"Who wants to put up with the bugs and the heat and the fucking humidity?"
"Obviously not you ."
"And the snakes and the spiders and the damned rain most afternoons, and trying to sleep while those jerk-offs play those stupid video games. Bang, bang, bang. My ears haven't stopped ringing since I came here."
"You knew from the get-go you were being paid to learn about guns."
"I know about guns."
"Yeah, right. I've seen the way you shoot."
"And you didn't tell me I'd have to clean the damned guns after I shot them. And you didn't tell me I'd be humping heavy packs and crawling through swamps and . . . I might as well have joined the stupid army. Everybody telling me what to do. This is worse than when I was in the joint."
"Not hardly." Carl stared at the scars on his hands.
"And where the hell are we anyhow? How close to the nearest city? I want to get back to Chicago. Hang around with the guys. Find some action. Get laid. Man, that would be different."
"Wanting sex too much is what got you in prison," Carl said. "Maybe you should stick with guns."
"Just answer the question. How close is the nearest city?" Ferguson demanded
"An hour. And it's not a city. It's a town."
" What? Why didn't we fly out of here? That's how you brought me into this mess."
"You're not worth the price of aviation fuel, buddy. You want to know a secret? You were part of a great experiment."
"Living in a swamp? Some experiment."
"About visualization."
"Whatever that means."
"First, I show you how to do something--shoot, use a knife, whatever. Then I make you close your eyes and repeatedly imagine doing what I showed you. I reinforce it by making you watch accurate movies of what I demonstrated, Hollywood stars doing things so smoothly you want to be those stars. Finally, I tell you to do what you imagined in the movie in your mind."
The truck hit a bump. Carl heard it jostle Raoul in back.
"The military discovered that, by using visualization, a four-week course could be reduced to three days," Carl said. "It's a form of self-hypnosis, reinforced by the video games."
"Yeah? Well, I've been here three weeks . How come it didn't work on me ?"
"Nobody's perfect. You want to know another secret? A long time ago, this used to be a plantation."
"What's that got to do with anything? Drive faster."
"Then the plantation went bust, and the owners tried to keep the land in the family, and finally a private foundation bought it as a nature preserve."
"Tears, man. You're boring me to--"
"Then the CIA took over the foundation and all this land."
"CIA?"
"Finally got your attention? Strictly speaking, not the CIA. It was a company that worked for a company that worked for the Company. They call it 'compartmentalizing the risk. Plausible deniability.'"
"I call it yawning, man."
"The whole point was to build a private airstrip that hardly anybody knew about. See, to fly what you'd call 'spies' into hot spots . . . in those days, Central America had a lot of those . . ."
"Yawn, man."
The truck hit another bump.
"The CIA couldn't just pop their people onto a United jet and fly them to El Salvador or Nicaragua. They'd leave what's called a 'paper trail.'"
"You know what I call it?" Ferguson made an obscene gesture.
"So this company that worked for the Company made up its own airline and flew its people out of here straight across the Gulf to where the action was."
"Gulf?"
"Of Mexico."
Ferguson looked interested. "We're near Mexico?"
"But then times changed, and the hot spots moved to other countries, and the company that worked for the Company didn't have any more use for this place. Besides, it had started to attract attention, so they sold it to some drug smugglers they'd been working with."
"Drug smugglers?" Now Ferguson was really interested.
"Sure. The spy business is based on 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours,' the same as any other business. The spies had been working with the drug smugglers, getting tactical information from them, using them for cover, giving the spies an excuse to go in and out of various countries via secret airstrips. If you're a drug smuggler, nobody questions why you're so secretive. But if people think you're a spy , you're in trouble. So when it came time to get rid of the airstrip, it made sense to sell it to the smugglers, who were already using it. But eventually, the smugglers decided to switch locations, too, and the place was rotting until we bought it."