He tightened the bullet-proof vest - the extreme light-weight model - and pulled a black cotton long-sleeved shirt over it. He slid a Makarov pistol underneath his shirt and into a special holster retro-fitted into the bullet-proof vest. He had a knife inside his right boot which sat on a spring mechanism for ease of access. Mama Garcia handed him a small bag of eighty per cent pure cocaine and he slipped it into his black jockey shorts. Smuggling everything in by boat and bringing it over to Speightstown had been achieved without fuss simply because of the presence of Mama Garcia, whom to the outside world was a caricature of a rich old lady from South America with a young male companion.
Their two bedroom villa lay between Holetown and Speightstown, less than a mile from the west coast of the island. It was semi-detached but well-screened from its neighbour. It had its own small private plunge pool. It overlooked the golf course. Juan Andres was ready to go out when the door-bell sounded. Mama Garcia frowned. They weren’t expecting anyone. She peered through the tiny hole in the door and saw, through the miniscule fish-eye lens, a man wearing a yellow polo neck and grey trousers. He didn’t look dangerous. He looked like a tourist.
‘Mierda’, she said, waving her hand at Juan Andres to put his gun away.
‘Quien es?’
‘Turista.’
‘Let’s wait. He’ll go.’
Mama Garcia walked slowly to the stairs and went up to the first floor. She went to the bedroom window and peered out. The man was looking out towards the golf course. She saw him turn and heard the door-bell again. Downstairs, Juan Andres perched on the end of the sofa that faced the door, his gun in his hand. He stood as he heard the letter-box rattle and then a business card dropped to the floor. He heard the man walk away. Upstairs, Mama Garcia saw the same thing and she made her way back downstairs.
‘What did he want?’
Juan Andres studied the card.
‘He’s looking for a golfing partner’, he replied with a smile.
24
February 1994
Martin Jeavons called me into his office and locked the door behind him.
‘I know why you need all that tropinone’, he said flatly. ‘You’re going to make cocaine with it, aren’t you?’ He held up my battered notebook, the encrypted shorthand that I’d thought only I could understand. ‘I found this in your desk.’
‘The desk was locked, Martin.’
‘I have a key. I stayed up last night decoding your scribbles, old bean. You’ve done this before, haven’t you? In South America, perhaps?’
‘Perhaps.’
I fished in my pocket for a cigarette. Smoking was strictly verboten but I needed to give myself time to think, to work out what to do with the potential Nobel prizewinner looking at me unblinkingly through his archaic spectacles.
‘Tell me what you’re thinking, Jeavons.’
‘You know what I’m thinking, sport.’
‘Do I?’
Jeavons waved my book at me.
‘Do you think Warmington is going to be pleased to discover that his new post-grad’s getting together the raw material to manufacture cocaine?’
‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’
‘But you’re going to, aren’t you?’
‘Why would I?’
‘The money.’
‘Tell me what you think about the money.’
‘Look Ryan. It seems to me that you could make close to half a tonne of the stuff from the quantities of raw product you’ve requested.’
‘Go on.’
‘I may look like a nerd to you, but I’m not a total idiot. If you could get it into the hands of the right people you might get ten million quid for it.’
‘Or more.’
‘More?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘It’s enough to go round, isn’t it, Ryan? Ten or fifteen mil?’
‘What are you saying, Martin?’
‘I’m saying I want you to sit down, make us both a nice cup of tea and tell me all about Colombia.’
He slapped my note-book down on his desk for emphasis. I went over to the kettle and filled it with water. The kettle was spotless, immaculately free from scum and I knew Jeavons had a water filter. He left nothing to chance. He could get me my raw materials. He would help me. I decided it was time to alter my status from that of sole trader to one of partnership and I told him everything.
It was getting dark and so Jeavons and I decided to go for a drink around the corner at the Spread Eagle, to celebrate.
‘I get thirty grand a year, Ryan’, he told me as we walked along Lensfield Road, passing the house I’d lived in for my third year, the red-brick Victorian semi-detached at number fifty-six. ‘And with all the free meals and accommodation I only spend ten.’
‘How much you got?’
‘How much have I got. Prison has obviously destroyed your grasp of the English language. If we’re going to do this I really must insist that you clean up your grammar.’
‘Are you going to smoke that?’ I asked, pointing to the cigarette behind his ear.
‘When the fat lady sings’, he replied.
‘Two pints of Guinness, then.’
‘Two pints it is.’
We took our drinks and found a table in the corner, letting the smoke from the gaggle of undergrads waft over us like weak chloroform. We raised our glasses in a toast and sipped for a while in silence.
‘So how much have you got, Jeavons?’
‘Forty grand in my account on Regent’s Street earning four per cent net.’
‘That’s thirty-nine more than me.’
‘Why?’
‘Working capital. We need to establish our distribution channel. We can’t just sell five grams here, two grams there, can we? It’ll take us years to liquidate our stock.’
‘We can just keep replenishing it. Less risky as well, old chap.’
‘That’s not what I’m after.’
‘Warmington has no idea, does he, that you were in jail for three years?’
‘Not a clue.’
Jeavons glugged his Guinness down and placed the empty glass triumphantly on the table.
‘Another?’
‘Another.’
We drank three more pints each and then the curry house round the corner beckoned, the one on the corner of Lensfield Road and Regent’s Street. Everyone from undergrad to postgrad to senior tutor loved the Cambridge curry phenomenon. Five pounds would buy you a three course meal and one more would ensure it was washed down with a Kingfisher lager.
‘So what’s the split?’ he asked me, his eyes glazed over not only with his thick convex lenses, but also with the lustrous sheen of a night’s drinking.
‘Good question.’
‘I thought so.’
‘I don’t have to do this here, you know, Jeavons. I can walk away. I haven’t made one gram of the stuff yet. You can’t prove anything. Even with my book.’
‘What about your criminal record?’
‘In Colombia? I can say there was lack of due process, protest my innocence. I’m not a criminal in the UK you know. Or anywhere else for that matter.’
‘They’ve got records.’
‘Fuck off, Jeavons. Are you going to start being sensible or do I have to kill you?’ I watched his eyes widen. ‘When you survive three years in a Colombian prison, nearly four actually if you count my incarceration before the trial, you learn a lot. You learn how to survive.’
‘Are you mad, Jacobs?’
I gripped his jaw with my right hand. I was strong now, stronger than before, physically fit. The jail in Cartagena had had a primitive gym club that I had been proud to ‘join’. No-one ever spoke in the gym. Everyone just pumped iron, building for the future, thinking of the hijos de puta that put them in jail in the first place and how satisfying it would be to watch them die, slowly.
‘Let go.’
‘You start being a bit more respectful, Jeavons.’
‘Okay, okay.’
I let g
o and he rubbed his face.
‘Twenty-five per cent. It’s my project, and that’s what you’re getting.’
‘Is it now.’
‘Do we have a deal?’
‘Fifty per cent.’
‘You’re in no position to bargain Jeavons.’
‘Well fuck it, Ryan! Neither are you!’
‘Thirty per cent. That’s my final offer. I’ll have to do all the dangerous stuff. You can get the raw materials and make the coke.’
‘Thirty-five.’
‘Done.’
We shook hands. It was a glorious moment. My second coke deal in four years. I sincerely hoped it would be more successful than the first.
25
July 2007 – Grasse, South of France
By ten o’clock, the moment when the agent handed me the keys and shook my hand, it was nearly ninety degrees outside. I opened the huge main door underneath the big ‘Daillion’ sign and the three of us entered my newest purchase, bought with the funds I had taken from the recently deceased Wisemans. We spent the morning walking around my new perfume factory, just me, Stephanie and Monsieur Louveau, the chemical engineer that Stephanie had introduced me to.
Louveau tapped and tested the equipment, accompanied by what I soon learned was his trademark sucking-in of cheeks. He tutted a lot, too. Stephanie was impressed, I could tell, that this was all mine. It was enormous. Three large rooms with tiny windows stretched along the ground floor. The machinery was old but in good order, according to Louveau. There were two laboratories on the upper level together with five or six offices and a big meeting room with a highly-polished parquet floor and garishly-papered walls.
I sat down at the head of the large meeting table. Stephanie followed me in and grinned.
‘Chairman of the board’, she said.
‘Then I’m looking at the new managing director of the Daillion brand.’
Stephanie curtsied.
‘Is better than Sephora.’
‘Come here, Madamoiselle Daillion.’
Stephanie walked over to me, her heels click-clacking on the shiny wooden floor, and stood by my chair.
‘We are going to make a world-class brand’, I said. ‘It will be incredibly profitable. More profitable, I think I can safely say, than any other parfumerie on earth. As long as we do not over-indulge in our secondary product. We won’t do that, will we Stephanie?’
She leaned over and kissed me, slipping her hand onto my shoulder.
‘You ‘ave some with you?’ she asked me. ‘We could…celebrate?’
I cleared my throat as Louveau walked in. He was a tall man of about fifty with square glasses that made him look sterner than he actually was.
‘Monsieur Milton?’
‘Oui?’
‘We need to talk, Monsieur Milton.’
‘You can say anything in front of Stephanie.’
‘It is about money. It is about time. Time and money.’
‘What about them?’
‘You will need to pay maybe maybe three hundred thousand euros to have the operation, the parfumerie, is making perfume. You have the raw materials?’
‘Stephanie can source my raw materials for me. Downstairs, parfumerie. Up here, laboratoires.’
‘Fine. I can have a quote ready soon. ’
‘Soon. Is good. We’ll need to get started.’
‘Before Carlos comes?’ she whispered to me as Louveau consulted his palm-pilot.
‘Yes’, I replied. ‘Before Carlos comes.’
***
December 1990
Juan Andres sat at a table at The Lone Star, one of the more up-market restaurants on Barbados, just outside Holetown on the west coast. The moonlight glistened on the water that virtually lapped at his feet and he was surrounded by other diners, their presence making both Juan Andres and the man he was sitting opposite feel safe.
‘Ten grams?’
‘Si. Ten grams.’
‘And you say you have a hundred kilos.’
‘Si.’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘It is not stolen.’
‘I don’t care if it is.’
Juan Andres sipped the sparkling water in front of him.
‘Have you been to Panama City?’ he asked the man.
‘No. Now just give me a momentito, okay?’
Juan Andres nodded. He watched the man stand up and walk over to the toilets, the little bag safely tucked inside his jacket pocket. They wouldn’t be greedy, he’d agreed with Mama Garcia. There was no point being greedy. They just needed to find a buyer with more than a million dollars. It would be enough. Ten thousand dollars per kilo was less than one-sixth of what they could get for it with a proper distribution network. The distributor would cut it again – even though Juan Andres had already diluted it by twenty per cent – and multiply the investment by ten, a nice thousand per cent gain on capital employed.
He was providing a valuable investment opportunity for the distributor as well as providing for his mother and himself. They could buy a lovely house inland somewhere in the Caribbean for two hundred and fifty thousand, and with the interest from seven hundred and fifty in the bank, and whatever else Juan Andres could bring in, perhaps as a life-guard or swimming instructor, perhaps as a Spanish teacher, they would have enough to be comfortable for the rest of their lives. Mama would be able to wake up every morning and look out over the sea. There would be no cartels or mayors or Suareses chasing them.
Juan Andres Montero Garcia watched as the man came out of the toilets at the back of the restaurant and made his way back to the table. He sat down slowly, avoiding eye contact.
‘It’s good.’
‘I told you it was.’
‘I’ll rephrase that, my friend. It’s too good. Where did you get it?’
‘Like I told you, it’s not stolen and it’s not traceable.’
‘A hundred kilos? Not traceable?’
‘Every time you ask a question the price rises.’
‘Every time I need to ask a question the price falls, my friend, do you see? Where is the material?’
‘First I need to know how much you’re prepared to pay for it. There are others, you know – ‘
‘Of course, of course. Also from Miami?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Who?’
‘How much?’
‘I’ll give you one point five million.’
‘It’s not enough.’
Dios mio! One and a half million? Juan Andres’s mind was racing. Mama would be pleased. They’d lowered their expectations once they left Colombia. The chances of getting three or four million were non-existent. But if mama were here this would be only the start of the negotiation.
‘I will need cash and I will need two million.’
‘Twenty thousand a kilo?’
‘Si.’
‘One point six. Final offer.’
Juan Andres stood as if to go and the man instantly put his hand on his shoulder to stop him. Juan Andres looked at his hand and put his own hand on top of it.
‘Two million’ he repeated, ‘in unmarked one hundred dollar bills. We exchange suitcases. You will receive four suitcases each containing twenty-five kilos. You will give me two suitcases in return, one million dollars in each. We can do this tomorrow.’
‘So the product is on the island?’
‘Perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t.’
‘It is a very small island.’
Juan Andres opened his shirt slightly to reveal the gun resting inside. The man saw it and suddenly broke into a smile.
‘OK. I see you’re serious, senor. One point seven-five. Can we shake on it?’
‘This is a very good deal for you.’
‘And for you.’
‘Don’t be greedy’ said his conscience. ‘Leave something for the next man.’
‘One point eight.’
‘Deal.’
They shook hands.
‘You have the cash?’
>
‘I can get it by tomorrow.’
Neither man could trust the other. In fact, it was better if neither man trusted the other because then the actions of both men would be predictable. This predictability was what Juan Andres was counting on.
26
February 1994
The facilities within the science labs at Cambridge were fifty thousand times more conducive to the manufacture of synthetic cocaine than the double garage-block attached to the Garcia home near Villamaria. In Colombia it had taken us eight days or so to create two or three grams, a pitifully small amount. Here, in Cambridge, with our raw materials paid for, our only expense was our time. In addition, the equipment was at the upper end of high-tech and Jeavons’s ability eclipsed Juan Andres’s and mine combined, times four.
Jeavons ran a trial run to see how long it would take, and how much raw material it would consume, to manufacture one gram of pure synthesized cocaine. Unbelievably, by circumventing the process that Juan Andres and I had followed, he managed to produce the first trial batch in less than forty-eight hours.
‘Try it’, he said, at eleven o’clock at night in his locked office, the blinds drawn. He handed me a three-inch long aluminium cylinder and I looked down at the steel tray on which lay six large lines.
‘You too’, I said.
‘I’ve never tried it before, Jacobs. I wouldn’t know if it was any good or not. I can tell you it made my gums pretty numb and I still have the use of my arms and legs, so it’s not lethal.’
I took the aluminium tube from him and thought about the trial we’d given Kieran about four years before. He’d nearly died, but not from what we’d made. It had been the university cocaine, and that was what was worrying me now. Universities could sometimes be too efficient, too clinical, too pure. We were in a university, Jeavons was a fanatic for perfection and a very, very clever man, much clever than I was. He knew, I knew it, and that was why it was me testing the cocaine and not him.
I leaned over the tray and studied each of the lines. They were identical.
‘It’s all the same stuff?’
‘This is the distillation of our raw material.’
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