Cocaine

by Jack Hillgate

  There were two tunnels set at ninety degrees to each other. The muffled sound of heavy industrial processes filtered through to the junction in which he now stood, the sound of the printing of crystalline money, an international currency that required no sovereign’s head or promise to pay the bearer. He crouched in an alcove, which almost made him invisible, and he heard boots pounding the beaten earth and heading in his direction. He had an Uzi, a couple of grenades and a Russian pistol, an old Makarov PM. The Uzi would be very noisy and the only people he had killed in his life had been too distant for him to see their faces. This would not be like before.

  They were twenty yards away, maybe less. When they stopped, he heard the click of a cigarette lighter. He held the Makarov in one hand and the Uzi in the other. The boots started again and now the voices were distinct, not just one amorphous blur of sound. But it was more than that. The voices were familiar, especially the one doing most of the talking.

  By the time Suares had reached the junction, the Makarov was back in Juan Andres’s holster, the Uzi was slung nonchalantly over his back and he was casually smoking a cigarette, a cheap Honduran import which consisted mainly of wood-shavings.

  ‘I came to warn you’, said Juan Andres. ‘Americanos.’

  Suares frowned.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Si, jefe, a group, in a black helicopter.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be here, Juan Andres.’

  ‘I know, sir.’

  ‘If you are lying to me I will have to take appropriate action.’

  ‘I will go first if you like.’

  ‘Yes’, drawled Suares, ‘perhaps that would be best.’

  Juan Andres Montero Garcia climbed the ladder towards the hatch with three Kalashnikovs pointing up at his coccyx.

  ‘Go on,’ urged Suares to his prize pupil.

  Juan Andres opened the hatch, climbed outside, shut the hatch and started running.

  ***

  We sat together, dozing on the rear bench of the bus, clattering over the potholes and taking all five seats. I could hear the faint tinny sound of Kieran’s Walkman, which in my dreamy state led me to imagine we were a rock band on tour, sitting in the back of our tour-bus, recovering after a heavy night pumping a cocktail of tequila and groupies. He was asleep. The bench was only held in place by our bodyweight and none of us had trusted our bags to the overhead or over-wheel storage facility. I had a black leather bag which I’d purchased in Cotacachi, Ecuador’s answer to World of Leather. Kieran had a grimy black sports bag with grey straps and Juan Andres had a battered brown leather satchel which gave new meaning to the concept of traveling light.

  Everyone else on the bus was an Indio, and I heard Quechua rather than Spanish, a comforting, incomprehensible and soporific mix of low level white noise.

  ‘What about a passport?’ I asked Juan Andres. ‘If they think you’re dead.’

  ‘No es problema. They more interested in peoples coming the other way.’

  ‘Into Ecuador?’

  ‘Si. Colombia, she need all the turistas she can get.’

  We exchanged a smile. He seemed relaxed so I forgot about being tense. I wanted to ask him about compound break-downs, solubility and texture, but I wasn’t sure if this was the right time to reveal to him that I’d read natural sciences at Cambridge, with a particular emphasis on the molecular structure of crystalline substances, and that my interest in South America was more than purely academic.

  That could wait until we got to know each other a little better.

  5

  March 2007 – Cannes, South of France

  The next time I walked down the Croissette I thought someone was following me. I waited a minute until I could feel them nearly on top of me and stopped, turned round abruptly and walked off in the opposite direction. I peered out of the side of my Persol sunglasses, looking for evidence of anyone changing direction with me, but all I saw was a ridiculous old woman dressed like a prostitute, in fishnets, a short black leather skirt, garish red lipstick and wearing an orange wig. ‘What a disguise’, I thought. I doubted if her own children would recognize her, not that they would want to. But she was following me.

  ‘Excusez-moi, monsieur’, she began, in a quivering voice, ‘vous avez de la monnaie?’

  ‘If you have the time.’

  ‘Quoi?’

  She didn’t speak English. I gave her a euro. She looked disgustedly at it.

  The place I was looking for was in an arcade called Gray D’Albion, set on Rue D’Antibes, the main shopping street behind La Croissette. I found the shop just inside the main entrance. I stood on the red carpet and looked in at all the toys in the windows. It would be impossible to find a shop like this in a provincial town in England. Not one that sold Tasers, miniature cameras, air-guns, bugging equipment and crossbows, as well as all the other really good stuff that they didn’t put on display.

  The bullet-proof vests looked quite chic, but then the French had a much better sense of style than the British, even when it came to body-armour. I dawdled by the window for a few more seconds, checking to see if I was being watched. A few feet away a woman and three small boys were gawping at the miniature cameras with Leica lenses. There was no one else even remotely interested in me or the shop, so I walked inside and made for the brightly-coloured Mace stand.

  ‘Bonjour monsieur’, said a voice behind me. ‘Can I ‘elp you?’

  My heart sank, because this meant that I looked British or American or German, but definitely not French. This was not fatal, because Cannes was full of people who were also not French, but it did mean that he would probably assume that I was rich.

  ‘Aah need security’, I said, adopting a broadly Texan American accent. ‘Back home we got guns ‘n all, and I don’t have a permit here, see, so I need to buy me some alternative means of protecting myself.’

  ‘Boorglars?’ he asked in a thick French accent.

  ‘Yeah, I wanna give anyone who comes in unannounced a surprise. Can you help me, son? I’m goin’ back to the States and it’s a gift for my wife. Fer when I go away on business.’

  The man smoothed down his slicked back hair and nodded, holding his chin on his palm. I could see him carefully looking at my shoes and my watch.

  ‘You said you az hand-gun experience, sir?’

  ‘Yup. And so does my wife.’

  He walked over to the Taser section.

  ‘Zees come in variety models, ze price range from four-hundred euros to one thousand five ‘undred.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Well. You ‘ave more shots, is lighter, smaller and az more features.’

  ‘How big is the box?’

  ‘Excusez moi?’

  ‘I need it to fit into this bag, see.’

  I unraveled my large green logo-less supermarket bag. My French guide raised an eyebrow in a way only the French can.

  ‘I think you take the smallest one’, he said. ‘You ‘ave many free cartridges, and the instructions, zey come in English.’

  ‘Fifteen hundred euros?’

  ‘One thousand, five ‘undred. Made in America.’

  I opened my wallet, handed him three five-hundred euro bills, slipped the box in my bag and walked out of the store before he had a chance to ring it through on his till or to ask me if I wanted to go on his mailing list.

  I turned onto Rue d’Antibes and lingered for a second to light a cigarette, a Gauloise Blanc, with the blue and white packets. They fitted the colour-scheme of my apartment with their brilliant white filters and black tobacco. Opposite me there was a branch of Sephora, a cosmetics store for men and women. Outside, leaning against a black plastic hoarding, a woman in her twenties was also lighting a cigarette and it was also a Gauloise Blanc. I had my sunglasses on – as always – and I stood pretending I was waiting for someone whilst I was watching her.

  She wore a black and grey uniform with a white name-badge, and the skirt brushed the top of her knees. She was t
all and she wore highly-polished flat shoes, diamond earrings and a pendant around her neck with a stone that looked green through my blue-tinted lenses, which probably meant it was yellow. She had long dark hair, wide-set brown eyes, and a deep sun-tan. She was very slim and I could see the bulge in the muscle of her calf. She probably cycled and swam, or did step-aerobics or spinning or some other activity that kept her toned. I had an overwhelming desire to go over and speak to her, but I was also aware that I was standing on a busy shopping street holding a weapon that was illegal in most countries.

  I crossed the street, still holding my cigarette, and stopped outside her place of work with my back to her. I pulled out my mobile telephone and pretended to take a call.

  ‘Oui, oui’, I said to my non-existent caller. ‘Je cherche le CD. Charlotte Gainsbourg. Cinq-cents-cinquante-cinq. Oui, c’est ca. FNAC? Ou est FNAC? ‘Allo? ‘Allo?’ I shut the phone with a quiet ‘merde’, but just loud enough for her to hear. I smelt her perfume now, coming towards me.

  ‘Excusez moi, monsieur? Vous cherchez FNAC?’

  ‘Oui mademoiselle’ – I looked at her badge – ‘Stephanie.’

  ‘C’est juste par la.’

  She pointed to the large FNAC sign a hundred yards up the road on the left. I smiled and nodded. It was enough. A first contact. She didn’t have a wedding ring and I was a good fifteen years older than her, but that made the whole thing far more exciting. I hadn’t spoken to a pretty woman for a few weeks apart from a prostitute on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, and then it was solely to enquire of the price of a blow-job. For research purposes only, I added wickedly; a comparative study of twelve European cities. ‘Oh’, she replied, telling me thirty euros and sounding rather proud when I told her that that was much more expensive than Prague.

  Waiting for Carlos had made my brain go soft. I needed to sharpen it again. I hadn’t actually slept with a woman for two years but as I walked up Rue d’Antibes I stopped at FNAC and turned to see if Stephanie was still there, to see whether she would be watching me, to ensure I didn’t miss the unmissable, enormous entrance right in front of me, but she was gone.

  *********

  Juan Andres Montero Garcia stopped running when he saw the hut. Rickety and windowless, it didn’t belong in the jungle, but someone must have put it there for some reason. He took the Makarov out of its holster and crept slowly towards it. He had lost Suares and his men a good ten minutes ago, but he had kept going just in case. He knew they would not be able to out-run him, but if he didn’t change direction then they would simply radio ahead and have another team pick him up. So he turned right and ran ten minutes eastwards. The hut was locked with a single brass padlock, which he opened within seconds. Flat on his stomach, the rough grass prickling him through his uniform, he swung the door open, pistol raised. Nobody. The hut was eight foot by six and he noticed that there was a window masked by a makeshift shutter. He walked in and opened it to let in a little more light.

  He saw what at first sight looked like medical supplies, covered by a plastic sheet and cocooned in polystyrene. Tropinone? He remembered a lecture given in Bogota in the second year of his chemistry degree by a jolly man with a clean-shaven face who mopped his brow constantly. Here in the hut there were several heavily-insulated packets of the stuff. He stared at them, trying to recall the exact words the clean-shaven professor had used. He remembered he had been making some point about the synthesisation of alkaloids and then he had made a joke about everyone becoming rich. It was coming back to him.

  Tropinone was an alkaloid, synthesised during the First World War by an Englishman as a synthetic precursor to atropine. If one converted the tropinone into 2-carbomethoxytropinone and reduced this to ecgonine, one could, with difficulty and under microbe-free laboratory conditions, proceed to convert the ecgonine into pure, synthetic cocaine. No need for coca leaves, no need to be in the Colombian jungle, no need to be in South America. No need to run the risk of transporting an illegal substance across thousands of miles, no need to cross borders, no need to centralize.

  He remembered something about the expense of the synthesis being a barrier to entry, but laboratory techniques were improving all the time, and the clean-shaven man had said that he would give an Alpha to whomsoever could manufacture a gram of synthetic cocaine for less than the cost of buying it in the street a few hundred yards from the university in Bogota. Everyone, including Juan Andres Montero Garcia, had thought he had been joking.

  He couldn’t risk lighting a fire, so when night fell he ate the snake raw. It rained heavily, which meant he had enough to drink, and the hut provided good shelter. It would only be for one night because he knew he could not stay there any longer. Someone would visit the hut at some point, although why anyone would keep tropinone in conditions as filthy as this was a mystery, unless, of course, the people keeping it had no idea what it actually was. The sterile packets had been made up by someone in a laboratory, and Juan Andres was careful not to leave any prints on the packet he inspected. He could see the remains of a quality-control stamp, and although he could not read every letter of it clearly, he was sure that the packet did not originate in Colombia and was probably produced, packaged and sealed in the United States of America.

  The road was getting worse, which slowed our progress considerably, but it meant I had time to ask Juan Andres about his time at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. He was impressed, or at least he seemed to be, that I had studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge. We compared syllabuses as best we could and I told him that if I hadn’t got a third I might have wanted to take my studies further. In comparison, Juan Andres came fourth in a class of three hundred. He was far more gifted than I, but once he had finished his course he had needed to work. He didn’t have the luxuries afforded to English students in the 1980s: the student grants, the absence of tuition fees, the swelling pots of research funds and the birth of Silicon Fen.

  Kieran had been asleep for more than two hours, his headphones firmly clamped to his ears to block out the noise of the bus and the content of our conversation. If he had listened he would have heard about the constituent parts of the Tripos examinations that I had had to endure at Cambridge: Chemistry, Evolution and Behaviour, Geology and Materials and Mineral Sciences. Juan Andres told me about the thesis he wrote in his second year, something to do with peptides, and then, before I could ask him about my idea, our bus pulled into the last town in Ecuador, Tulcan, close to the border with Colombia, and we all had to get out and walk.

  6

  Colombia’s location and racial profile were part of the clue as to why it owned the ‘cocaine’ brand. The countries to the south and south west, Ecuador and Peru, were Indian countries, similar to Guatemala. Their people were generally honest, hardworking and were descended from stock that pre-dated Christopher Columbus, hence the strange ancient dialects, larger hearts as a result of the altitude and shorter, squatter bodies as a result of the meager diet. These were not as sophisticated a people as the Spanish, nor as ruthless. The Kings and Queens of Spain sliced their way across the Continent, introducing the notion of currency rather than barter, and international trade.

  The coca leaf grew in abundance in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, but it was only Colombia of these four that embraced European culture and values. Venezuela had oil, Brazil had samba. They didn’t need cocaine, and the Spanish-descended inhabitants of both countries, often a mixture of Spanish, negro and Indio, called triguenos, could pass for the same people you would see on the streets of Seville or Madrid. They could pass relatively anonymously into those parts of the United States that sold frijoles instead of fries.

  A perseverance with international trade is what maintained the Cartels in the late twentieth century. The creation of wealth from the export to rich countries of a commodity readily available in poorer ones. The wide northern Caribbean coast, principally the stretch from Cartagena to Santa Marta and Barranquilla, the proximity to the Panama Canal and the myriad of isl
and tax havens only a short boat-trip away were the Cartels’ natural allies. From these islands, a twenty-five metre motor-yacht under a Cayman Islands flag could venture relatively easily into port in Miami under the guise of a holiday charter and deliver its cargo. It was so simple, so obvious, that it was surprising that anyone with a bit of working capital wasn’t making an investment into this particular strand of the export market.

  As we walked towards the guards at the border checkpoint I deliberately lagged behind Juan Andres and Kieran, just in case they were stopped. I watched as Kieran grinned at the bored young soldier in his camouflage gear and then as Juan Andres produced an Ecuadorian passport, not a Colombian one. He didn’t smile. The guard quickly stamped their documents and waved them through and he did the same with me a few seconds later. The three of us were now in the border town of Ipiales, in south-western Colombia, only a bus-ride, albeit a very long one, from Juan Andres’s home in Villamaria.

  ‘How much you carrying?’ asked Kieran, grinning, his hand near his balls and only just out of earshot of the machine-gun toting Colombian border guards. ‘I got about a half of black.’ He tapped his crotch and winked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s in my shorts. Getting’ greasy down there.’

  Juan Andres smiled, so I smiled too. A half of black in Kieran’s shorts. I had more than two thousand dollars in mine, in hundred dollar bills. I also kept two hundred in my shoes, two hundred in my pants and one hundred in my wallet. Another two thousand was tightly rolled inside a small plastic tube that was too large to stick up my arse, so I kept it inside a dirty pair of boxers in the bottom of my bag.