The aim of terrorism, in all its forms, is maddeningly simple. If you blow up a plane or yourself or a car parked in front of a busy hotel, or even if you just walk up and shoot a political figure, the reasoning can usually be broken into one of three things:
A desire for revenge.
A desire for acknowledgment.
A desire for publicity.
On the occasion that terrorism is used for strictly religious purposes, it’s very rarely what any god has told someone to do, but rather the skewed interpretation that a god seeks revenge for being put behind the eight ball of some other religious idol.
The difference between a terrorist organization and a prison or street gang is negligible. The Latin Emperors didn’t rise in prominence because of their political bent in the late nineties; they rose because they controlled a vast network of drug dealers and gave back to their own community-which is to say, they hired people in their own neighborhoods to do menial tasks, handed out money on holidays and gave the people of the projects a sense of identity and even a little bit of hope. When you’re hopeless, even a gang seems like a good idea. The difference between Hamas and the Latin Emperors isn’t that large: for both, it’s about defending a piece of land and defending a particular identity, and the conflicts between power and preeminence.
How you defeat terrorism is more complex. But it begins with counterinsurgency. The level of violence-or the threat of violence-determines the response. Blow up the World Trade Center, for instance, and expect to have your country, or countries, invaded. Threaten the president via e-mail, and expect to have a Secret Service agent outside your door in about five minutes, just to make sure you’re not producing anthrax in your mother’s basement. Begin organizing an anarchist organization that believes violence is the only way to achieve the aims of the revolution-what this revolution will entail is anyone’s guess-and expect to have a new member within a few weeks who, eventually, will be writing your FBI file.
As it related to Junior Gonzalez, I suspected we’d need a little of all of the above to stop his campaign against Father Eduardo.
“Why don’t we just shoot him?” Fiona asked. I was at her place fixing her sink and explaining the situation I’d decided to enter all of us into, and, as per usual, Fiona had a very simple solution. That she had it while I was under her sink wasn’t my choice. I called her that night and told her we needed to talk about a new client, and she told me that she’d love to discuss our latest venture over dinner, except that she was having a household problem and only I, with my superior skills, could fix the issue.
I thought she was speaking euphemistically.
She wasn’t. So with wrench in hand, I told her all we knew.
“He hasn’t actually done anything yet,” I said. “He plans to extort Father Eduardo. He plans to blackmail him. He’s maybe planning on killing him, but there’s nothing criminal in what he’s done yet, apart from maybe having some cops on his payroll, and that sort of makes it difficult to kill him, too.”
“But let’s be honest, Michael. Eventually he will put himself in a position where it would be easier if we just shoot him or put a bomb in his house. Why not just jump ahead? Darwin would approve of this plan. And so would Sam.”
Fortunately, Sam was off getting information on Junior and wasn’t there to nod his head or tip his beer in assent. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in a position to really start arguing with Fiona, seeing as I was on my back and attempting to unscrew the elbow joint of her sink. Since she’s prone to sudden violence, I thought it would be wise to keep things, you know, calm.
“I see your point,” I said. “But no.” I finally popped the joint, and a slow drip of water came out. I reached into the pipe and pulled out what looked to be clogging her drain: an eight-inch knife that could gut Big-foot. “Have you been looking for this?”
“I knew I left it somewhere,” she said.
“Were you expecting ninjas to come after your stamp collection?”
“Michael, you can never have enough sharp objects in your home. You know that.” She took the knife from my hand and admired it a bit. “I bought this in Switzerland. It can cut meat, vegetables or human flesh with equal acuity.”
“That’s wonderful.” I rescrewed the joints together and then stood up.
“Anyway,” she said. “My point here, Michael, is it would be nice not to play these games. You’re always saying you want your job back. Yet you never exactly used due process when you were a spy.”
“Which is precisely why I can’t go put a bullet in Junior’s head,” I said.
“But it was so much sexier when you could,” she said.
“I guess we all lose, then,” I said. I went into Fi’s fridge and pulled out two beers and a blueberry yogurt I’d left a few days previous. It’s always smart to store rations in a safe place. I opened Fi’s sliding door and stepped out onto her patio and sat down at her picnic table. It was just after seven in the evening, and there were a few people out on the water in small boats, oblivious to the plots and scenarios of the bad people. That wouldn’t be such a horrible thing, I suppose.
A few minutes later, Fiona came out with a plate of fruit and some cheese.
“I thought you were making dinner,” I said. “I thought that was why I had to fix your sink.”
“No, you had to fix my sink because I asked you and you’re unable to say no to me.” She pushed the plate toward me. “Eat some solid food. It will be a shock to your system.”
I took a piece of cheese and gnawed on one corner.
“Something the matter, Michael?”
“I’m a little concerned about the fact Junior has cops on the take. That’s not good for Eduardo, but it really isn’t good for us, either. Last thing we need is some crooked cop deciding to make a name for himself by arresting someone like you.”
“They’d never take me alive,” she said.
“Fi, that’s noble, but let’s not get crazy here,” I said.
“I didn’t mean that I’d die,” she said. “I meant that they’d never be able to take me and live.”
“Great.”
“Does Sam know anyone on the police force?”
“Not really,” I said. “At least not since that trouble we ran into.” A rather adept Miami officer, Detective Paxon, thought she might find something of interest in my life a few months earlier-turns out that if you blow up half the city and leave a few bodies on the streets of Miami, eventually people tend to notice-and since then, Sam was a bit worried about his contacts there. But it’s not as if a bad cop sits around the locker room, telling everyone about the great gig he has working for a prison gang. “If Junior has cops working for him,” I continued, “I’m going to guess that it’s not as easy as paying someone off to deliver messages or look the other way when crimes are being committed.”
“You think the Latin Emperors have a mole in the police?”
“Moles. That’s what I’d do. Hell, that’s what I do. It would make sense for the long-term survival of the gang-get some boys loyal to the gang to go in to the police.”
Fiona took an orange from the plate and sucked the juice out of it. It had been a while since we’d been intimate with each other-we go through cycles where we want to love each other and where we want to kill each other, and where we just want to be near one another but not put that huge emotional investment at risk by actually having any real emotion-but that doesn’t mean I didn’t think about the possibility on a fairly regular basis.
“What would be the benefit for the bad cop?” Fi asked.
“Same as for anyone. Money. Power. Influence. A little street fame, maybe. And if they’re loyal to the gang, it’s either do what’s asked of them or take a permanent vacation from this life. At least this way they get health benefits and get to carry a gun legally.”
“That’s a long distance to go just for something childish like a gang.”
“You robbed banks for the IRA,” I said.
“That’s been slightly misrepresented. I just helped some fellow countrymen who needed money for a charity event.”
“Fiona, I know your file,” I said.
“And I know your file,” she said. “And as I recall that’s what cost you your job. A few discreet lies.”
“It might be what costs Father Eduardo,” I said.
“Do you believe he’s a hundred percent clean?”
“I do,” I said. “He reformed, and he’s doing good things, Fi. Better things than we are. That’s for sure. But I also know that there are probably a lot of people who look at him and can’t separate who he is now from who he was then. My mother, she took him at face value, but I had to get a full tour of his facility, sit down and talk with him and pull out a dreadful secret in order to believe that he’s not doing it all for some lower purpose. What’s wrong with me?”
“You’ve seen a few things that might cause you to question other people’s motives,” she said. “And you have inherent father issues.” That was the great thing about Fiona: She always knew the right thing to say. “And,” Fiona continued, “your mother sees very deeply into people.”
“No, she doesn’t,” I said.
“You don’t give her enough credit. Maybe she’s a psychic.”
“If she were psychic, she’d know when her car was going to run out of oil, and I wouldn’t need to pick her up from the Lube and Tune tomorrow morning.” Sometimes my mother can be a little frustrating. But, then, whose parents aren’t frustrating? “The mayor certainly didn’t have a problem with him. He’s doing all the right things, and then something like this shows up. I just can’t let him fail now.”
“So what’s the plan?” Fi asked.
Sun-tzu may have said, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer” more than fifteen hundred years ago, but that notion still applies when forming a strong counterinsurgency plan. If you really want to defeat a terrorist organization, which a gang certainly is, you need to understand their methodology, their aims and just how far they are willing to go to get what they want.
The best way to deal with a terrorist is to dictate the terms of the fight. If there are rules of engagement, it’s not all that terrifying to face an adversary. You know what kind of guns they have, you know what parcel of land they are after and you know just how much they are willing to lose. So to fight someone who leans on your fear, you need to bring him to a place where you have no fear at all.
“We give Junior what he wants,” I said. “We give him every single thing he demands. And then we make him wish he’d never stepped foot back in Miami again.”
“Oh, Michael,” Fiona said, her glee barely contained. “That sounds like a potentially violent and dangerous thing to do. Would you like me to get some armor-piercing rounds out of storage?”
Before I could answer, my cell rang. It was Sam.
“What do you have?” I asked.
“A hangover,” Sam said. “Or what do you call that feeling before a hangover when you’re not happy anymore?”
I put my hand over the mouthpiece and said to Fiona, “Brew some coffee. And do you have any bread?”
“I think I have some English muffins,” she said.
“Maybe run over to the store and get a loaf of something. Oh, and some Mylanta. Get some Mylanta for sure.”
“Will we be entertaining later, darling?”
“Sam’s been drinking pruno,” I said. “He sounds… off.”
That’s all Fiona needed to hear. “Say no more,” she said, and disappeared back into her house.
“Where are you?” I asked Sam.
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Oh, hell, Mike, I think the cab left me at the wrong place. I told him to take me to your mom’s place, thinking maybe I’d get a bowl of oatmeal inside me, maybe some soup, maybe something made of lard, and then I sort of thought about that sofa in the living room, which always is very soft in the small of my back, and…”
“Sam,” I said. “Focus. Where are you?”
“In front of that strip club Mom’s Place. Over by the airport. Some very nice ladies seem to work here. Have you ever noticed how loud airplanes are, Mikey? It’s like they are filled with jet fuel or something. Just one big roaring noise.” Sam stopped speaking for a moment, which concerned me, until I heard him say, “Hello to you, sweetheart. What’s that say on your back? Oh? Oh, I’m a bad boy? You’re a bad girl…”
“Sam!” I shouted.
“Oh, sorry, Mike. You know what I like? Those tattoos women get on the small of their back. Never stops being sexy.”
“Sam,” I said, “I want you to step away from the strip club. Is there a gas station nearby? Something with a mini-mart?”
“Let me tell you something, Mikey. Those mini-marts are ruining the mom-and-pop stores. I won’t go into them anymore.”
“Sam,” I said, “you go into them every single day.”
“I’m having epiphanies tonight, Mikey. Things are changing, for sure.”
“How much did you drink, Sam?”
“It’s not about how much. It’s about how long. And I don’t know that answer, either.”
The reason people in prison drink pruno is so they can forget-for just a little while-why they are in prison. The downside, however, is that alcohol in pruno is so abusive, it can make you forget the day after you drank it, too, and maybe the next week or two if you’re not careful. And, of course, if it’s made incorrectly, it can just shut down your kidneys and then forever isn’t a very long time. Fortunately, K-Dog sounded like the kind of guy who had good recipes, and Sam didn’t sound like he was in renal failure, just regular failure.
“I want you to stand at least ten feet from the road,” I said. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. While you’re waiting for me, don’t go inside the strip club and don’t give anyone any money. And, Sam, please don’t drink any more.”
“Nothing to worry about, Mikey, because I’m never drinking again,” Sam said, which made me think this was much more serious than I ever could have imagined.