High Crimes
Page 13
I am trying to be like Pete, nonchalant. I hum, look at the scenery.
“And don’t give me that risk-free beeswax. I’ve heard that from other suppliers. We take the risk — Senator Paez and you guys, you splash around in your swimming pool while we’re breaking our eyeballs watching out for the Coast Guard. They don’t give a damn if you’re out on international waters — they grab you anyway.” He looks at us as if we should get ready to go. “Meyers, I can get thirty million on a consignment deal with any family in the country.”
Meyers and Escarlata look at each other. Then Meyers laughs. It is a high-pitched laugh. “Come, Peter, have a cup of tea with us. We’ll talk, is that all right? We’ll talk.”
They take Pete to the administration building.
The rest of us find some shade and sit.
“What the fuck does he think he’s doin’, man?” says Billy Lee. “Bargainin’ for bananas in the local fruit market?”
Kelly, stoned right out, lies back on the grass. “Don’t worry, meesters,” he says, and rolls up a few joints for later.
Pete comes back.
“We’re getting screwed,” he says. “We’re up against the wall. Meyers knows about Ugarte’s blacklist.”
“How much?” Billy Lee asks.
“Twenty million. Fifteen on delivery, the rest a month later when it hits the streets.”
That is why Pete is number one.
***
The fat man and his scary DC-4 stay on the runway. We leave this pot-plant paradise by Cessna Citation executive jet.
“One of El Patrón’s little toys,” Meyers says. “We borrowed it for the day. The senator has actually never been out to this farm. It is not considered politic for so public and important a figure to be standing up to his neck in marijuana plants.”
Escarlata gets behind the controls. Billy Lee starts to get up front with him. “Hey, man, I used to fly something like this, a Lear.”
Escarlata gives him a freezing look. “Maybe the young lady would care to sit up front. Mademoiselle Larochelle?”
She smiles sweetly at Billy Lee and moves up past him.
“Good luck, Pete,” Billy Lee says in a loud whisper. “Did you see the way that guy kissed her hand?”
Kelly gets in on it. “Yeah, he’s a real Latin charmer, boy. Must be the Aqua Velva. He sure smells good.”
We leave Captain Jackpot to simmer while I study this character Meyers. Billy Lee has already told us about how they met in Viet Nam. Meyers was with military intelligence. Billy Lee had caught some flak and gone down over no man’s land. When a chopper picked him up, he had two Viet Cong prisoners.
“Shouldn’t have turned them over to Meyers, man,” he told us. “That’s when I started thinking war is shit city.”
On the plane, Kelly offers Meyers a joint. Jokingly, of course, as if the man might be out of stash.
Very icy, Meyers says, “Put that away, Mr. Kelly. I don’t touch it.”
Okay, I am thinking, it’s a free world. But Meyers does not stop at that. We are sitting around a table in the cabin of the plane, and he is telling us how drugs have destroyed America, how pot has “created a generation of useless, apathetic, and spineless slugs.” He keeps repeating, “Spineless slugs, Mr. Kelly. As far as I am concerned they can rot in it. America can decompose in its own fetid compost heap.”
This is a guy who is putting together a third-of-a-billion-dollar deal in sinsemilla. I think possibly he has a very subtle sense of humor. I do not know if I should be laughing to prove I share his sardonic wit.
“Let it rot,” he goes on. “And then the hard and the tough and the clean will take over. Then we might shoot the pushers.”
He is smiling, but that is not very reassuring, because he is always smiling. You would have to call it a smile, but there is no warmth in it. We are exchanging looks back and forth. Pete, Billy Lee, Kelly, and me. Do we laugh? Will he shoot us if we laugh?
After a while someone asks where we are going.
“Cartagena,” Meyers says. “El Patrón has set aside several rooms in one of his new hotels. An entire floor, in fact.”
We have left our bags in Bogotá. We complain about this.
Meyers waves the complaints away with a flick of his hand. “Please, gentlemen,” he says, “your Bogotá hotel is being taken care of. Your luggage will be brought to Cartagena.”
***
We are in a station wagon driving to Bocagrande Beach outside the old city. Escarlata is driving. Marianne is beside him. It is getting obvious that she likes his style, which is somewhat more subtle than Pete’s.
Meyers is briefing us. “I will come and get you in a week. The senator will want to meet you, probably at his villa. The goods will be ready by then. We will air-freight to a drop near the Magdalena River and barge it down to Barranquilla and onto your ship. Oh, yes, I know your ship, the Juan Atrapa. It is being supplied to you by one Juares. A sleazy fellow. My men were watching you while you inspected the ship. I hope you don’t mind. You must watch your wallets with Juares. He is a dishonest man.”
Meyers has this imperious air about him. King of the big connections.
“There will not be a problem moving the goods out of the country. We will look after all the bribes that are necessary. I have arranged for short-range air cover up to the north Florida coast.”
“Air cover?” This is me.
“Yes, right through the Windward Passage, up the Bahamas Channel and the Strait of Florida.”
“We’d be crazy to go that way,” Pete says. “I always take the Mona Pass and head straight into the gut of the Atlantic.” When you are carrying a shipload, you want to be as far off the coast and the main shipping channels as possible. That’s always been Pete’s modus operandi. Deep-sea trucking, he calls it. Set a course a hundred miles east of Bermuda, and you’re on a straight line to Newfoundland.
“There are eight Coast Guard cutters working the Mona Pass,” Meyers says. “Eight cutters, all anxious to stick one more cannabis-leaf decal on their bows. It’s a choke point. There is an operation going on there, Peter, out of Puerto Rico. The Steadfast is there, the Dauntless, the Hamilton, and they are operated by some of the best shallow-water sailors in the Coast Guard. Each of those vessels has bagged at least ten drug ships in the last year.”
I am wondering how he knows so much. He tells us.
“I have a large information-gathering service, gentlemen. And I have connections — far-reaching connections. Take the Windward Passage, Peter, and go between Cuba and the Bahamas, and up the Strait of Florida.”
The Florida Strait — we cannot believe this. We would be just off the U.S. limits, in the main shipping channel.
On the other hand, we have never before had the luxury of air cover. Meyers says he will give us a frequency, and a single-engine aircraft will alert us by radio to the dangers of any lurking cutters. Meyers himself will be in the plane. Fortunately, the Coast Guard boats are easy to recognize — white, with fat diagonal red racing stripes near the bow.
Pete is not happy with this route. “You’re putting your dope on the line. We’re putting our nuts on it.”
“I have connections, Peter.” Meyers says this slowly, as if he is telling us he wants us to get the hint and not ask dumb questions.
***
The hotel caters to middle-class tourists from the United States. We are not allowed to dawdle but are taken right up to the eighteenth floor — which is ours.
“You are to stay put here until one week from today,” Meyers says. “When I say stay put, I mean right here on this floor. You are to keep away from the bar, away from the pool, away from the beach. Away from the city.”
What he is trying to tell us is he thinks we are heat collectors.
“There are only two types of gringos in Cartagena,” he says. “Crooks and tour
ists. You don’t look like tourists. To la policía, you will stand out like billboards.”
Escarlata has a scotch in his hand and is lounging in a chair. “I think Mademoiselle Larochelle is an exception,” he says. “She does not look like any crook, Rudy. I think she may be permitted to leave the hotel. Escorted, of course. This is not a city where a woman cares to walk alone.”
“Depends on the escort, I guess,” says Pete.
Marianne is pretending she does not realize how much attention she is getting.
Meyers takes Pete and me through the rooms like an eager bellhop. “There is scotch and rye whiskey and bourbon. There is beer. There is marijuana. If you need anything else, call room service. For meals. Magazines. Girls, if you desire.” He counts out twenty thousand dollars and gives the bills to Pete. “I’m on an expense account. Enjoy.”
At the elevator, as he and the colonel are about to go, Meyers says, “By the way, I’ll see what I can do about getting Señor Ugarte off your back. He’s an old friend, of course.”
He gives us this little moon-face smile, and he is gone. Bang, bang, zip, zip. The fix-it man. American efficiency. No drug rot in this guy’s brain.
“He’s a narc,” Kelly says.
“He’s a crook,” says Billy Lee. “Just like you and me. A tramitor. A fixer.”
Kelly is looking at the business card he left us. Private investigator, it says. Out of Miami.
“He’s a narc,” Kelly says.
“This country is full of these guys,” says Billy Lee. “Ex-U.S. military, ex-CIA, ex-mercenary. They run dope while they wait for the next war.”
Friar Toke, a paranoid, is insistent. “If a guy talks like a narc, looks like a narc, thinks like a narc, nine to one he’s a narc. I don’t trust him. Boys, I had a five of swords reversed yesterday on the tarot spread. ‘Disaster, malice, treachery. Beware of false friends.’”
“Come off it, Kevin,” Pete says. “Meyers worked for Ugarte. I know that for a fact. He works for the Paez family now. And you heard him rapping about dope. A narc would lie. Besides, his hair’s too short for a narc.”
Chapter Seventeen
Kerrivan was strung out, although he had taken neither drug nor drink during the evening. Exhausted, he had gone to his room at ten o’clock, undressed, lain down, tried to sleep.
And the hours passed, and the night trickled slowly away, and he lay on his bed, his eyes staring at the darkness, something in his stomach gnawing at him like a rat.
It was three o’clock.
Kerrivan felt used. He had a sense of dancing to the pull of a puppeteer’s strings. Trucking drugs for other men — it was not his way. Until now, he had bought his own and sold his own and taken nobody’s orders. He was the Masterless Man of Newfoundland, the heir to the great Peter Kerrivan of the Butter Pot barrens, beholden to no person.
Kerrivan remembered Mitchell’s words from the trial: The syndicates come in; they hire people like Kerrivan to do the hauling. Kerrivan, so proud of having been his own man, was now something he had always scorned — a mule. Carrying a load for El Patrón. Taking orders from Meyers, a strange piece of warped humanity.
For all his career, Kerrivan had been working up to the big one, the multimillion-dollar trip. It was here, it was set, it was organized. If he got out of it with his skin intact, he would be many times a millionaire. And he was feeling shitty.
He was not free. Then add to that the nagging, constant doomsaying of Kevin Kelly, who had been getting to him. Over dinner, Kevin had not stopped bitching.
And on top of it all, this goddamned crippling infatuation with a woman he so little understood. Was it just a physical thing, straight-out goat lust? Or had he somehow fallen for her mystery? What was it about her? Something, perhaps, off center. A slight lateral drift a few degrees off course. Something, whatever it was, that held him fascinated. But, shit, he wasn’t going to follow her about forever like some mooning fool. He decided to work at blotting her from his mind.
And as he reached that resolution, she came to his door, tapping gently on it.
He let her in, and they sat on his bed, and she touched him. They did not speak. For several minutes her fingers moved gently along his neck and arms, and she began to work his muscles with her hands, loosening them. He felt them release, one by one. Laying him on his stomach, she worked her fingers along his upper back.
“Cocaine,” she said. “The more I do, the more I want. The more I want, the more I do. The more I do, the less I sleep. I think I’m wired. Bitten by the white mosquito.”
Her hands went down his spine, working at him, working at him. Her fingers were strong and seemed to emit energy, to concentrate fields of force and send them deep into his body.
“Juares gave me a half-ounce rock of crystal yesterday,” she said. “Just laid it on me. I’ve been shaving crumbs from it all night. I can’t stop. Like some?” She took the coke from the pocket of her robe, and a razor and a ballpoint-pen tube, and put them on the bed table.
“No,” Kerrivan said. “Not now.”
She moved down the bed and began massaging his feet, and her hands moved slowly up his legs.
“I’ve never felt anyone quite so tense,” she said. “Relax. Roll over.”
He was naked, his cock up and hard.
He felt a whisper of air on the head of his penis.
He heard her voice, soft and a little teasing.
“Are you certain I can’t offer you a little blow, Peter?”
He felt the sharp tip of her tongue touch, touch, darting, withdrawing. Then her hands closed around his cock and her mouth came down wet over it.
Larochelle paused each half hour to cut more powder from her glittering white stone, and by the time the sun was in the sky she had taken Kerrivan through the book of sex, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. Her hands played music on his body. Her mouth whispered over it. Her cunt seemed to suck him inside her, and held him like a clamp.
“You’re going to remember this night,” she said. “You’re going to remember me.”
***
At noon, Escarlata arrived, exuding charm and gentility.
Kerrivan followed Larochelle into her room and watched her packing her bag.
“I don’t believe it,” he said. “He’s old enough to be your father.”
“That’s how I like them, Peter, my cheri. Fairly used.”
Which is how Kerrivan felt after she had left with the Cuban.
***
O’Doull’s solid-state creation was a little device called a Sat-Track transmitter. Approval had been given by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to beam UHF signals from the transmitter to its Nimbus-6 satellite which, as O’Doull explained to Mitchell, was “in a sun-synch orbit over the poles,” circling the earth every hundred and seven minutes.
Mitchell was surprised at how small the device was: eight by six inches, and three inches high.
“How does it work, Theo?”
“How does it work?” This was not going to be easy. “Okay, it’s a digitally encoded beacon.”
“Digitally encoded, yeah.”
“Every sixty seconds it gives off a one-second burst of information which is binarily encoded in the digit screen. It gives up three hundred and forty milliseconds of plain carries and sixty-four bits of encoded information, including its own id code.”
Mitchell wore a bland look. “Go on.”
“The data is transmitted to the satellite and time-tagged. Each time the Nimbus-6 passes over Alaska, the data is dumped by ground command to a station at Fairbanks, and the tape made from the down-links is transmitted by way of landline and microwave to the Goddard Space Flight Center at Greenbelt, Maryland. There, the information is computer-formatted and processed.”
Mitchell was nodding his head, so O’Doull decided to carry on.
“Successive linkups, uh-huh.”
“Using those four frequencies and measuring the Doppler effect, we calculate the change in distance from linkup to linkup.”
“I see.”
“In other words, how far the Sat-Track — and the ship carrying it — have traveled within those frames of time.”
Mitchell nodded.
“At Goddard, they take a readout from the system: times, locations, the confidence value — that’s a statistical measure of accuracy of the data-fit to the algorithm. All right?”
“Sure, yeah.”
“The printout at Goddard gives the platform location — that means the transmitter location — at Zulu time.”
“Zulu time?”
“Greenwich-Meridian time. It’ll read something like this: ‘Day one-two-nine of year one-nine-eight-two at zero-five-three-zero Zulu.’ Then it gives numerals which translate to coordinates of latitude and longitude.”
“Uh-huh. That’s pretty good, Theo.”
“From Goddard, they will relay to us at Potship telephonically at timed intervals.”
“And what do we do?”
“What we do is we stick pins in a map of the Atlantic Ocean.” O’Doull smiled. “That’s the dangerous part. We might prick our fingers.” He looked at the blank face of Inspector Mitchell. “You understood all that?”
“About three words, Theo.” Mitchell shook his head. “I got lost somewhere between the Zulus and the algorithms. Jesus, Theo, sometimes I worry that the days of old-fashioned cops like me are passing. I can’t understand half the stuff that’s happening. The age of computer electronics. The bad guys don’t have a chance any more. It’s not going to be any fun, Theo.”