Between Two Scorpions Read online

  “Okay, I think we should take a little break,” the host said nervously, looking at his producers and seeing their same stunned, frozen reaction. But Director Peck’s voice just grew louder, more frantic, his gestures manic and wild.

  “You can see the tentacles everywhere, reaching into everything, and nobody wants to do something about it! It wants the end of all of us! Don’t you see it? We’re not safe! None of us are safe!”

  CHAPTER 20

  The word spread like wildfire through America’s intelligence community; by the time NBC News reported that CIA Director William Peck had been taken to Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington because of “chest pains, as a precaution,” hundreds of people around the globe already knew that he had some sort of breakdown while taping the interview. Their job, of course, was uncovering official secrets, and those skills were easily reapplied to their own government.

  Raquel’s professionalism and empathy almost completely overcame any lingering resentment of Peck’s snide dismissiveness from earlier in the day. Almost. She couldn’t help but wonder if a severe bout of karma triggered Peck’s sudden, overwhelming panic attack just hours after she had warned him about the possibility of a terror group cooking up some sort of fear drug. Once Patrick Horne had begrudgingly confirmed to Raquel that the rumors were true, she sent four get over here right now texts.

  “Director Peck wasn’t hospitalized for heart palpitations,” she told the team once they had gathered back in the office. “He had a full, all-out psychotic breakdown with the cameras rolling.”

  The team stared back in disbelief for a moment, until Alec burst out with inappropriate laughter. “I mean, that’s terrible. Not even he deserves that.”

  “They had to give him a sedative and restrain him on the way out the door. They think he was drugged.” Everyone exchanged an uncomfortable look after the final word.

  “Let me get this straight,” Ward rumbled. “The CIA director goes on television to tell Mr. and Mrs. America, ‘Don’t worry about this Atarsa thing, we got this,’ and right at that moment, somehow they drug him and he starts screaming about lizard people?”

  Raquel gave him a grim nod. “Bugs were controlling people like puppets,” she paraphrased.

  Ward winced. “Man, we’re going to get some insufferable I-told-you-so’s from Alex Jones.”

  “They’re running every conceivable test on him,” Raquel continued. “If Atarsa has created a modified version of Agent 15 or BZ, then there’s a million different ways you can hit somebody with this. Peck could have inhaled it, drank it, eaten it, had it applied to his skin if he shook someone’s hand.”

  “And they could use the same stuff just about anywhere else,” Katrina surmised. Since they had returned from Brazil, she had been brainstorming the most dangerous places someone could have a chemically induced debilitating panic attack, and thus, she concluded, the most likely targets for Atarsa. Her list was a catalog of nightmares: train engineers, airline pilots, police officers, surgeons, anyone in a crowded location like a sports arena, nightclub, or Times Square on New Year’s Eve …

  But her teammates quickly came up with other frightening possibilities.

  “The floor of the New York Stock Exchange,” Dee suggested. “Literal panic selling. Could make the Flash Crash look mild.”

  “Truck drivers?” Alec asked, thinking of the jackknifed tractor trailer that had made a mess of the Beltway that morning. His stomach grew queasy. How did they know Atarsa hadn’t been using the panic drug on people already?

  “Children,” Ward interjected. Everyone stood in grim silence at the thought.

  Raquel broke the gloom. “With Peck out until further notice, Mitchell is now running the show, and he was always … more tolerant of our old tricks than Peck.”

  CHAPTER 21

  The second message from Atarsa lasted only a few moments, interrupting those viewers in the Philadelphia area who still watched television off antennae. It was ghostly: Angra Druj’s face, fading in from static, staring at the viewers with a smile.

  “We got to him.”

  Then the screen returned to the reality show.

  ***

  SATURDAY, MARCH 20

  Katrina’s nightmares didn’t always align with impending disasters, but over the years she grew to interpret them as a warning shot, her subconscious sensing some sort of danger headed her way. The one the night after Peck’s nervous breakdown felt as clear a warning as a flashing neon sign.

  Like all dreams, it just began, with no sense of how she got here. In her dream, she was outside some nondescript Rust Belt city. She was driving a car with Alec in the backseat. (Sometimes the symbolism of her dreams wasn’t too hard to interpret.) The highway was empty, except for abandoned cars on either side of the road.

  She knew something terrible had happened, and she had to get away. She looked up and down the road, at the fast-food places in the distance, and she could see bodies hanging from the golden arches and kingly crowns and other icons of the roadway.

  She pulled off the highway and found herself parking in front of a Friendly’s restaurant. She got out of the car into the parking lot, even though she didn’t want to, and immediately Alec started wandering off. She tried to yell a warning but couldn’t, her voice wouldn’t work. She turned to the Friendly’s and saw the windows had been replaced with signs:

  outsiders not welcome here

  we have found several infiltrators

  we will kill any more we find

  Even though she didn’t want to, she walked closer to the restaurant and realized the locked door had been covered by wanted posters: a whole town of people, elderly, children, teenagers, all suddenly wanted and suspected as sleeper agents and sentenced to death.

  sleepers agents and bugs

  they are here to kill us

  do not trust them

  kill them

  She heard noises from the other side of the restaurant—someone or a group of people, undoubtedly hostile, were on the move. The wind howled, and she looked down, seeing her feet were buried by a pile of little white insects that were crawling up her legs, climbing up her body …

  That was the last thing she saw before she awoke, suddenly and violently, bolting into a sitting position and thrashing her arms. On the way up, her right arm had managed to whack Alec in the nose, and he groaned in pain. After a moment of realizing it had been a dream, and that she had just struck him, she wiped the sweat from her forehead and apologized profusely.

  Alec rubbed his nose. “I’d wear a hockey mask to bed, but that would just make the nightmares worse, wouldn’t it?”

  CHAPTER 22

  Jaguar, a.k.a. J.C. Lopez, a.k.a Juan Perez, a.k.a. Juan Comillo, was on a plane about to land in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan—the farthest he had ever traveled from his native Mexico.

  Juan Comillo grew up knowing exactly what he wanted to be: a heroic lawman. His father was a lawyer and his mother a former model, and they enjoyed a comfortable life in San Juan Teotihuacan, a town just northeast of Mexico City, noted for the spectacular Mesoamerican pyramids and ruins of Teotihuacan next to the modern town. By his teen years, Jaguar knew mere police work wouldn’t be enough for him—even though it certainly involved enough danger from the country’s perpetual war with drug cartels. No, he set out to join Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional, Mexico’s intelligence agency.

  His shining transcript from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México—with a year abroad at the University Texas at Austin—and obsession with all aspects of law enforcement made him a star recruit for the agency.

  At CISN, Comillo learned everything he could about almost all of the dark arts of espionage. He proved ruthless in a fight and sharp-eyed on the street, a keen analyst. What his bosses and family could not know was that the clear view from his new position—seeing how his country really worked—was slowly eating away at his worldview. Once determined to serve his country, he began to wonder if he still had a country.
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br />   He gradually and painfully learned modern Mexico was rife with corruption, an afterthought in international affairs, and pushed around with impunity by its northern neighbors. Far too many of its citizens left and headed north for a better life. Some police and prosecutors fought hard for order, but their efforts were whack-a-mole at best; knock down one dealer, gang, or kingpin and another would quickly replace him. Battles against poverty, ignorance, and violent crime were marked by frequent setbacks.

  The Catholic Church, the faith of his childhood, seemed hapless and helpless in the face of these dire challenges. Overwhelmed with crime, corruption, and despair, they assured the faithful that everything would be better in the afterlife. To Juan, it increasingly felt like a message of surrender. He found himself haunted by his college readings of Nietzsche, the dismissal of Christianity as a “slave morality,” more focused on good or evil intentions than good or bad consequences. Jaguar concluded that whatever the modern leaders of Mexico had intended, the consequences of their leadership were disastrous. The economy stumbled, torn between rapacious greed at the top and inflammatory populist crusaders, quick to turn around and enjoy the high life once they had tasted some of it for themselves.

  He had been raised to detest the cartels, but the more he studied them, he found himself begrudgingly admiring them. Some far-off madman had once declared that given a choice between a strong horse and a weak horse, people will always choose the strong horse. In his country, Comillo began to conclude the cartels were the stronger horse—arguably the true government in some portions of the country.

  After close to a decade of service, Juan Comillo resigned his government job and went into “the private sector”—working for the cartels under the nom de guerre “Jaguar,” a career path that he found was not that unusual. He found himself wealthier—able to purchase a nice condo in Xochimilco, not far from the canals in Mexico City, as well as a cheap apartment for use as a safe house—but still haunted by the state of his homeland.

  What maddened Jaguar was that the cartels had everything before them to complete the takeover of a country that some analysts argued was on the cusp of becoming a failed state. They had enormous financial resources and an intelligence network that penetrated every urban neighborhood or small town. They commanded not-so-virtual armies. One analysis concluded the cartels commanded 100,000 men through their network of allied gangs and informants; the Mexican Army had 130,000 soldiers. But then again, some men would be counted among both groups.

  What’s more, for all of its flaws and weaknesses, Comillo saw that Mexico had two things other people needed. It had drugs that Americans wanted and needed and would pay dearly for, and it had the access to the United States that the rest of Central America coveted.

  Jaguar said to anyone who would listen that Mexico could demonstrate its leverage quickly and easily. Give the American DEA and Mexican government what they say they want and stop the drug shipments. He proposed launching a brief “strike” of drug shipments to get every American user to go into a paralyzing state of withdrawal and desperation. Jaguar had done the research; the US National Institutes of Health estimated that 27 million Americans had used an illegal drug in the past month, a number only increasing as opioid addiction became disturbingly mainstream.

  The cartels had more than enough financial reserves to survive a “work stoppage.” Within a few weeks—two months, tops—the consequences of a national forced withdrawal would be clear all over America: overwhelmed emergency rooms and drug treatment centers, gangs and drug dealers shooting each other in the street over remaining drug stashes, amateurs trying to cook their own meth and blowing up their houses.

  “Let’s show them exactly what a drug-free America would look like,” Jaguar would declare with a smile.

  Jaguar proposed that after a good month of chaos north of the border, the cartels could make an offer no one could refuse: Everyone on both sides of the border would accept that the cartels were merely giving Americans what they wanted, a chemical escape from their miserable, hopeless lives. The DEA would find something else to do, the border posts would be left open, and the cartels would be free to sell their product to anyone who wanted to buy it. To Jaguar, legalization was moot; he didn’t care if cocaine, heroin, and crystal meth were sold at the corner store or the alley behind it, as long as the distribution networks and customer base operated unmolested. Americans would finally realize that they needed Mexico more than Mexico needed it and behave accordingly. The Mexican government would recognize the cartels held the whip hand.

  When Jaguar discussed this idea, most of his cartel employers smiled, nodded, and ignored him, or pointed out the minor flaw that getting the three major cartels, four regional cartels, toll collector cartels, and hundreds of gangs to cooperate on a stoppage was nearly impossible. They pointed out that drug cartels from other regions of the world would eagerly step in to fill the vacuum—or perhaps even big pharmaceutical companies. Under Jaguar’s plan, America might remain every bit as addicted, with the Mexican cartels simply losing their customer base.

  One spring night, years ago, Jaguar walked through the Templo Mayor Archeological Zone in Mexico City. The glories of his country’s pre-colonial past still captivated him, much as it had as a boy. He marveled at how the city had grown over the ancient sites, and how people had unknowingly walked atop the sites of rituals and sacrifices for centuries. Only a random discovery in 1978, while digging a subway tunnel, uncovered this long-forgotten chapter of his ancestors.

  He strolled past the excavations of the twin temples—one to Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, and to Tlaloc, the god of rain or water. He paused at the tzompantli shrine or wall of skulls—a stone square of rows arranged with carvings of human skulls. A stone eagle represented Huitzilopochtli; devoted followers would bring human hearts and place them before the giant bird.

  Models within the museum depicted the complex in ancient times, including a spire in the center devoted to worship of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent sky god.

  He exited the museum and walked toward the Museum of the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit—an awkward name for an art museum, one that recognized the building’s previous occupant. Before that, it was owned by the Church. Some of the artwork and artifacts within the museum paid tribute to what stood atop that spot before the church’s arrival: the Temple to Tezcatlipoca.

  Both young Juan Comillo and adult Jaguar felt a chill and bit of excitement at the thought of the Aztec God Tezcatlipoca, whose name translated to “Smoking Mirror.” Smoking Mirror was the deity no mortal dared disrespect. He was the punisher, the arbitrary, the dark, the powerful, the merciless. His realms and symbols communicated pure intimidation: the night sky, obsidian, discord, war, the color black, and of course … jaguars.

  Outsiders oversimplified Smoking Mirror as a devil character, Jaguar thought. He was also the deity of beauty, temptation, sorcery, and the change that comes from conflict. He was everything strange and terrifying about the world to the Aztec people, yet the world could not have such beauty, peace, growth, and change without the forces he represented. Smoking Mirror was not a benevolent, distant, smiling old man in the sky. He was a deity for modern adults—mysterious, occasionally cruel, demanding, unforgiving, and caring not one whit about how human beings treated one another. Juan Comillo saw little or no sign of the Christian God in the world, but Smoking Mirror’s fingerprints were all over it.

  And then, standing there, above the site of Smoking Mirror’s temple that night, Jaguar had a vision that filled him with adrenaline. Suddenly, he wasn’t standing in Mexico City and the modern day. It was some future time—Jaguar couldn’t tell if it was just a few years away or generations from that moment—when all of the buildings around him were covered in ornate carvings of the Aztec gods.

  Directly in front of Jaguar, the Museum of the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit would be gone, and a new temple to Smoking Mirror stood in its place. He turned its head. Mexico City Cathe
dral, a block away, was torn down and replaced as well; the new temple stretched out more than twice the length of the Plaza de Constitution. With walls of black obsidian, shining and lit by torches, the pyramid rose over the rest of the city, with all of the other temples of Templo Mayor restored as well. But Smoking Mirror’s was the largest—and indisputably the most important. He heard chanting within and could smell blood. Where the Cathedral’s entrance had once stood was a pit—a giant circle, lined with a complete circle of human skulls. And directly beneath that circle was another. And another. And another, hundreds, and Jaguar could not see the bottom from where he stood. He knew that many had opposed the rise of this new order—and their eyeless skulls and open jaws would stare out from that pit forever, a warning to anyone who dared oppose the country’s new Aztec regime.

  Jaguar knew that in that future moment, whether it was a year or a generation away, Smoking Mirror would no longer be this forgotten legend, confined to storybooks and archaeology textbooks. He and the other Aztec Gods were real, restored to their central role in the life of his countrymen, steering the people on their path, and bestowing protection upon the followers who made the appropriate sacrifices.

  The vision ended, and Jaguar looked around, noticing strange looks from several people in the square, pointing and whispering to one another. He looked at himself, everything seemed normal. An old vendor finally approached and asked if he felt okay. Jaguar nodded affirmative and asked why the old man had asked. The vendor, keeping his distance, said that Jaguar had been staring at the museum, unmoving and unresponsive, for about fifteen minutes. Jaguar sheepishly apologized and moved on, ready to burst from excitement about his vision.