“Albert, you will go to Stanley in the Falklands,” King Edward said to the floor. Really, the King did not care where it was he was sending his son, so long as it is from his sight.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Albert replied with a sigh.
2: DOGO
“No one becomes depraved all at once.”
There was a building in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires, on a street not far from the main square in the Monserrat neighborhood of the central capital. Constructed in 1929, the neo-classic building included a collection of antennae that jutted from its mansard roof, but was, to all outward appearances, otherwise stuck in time. Twenty-odd stories in height, pedestrians tended to quicken their pace as they passed it by.
Known as the home of Argentina’s National Directorate of Strategic Military Intelligence, the building hid a long, dark history that the bright lights flooding its façade could not wash away. Its upper floors held the aroma of wooden shelves and old books. Below street level, however, the thick air of its basement reeked of sweat, urine, and blood. It was here that shadows lived; shadows of the past that still crept along hallways and stopped to listen at doorways. Among these shadows was a stooped, wheel chair-bound form.
Doctor Amsel sat huddled in one of the building’s antechambers, staring at a flickering black & white video screen. Since Valeria was not around to scold him, he was smoking again. As he took a long draw on the crackling American tobacco, he watched one of his best at work, listening to the proceedings through a wall-mounted speaker.
Major Ezequiel Vargas, of the elite 601 Commando Company, struck the prisoner. Caught near a military facility, the bloodied Chilean man was quickly labeled a spy and taken into custody. Albeit just an innocent tourist, the prisoner would never see his children, wife, or homeland again.
Argentina had never forgotten Chile’s support of the British during the Falklands War, and Vargas would make sure to properly remind this man of the fact. In the middle of the dark damp interrogation room, beneath the lifeless stare of the ceiling-mounted camera, the Chilean slouched naked and bound to a cold metal chair, his face swollen and cracked from repeated punches. Vargas landed another, knocking the Chilean from semi-consciousness into blackness. The victim awakened several minutes later when Vargas poured ice water over his head.
“Bueno, mi amigo,” Vargas said. He raised one of his favorite motivational instruments: a power drill. He revved its electric motor, spun its bit, pointed it at the Chilean’s hand, and slowly pushed it closer to flesh. Even though the prisoner could hear the tool and he saw it approaching, he was unable to utter a word. Instead, he gurgled. And then, he screamed.
The bellow passed through the thick stone walls as if they were made of paper. Amsel pushed a button on his control panel.
The interrogation room speaker crackled with Amsel’s familiar German-accented Spanish. Vargas had been summoned.
Although proud to be favored — giving him purpose and justification for his methodology — Vargas still had to hide his annoyance at the disturbance. Splattered with blood, Vargas dutifully went to his superior and mentor.
“I have an important job for you,” Amsel said. Vargas nodded, saluted, and said: “Entiendo, jefe.”
Cerro General Belgrano loomed the tallest peak among the Sierra de Famatina Mountains of Argentina. Snow-capped and jagged, this alp stood surrounded by smaller crags. The mount, named for an Argentine economist, lawyer, politician, and military leader who had taken part in the Argentine Wars of Independence and had created the new nation’s flag, stood surrounded by young peaks, not yet rounded by time, rain, and wind. The smaller peaks surrounded the tallest, most majestic one, sitting about it in a circle, as though eager to hear a riveting story.
Vargas sat there too, on an outcropping that perched inconsequentially partway up that big rock, overlooking the valley town of Chilecito, a small city surrounded by rock and farm fields that seemed out of place among the dry heights.
Vargas looked up at Belgrano’s heights with awe and inspiration. The wind at its peak grabbed and pulled the snow, forming a white plume that feathered into the atmosphere. At the snow line, where the stark rock became ice-covered, were the ore fields of La Mejicana. Vargas took a deep, refreshing breath that tasted of new snow. Light-headed from the altitude, Vargas felt good. He knelt to inspect a purple flower growing from among cracks in the rock.
He knelt beside it and watched the plant sway in the breeze. Vargas’s bruised knuckles closed about the flower’s delicate stem. If not for the clanking of the Cable Carril — an antique wire ropeway that climbed into the heights — he would be surrounded by dead silence.
Although the Cable Carril once transported rich ore from the towering heights down to the railroad located in the steep valley floor, the old system was now relegated to moving batches of tourists to a trailhead located at the ropeway’s first station. Vargas watched a gondola approaching. As he waited for it to arrive, he thought about his wife.
Vargas had loved her even more than he loved Argentina. The day she died in a fiery car crash, his unborn child nestled in her creamy-white belly, Vargas had changed, become different, a much darker man. No longer was he a simple soldier. Instead, Vargas became a killer driven by vicious anger at a seemingly uncaring God. Yes, he had been raised as part of a devoutly Catholic family, but when the coroner had pulled back the fluid-stained sheet from his wife’s corpse, exposing her crisp and blackened face, Vargas felt an electric shock within and experienced a black epiphany: There was no God, and the universe was a cold, neutral, indifferent place. Vargas had killed shamelessly ever since, daring the supposed deity to prove His existence by taking and punishing a once-pious man. As always, during peaceful moments, when surrounded by the beauty of the land, Vargas longed for the man he once was, to be good and forthright again. He shoved these thoughts quickly shoved away, caught by the breeze, and supplanted by a question: Was it a daughter or son that had died in his wife’s womb, starved of blood and oxygen, squirming as its newly developing organs shut down? Vargas wanted to simultaneously cry with sadness and scream with anger. He was convinced that, if their child had been a girl, she would have been as beautiful as his wife. And, if a boy, he would be strong and focused like his dad. Somewhere in his soul, Vargas knew it was a little girl that had died with his wife that day, and this knowledge made him all the angrier. What more, after all, is a father meant to do but protect a sweet, innocent little girl? There can be no divine being, he concluded. Vargas was convinced of this. For no such supernatural spirit of good could let such things happen. And, if there was no God, no Heaven, or Hell, Vargas could do as his nature told him, and as those with a better understanding of the world ordered him to do. The sound of the old wire ropeway jarred Vargas from his troubled thoughts.
Among the Cable Carril’s load of tourists was a man Vargas recognized, a face he had studied; memorized, a member of the Argentine National Congress. He was an outspoken member who openly criticized the administration of President Valeria Alonso. While most other Argentinians wished to forget, this man had pushed for more information, information on those that had disappeared in the time of La Junta. The wire ropeway slowed, and the station attendant glided the gondola and its load of tourists into the station. The riders disembarked.