ten o’clock. Most of those days, Vera saw her coworkers very little, even though they were all housed in glass.

  Work schedules were grueling and their department took on the task of trying to restart a project left by none other than the “Great James Haberman.” Haberman was the one who perfected the laser that shot down the satellite from the Nevada desert many years ago.

  Everyone at Conceptual with the right clearance level knew Haberman’s sector was working on the next laser and a special EMP project when he snapped. His absence secretly put the employees at Conceptual into a funk, as everyone was sure they were watching history in the making. Haberman was that good.

  Cooper understood the concept, but the project required involving other departments, and he didn’t work well with the other project managers. Vera had overheard him mumbling once, “It’s bad enough they have to leave Haberman’s vault here, but now I have to take input he never had to deal with.” Most people learn to shut others out when they were functioning at a high speed, but Pablo had taught her that life was like chess. If a person focuses one-dimensionally, then one will overlook two thirds of the board.

  Vera had gathered the information about Dr. Cooper’s life and frequently relayed all of his idiosyncrasies to Pablo. Pablo formulated a plan, especially loving Dr. Cooper’s predictable, obsessive-compulsive behavior. Pablo taught Vera that all great minds are egocentric and typically display OCD-like behavior. He even brought her to the knowledge that Einstein was a high-functioning autistic. But it didn’t take a genius to observe that every day at two-thirty, Dr. Danny Cooper (as he liked to be called) went for a thirteen minute constitutional, a habit that had not been broken in the last year.

  As is the norm with most companies, the lunchroom at Conceptual was the epicenter of gossip, and Dr. Cooper was a frequent conversation piece. Vera, a good listener who never gossiped and never said anything negative, was like a sponge. She had absorbed many things, like how Dr. Cooper prided himself on his vegan diet and the regularity it gave him. So he would never have broken his constitutional or he would have had to admit he wasn’t perfect.

  His regularity was just the thing Pablo needed for his plan. The timing was so thin, but fortunately Danny took exactly thirteen minutes, which was the time Vera needed to do what she needed to do. It did seem a bit strange to have such monumental things come down to one small thing, but Dr. Cooper’s precise bathroom routine was what had led to their original plan.

  Now she had to have a new one.

  2 – Escape

  Pablo sat back and looked out at the noonday sun’s oppressive effects on the land. Although he was in an air-conditioned office, he could sense the heat outside just wilting the foliage. He was staying in Guayaquil temporarily, but soon he would move back to the compound near Ibarra. It was really a hacienda like no other, built in the backcountry of Ecuador. He had systematically purchased every other property in a ten-mile radius, under different aliases and blinds of course.

  He was neighborless, which was good because the construction never stopped—construction that required dump truck after dump truck of dirt to be hauled away. At last count, they had dug out all four levels and were using their imported workforce to set the facility up. Pablo knew it wouldn’t be long before they were operational. His team in Brazil had already started producing key components inside one of his software companies.

  Pablo was sitting like “The Thinker” without realizing it, lost deep in thought. I wonder how it went. How is she? He had lived with the guilt of this moment for two years now—two years and now it was here, the day of reckoning. The immoral would suffer greatly if she were successful. Of course, if she failed, then things will take quite a while longer, as one part of the plan would be altogether useless because the information lay only in James’s safe. How far had he come since the simple days?—the days in Otavalo, speaking their native Quichua at the table with his family.

  Pablo had six brothers and sisters, with four boys and two girls. He was the seventh child born to José and Delores Manuel. He was not born by some common story, though, as his was exquisite in its uniqueness and destiny.

  José had been a Master Roofer. Delores had worked at the market, weaving textiles for the tourists and locals. Their life was uncomplicated, filled with children and laughter and love after many hard hours of work. That was until a carnival came to town and José talked Delores into seeing the Adivina. It was a move that his father wished he could take back a thousand times.

  The woman was very, very old and she was hunched over the table when they walked in. She wore a full-length wool coat and an old blue scarf over her shockingly-white hair. Her eyes bulged as if someone were choking her, and the lines on her face were like the driest desert on the planet, looking so dry it appeared as if they would crumble and break if she moved her mouth to speak.

  Delores was immediately terrified and mesmerized by this woman. The old woman had grabbed her hands and looked at her deeply in the eyes, as if in shock. Then she had let go and stared at her for a long time. Finally she had said, speaking in a semi-trance, “You have six children.” Delores could only nod, so she did. “But what you don’t know is there is going to be a seventh. Not just any child, I know this is hard to believe, but this child will change the earth. He
will move mountains, but be warned, he must be guided carefully. Left to his own devices, he could become very dangerous and misguided.”

  When they started, the old woman had an air of pomposity that could be called hubris, for she had the inside deal, she knew the cards, she was in control. Delores noticed a new look on her face after the hand grab. It wasn’t necessarily fear, it was more like she was overwhelmed at what she’d seen, like it was too much for God to hand her.

  His mother had heard what she had wanted to hear, though, and soon she forgot the look of true foreboding from the old woman. For many months after that she was the happiest person in the world; but then she miscarried, and miscarried again. Finally, at the doctor’s office, she got the news that her uterus was too weak to support a baby. The depression Delores suffered at that news lasted weeks; she couldn’t accept that the prophecy would not be fulfilled. There was no way to tell her that there was no prophecy, and that the lady was just an actor of sorts, who guessed about people’s lives for money. The aftermath of the news was affecting their marriage and testing their love.

  One day José came home to hear something he had not heard in a long time. His wife was singing the lullaby, “Dormite mi Niño.” She was doing the dishes and she was singing. He had asked what the occasion was. She announced that she was three months pregnant!

  “But the doctors?!” he had said.

  She had put her fingers over his lips and said, “Stop getting in the way of destiny with questions and doctors, José, and hand me that towel.”

  Six months later, on October 10, 1990, he was born and named Pablo Jairo Manuel by two very appreciative parents. It had never been lost on him that even his birthday was unique, as he would soon enjoy 10-10-10 as his twentieth birthday. His first years were spent as any child’s should be, filled with love, joy, and bonding time with his Mama.

  Delores noticed the special things about her child early. Like when he was three, she and her husband were talking about money worries in a way that a child should not have known. But he did and took worry on too. At first they thought he was just parroting them, but when he went to his piggy bank and handed it to his Mama, they began to see that he was not just another child in the line of the Manuel family.

  They tried to explain it away by thinking that he must have heard the word “money” or something, but they both knew it was more than a little odd. He was done with picture books by the time he was three and a half and started sounding out words with his sister Jasmine as she was soon starting kindergarten. Soon he surpassed her and was reading at the age of four.

  A lot of children develop at different paces, though, and they couldn’t point to any specific behavior and say, “That old woman was right.” That is, until Pablo was five.

  There were different languages spoken at the market: German, French, Portuguese, English, and Spanish. Delores knew the people in different places that spoke these languages. One was a baker, butcher, and so on. By the time he was five, Pablo spoke to all of them in their native tongues and understood what was being said back—not just parroting. Not just words, either, but light conversations, even inflections. The women would always ask her who she knew that spoke their language and Delores would answer, “Only you,” and they would laugh and never quite believe her.

  At home, Pablo would have to be stopped from doing all his siblings’ homework, even before he started school. Delores always had that sentence dancing in her head, “He’ll move mountains.” He was so far ahead in school that the Principal taught him directly, and by seventh grade he was smarter than the Principal. He had read every book in the school—twice, albeit he memorized them the first time, he was just bored.

  One day his uncle showed up, and the two brothers talked for a long time. It was a day that would change his life forever and it was the second part to his amazing story, one that led to him sending Vera to America to extract his mentor’s things out of a safe at Conceptual Labs.

  Pablo went to leaning back again in the chair. He watched the river flow by outside, waiting the wait that tortures. The kind of wait that one has to endure as the doctors wheel a loved one off for surgery, it’s a world that the family members have no control over. One where they have no choices left, where their loved one’s immediate future is out of their control. At this point, Pablo could only pray Vera made it out of the San Francisco Bay Area, so that later he might be able to help her.

  * * *

  Vera’s training taught her to be cool in a crisis, but who can really be cool after just ending someone’s life? Jesus, did I really just end someone’s life? A shallow turd of a man, but a life nonetheless. Pablo taught her about nerves and about breathing. If one hyperventilates then the hands shake even more, and it can lead to blackout. She stopped what she was doing and took thirty seconds to get her breathing right. Her hands steadied a little.

  Okay, time for Plan B. Her first problem was that she was just supposed to stroll out after work, a hidden compartment in her briefcase as her means of concealment. So just walking out the front door two hours early would be impossible. Or would it?

  Vera remembered the plans for the room she was standing in. It had laser light sensors, pressure sensors, and heat sensors. The heat sensor was the key, but once she set the alarm, she would have scant minutes until it triggered a lockdown. She remembered from her training that the heat sensor was set at sixty-eight degrees, the same as room temperature. His body would still be higher than that for a while.

  She already knew that it was one and a half minutes from her desk to the door via the staircase. Once the security door came down, only Homeland Security could open it again. She had no more time to waste, this was the plan, and there was no time to grab anything other than her keys. She made the sign of the cross over her chest and forehead out of superstition and set the alarm.

  For a year they had planned. In the daytime she would study with him—physics, philosophy, art, literature, martial arts. Pablo was a masterful teacher, and his use of many languages when he was teaching made it hard to concentrate, especially when he used Italian. God, I love him. At night they practiced her being Nancy Chavez, and although they practiced English whenever possible, they honed it at night. It was amazing how he got her accent to fall away whenever she wanted now, just like he could.

  They practiced a myriad of things, including using Google Earth to plan exit routes, last minute ditch routes, and just general memorization. They went over police and Federal Investigation tactics as well as the location and strategies of their safe houses. During her daily runs she found many places that she ran to the highway from, so she knew where to stop her car on the highway and run to safety in a worst-case scenario situation.

  Basically, the last four years were done for this moment and it would be this moment that differentiates a champion from second place. She was off the script as of right now, so it would have to be done the hard way.

  * * *

  Pablo remembered observing his father and uncle talking that day. It had turned out to be a very emotional day, as he was not the only one eavesdropping on this conversation. He had been at the window and he had heard his uncle tell a tale that Pablo would later unravel all the way, almost to its actuality (which was ironic because it was all a lie).

  His Uncle Julio was a slick man, and like his brother, he was tall for a Hispanic. He stood five-foot-ten and weighed a good hundred and sixty pounds. Their Papa, Jairo Juan Manuel, had raised the two of them after their mother had died when Julio was very young—victim of the true king of the jungle, the mosquito.

  His trade was roofing, so he taught the boys how to roof. We’ll, first he had taught his José, as José was his first son by a long shot. José was eighteen and going to work when Julio was just in grade school, so Julio saw the effects of this type of work from the outside.

  At fifteen, they started working him when school was on break, and by the time he was seventeen he’d had enough and ran away to Quito. Julio wanted n
othing to do with the laborious life of roofing. There was no way to even let him know when his own father died, until he had called months later. Julio believed that there must be an easier way to make money, and he was right yet wrong, both at the same time. Nearly a decade younger than his brother, he had a lot to learn about the evil that lies in men’s hearts, the world, and coca.

  * * *

  Nearly two thirds of the world’s cocaine is grown in Peru and most of that is grown in the Upper Huallaga Valley. There it is processed into a cocaine base, where it is flown to Colombia for processing and distribution to the U.S. and Europe. At the epicenter of this trade is the Communist Party of Peru, or as the rest of the world knows them, the Shimmering Way terrorist group.

  In the 1920s, José Carlos Montoya started Peru’s first Communist movement. His belief was that if one put Marxism-Leninism into action then one would open a “Shimmering Way” to true Communism.

  In 1980, Adian Gomez thought that would be a good name for a political organization, and thus the Shimmering Way was born. Their objective was simple: to run out the bourgeois democracy running Peru and replace it with “true Communism.” The greater idea was to not stop with Peru. True to that agenda, their philosophy spread to other places in the world.

  Like people anywhere on the earth, the Peruvian Communists work with what they have. What they have is the best soil and conditions to grow cocaine in the world, and cocaine equals money.

  In 1992, the Peruvian Government captured Gomez, kneecapping the organization. But Luis Santiago Calderón decided to change that fate. He became the leader, and he knew that cocaine was the way to get the money for the work he wanted to get done. Calderón’s grandfather had worked for Montoya, and was killed outside a bar in Lima by someone who didn’t agree with his ideology.