The South American Incident-09

Ken and his fast friends took up a room in the hostel that night. The group, thinking Ken to be One of Them—part of their class, if not another Agency asset—paid him no mind as he made himself a party facilitator. They failed to notice that he handled their drinks, and as such failed to notice that he slipped a drug to them that would be their undoing: Scolopomine, “The Devil’s Breath”. Within a half-hour, all of them were under its sway and Ken had them trapped. Now Ken would compel the leader of this Intelligence network to come to him.

First, having seized control of his targets’ minds, he compelled them to divulge all. They took turns confessing that they were all C.I.A. agents, assigned to South America as part of an operation to seek out and identify a figure known as “The White Death” here. Unable to resist Ken’s commands, they explained that this guy had interfered with a long-running operation that the Agency uses to finance the most important—and unpolitic—operations that would not receive Congressional approval.

Second, they told Ken in detail of their own connections—familial, fraternal, social—to their superiors, and how this was a milk-run assignment meant to give them some easy field experience before being rotated into the fast track towards the top of the Agency. The men were all members of Skull & Bones, while the women were daughters of Bonesmen betrothed to junior Bonesmen, and so they felt no real danger despite being in the middle of Narco country. If anything went wrong, all that they had to do was hit a panic button and an evacuation team would be on its way from the Embassy.

Third, they went on to brag about how this would all turn out to their advantage in the end. This “White Death”, as they explained, had so cleaned out the region’s criminal syndicates that their superiors would now be able to install loyal puppets throughout the network and rebuild it into a far more profitable and effective machine that would allow American influence to remain dominant here for at least another 25 years, and probably 50 or more. Killing all of those gangsters and government officials meant that, after some short-term disruptions, instead of getting rid of now-useless locals themselves all they had to do was to groom and install new tools to keep the game going.

Ken recorded all of this, filming the entire conversation. Then he put them to sleep, and while they slept he uploaded the entire thing to YouTube, Vimeo, and other social media video sites using a series of backup accounts as well as a proxy server to mask tracking back his location before it was too late. Ken knew that the Scolopomine would induce amnesia in these poor suckers, so his identity was safe from C.I.A. identification for now. Then he sent a text message to the Colonel where to pick them up; he did.