The shooters pa-4

by W. E. B Griffin

  The shooters

  ( Presidential agent - 4 )

  W. E. B. Griffin

  The shooters

  W. E. B. Griffin

  I

  [ONE]

  Airport Highway

  Asuncion, Paraguay 1625 25 August 2005

  When Byron J. Timmons, Jr., saw what was causing the airport-bound traffic to be stopped and backed up for at least a kilometer, he muttered an obscenity that was absolutely not appropriate for an assistant legal attache of the embassy of the United States of America.

  The twenty-nine-year-old-who was six feet one and weighed two hundred five pounds-had a reservation on the Aerolineas Argentinas five-thirty flight to Buenos Aires and it looked to him to be entirely likely that these bastards were going to make him miss it.

  Timmons looked at the driver of his embassy vehicle, a lightly armored Chevrolet TrailBlazer.

  Franco Julio Cesar-a quiet thirty-nine-year-old Paraguayan national who was employed as a chauffeur by the U.S. embassy-was silently shaking his head in frustration. He, too, knew what was going on.

  These bastards were officers of the Paraguayan Highway Police and they were running a roadblock. There was a Highway Police car and a Peugeot van on the shoulder. The van had a sliding side door-now open-so that it could serve as sort of a mobile booking station. Inside was a small desk behind which sat a booking sergeant. He would decide whether the miscreant caught by the roadblock would be simply given a summons or hauled away in handcuffs.

  There were three police forces in Paraguay. In addition to the Highway Police, which was run by the Minister of Public Works amp; Communication, the Minister of the Interior had a Capital Police Force, which patrolled Asuncion, and a National Police Force, which patrolled the rest of the country.

  The opinion Timmons held of all three was as pejoratively vulgar as the obscenity he uttered when he saw the Highway Police roadblock. His opinion was based on his experiences with the various police forces since arriving in Paraguay, and his criterion for judgment was that he thought of himself as a cop.

  He actually had been a police officer, briefly, but the real reason he thought of himself as a cop was that that was what the Timmons family did-be cops.

  His paternal grandfather, Francis, used to say that he was one of the only two really honest cops on the job in Chicago. He refused to identify the other one.

  Francis and Mary-Margaret Timmons had five children, three boys and two girls. Two of the boys-Aloysius and Byron-went on the force. Francis Junior became a priest. Dorothy became Sister Alexandria. Elizabeth married a cop, Patrick Donnehy. Father Francis, who was assigned to Saint Rose of Lima's, spent most of his time as a police chaplain.

  Aloysius and Joanne Timmons had four children, all boys. Three went on the force and one went in the Army. Byron and Helen Timmons had five children, three girls and two boys. Two of the girls married cops, and Matthew went on the force.

  Byron Junior skipped the third grade at Saint Rose's, primarily because he was much larger than the other kids but also because the sisters understood that he already knew what they were going to teach him in the third grade-he never seemed to have his nose out of a book.

  The sisters also got him a scholarship to Cristo Rey Jesuit High School. His Uncle Francis and his mother were delighted. His grandfather and father were not. They quite irreverently agreed that The Goddamn Jesuits wanted him for the priesthood.

  At age sixteen, Junior, as he was known in the family, graduated from Cristo Rey with honors and without having felt the call to Holy Orders. He immediately became a Police Cadet, although you were supposed to be eighteen. Before the summer was over, the Society of Jesus reentered the picture.

  Loyola University (Chicago) was prepared to offer Junior, based on his academic record at Cristo Rey, a full scholarship. This time his father and grandfather disagreed. His father offered another quite irreverent opinion: that you had to admire those tenacious bastards; they never give up when they're trying to grab some smart kid for their priesthood.

  His grandfather disagreed, and suggested that Junior had two options.

  One was to spend the next nearly four years in a gray cadet uniform riding in the backseat of a patrol car, or filing crap in a precinct basement someplace-he couldn't even get into the academy until he was twenty years and six months old-or he could spend that time getting a college education on the Jesuits' dime.

  For the next three years, Junior studied during the school year and returned to the police cadet program in the summers. On his graduation, cum laude, he immediately entered the police academy. Three months later, he was graduated from there and-with most of the family watching-became a sworn officer of the Chicago Police Department.

  He had been on the job doing what rookies do for six months when Grandfather Francis reentered the picture.

  "Go federal," Grandpa advised. "The pay is better. Maybe the U.S. Marshals or even the Secret Service."

  To which Byron-no longer universally known as "Junior" after he made good on a promise to knock his sister Ellen's husband, Charley Mullroney, on his ass the next time he called him that-replied that he'd already looked into it, was thinking of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and going down that road, was really thinking of getting a law degree.

  He told his grandfather he'd talked to people at Loyola, and they not only were going to let him in the law school but had arranged for him a job as a rent-a-cop on campus. Christ knew he couldn't go to college if he had to change shifts on the job every three months.

  Byron graduated, again with honors, and passed the bar examination on his first try. By then he had just turned twenty-eight and had seen enough of the FBI to decide that wasn't for him. The Border Patrol looked interesting, but then he met a guy from the Drug Enforcement Administration whom his brother-in-law Charley Mullroney had been working with in Narcotics.

  Stanley Wyskowski said Byron was just the kind of guy the DEA was looking for. He'd been a cop, and he had a law degree, and he spoke passable Spanish.

  Actually, he spoke better than passable Spanish. He had the grammar down pat because he'd had Latin his last two years at Saint Rose's and his first two at Cristo Rey, and then he'd had two years of Spanish at Cristo Rey-somebody had tipped him that if you had Latin, Spanish was the easiest language-and four more years of it at Loyola. And he had polished his colloquial Spanish with a young lady named Maria Gonzalez, with whom he'd had an on-and-off carnal relationship for several years when he was at Loyola.

  Wyskowski said if Byron wanted, he'd ask his boss.

  Byron J. Timmons, Jr., entered the Federal Service two weeks later, as a GS-7. On his graduation from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center at Glynco, Georgia, he received both his credentials as a Special Agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration and a promotion to GS-9, because of his law degree.

  He was initially assigned to Washington, D.C.-the DEA is part of the Department of Homeland Security-where, he understood, they wanted to have a look at him. Two months later, they offered him his choice of the Legal Section (which carried an almost automatic promotion to GS-11 after two years), or The Field.

  He had seen what was going on in the Legal Department-pushing papers held absolutely no appeal-so he chose The Field.

  That wasn't the answer they wanted.

  They reminded him of the automatic promotion that came with the Legal Section, and told him that the only vacancies in The Field were in El Paso, Los Angeles, Miami, Mexico City, and Asuncion, Paraguay. Timmons didn't like the sound of El Paso, Mexico City, or Los Angeles, and had only the vaguest idea of where in hell Asuncion, Paraguay, even was.

  So, when he said "Miami," he was not very surprised that they sent him to Asuncion, Paraguay.
They were really pissed that he had turned down the Legal Section-twice.

  No regrets, though. He wanted to be a cop, not a lawyer preparing cases for prosecution by the Justice Department.

  Specifically, he wanted to be a drug cop.

  In Byron's mind, there wasn't much difference between a guy who did Murder One-roughly defined as with premeditation, or during the course of a Class One Felony, like armed robbery-and some guy who got a kid started on hard drugs. In both cases, a life was over.

  If there was a difference, in Byron's mind it was that the drug bastards were the worse of the two. A murder victim, or some convenience store clerk, died right there. Tough, but it was over quick. It usually took a long time for a drug addict to die, and he almost always hooked a lot of other people before he did. If that wasn't multiple murder, what was?

  Not to mention the pain a drug addict caused his family.

  Another difference was that dealing in prohibited substances-even for the clowns standing on a street corner peddling nickel bags of crack-paid a lot better than sticking up a bank did.

  And that was the problem-money. It was bad in the States, where entirely too many cops went bad because they really couldn't see the harm in looking the other way for fifteen minutes in exchange for a year's pay, and it was even worse here.

  Byron knew too much about the job to think that when he came to Paraguay he personally was going to be able to shut off the flow of drugs, or even to slow it down very much. But he thought that he could probably cost the people moving the stuff a lot of money and maybe even send a few of them to the slam.

  He'd had some success-nothing that was going to see him named DEA Agent of the Year, or anything like that-but enough to know that he was earning his paycheck and making the bad guys hurt a little. Making them hurt a little was better than not making them hurt at all.

  And that was why he was pissed now that it looked like the goddamn Highway Police were going to make him miss his plane.

  He was going to Buenos Aires to see an Argentine cop he'd met. Truth being stranger than fiction, an Irish Argentine cop by the name of Liam Duffy. Duffy's family had gone to Argentina at about the same time as Grandfather Francis's parents had gone to the States.

  Duffy was a comandante (major) in the Gendarmeria Nacional Argentina. They wore brown uniforms, not blue, and looked more like soldiers than cops. Most of the time they went around carrying 9mm submachine guns. But cops they were. And from what Timmons had seen, far more honest cops than the Policia Federal.

  That was part of the good thing he had going with Liam Duffy. The other part was that Duffy didn't like drug people any more than he did.

  Even before he had met Duffy, Timmons had pretty well figured out for himself how the drugs were moved, and why. There had been briefings in Washington, of course, before they sent him to Asuncion, but that had been pretty much second-or third-hand information. And he had been briefed when he got to the embassy in Asuncion, although he'd come away from those briefings with the idea that Rule One in the Suppression of the Drug Trade was We're guests in Paraguay, so don't piss off the locals.

  It hadn't taken Timmons long to understand what was going on. Paraguay was bordered by Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina. The drugs came from Bolivia, where the cultivation of the coca plant was as common as the cultivation of corn in Kansas. It was refined into cocaine in Bolivia. Some of the refined product went to Brazil, where some was consumed and some exported. Most of it went to-actually through-Paraguay to Argentina.

  Although there was a substantial, and growing, market for cocaine in Argentina-this explained Liam Duffy's interest-most of the cocaine simply changed hands in Argentina. The coke then was exported by its new owners through the port of Buenos Aires, near downtown, and the international airport, Ezeiza, some twenty kilometers to the southwest, the bulk of it going to the United States, but a good deal to Europe, and some even to Australia.

  There were some imaginative ways of moving the cocaine, a crystalline powder, across borders. These ranged from packing it in caskets-or body cavities-of the deceased being returned home for burial to putting an ounce or more in a latex condom, which was then tied, swallowed by a human smuggler-or "mule"-and either regurgitated or defecated once across the border. (Unless, of course, one or more of the condoms were to rupture en route-which they often did-causing the mule severe toxicity…then death.) Most of the drug, however, was commonly packed in plastic bags, one kilogram-two point two pounds-of cocaine to a package.

  These sometimes were not concealed or disguised at all, if the shippers were confident the customs officials at the border had been adequately bribed. Or the kilo bags were hidden in myriad ways-in the tires of cars or trucks, for example, or packed in a crate with something legitimate-operative word myriad.

  The only way to interdict a "worthwhile" shipment was to know when it was to be made and/or the method of shipment. For example, that one hundred kilos of cocaine were to be concealed in the spare tires of a Scandia eighteen-wheeler of the Jorge Manso e Hijos truck line carrying bagged soybeans, which would cross the border at a certain crossing on a certain date.

  This information could be obtained most commonly in one of two ways. It could be bought. The trouble here was that the U.S. government was reluctant to come up with enough money for this purpose and did so only rarely. The Paraguayan government came up with no money for such a purpose.

  Sometimes, however, there was money as the result of a successful interdiction-any money over a reasonable expectation of a truck driver's expenses was considered to be as much contraband as any cocaine found-and this was used.

  The most common source of information, however, was to take someone who had been apprehended moving drugs and turn him into a snitch. The wheels of justice in Paraguay set a world standard for slow grinding. Getting arraigned might take upward of a year. The wait for a trial was usually a period longer than that. But when the sentence finally came down, it was pretty stiff. Paraguay wanted the world to know it was doing its part in the war on the trafficking of illegal drugs.

  The people who owned the cocaine-who arranged its transport through Paraguay into Argentina and who profited the most from the business-as a rule never rode in the trucks or in the light aircraft that moved it over the border. Thus, they didn't get arrested. The most they ever lost was the shipment itself and maybe the transport vehicle. So basically not much, considering that the cocaine-worth a fortune in Miami or Buenos Aires or London or Brisbane-was a cheap commodity until it actually got across the Argentine border.

  What really burned the bad guys-far better than grabbing a hundred kilos of cocaine every week-was grabbing the cash after the Argentine dealers paid for it in Argentina. Even better: grabbing the cocaine and the money. That really stung the bastards.

  Timmons and Duffy were working on this. Step One was to find out how and when a shipment would be made. Snitches gave Timmons this information. Step Two was to pass it to Duffy.

  The Gendarmeria Nacional had authority all over Argentina. They could show up at a Policia Federal roadblock and make sure the Federals did their job. Or they could set up their own roadblocks to grab the cocaine and/or turn the couriers into snitches.

  With a little bit of luck, Timmons and Duffy believed, they could track the cocaine until it changed hands, then grab both the merchandise and the money the dealers in Argentina were using to pay for it.

  The problem Timmons had with this was getting the information from the snitches to Duffy without anyone hearing about it. It wasn't much of a secret that the bad guys had taps on both Timmons's and Duffy's telephones.

  The only way for Timmons to get the information to Duffy without its being compromised, and in time for Duffy to be able to use it, was to personally take it to him.

  Which, again, explained why Timmons was heartsick when he saw the Highway Police roadblock on the road to the airport.

  The information he had gathered with so much effort would be useless unless h
e could get it to Duffy in Buenos Aires tonight. If he missed his flight, the next wasn't until tomorrow morning. Before that plane left, the Scandia eighteen-wheeler of the Jorge Manso e Hijos truck line, Argentine license plate number DSD 6774, which had two hundred one-kilo bags of cocaine concealed in bags of soybeans on the second pallet from the top, center row, rear, would be lined up to get on the ferry that would carry it across the Rio Paraguay-the border-to Formosa.

  And all Timmons's work over the last seventeen days would be down the toilet.

  What was particularly grating to Timmons was that he knew the moment a Highway Policeman saw the diplomatic plates on his embassy Chevrolet TrailBlazer, the vehicle would be waved through the roadblock. The Highway Police had no authority to stop a car with CD plates, and no authority of any kind over an accredited diplomat. The problem was to actually get up to the Highway Policemen.

  That had taken a long time, almost twenty precious minutes, but the line of vehicles moved so that finally the TrailBlazer had worked its way to where the Peugeot van sat with its door open.

  The embassy vehicle with CD plates, however, didn't get waved through.

  Instead, two Highway Policemen approached.

  "Shit," Timmons said.

  Cesar remained silent behind the wheel.

  Timmons angrily took both his diplomatic passport and his diplomatic carnet-a driver's license-size plastic sealed card issued by the Paraguayan Foreign Ministry identifying him as an accredited diplomat-and hurriedly held them out the window.

  "Diplomat, diplomat," he said impatiently.

  "Please step out of the car, Senor," one of the Highway Policemen said.

  "Didn't you hear what I said?" Timmons demanded. Waving his diplomatic credentials, he added, "Don't you know what these are?"

  "Step out of the car, please, Senor."

  One of the Highway Policemen now pointed the muzzle of his submachine gun at Timmons.

  Timmons told himself not to lose his temper. He got out of the TrailBlazer.