Guardians of the Secret
copyright © 1998 by Cary Shulman
All Rights Reserved
2.
In the mid 1980's it was a typical setting for the intersection of illicit commerce and politics. An airfield cleared in the midst of a jungle in South America. A customized plane sat on the runway. The head of a drug cartel, Emiliano Diaz, surrounded by paramilitary troops, waited as an American operative exited a jeep nearby.
Diaz could have had a functionary be there in his place. His choice of not doing so put him in unnecessary danger. It was a matter of pride. Foolish pride, he knew. But when is pride not foolish. He grew up very poor and it was the only coat he had. He still wore it.
The linear dirt track runway announced a single-minded intention in the face of the impenetrable density of the surrounding jungle. It made flight out of the rain forest possible. A hundred miles away, across the mountains, Indians, who were being driven off their land, held on to an incomparably older way of flight. Their shamans took magical journeys from the jungle to the world of the spirits in order to maintain the integrity of their tribe.
The operative, whose name was Russell Everett, was interested in a more prosaic kind of flight. But one which he too believed was necessary in keeping his world together.
The rain forest offered a perfect place to grow and process the cocaine. It also provided with its profusion of trees and vines a perfect place to hide. In such tropical profusion the Hindus conceived the idea that God could even hide from himself. The drier world of the biblical Middle East was one of transparency. Eden, lush as it was, wasn't much of a place to hide.
But hiding was only of a practical concern for Everett, not a moral one. The clearing was the site of an invisible line. Step over it too boldly and the ethical tension that holds you and the country together begins to dissolve. Fall too short of it and you leave the field to someone else.
Everett had gone over that line many times, his career was built on that. As long as he knew the exact coordinates of just how far, he felt he could always get back. The moral terrain was no different than a topographic one. He had turned the Sisyphean effort of endlessly climbing back up slippery slopes into a kind of moral aerobics. It tested a certain moral rigor.
Diaz was looking at Everett as he approached. Everett was medium height had short dark hair and a military bearing that he had tried unsuccessfully to ease. He understood the problem. It was second nature to him and he had never known a first.
Diaz thought that he was like El Norte, cold, distant, clean. He and the others always seemed like they were headed for the stars. Diaz was bound to the earth and its dirt and blood. He loved it, but even he was giving his son to El Norte to go to college. He saluted Everett, gave him a warm embrace and finally a suitcase. Everett saluted back and climbed into the plane.
He checked that the suitcase was filled with hundred dollar bills and took off. He looked disdainfully at the Colombians below. The reckoning would have to come later he thought and then muttered to himself, "Billions of dollars, and all they can think of doing is buying yachts and gold bathtubs."
Ordinarily the suitcase of money would have gone from him through a dummy corporation to a bank like the one in Coral Gables, or Australia, but this was being sent by courier to Europe. The destination was someone he had only known as a constellation of rumors he had heard for some years. He had heard enough to make him realize that while he was trying to win the cold war, this person was planning for the next.
The flight ahead was routine, so he occupied himself speculating who the person might be. He recognized the rumors as a carefully constructed cover. They almost always stemmed from couriers and go betweens. This individual could be a fiction created by a group of people, or might be one of them protected by the others.
It was not in his interests to professionally penetrate it. This was for his private amusement so he continued in his efforts to fill in the blanks.
Of all the stories he had heard, one seemed more coherent and plausible. It often included the joke that the object of his speculation was an enigma wrapped in an expensive Armani coat. It went on to suggest that he was illegitimate, the son of a German high official who had escaped the downfall of the Third Reich to live in Argentina. The fall of Peron led to a brief sojourn in Brazil, remote Mato Grosso but also Sao Paulo where his father's interest in the prurient nightlife led accidentally to his birth.
The father's exile continued on to Paraguay, leaving his son to his own exile. His mother put him up for adoption, never telling him who his father was. He was left to solve the mystery of his identity. Having finally done so, he made his history a matter of complete indifference. He made no claims for himself one way or the other. That he was once poor, illiterate, now well to do and self educated. Irrelevant. Who his mother was, his father. Irrelevant.
This made his associates even more curious. They looked into it with conflicting results. In the end they realized it didn't matter, it was made irrelevant by the force of his character.
His father had lived at a time of great catastrophe, and rather than be buffeted around the edge of the maelstrom, he chose to move to its center. He worked for Hitler and secretly for Stalin giving substance to the long held notion that someone in the German high command had been a spy.
The son lived in a different age, but like his father he was fascinated with power, though not being on the margins of it. In the coming battle between the nationalists and the internationalists, it was simply a contest of vision and money. It was always a contest of vision and money.
He was certainly a visionary, but was clear headed enough to intuit that in having a dream there was the possibility of a nightmare. He felt the risk was worth it, even more, it was life at its fullest, the only life bearable. He possessed the vision, now he would set about getting the money it required.
copyright © 1998 by Cary Shulman
All Rights Reserved