Chapter 47

Managua—San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua
May 2011

I stood at the entrance to the Camino Real at exactly nine o’clock in the morning as Quindarius Lee had instructed. It was the beginning of the rainy season in Central America, and the weather had changed from when I was here last. It was humid; the air was heavy and there were thick black rain clouds on the horizon. The ground outside the hotel was parched, and Managua was still expecting its first rain. The smell of burning garbage and brush was heavy in the air, and clouds of smoke partially obscured the sky. Third world countries all smell the same to me, whether they’re in South Asia, Central America, or some god-forsaken parish in central Louisiana. They stink with the liberating stench of chaos and neglect. No zoning restrictions or leash laws here. Got to take the bad with the good.

The Camino Real had a huge aviary on the west side of its driveway to entertain foreign tourists. Huge, colorful macaws sat on their high perches and observed the world around them with haughty disdain. As far as bird cages go, it was spacious, but my heart went out to the inmates. Nicaragua was even harder on wildlife than it was on people and that was saying something. The campesinos ate every iguana they could find, and most species of exotic wildlife native to the country could be found for sale on the side of the road. I’d seen ocelots for sale in cramped cages outside of Jinotepe on the side of the Pan American highway. Drive across the border to Costa Rica, and the situation is completely different. The whole country is like a wildlife preserve, and you find yourself dodging iguanas instead of watching them with awe like they were an endangered species. In Nicaragua, though, it seems that violence is a disease endemic to the country with both people and animals falling victim to the malaise. Every couple of decades the United States raises its head to exacerbate an already desperate situation. We’re far more humane to the animals, though.

I stared at the parrots and let my thoughts drift. A group of overweight American missionaries with southern accents came out of the hotel toting mountains of luggage and boarded the shuttle for the Augusto Sandino International Airport. I shook my head in wonder. This country needed a lot of things, but I didn’t think a group of waddling Baptist missionaries from Mississippi was one of them. I felt a tug on the back of my Quicksilver t-shirt and heard a deep voice repeating, “Señor Worthington?” I snapped out of my daydream and turned around to see a thickset young man in t-shirt, baggy jeans, and Adidas running shoes. He wore a New York Yankees baseball cap on backwards and wrap-around sunglasses. I recognized him from my San Jorge adventure back in March. It was Colonel Cerna’s driver. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Sloane, Cerna, Ortega. No mistake about it. This was the unholy Trinity.

He took my one suitcase and motioned me to follow. Sure enough, there was Cerna’s black Toyota Land Cruiser with its dark tinted windows parked in the semi-circle of the Camino Real entrance driveway. Two Hilux pickup trucks were parked next to it: one in front and one in back of Cerna’s SUV. I had graduated to VIP status. We had chase cars. A motorcade led by the former head of the Nicaraguan security service, who surely resided on a black list somewhere in the archives of Amnesty International. I didn’t know whether to rejoice or mourn my new status.

“¿Qué pasó, Max?” Lenin Cerna greeted me casually, as if we had lunched together the day before. “Te están esperando.”

I wasn’t sure I liked the idea that I was expected. In my recent experience that hadn’t worked out so well. Actually, I was probably lucky to still be alive. I climbed in the car in between the same two thugs as before. I wondered what they had been up to in my absence. They grinned at me as if we were old drinking buddies. The word had apparently trickled down. They were here this time to protect and not to intimidate. That was fine with me.

Lenin Cerna’s crew was all business during the two hour plus drive to San Juan del Sur. Cerna himself was in constant communication with the chase cars, which didn’t allow any vehicle to get close to our SUV. I wondered if they were just taking precautions or whether they had specific intelligence of any threats. Quindarius and I had discussed the possibility of the Russians making a move on me in Nicaragua, and we hadn’t ruled it out. That was one reason for the alias passport. I wasn’t particularly worried, but then again, I hadn’t been worried in Moscow either.

We stopped once in Nandaime for Lenin Cerna to relieve himself. His hoodlums fanned out in a semicircle around the Texaco gas station with their AK-47s locked and loaded. I followed Cerna into the men’s room for protection. My two companions walked on either side of me. I hoped there would be a limit to their protective services. I usually prefer to urinate in private.

Ninety minutes later we turned right on La Chocolata as we entered San Juan del Sur. We headed north along the Pacific coast past theAlcaldía on the left. I knew we were either going to Ortega’s luxury home in Pacific Marlin or heading further north to his beach house perched high on the hill above Playa Madera. This was my second visit in as many months, but things were different this time. Security was much tighter than it had been. We passed several roadblocks set up along the unpaved road through the dry jungle that led to Playa Madera. Nicaraguan army units were methodically searching most of the cars that lined up at the checkpoints and frisking the drivers and passengers.

We drove for several more kilometers and turned right off the road to Playa Madera where we passed two more roadblocks along Ortega’s 400-meter private driveway. Teams of four uniformed soldiers wearing black berets manned each of these checkpoints: an elite special forces unit, according to Lenin Cerna. I also could see numerous plainclothes security agents dispersed in the dry jungle surrounding Ortega’s house, beginning at least several hundred meters from the residence at the top of the hill. Something was definitely up.

When we arrived at the beach house, I got out of the car and looked back down at the ocean. It was breathtaking. Standing on the summit of the steep hill, I felt like I was suspended in air several hundred feet above the beach with an endless view of the coastline and ocean both north and south. A couple of miles offshore, lightning flashed brightly in the dark clouds of a thunderstorm, and diagonal torrents of rain fell where they were least needed. The distant sound of the storm reached us some thirty seconds after each brilliant display of lightning, the faint peals of thunder held at bay by the insistent offshore wind. The scorched Nicaraguan countryside, though, was still waiting its turn for the precious liquid.

As soon as I exited the vehicle, I detected a muffled Latin rock beat and the chords of a song that sounded vaguely familiar. Ortega and company apparently had started the party early today, and it looked like I might be joining in. I took one last look at the fairytale beauty of the view down the coastline and dove into the Sandinista den of iniquity.

It seemed like every time I looked around in Nicaragua, I found something that astonished me, and it was usually in the presence of this misanthropic ex-revolutionary who motioned me to follow him. When Lenin Cerna opened the door to Ortega’s private auditorium, the first driving chords of “Rayando el Sol” hit me like tsunami tidal wave. It was one of my favorite Maná songs. I looked over at Lenin Cerna and could have sworn the old fart was bobbing his head up and down to the music. When he saw me looking, he quickly assumed his security persona and waved me over toward the stage where I saw the silhouette of Daniel Ortega, shirtless, in baggy surf trunks and wearing his ubiquitous Sandinista black and red bandanna tied around his shaggy hair. His famous moustache was still bushy, but even in the dim light I could see it was turning gray. The leader of the Sandinista revolution was dancing a free style rhumba with a topless young beach nymph in a minimum thong which left little to the imagination.

I had stumbled into a Central American version of Sodom and Gomorrah. From a look around the room, I sensed this was a gathering of Nicaragua’s beautiful people, a liberal sprinkling of the stars from the Nicaraguan music scene mingling with the menopausal antiheroes of the Sandinista revolution. The girls might have been professionals or amateurs. It mattered little. Money and power could turn the latter into the former in the time it took a woman to do the math. In a country like Nicaragua, the temptation threshold was quite affordable.

As I walked slowly toward Ortega, I surveyed the room. There were probably forty people packed into the small auditorium. Most of them were dancing to the live band while the rest listened to the music and pumped their fists in the air to the contagious beat. They were drinking, and a few of them were openly smoking marijuana. If this hadn’t been a get-together organized by the president of Nicaragua, I would have said it was a typical San Juan del Sur surf party.

In my hurry to find Ortega, I hadn’t paid much attention to the band except to note subconsciously that they were doing a great cover of ‘Rayando el Sol.’ I glanced up at the lead singer and was stunned to see Fher Olvera bare chested in Sandinista red & black surf trunks and a pair of Rainbow flip flops, his right arm pointed straight up, and singing, “Te tengo atrapada entre mi piel y mi alma….” It wasn’t a cover band; itwas Maná! I couldn’t believe it. Ortega had hired Maná to play for his private party! That must have cost the national treasury a pretty penny. I looked in back of Olvera at the drummer. Sure enough, it was Alejandro Trujillo doing his usual acrobatics and twirling the drum sticks like a demented majorette. I didn’t recognize the tall musician on backup vocals, playing rhythm guitar, though. Like Fher, he was bare-chested in surf trunks and flip flops, but he looked more like a gringo than a Mexican or a Nicaraguan. He had long blond hair tied back in one of Ortega’s classic red & black bandanas and was wearing sunglasses. Even in the half-darkness I could see he had the ripped torso of a long-time serious surfer. He was lean and tan and appeared to be a competent musician. Every few minutes Fher would invite him up to the microphone, and they would harmonize together. I had momentarily forgotten Ortega in my amazement at seeing Maná on stage and trying to figure out who the other musician was. Ortega had caught sight of me in the meantime and waved gregariously.

When Fher and company finished the song, someone unexpectedly turned on the bright stage lights. The inebriated guests hooted and catcalled, liberally sprinkling their feigned indignation with choice obscenities in Spanish. In the five seconds the lights remained on, illuminating both the stage and the band, I was able to get a good look at the rhythm guitarist’s face and could see that despite his lean and fit look, he was older than the other Maná musicians. He had a slightly weather-beaten look, and the sun had left his face subtly lined. A surfer version of the Marlboro man, but without the cigarettes.

What were the chances that another middle-aged American would be at Ortega’s party? I asked myself. No, the coincidence would have been too great. Besides, if there was one thing I had learned over the past two months, it was not to believe in coincidences. I looked at the old surfer with the guitar and realized I had found Mako Sloane.

●

I couldn’t help staring. This was the Holy Grail of my journalistic quest. Here he was in flesh and blood. I could almost reach out and touch him. The man we all thought had been killed in Afghanistan ten years ago; the man who had morphed from CIA golden boy and American hero to Guantanamo inmate and CIA pariah was on a stage performing with Maná in a beach house in Nicaragua belonging to Daniel Ortega, leader of the defunct Sandinista revolution. I didn’t think it could get much stranger. I was wrong. It would later in the day.

It was difficult to reconcile what I knew about this man with what I saw on stage. Sloane was playing a 1969 Stratocaster, coaxing sounds out of the old classic guitar with body language when the strings failed to produce the sound he was looking for. Yet I knew this was the same man who had killed a CIA assassin in Managua, and who had tried to take out Daniel Ortega some twenty-five years ago. This was the same man who had stood together with Boris Yeltsin on top of a tank in Moscow during the 1991 Putsch attempt and who had exfiltrated a Soviet nuclear scientist from under the nose of his KGB watchers. Countless other stories and second-hand anecdotes I had heard about Mako Sloane flashed through my mind as I watched Fher share the microphone with him as the two sang.

“Bendito Dios por encontrarnos en el camino, y de quitarme esta soledad de mi destino.”

I wondered how it was that a man like Mako Sloane had ended up in Nicaragua like a prisoner of conscious in exile. Was he lamenting the loneliness of his own destiny in the words of the Maná song, or had the years in prison taken their toll and reduced the man? Maybe he merely sought a tranquil refuge from the frenzied tempest his life had been. I couldn’t even begin to answer those questions, but the discomforting sensation that I was a voyeur, an observer and chronicler of life rather than an active participant stuck in my craw.

Fher ended the song with a plaintiff, “Bendita la luz de tu mirada.” Sloane lay down his guitar and nimbly jumped down from the stage and joined Ortega, who handed him a tall Cuba Libre. Mako took the rum & coke gratefully and glanced around the room, his eyes stopping on me and fixing me with a piercing stare that made me feel self-conscious. Then I remembered that I had brought something all the way to Moscow at Vasiliy’s request to give to Sloane. Emboldened by the recollection of my own mission, I approached Sloane and stuck out my hand.

“Max Crandall,” I said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Sloane shook my hand with what appeared to be a certain degree of reluctance.

“And I’ve been avoiding you,” he said, none too cordially. “You’ve managed to stir up a hornet’s nest, you know. People have died. Fortunately for you, not on our side.”

Unlike Ortega, who on this occasion was visibly affected by the weed he smoked and the rum he drank, Sloane appeared cold sober and shook his head when Ortega handed him a joint. He said something to Ortega and Cerna in Spanish and motioned me to follow him as he headed toward the exit. I walked like a star-struck groupie behind him and saw Cerna signal to his security goons, who followed at a discreet distance. It had been so dark in Ortega’s auditorium that I had almost forgotten it was still the middle of the afternoon. The blinding light of the midday tropical sun stunned me for a minute. Sloane didn’t wait for me and walked swiftly behind the main residence to a small guest house I hadn’t seen before. Like the main house, the guest quarters were of concrete construction with whitewashed stucco and a red ceramic tile roof. Bougainvillea vines with purple and white flowers covered the outside walls. The vines had grown thick as tree trunks. Sloane entered the small building and left the door open for me to follow. I looked back at our security escort fanning out around the little house and wondered why Cerna was being so cautious.

I don’t know how long Sloane had been living in Ortega’s one-bedroom guest house, but it looked like he had been ensconced there for a while. A magnificent antique mahogany book case extended along the entire north wall filled with tomes in at least three languages. While Sloane mixed two rums & coke, I studied the reading tastes of my subject. As I expected, I found a vast array of 19th century classics, all in the original Russian: Dostoyevskiy, Tolstoy, Lermontov, Turgenev, Pushkin. None of those surprised me. I also saw the works of more obscure Russian authors, as well as a whole series of novels and nonfiction works chronicling the revolutionary movements of the late 19th century and early 20th century. Chernyshevskiy, Bakunin, Marx, Lenin. They were all there. Even some of the hack writers of the Soviet era who passed for literary geniuses because of their political conformism and strong aversion to death by firing squad were represented. A sprinkling of ancient Russian literature in Old Church Slavonic surprised me. The Russians have a saying that reads something like “someone else’s soul is like the darkness.” I had no idea who Sloane really was, and I realized that my research had barely scratched the surface of this man.

I wondered if Sloane knew what I had brought him. I suspected that Quindarius had been in contact, but I didn’t know how much information would have been shared over an open telephone line.

Sloane came out of the kitchen with two drinks. He handed me the lingua franca of alcoholic beverages in this part of the world and clicked glasses with me in a manner that belied the coolness of his reception a few minutes earlier. We stood at the bar separating the kitchen and living room. He looked at me expectantly and said, “Max, I haven’t been looking for you, and I didn’t crash one of Daniel Ortega’s parties to see you. What the fuck do you want?”

Not exactly the reaction I had expected or hoped for. I had fantasized that Mako Sloane had been following my progress from a distance, sympathizing with the obstacles that faced me and outraged over the treatment allotted to me by the ‘enemy.’ Why did I always feel silly and superfluous in the presence of Sloane and his friends?

“Look, Mako.” To my chagrin, I found myself stuttering. “I don’t know what you’ve heard from your people, but your son asked me to deliver something, and I have some news that maybe you haven’t heard yet.” I looked at Mako who was taking a long draught of a Flor de Caña Cuba Libre.

“I don’t know any details of what happened in Moscow. QL and I have no way to speak openly right now. We’ll have some encrypted gear in place in about 10 days, but all I know is that you have something for me. But don’t play games with me, Max. You’re on my turf now. This isn’t Capitol Hill, and my homeboy Lenin Cerna doesn’t have an account with the Federal Employees Credit Union and is not a Redskins fan. You’ve caused my friends and me a lot of problems, and you need to be on your best behavior. Let’s have it.”

I could take a hint. He was right. I was on his turf. I opened my shoulder bag and extracted the tattered envelope Vasiliy had given me in Moscow. The envelope was still sealed, and I handed it to Sloane without comment.

“Vasiliy told me he had something that might interest me, and I told him to give it to you. Only to you. I knew you wouldn’t open it. Quindarius, bless his black Uzbek heart, would have opened the damn thing. He doesn’t need to know what’s here. I’m not sure I want to know.”

Sloane took the envelope without dropping his piercing stare. His eyes penetrated and cut knife-like into my thoughts. I felt naked. The man’s very presence exuded an energy and level of intensity that made me feel insignificant. He finally dropped his gaze and opened the envelope, extracting a single 3 x 5 photograph with his long, artistic fingers. He stared at the photograph for over a minute without saying a word, turning it over several times to read an inscription on the back side. When he finally looked up, he stared out the window and then got up and paced back and forth across the living room turned library.

He tossed the photo on the bar. “That sonofabitch!” he exclaimed under his breath. “He actually did it…and nobody ever knew.”

I picked up the photograph, wondering what could have aroused that level of passion in Mako Sloane. I peered at the indistinct image. The photo showed a middle-aged man sitting on a rough concrete floor in the corner of some sort of unfurnished room. He was bearded and his gray-streaked hair was long and shaggy, matted in places. His clothes were nondescript: dark trousers and a blue denim shirt buttoned to the top. Clunky black shoes, functional but far from stylish, completed his depressing attire and gave the distinct impression of prison clothing. When the photograph was snapped, the man was looking at the camera with the blank stare of a long-term GULAG guest. I turned the photo over and read in Russian, “George, February 2011.”

“What the hell?” I thought and looked over at Mako Sloane.

“There’s your story, Max,” he said. “That’s the former president of the United States in a Russian prison cell.”

Sloane could have hit me over the head with a baseball bat, and I would have been less surprised. I was stunned and unable to muster any kind of intelligible reply. I looked down at the photograph, studying the features of the man I saw. If Mako had not told me who the man in the dark image was, I never would have recognized him. Gradually, though, the indistinct features coagulated into the recognizable face that had peered sarcastically from television screens, newspapers, and magazines for so many years. He had aged terribly, but I could see Sloane was right. I was looking at a grimy and bearded George W. Bush in desperate need of his White House barber and tailor.

I looked up at Sloane in shock, unable to sort out the implications of what I had just learned. My companion did not seem inclined to enlighten me. On the contrary, he stared at me impatiently and said, “You mentioned two things you had for me. I’ve seen the photo; what’s the second thing? Max, snap out of it. Talk to me!”

I looked at Sloane as if this was all a dream, and I was desperately trying to wake up to end the nightmare. I shook my head and concentrated on his question. I knew he wasn’t going to like what I had to say much more than he had enjoyed seeing Bush’s photo.

“Vasiliy is missing. On the way out of Moscow, he missed the rendezvous with the rest of us. We had to leave without him.”

It was so quiet in the little guest house that the pounding beat of drums and bass guitar from Ortega’s party were just audible above the hum of the air conditioner. I wasn’t sure how I expected Sloane to react to this news, but he surprised me again. Sloane seemed to have knack for doing the unexpected.

“There’s an extra pair of surf trunks in the bathroom. A rash guard, too. Go put them on. We can talk in the line-up.”