Out of Crisis

by Richard Caldwell

  “I mention these two blindingly obvious facts to emphasize the need for including a tightly focused advertising and voter registration effort as part of our campaign strategy. I know this won’t escape the attention of our partners from Watkins and Evans, but doing my due diligence”‍—Mia pointed at the monitor facing her‍—“means getting it plastered on that screen.”

  Applause exploded around the room, and Melissa shouted, “You go, girl!”

  Milt stood up. “Thank you, David and Mia, for sharing those words of inspiration and guidance. Now, folks, it’s time to do what we came here to do.”

  …

  For the remainder of the week, the team worked twelve to fourteen hours a day refining the clayman materials into the Centrist platform and campaign strategies. Even when they weren’t working, they talked about working.

  Milt made sure there was nothing to distract the team. From 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., both cellular and internet access was blocked. Technically, it was illegal to block cellular access, or even to have the equipment to do so. However, no one seemed to know the details of this FCC regulation. Or if they did, they either didn’t care or acquiesced to the perception that their mission justified this esoteric infraction.

  Oddly enough, at least in the world of politics, even this slight deviation from the letter of the law troubled David. He had sworn to run a “clean machine.” That was his story, and he, by God, was gonna stick to it.

  By the end of the third day, the team agreed that what started as their clayman had been shaped, reshaped, and wordsmithed into a manifesto that reflected the core values of their vision for the Centrist Party. They were convinced that what they had developed would serve the citizens of the United States well into the twenty-second century.

  Despite their convictions and their confidence in the Stakley-Lopez ticket, they knew they were facing an Omaha Beach–grade uphill battle. They were planning to dramatically change the underlying principles, the very fabric, of the United States Constitution, the document and the legal framework that had held the nation together for over two hundred years. Everyone knew the time had come for the amendments they had developed. In fact, they were long overdue.

  As the third day drew to a close and that struggle become a hard reality, Milt stood up to verbalize the concern creeping onto everyone’s faces. “We all know the American people, at least the sixty-one percent who bother to vote, can be a politically entrenched lot. Everyone in this room knows, and should fear, the sociopolitical magnitude of the crusade we are preparing to launch. But I need to accentuate this even more. It will take a cataclysmic event to bring about the forum for legislation necessary to make the amendments envisioned in our Centrist platform.”

  Milt paused and looked around the room. “Folks, that forum must be a constitutional convention. And, David, you’ll have to know when to pull the trigger. You might want to start praying for an act of God.”

  36

  Mexico, the Yucatán Peninsula

  Sometime in the nineties

  Two men sat at a small, white, wrought-iron table next to the pool of a house about forty kilometers south of Cancún, near the city of Puerto Morelos. The larger of the pair clutched an ice-cold Modelo, his third, in his catcher’s mitt of a hand. The other, much smaller man sipped from a glass of Perrier.

  They were quietly celebrating the success of the partnership they had entered a year earlier, as well as the horrific reputation it had earned among the federales and their criminal counterparts all along the Yucatán Peninsula. They were professional kidnappers and extortionists who now focused exclusively on rich norteamericanos.

  Although they always worked as a two-man team, the authorities didn’t know that. They were referred to on the street by the singular moniker “El Choppo.”

  The name came from their modus operandi. From day one, their strategy had been to put the fear of God into their victim’s significant other by including a severed fingertip along with their demands for ransom. They would also convincingly tell the victim they had implanted a heat-fusing chip at the top of his or her spine that could be ignited remotely if either of them was reported to the police.

  Despite the frequency of abductions and the demands of outrageously large sums of money, their grisly intimidation techniques were so successful that the pair never came close to actual apprehension. But the whispered legend of El Choppo, and the gut-wrenching fear it inspired, was starting to draw the attention of Mexican authorities as well as others north of the border.

  …

  Arturo Flores was born and raised in Mérida, the capital of the Mexican state of Yucatán, where both his mother and father were tenured professors at the Universidad del Mayab Escuela de Medicina.

  Growing up as the only child in an academic, upper-class family, Arturo learned early on the benefits of education and exposure to the arts and science. In addition to his native Spanish, he spoke fluent English and acceptable French.

  Arturo was exceptionally bright. When tested during his first year of secondary school, his IQ registered in the 150 to 160 range. Naturally, his parents expected him to follow in their footsteps and attend medical school. However, Arturo wasn’t the least bit interested in comforting the sick. As he entered his teens, with their inevitable testosterone-induced changes, he discovered what began as a curiosity and then blossomed into a raging, all-consuming passion: he liked to hurt things.

  At first, it was relatively harmless: pulling the wings off the ubiquitous June bugs that swarmed the tomato plants in his parent’s garden or squirting lighter fluid on a hapless green snake, then watching it writhe in agony when he set it on fire.

  As he got older, he started trapping agoutis, the small Mexican rodents that looked like an overgrown squirrel. They would make amazingly loud screaming sounds when he nailed their feet to a board, sliced them with a razor, then used pliers to pull strips of skin from their living bodies. It was after graduating to stray dogs and cats that he decided he wanted to become a veterinarian.

  Masking their disappointment at his decision not to attend medical school, Arturo’s parents agreed to pay his tuition with the stipulation that he study at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, UADY, which was less than twenty kilometers from their home. UADY was just fine with Arturo. He could live at home and not have to worry about cleaning an apartment or cooking or buying his own clothes.

  Physically, Arturo wasn’t unattractive. In fact, he was incredibly nondescript. A little above average height with a slim, teetering-on-muscular build, Arturo was eerily easy to forget. He was not the party type and really wasn’t into girls, or boys, for that matter. At eighteen, Arturo had never tasted alcohol, didn’t smoke, and was still a virgin with no desire to change that status. He was the polar opposite of the image of a male college freshman.

  He enjoyed his chemistry and pharmacology classes and absolutely loved anatomy, especially the dissection labs. But it was during his fourth year, when he and his fellow students were able to practice what they had learned on living, breathing pets and farm animals, that he realized he had made the right career choice.

  During their internships, each student was required to assist staff veterinarians in the school’s free clinic. Following the “see one, do one, teach one,” practice long associated with veterinary and medical schools, Arturo was soon allowed to perform procedures on his own, without supervision.

  It didn’t take him long to begin diluting or totally withholding anesthesia when he clipped dog ears and tails. Or his favorite procedure, neutering. Their screams of pain brought the same sensation that rock-and-roll or heavy-metal music gave an average person: a quickening of the pulse and waves of pure, albeit fleeting, pleasure.

  It was during one of the commencement speeches, shortly before being confirmed as “Doctor Flores,” that he heard a comment he would take to heart and that would set him on a course that would chan
ge his life forever. Before sending the graduating class out into the real world, one of UADY’s professors challenged them to “apply their education and academic calling to fulfill their lives by realizing their individual passion.”

  Arturo had only one passion, one burning desire, and he decided at once to begin his quest for a profession that would allow him to apply his training and live out that passion.

  He would stumble across his calling much sooner than he expected.

  Arturo and Hector were introduced to one another virtually, while each was visiting the fiercely secure chatroom Wet Work Wanted‍—WWW‍—deep inside what was referred to as the “darknet.” As was common among those who frequented WWW and most other darknet sites, Arturo and Hector danced around getting to know one another for weeks before finally connecting.

  Hector lived in Cancún, the famous resort city, roughly 270 kilometers south of Mérida, where he worked as a part-time tour guide.

  “Part-time” was something of a misnomer. He trolled just outside the Cancún airport’s arrival-passenger customs and baggage-claim area throughout the day, timing his rounds to coincide with international flights. When he wasn’t at the airport trying to hustle tourists into signing up for tours to Chichen Itza or Tulum, he was working the lobby of the big hotels doing the same. It was a living, but only barely so.

  His physical appearance didn’t help much, not in the tourist trade. He was a tall, brutish-looking man whose ill-fitting clothes highlighted thick, construction-work-hardened muscles. The scarred knuckles on his callused hands suggested a lifetime of bar fights and beatings. Hector was well aware of his intimidating appearance and had recently decided to try his hand at the dangerous but lucrative kidnapping-and-extortion trade.

  Following Arturo and Hector’s darknet tête-à-tête, they met face-to-face at Cenote Dzitnup, a picturesque but touristy natural-spring-water-filled cavern about ten kilometers south of Valladolid, the halfway point between Mérida and Cancun. They hit it off immediately; a Laurel and Hardy–looking but far-from-comedic pair.

  Hector reiterated what they had been discussing for weeks. He needed a partner to help break into the tourist-abduction-and-extortion business. He elaborated on the business model they had gingerly discussed in the WWW chatroom. They would stalk the airport, bars, and upscale hotels for Brits, Europeans, or gringos who had that filthy-rich look about them. Once they identified a suitable couple, they would stake out their movements. Then, once they identified a pattern to the couple’s actions and a location, he and Arturo, working as a team, would grab the female, throw her into a black-market van, and start the ransom process.

  After hearing the details of Hector’s partnership proposal, Arturo responded, “I like your strategy, mi amigo, but if you don’t mind, I have just a couple of suggestions. First, we need to demand payment in bitcoins. A bitcoin account is completely untraceable, and so is everything associated with it: purchases, transfers, withdrawals, everything. And ten or eleven thousand dollars is peanuts. We need to hit these rich fuckers up for at least a hundred grand, maybe more. We can demand a deposit up front, and thanks to being able to hide behind bitcoin security, we can give them a little longer, un poco, to scrounge up enough to make it worth our while.

  “Unbelievably, even obscenely wealthy people, especially Americans, don’t have money that is just lying around. They have it invested in stocks or mutual funds or stashed away in annuities. That means we need to give them a little extra time to scratch it up if we want to make el dinero grande. But not too much time. We don’t want them getting over the shock of what they are going through and bringing in the federales.

  “That brings me to another change I want to make in our future modus operandi, what I call the ‘horror factor.’ Since our initial discussion, I’ve studied the accounts of hundreds of kidnapping cases. Most of the successful ones, at least from the banditos’ perspective, were for small potatoes, or they ended up with a body in a ditch with nothing to show for the effort or with the nappers getting caught and thrown way the fuck back in prison‍—or here in Mexico, executed. The reason in ninety percent of the unsuccessful cases is that the nappers were too soft or gave the family too much time to collect the ransom. If they snatched a drug lord’s kid, zap, no more napper.

  “We’re going to do things differently from the get-go. We’re going to instill absolute terror in their hearts, unimaginable shock and pure, unadulterated horror, before they realize what is happening. I’ve given this concept a lot of thought, and I’ve come up with a plan that will make your worst nightmare look like a bedtime story.

  “Rather than just snatching the woman and then trying to contact the hombre, we grab ’em both at the same time. You’re a fucking gorilla, so unless we stumble upon the ghost of Bruce Lee, you shouldn’t have any problem putting the guy in a bear hug and throwing his ass in the van. I’ll do the same with the chica.

  “Now here is where we put the fear of God in our guests.”

  37

  US Route 191 approximately ten miles north of Jackson Hole

  Five days after the day of

  Things were close to unbearable in the Airstream.

  This time of year, the daytime heat in Southwest Wyoming was always in the low to mid-nineties. Four adults, two near-adult-sized teenage girls, and a year-old baby cooped inside a twenty-five-foot aluminum tube with virtually no ventilation were almost more than was humanly tolerable. Throw a lack of water and diapers into the mix, and you soon had an environment ripe for explosive tempers.

  Jeremy had anticipated this eventuality. He set aside regularly scheduled times for the adults to discuss their predicament. His intention was to remind his fellow cellmates of the need to focus on anything other than their situation.

  Jeremy and Brandon opened out the Airstream’s awning to create at least a semiprotected space outside the RV. Although they positioned its roof at its steepest angle to keep the ash from accumulating, someone still had to pound the underside every few hours. Ash built up like snow underneath the steep roof of a Swiss chalet. Even though the space under the awning was only about four feet wide, it did afford them some degree of airflow, and the tasks involved in keeping it open exercised both their minds and bodies.

  Using an army entrenching shovel that Jeremy kept in the truck’s toolbox, they continually cleared a path through the mounding ash between their latrine and the F-250.

  Trudging through fourteen inches of the dry ash covering the ground was physically exhausting. Jeremy fashioned a pair of snowshoes from two baking sheets they kept in the Airstream’s kitchen oven and trudged down to the Snake River for fresh water. The continuously falling ash had choked the winding, slow-moving stream into a sticky, black bog. Still, after five days of living like chickens in a coop, despair was starting to set in.

  Then it began to rain.

  The rain turned the ash into volcanic mud. Moving became virtually impossible. However, they had no choice. They had to keep the path to the truck and their latrine area open, and so they did. Hour after agonizing hour, everyone but Hunter took turns shoveling the accumulating mud out from under the awning and out of the two paths.

  The blade on the entrenching tool was less than a quarter of the size of a standard shovel, about five inches by six inches. This meant that whoever was using it could pick up little more than a double handful of the soggy ash with each scoop. The good news was that a small amount wasn’t all that heavy, so even the twins could do the necessary work without physically exhausting themselves.

  At around five thirty, after four days of captivity, Judy jerked open the door of the Airstream and stepped outside. She screamed.

  In an instant, Jeremy bounced off the couch and headed toward her, a mixture of fear and bewilderment masking his face. “What’s wrong, Judy? Are you all right?”

  “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong!” Judy shouted. Sweeping one hand toward t
he horizon and grabbing Jeremy’s arm with the other, she gleefully blurted, “It’s stopped! The ash isn’t falling anymore.”

  By now, Sophie, Brandon, and the twins were all trying to squeeze out the door, making it look like a circus clown car. Everyone started laughing and hugging.

  Then Judy, regaining her composure, calmly told the group, “I suspect the front that brought all this rain is pushing the volcanic cloud toward the east. You can see the sky already getting a little brighter out toward the west. Not much, but enough to notice.”

  “Well, it’s enough for a celebration,” Jeremy said. “Back inside! This calls for a round of Jack Daniels.”

  “Oh boy, Fiona,” Ellis cried, clapping her hands and bouncing up and down. “It’s adult-beverage time!”

  “Not quite,” Jeremy interjected. “But I’ll let you two split one of the Cokes.”

  Everyone slept a little better when they went to bed that night.

  Shortly after he began his watch the next day, Jeremy saw the faint glow of headlights piercing the mixture of morning fog and the slowly dispersing ash. He couldn’t think of a single time in his life when he had been more excited, and as the lights inched their way closer, he felt the first waves of relief washing away all of his other thoughts.

  Snapping out of his newfound state of euphoria, Jeremy started pressing, then pounding the truck’s horn.

  It was Sophie’s turn at shoveling, and she was going through the perfunctory motions of scraping and tossing ash sludge, which she noticed, as the day got warmer, was starting to develop a slight crust. She dropped the entrenching tool the instant she heard the blaring horn. She would later recall it as the most melodic, sweetest sound she had ever heard.

  Once again, the Airstream took on the appearance of a clown car as Brandon, Judy, and the twins, with Fiona carrying Hunter, poured out the door. They stood cheering and hugging each other as the first Wyoming National Guard double-bladed road grader, followed by a string of deuce-and-a-half cargo trucks slowly became visible through the haze.