by Phil Klay
“Perfect. It’ll be a mess, with lots of different theories for people to argue over. Don’t you see it’s better this way? If we give them something to argue over, it keeps the story alive. It keeps Jefferson’s name in the news.”
Ah, Valencia thought. Intelligence.
“And,” Sara said, “if we want to be extra clever, we create another account, and a few hours after the first thread have that account respond, adding more charges, along with at least one thing they can verify.”
And so that is what they did.
* * *
—
Jefferson woke up in pain, as he did every morning. Exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept at all. The doctor warned him about this. It would only get worse. He got up, walked to the bathroom, and popped some pills for the pain before even urinating. He hated this. Not the pain so much as what it made him. Weak. The drugs interfered with his mind, his clarity. But recently the pain had begun interfering with his mind even worse than the drugs. It was a battle he felt himself losing. He’d rather kill himself than lose, and though he didn’t fear death, he did have unfinished work that required his attention. That required his mind, and his energy, and most cruelly, his time.
Does Javier know? It seemed impossible that Javier didn’t know. But he kept Javier busy. Busy, rich, and at a distance, a strategy designed to maximize his safety and Javier’s loyalty. Javier would happily retire him if he sensed weakness.
There was a cosmic unfairness to his situation. He’d spent years developing contacts in the Venezuelan military, years establishing a base across the border, years preparing the ground for his expansion inside Colombia itself. And the conditions were perfect, like a sign from God, this majestic reordering of the power within Norte de Santander, the receding of the old ideological forces and the targeting by the police and then army of what would have been his most powerful rival, the Urabeños. This was a wilderness ready for exploitation. This was one of the key drug routes, and with the right series of moves it could be his within a few years. A few years. He laughed. In a few years, I could be Carlos Castaño. I could be Pablo Escobar. I could be Che Guevera, Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama.
His phone rang, and he saw from the number that it was Luisa, the fat bitch from the foundation.
“Who did it?” he said.
“The foundation put out a release, you can see it on their website. It says they were dressed as guerrilla.”
“Who did it?”
There was a pause, and she said, “Father Iván wants to talk to you.”
Father Iván. Who worked it out with the cocaleros and the indios and ex-guerrilleros and a couple of other groups that had been causing trouble.
“Fine.”
He took down the details and considered the matter. He was mostly in the dark, but he knew a few things. They’d reached out through Father Iván, a priest who had worked with ex-guerrilleros. They’d asked to meet in territory that used to belong to the FARC. The cocaleros there, who used to sell to the FARC, had been more troublesome than in the regions closer to La Vigia. They’d complained about the prices he paid, the taxes he’d charged. He’d even had to kill one man who’d tried negotiating a better price from the Peludos, who controlled the territory to the north. Undoubtedly, there was anger over that. And any number of guerrilleros had returned home in recent years, so there was presumably a reserve of ex-combatants with military experience. Perhaps one of them was rallying resistance. A failed revolutionary, returned home but missing the sense of purpose war gives to young men. If so, Jefferson could handle him.
His maid cooked him a simple breakfast—eggs and arepa—and he forced himself to eat. His body needed fuel to fight the disease and to power his day, it was that simple. He was even starting to feel a bit better about the situation when he turned on the news and there, on Caracol, was the image of the reporter. And he turned the sound up, and he continued to eat, and then he heard his name, and he looked up and saw his own picture. A recent picture. Wearing the same shirt he’d worn the day before.
He closed his eyes as a wave of nausea came across him. This had to be the foundation’s doing. They were making a play. They thought he was weak. And they knew that right now he couldn’t afford to slaughter them. But Luisa should know he could be subtle when he had to be.
“I’m famous now,” he called out to his maid. She hadn’t seen the television, and clearly had no idea what he was saying, but nodded anyway, pretending to understand.
This wasn’t the worst thing. Fame was dangerous, but it had its own kind of power. He’d learned that from his old comandante, Tomás Henríquez Rúa, when they were incarcerated together after the demobilization.
Rúa was famous for being crazy. That was one of his aliases. The Crazy Man. He was famous for fucking young virgins. That was another one of his aliases. The Drill. And in prison, that fame followed him around like a tiger on a leash. Everyone respected him, held him in awe. Rúa had more power than the warden, than the prison guards, than anyone. And since Jefferson was in his circle, the blessings fell on him, too. He had eaten better, and fucked prettier whores, than he ever had outside prison. In some ways, it had been the happiest time in his life.
In their second year there Rúa had thrown a party in the common area of the jail. Everyone thought of Rúa as a madman, but he had a genius for connecting with the people. Jefferson had studied this and learned from him. That party was his masterwork. Rúa brought in three tiers of prostitutes. Red, black, and yellow. The highest tier came dressed in red, escorted by armed guards, dripping with perfume, clothing bulging with fake asses and tits, reserved exclusively for Rúa’s inner circle. The middle rank came in black. They were all pretty enough, or if not pretty they were young enough to feel fresh, and they only fucked men who’d been in the autodefensas. The cheap whores, for common use, old and strung out, dressed in yellow. It had been especially inspired, he thought, to insist on the uniform colors of clothing. As the prisoners danced and fucked, as the whores went down on their knees and sucked prisoner after prisoner off in the far corners and corridors, behind columns or right in the middle of the dance floor, you could see how people ranked. The whores were human jewelry marking concentric circles of envy, with Rúa at the center. It was like he was a God. It was being a God.
In the middle of the party Rúa had brought out his weapons, his arsenal, to show off to the whores. Somewhere, Jefferson had a photo of himself in prison, holding a Jatimatic SMG just like Sylvester Stallone on the poster for Cobra, but with two whores in red crouched at his thighs and making sexy faces.
And then some idiot drunk on aguardiente pulled the pin on a grenade. He’d laughed and tossed it to a whore and she’d screamed. The grenade fell on the floor and only then did it dawn on the idiot what he’d done. Jefferson remembered the man’s face as the realization hit, and Jefferson had grabbed Rúa and dove to the floor as the grenade rolled into the pulsing crowd, and then there was a flash and a bang and blood and screams.
Of course, the prison guards immediately came to find out what happened. Jefferson had his men bar them from the common area while Rúa directed others to clean up the body parts, take the corpses to the basement of the prison, and dissolve them in acid. Nothing, they told the guards, nothing at all has happened. Some fool set off a firework.
Meanwhile, Rúa demanded everyone else stay on the dance floor. Everything was okay, everything was normal. And Rúa ordered them to keep dancing.
There was blood on the floor. There was blood on the ceiling. Some of the whores had bits of skin blown into their hair. Some were bleeding. One man screamed that he needed a doctor and Jefferson had his men slit the man’s throat. They turned up the music. Reggaeton played. They danced.
That was power. Pure power, built of fear and envy and desire. It was the most beautiful thing Jefferson had ever seen.
He opened his eyes. The news had moved on to
a piece about the health effects of only eating the same kinds of foods that were eaten by cavemen.
7
Father Iván followed behind Misael Castillo as he walked the northern side of his land, touching one spoiled palm branch after another. He’d come to the farm to ask Misael not about his crops but about his nephew, Edilson, who was apparently behind this idiotic kidnapping. Misael, on the other hand, wanted to talk crops.
“Idiots,” Misael said, and Father Iván nodded in agreement. This was a field of African palm, perfectly legal, and now a full two thirds of the man’s trees were dying. The planes the government sent out to spray coca had accidentally hit here, destroying his livelihood. And worse, because they both knew what those chemicals did. Father Iván figured that Misael’s children would be shitting all night for the next couple of days, and nothing good would ever grow on this land again.
“There’s no coca around here,” Misael said. “We were sick of government planes ruining our fields. That’s why I switched to palm.”
“I thought you switched because the price of coca went down.”
“That, too.” Of late, Misael had been a booster of palm oil. He’d tell anyone who’d listen that it put more money in his pocket than he’d ever had growing coca. And he was a leader in a local collective of farmers who were getting free seeds and fertilizer from Oleoflores, which promised to send trucks to pick up the product, just like the narcos did with coca. He was building his family a brick house. And the work was cooler—under the shade instead of in the sun. But there were more important things at hand.
“I need to know what your nephew wants before I talk to Jefferson,” Father Iván said.
“You know how it is up there.” Misael tugged on a withered palm frond and held it up for inspection before discarding it in disgust.
Father Iván had some idea. The arrival of Jefferson into the area had coincided with a drop in the price of coca, so there’d already been a lot of anger up in the north, where Edilson had been trying to organize a local union. It got worse when the Jesúses had murdered a cocalero who’d tried selling to the Peludos, and then, days later, this American had arrived, setting off all kinds of conspiracy talk.
“I have no idea what he thinks he’s doing,” Father Iván said. “And I’m starting to suspect he doesn’t either.”
Misael walked to the edge of the trees and stared out into the jungle.
“Palm is good work,” Misael said. “A harvest every eight days, regular income. But if I plant new trees, it will be a year and a half before they produce oil. If I plant coca . . . the money will come faster.”
“What will you do?”
Misael stepped into the tree line and Father Iván followed him. Nettles caught against his skin and he had to push through the underbrush. He should have worn work boots, like Misael.
“I’ll have to cut out more forest,” Misael said. “Cut and burn. Awful work. And then I’ll ask around. Maybe my nephew can negotiate a better price with Jefferson for coca. Maybe the price of palm oil will go up. Or down.”
“This country is growing more coca than it ever has,” Father Iván said. “The price of coca isn’t going up.”
“People always think they can tell,” Misael said. “But no one knows. I will wait and see.”
That was fair. Anyone who tried too hard to anticipate the market always ended up a fool. With the price of coca, the price of palm oil, there were just too many factors to consider. The opening and closing of drug routes. The law requiring diesel retailers to mix in 10 percent biofuels. The cocalero unions bargaining for better prices. The new palm oil companies sending trucks out to remote places. The six thousand soldiers patrolling Norte de Santander. The seven dead farmers whose funerals Father Iván had officiated, all of them shot when the counternarcotics police descended on a coca field and opened fire. The aerial spraying of crops. The fungus moving across the coast, poisoning coca plants at the root. The temperature and the rain. The lack of good roads. The decisions of farmers and narcos and policemen and drug addicts and presidents and mayors and weather systems and God himself, all factoring in to determine the forever varying price of a kilo of coca leaves and a kilo of palm oil, so that men like Misael could make decisions about what kind of life they were going to live, legal or illegal.
In one sense, it was magical, the way the market worked. But in another sense, the sense Father Iván had come to after years of documenting the wreckage—the murdered trade unionists, campesinos, human rights workers, and others—there had come to seem something sinister about it. Perhaps everything you buy ought to include a surcharge of a drop of blood. Or, depending on the product, an ounce.
“Hey, father.” Misael was looking upward, and Father Iván followed his gaze. High up in the branches was a metal box. Snaking upward from the box was a long antennae, hidden among the branches. Father Iván had never seen anything like it before. Military? Police? Military.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “Misael, you must tell your nephew he needs to figure out what he wants right now. Because if he’s going to negotiate with Jefferson, it has to happen immediately.”
* * *
—
A crowd of children greeted Jefferson when he arrived at the hut, a rectangular bohío with crooked wooden planks and a thatched roof. The youngest were naked, the older ones in dirty pants, fading blouses. One girl of about eleven had a brightly colored beaded necklace, and eyes so dark they seemed to glow. She stared at him as if he were the strange and pitiful one, emerging from his Land Rover, pistol prominently tucked in his jeans, two men with assault rifles at his side, and a caravan of Jesúses in trucks pulling watch at every possible route of egress from the village.
Jefferson did not like children. They were what would last after his death. So he moved through the crowd and strode inside the hut, looking for the priest. Inside was dark and quiet. A shape floated before him. The shape moaned. His eyes adjusted, and the shape materialized into a naked woman, pregnant, massively pregnant, and floating in midair. Her feet hung a few inches off the ground, rope and some kind of leather harness around her upper torso and strung up to the crossbeam of the hut. It was a woman in labor, hung suspended so that gravity could help the baby out. Jefferson was familiar with the practice, but had never seen it before. Other women huddled around, nuns in dark habits. One of them lifted a hand and said, “Out! Out of here!” And she moved forward, as if ready to throw him outside herself.
The pregnant woman moaned. Jefferson felt his nausea returning. He stumbled backward, out to the crowd of children. He breathed once, twice. His guards followed awkwardly behind. A breeze carried the scent of animal shit. His men fingered their trigger guards.
He breathed again. He had been scolded like a child. It had happened in front of his men. He considered heading back in, but to do what? Beat her? That wouldn’t regain him any respect. Nuns have a power. And women giving birth, they also have a power. He’d never understood it. Even Javier, who took more pleasure in torture than in sex and food, had an odd thing for new mothers. Jefferson found it stupid, disquieting. But it was there.
So instead, he turned to his guards and said, “Indios are animals,” and they laughed. Fine.
Up the road, he saw a black cassock. Father Iván, presumably. Waving excitedly. A large cross hung from his neck, like a priest in an old movie.
“No, no,” Father Iván called out. “Not in there.”
Father Iván was tall and thin and covered in sweat. There were dark stains under his arms and across his stomach. His face shone with it. A droplet of sweat sat on the edge of his nose. Another moan came from inside the hut.
“Idiot! You told me . . .” Jefferson began, but then stopped as nausea rose up again.
“Yes, yes, sorry. But one of the women in the village,” Father Iván gestured to the bohío, “well, you saw.”
They both stared for a
moment at the hut where the indio woman was hanging, giving birth.
“Maybe it’s a good omen,” the priest said. “A very powerful thing, what’s happening. Us men aren’t so impressive on a day like today, are we? We can’t start a life.”
“I’ve come in enough women to have started a few lives.”
The priest laughed. He motioned down toward the stream on the far side of the road. There was a man sitting there on a log next to a dirty white cooler.
“That’s Edilson,” he said.
“He’s the fool behind this?”
The priest sighed. “Please,” he said, “try to understand. These are very poor, very desperate people. Times have been very hard for them, and you have been very hard on them, too. They thought capturing a CIA agent would give them leverage.”
“A CIA agent?”
The priest began explaining a rather convoluted theory about Jefferson’s links to the foundation and the American journalist, who had suspiciously come here from Afghanistan.
“She’s just a stupid gringa,” Jefferson said. “Not CIA.” He was pretty sure.
“Oh.” The priest shook his head. “Well, they didn’t understand all the problems this would cause.”
What difference did it make, whether they understood or not? Jefferson started down toward the stream. “You coming?” he said.
“I . . . cannot.”
Of course. The priest wanted to keep his hands clean. Jefferson called out over his shoulder, “You know what my father told me when I was a child? He told me, ‘I’d rather slit my throat than have my son become a Conservative or a priest.’”
“My father told me the same thing,” Father Iván called back. That made Jefferson smile.
Edilson stood up as Jefferson approached. He was an unimpressive little man. Not very tall. Not much of a mustache. Who was this fool? Did he understand what he’d unleashed?