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Dexter noted the language. Not “I want you to . . .” or “I am offering . . .” but “I would be most grateful . . .”
“I would need to know more. A lot more.”
“Of course. If you could drive over to Washington to visit with me, I would be happy to explain almost everything.”
Dexter, standing in the front window of his modest house in Pennington, looking out at the fallen leaves, thought it over. He was now in his sixty-first year. He kept himself in shape, and, despite several very clear offers, had declined to marry for a second time. All in all, his life was comfortable, stress-free, placid, small-town bourgeois. And boring.
“I’ll come over and listen, Mr. Devereaux. Just listen. Then decide.”
“Very wise, Mr. Dexter. Here is my address in Alexandria. May I expect you tomorrow?”
He dictated his address. Before he hung up, Cal Dexter had a question.
“Bearing in mind our mutual past, why did you pick me?”
“Very simple. You were the only man who ever outwitted me.”
PART TWO
HISS
CHAPTER 3
FOR SECURITY REASONS IT WAS INFREQUENT THAT THE Hermandad, the controlling super-cartel of the whole cocaine industry, met in plenary session. Years earlier, it had been easier.
The arrival in the presidency of Colombia of fiercely anti-drug Álvaro Uribe had changed that. Under his rule, a clearing out of some elements of the national police force had witnessed the rise to the top of General Felipe Calderon and his formidable chief of intelligence in the anti-narcotics division, Colonel Dos Santos.
Both men had proved that, even on a policeman’s salary, they were bribeproof. The cartel was not accustomed to this and made several mistakes, losing key executives, until the lesson was learned. After that, it was war to the knife. But Colombia is a big country with millions of hectares to hide in.
The unchallenged chief of the Brotherhood was Don Diego Esteban. Unlike a former cocaine lord, Pablo Escobar, Don Diego was no psychopathic thug drawn from the backstreet slums. He was of the old landed gentry: educated, courteous, mannerly, drawn from pure Spanish stock, scion of a long line of hidalgos. And he was always referred to simply as “the Don.”
It was he who, in a world of killers, had, by force of personality, forged the disparate warlords of cocaine into a single syndicate, highly successful and run like a modern corporation. Two years earlier the last of those who had resisted the unification he demanded had departed in chains, extradited to the U.S., never to return. He was Diego Montoya, chief of the Cartel del Norte del Valle, who had prided himself on being the successor to the outfits of Cali and Medellín.
It was never discovered who had made the phone call to Colonel Dos Santos that led to the raid on Montoya, but after his media appearance, shackled hand and foot, there was no more opposition to the Don.
Colombia is slashed, northeast to southwest, by two cordilleras of high peaks, with the valley of the river Magdalena between them. All rivers to the west of the Cordillera Occidental flow to the Pacific or the Caribbean; all water east of the Cordillera Oriental flows away to join the Orinoco or the Amazon. This eastern land of fifty rivers is
a vista of rolling open range studded with haciendas the size of counties. Don Diego owned at least five that could be traced and another ten that could not. Each had several airstrips.
The meeting of autumn 2010 was at the Rancho de la Cucaracha outside San José. The other seven members of the board had been summoned by personal emissary and had arrived by light aircraft after the dispatch of a score of decoys. Even though the one-time-use-and-throw cell phone was deemed extremely secure, the Don preferred to send his messages by handpicked courier. He was old-fashioned, but he had never been caught or eavesdropped upon.
That bright autumn morning, the Don personally welcomed his team to the manorial house in which he probably slept no more than ten times a year but which was maintained at permanent readiness.
The manor was of old Spanish architecture, tiled, and cool in the summer, with fountains tinkling in the courtyard and white-jacketed stewards circulating with trays of drinks under the awnings.
First to arrive from the airstrip was Emilio Sánchez. Like all the other division heads, he had one single function to master: production. His task was to oversee every aspect from the tens of thousands of dirt-poor peasants, the cocaleros, growing their shrubs in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru. He brought in their pasta, checked the quality, paid them off and delivered tons of Colombian puro, packaged and baled, at the refinery door.
All this needed constant protection, not only against the forces of law and order but against bandits of every stripe, living in the jungles, ready to steal the product and try to sell it back. The private army came under Rodrigo Pérez, himself a former FARC terrorist. With his aid, most of the once-fearsome Marxist revolutionary group had been brought to heel and worked for the Brotherhood.
The profits of the cocaine industry were so astronomical that the sheer ocean of inflowing money became a problem that could be solved only by laundering from “tainted” dollars into “clean.” Then they could be reinvested in thousands of legitimate companies worldwide; but only after deduction of overheads and contribution to the personal wealth of the Don, which ran to hundreds of millions.
The laundering was mainly accomplished by corrupt banks, many of whom presented themselves to the world as wholly respectable, using their criminal activities as an extra wealth generator.
The man charged with laundering, Julio Luz, was no more a thug than the Don himself. He was a lawyer specializing in financial and banking law. His Bogotá practice was prestigious, and if Colonel Dos Santos had his suspicions, he could never raise them above that level. Señor Luz was the third to arrive, and the Don greeted him warmly as the fourth SUV arrived from the airstrip.
José-María Largo was the supremo of merchandising. His arena was the world that consumed the cocaine and the hundreds of gangs and mafias that were the clients of the Hermandad for its white powder product. He was the one who concluded the deals with the gangs spread across Mexico, the USA and Europe. He alone assessed the creditworthiness of the long-established mafias and the constant stream of newcomers who replaced those caught and jailed abroad. It was he who had chosen to award a virtual European monopoly to the fearsome Ndrangheta, the Italian mafia native to Calabria, the toe of Italy, sandwiched between the camorra of Naples and the Cosa Nostra of Sicily.
He had shared an SUV, because their aircraft had arrived almost together, with Roberto Cárdenas, a tough, scarred old street fighter from Cartagena. The interceptions by customs and police at a hundred ports and airports across the U.S. and Europe would have been five times higher but for the “facilitating” functions of bribed officials. These were crucial, and he was in charge of them all, recruitment and payoff.
