by Layton Green
The name of the mental patient who had startled Viktor was Glen von Reisenberg. Viktor was correct, he had been imprisoned once before, in a local jail near Santiago, Chile. The charge had been assault and attempted murder.
What, Viktor wondered, had a German with mental health issues and obvious means been doing in Santiago? Viktor slapped a hand on the table, causing a stir among the other diners.
Germany, Chile, of course! He remembered where he had seen this man. He remembered it well.
Colonia Dignidad. 2006. One of the most disturbing utopian cults with which Viktor had dealt. The leader, Paul Schaefer, was an émigré from Germany, a notorious pedophile and puppet of Pinochet. After the Pinochet regime folded in the early 1990s, public pressure led to an investigation of the colony, and Schaefer was forced to flee the country. He was arrested in Argentina in 2005, extradited to Chile the next year, and Viktor was called in to help cement his prosecution.
After cataloguing the torture chambers and assisting in the search for mass graves, Viktor had interviewed dozens of colony members. Glen von Reisenberg had been one of them. Viktor remembered now the purple birthmark. He also remembered the lack of emotion, the eerie movements of an automaton, the inability to relate to normal human motive.
He almost smacked himself. Glen von Reisenberg wasn’t mentally ill—he was brainwashed. In the heat of the attack and because Glen was a patient at the sanatorium, Viktor had missed the signs.
One of the remarkable things about Colonia Dignidad was that a decade after the departure of their leader, not much had changed inside the colony. The residents were still loyal to Schaefer, still followed the mandates of his lieutenants, still followed the same lifestyle. And why shouldn’t they? For most, it was all they had ever known.
Glen was one of these. Born and raised in the colony. At the time Viktor interviewed him, he had never set foot outside its walls. Viktor remembered a hollow puppet of a man so indoctrinated into the cult that he hadn’t been able to tell Viktor the current president of Chile, or even the identity of his own birth parents, who were also members of the cult.
Yes, Viktor remembered Glen, but what was the possible connection among Colonia Dignidad, the recent threat against Viktor, and Grey’s investigation into the General?
Viktor returned to his room and fired off another Interpol request, this one for a more detailed report of Glen von Reisenberg’s actions and whereabouts since 2006. How did he afford the sanatorium? Did he come from a wealthy family? Did he have drug connections?
After spending the afternoon pacing back and forth in his room awaiting an answer, he decided to go ask the man himself.
An hour later, after surprising the guards at the gate to the criminal asylum by flashing his Interpol identification, he secured a visitation window with Glen von Reisenberg, who had mysteriously returned to the asylum.
Though Glen sat across the visitation table with his hands unbound—at Viktor’s request—a pair of guards waited at the rear of the room, electric batons and syringes at the ready.
Viktor spoke in German. “Hello, Glen.”
The bovine head lifted to regard Viktor.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell them about your excursion yesterday. It shall remain our little secret.”
Still no response.
“We’ve met once before. Do you remember?”
This elicited a squinting of Glen’s tiny eyes, making them almost disappear.
“Colonia Dignidad,” Viktor said. “Eight years ago.”
Glen’s lips parted, and Viktor saw a glimmer of intelligence behind the foggy vision. “I remember,” Glen said. “The investigator.”
“That’s correct. I understand, you know,” Viktor said quietly. “You’ve no idea how many people I’ve seen in your position. You’re just following orders. Someone let you out, someone told you to find and hurt me, and someone told you never to speak about it. Someone told you it was for the good of the colony.”
Viktor could tell by the flare of Glen’s nostrils that he had struck a nerve. The man was a member of a cult, not a trained intelligence operative. He was not immune to questioning.
That said, Viktor knew it was pointless to try to rehabilitate him in so short a time, so he tried a different angle.
“They’ll never let you out of here, Glen. Never. Why do you think they made you come back inside? Why not take you back to Chile?”
Glen looked straight at Viktor, eyes shining with conviction. “Because I have a job to do. When it’s done, I’ll return.”
“You won’t. It’s over. Didn’t they tell you? Of course they didn’t, or you wouldn’t be helping them. The government shut it down, Glen. The colony dispersed. They sent the children to orphanages and put all the adults in places like this.”
“You’re lying,” Glen said. “Just like he said you would.”
“Just like who said?”
“Him.”
“The one who let you out yesterday?” Viktor said, then took a stab. “Or the one who replaced Schaefer? Who is he? Tell me and I’ll work on your release, you have my word.”
Glen pressed his lips together and stilled, his cartoonishly small features lines of stencil on his face.
“Whoever he is,” Viktor said calmly, “he’s lying. They shut it down. You don’t have anywhere to go back to, and the people who want me dead don’t care about you. If you don’t help me, you’ll be in here forever. You’ll die in here.”
Glen slammed his hands on the table, rattling it. “Liar! Filthy heathen liar!”
Maybe, Viktor thought, he was a little crazy after all.
Glen rose, and Viktor stepped backwards as the guards rushed forward.
“Your judgment is upon you!” Glen screamed, shrugging off the first guard and wrestling with the second. He looked as strong as a buffalo. “Your judgment,” his words began to slur, after one of the guards jammed a syringe in his arm, “isss . . . up . . . onnnn . . . youuu.”
Early the next morning, Grey listened to a message from Viktor describing his encounter with the mental patient. It disturbed Grey that someone—the General—might be targeting Viktor in Switzerland. Was there something the General didn’t want Viktor to piece together? Or was it a warning for Grey to back off? Just in case, Grey called Nya and left a message for her to call him as soon as possible.
He joined Fred in the hotel lounge for a mediocre coffee. If Fred knew Grey had slipped out the previous evening, he gave no indication.
“So how’s Colombia these days?” Grey asked.
“Better than it was when you were there. Still rough. Still the world’s largest coke refiner. The players are more scattered and under the radar after the breakup of the big cartels, but those motherfuckers don’t just take a bow. The new cartels are run more like a business, less flamboyant, making sure they clean up their cookie trails.”
“Harder to know who the enemy is.”
“You bet,” Fred said. “Wondering what the hell we’re about to get ourselves into?”
“Something like that.”
“If it makes you feel any better, coffee country is as safe as it gets in Colombia. Apparently the drug lords like their coffee and leave the area alone, for the most part.”
Grey shook off a yawn and leaned forward with his cup cradled between his hands, elbows resting on his knees. “I give it two days at most before someone figures out we’re there.”
Fred shook out a toothpick from his case. “In and out, buddy. In and out.”
Though Grey and Fred took the same flight to Bogotá, they arrived at the Miami airport at separate times and stayed apart. Lana took a different flight altogether, and assisted with fake passports and boarding cards. Still, Grey knew their pictures were circulating.
Which was why, the morning before their flight, they took a few liberties with their appearance. Grey wore a San Francisco Giants cap pulled low, brushing against rectangular black-rimmed glasses that shielded the middle portion of his face. A week’s worth of stubbl
e covered the lower third, and a green North Face pullover and worn jeans completed the outfit.
Fred had shaved his moustache. The exposed skin on his upper lip looked fresher than the rest of his face, as if grafted on from someone younger. Grey thought he looked much less imposing; as if his moustache, like Samson’s hair, held the source of his strength. Fred also sported a pair of cosmetic glasses, and was wearing khaki pants and a casual blue button-up. The disguises were far from perfect, but should throw off someone glancing at a photo.
Disguises notwithstanding, there was still the very serious issue of the leak. The trip needed to be a surgical procedure, stitched up before anyone knew they had left.
Hours later, Grey and Fred descended into Bogotá, the Andean ridgeline coiled around the city like the tail of a dragon. With an altitude of eight thousand six hundred feet, the capital was a chilly, gloomy metropolis defined by the mountains hovering at its edges, watching, brooding like a tempestuous artist at odds with its creation.
During the descent, Grey watched a little boy clinging to his father during turbulence. The fear and love comingling in the boy’s eyes brought back memories of Grey’s first posting with Diplomatic Security. Of a city of warm but guarded Bogotános, their collective psyche a damaged flower struggling to reopen after the horror of the drug wars.
The empty streets at night. Vast swaths of the city under the sway of gangs and street criminals. Teenagers scurrying to school in broad daylight. Younger children playing in the city’s parks while their parents clenched coffee cups and jumped at the slightest movement.
The thing was, Grey could relate. His own childhood was a haze of violence. In the eyes of the Bogotános he saw the shame of those endless nights of fear, the rage of the morning after, the crippling memory of not being able to protect oneself or one’s family. No one had forgotten, and it was why Bogotá felt so edgy, as if the entire city was expecting violence to erupt at any moment.
Two job-related incidents had defined his posting. The first was an emergency raid on a shack in one of the poorest sections of Bogotá. A U.S. consular officer had used bad judgment in his choice of whorehouse in Chapinero, the rundown student district, and had been kidnapped mid-coitus by a couple of enterprising street criminals. Not used to kidnapping diplomats, the thugs took his cell phone but didn’t smash it, unaware that it contained a tracer.
A Special Forces team had led the raid, but Grey was one of the DSOs chosen to ride along and help manage the situation. He would never forget the ride in the middle of the night deep into the slum, a no-man’s-land unlike any Grey had ever seen. The abominable scenery seemed to stretch to eternity, a dystopian warren of rotting wood and corrugated metal, the wind off the ridge blowing trash through the streets, bullet-riddled windows and muddy alleys and shacks built on shacks. An eerie lack of ambient light.
Yet it was the omnipresent violence that stunned him, and to which he was acutely attuned: the armed gangs who stood sentry on the corners and slunk through the potholed roads, men whose lightless eyes conveyed an absolute willingness to put a bullet in someone’s head without a shred of remorse. Make no mistake, Grey knew—they were driving through a war zone.
The raid had been a joke, a van full of commandos versus a handful of freebasing thugs with rusty handguns. They pulled the diplomat out unharmed, shot everyone else, and the van sped out of Dante’s Inferno and back to the embassy. Yet while the rest of the team whooped and high-fived with leftover adrenaline, Grey watched with hooded eyes as the nightmarish scenery rolled by. All he could think about were the voiceless souls living under siege and without hope, of fathers with no jobs trying to keep their families fed and safe, of the neighborhood kids getting shot or conscripted into gangs, at what colonialism had done to the world, at the injustice of it all.
The second incident was the one that cost Grey his seniority, and got him transferred from Bogotá to Harare, which was a posting for diplomatic careers on life support.
One fine summer day, which meant the sun showed for almost an hour and the weather neared seventy degrees, Grey was helping oversee the arrival of a minor functionary, a mayor from one of the jungle provinces who was integral to a coca-dusting operation the U.S. was about to launch. Built to withstand a full-on attack by the cartels, the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá was a fortress, a multistory compound near the airport.
Grey was posted on a side street near the embassy, peripheral to the action but guarding against threats from the intersection fifty feet behind him. Just before the mayor entered the embassy, his position relayed by headset, Grey heard a scream from one of the streets approaching the intersection.
He spun towards the sound, gun at the ready, unable to believe his eyes: a carjacking taking place right in front of him.
Scratch that, he could believe it. Though better than in the eighties, Bogotá was still lawless, a Molotov cocktail of government soldiers, local police, ex-cartel assassins, FARC and ELN insurgents, and the new players on the drug scene. All looking for a play, all long ago having abandoned the code of conduct limiting violence against civilians. Robberies and bombings and assassinations by sicarios on motorcycles were commonplace.
Grey’s duty was to the consular officer and the visiting mayor. Unless required for the protection of his assets, Grey was not to abandon his post—for any reason—until given the okay.
As Grey watched, the bejeweled woman driving the Mercedes locked her doors and reached for her cell phone. Her assailant broke the car window with the butt of his gun. Grey twitched but could only listen, watch out of the corner of his eye to make sure the violence didn’t spill over and affect the arrival of the mayor, and seethe in silent rage.
The carjacker pulled the woman out of the car. Stupidly, she struggled, waving her arms and screaming at her assailant.
So he stabbed her.
Grey lurched forward. His partner for the detail screamed at him from five feet away. “Stand your ground, Grey! We don’t have clearance!”
Grey’s headset blared. The assets are safely inside. Hold your positions until further notification.
The carjacker pulled a pistol and aimed it at the woman, who was slumped against the side of the Mercedes, blood pouring over her hands and staining the pavement.
It could have been a decoy. A ploy to divert attention on a side street while someone else fired on the mayor or stormed the embassy. Grey did a split second eval and found it highly, highly unlikely. Any action would have gone down before the assets entered the embassy.
Regardless, Grey knew what he was about to do was against protocol.
He just didn’t care.
Grey fired his weapon in the air. The assailant jumped away from the woman and saw Grey advancing, the laser sight from his semiautomatic leveled at the carjacker’s chest.
The carjacker fled, the woman survived, and Grey was banished to Southern Africa.
After a café tinto, an espresso so thick and black the locals called it ink, Grey hopped on a commuter plane to Armenia, one of the three triangle cities outlining the Zona Cafetera, or Coffee District. Fred was seated ten rows ahead of him. The flight took less than an hour.
The Armenia airport was the size of a large retail store. When Grey stepped outside, he saw fields of coffee bushes and a row of banana trees swaying in the warm tropical breeze. A two-lane road led into the verdant countryside.
As discussed, Fred waited five minutes before sidling up to Grey outside the airport. Long enough to throw off any spotters waiting at the gate, and short enough not to raise eyebrows by loitering.
“Not exactly a metropolitan center,” Fred said.
“Not exactly.”
Most of the twenty or so passengers filed into either the small bus waiting near the exit, or into vehicles filled with family members. A taxi driver parked behind the bus tried without success to coax passengers into his vehicle. In front of the bus, a man in an aging black sedan waited with a sign that bore Fred’s alias.
“Ou
r ride,” Fred said, taking a step towards the private car.
Grey put a hand on his arm. “How’d you book the car?”
“Rental car agency in Armenia. Gave him the false name, no deposit. I’ll have him swing by the address in town Lana gave us to pick up the guns, then take us to Salento.”
“What do you know about Lana’s contact?”
“About as much as you. Local guy, knows CIA contacts drop in from time to time.”
Fred looked down at Grey’s soft grip on his arm, then back up. “What’s up, partner?”
Grey released his arm. “Let’s take that taxi over there. And skip the guns.”
Fred gave him a long look, then ran his tongue along the front of his teeth. “I’m not opposed to that. Though I’ll feel naked until I find a piece.”
“I won’t.”
The taxi driver was more than happy to take them to Salento, about an hour’s drive northeast. According to Lana, Medellín had been Julio Ganador’s hometown before he moved to Bogotá. Salento was his second home. A passport check showed that Julio had flown all over Latin America for years, presumably on business trips for the General. And those were just the flights he took on the record.
The question was, where was he delivering the payments?
If there was a Palo connection, and if the person they were looking for was Tata Menga’s palero, then what could they expect in Salento? Something worse than a fence made of human spines and a sinkhole filled with bodies?
They gave themselves two days to find a link. Anything more was reckless, Grey felt, unless Lana wanted to call for backup.
Steering well clear of Julio’s former residence, Grey opted to start the search at La Finca, a combination coffee farm and guesthouse just outside of town, claiming to be one of the oldest coffee farms in Colombia. Though he would have to play it cool, Grey hoped to pump the owners for information.
He also hoped they weren’t connected to the General.
After passing through the concrete scar that was the town of Armenia, the countryside turned even lusher than before, steep emerald peaks and long sloping valleys drizzled in mist, villas perched on top of knobby hills, a curvaceous silver river running through the valley like the back of a salmon glinting in the sun.
