And anyway, screw his potential critics. Anytime they liked, the CIA's brass could've called him home.
El Salvador was feeling more like "home" these days than Washington, where he'd been born and raised, launched on his present life's course by two generations of forebears who'd served the U.S. government and died while doing so. If it was wrong for him to do that, someone should have warned him when he was a kid.
Outsiders who believed the TV news might think El Salvador's bloodletting had subsided since mid-January, when the various combatants met in neutral Mexico City and signed the Chapultepec Peace Accords. That sounded great on paper, if you managed to forget that civil war had slaughtered thousands for twelve years, three months and one day on official timelines of barbarity.
Before that, and continuing today…well, no one with a working memory forgot about the pain and losses they had suffered, much less the identities of those they held responsible.
Military reform was proceeding, of course, reducing the number of government troops by some 50 percent, while a UN-sanctioned Commission on the Truth for El Salvador slowly began taking stock of atrocities, opening mass graves of murdered civilians while transcribing pleas of ignorance and innocence from two men most responsible, Salvador's Minister of Defense and the Armed Forces Joint Chief of Staff. The latest digging had begun yesterday morning, outside El Mozote, Morazán Department, but it might take weeks to bare the decomposing truth from 1981.
Meanwhile, Operation Silence was continuing in Chile and surrounding nations, military murderers and their political accomplices laboring night and day to hide the evidence of savagery ordered by General Augusto Pinochet during his seventeen years as dictator, still commander in chief of the Chilean military until March of 1998.
In Colombia, sporadic warfare persisted between the Cali and Medellín Cartels, with various guerilla armies pitching in for ideology and profit. FARC commandos had kidnapped a daughter of Cali Cartel boss Jose Londoño, demanding $10 million ransom, whereupon the drug lord's soldiers had abducted twenty-odd leftist leaders from the Colombian Communist Party, Patriotic Party, and United Workers Union.
Pablo Escobar's mob still preferred killing cops and other government officials, including Myriam Velez, one of Colombia's "faceless" judges whose identity was meant to be secure from drug cartels and terrorists. That pipedream was discredited in September, when Medellín gunmen ambushed Velez in Bogotá, killing her and three bodyguards to thwart her investigation of Don Pablo for the 1989 assassination of presidential candidate Luis Galán and the 1986 slaying of journalist Guillermo Cano. Medellín police responded to Velez's murder and the recent deaths of nineteen fellow officers with the Villatina Massacre, randomly gunning down one adult and eight kids from a Christian splinter sect in that impoverished Medellín barrio.
Stateside, Langley had created an Office of Military Affairs in March, coordinating foreign operations with the Department of Defense, right around the time that DOD investigators recommended discontinuation of the Agency's torture manuals circulating abroad and serving as textbooks at the School of the Americas. The problem with those handbooks, as boiled down and sanitized, was DOD's admission that "two dozen short passages in six of the manuals, which total 1169 pages, contained material that either was not or could be interpreted not to be consistent with U.S. policy."
Meaning, of course, the U.S. policy that Washington presented to the world on paper, as opposed to what went on in other countries when reporters weren't around.
There'd been good news about Manuel Noriega back in April, anyhow. He'd been convicted on all counts, sentenced to forty years in prison, and with any luck, no one would notice that the northbound flow of drugs through Panama continued unabated in is absence, with the payoffs democratically divided between Panamanian officials and their overlords in Washington, D.C.
What was that line from Peter Byrne, lead singer of the Talking Heads, that came to mind just now?
Oh, right: Same as it ever was. And you could take that to the bank.
Miami: December 23, 1992
"I dunno, bro. It just don't feel like Christmas down here, with the palm trees and no snow."
"You're lookin' at it wrong," Dom Giordano told his younger brother, Angelo. "In Florida, it snows year-round."
Ange snorted at the joke, a half-assed pity laugh that set Dom's teeth on edge. "Remember, hermanito, these guys we're goin' to see are serious. Don't say or do nothin' to piss 'em off."
"I heard you the first three times," Angelo replied. "So, what's this hermanito shit?"
"Means just the same as fratellino, little brother. Workin' with the Cubans and Colombians so much, I figured that it couldn't hurt to learn their lingo, and it ain't much different from Italiano when you get down to it."
"You turnin' spick, man?"
"Vaffanculo," Dominic replied. "The way you got them Russians and Jamaicans movin' in up north, I'd say you gotta be un idiota if you don't learn how to understand 'em. Take it from me, Ange. You need to try out this new thing for computers called Rosetta Stone."
"You're usin' a computer now?" Ange laughed again. "Wait till the boys hear that back home."
His brother's mocking tone raised Dominic's hackles, but he kept quiet, switching on his BMW's left-turn signal as he pulled into the driveway of a motel set on Biscayne Boulevard, across the bay's blue water from Miami Beach.
"A motel? Are you serious?" Ange asked.
"It ain't just a motel," Dom answered back. "It's headquarters. The guys from Medellín own the whole place. You see the sign?"
"It says 'No Vacancy'."
"And always will. We're rollin' into what I like to call the Cocaine Embassy."
Dom parked the BMW and warned his brother one last time. "No smartass bullshit from here on. Believe me when I say these guys are serious."
"I get it. Gesù Cristo, bro. Don't piss yourself before we even get inside."
A pair of soldiers met them, walked them down a line of ground-floor doorways with another tier above, pool to their right, water as blue as Biscayne Bay across the boulevard. Dom didn't have to knock at Number 13, since the taller of the two soldatos did it for him, heard a voice inside say, "Entrar" and then opened it, standing aside to let the Giordanos pass inside.
Dom recognized two of the three men waiting for them, both Colombians from Medellín, Jorge Cardona and Raúl Solano. He began the introductions, handshakes all around, and Jorge introduced the third man in their lineup as Alfonso de la Rosa.
"So, caballeros," Dom began, using the Spanish word for gentlemen, "I wanted you to meet my brother so you'd know who's handling your product on the New York end."
"Thing is," Ange interrupted, seeming heedless of his elder brother's warning scowl, "we met already and forgot to tell ya."
Dominic could feel the short hairs rising on his nape. "Oh, yeah? And when was that?" he asked.
"A couple months ago," Ange said.
"Siete semanas," Cardona added.
Seven weeks.
Dominic glowered at his brother, then turned to the three Colombians and asked the question they'd already answered for him. "So, what's this shit all about, then?"
Ange answered with a question of his own. "You ever watch The Jeffersons when it was on TV?"
The theme song from that comedy program ran through Dom's mind as if he had it on the tube right now. "You're movin' up, eh?" he asked Angelo. "You're headed for the Big Time."
"Now you got it, bro."
There was a pistol in his brother's hand that Dom had overlooked before, and how stupid was that? It rose into alignment with his face.
"And all I have to do is seal the deal," Ange said.
"Cazzo stronzo," Dom spat the curse at Ange. "Guess I'll be seeing you in Hell."
"Save me a seat, bro," Ange replied, and squeezed the pistol's trigger once.
A Look At: When Honor Dies (The Bureau 10)
In The Bureau's final episode, When Honor Dies, Hardy and Wyman Ga
ntt continue on their paths of service to the CIA and FBI in a world fraught with terrorism emanating simultaneously from the Middle East and on the home front. Agent Erin O'Hara finds sufficient evidence to put her on the track of colleague Stephen Barnes, but not enough to file charges against him yet. Barnes presses on with his campaign to undermine the FBI. Angelo Giordano dons his brother's mantle as head of the New York Cosa Nostra family and finds himself besieged by interlopers from abroad, as well as Gotham's own historical Five Families. Ex-Sergeant Payton Sawyer seeks a way to pacify Harlem's crime-ridden streets without a badge to give him the required authority. The fates of clashing families collide in the chaos of 9/11, which will change America forever.
COMING SOON
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Michael Newton
About the Author
A California native, Michael Newton has published 215 books under his own name and various pseudonyms since 1977. He began writing professionally as a “ghost” for author Don Pendleton on the best-selling Executioner series and continues his work on that series today. With 104 episodes published to date, Newton has nearly tripled the number of Mack Bolan novels completed by creator Pendleton himself.
Newton's first book under his own name was Monsters, Mysteries and Man (1979), a survey of unexplained phenomena for younger readers. While 156 of Newton's published books have been novels—including westerns, political thrillers and psychological suspense—he is best known for nonfiction, primarily true crime and reference books.
Find more great titles by Michael Newton and Wolfpack Publishing here.
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