The Devil's Elixir

by Raymond Khoury

  “Talk to me, Sean,” she pressed, reading my hesitation. “Tell me what happened.”

  And something shifted inside me, and I decided I didn’t want to make the same mistake I’d made with Michelle. I should have told her, just like I should have told Tess about this, too, ages ago.

  I looked out, the sun no more than a golden sliver getting swallowed up by a ravenous sea, and I could still see those events unfurling in my mind’s eye, like it was yesterday, although you never know, do you? The mind plays tricks. I’ve found that some memories people remember so vividly, the ones we’re sure we know so precisely, are sometimes not as accurate as we think. Over time, the mind massages the truth. It distorts and adjusts and adds in small increments, making it hard to tell what actually happened from what didn’t. But in this case, I think my memory was razor sharp.

  I’d have been happier if it wasn’t.

  It wasn’t easy to get to him.

  Navarro’s lab was in the middle of nowhere, high up in the lawless and impenetrable Sierra Madre Occidental, a volcanic range of tall mountains that were cleaved by steep gorges, ravines, and plunging canyons known as barrancas, some of which were deeper than the Grand Canyon. Neither the Aztec emperors nor the Spanish conquistadors had ever been able to impose their authority on the violent and fiercely independent villagers who lived in the Sierra’s folds, and the Mexican government hadn’t fared any better. The mountains, rife with marijuana and poppy fields, were controlled by regional strongmen and warring drug mafias. Gangs of armed bandits and renegades still roamed around the wild hinterland on horses and mules, like they did a hundred years ago and more. Navarro had chosen his compound’s location well.

  We didn’t have that much to go on. McKinnon’s position had been pinpointed by homing in on the signal of the cell phone during his call. After that, the mission had been planned hastily, and in the interest of not alerting any bought-and-paid-for Mexican law enforcement personnel in Navarro’s pay, we put together the intel we needed ourselves using one of the Air Force’s Predator drones, without involving the local authorities.

  The plan was for us to be choppered in, but the landscape around our target wasn’t doing us any favors. The compound sat on a high mesa, and the terrain around it was too hostile and inhospitable for a ground infiltration. Given its high altitude setting and its commanding allaround views, chopper approaches were also highly vulnerable to detection. The best we could do was land about three miles away and cover the rest of the journey on foot over rough terrain that, we knew, was home to scorpions, rattlesnakes, mountain lions, bears, and weird, mythical mutant cougar-like beasts called onzas to boot.

  A cakewalk.

  We hit the ground about three hours before sunrise, figuring that would give us enough time to get to the compound under cover of dark - ness, get McKinnon out, and make it back to the chopper by dawn. We moved fast and sleek across steep, rocky slopes and rushing creeks, through pine forests and thickets of oak saplings, juniper, and cactus. There were eight of us in the strike team: me, Munro, a couple of DEA combat troops, and four Special Forces soldiers. We knew we were venturing into a well-guarded compound, so we were armed to the teeth: Heckler and Koch UMPs with sound suppressors, silenced Glocks, Bowie knives, body armor, night vision goggles. We were also wearing head-mounted video minicams that were sending a live feed back to the DEA’s field office inside the embassy in Mexico City, and we had a Predator flying overhead, giving us real-time visuals via the drone’s operators at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. The plan, obviously, was not to engage. We were meant to sneak in and get our man out before they knew we were even there.

  Didn’t happen.

  Munro and I made it through the sleepy security without too much trouble. There was only one guard we couldn’t get around stealthily, and Munro had used his knife to put him down. We found McKinnon where he said he’d be, in his lab. He looked like he was in his late fifties and was of average height, a bit on the skinny side, with a silvery goatee and clear blue eyes that were shot through with intelligence. He was wearing a white straw cowboy hat with a silver scorpion clipped onto it and a snapbutton Western shirt, and he had a battered old leather satchel on the counter beside him. He seemed scared and thrilled in equal parts to see us there, and was all raring to go. But there was a wrinkle.

  He wasn’t alone.

  He had a woman with him, someone he hadn’t mentioned in his call, a local who’d been cooking and cleaning for him during his incarceration. A woman he’d bonded with. Deeply, evidently, since she’d risked her life to sneak in a phone to him, the one he’d used to call us. She had a kid with her, her son, a boy of three or four—that thought now made me feel like I was swallowing my fist. She was also pregnant. With McKinnon’s baby. She had a pretty big bump on her.

  He wasn’t leaving without her. Or the kid.

  Which was a problem.

  A huge problem.

  We didn’t exactly have a limo waiting outside. We had to get around the guards again. Quietly. Then there was the three-mile trek back to the chopper. Over rough ground. In total darkness.

  Munro refused.

  He told McKinnon there was no way the woman and the kid would be able to make the trip. Not without seriously slowing us down or unwittingly giving up our presence, which would blow the mission and possibly get us all killed. There was a small army of coke-fueled, trigger-happy pistoleros out there, and the last thing Munro wanted was for them to know we were around.

  McKinnon was incensed. He flat out refused to leave without them.

  Munro wouldn’t budge and got angry.

  Then it got ugly.

  McKinnon said it wasn’t negotiable.

  Munro told him he wasn’t the one dictating the play and mocked his naïvete, asking him how he even knew the woman’s baby was his and mocking him by saying he’d probably been duped by the woman who saw him as a ticket out of that miserable hellhole and into the United States.

  I tried to mediate and interceded on behalf of the woman and her kid, telling Munro we could carry the boy and the woman probably knew the terrain better than we did. Munro turned on me and growled about how this wasn’t a mission to rescue innocent hostages, but rather to bring back a scumbag who was working on new ways to wreck people’s lives. We didn’t owe him anything, Munro hissed. We weren’t rescuing him—we were there to make sure his work never saw the light of day, period.

  McKinnon told him to go fuck himself and said he was staying.

  And Munro just lost it.

  He pulled out his Glock and, without so much as a blink, pumped a bullet into the kid, then another into his mother.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. I can still see the shock and horror on the woman’s face for that split second after the bullet hit her kid and the way her head snapped backward like it had been punched by a blast of wind when he shot her before she collapsed onto the floor, already dead.

  McKinnon just lost it.

  He started shouting, hurling abuse at us, moving around frantically, just incensed and raging and out of control. Munro was yelling back at him, ordering him to shut up while jabbing his gun angrily at his face. I tried to calm them both down, but they were beyond that. McKinnon started throwing things at us, lab equipment, stools, anything he could get his hands on.

  Then he ran.

  We scambled after him, but he was at the lab’s door before we could get to him, flinging it open and storming out while screaming from the top of his voice.

  And everything went haywire.

  I was on him first and just managed to grab him when the first shots crackled in the night. Shouting echoed in the darkness around me, the guards snapped to attention at his outburst and rushed out from all directions. Bullets ate up the timber walls around me as I dragged McKinnon back inside, wild, nonsilenced bursts from the Mexicans’ AK-47s flying all over the place while, from beyond the perimeter of the compound, short, three-bullet snaps were coming in from our guys who were po
sitioned in various spots to cover our exit, the whole chaotic mess mixed in with urgent, clipped commentary coming through the earpiece of my comms set.

  Between the weed, the lechuguilla bootleg tequila, and the coke, the pistoleros weren’t thinking straight, and it went manic. I was hustling McKinnon back through the lab, my left arm around his neck, the other leveling the snub-nosed UMP at the door way, when the first guards burst through, three of them. I cut one of them down and saw another get hit by Munro’s fire, but the third took cover behind a counter and started spraying gunfire recklessly from behind it.

  I pulled McKinnon and we both dove for cover behind another cabinet, landing heavily under a shower of debris from the torrent of bullets blasting everything around us, while Munro slipped out of sight, his voice in my earpiece telling me he was going to secure McKinnon’s files, which were farther back, at the very back of the lab. Then another pistolero charged in, laying down more gunfire randomly, firing at everything that moved, tacking left, away from his compadre, snaking his way farther down the lab, and before I knew it I was separated from Munro and pinned down by the two gunmen.

  Then I heard McKinnon curse and groan, and noticed his thigh.

  He’d taken a slug there, right through the middle of it halfway up from his knee. I couldn’t see if it had gone through, and while it didn’t look good, at least blood wasn’t gushing out, which meant maybe his femoral arteries had been spared. His face was taut with pain, his eyes bristling with fury, his hands covered with blood, and I immediately knew there was no way he was going to make it back to the chopper. I wasn’t sure I was either—not with the two shooters doing a pincer move on me.

  Munro was in a bind of his own, cornered by more shooters, and I heard him growl through my earpiece that he was pulling out and heading for cover.

  I was left alone with McKinnon, pinned down, with the scientist cowering next to me and two half-crazed Mexicans closing in.

  Outside, the battle was raging. Life was cheap down here, and Navarro had a small army based in the compound, a small army that was now coming out of the woodwork, full force, guns blazing. Our guys were racking up the kills, but the sheer number facing them meant that we were taking losses, too. I heard one, then two of them get hit—and knew I had to pull out, too, and fast.

  I wasn’t sure I could get out of there in one piece, but if I managed it, I sure as hell couldn’t do it with McKinnon in tow. Even if I cut down the pistoleros, I couldn’t take him with me, not in the shape he was in.

  But I couldn’t leave him there either.

  Not with what he knew.

  Munro was in my ear, haranguing me, pushing me to do what needed doing.

  I can still hear his words, crackling in my head. “Just cap the sonofabitch, Reilly. Do it. You heard what he’s done. ‘It’ll make meth seem as boring as aspirin,’ remember? That’s the scumbag you’re worried about wasting? You happy to let him loose, is that gonna be your contribution to making this world a better place? I don’t think so. You don’t want that on your conscience, and I don’t either. We came here to do a job. We have our orders. We’re at war, and he’s the enemy. So stop with the righteous bullshit, pop the bastard, and get your ass out here. I ain’t waiting any longer.”

  I was running out of time. Fast.

  And maybe it was a horrible mistake, maybe it was an inexcusable murder of an innocent civilian, or maybe it was the only thing to do—I really don’t know which one it was anymore—but, either way, I turned my gun on McKinnon and put a bullet through his brain. Then I lobbed a couple of incendiary grenades at the banditos and got out of there just as the whole place went up in flames.

  47

  Tess was looking me like I’d just strangled her pet cat. Not just strangled it, but chopped it up and tossed it in a blender. It’s a look I’ll never forget.

  She was quiet for a torturously long moment. I didn’t say anything more either. I just waited for her to digest it in her own time.

  After a while, I couldn’t deal with the silence anymore.

  “Say something,” I told her, softly.

  She let out a weary sigh and did, her voice subdued.

  “I just . . . I don’t . . . It’s the second time in a week you’ve hit me with stuff from your past, and this . . . I can’t believe you never told me about it.” There was hurt in her eyes, and I hated seeing it there, knowing I’d caused it.

  “It’s not something I’m proud of.”

  “Still . . .”

  “I . . . I was disgusted with myself. I could barely live with what I’d done. And I didn’t want to lose you because of it either.” Looking at her now, I wasn’t sure we’d ever recover from this.

  It didn’t help that she didn’t say anything to contradict my feeling. She just looked away, nodding to herself with a hint of resolve in her expression, like she was looking for something, anything, to limit the fallout.

  “Why was it so important to stop him?” she finally asked. “What was this drug he was working on?”

  I frowned. It was something that made the whole feeling even worse. “We never found out,” I told her. “The secret died with him. And with Navarro, I guess. But someone out there wants it, and they want it real bad.”

  I told Tess everything I read about McKinnon after we got back from there. I had wanted to know everything about him. He’d become an obsession. So I’d got hold of the file the DEA had put together on him and followed it up with a few inquiries of my own.

  McKinnon was a quiet, unassuming, and well-respected anthropologist and ethnopharmacologist from northern Virginia. He held a PhD from Princeton, and after teaching there and at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for a number of years, he obtained a grant from the National Geographic Society to explore the medicinal plant usage of indigenous peoples in remote corners of Central and South America. He went there seeking out traditional cures that were typically passed down orally from one healer to another, and the fascination blossomed. He’d turned into a medicine hunter and ended up dedicating his life to living with isolated tribes in the Amazon and the Andes, researching and cataloguing their use of plants and funding his ongoing bioprospecting from lecture fees and by selling articles and photographic essays to newspapers and magazines.

  His life was his work, and he’d never married or had kids.

  Tess asked, “So how’d he end up coming up with a superdrug?”

  I reminded Tess that in many cultures, particularly in the Far East, the mind and the body were considered to be one entity, unlike in Western medicine. Curing a problem in either one of them invariably meant dealing with an underlying cause in the other. Amazonian shamans, I had discovered, pushed this approach to another level. They believed that true healing involved healing the body, the mind, and the spirit. Some of them believed that bodily disease, as well as mental illness, were caused by noxious spirits that needed to be expunged in religious rituals that often involved psychoactive substances—hallucinogens such as ayahuasca, which has been documented to cure both depression and metastasized cancers. This meant that for someone like McKinnon, studying the cures that healers and shamans administered involved learning and understanding the properties of the complicated brews the healers had perfected over centuries of usage and of the psychoactive plants they put in them.

  “His medicinal work involved participating in religious rituals and taking all kinds of hallucinogens,” I told her. “And somewhere on that path, he came across this drug.”

  “You don’t know where he discovered it, with what tribe?”

  “No. And, obviously, Navarro didn’t either, nor does whoever is after it now, whether it’s Navarro or someone else.”

  “But clearly, it’s something really powerful—otherwise they wouldn’t be doing all this now, five years later, and still be this desperate to get their hands on it, would they?” She looked at me with an expression that somehow injected a touch of hope in me that maybe we weren’t completely toast. “Maybe you did th
e right thing. Maybe . . . maybe if he’d lived, things would be much worse.”

  Michelle had said that, too. I’d tried to convince myself of that for years, and hearing her say it as well, thinking about what was happening now—maybe there was some truth in it. Right now, I was just pleased Tess was still in the same room as me.

  “But what the hell is it?” she asked. “There are plenty of hallucinogens out there and they’re not as bad as something like meth, right?”

  I’d asked the same question, back then. “Three reasons. One, he said it was something that could be hugely popular, that it had such a kick in it that people wouldn’t be able to resist, that it would make meth look like aspirin—his words, not mine. Two, he’d managed to turn it into a pill. Which means it’s easy to take. And the right drug at the right time can spread like the plague. Three, since Navarro would be the only one supplying it, he could make it as addictive as he wants. Which would be a disaster since we’re talking about a heavy-duty hallucinogen.”

  “Why?”

  “Most human brains,” I explained, “are not wired to deal with the effects of a hard-core hallucinogen. They’re just not. The brain can deal with the effects of weed or coke or heroin, but a hard-core hallucinogen is very different. It runs a serious risk of destroying a big chunk of the psychological fabric of its users. That’s why these drugs have always been seen culturally, in pagan religions and such, as something that is by the few and for the few, meaning it’s meant to be taken only after a proper initiation. It’s part of a ritual, a ceremony, a rite of passage . . . you do it once in a lifetime, maybe when you come of age, when you enter adulthood, when you reach a certain milestone of maturity—or when you’re in bad shape and you need to be healed. The only people who are allowed to do it regularly are the shamans and the medicine men, and there’s a reason for that. They can take it on a regular basis because they’re trained to deal with its effects, their whole lives are devoted to coping with the ramifications of what you see and what you experience when you’re tripping. Biologically and, more importantly, psychologically, the average person is just not equipped and not trained to deal with something this intense, and from a social point of view there isn’t time for the average user to do that. There’s a real risk that if a drug like this were to become mainstream—based on what we know about it—it could cause a lot of problems. People using a pill like that wouldn’t be able to function. They could easily develop long-term depression and mental instability and suffer breakdowns. Psychiatric wards would have to deal with an onslaught of hundreds of thousands of patients. Look at how devastating and debilitating meth is, how it takes over lives and turns healthy, successful people who had everything going for them into zombies—and we’re only seeing the beginning of it.