Carlos stared at the “sea of green”— Jeff’s term— and marveled. The entire front room had been taken over by eighteen-inch plants with serrated leaves and hairy tops—“calyxes,” Jeff called them—waving back and forth in the gentle breeze from a trio of oscillating fans. They clustered in children’s plastic swimming pools that in turn sat on metal platforms. Shades, duct tape, and heavy drapes sealed the windows. Rubber tubing snaked from plant to plant, supplying water and fertilizer; heaters warmed their roots from below while the sodium lamps above bathed them in artificial sunlight twelve hours a day. A large metal tank kept the air rich in carbon dioxide for maximal growth.
“And the beauty part of the operation,” Jeff said, “is it’s all computerized. The whole room is rigged with sensors that monitor light, temperature, humidity, CO2, and water levels. The computer’s modem allows me to keep tabs on every one of my seas of green from a phone booth, and a smart interface lets me make adjustments over the wire. I’ve rigged the place with motion detectors so I know if someone’s broken in. And last, all my computers are infected with Deicide, a virus that wipes out the hard drive should the wrong dude try to access it.”
“You appear to have thought of everything,” Carlos said.
Inside his suit he was bathed in sweat. A man of his weight should not frequent jungles, even indoors. Yet despite his discomfort, he was almost mesmerized by the gentle swaying of the leaves and calyxes. They seemed almost… happy. Where had plants ever been treated so well?
A wave of nostalgia engulfed him for an instant. His first brush with the drug trade had involved marijuana. Many moonless nights on the beach west of Cartagena, transferring bale after bale of Colombian Red from trucks to trawlers bound for the Gulf Coast of the United States. The “square groupers,” as they were known, were the most profitable “catch” for those crews in the early seventies when America’s domestic marijuana was so poor.
Smuggling… it was in his blood. After all, he was a paisa. His ancestors had left the Basque regions of Spain in the 1600s and settled in the Andes, in Antioquia Province around what would later become the city of Medellin. When Spain fixed the price of gold in Colombia, his forebears smuggled it out to Jamaica where they got the higher market price. Down the centuries it became an Antioquian tradition: Sneak out coffee, emeralds, and quinine; smuggle electronics, appliances, and perfumes back in past the rapacious import duties.
True to another paisa tradition, his father had kicked him out at age sixteen, telling him: If you succeed, send money; if you fail, don’t come back.
He had succeeded.
“Yeah, the technology’s great,” Jeff was saying, drawing Carlos back to the present, “but it’s the plants that are truly awesome—four pounds of top-grade sensemilla per hundred. This ain’t no Maui Zowie, you know what I mean? The stuff I started smoking in the sixties was maybe one percent THE. Lizard King is connoisseur stuff, man—tests opt to fourteen percent. An absolutely bodacious high. Brings down a minimum of five hundred bucks an ounce.”
“How many plants in this room?” Carlos said.
“Two hundred.”
Carlos glanced at Alien Gold, his lean and lupine chief bean counter. “Alien?”
Gold stood near the door, his arms folded across the front of his Armani suit, the sodium lights reflecting off his blond hair and the wire rims of his glasses. “That’s sixty-four thousand per crop,” he said without hesitation. “At roughly eight crops a year, figure half a mill per room per year.”
Carlos looked at Jeff. “That is a good living. Why do you need me?”
“I want to expand,” Jeff said. “Look. Grass is a thirty something-billion-dollar industry. I can’t produce it fast enough to keep my customers happy. I’m ready to move up to warehouses.” He extended his arms over his tiny jungle as if blessing it. “Imagine it, man. A twenty thousand-square-foot sea of green. Cosmic!”
“You are not afraid of President Winston legalizing your crop?”
“Never happen. This is a growth industry, and I need a banker—somebody with connections… you know, for security and such. You’re that guy.” Gold’s cell phone beeped before Carlos could reply.
He saw a troubled look steal over the young MBA’s features as he muttered monosyllables into the receiver. “Everything is all right?” he said as Gold turned toward him.
“It’s Llosa,” he said. “He just got a call from your new contractor saying something about the package being defective. He insists on speaking to you right away.”
Defective? Carlos felt a sudden tightness in his chest. Had something gone wrong? Had the child been hurt? He prayed not.
“Have Llosa tell the contractor to give a number and wait. I’ll call him from my office.”
As Gold passed on the instructions, Carlos turned toward the door. “We must go,” he said.
“That’s it?” Jeff said. “I took a risk bringing you here, you know.”
“We will be contacting you.”
“I’d like an answer soon,” Jeff said. “After all, I ain’t getting any younger.”
“You must be patient,” Carlos said, giving the man’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Otherwise you could be worried about getting older, eh?”
Jeff blanched behind his beard. “Hey, I didn’t mean any—”
“You will be contacted,” Carlos said, smiling grimly as he walked out into the cooler, fresher air of the dirty hallway. He didn’t like to be rushed.
22
“Any details from our friend that you didn’t mention?” he said to Gold when they were seated in his Lexus and his driver was gliding them back to Georgetown.
Gold shook his head. “No. Pretty damn enigmatic.” His voice took on a whiny tone. “Just like the rest of this kidnapping thing. If you’d let me in on the big picture, maybe I could help.” As much as Carlos trusted Gold, this “big picture” was best left under wraps.
“All in good time. Alien,” he said. “But tell me: What did you think of that little demonstration back there?” Carlos did not really want to talk about marijuana— he was more concerned about the “defect” in the package MacLaglen had picked up—but he did not want to listen to Alien’s whining about not being trusted.
“A warehouse-sized setup like that could be very profitable But I hope you’re not considering investing—”
“Not me,” Carlos said. “But I can connect him with some money people—”
“And take a cut.” Gold smiled. “That’s my man. For a moment there I was afraid you were thinking about getting back into handling product.”
“No.” Carlos shook his head slowly. “I’ve handled more than enough in my day.” How many years had he been in the trade? Certainly half his life—and he was looking down the barrel at fifty.
His first brush with cocaine had come when he joined up with fellow paisa Pablo Escobar, who was transshipping kilos of the white powder from Chile to the U.S. in spare tires. Cocaine was a small business back then, a cottage industry run out of Chile. But everything changed when Pinochet took over in 1973. The cocaine refiners fled to Colombia and into the arms of Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa… just about the time cocaine use exploded in the U.S.
Colombia, Medellin, the world—especially Carlos’s world—would never be the same.