Deep as the Marrow

by F. Paul Wilson

  Llosa looked up from the lights and dials on his scanner box and nodded. Carlos pressed the recorder button before speaking.

  “So, Miguel. You have picked up the package, I am told. I am delighted that the first phase is completed.” Clean scan or not, Carlos believed in revealing as little as possible over the telephone.

  “Yeah. That went fine. But the contents are defective.”

  “So my associate informed me. How so?”

  “You ever hear of epilepsy?”

  “Epilepsy?” Carlos smoothed his mustache and glanced at Gold. Epilepsy?

  He’d seen people convulse after too much cocaine. Was that what this child would be doing? “You are saying that epilepsy is involved here?”

  Gold stood near the window. He spread his hands and shrugged, offering his that’s-news-to-me expression.

  “Damn right it is,” MacLaglen said. “Why didn’t anyone know about this?”

  Good question, Carlos thought. He’d received excellent in-depth intelligence on the President and his doctor friend, all of it free. That something this important could have been overlooked annoyed him. Well, as the saying went, you get what you pay for.

  “Or did somebody know about it,” MacLaglen was saying, and Carlos could hear the anger rising in his voice, “and neglect to tell me?”

  “Calm yourself, Miguel. No one neglected to tell you anything. It was somehow missed. It is not, after all, something that one parades around. Certainly for a man of your talents this is not an insurmountable difficulty.”

  “Don’t give me that. This is a major glitch. It shows incompetence right at the source. What else don’t we know, señor?”

  “I have the utmost confidence in you, Miguel. I am certain everything will be fine.”

  “This means more contact with the package’s point of origin. It broadens the interface. The more contact, the more chance of something going wrong.”

  Carlos was growing impatient with MacLaglen. Time to put him in his place. “I have three words for you, Miguel: Deal with it.” Cold silence on the other end of the line. Carlos let it continue for a few seconds. He’d used the stick; now for the carrot.

  “By the way,” he said cordially, “you are due the second installment. You may pick it up today, at which time I will inform you of phase two.”

  “I’ll be over around five.” The line went dead.

  “Manajate!” Carlos muttered as he hung up and swiveled toward Alien Gold. “Our friend is angry.”

  “I’d say he’s got a damn good right to be,” Gold said. “It’s inexcusable. We should have been told.” He shrugged. “Could be worse, though. She could be a diabetic. Then MacLaglen would have to learn how to give insulin injections.”

  Gold was right: It could be worse and it was inexcusable. Bad intelligence could ruin everything. Carlos wished he could mete out suitable punishment to the man responsible, but that was not possible—not to someone so high in the United States government.

  “MacLaglen is arriving later to pick up his second installment. Have the cash ready.”

  “Sure thing,” Gold said, making a note in his everpresent scratch pad.

  “How many more installments?”

  “One.”

  Gold whistled. “He’ll need a wheelbarrow to cart that one out in cash.”

  “He won’t see a penny of it until this is all over.”

  “Come on, Carlos. What’s this kidnapping all about? What’s our goal here?”

  “All in good time, Alien.” He wondered if he’d ever tell him that the goal was to see President Thomas Winston either dead or out of office.

  Carlos sighed and leaned back in his chair. He pressed a button to start the automated low-back massage. Heat and gentle, padded pistons began to ease his perpetual backache. Ah, good.

  He wished he didn’t have to shoulder this entire burden himself, but it was far too sensitive to entrust to anyone else, even Alien.

  I should have refused, he thought. I should have kept my mouth shut when I heard about Thomas Winston’s legalization plans.

  But how could he have kept silent? What threatened the drug trade threatened him. And threatened la compania even more.

  If only he weren’t El Mediador.

  He’d earned that title after the 1981 summit at Hacienda Veracruz.

  Carlos had impressed Jorge Ochoa at that meeting—enough so that El Gordo called on him whenever la compania needed someone to quell the all too-frequent flare-ups between rival subgroups.

  He became El Mediador—the top negotiator for la compania. He dealt with the low-down and high-up. He arranged with cara de Piña Noriega to set up cocaine labs in the jungles of southern Panama. Later he was paying the Sandanistas for the use of their airfields to refuel la compania’s cocaine-loaded planes. All along he took his fee in product, which he sold off through his own network in Miami. Life was good.

  But then the so-called War of the Cartels broke out in 1988, and nothing could stop the bloodshed. Carlos tried to get the message into their thick heads that there were enough billions to go around, but no one was listening. His old friend Pablo Escobar went crazy, declaring war on the rival Cali cartel, and on the Colombian govern ment itself. Blood quite literally flowed in the streets of Medellm.

  Carlos Salinas watched the carnage with growing dismay. He had a new wife then, the beautiful Maria, and he wished to keep her out of the line of fire. But what else did he know? He decided to trade on his reputation as El Mediador by going into an ancillary service.

  But he needed guidance. When he learned of a young man named Alien Gold, fresh out of the Wharton MBA program, who’d been arrested in a cocaine sting operation, Carlos got him off and hired him. Through various fronts set up by Gold, Carlos began investing heavily in the stocks of small independent banks up and down the East Coast. When he gained controlling interests, he began maneuvering his own people onto the boards of directors.

  The best move he’d ever made. Even while the war raged, the white powder flowed unabated—as did the profits. And all that tainted money needed sanitizing. Who better to trust than El Mediador, Carlos Salinas? And even after the Cali compania eclipsed Medellin, the negotiating skills of Carlos Salinas remained in demand.

  In 1992, Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, a Cali leader, retained his services to help NAFTA get through Congress. Carlos moved to the Washington area and made sure money from the Cali compania got into the right pockets. Of course, he took his cut, and pocketed a bonus when the bill was signed into law.

  Free trade… it was wonderful. No more need for offshore air strips and risky flights across the border. Now the Mexicans were moving truckloads of Colombian product into Texas every day.

  And along the way Carlos Salinas discovered that Washington was much more convenient than Miami as a center of operations for his banking business, especially after all the high-placed friends he’d made here during the NAFTA legislative battles.

  Life got better. The landscape of the cocaine trade was changing yearly, but so what? The cocaine princes came and went—Pablo Escobar was dead, and most of the leaders of the Cali compania were in jail—but Carlos Salinas remained. Did the jailings and killings affect the trade? Not by an ounce. The only result was the consolidation of the power of the Colombian companias into fewer hands—mostly into Emilio Rojas’s—but no matter. As long as drugs remained illegal, the profits would need laundering. And Carlos was here to help… for a cut.

  But there would be no cut for this service. Instead he’d been offered a simple flat fee for stopping President Winston’s plan: one billion dollars.

  And if he succeeded, he’d‘be more than mindnumbingly rich. He’d be a legend. If he succeeded.

  No, don’t think if—think when. Because if he didn’t succeed…

  Better not to think about that. Better to think about how this opportunity to become a legend had dropped into his lap exactly ten weeks ago when he received the first of a series of anonymous calls. The caller us
ed a voice distorter, but Carlos eventually learned who he was. And was shocked. This was a man no amount of money could have bought, yet he was giving him information about the president’s plan.

  At first Carlos did not believe him. Legalize drugs? All drugs? Impossible… unthinkable! Never happen. Had to be a trick, part of some weird scheme to entrap him.

  He passed the story—along with his misgivings—to Emilio Rojas, the current head of the Cali compania.

  Rojas scoffed at first, but he began making inquiries, tapping la Campania’s many sources, even in the White House itself.

  And Rojas learned it was true. Not just marijuana and the occasional mushroom—all drugs. Cocaine included.

  How they’d all laughed back then, thinking what did it matter what this loco president wanted, the American people would never accept it. But then as more information flowed in from Carlos’s big shot source, la compania began serious research. What they learned scared the living mierda out of them. Emilio Rojas himself made a trip to the United States to meet with Carlos. Emilio came here.

  Carlos remembered sitting in this very room, just the two of them, and listening with a sick feeling in his gut as Rojas told him how, with a plan promising lower crime rates and lower taxes, backed by support from the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and the tobacco states, this Thomas Winston just might do it. Not total decriminalization, perhaps, but a beginning that would eventually finish most antidrug laws. And where America went, the rest of the world would surely follow.

  Rojas admitted that for a while he and la compania had been panicked. But when they calmed themselves, they set about making plans. They examined every possibility. No cost was too great. How could it be? With billions of dollars coming in every month, they would spend any amount necessary.

  Although Rojas had tried to appear calm and confident, Carlos could sense his fear, his rage. This was not some little brawl for a bigger piece of the market—this was a war for their very lives. This upstart gringo, this Thomas Winston, could wipe out their global empire with the stroke of a pen.

  Carlos agreed that he had to be stopped. But how?

  A bullet was the first thought, but that was discarded immediately. Assassination would make a martyr out of Winston—the last thing they wanted. They could hear the speeches: A heroic president has been shot down by the evil drug lords. We must carry his brave plan forward and put an end to these criminals so powerful and arrogant that they will kill our president to preserve their profits! Do not let the drug lords get their way! Honor the slain president’s commitment! Legalize drugs now!

  No… a martyred President Winston would be an even more formidable enemy than a live and healthy one. They had to find a way that would look like an accident—or his own fault.

  La compania peered into Winston’s past with a microscope and found many instances of youthful wildness, but nothing that would discredit or disgrace him. It had looked hopeless until… until Carlos’s mystery source came through with a bit of history that Winston had thought he’d destroyed. Some U.S. agency had unearthed it in a background check during his first run for office and filed it away.

  Carlos had passed it on, attaching little importance to it. But it had proved to be very important.

  And so the two of them had sat here in this very safe room and devised a wonderful and terrible plan…

  “It’s about drug decriminalization, isn’t it?” Gold said.

  Carlos bolted from his reverie. “What do you mean?”

  “The kidnapping. You’ve had it poised to go for weeks. And then as soon as the President speaks last night, boom!—you’re on the phone to MacLaglen. There’s got to be a connection.”

  Was I that obvious? Carlos wondered as he hoisted his bulk out of the chair and waddled around the office. Or was Gold simply too bright? That was why Carlos had brought him in.

  He knew Alien would not be shocked by a plan against his President, but the fewer who knew, the better. An old paisa saying went: Three can keep a secret—if two are dead.

  He stopped before a framed autographed photo of Richard Nixon. It was inscribed to someone else, but that didn’t matter. The man was what mattered.

  “I am not worried about a pipsqueak like Thomas Winston. He has no courage.” He pointed to Nixon’s photo. “How does he have the gall to sit in the same office as this man? Here was a president!”

  “Nixon?” Gold said, his voice jumping an octave. “He was a jerk.”

  Carlos turned as quickly as his girth would allow and pointed his finger in Gold’s face.

  “When you speak of this man, you will show respect. He is the president who first declared war on drugs in 1972. You would not be standing here if he had not. You would not be wearing that fancy suit or driving that German sports car you prize so much. You owe this man everything—him and all the presidents who continued the war after him. They were men.” Carlos turned back to his photo of Nixon and stared at that smiling face.

  “Why can’t Thomas Winston be like the others and follow in their footsteps? But no. He is a cowardly hijo de puta who will ruin everything!”

  “He hasn’t got a chance,” Gold said. “The only thing he’ll ruin is his political career.”

  If only you knew what I know, Carlos thought.

  He returned to his desk and dropped into his chair. The automatic massager was still on. He adjusted his back against it for full effect but it gave him only minimal relief. He’d have to call that Chinese girl—Tree Flower, or whatever her name was. She was the only one who could soothe his pain. When she walked up and down his spine with her little feet and massaged him with her toes, he found the closest thing to heaven… next to his wife.

  The thought of Maria saddened him. He had met her on a visit home. A girl then, barely out of her teens, pure paisa like him, no native blood, able to trace her family all the way back to Spain. For the first time in his life Carlos had known love. He wooed her, married her, and brought her to the United States. For ten years he knew bliss.

  And then Maria began to change. She became moody, unhappy. She moved to another bedroom. And then three weeks ago, she rented a townhouse in Georgetown and moved out. Carlos had never thought he could be so devastated by a woman…

  But he hadn’t lost her. This was a temporary thing. She’d come back. He could bring her back, of course, but what good was that? He didn’t want to be her jailer. But he was her watchdog, keeping her under round-the-clock surveillance.

  “What is the latest from P Street?” he asked Gold.

  Gold shrugged. “She shops. Goes to museums. Shops some more. Goes to the library. Shops. She’s enrolled in a course at G.U. She—”

  “What course?”

  “Something in the Women’s Studies program. I have the exact name in the report. Want me to—?”

  “Never mind.” He sighed. “No other man?”

  Alien shook his head. “Or woman. It’s like she’s become some sort of female monk… with an Amex card.”

  Carlos knotted his fists in frustration. La perra! He did not understand her.

  Yes, he did. He knew what the problem was: the United States. She was being corrupted. Becoming… American. He had to get her away from the talk shows and soap operas and magazines that put crazy ideas into her head. He had to get her back home—to Colombia— whether she liked it or not. When he was finished with this business here, when he was a billionaire, he would build an estate bigger than Jorge Ochoa’s Hacienda Weracruz, where he would raise magnificent caballos de paso, just as Maria’s father had done. And there, back in her homeland, she would regain her senses. She would become his Maria again.

  But all that was dependent on bringing down President Winston. Everything depended on getting rid of that cabron.

  Carlos picked up the TV remote. The sixty-inch rear projection screen buzzed to life. He saw two vaguely familiar politicians, one white, one black, standing behind a podium at what looked like a press conference.

  �
�Talk about politics making strange bedfellows,” Gold said. “Good Lord, it’s Jessup and Wagner side by side. Stay here.”

  The banners at the bottom of the screen identified the black man as REP. FLOYD JESSUP (D-NY) and the white man as REP. QUINCY WAGNER (R-SC). Each was outdoing the other in flogging the President. Congressman Jessup was shouting about “genocide on a level that will make Adolph Hitler look like a piker!” while Wagner was warning about “the unraveling of the very moral fiber of America!” Gold was laughing. “First time I’ve ever seen those two agree on anything! This is awesome!”

  “Alien,” Carlos said. “I wish you to find the addresses of these fellows’ re-election campaign funds and write out a check to each for two thousand dollars with a note to keep up the good work and escalate the war on drugs.”

  Gold nodded, grinning. “I love it! I’ll draw them from the restaurant’s account. Not that we need to contribute a dime—I mean, they can’t fail—but I love the irony.”

  “And I love insurance.” Carlos cruised the channels, not sure of what he was looking for. Something, anything, to help him get a feel for the mood of the country. La compania’s projections had predicted this initial angry reaction, but said it would be followed by a general cooling of emotions as the spin doctors in the media and the administration began to work their spell on the public and congress.

  He stopped at a channel that showed a man standing on a stage before a sign with the word drugs in a red circle with a red line drawn through it. An 800 number flashed at the bottom of the screen. He recognized the Reverend Bobby Whitcomb. Everybody knew the reverend. In the past few years he had become increasingly influential in Christian Fundamentalism. At the rear of the stage, behind the no-drugs sign, sat three tiers of phone banks and busy operators.

  “Looks like a telethon,” Gold said.

  The Reverend Whitcomb stood teetering on the edge of his stage, his microphone pressed to his lips, his free hand clawing the air, as he—literally—foamed at the mouth.

  “… and I say to you now that we will not be able to live, work, or play in the sight of the Lord if we allow this to happen! We will not be able to hold our heads up when we enter the house of the Lord. In fact, the Lord will turn a deaf ear on all our prayers if we do not cast out this evil man from the White House! If we do not disown this man as the leader of our nation!” The studio audience was on their feet, cheering, waving their arms.