The Shooters (Presidential Agent 4)

"Ed calls me Charley, Mr. Weiss."

"I thought he called you Ace? You don't like being called colonel, Colonel?"

"Not the way you pronounce it."

"That's probably because I'm having trouble thinking of you as a colonel; you don't look old enough to be a colonel. When Ed and I were running around together, the colonels we dealt with had gray hair-if they had hair at all-and paunches. No offense was intended."

"You won't mind, right, Milton, if I don't believe that?"

"You are a feisty youngster, aren't you? Aren't you, Charley?"

"Better, Milton. Better."

"Getting back to the subject at hand, Charley. On the other hand, Argentina does have a working drug-interdiction program. They even have a remarkably honest-honest by South American standards-police organization called the Gendarmeria Nacional.

"So why run the greater risk?

"Looking into it further, the good guys learned a little more about the flow of drugs through Argentina and into the U.S., and the manner of doing business. Normally-you've seen the movies-it's a cash business. The farmers sell the raw material-that stuff that oozes out of the poppy seed pods-to the refiners. They don't get much for it, but they get paid in cash. Next step, normally, is for the refiners to either sell what is now heroin to someone who shows up at the refinery and carries it off. That is also a cash transaction. Or they take it someplace away from the refinery and sell it there. That's where you see those briefcases full of money in the movies.

"Every time the product changes hands, in other words, so does cash. Usually.

"This didn't seem to be happening with the drugs coming out of Paraguay into Argentina, either when it arrived from the refiners, or when the movers got it into Argentina, or when it left Argentina. The first time money changed hands was when the movers had it in the States and turned it over to the wholesalers. Then we had the briefcases full of hundred-dollar bills.

"So what could be inferred from this? That it was being operated in what the Harvard School of Business Administration would call a vertically integrated manner. The whole process-from initial receipt of the product from the refiner, through the movement to Uruguay, to Argentina, to the United States and the sale there-was under one roof.

"The refiners, the movers, the smugglers, and the transporters, rather than being independent businessmen, were al

l employees."

"What's the purpose of that? What difference does it make?" Castillo asked.

Weiss held up his hand, signaling he didn't want to be interrupted.

"Another problem businessmen involved in this trade have is what to do with the money once they have sold the product. It cannot be dropped into an ATM machine, for obvious reasons. And, to get it into one of those offshore banks we hear so much about, it has to be transferred through a bank; no cash deposits allowed.

"Unless, of course, the bank is also in the vertically integrated system."

"You mean they own the bank?"

Weiss nodded.

"And that raised the question, among many others, in the good guys' minds, 'Where did all this come from?' Drug dealers are smart, ruthless, and enterprising, but very few of them have passed through Cambridge and learned to sing 'On, Fair Harvard!' "That suggested something very interesting," Weiss went on, "that it was not a group of Colombian thugs with gold chains around their necks who were running this operation, but some very clever people who may indeed have gone to Harvard and were employed by their government. Two governments came immediately to mind."

"Which?"

"The Democratic People's Republic of Cuba and the Russian Federation."

"Jesus H. Christ!"

"Another thing needed to run this operation smoothly, Charley," Delchamps said, "is discipline. The employees-especially the local hires-had to completely understand that any hanky-panky would get them, and their families, whacked."

"Lorimer told me that Timmons's driver-"

"Timmons?" Weiss interrupted.

Just as Weiss had a moment before, Castillo held up his hand imperiously, signaling he didn't want to be interrupted.

Delchamps chuckled, and Weiss, smiling, shook his head.