I was hoping for a patrol car or a CHP motorcycle in the rearview mirror, when Valentín Vega’s hand appeared in my peripheral vision. A Glock 26 dropped onto the leather seat beside me. I heard heated whispering in back. After a couple of seconds, another pistol joined the Glock, also a 26, the smaller size, convenient for concealed carry.

I removed my foot from the accelerator and touched the window button.

As the glass began to rise between us, Vega said, “Please leave it down. We did as you suggested.”

“Your friend Señor Castro might have a knife.”

“He does not.”

“In that case, he might try to stare me to death.”

“But we must talk.”

“Do not worry. I will leave it open just a little.”

When the gap at the top of the glass was too small for them to reach me, I touched the button again to stop the window. “All right,” I said. “Please explain why Señor Castro felt he had to draw his weapon.”

The one with the yellow eyes spat out a few Spanish curses and suggested that I was a homosexual. He didn’t use the polite word for it in Spanish.

I spoke to Vega in English. “Does he understand me now?”

“No. Fidel speaks very little of your language.”

“Your friend doesn’t like me very much. Why is that?”

“It is not only you, Mr. Cutter. I am afraid Fidel hates Americans. He is a little bit… what is your expression? Obstructive-compulsive?”

“Obsessive.”

“Ah yes. He is obsessive-compulsive about this hatred.”

“Are you trying to say he’s crazy?”

“I think he is a little bit. Yes.”

“Your travels might be easier if you left him at home.”

“That is true, but what can I do? Fidel is my wife’s brother, and he saved my life many times during the war.”

I drove on, thinking about insanity, about men—friends—driven to embrace brutality by the unrelenting fear and grief of war. I thought about loss and guilt, and the psychedelic impulse to flee into midair. I thought about where I had spent the past seven months, about straitjackets and psychotropic drugs and solid steel doors and tempered windows reinforced with wire. If it were true that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, it was doubly true for padded cells. I decided not to judge Señor Castro too harshly.

I said, “Maybe you should tell me what you want.”

2

“You were in the first force recon company,” said Comandante Valentín Vega.

I changed lanes, preparing to take the next exit off the freeway. “That’s right.”

“You visited my country another time, more recently. You commanded Colonel Kyle Russell’s personal security detail.”

He shouldn’t have known that, and I couldn’t confirm it, so I said nothing.

“When the tyrant Ríos Montt was nominated as the Guatemalan Republican Front candidate in my country’s 2003 presidential election, Colonel Russell visited us to collect information for a report that your Pentagon delivered to your government’s committee on Latin America affairs. Because of your influence, Colonel Russell suggested an assassination, arranged to look like an accident. Unfortunately, that did not occur. It was an excellent idea.”

Vega had it only partly right. Efraín Ríos Montt was a Guatemalan politician, a former general and a dictator and cofounder of the military junta in the early eighties. During his brief dictatorship, thousands of Guatemalans had been “disappeared,” which was what Guatemalans called it when their government murdered them and buried them in unmarked graves. Ríos Montt, a self-professed Pentecostal preacher who had never been convicted of the genocidal crimes committed while he controlled the country, had resurfaced to run for Guatemalan President in 2003. Probably because of my experience in Guatemala a decade before, I had been assigned to Colonel Russell’s security detail when the Pentagon ordered him to assess the impact of a potential Ríos Montt victory on the military situation in Central America. A contingent of Drug Enforcement Administration guys had also tagged along to look into the narcotics trafficking situation.

Russell and I had served together at Camp Rhino during the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, and we had a certain level of mutual respect.

During my second deployment in Guatemala, Russell had often asked for my operational opinions. We spent six weeks traveling the mountains and coastal lowlands of Guatemala with the Marine detail and our the DEA agents, hearing horror stories and seeing mass grave sites and the physical scars of torture on survivors of the junta’s interrogations. I came to believe that a Ríos Montt political comeback could destroy the fragile stability of the region. If I had been a Guatemalan, and he had been elected, I would most certainly have come down from the mountains in a killing frame of mind. To avoid a return of the bloody Guatemalan civil war, it had seemed to me that Ríos Montt’s candidacy for presidential office should be stopped by whatever means necessary.

I said as much to Colonel Russell when he’d asked, and it was possible my comments had some slight influence on his report to the Pentagon. But I had no idea how the man in the backseat of my limo knew any of this. And if Russell had actually suggested a black operation against Ríos Montt to his superiors, I didn’t know a thing about that either, except that it wasn’t based on my suggestion. The United States of America doesn’t base its foreign policy decisions on the opinions of gunnery sergeants.

As these memories arose in my mind, I also considered the fact that I was thinking lucid thoughts. At least it did seem as if I was thinking pretty clearly. Assuming that was true, assuming I was remembering things the way they had really happened, it was a relief to know my damaged brain could still collect facts from that far in the past and line them up in order. But regardless of whether I remembered those weeks in the Central America mountains correctly, or whether past and present still swirled unconnected back and forth between my synapses, I couldn’t talk about it with civilians, and certainly not with a pair of Guatemalan ex-revolutionaries.

Valentín Vega’s voice came over the glass behind me. “You have nothing to say?”

“I do not.”

“Are you not curious about why I arranged this meeting?”

“I’m not paid to be curious.”

I had already taken the Cahuenga Boulevard exit. We were creeping along behind a guy on a bicycle who wouldn’t get out of the center of the lane. He wore nothing but flip-flops and a Speedo. Welcome to Hollywood.

There was a taxi in front of the restaurant. I circled the block, steering with one hand while I checked the two Glocks for chambered rounds with the other hand. When we approached the restaurant again, the curb in front was open. I paralleled into the spot, always an interesting process in a stretch. I emptied both of the weapons’ magazines. I lowered the glass between the front and back seats an few inches. Then, one at a time, I passed the pistols back through the narrow space above the glass partition behind me. I got out, walked around the car, and opened the rear door on the sidewalk side.

“Gentlemen,” I said.

Both of the men emerged, adjusting their shirttails over their empty weapons. They stood blinking in the sunshine, looking around at Hollywood Boulevard. Both of them were nearly a foot shorter than me, but Castro was nearly as wide in the shoulders.