Plausible Denial

by Rustmann Jr. , F. W.

  “Georgi Markov. He was a Bulgarian defector,” said Mac.

  “Yep, that’s the stuff. I know the story. It only takes five hundred milligrams to kill you. That’s about the size of a half a grain of sand. Stuff’s made from castor beans. You can buy them anywhere and I can mix you up a batch in no time at all, powder or liquid—your choice. Just depends on what you’re gunna put it in.”

  Culler and Mac considered how much to tell Barker, though Barker had clearly figured out what they wanted to do. Maybe Rothmann had told him more than he would admit. In any event, if they were to succeed, they would need Barker’s help.

  Sensing their dilemma, Baker decided to jump in with both feet. “Look guys, I’m here to help y’all. I think I got a pretty good idea of what y’all want to do out there, and I can tell you straight out there ain’t no half measures in this business. Either go big or stay home. That’s what my ole daddy used to say. Do it right the first time or don’t do it at all. Y’all look like good guys to me, and Tom and I go back a long way. You’re on the right side and that’s the side I’m on, too. We all wear the same color hats. You want to fuck up the drug lords and turn their own people against them. That’s a good thing. I’d like to have a part in that. Just tell me what you want to do and I’ll help you do it.”

  Santos glanced at Mac and nodded.

  “Okay, you’re right, of course,” said Mac. “You’ve figured it out. We’re planning on getting into to a shipment of heroin bricks and salting it with something that will make the users never want to buy any of the druggie’s shit again.”

  Barker nodded, “Yep, figured.”

  “And if they get sick enough, they will turn on the pushers and eventually on the drug lords themselves—right up the ladder until the entire network is disrupted. That’s our goal.”

  “Yep, well then, ricin’s what y’all need.” Barker took a theatrical sip of his coffee. “Untraceable and easy to make. Only problem is you’ll kill anyone who ingests even a tiny bit of it. But that’ll sure as hell get their attention.”

  “And Tom seemed okay with that?” asked Mac.

  “Yep, suspect so.”

  Culler looked over at Mac. “Can’t say as I disagree with him, and if the goal is to get their attention, that’s the way to do it.”

  “If we decide to go that route, how would you get it into the heroin bricks?” asked Mac.

  “Well, I’d probably use a liquid form and either pour it on the bricks and let it soak in or, if they’re wrapped up in paper or something, y’all could use a syringe and inject the ricin through the packing to the center of the brick. The heroin would absorb the ricin nicely.”

  Barker scratched his head. “Heroin bricks are much like cocaine bricks. They’re a chalky substance and weigh about a kilo each when they come out of the hills. The bricks are actually made up of morphine hydrochloride, a fine white powder that they press and dry in the sun before they take it out for more processing where they have real chemists. That’d be Hong Kong in that part of the world.”

  Culler and Mac exchanged glances. Anyone using the tainted heroin would die, and many of the users would be innocent people. Well, maybe not so innocent. They were contributing to the drug trade, but they weren’t actually profiting from the drug trade. They were simply users. Could they afford this kind of collateral damage, and if not, was there an alternative—one that would still allow the operation to succeed? They were on the horns of a dilemma.

  Mac broke the silence. “I don’t know if we can afford to do this. We’ll be killing a lot of innocent people. Isn’t there a better alternative?”

  “None that I can see.” Barker was leaning over the bar toward them, studying his nearly empty coffee cup. “Not if y’all want to succeed in this.”

  “You know my thoughts on the subject,” Culler said to Mac. “This is war and in war you’ve got to accept some collateral damage, and anyone dumb enough to be shooting up on heroin doesn’t deserve to live anyway.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Mac. “Tell you what. Bill, go ahead and mix up a batch of ricin for us. Fill up a dozen or so syringes for injection, so we can put a couple cc’s into each kilo brick. Then put’em into our shipment with the other stuff. We can decide later whether to use them or not.”

  “I can certainly do that. But I’d better dilute the ricin a bit so it can absorb better into the bricks. If we put only a couple of cc’s into each brick, it might not saturate enough of the brick to do the job. How about I make up about fifty syringes of about ten cc’s each? If you inject five cc’s into each brick in two or three places, it should do the trick nicely and be totally unnoticeable. After all, the shit is going to have to go through another refining process anyway when it gets to the chemists. That ought to spread out the ricin really good.”

  Mac looked over at the unperturbed Santos and said, “Okay, let’s go with it. Go ahead and assemble all of the gear and the ricin and get it ready for shipment to your contact in Thailand. Now we’ve got to hit the road.”

  “Don’t ya want to shoot them weapons and check out the night vision gear.” Barker was clearly disappointed.

  “I’m sure everything will work just as advertised. We should get back,” said Mac.

  Barker called to Ruth who was watching TV in another room. She joined them at the bar and they said their goodbyes.

  Culler and Mac spoke very little on the drive back to Ft. Lauderdale. Culler dozed in the passenger seat listening to his music on his I-Pod, while Mac was left alone with his thoughts. Knowing Maggie would not approve of what was being planned, he was not looking forward to the inevitable confrontation.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was after midnight when they got back home to Ft. Lauderdale. Mac dropped off Culler at his apartment and drove east toward home. He entered the access code at the entrance of a new gated community a few blocks from the ocean and drove through the gates down a tree-lined winding road to the two-story Mediterranean town home he had purchased shortly after his separation from the Agency.

  The house was dark and lonely. He turned on the TV for noise, showered, brushed his teeth and went straight to bed. He didn’t like to sleep alone, but being single meant he did it a lot. The scent of his most recent girlfriend, Cindy Keskiner, a bright, attractive psychiatric nurse at Ft. Lauderdale General Hospital, was still on the sheets and pillow. He wished she were there now and thought of their last night together in that bed while inhaling the scent of her familiar soap and shampoo. He had thought about calling her after he dropped off Culler, but knew it was too late and she would already be in bed.

  MacMurphy knew it was about time to settle down with one woman and start raising a family, but his career in the Agency had always precluded that. He recalled one of his instructors down at The Farm telling a group of students that if CIA case officers devoted too much time to their careers, their family life would suffer, and if they devoted too much time to their families, their careers would suffer, and if they tried to do both, both family and career would suffer.

  For now he satisfied himself with cyclical affairs with local women and with colleagues in the CIA and State Department. He was an attractive, exciting and charming man with an exceptionally strong libido, who never had trouble finding attractive and exciting women to join him in bed. He moved easily from one woman to another, and frequently back again, as he moved from post to post within the CIA.

  The closest he had ever come to marrying and settling down was with Wei-wei Ryan. They had been together, off and on, for more than ten years. MacMurphy first met Wei-wei when he was assigned as a case officer to Udorn Base in Northeast Thailand, and she was a branch secretary at the CIA’s station in Bangkok.

  Their romance progressed through subsequent overseas posts in Paris, Tokyo and back again to Paris with Wei-wei attempting to follow him wherever he was posted. But the Agency finally put its foot down when Mac was posted to Hong Kong as chief of station and Wei-wei tried to follow him. Rules were rules, a
nd the Agency was not about to permit the wife or girlfriend of any COS to work with him in the same station. That would give “the appearance of impropriety,” in Agency lingo.

  When Wei-wei couldn’t follow Mac to Hong Kong, she requested to be assigned back to Paris where she had lived as a child and became fluent in the French language. Her request was granted and she landed the much coveted job of secretary to the COS.

  When Mac showed up in Paris on temporary duty a year later to run the operation against the Chinese embassy, their relationship was rekindled. But when the operation went bad and Wei-wei Ryan became the victim of Lim’s rage, and Mac was forced into early retirement, Mac moved to Ft. Lauderdale alone

  Mac should have protected her. He was wracked with guilt over the mess he had caused. He should have kept her out of the operation. He should have married her. She would still be alive now and would be with him now in Florida. But for some reason he did neither. He had always put career and duty ahead of his personal life, and so, more out of habit than anything else, he moved on once again.

  Soon the events of the last few days, beginning with Rothmann’s visit which cut his vacation short in Suze-la-Rousse, took over his thoughts.

  He was excited about being back in the game with Culler Santos at his side, but worried about the ethical aspects of what he and Culler were planning to do. Mostly he worried about what Maggie Moore would think. She had the reputation of being a straight-shooter in the Agency, and had kept many a young case officer from making egregious errors in operational judgment. Being torn between Edwin Rothmann and Maggie Moore was not a good place to be.

  Chapter Nineteen

  MacMurphy awakened early. He had slept fitfully during the night, his mind churning with ideas, possibilities, different approaches, arguments. He drove to the airport, turned in his rental car, and retrieved his BMW from the parking lot. He called Santos and they agreed to meet for breakfast before heading to the office. Mac wanted to go over the events of the previous day one more time before briefing Maggie.

  “She’s not going to go for it, Culler. I can’t lie to her, and I don’t know how to do this without her.”

  Culler surprised Mac with compassion. “There’s no way around it, Mac. You’ve got to tell her the truth. She’ll never accept some cockamamie story about making people sick. She’s too smart. And I agree, you can’t lie to her. Actually, she probably already knows that the only way to do this is to kill a few people in the process. You’ve just got to convince her that a little collateral damage is worth it.”

  “I know, I know. But what if she doesn’t go along? What if she puts up a stink?”

  “She won’t. Anyway, we don’t really know how this is going to play out until we get there. Tell her what might happen, that some people might die, but leave everything kind of open to adjustment depending upon what happens when we get out there.”

  MacMurphy was silent for a long while and then he looked up at his friend. “Yeah, good advice. I’ll be as smooth as I can, but I’ll tell you what I think. I think if we get an opportunity to poison some of Khun Ut’s heroin, we’re going to do it.

  Culler pushed his chair back and hit Mac on the shoulder. “That’s what I like to hear, Mac.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Chiang Mai, Thailand

  The discussion with Maggie had not gone well. She acquiesced only after Mac appealed to her loyalty to Edwin Rothmann and asked her to reserve judgment until after he got on the ground in Thailand and got a better feel for the situation. She had no compunctions about taking down Khun Ut and his empire, only about the collateral damage that would inevitably result.

  So it was with mixed emotions that MacMurphy landed at the rural airport in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with Santos.

  Culler had been a rock for MacMurphy ever since they met at the CIA’s covert training base, The Farm. Santos was one of the smartest and toughest men Mac had ever known. Trained as an electrical engineer at MIT, he was a mathematical genius and a skilled artist locked in the body of a brute.

  His sensitivities to those around him astounded MacMurphy. Always calm and unflappable, he had a knack for relieving tensions and cooling things down when tempers rose. But if confronted, he would destroy anyone who threatened him or those he cared about.

  Mac had seen Culler erupt only once. They had been hanging out with a small group of Farm students at a nearby bar called the Tumble Inn. Everyone was feeling mellow, and the beer and camaraderie were flowing freely when one of the female students slapped one of the townies who was slobbering all over her.

  The townies hated the CIA students. The whole town knew that the facility was a CIA training base, despite the CIA’s futile efforts to maintain its cover. They considered the students pompous interlopers on their territory.

  The townie was a huge, pot-bellied, tattooed beast accustomed to bullying people in “his” bar, and he was surrounded by an entourage of similar low-lifes who egged him on.

  Culler had calmly stepped between his female colleague and the townie, politely asking the townie to leave his friend alone and take his smelly group of pig farmers to the other side of the room.

  The townie responded by smacking Santos in the face with a beer bottle, splitting open his lip. The blow had not seemed to faze Culler. He had stepped back away with his left foot, crossed his right foot over in front and brought it up and around to meet the townie’s right cheek with such force that teeth and cheek bone shattered, sending the huge man careening across the room and into la-la land. Without missing a beat, he had turned on the others, swiftly taking out two of them with rapid-fire, vicious kicks and punches while the remaining thugs beat a hasty retreat toward the door.

  Mac was reminded of this fight every time he saw the angry scar on Culler’s upper lip. Santos was the meanest, toughest guy MacMurphy had ever known, and he was totally loyal to Mac and Maggie and Edwin Rothmann.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  At the Avis counter at Chiang Mai airport Mac rented a dark Toyota Corolla in the alias Bob Humphrey. He and Culler drove north to Chiang Rai along a newly paved, four-lane highway. On the way they stopped at a roadside local restaurant and had a lunch of Mac’s favorite Thai gueyteow lad na noodles with sauce, pork, and vegetables as well as a couple of local Kloster beers.

  They arrived at the center of the town less than an hour later and pulled up in front of the modern Wangcome Hotel. Again using their aliases, they checked into adjourning rooms on the tenth floor overlooking the bustling city.

  Mac recalled Chiang Rai as the Thai city closest to the famed Golden Triangle, formed by the confluence of the Mekong and Ruak rivers where Burma, Laos and Thailand came together. The town was infested with people involved in one way or another in the drug trade. A modern day Dodge City, much like Medellian in Colombia. It was equally infested with police—some who were not even on the take.

  The tourist business was also booming in Chiang Rai, with excursions to the surrounding ancient temples, mountain villages and the poppy fields, and an abundance of first class hotels. There were also hundreds of low cost hostels frequented by hippies and youth interested in trekking and hanging out and sampling Thai gunsha – the best marijuana in the world. There was also an abundance of heroin in all forms, and more earthy Oriental delights.

  Culler and Mac chose to pitch up in one of the first class hotels for reasons other than just comfort. These hotels offered better security and fit well with their use of tourist cover.

  Once they had settled into their hotel rooms, Mac used his non-attributable cell phone to call Bill Barker’s Thai contact, retired policeman General Sawat Ruchupan.

  While not perfect security, prepaid cell phones could not be traced back to owners, and cell phone records were not kept by the companies because there was no billing. MacMurphy knew that all security was a tradeoff with efficiency, and the convenience in this case outweighed more stringent security measures.

  Since it was getting late in the day, General Sa
wat suggested they meet at his villa in Chiang Mai the following morning. He informed Mac the shipment of gear had arrived and was awaiting opening and inspection.

  Tired and jet-lagged, Culler and Mac had an early dinner at the hotel, took two melatonin each to assist in getting over the jet-lag, and retired for the evening.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Mac and Culler arose early, had a light breakfast at the hotel and headed south for Chiang Mai. They easily found Sawat’s spacious villa overlooking the Gymkhana golf course in a beautiful residential section of Chiang Mai, located in the posh southeast quarter. From the looks of his palatial villa, General Sawat Ruchupan was clearly a man of some means.

  A thin, balding man in his mid-seventies, he met Culler and Mac at the door. Dressed impeccably in long white trousers and a long-sleeved, white shirt, he bowed deeply in the traditional Thai wai with his palms pressed together in a prayer-like fashion, showing respect to his visitors. “Sawatdee khrap,” he said.

  Both Culler and Mac returned the wai and spoke the sawatdee khrap greeting in unison. They removed their shoes at the door and left them on the threshold. The general led them through the hotel-like foyer, padding barefoot over the polished teak floor, through sliding glass doors at the back of the house and onto a patio pool deck beyond.

  They took seats around a white patio table shaded with an umbrella to shield them from the morning sun. A tanned, bikini-clad young Thai woman was lounging by the pool nursing a yapping Shih Tzu at the obviously augmented breasts that threatened to burst out of her bikini top.

  “Quiet Ling Ling,” she chastised the mutt, “these are farangs from America. They won’t hurt you my baby.” But the dog continued to yap incessantly, regarding the interlopers with canine disdain.