Brian Stephens, an American graduate student working in Guatemala, eventually becomes a contractor to the U.S. Government and later to the Guatemalan government. He sees, on a field trip into the countrythe pot grown there being loaded into Army helicopters and learns it is to finance the war against Communists at a time when President Carter has cut off funds because of human rights violations. Trying to tell about what he saw, he ends up in jail from which he eventually escapes, then goes home to his family in States. But he is followed, and to protect his family he leaves again and takes a job in Peru, where he survives as a money launderer working, he thinks, for the U.S. Government. He later finds that the money he is taking north to the Caribbean is money for the Contra War. That is the subject of Book I of the Circus series, Sideshow. Book II, Center Ring, finds him in El Salvador, where he is forced to move a massive amount of drug money stolen from the Contra cause by one of its creators. This is a work of fiction within a true situation, written by someone who was there.