Checkpoint…
The line to pass through customs at Houston International Airport came to a halt at 1:45 p.m. on December 29, 2015. Hundreds of U.S. citizens returning from trips abroad stood in line, holding trinkets and mementos of their holiday in South America and wondered why forward movement had stopped.
The Rodriguez family was returning from visiting Grandmother Rodriguez in Colombia. Baby Ignacio cried loudly as he needed changing. Unfortunately for his parents, Marta and Angel, stepping out of line was not an option. So they stood there, confused and afraid that they would miss their connecting flight to Chicago. The smell of the baby’s diaper slowly became the most dominant feature of the airport to them.
Burt Johnson was a few people in line ahead of the Rodriguez family. He awkwardly held a guitar he’d purchased from a Mexican bazaar. The guitar was light but the task of balancing all of his other luggage made the job of holding the instrument harder than it should have been. He found some solace in the memory of pouring his wife’s ashes into the ocean in Puerto Vallarta on Christmas morning, but he had to catch his flight to St. Louis and couldn’t afford to be stuck in Houston tonight.
On up the line, passenger after passenger was returning from some emotionally significant trip and was having the memory of that trip tainted with this one bad experience. None knew what was going on. The ones in front could see Nate Daniels answering question after question from the TSA agents around him, but they couldn’t understand why any of those questions were causing such a back up.
They didn’t know that the TSA agents were simply stalling Mr. Daniels until agents from the Department of Homeland Security could come and take him to an interogation room. They’d seen something odd when Nate walked through the BFX-9000 non-invasive passenger scanning device. In accordance with procedure, they tripped the silent alarm, uploaded the scan to Homeland Security, and began asking Daniels questions from the approved list of stalling measures. Finally, the agents arrived, asked Mr. Daniels to go with them, and the rest of the international passengers were processed without further incident. Nate was led to a small room below the terminal and handcuffed to a large metal table.
“Mr. Daniels?” asked Agent Jones. “Why do our security scans show an unusually large number of foreign objects in your digestive tract?”
“Excuse me?” responded Nate.
“To put it bluntly sir,” said Agent Washington, “your scan is consistent with that of someone with a belly full of drug laden condoms.”
Washington and Jones stared at Nate, waiting for his response. The two female agents knew that this interview was heading into the toilet.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Nate. “I don’t have any condoms filled with drugs in me.”
‘“Well then Mr. Daniels,” said Jones. “We’ll just wait for this shit to work itself out.”
The two agents sweated Nate for a couple of hours until the pressure in his bowels built up so much that he had to release it. After begging the agents to be allowed into the toilet, Nate was disgusted when pushing the handle resulted in no accompanying flush.
“Gross,” said Nate when he looked into the toilet bowl. There, in the dry bowl, lay about thirty condoms that had been ejected from his body. Before he could do anything to the condoms, Jones and Washington kicked in the door of his stall and pulled him out of it. The stood looking at the pile of fecal coated condoms as if they held the secret to the grail.
“Your turn,” said Jones.
“Fuck,” exclaimed Washington.
Washington put on a pair of latex gloves and reached into the pile. She grabbed one of the tightly bundled condoms and set it on a specimen tray. She took her Leatherman multi-tool out of her pocket and sliced open the condom. She was taken aback when the condom tore open to reveal chocolate cake instead of cocaine.
“What the…” Washington began as Jones pushed Daniels against the bathroom wall. She picked up another condom and sliced it open. Again, instead of cocaine, the condom was full of cake. She stood up and got in Nate’s face as Jones held him by the throat.
“How many condoms, asshole.” she asked him.
Nate was shaken up by now and willing to be cooperative. “About 50.”
“And all of them are cake?” she asked.
“Yes m’am,” Nate replied.
Washington took out a pair of cuffs and began applying them to her prisoner.
“Why do you have a colon full of cake filled condoms Mr. Daniels?” she asked.
“Because I wasn’t sure if I could bring it into the country,” he answered flippantly. “It’s really good cake.”
They went around and around like this for an hour. Finally, Jones and Washington had to let Nate go, since he technically hadn’t broken any laws.
“Mr. Daniels,” said Washington, “we’ll be watching what you do in this airport for now on.”
“Thank you agent,” said Daniels as he left the airport interrogation room. His cellphone soon vibrated as he receive a text message from Pablo.
“Made it through,” read the message. “Once they had you, no one looked twice at me.”
Nate smiled. The two suitcases of coke that they’d successfully smuggled into the country while he was being interrogated made up for the scrutiny his bowel movement had endured.
He walked out of the airport whistling, and wanting pie for lunch…not cake.
