Covert Warriors (Presidential Agent 7)

Rule Seven in the Uncle Remus List of Rules for the Interrogation of Belligerent Bad Guys: “Make them think you’re stupid and then let them show you how smart and knowledgeable they are.”

“Let me try to sum it up this way, Carlos,” Juan Carlos said. “This stuff starts out when some campesino in Bolivia or wherever the fuck sticks his knife in a flower, a poppy, and collects the goo that comes out. Or boils down the coca leaf. The last stop is when some junkie in the States either sucks it up his nostrils, or sticks it in his vein. By then it’s either cocaine or heroin.”

“What are you telling me you think I don’t know?”

Juan Carlos held his now empty whiskey glass. The maid took it.

“Put enough in it this time,” he said in Spanish, and then switched back to English.

“Shut your mouth for a fucking minute, Carlos, and I’ll tell you what you don’t know. At every step, from processing that shit so it becomes heroin or cocaine, the price goes up, way up. You do understand that?”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, Juan Carlos.”

“You could have fooled me. Now, the same thing is true in every step between the fields and the junkie’s nose. The price goes up. Way, way up by the time it gets close to the States.

“Now, the people in this business, as you can imagine, are not very nice people. Doña Alicia would not invite them to dinner—and on that subject, thank you very much, but I can’t stay for dinner.”

“Why not? We haven’t even started walking down memory lane,” Castillo said.

“I got things to do, Carlos. The only reason I’m here is to try, because we go way back, to warn you what you’re fucking around with and to try to keep you alive.”

“I can keep myself alive, thank you very much.”

“Will you shut your fucking mouth and listen? Jesus Christ!”

Castillo hoped the look he made indicated his feelings had been hurt.

Proof that he had been successful came immediately.

“For Christ’s sake, Carlos, I’m trying to help you,” Juan Carlos said, almost compassionately.

“Sorry.”

“Okay. Now, except for what the junkies in the States pay for their one ounce—or less—little bags of this shit, it’s most valuable just before it’s sent over the border into the States. By then it’s in bricks, generally weighing a kilo—that’s a little over two pounds.

“Some of the people taking it across the border, after buying it at a stiff price from somebody who brought it from Venezuela or Colombia, and running the risk that we’d catch them while they were moving it from south Mexico to the border, decided it would be safer and a hell of a lot cheaper to just steal it from some other trafficker.

“And the way to do that was just kill the other trafficker; let their bosses just guess who stole it. And the way to keep the police from interfering with the movement, do one of two things. Pay off the police—Carlos, you have no fucking idea how much fucking money is involved here. We grab some of these people with two, three hundred grand, sometimes more, in their pockets.

“And then they realized that it would be cheaper to kill the police who were getting close than to pay them off.”

“No shit?” Castillo said wonderingly.

“No shit. So what we have is war here, Carlos. One ground of drug movers—they call themselves ‘cartels’—killing each other to steal, or protect the product, whether it’s cocaine or meth or heroin, and all of them perfectly willing to kill the police.

“I don’t know where it’s going to end. I know the good guys ain’t winning. Now, as to your friend. I heard two stories, and I don’t know which one to believe. The first is that they just got in the way. By that I mean they’d been responsible for us—the Policía Federal, or the American DEA, or Border Patrol grabbing shipments. Since these shipments are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—sometimes millions—this made them mad, so they had to be killed.

“The second story I heard is that they want to swap your colonel for a man named Félix Abrego. He’s doing life without the possibility of parole in that maximum-security prison of yours . . . what’s it called?”

The words Florence Maximum were almost on Castillo’s lips when he caught himself, shrugged, and asked, “Leavenworth?”

“No,” Juan Carlos said.

“Sorry, I was a soldier, not a policeman. But I do know, Juan Carlos, that it’s firm American policy not to do something like that. The Taliban tried it on us in Afghanistan, and it was decided that if we—”

“Florence,” Juan Carlos interrupted him. “The Florence ADMAX. It’s in Colorado.”

“Never heard of it.”