CONSUELO JONES: PART FOUR
A Spy Noir by Kenneth Howard Smith
(Set against the shadow games of the 1980s — a time when peace wore a smile and carried a gun.)
PROLOGUE
The World Changes Its Uniform
By 1981, the flags had changed but the lies hadn’t. The Cold War had become a television show—heroes and villains framed in prime-time, every covert operation dressed as patriotism. Presidents spoke of freedom while men in unmarked helicopters wrote their own constitutions.
And somewhere in the cracks, Consuelo Jones—believed dead, filed away, forgotten—was very much alive.
In a world now run by deals made in hotel lobbies and whispered over expensive Scotch, she had found anonymity in the one place still untouched by ambition: a fishing village south of Ensenada. She fixed radios, mended nets, and sometimes stared too long at the sea. The locals called her La Americana Silenciosa—the silent American.
CHAPTER ONE
The Stranger with a Photograph
It was a Tuesday. Always is, when fate knocks.
A man with government shoes stepped into her shop—creased khakis, mirrored glasses, the kind of haircut that doesn’t change with politics. He didn’t order anything, just placed an envelope on the counter. Inside: a single photograph of a young pilot—blonde, familiar—and a note that said, He’s alive.
The pilot was John. The man she had buried under stones in the jungle six years earlier.
She looked up at the stranger. “You’re late,” she said quietly.
He smiled like someone used to betrayal. “You’re needed again, Colonel Jones. The Company has ghosts that only you can talk to.”
CHAPTER TWO
Langley’s Mirage
Back in Washington, the CIA looked different but smelled the same—fresh paint on old secrets. The brass called it Operation Sandglass, a quiet, deniable program threading through Latin America’s new dictatorships. Officially, it didn’t exist. Unofficially, it financed rebellions, toppled governments, and fed both sides of every border war.
Connie’s handler was a young intelligence officer named Philip “Phil” Cates—too smooth, too polite, the kind of man who could ruin you with a handshake. He briefed her in a smoke-filled room beneath the Pentagon.
“Your pilot, Captain Reynolds—John—was extracted from the jungle. Never reported in. Now he’s flying cargo for a company that doesn’t exist. South Florida, Nicaragua, Honduras… You know the pattern.”
“I know the smell,” she said. “Cocaine and cash.”
He didn’t argue. “You’ll find him. Bring him home—or bury him properly this time.”
CHAPTER THREE
Miami Vice
Miami was a fever dream of pastel suits, Cuban coffee, and easy money. The city pulsed with cocaine dollars, and everyone with a boat and no conscience was suddenly a patriot. Connie blended in under a new alias—Constance Hale, import/export consultant.
She traced John through bars that never closed and warehouses that smelled like gasoline and danger. His face appeared in whispers: a pilot who flew anything, anywhere, no questions asked. Some said he worked for the Contras; others, for himself.
At a dockside bar in Little Havana, a drunk whispered something that froze her drink midair:
“He flies for Orion. If you see the owl, you’re already dead.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Owl and the Cross
Orion Corporation—a front company run through Swiss banks and Florida real estate. Their jets moved “agricultural aid” south and “private donations” north. The aid was ammunition; the donations were cocaine.
Connie watched the paper trail bend like a snake: CIA contracts routed through shell firms, politicians smiling on TV while the same money burned villages. The mission wasn’t to save John anymore. It was to find out who had built this machine—and how deep the rot went.
She remembered her old War College paper, Project Santa Ana Hidalgo. The same logic. Different enemy. Only this time, the villain wore her country’s flag.
CHAPTER FIVE
Old Friends, New Wars
Manuela Ortega reappeared like smoke—older now, sharper, working inside the State Department’s “Latin Desk.” Over whiskey and silence, she told the truth:
“The White House wants deniability. They’re arming the Contras through third parties. If it leaks, they’ll bury everyone who touched it.”
Connie laughed, low and bitter. “So the same government that trained me to stop corruption now sells it wholesale?”
Manuela looked tired. “We stopped fighting wars abroad. So we started fighting them quietly, here.”
CHAPTER SIX
The Reunion
She found John in a hangar outside Managua. Same smile, same swagger, but something hollow behind his eyes. He hugged her like a man who’d forgotten how.
“They told me you were dead,” he said.
“I was,” she replied. “Just didn’t stay that way.”
They talked long into the humid night—about survival, about betrayal, about the feeling of watching ideals rot from the inside. John wasn’t a villain. He was what war does to a man who believes too long and sleeps too little.
When dawn came, he made a confession that turned her blood cold.
“Connie… these shipments? They’re not just guns. They’re people.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Fall of Orion
The next week was smoke and chaos. A Contra convoy ambushed, a radio transmission intercepted, and the CIA’s own pilots suddenly listed as casualties. Connie leaked documents through an old journalist contact in Panama—one story that would later echo as the Iran-Contra Affair.
Before the Agency could silence her, she vanished again—like she had in the jungle. John’s plane exploded over the Gulf of Fonseca. Official reports said “engine failure.” She knew better.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Woman Who Knew Too Much
By ’89, the Berlin Wall was falling, and everyone pretended history was ending. But in the quiet corners of Langley, they still whispered her name like a ghost story.
A Senate committee reviewed boxes of redacted files, and a single phrase kept recurring in the margins:
Consultant: C. L. Jones. Status—Unverified.
EPILOGUE
The Desert Never Forgets
Back in Rosamond, California, a woman with a limp and a wide-brim hat walked the desert trails at sunset. She carried no weapon, no identification, just a radio that caught strange frequencies—numbers, voices, fragments of a world still burning quietly.
She lived near the old Edwards flight path. Some nights she’d look up and see test planes slicing the dark, the way secrets cut through history.
Once, a child asked her what she used to do.
“I kept bad men honest,” she said.
The child frowned. “Did it work?”
She smiled. “For a while.”
The wind moved through the creosote bushes, carrying the scent of dust and jet fuel. Somewhere far off, a distant hum—an aircraft nobody admitted existed.
Consuelo Jones closed her eyes, the desert warm around her, and listened.
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