The Oshkosh Connection

by Andrew Watts

  Karen landed her aircraft on the runway and taxied up to her hangar. She shut off her engine and finished the checklist as the propeller spooled down. Then she slid open the canopy and removed her headset, long tousles of blond hair falling down over her flight suit.

  A black sedan waited in the parking lot behind the chain-link fence. Her father stood next to it, waving. She waved back to him, smiling, and headed his way.

  She was glad for the surprise visit. He rarely came out to see her anymore, even when he was home. Especially during a midterm election year like this, his time in Wisconsin was usually packed with town halls and visits to various groups of his constituents.

  Karen’s coach and agent both walked with her as she made her way from the plane towards the hangar area.

  “That’s your last run until we perform next week. How did it feel?” asked her coach.

  “Good. How’d the spin look from where you were?”

  “I think you entered it a bit aggressive.”

  “It was under control…”

  “Karen.”

  “I’ll ease up next time.”

  Her coach kept talking while she tried to signal her father through the fence. She yelled to her dad, “Give me five minutes!” The senator, who was on the phone now, nodded and gave her a thumbs-up.

  Karen’s agent, a woman in her late twenties who represented several singers, a touring magician, and two actors, said, “Your conference call with the reporters is tomorrow. I was going to prep you with the publicist.”

  “Let’s do it tomorrow. I’m tired.”

  The agent pursed her lips. “Fine. I’ll call you later.”

  Aerobatics pilots didn’t normally have agents. Karen was the exception. Her looks and family name had gotten her a book deal, and now she was in talks for a possible documentary series. The agent always seemed put off at Karen’s lack of interest in publicity. Karen saw it as a necessary evil. But it wasn’t rocket science. For the crowds and cameras, she just had to smile and wink and shake what god gave her a little. Her real work was in the cockpit. The agent wouldn’t understand.

  In the locker room, Karen changed into tight designer jeans with a few tears in them—to make them more stylish. Karen couldn’t understand why the three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar jeans had holes in them, but it gave everyone a little more glimpse of her tanned thigh. Not exactly something she wanted to show off in front of her father, but a lot of her fellow aerobatic pilots on the circuit were training here this week too, and maybe she’d join them for beers later.

  Seeing her come out to the parking lot, Senator Becker said into the phone, “Gotta go, I’ll call you later.”

  She hugged her father. “What brings the good senator to town? You weren’t supposed to be here until next week, when I perform. I just spoke to you on the phone a few days ago. What gives?”

  “We need to speak about something.”

  “About what?”

  “Ron Dicks is dead.”

  “What?” Her mouth gaped open. “Dad, I’m so sorry. How?” Karen saw the look on her father’s face. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s happening, Karen. Just like you said it would.”

  “You think it was them?”

  Her father nodded somberly. “I do.”

  He forked a piece of rare steak into his mouth and chewed. The two were alone, other than the two local police officers who were roaming the perimeter of the two-acre property. The senator’s two-story home rested on the shores of Lake Winnebago. The police security detail had been arranged after his conversation with the FBI. The authorities were taking the Senator’s death threats seriously, while keeping them confidential at the senator’s behest.

  Senator Becker had cooked a dinner of steak, asparagus, and corn on the cob on his Big Green Egg smoker grill. Cooking was one of his hobbies from a life of calm long ago. The red juices of his steak now covered his plate. He broke off a piece of hard roll to sop them up, then stuffed it into his mouth.

  Karen looked out over the lake. A summer storm brewed in the distance, brilliant flashes of lightning branching up through the clouds on the horizon.

  “I’m trying not to say I told you so.”

  “Say it.”

  She shook her head, fuming. “I’m very sorry about Ron. But he made poor choices by introducing you to these men. So did that wretched woman you had with you.”

  “Don’t bring Jennifer into this. That’s not helpful.”

  Karen turned away. Years ago, she and her mother had come home from a shopping trip to then-Congressman Becker and one of his female staffers in a compromising situation, in this very house. That had led to a quick but painful divorce from Karen’s mother.

  Karen had forced herself to blame the staffer, a woman by the name of Jennifer Upton. It was easier than blaming her dad. Upton had been toxic. An easy scapegoat in Karen’s mind. And while Karen knew her father had his flaws, he also had a great many gifts. He was a master politician. One of the few left who could garner support on both sides of the aisle. A true statesman with a powerful intellect. She knew in her heart that he would be president someday. And she believed he would make a great one.

  But while Karen was able to forgive her father and to look past his shortcomings, the ugliness of politics had changed her. Karen had been just out of college back then. Interning on her father’s congressional staff, intent on beginning a career in D.C. Then her eyes had been opened to how none of it worked the way it was supposed to. She’d found out what really motivated the people who worked in Washington. Ambition. Power. Truth and principle be damned. Her idealism was soon shattered.

  Jennifer Upton and Ron Dicks were perfect examples of this. They were always conspiring together. Bending and breaking every rule. They just wanted to win, no matter the cost.

  One day her father, Jennifer Upton, and Ron Dicks had arrived back from an overseas trip. Upton and Dicks acted like they’d won the lottery. Decided right there on the spot that Becker could run for Senate the next cycle. Some new source of funding that they wouldn’t talk about. But it was a game changer.

  When she’d confronted him, her father had told her what was going on. He’d always been honest with her. Ron and he had made a deal. Landed a big fish. Some powerful men were going to bankroll him. She had asked if it was illegal. He’d told her no, but she’d known better. He was blinded by his own ambition, and his future was brighter than ever. The group just wanted a little help on some Afghanistan policy proposal, Ron had said.

  But it was never that easy. Not with men like these. Before long, Karen had overheard signs of trouble. The mysterious power brokers turned out to have dark connections.

  Karen had asked her father to break off all ties with the foreign group. Told him he should go to the authorities and tell them who they were. Jennifer Upton had argued the opposite. The funders’ policies were identical to their own. What would it hurt if they were to continue to accept untraceable money?

  Ron Dicks was neutral.

  That was when Karen had caught her father having the affair with Jennifer Upton. She’d used it as leverage. A moment of rock bottom to snap her father out of his death spiral. She’d given him an ultimatum, demanding that Upton leave, in return for Karen’s own silence to the press about the affair. She also demanded that he break off communication with the international group that had been funneling money to his campaign. Her father had probably doubted that she would ever go through with it. And he was right. But the senator was a transactional man, and he knew that he had to give something to his daughter. So, he’d cut Upton loose and promised that he would break off contact with the group.

  In truth, it wasn’t the affair Karen was trying to stop. She wanted Jennifer Upton’s negative influence on her father gone. The next year he had become a senator, and Karen convinced herself that the dark financiers were a thing of the past.

  While she’d chosen a career that had nothing to do with politics, Karen remained politically astute. A
savvy strategist, her father had for years tried to convince her to come to D.C. and rejoin his staff, or perhaps go to get a master’s in public policy at the Kennedy School. He could easily get her in. But Karen had found flying, and now she wanted little to do with any of that.

  “Why are they acting this way now? After all this time…”

  “I’ve turned my back on them.”

  “You were supposed to have done that long ago.”

  “I’ve done it for good this time.”

  “And they killed Ron for it?”

  “And a lobbyist that served as their intermediary.”

  Karen covered her mouth. “Have you told the authorities?”

  “Not everything. But enough. I met with the FBI today. I’ve told them what they need to know, and that we received death threats. That’s why I have a police escort now.”

  “You received death threats?”

  “Ron did. He claimed the threats extended to me. He also left a note. He implicated himself and proclaimed me innocent of any wrongdoing.”

  Karen studied her father. “Are you?”

  He looked hurt. “Of course. I didn’t know the details of who these men were.”

  “That was intentional. Plausible deniability.”

  “It matters little now.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would they kill Ron? And the lobbyist? What did they have to gain from that?”

  “At first I thought they were trying to scare me. To change my vote on a key piece of legislation they didn’t like.”

  “That’s behavior I would expect from the mafia.”

  “You may not be far off.”

  Karen finished her glass and sighed. “Dad…”

  “I know.”

  “Do you think they’re going to come after you?”

  “I don’t know. I’m still trying to understand their motivations. I fear we aren’t dealing with rational actors.”

  “They know you’re done with them because you have no more use for them. Or no more need. Because you’re running for president next year, right?”

  “There’s my smart girl.”

  “And when that happens, people will start digging into your past like never before. They’ll find all the skeletons. So they’re getting rid of them. That means eventually they will…” She looked up at her father, too disturbed to finish her sentence.

  But her father’s look told her that he’d understood. “You’re reaching the same conclusion that I did.”

  Karen sighed, shaking her head. “I warned you that they were bad news.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have listened.”

  She shrugged.

  “Have you ever spoken to your mother about any of this? Or anyone else, for that matter?”

  “Never. You told me not to.”

  “I’ve asked you not to do a lot of things, and that never stopped you.” Her father smiled.

  She laughed. “Well, I listened this time.”

  “Good. We will be able to get out of this. But no one can know the truth about who these men are.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m coming up with a plan. It’s still a work in progress.”

  “Be careful.”

  Chapter 13

  Ian Williams sat on a stone patio, looking out over one of his boss’s sprawling family ranches, ten miles from Durango. To the east, steep green slopes formed the backbone of Mexico, the Sierra Madre Occidental. A fiery sunset painted the sky a brilliant red. Williams liked this time of night in Mexico. It was muggy, but peaceful.

  The Martinez family was inside, the cartel boss’s wife reading to his young children. Armed men in cargo pants and tactical boots roamed the premises, carrying machine guns. Even here, on the home turf of the Sinaloa cartel, they could never let their guard down.

  Especially now, when they were so close to the meeting.

  As the relatively new leader of the Sinaloa cartel, Ian Williams’s boss, Juan Martinez, was already a target to many. The city of Durango, along with Sinaloa and Chihuahua, formed one of the corners of the Golden Triangle, the infamous section of Mexico whose unique climate, elevation, and terrain made it the ideal place to grow most of the poppies that fed America’s insatiable appetite for heroin.

  Williams would have laughed if someone had told him two years ago that he would end up as head of security in one of Mexico’s drug cartels.

  After his forced departure from MI6, he had gone to work for a commercial research and strategic intelligence firm based out of London. He spent six months there, doing opposition research on political candidates and potential corporate board members. But apparently it wasn’t enough that MI6 had fired him from that job. The spiteful bastards had gone on to ruin his reputation outside of the agency as well. Word was out. If you hired Ian Williams, you were on their blacklist. And no one in Williams’s line of work wanted to anger one of the chaps at the Secret Intelligence Service.

  The official break from MI6 had been years in the making. Too many pissed-off members of Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, and too many unexplained dead civilians.

  After his firing, Williams had quickly reached out to his connections in Pakistan’s intelligence service. His close collaboration with the ISI had been one of the reasons MI6 had cast him away. He was now ready to cash in on that relationship.

  Abdul Syed had arranged for Williams to take a job as a security consultant in Mexico City. But that was just a seed investment. A starting point for Williams to learn the country, grow his network, and infiltrate the organizations that ran Mexico: the cartels.

  A glass sliding door opened and Juan Martinez, head of the Sinaloa cartel, walked towards him, whiskey glass in hand.

  A national bank vice president at age forty, with family connections to Mexico’s upper crust, Juan Martinez would’ve had no problem continuing his successful and legitimate business career on his own. But Ian Williams had made a livelihood out of luring talented and ambitious men into his web. Martinez was the piece that was missing from the ISI’s new operation in Mexico.

  Together, Williams and Syed had orchestrated a remarkable coup. It was one of the most swift and complete takeovers of a multibillion-dollar company in modern history. And it was almost completely bloodless. An amazing feat, given the industry norms.

  But like many achievements in the world of espionage, it wasn’t something that Williams could publicize. Only ten people around the world knew anything about it.

  Nine, he reminded himself. One of them had been killed last week, at a park in Virginia.

  “Good evening, my friend.”

  “Good evening, Mr. Martinez.” Martinez had told Williams several times to call him Juan in private, but he never did.

  The Martinez family had been the aristocratic land owners in Durango for generations. Juan’s parents had moved north, to a wealthy housing district near Mexico City, when the cartels had moved into the area. It was ironic that he would end up moving back to the area to run the cartels.

  Williams, having quickly grown his book of business in Mexico City, had done work for the cartels and Martinez’s bank. Williams had earned the young businessman’s trust as an advisor and problem-solver in the areas in which legitimate businesses couldn’t easily participate. Money laundering. Bribery. Extortion. A man like Ian Williams had no scruples about being the go-between. And Williams was happy to see that Martinez had the stomach to allow such flexibility.

  With his business acumen, his Durango family roots, and his strong personal relationship with Williams, it was time for a promotion.

  The Sinaloa cartel had, through a shell company, used Martinez’s bank for several large real estate deals in Panama. Syed had helped to influence the bank choice through one of his ISI agents in Mexico. They’d ensured that Martinez’s division would be assigned the account.

  At first Martinez had wanted nothing to do with the project. He had seen enough of the cartels during his childhood in Durango. With his e
ducation and upbringing, why did he need to succumb to a life of crime? It was beneath him. Or so he thought.

  But Williams had been hired by the cartel as an external auditor. Behind closed doors, he’d convinced Martinez of the benefits of taking on the job. When he’d seen some of the numbers, Martinez had realized just how obscene the profits were.

  Williams had convinced Martinez that he could do better still. Let us meet with a few of the cartel men, and see if we can’t get a bigger piece of the action? Williams was already connected with one of them.

  His name was Hector Rojas.

  Soon Juan Martinez, with his advanced degrees and years of experience in banking, saw what Williams had been telling him. The cartel’s finances, as big as their revenues and profit margins were, were being run by amateurs. After all the articles that Martinez had read claiming that they were being run like Fortune 500 companies, he now saw what was beneath the hood and knew that he could do better.

  Much better.

  He was in.

  Martinez and Williams soon had their hands in all of the Sinaloa cartel’s financial dealings. And the higher-ups in the cartel saw their collective worth. Martinez had made recommendations for improvement that increased the cartel’s profitability by billions of dollars without breaking a sweat.

  Soon Martinez and Williams were taking personal meetings with the head of the cartel himself, a man named Vasquez. Vasquez liked Martinez immensely, seeing him as reliable, professional, and clean. He didn’t use any of the product, he didn’t drink, and he valued family. Family, and in particular the loyalty one had to family, was very important to Vasquez.

  “Would you like to be part of our family?” The former leader of the Sinaloa had posed the question to Juan Martinez, with Williams standing in the background, almost two years ago.

  Martinez, while disciplined and professional, was also ambitious. When he had worked as an executive in a company, he’d had the potential to rise up the food chain and one day lead that company. As a member of one of the cartels, he had now increased his risk due to the nature of the work and stepped off the golden path towards being a chief executive. He related this concern to Vasquez. Vasquez smiled.