Costa Rica serves as more than a backdrop in the novel: it is a discreet meeting place where documentary evidence connects the Barrera organization to Colombian cocaine, and part of the southern approach to Nicaragua in the covert conflict over the Contras. Through these two uses, the country links criminal logistics with the larger political struggle that unsettles Art Keller.

Setting and Strategic Geography

Costa Rica is presented as lying south of Nicaragua within a regional landscape shaped by U.S. efforts to contain Communist influence. John Hobbs describes the Nicaraguan frontier as a strategic threshold, with the Contras surrounding Nicaragua from Honduras to the north and Costa Rica to the south. His argument makes geography an instrument of security rhetoric: he casts Nicaragua not as an isolated island, but as a foothold on the Central American isthmus, close to the Panama Canal and to countries already troubled by insurgencies.

Hobbs extends that warning northward toward Mexico, imagining that a Communist victory there could expose a vast border and place Soviet weapons within reach of major U.S. cities. The novel does not establish Costa Rica as a battlefield in this discussion; rather, it places the country within the map Hobbs uses to justify intervention. His alarm also exposes the reasoning by which political choices become presented as necessities, even when the proposed allies include forces implicated in drug trafficking and violence against civilians.

The Quepos Meeting

Costa Rica becomes an operationally significant location when Chris Conti proposes that he and Art Keller meet halfway, in Quepos. The choice is discreet: Conti does not want Tim Taylor or anyone else to know that he is meeting Keller. They sit in a palm-frond cabana by the beach, where Conti lays deposit slips across a rough table. The slips correspond to cashier-check receipts from a Bank of America branch in San Diego, seized in an earlier raid.

Together, the records provide documentary evidence linking the Barrera organization to Colombian cocaine. Conti says the deposits came from small-town banks in the Medellín area. The importance of the encounter lies in the paper trail: rather than relying only on suspicion or a single witness, Keller receives records that connect money moving through local banks to receipts already in U.S. investigators’ hands. Quepos thus becomes a quiet meeting point where evidence from different places is assembled into a broader account of trafficking.

Costa Rica and the Covert War

The meeting also intensifies Keller’s concern about the overlap between the drug trade and anti-Communist operations. The novel places the Contra campaign within a regional network extending across Nicaragua’s borders, while the Boland Amendment bars military aid to the Contras. Against that political backdrop, SETCO and the movement of aircraft and cargo raise questions about how covert activity can continue when official channels are restricted.

Hobbs frames Nicaragua as an existential danger and argues that the Contras are preferable to the prospect of U.S. troops fighting in the region. Keller’s response challenges the moral terms of that choice, pointing to the violence committed by the forces Hobbs would support. Costa Rica’s position on Nicaragua’s southern side gives this debate a concrete geography, while the Quepos meeting supplies a separate but intersecting trail of financial evidence. After his encounter with Conti, Keller leaves Costa Rica more alarmed than when he arrived: the country has brought him closer to proof of a drug connection and deeper into a covert political world where the stated war against Communism and the movement of cocaine cannot be cleanly separated.