by Layton Green
His son.
Lana was right. He was a true believer. Most Americans spent their lives unaware of what the cost of cheap gas truly was, or what it meant not to have religious or political freedom. What it meant to walk down the street without worrying that the son of the current dictator might decide to pluck your daughter out of the crowd and rape her.
Fred did not kid himself that Americans were any better than anyone else, or that he wasn’t lucky as a leprechaun to have been born in the States, or that the American ghettos were not their own form of living hell.
He just knew his kids were safer than most around the world, and he was helping to keep them that way.
On the way home, Fred had looked for Freckles but hadn’t been able to find him. He was probably holed up in a crack house somewhere.
Stranger that he hadn’t been able to reach Ernesto. His secretary had confirmed the accountant’s presence at the office that morning, but Ernesto usually called him back within the hour.
Fred stepped outside to smoke a cigar, offering his flesh to the creatures of the night in exchange for a hit of nicotine. Talk about an addictive substance—he’d seen people shake off meth easier than cigarettes.
A breeze stirred, keeping the bloodsuckers at bay. He could still catch the end of the Braves game, a frozen pizza was in the oven, and the fridge was full of beer. Life was good.
A buzz on his BlackBerry caught his attention. It was an email from his regional supervisor, ordering Fred to attend a meeting with the Office of Professional Responsibility on Friday morning to discuss the incident at Hector Fortuna’s house.
The Office of Professional Responsibility was DEA internal affairs. This was not routine.
This was the Inquisition.
Fred crushed his beer can. “Goddammit.”
Lana had been right. He wasn’t surprised, just disappointed. The better he did his job, the more heat he got. What had the Suits thought was going to happen when Fred rang Hector Fortuna’s doorbell? Those monsters had killed Agent Turner and stuffed her in a closet.
He ran a hand through his hair and called the wife. He needed to hear his daughters’ voices.
No one answered, and Fred spewed more curses. He knew they were home.
After popping another beer, he sat on the couch with the phone in his lap, staring at it while grown men ran circles around a patch of dirt. He finished the beer in minutes, gathering the nerve to push and hold the “1” button on his cell. Speed dial for the methamphetamine clinic.
A nurse answered, and Fred said, “I’d like to speak to my son. Danny Hernandez.”
“Let me see if he’s available.”
Fred paced the living room while he waited. Danny was four months deep into the six-month recovery program, his third in three years. Meth addiction was notoriously difficult to treat. Unlike heroin addicts, who can use methadone to wean themselves off the drug, meth had no known pharmacological treatment. The only relief was an uncertain mix of behavioral therapy, family support, and luck.
Moreover, withdrawal from meth was insidious: not a physical reaction, but a condition called anhedonia—an inability to experience pleasure that could last up to six months, induce deep depression, and cause users to crave another hit. The brain’s response to the manufactured highs of prolonged meth abuse.
What that meant to Fred was that his seventeen-year-old son was a robot, an empty shell of the curly-headed boy he had raised and loved, who he had taken to soccer games and taught to ride a bike and held in his arms after a bad dream, who he would die a thousand terrible deaths for and smile while he did it.
A boy whose chances of beating the drug for good, while never high, were sinking with each relapse.
“Dad?”
The same wooden voice to which Fred had grown accustomed. The new normal.
Fred forced himself to sound upbeat. “Hey, son. How are things? I mean, are you doing okay this week? Have you talked to Mom?”
“Yeah, she called.”
Fred waited for him to say more, knowing he wouldn’t.
“You been sleeping okay?” Fred asked.
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Eating?”
“Mm.”
“Exercising?”
“Nah,” his son muttered, as if his energy was already sapped.
“Still turning girls’ heads at the Center?”
Danny didn’t even muster a response.
The reason Fred dreaded calling his son, besides the obvious pain it caused, was because he never knew what to say. They couldn’t talk about normal life, because it didn’t exist. They couldn’t talk about treatment, because Danny would freeze up. So the conversations would go from awkward to silent, and Fred would mumble his good-byes and then lie on his side and stare through the TV for the rest of the night.
“Son,” Fred said, “there’s something I need to tell you. I might be going away for a while, probably a week or so, just a little getaway.”
Silence.
“You’ll be okay if I don’t call for a few days?”
“Mm.”
“Son, I just needed to say . . . I just wanted to let you know that I . . .”
Fred tried to get the words out, but his voice cracked. Embarrassed, he tried to speak again and failed.
Danny mumbled a good-bye and hung up. After a prolonged silence, a sob escaped Fred, a brief hiccup that he choked off as if it were rising bile. He held the phone in his hand for a moment, then cursed and threw it against the TV. He stalked across the room and punched a hole in the drywall, kicked the foot hammock down the hallway, and then stood with his arms extended against the bedroom door, deep shuddering breaths heaving out of him, his rage and pain pressing down on him like the weight of an ocean.
When he calmed enough to speak, he retrieved his phone and called the number Lana had given him.
“Agent Hernandez?” she said. “Everything okay?”
“Put me on the first plane to Mexico.”
When Grey and Fred returned the next day, to the same table at the same café, Lana greeted Grey by lifting her eyebrows, her chestnut eyes intense.
“I’m already in,” Fred muttered.
Grey gave Lana a single, curt nod.
She leaned back and pushed a thin black folder across the table to each of them. A beige “Classified” stamp was splayed across the front.
“It’s what we know about the General’s activities over the years. It isn’t much. There are two notable items I wanted to bring to your attention, one of which isn’t included in the dossier.” She waited until Grey and Fred had ordered coffees before continuing. “We know he has a right-hand man, a Colombian named Señor Guiñol. We don’t have a photograph of him either. He only meets with high-level cartel leaders, usually in a neutral location, to hand out instructions or reprimands from his boss.”
“Reprimands to cartel leaders,” Fred said. “Jesus.”
“What else do we know about him?” Grey asked.
“Almost nothing, except he was known in Colombia as Doctor Zombie.”
“Excuse me?” Fred said.
“In his former life, he was a pharmacist known for experimenting with scopolamine on his patients.”
Grey had been briefed on scopolamine during the Bogotá posting. It was a substance derived from the borrachero tree, native to Colombia. In high doses, it was lethal. In lower doses, it robbed victims of their free will and erased memory. It was used in rapes and street crime in the larger Colombian cities, especially Bogotá.
“It’s been called the most dangerous drug in the world,” Lana continued, “but Agent Hernandez would know more about that than I.”
“It’s the real deal,” Fred said. “Frightening.”
Grey smacked at a mosquito. “So he gets off on turning people into zombies?”
“Something like that,” Lana said. “Though those who’ve seen his handiwork swear he doesn’t use any drugs. Obviously, they’re misinformed.”
“Th
is is some organization this General’s got going,” Fred said. “Anything else on Guiñol?”
“Just that he’s the only known associate. Finding him might be almost as good as finding El General.”
Grey took a sip of coffee. “You mentioned a second item?”
Lana pressed her lips together, her head bobbing almost imperceptibly. “We think he’s one of ours.”
“Guiñol?”
“The General.”
Grey’s eyebrows rose, and Fred spluttered ice water back into his cup.
“No one could operate like he does without inside knowledge,” Lana said. “Continuing inside knowledge. And what we know of the way he works . . . he acts like one of us. Thinks like one of us.”
“Not to burst your bubble,” Grey said, “but there are other intelligence services around the world with some pretty talented operatives.”
“Every agency has distinctions, its own idiosyncratic methods, and he follows ours.”
“Still,” Grey said, “couldn’t it be a rival agency or a cartel playing games, using info from a captured CIA operative to lead you on a goose chase?”
Lana crossed her legs and smoothed her skirt. “Anything’s possible.”
“It’s starting to make sense,” Fred said. “You’ve kept it under wraps because of the potential for embarrassment?”
“The threat to national security is real,” Lana said. “That’s all I can say. I’m doing my best to probe the angle of his past identity.”
“We’re putting our lives on the line,” Grey said. “I don’t want to find out you’ve kept something to yourself that might help.”
“You have my word,” Lana said. “You’re doing the right thing.”
Grey’s smile was thin.
“Remember, we’re not asking you to penetrate the cartel. We just want to see where the cult angle leads.”
Fine advice, Grey thought, except that judging from past experience, the cult might be the more dangerous of the two.
On the ride home, Fred took a call on his cell and then did a U-turn in the middle of the highway.
“What’s up?” Grey said.
“Someone found a corpse in the Everglades with my business card in the pocket. They want me to come identify. You mind coming, in case there’s something we need to see? Or you got evening plans?”
“My only plans involved not seeing any more dead bodies.”
Fred cranked the A/C. “Yeah, sorry about that.”
It took them an hour to pass through the dregs of Homestead and Florida City and reach the entrance to the Everglades. As soon as they passed through the gate and entered the park, minutes from the strip malls of South Dixie Highway, all pretense of civilization disappeared. The saw grass and endless vistas of the Everglades sprawled to the horizon, reminding Grey of an African savannah.
They had the road to themselves. Dusk approached, and Grey didn’t need a park ranger to tell him it was a bad idea to be caught out there after hours. The din from the insects was stunning, not a soft concerto but a violent throbbing of sound, a rape of the night. Alligators lined the muddy watering holes, and Grey whistled when he spotted a twenty-foot snake slithering into a canal.
“Did I just see a python?”
Fred shuddered. “They’re taking over the Everglades. That’s what happens when people buy pet snakes that get bigger than they are.”
There was beauty as well, visceral and intense. Brilliant roseate spoonbills swooping over a hardwood hammock, the symmetry of a grove of dwarf cypress, a sky that spanned worlds. Nya would love it here, Grey thought. Find it spiritual.
The spell was broken by a bevy of police cars parked alongside a sign that read SNAKE BIGHT. Behind the sign, a footpath led into the swamp. Grey could see more officers farther down the path.
When they left the car, the rush of humid air made Grey feel as if he had been lowered into a volcano. Fred flashed his identification at a uniformed policeman and nudged his head towards the trail. “The body’s down there?”
“Yeah,” the officer said, “but you don’t want to go in there like that.”
“Like what?”
“Look at your arms.”
Grey saw Fred look down at his bare forearms, then start cursing and slapping at his skin. Grey looked at his own arms and noticed they were covered in black dots.
The officer grinned and thrust a bottle of mosquito repellent at Fred. Grey blanched and snatched it as soon as Fred was finished.
“A few hundred yards down the path,” the officer said. “Trust me, you won’t miss it.”
He was right. Deep into the mangroves, surrounded by cops and medical examiners, bound with rope to a bald cypress, was a corpse with a face so swollen from insect bites that it was unrecognizable. It was also missing one of its legs below the knee, and the skin was flaccid and sagging.
A plainclothes detective approached Fred, who was chewing furiously on a toothpick. The detective handed Fred a business card sealed in a plastic bag. “This yours?”
Fred looked down. “Yeah,” he said softly. “The guy’s name was Ernesto Reinas. He’s an accountant on our payroll. We turned him a while back, had him looking into the cartels.”
“Apparently they didn’t like it.”
Trying not to gag from the stench, Grey breathed through his mouth and waved mosquitoes off the body as he checked for signs the murder might be cult related. “Body was found like this?” he asked.
“With the business card halfway out of his pocket.”
A medical examiner stepped forward. “The body’s been here overnight. My guess is a gator got the leg, and take your pick as to cause of death: blood loss from the missing limb, dehydration, allergic reaction to a million insect bites. Another twenty-four hours and bones are all we’d have left.”
“No one found him sooner?” Grey asked.
The detective chuckled. “Not from around here? Let’s just say summer is not tourist season in the Everglades. Imagine this place at noon. These mangroves are infested with mosquitoes.” He turned to Fred. “You got any idea who dragged him out here?”
Fred flicked the sweat off his brow, and exchanged a glance with Grey.
MEXICO CITY
1983
His handlers had called it “situational flexibility,” the ability to convince oneself that normal ethical standards did not apply in certain self-serving scenarios. The textbooks referred to it as “moral disengagement.” Nietzsche termed it the concept of the Superman.
John Wolverton called it The Mirror.
He had been a young man before Jonestown. Two years out of Yale, two years into the Company. Still a man of society, of the Western world, though too brilliant and restless for a normal life to be of interest. Possessed of an intellect so keen it seemed as if everyone else spoke too slowly, lived far below the human potential.
They sent him to Guyana because he had exhibited the same psychological traits as the leader of the Peoples Temple, Reverend Jim Jones.
High charisma. Rhetorical gifts. Situational flexibility.
Yes, he was morally ambiguous, at least according to societal standards. Not vacant, which he realized after kneeling beside the corpse of his beloved and their infant child. Just ambiguous. Weren’t we all, except for a select few misguided souls on either end of the spectrum? Wasn’t that the point of evolution? To adapt and survive the best we can?
Besides, those societal standards had produced My Lai and irreversible ghettos and the School of the Americas, along with a million other atrocities.
The drug deals with Hilltown and Rabbi Washington had started the connections. John Wolverton began using a variety of pseudonyms and business fronts, both when dealing with the CIA and with other entities, which ranged from South American governments to drug cartels to the Mafia. He had to be especially careful with the CIA, who might connect the note he had left at Jonestown with the rising gringo crime lord in Guyana. While the Jonestown tape was a powerful piece of leverage, an
onymity was even better.
The deals and alliances, the orchestral chess moves in the underworld, came easy to him. Within three years he was a wealthy man, possessor of a million dollars of cash and real estate in Guyana, Venezuela, and northern Brazil. His ambition was as vast as the Argentinean pampas, yet he felt as if he were missing a key ingredient, something that set him apart.
He needed an angle. He needed a name. He needed an identity.
Deciding to follow in the footsteps of countless philosopher kings before him, he set out on a journey to explore the continent, a pilgrimage of personal enlightenment.
He started with Venezuela, from its sultry Caribbean islands to the high society shoreline of oil-soaked Lake Maracaibo, up to the cozy Andean mountain resorts and then down to his personal favorite, the flat-topped jungle mesas known as tepuis, their prehistoric ecosystems immortalized by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.
And the women—ah, if only he were a bard as well, the ballads he would compose! Suffice it to say he could have lingered in the salsa and merengue clubs of Caracas forever, rum-soaked and dazed, lost in a fever dream of dark eyes and lilting Spanish voices.
It was a blur after that. Absorbing the otherworldly beauty of Rio, hearing the roar of Iguaçu Falls, swept along by the hypnotic current of the Amazon, drifting across a glacial lake in Chile, mesmerized by street tango in the colorful streets of Buenos Aires, tumbling down sand dunes on the coast of Peru, staring agog at Machu Picchu. And all along the way, with his money and charisma and swarthy good looks, he lived the life of the most indulgent of rock stars, gobbling up exotic cuisines and drugs and women.
Months went by, then a year. An entire continent split open and savored like a ripe papaya. Still, as enjoyable as it all was, nothing and no one moved him as had Tashmeni. He wasn’t sure what to think about that. Was he seeking to forget, or remember?
Youthful passions satiated, he was ready to build his empire. Still lacking an identity, he traveled north, through the beauty and poverty of Central America, a true lost world, misted green volcanoes crouching above bubbling fumaroles and black sand beaches, ramshackle cities draped over the ruins of ancient civilizations, villages infused with the aroma of coffee beans.
