“We need you back home.”
His eyes snapped open. “Home? In the States?”
Slater broke in. “Yesterday afternoon several officers in Khodai’s battalion were photographed with a man we’ve identified as Tito Llamas, a known lieutenant in the Juárez Cartel. With them were two unidentified men, possibly Taliban. You’ll have those photos momentarily.”
“So we have corrupt Pakistan Army officers meeting with a drug cartel guy from Mexico and the Taliban,” said Moore. “That’s an unholy trinity, all right.”
Slater nodded. “Max, you know a lot of the Middle Eastern players. You’ve got the expertise we need. We want you to field-supervise a new joint task force we’re putting together.”
Moore’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Is this like a promotion — after what just happened? I mean, I’m oh-for-two in two weeks …”
“We’ve been discussing this for a long time now, and your name has always been at the top of the list. That hasn’t changed,” answered Slater.
But Moore kept shaking his head. “The two guys in the hall …I thought they were a couple of ISI agents controlling access to the fifth floor. They were just making sure the bombs went off …”
“That’s right,” said O’Hara.
O’Hara leaned toward the camera. “We need to know the extent to which the Mexican drug cartels are in bed with these Afghan and Pakistani smugglers. If it’s any consolation, you’ll still be working on the same case — just from another angle.”
Moore needed a moment to process all that. “So how do the Mexicans fit in, besides being middlemen and customers?”
O’Hara drifted back into his chair. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?”
Slater cleared his throat and consulted some notes. “Your primary task will be to learn if this connection between the Taliban and the Mexicans is just to expand the opium market or if it’s meant to foster something more problematic, like the Taliban recruiting in Mexico to develop a new base of operations and easier access into the U.S.”
“You said joint task force. What other agencies are involved?”
Slater grinned. “The whole alphabet: CIA, FBI, ATF, CBP, and a half-dozen smaller and local agencies to assist.”
Moore shuddered as he considered the enormity of what they were asking. “Gentlemen, I appreciate the offer.”
“It’s not an offer,” O’Hara pointed out.
“I see. Look, just give me a couple of days to follow up on Khodai’s killers and see if I can get some intel on Gallagher. That’s all I’m asking.”
“We’ve already got another team en route,” said Slater.
“That’s fine. But let me take one more shot.”
O’Hara winced. “We all failed here. Not just you.”
“They killed the colonel and murdered his family. He was a good man. He was doing the right thing. We owe him and his nephew this much. I can’t walk away.”
O’Hara mulled that over, then raised his brows. “Two days.”
2 MOVEMENT
Juan Ramón Ballesteros cursed through his teeth and reached past his swollen beer gut for the cell phone lodged in the pocket of his cargo shorts. His sleeveless white T-shirt was already soaked in sweat, and the unlit Cohiba Behike jammed between his lips was soggy. It had been a brutal and unforgiving summer, the air so humid that it felt as though he were walking through loaves of warm bread.
Ballesteros was barely forty, but the heavy burdens of his position had drawn deep lines around his eyes, had turned his beard and curly locks gunmetal gray, and had left him hunched over with chronic back pain that struck like blows from a machete.
However, his physical discomforts were the least of his concerns: The four young men with gunshot wounds to their heads had his complete attention.
They’d been lying on the jungle floor for most of the night, and the early-morning dew had left a sheen on their pale bodies. The flies buzzed and alighted on their cheeks, their eyelids, and flew into their open mouths. Rigor mortis had already set in, and their bowels had released. The stench was ungodly and had Ballesteros turning his head away to gasp and swallow back the bile.
The team had come to set up another mobile cocaine lab, which was anything but high-tech and hygienic — only a few homemade tents covering mountains of coca leaves drying on the dirt floor. One tent was used for the production and storage of gasoline and sulfuric acid, among other chemicals necessary to manufacture at least one thousand kilos of paste per week. In years past, Ballesteros had given a few of his more powerful buyers tours of the camps, showing them the exacting and multi-stage process by which the product was produced.
While coca farmers all followed slightly different recipes, Ballesteros’s men needed one thousand kilos of coca leaves to get just one kilo of paste, about 2.2 pounds. For the tours they would demonstrate how to make one-tenth of that amount. His men fired up weed whackers to crush one hundred kilos of leaves and add to them sixteen kilos of sea salt and eight kilos of limestone. They would mix those ingredients together by vigorously stomping on them until they created a black, dirtlike mixture that was poured into a large drum. Twenty liters of gasoline were added, and the ingredients were left to sit for about four hours.
The men would turn to another drum that had already been soaking, and this liquid would be drained into a bucket so they could discard the pulp and leaves. The valuable product at this stage was the drug leached from the coca leaves and now suspended in the gasoline.
Next came eight liters of water and eight teaspoons of sulfuric acid, and this new mixture was scrubbed with a plunger for a couple of minutes, then decanted, leaving the sediment on the bottom. Sodium permanganate was added to the sediment, along with caustic soda in no specific amounts, just enough to drown the sediment. The liquid was now a milky white, the paste congealing at the bottom. The remaining liquid was filtered away via a rag, and the paste was left to dry in the sun until it turned a light brown.
The price for Ballesteros to produce one kilo was about one thousand U.S. dollars. When that kilo was processed into cocaine powder and transported to Mexico, the price jumped to $10,000 per kilo. Once that same kilo reached the United States, it sold for $30,000 or more to the street gangs, who then cut it with additives to reduce the purity and get more out of each stash. The gangs sold their product by the gram, and a single kilo could generate a street value of $175,000 or more.
Ironically, a buyer had once asked, “Why do you do this?” Didn’t he understand that some teenager in Los Angeles had just died by overdosing on the very substance he produced? Didn’t he realize that he was destroying families and ruining lives all over the globe?
He never thought about it and considered himself a farmer come full circle from his own family’s days working on the coffee plantations. He’d grown up in Bogotá, gone off to college in the United States, in Florida, and had returned home with a business degree to try to start his own organic banana farm, which had failed miserably. Some of his friends in the banana business introduced him to several drug traffickers, and as they say, the rest was history. It was, for him, a matter of survival. After twenty long years as a drug producer and trafficker, Ballesteros was reaping the benefits of his high-risk occupation. His family now lived among white Europeans in a wealthy northern suburb of the city, his two sons were doing well in high school, and his wife wanted for nothing, save for more time with him. He was away most of the week on “business” but returned home on the weekends for family gatherings, church, and time to attend soccer games with his sons. In truth, he lived in his jungle house about a quarter-kilometer away from this lab and had, thus far, an excellent relationship with FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a paramilitary group that helped him distribute and export his product. He hoped his men were not killed by FARC members; there had been some tension between himself and a FARC colonel named Dios, a simple disagreement over price. Now Ballesteros’s workers had been executed in their sleep with what had to be a silenced weapon.