The Shooters (Presidential Agent 4)

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.