The Evening News (11 page)

Recently in Peru, Sendero
Luminoso had grown more powerful while the official government became in-
creasingly inept and weak. Where once Sendero's domain had been limited to
the Andes Mountains, Huallaga Valley and centers like Ayacucho and Cuzco
,
nowadays its bombing teams and assassination squads roamed the capital
city, Lima
.
Two strong reasons existed for linkages between Sendero Luminoso and the
Medellin cartel. First, Sendero customarily employed outside criminals to
conduct kidnappings which were frequent in Peru, though not widely reported
by the American media. Second, Sendero Luminoso controlled most of Peru's
Upper Huallaga Valley where sixty percent of the world's coca crop was
grown. The coca, in leaf form, was converted to coca paste-the basis of
cocaine-and afterward flown from remote airstrips to the Colombian cartels
.
In the whole process drug money contributed heavily to Sendero finances
,
the group exacting a substantial tribute both from coca growers and
traffickers-the Medellin connection among them
.
Now, in the surveillance Chevrolet, the two Colombian hoodlums were
searching through a collection of Polaroid photos which Carlos, an adept
photographer, had taken of all persons seen to have entered the Sloane
house during the past four weeks. The elderly man who had just arrived was
not among them
.
Julio, on the telephone, spoke in code phrases
.”
A blue package has arrived. Delivery number two. The
p
ackage is in storage. We cannot trace the order
.”

Translated: A
man has arrived. Delivered by
4 He has gone into the house. We do not know who he is; there is no Polaroid of him
.
The sharp-edged voice of Miguel, the project's leader, snapped back
through the phone, "What is the docket number
?
”

Julio, not comfortable with codes, swore softly as he leafed through a
notebook to decipher the question. It asked him: "at age is this person?
He looked to Carlos for help
.”
Un viejo. How old
?
”

Carlos took the book and read the question
.”
Tell him, docket
seventy-five
.”

Julio did, producing another terse question
.”
Is anything special about
the blue package
?
”

Abandoning code, Julio lapsed into plain language
.”
He carried a suitcase
in. Looks like he plans to stay
.”

South of Hackensack, New Jersey, in a dilapidated rented house, the man
whose code name was Miguel silently cursed Julio's carelessness. Those
pendejos he wasforced to work withl In the code book was a phrase that
would have answered the question, and he had warned all of them, over and
over, that on nidio phones anyone could be listening. Scanning devices
that could eavesdrop on cellular phone conversations were available in
stores. Miguel had heard of a radio station that used a scanner and
boasted of foiling several criminal plots
.
iEstzipidosl He simply could not get through to the idiots assigned to
him-when the success of their mission, plus all their lives and freedoms
were at stake-the importance of being vigilant, cautious, on guard, not
just most of the time, but all of it
.
Miguel himself had been obsessively cautious for as long as he could
remember. It was why he had never been arrested, even though he was on
"most wanted
”
lists of police forces in North and South America and some
in Europe too, including Interpol. In the Western Hemisphere he was
becoming as keenly sought after as his
brother-in-terr
orism Abu Nidal
,
on the other side of the Atlantic. About that, Miguel permitted
himself a certain pride, though never failing to remember that pride could beget overconfidence, and that was something else he guarded against
.
Despite all the turmoil he had been a part of, he was still a young man-in
his late thirties. In appearance he had always been unremarkable, with
average good looks but no more; anyone passing him on a street might think
he was a bank clerk or, at best, manager of a small store. In part, this
was because he worked hard at seeming unimportant. He also made a habit of
being polite to strangers, but not to the point of creating a memorable
impression; most who met him casually, not knowing who he was, tended to
forget having done so
.
In the past, this ordinariness had been Miguel's great good fortune, as was
the fact that he did not radiate authority. His power of command remained
hidden except to those on whom he exercised it, and then it was
unmistakable
.
An advantage to Miguel in his present enterprise was that, although
Colombian, he could appear and sound American. In the late-1960s and early
'70s he had attended the University of California at Berkeley as a foreign
student, majoring in English and patiently learning to speak the language
without an accent
.
In those days he was using his real name, Ulises Rodriguez
.
His well-to-do parents had provided the Berkeley education. Miguel's
father, a Bogotd neurosurgeon, hoped his only son would follow him into
medicine, a prospect in which Miguel had no interest, even then. Instead
,
as the 1970s neared, the son foresaw basic changes ahead for
Colombia--conversion from a prosperous democratic country with an honest
legal base to a lawless, unbelievably rich mobsters' haven ruled through
dictatorship, savagery and fear. The pharaoh's gold of the new Colombia was
marijuana; it would later be cocaine
.
Such was Miguel's nature that the coming transition did not faze him.

What
he coveted was part of the action
.
Meanwhile he indulged in some action of his own at Berkeley where he
discovered himself to be totally devoid of conscience and able to kill
other human beings, swiftly and decisively, without compunction or
unpleasant aftertaste
.
The first time it happened was after a sexual session with a
young woman he had met earlier on a Berkeley street while both were getting off a bus. Walking from the bus stop, they got into conversation and discovered they were both freshmen. She seemed to like him and invited him to her apartment, which was at the seedy Oakland end of Telegraph Avenue. It was at a time when such encounters were normal, long before the AIDS-anxiety era
.
After some energetic sex he fell asleep, then awakened to find the girl
quietly looking through the contents of his wallet. In it were several
identification cards in fictitious names; even then he was practicing for
his international beyond-the-law future.

The girl was too interested in the
cards for her own good; perhaps she was some kind of informant, though he
never found out
.
What he did was spring from the bed, seize and strangle her. He still
remembered her look of unbelief as she thrashed around, trying to release
herself; then she looked up at him with desperate, silent pleading just
before consciousness ebbed. He was interested, in a clinical way, to
discover that killing her did not trouble him at all
.
Instead, with icy calm he calculated his chances of being caught, which he
assessed as nil. While on the bus the two of them had not sat together; in
fact they had not known each other. It was unlikely that anyone observed
them walking away from the bus stop. On entering the apartment building
,
and in an elevator going to the fourth floor, they encountered no one
.
Taking his time, he used a cloth to wipe the few surfaces where he might
have left fingerprints. Then, using a handkerchief to cover his right hand
,
he turned out all lights and left the apartment, allowing the door to lock
behind him
.
He avoided the elevator and went down by the emergency stairs, checking
that the lobby was empty before passing through it to the street outside
.
The next day, and for several days after, he watched local newspapers for
any item about the dead girl. But it was nearly a week before her partially
decomposed body was discovered, then after two or three days more, with no
developments and
apparently no clues, the newspapers lost interest and the story disappeared
.
Whatever investigation there was had not connected him with the girl's
murder
.
During Miguel's remaining years at Berkeley he killed on two other
occasions. Those were across the Bay in San Francisco-what he supposed
could be called "thrill killings
”
of total strangers, though he
considered both as serving a need to hone his developing mercenary
skills. He must have honed them well because in neither case was he a
suspect, or even questioned by police
.
After Berkeley, and home in Colombia, Miguel flirted with the developing
alliance of mad-dog drug lords. He had a pilot's license and made several
flights conveying coca paste from Peru to Colombia for processing. Soon
a developing friendship with the infamous but influential Ochoa family
helped move him on to larger things. Then came M-19 with its orgy of
murders and the Medellin cartel's "total war
,”
beginning in late 1989
.
Miguel participated in all the major killings, many minor ones, and had
long since lost count of the corpses in his wake. Inevitably his name
became known internationally, but due to his meticulous precautions there
was little else on record
.
Miguel's---or Ulises Rodriguez's---connections with the Medellin cartel
,
M-19 and, more recently, Sendero Luminoso, expanded as the years went by
.
Through it all, though, he maintained his independence, becoming an
international outlaw, a gun-for-hire terrorist who was, because of his
efficiency, constantly in demand
.
Of course, politics was supposedly a part of it all. Miguel was by
instinct a socialist, hated capitalism passionately and despised what he
thought of as the hypocritical, decadent United States. But he was also
skeptical about politics of any kind and simply enjoyed, as one might an
aphrodisiac, the danger, risk and action of the life he led
.
It was that kind of life which had brought him to the United States a
month and a half ago, to work undercover, preparing for what would happen
today, which the entire world would shortly learn of.

The route he had originally planned to the U.S. was roundabout but
safe-from Bogotd, Colombia, through Rio de Janeiro to Miami. In Rio he
would change passports and identities, appearing in Miami as a Brazilian
publisher en route to a New York book fair. But an undercover contact in
the American State Department had warned Medellin that U.S. Immigration at
Miami had urgently requested all available information on Miguel
,
especially about identities he was known to have used in the past
.
Miguel had, in fact, used the Brazilian publisher identity once before and
although he believed it was still unexposed, it seemed wiser to avoid Miami
altogether. Therefore, even though it meant some delay, he flew from Rio
to London where he acquired an entirely new identity and a brand-new
,
official British passport
.
The process was easy
.
Ah, the innocent
democracies! How stupid and nai
ve they were! How simple
it was to subvert their vaunted freedoms and open systems to advance the
purposes of those who, like Miguel, believed in neither!
He had been briefed, before reaching London, on how it was done.