This is the second in a three-part series about books in my new Parallel Ops series. Next week I’ll (re)introduce you to the 4 “stars” of my novels and provide a little of their back story that you may not know, even if you’ve already read the Seeds of Civilization series that precedes “POps.”
The Scientists features Professor Jim Barnes and an entirely new supporting cast. Before hooking up with Frank Morton, Tony Nicoletti and Linda McBride, Jim was a professor of anthropology but his activities during the Seeds series have turned him into one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient civilizations. While attending a conference in Europe he learns of The Six and their sinister plan from another scientist. Jim makes a couple of strategic location moves during the course of the story, but The Scientists has my usual secondary plot and other characters will take you to Europe, Washington D.C. and more interesting places.
Although he’s never been the adventurous type, Jim picked up some of Tony’s bravado during their travels together in Seeds and he steps forward to lead a select group of international scientists against The Six by combining their resources – and the secrets of mysterious ancient artifacts they have all come to possess.
And here’s a little secret you’ll only hear on this blog: The Six also show up in Book 2, The Informants, when Linda and friends intercept a string of coded messages and they appear again in Book 3, The Guardians, where Tony Nicoletti is trying to distract them away from a site he’s sure they want to find.
Today is the first day of the traditional two-week vacation season here in Mexico. Technically, Holy Week begins tomorrow, on Palm Sunday (Passion Sunday) and is followed by Easter Week, which begins on Easter Sunday. These two weeks have great significance in Christian religions and are called Semana Santa and Semana de Pascua, respectively, here in Mexico. In fact, the predominantly Catholic society here doesn’t recognize the “Easter Bunny” or colored eggs as traditional symbols of the holiday. Schools are closed for both weeks and many Mexicans plan their family vacations during this period, while temperatures at the beaches and resorts are still relatively mild.
Tourism is a big part of the economy in Baja California Sur and there is both a federal and a state tourism office here in La Paz. However, the Municipality of La Paz (similar to a county in the U.S.) has put together an active, seemingly well-funded agency to promote La Paz and its unique tourist attractions. The La Paz municipality is the 4th largest in Mexico, covering more than 7,800 square miles, so there’s a lot to do (and talk about) here.
Today I’m going to take on the U.S. Census Bureau and the census process in general. I’m doing this because I just discovered that I won’t be counted in 2010 – in fact it’s against the law for me to be counted and I’m mad about it!
Maybe expats aren’t counted because there aren’t that many of us and so who cares. Well, one estimate I read states that in 2009 there were between 8 and 9 million Americans living abroad and the escalating exodus due to rising health care costs could push that number to 10 million by the end of 2010. That’s like forgetting to count Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia!
All this plot coordination requires some pretty careful planning, especially if I want to advance one of the stories quickly through time. To keep everything on track, I’m using a large chart and a consolidated Table of Contents spreadsheet where I track the dates and summary of events for each chapter in separate columns for each book. As I scan across a row I can see where each chapter is, book by book and I just have to make sure things are in sync when I insert an intersect. So far most of my intersects have involved only two books at a time but in Chapter 7 there’s a situation where the storyline in The Scientists, two separate storylines in The Informants and the storyline in The Guardians all have to be lined up within minutes of each other!
That being said, the recent incident in Ciudad Juarez in which a U.S. Consulate employee and her husband were shot to death after leaving a children’s birthday party reminds us all that the drug violence touches everybody. When the infamous drug lord “El Teo” was captured on January 12 of this year, I watched the military helicopters circle overhead from my deck, just a few blocks from the house where the man charged with more than 300 brutal murders was spending his holiday vacation!
What the sensationalized U.S. media stories fail to stress is that the vast majority of the narco-related violence in Mexico occurs in very specific areas and that most of the victims are members of the Mexican drug cartels. What’s going on down here isn’t that far removed from what went on in Chicago in 1929 when Al Capone’s men killed seven members of the Moran gang in what has become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. During the prohibition area, the U.S. was plagued with gang-on-gang violence and many innocent “civilians” were caught in the cross-fire and died. I’m not suggesting that makes it any better – or any easier for the families of those killed – but it does put things in perspective. Chicago survived and so, too, will Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and Mexico’s other border cities. It will be a long, painful battle, but justice will prevail and Mexico will be a better country for having survived the siege. And if we could just get the American and Canadian public to stop buying billions of dollars worth of illegal drugs each year, this entire problem would go away in a heartbeat!
