by Jerold Last
“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight?” he asked me. “Your wife is a Professor of Biochemistry at UCLA and giving a poster presentation about her research at this meeting. Are you a biochemist too?”
“No, I’m mostly here for some vacation time with Suzanne after the meeting.”
“But you’re planning to go to some of our technical sessions?”
“I’m a patent lawyer, so know something about the field. I just don’t feel any compulsion to be at every session.”
Once upon a time I actually was a patent lawyer, so it's a convenient cover story when I don’t want people to know I’m a private detective. If anyone does a quick web search on me, they’ll find me having done patent law, so the cover story holds up if anyone checks it out the lazy man’s way.
My plan was simple: seeming to be candid here might get me better acquainted with my new friend Vincent. He could give me the access I was looking for into the English-speaking group of biochemists at the meeting. On the other hand, Vincent was a suspect just like anyone else at this meeting, so I didn't want to be too candid.
"I want to make sure you don't have any excuses to skip out on us today. We can use all of the attendees we can find at this meeting," he said enthusiastically.
"OK, count me in," I replied. "But tell me something. You speak English like a native speaker, no accent at all. Where did you learn your English?"
"In the USA, of course. I'm an American, born and bred in Fond-du-Lac, Wisconsin. I've lived in Chile for a long time, but I'm part of a good-sized expatriate community in Northern Chile, and we tend to speak English as much as Spanish in any social setting."
"That sounds like the beginning of a fascinating story. Tell me more."
"It's currently pretty fashionable to knock General Augusto Pinochet, the dictator who led Chile during the military government. Many people now think of him as a ruthless fascist who ruined the country. It's a lot more complicated than that. Pinochet did a lot of good things for Chile as well as some pretty bad stuff. For example, many of his policies are the reason Chile is doing so much better economically than the rest of the Mercosur countries. He built the infrastructure and agriculture that made Chile competitive as a member of the global economy.
“In terms of what am I doing here, he also created affordable universal public education through expansion of the University of Chile to large branch campuses all over the country. His motivation might not have been pure, as he wanted to dilute the liberal influence of the historical university by staffing the new campuses with more conservative faculty members who voted in the academic senate of the University of Chile.
“He got some help from the CIA, who recruited a bunch of us to come down here and become part of the university expansion during the 1970s and early 1980s. We're all long since officially retired from the CIA, but life is relatively cheap and good quality down here, so quite a few of us opted to stay here when we had the choice.
“You'll get to meet some of my old friends and colleagues at the meeting, especially if you stay with the English speaking sessions. I'll enjoy introducing you to them, Roger."
"How'd you get from Fond du Lac to Chile, Vincent?"
"I grew up in Fond du Lac, went to college there at a Catholic school called Marian College majoring in chemistry, and went on to graduate school for a Master's degree in biochemistry at Marquette University in Milwaukee. In those days the CIA was recruiting for South American operatives in the Catholic parochial schools and I signed up. They sent me to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California for language training. I was fluent in Spanish in six months and posted to Chile after six more months of pretty intense training. In those days, and still, the M.S. degree was enough of a credential for a faculty position at the University of Chile branch campuses.
“Pinochet's plan for expanding the University of Chile was to do it on the cheap, so he created the so-called Chilean Traditional Universities, where a local college was merged with the virtual University of Chile to create a branch campus of the larger university. In this case, the University of Chile in Iquique, a small Agricultural campus, became the University Arturo Prat in 1981, and I got a job here a few years later. It was a win-win for everybody. Pinochet got a much more conservative University of Chile, the people of Chile got essentially free access to local colleges with a lot more prestige than they used to have, and the old colleges got bigger and better, as well as a significant infusion of public money.
“Iquique now has a large public university of 18,000 students, with branch campuses in Arica and three other cities. There are a few other guys with the same background as mine floating around Iquique and Arica in the northern end of Chile, as faculty members and retirees. Several of the real hard-core right wing Chileans from the Pinochet days are still there as high-level university administrators and they really like us former CIA types.
"Anyway, it's time for us to get going, so let's continue this discussion later. Stay with me when we get off the bus; I'll show you where the English language sessions are going to be. Then you'll want to find Suzanne's poster session and I have to be at another meeting at the same time. We can meet again at the afternoon session. How about some beer and ceviche this afternoon, just the two of us, when you get bored? I have something I want to talk to you about when we're not worrying about the time."
We gulped down the last of our coffee and got on one of the shuttle buses to the conference venue, a large theater in downtown Lima that had previously been a movie house. Suzanne had gone on ahead earlier, so I was expected to catch up to her when it was convenient. Vincent showed me the small room where the English language sessions were being held.
We said good-bye and I went down a floor to the large ballroom where the morning's poster sessions were being held. Suzanne was explaining her poster in Spanish to a small crowd gathered around it. It featured the results of her recent collaborative efforts with colleagues in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina. These were the experiments she had initiated when we spent a week in Montevideo helping to solve a murder.
When she got to a brief break point Suzanne told me, "I'm having dinner with a group that wants to discuss collaborating with me based on the results in this poster. I'll catch up with you back at the hotel. Is that OK with you?"
"Sure," I replied. "I'll be going out for beer and ceviche with Vincent after we get sufficiently bored with the English language session this afternoon. If Vincent and I can still stand each other, we'll probably have dinner together too. I'll see you back at the hotel later tonight."
"That sounds good to me," replied Suzanne. "Have fun."
"I'm not too sure about the fun part yet. You know what? There's something strange going on here. Vincent is making me feel a lot like Hansel from the old fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. He's very carefully pointing me towards a trail of breadcrumbs that leads directly to Iquique and the Atacama Desert region of Chile. I'm planning to stick with him until we see exactly where in Chile his trail leads us. But this help he's offering us seems to be happening much too easily, so I'll also keep an eye on those breadcrumbs behind me in case there's a hawk or two planning to eat them and us along the way."
Several hours and several not particularly exciting presentations later, Vincent and I were sitting at a table at a small restaurant about half a mile from our hotel. After a few minutes of meaningless chat about the meeting, Vincent turned serious and looked directly at me.
“Roger, are you familiar with the old expression that it takes one to know one? Remember I told you that I’m a trained CIA agent, or at least I used to be one? Well, I feel like I know you and Suzanne in that sense. You guys look like you’re in much better shape than the other scientists here, you move differently, you listen better, you ask different kinds of questions, and even your eyes look different. I get the impression of a couple of sharks visiting a pond full of guppies. So tell me, what are you two really doing here?”
Decision time. Should I blow
our cover and maybe get a powerful ally in our attempt to infiltrate this group? Or should I bluff this one out and burn the possible bridge? I decided to do a little bit of both in this case.
"Vincent, are you familiar with the old expression 'you show me yours and I'll show you mine'? I think that's where we are now. Tell me the rest of your story, and if I buy it I'll give you an honest answer to your question, and a lot more than that if you want it."
"OK. Let's order more beer and I'll tell you a long story about the history of Chile and why I'm still here," answered Vincent.
Our fresh beers came and my companion started talking.
"In 1973 Salvatore Allende, the elected president of Chile, was deposed by a military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet, who eventually became the dictator who ruled Chile for the next 17 years with the support of the army. Allende, who was a Socialist and most probably also a Communist, allegedly committed suicide when the junta took over. It was before my time, but the CIA was almost certainly involved, if only in terms of influencing our U.S. government's policy, in this coup.
"As I told you before, Pinochet 'reformed' the university, and the CIA sent several of us here as faculty for the new University of Chile campuses in the Atacama Desert in the northern part of Chile. We had several assignments, overt and covert. Overtly, we supported the development of, and taught at, the new universities in Iquique and Arica. Covertly, we trained the Chilean military and civilian police intelligence services in the Northern region in advanced interrogation techniques. They were trying to weed out communists and other subversives from the university and from the political apparatus, and we were still trying to recover from all of the mistakes the CIA made in Cuba a decade earlier. Other CIA groups were doing the same thing all over Chile. Also covertly, we were, and still are, responsible for training and oversight of the security personnel at a couple of observatories the CIA helped to build in the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth and a superb location for monitoring satellites in the Southern Hemisphere skies. Antofagasta gets an average annual rainfall of less than 1 mm per year, while other parts of the region get absolutely no rainfall at all.
"The observatories are nominally built and run by European countries and are owned and managed by the European Southern Observatory consortium. The newer one was built on Mount Paranal, about 75 miles south of Antofagasta, starting in 2004. The older observatory, La Silla, dates back to the 1960s and is at the southern end of the Atacama Desert."
He drank some beer. So did I. Then he continued.
"Now for a brief history lesson, then I'll pull it all together for you. The War of the Pacific lasted from 1879 through 1883. On one side was Chile and on the other were Peru and Bolivia. At stake was the entire region that is now Northern Chile, and its wealth of nitrates, guano, saltpeter, and other ingredients for gunpowder and fertilizer, as well as rich deposits of copper and other minerals. It ended with Chile winning the Atacama Desert and several ports on the Pacific Ocean, Bolivia becoming totally landlocked after losing Antofagasta and its entire Pacific Coast, and Peru losing two entire provinces at its southern end to create a new Chilean border just north of Arica. The Atacama area still has a fairly large indigenous population with ties to Peru, so politically it tends to be a bit unstable and a fertile ground for socialists and communists to try to make trouble with the miners and other trade unions.
"The area was Chileanized forcibly after the war with Peru and Bolivia finally ended, and the mineral wealth was exploited. There's also plenty of water up there, but it's all in underground rivers that are replenished by snow melting from the Bolivian Andes. Chile has extensively developed irrigated agriculture in the Atacama Desert, and most of the winter fruits and vegetables in Chile come from the area around Arica. Our local universities are where the technical stuff for learning how to irrigate a desert is taught and researched.
"So here we are now. I'm still drawing a regular salary from the CIA as well as what the Chileans pay me as a Professor at the University of Chile. So are a few of the other faculty members from Northern Chile you'll be meeting over the next few days. Our jobs these days are 99% teaching and research at the university. The other 1% is to keep our eyes open for threats to the observatories and/or the political stability of the region on behalf of the CIA. And you just came up on my radar screen. Now it's your turn in our little game of 'you show me yours and I'll show you mine', I think. Tell me where you're from originally and what you're doing here now."
"I was born in San Diego. My grandfather was a marine during World War II, so he was trained at Camp Pendleton just north of there. He loved the weather and the ocean, so he stayed in San Diego after the war and was a cop most of his life. My father carried on the tradition and also spent his life as a cop in San Diego."
We both drank some more of the beer. I found Vincent to be very, very likeable, possibly made of the stuff from which a real friendship could evolve between us. My gut instincts told me that he probably wasn’t our killer. The key word in this analysis was "probably". However, I also remembered Suzanne's favorite quotation about what it's really like to do scientific research in the laboratory. "If it seems too good to be true, it's probably too good to be true."
Hansel or Gretel whispered in my ear that all of this candor and cooperation from Vincent was still coming far too easily, so he was almost certainly working me with an agenda of his own. On the positive side, I wondered if he had been involved in making some sort of a mess that he needed outside help like us to clean up. On the negative side, I wondered if his external likeability and generally trustworthy demeanor hid a core that was totally rotten and depraved like a typical sociopath. Could he be our Surreal Killer? Either way, my best course of action was clearly to play this collaboration out without at the same time trusting Vincent too much.
“Come on, he’s a spy. Of course he’s playing me,” I told myself. “But fair is fair, I'm playing him, too.”
"OK, it's my turn to show you mine now," I replied cautiously. "I'm going to tell you the truth because I think you can be a big help to me. I hope you'll want to help me here, as a friend if not officially. First, we're not sharks. Suzanne is a guppy with a Type A personality. She's really, and only, a biochemistry professor at UCLA. She's in great shape because we run and work out at a gym regularly. I'm really a patent attorney, but I’m a lapsed lawyer. What you picked up on with me is that I followed the family tradition and used to be a cop, a detective on the Los Angeles police force, before I went to law school. I quit the patent lawyer job a few years ago and am currently making a living as a private detective. My work is done on a computer these days.
"But your instincts are good and there's more to it than our official biographies. We were in Montevideo last summer getting the samples from Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay that Suzanne used for the work she's reporting about here at this meeting. While we were in Montevideo we went for a run on the Ramblas and found a body very neatly cut up into several pieces. There was a lot of international publicity so you probably heard about it. The newspapers called it 'The Ambivalent Corpse' because of how the body parts were displayed. To make a long story short, the Uruguayan and Paraguayan police Lieutenants in charge of the case asked for our assistance and we got involved in helping to solve the murder. What makes that relevant here is that our policeman friend from Paraguay, Eduardo, came up to Los Angeles and asked us to come to this meeting to try to help him out on a current case that has him stumped."
"You have to tell me a whole lot more than that to catch up with what I've told you so far," Vincent commented.
"The brief version of the story is that a police computer seems to have found a link between the meetings your group holds and a series of serial killings that have occurred in Peru, Chile, and Bolivia," I replied. "Eduardo asked us to sniff around this group and see if we could come up with anybody worth his investigating further. You might say that he asked us to help him separate the sharks from the guppies among the gr
oup of scientists that are attending this meeting. So that's what we're doing here. You can have the longer version if you want to help. If not, I'd appreciate your keeping what I told you confidential. I give you my word that I'm not here in any way as a threat to your work with the CIA."
Vincent thought for a moment, sipped some more beer, and asked me the right question. "Assume I'm in and willing to help you. There's a lot more you need to tell me, but let's start with what do you know about whoever is doing these killings?"
"What do we know?" I repeated, "Is essentially nothing. But we can guess a little bit. The M.O. suggests that he, or they, have killed before and is very good at it. We might be looking for one of those guys who killed and tortured during the military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s. But that's pure speculation."
"Do you trust me enough to share the details?"
"Yes, I think I do," I answered.
"OK, I'm in. You've obviously thought about me and the other CIA guys as possible suspects too. For what it's worth, we were tested pretty thoroughly by lots of CIA psychologists before we were selected for this mission, so I don't think it's likely that one of us has lost it and become a homicidal maniac. On the other hand, there weren't any shrinks vetting the guys we trained locally, and lots of those guys are still around as faculty, administrators, and just normal people. I wouldn't give you any guarantees there. Some of them actually liked the killing and torture."