He doubted Julio Luz would now be parted from the reply letter all day or night. Perhaps when he was in the first-class cabin back to Bogota, he might fall asleep, but to do a "lift" of the attache case above his head with the cabin crew looking on was out of the question.
What Dexter wanted to discover before any pounce was made was simply this: who was Letizia Arenal and who was Papa? WINTER was loosening its grip on Washington when Cal Dexter returned at the beginning of March. The forests cloaking those parts of Virginia and Maryland next to the capital were about to clothe themselves in a haze of green.
From the Kapoor yard south of Goa, a message had come from McGregor, who was still sweating it out among the stench of toxic chemicals and malarial heat. The two grain ships were close to their transformation. They would be ready for handover in their new role in May, he said.
He presumed their new role would be what he had been told. This was that a mega-wealthy American consortium wished to enter the treasure-hunting world with two ships equipped for deep-sea diving and wreck recovery. The accommodation would be for the divers and surface crew, the workshops for the servicing of their rigs and the large hold for a small spotter helicopter. It was all very plausible; it was just not true.
The final completion of the transformation from grain merchant to Q-ship would take place at sea. That was when heavily armed marine commandos would fill the berths, and the workshop/ armories would contain some seriously dangerous kit. He was told he was doing a great job, and the two merchant marine crews would fly in at handover.
The paperwork was long since in place, should anyone search. The former ships had disappeared, and the two about to sail were the reconditioned MV Chesapeake and the MV Balmoral. They were owned by a company based in a law office in Aruba, flew the (convenience) flag of that tiny island and would be chartered to carry grain from the wheat-rich north to the hungry south. Their real ownership and purpose were invisible.
The laboratories of the FBI had produced a perfect DNA profile of the young woman in Madrid who had handled the coffee cup in the Villa Real. Cal Dexter had no doubt that she was Colombian, already confirmed by Inspector Ortega. But there were hundreds of Colombian youngsters studying in Madrid. What Dexter craved was a matcher to that DNA.
In theory, at least fifty percent of the DNA should have derived from the father, and he was convinced "Papa" was in Colombia. And who was he who could ask a major player in the cocaine world, albeit a "technical," to play postman for him? And why could he not use the mails? It was a long shot, but he put the request to Colonel Dos Santos, intelligence chief of the anti-drug division of the Policia Judicial. While waiting for a response, he made two quick journeys.
Off the northeast shore of the coast of Brazil is an obscure archipelago of twenty-one small islands of which the main one gives its name to the group: Fernando de Noronha. It is only ten kilometers by three and a half, its total area twenty-six square kilometers. The only town is Vila dos Remedios.
It was once a prison island like France's Devil's Island, and the thick native forests were cut down to prevent the prisoners building rafts to escape. Shrub and scrub replaced the trees. Some wealthy Brazilians had away-from-it-all holiday villas there, but it was the airfield that interested Dexter. Built in 1942 by the U.S. Army Air Force Transport Command, it would make a perfect site for a USAF unit operating Predator or Global Hawk drones, with their amazing capacity to loiter for hours aloft, looking down with cameras, radars and heat sensors. He flew in as a Canadian tourist resort developer, had a look, confirmed his suspicion and flew back out again. His second visit was to Colombia.
By 2009, President Uribe had effectively crushed the FARC terrorist movement which really specialized in kidnap and ransom demands. But his anti-cocaine efforts had been mainly offset by Don Diego Esteban and the mightily efficient cartel he had created.
In that year, he had offended his hard-left neighbors in both Venezuela and Bolivia by inviting American forces into Colombia to lend their superlative technology to help him. Facilities were offered at seven Colombian military bases. One of these was at Malambo, right on the northern coast by Barranquilla. Dexter went in as a serious defense writer with Pentagon approval.
Being in the country, he saw the chance to fly up to Bogota and meet the formidable Colonel Dos Santos. The U.S. Army ran him up to Barranquilla Airport, and he caught the shuttle up to the capital. Between the still-warm tropical coast to the city in the mountains, the temperature dropped twenty degrees.
Neither the chief of the American DEA operation nor the leader of the British SOCA team in Bogota knew who Dexter was or what the Cobra was preparing, but both had been advised, from their HQs on Army Navy Drive and the Albert Embankment, to cooperate. They all spoke fluent Spanish, and Dos Santos had perfect English. He was surprised when it was the stranger who mentioned a DNA sample that had been submitted a fortnight earlier.
"Strange that you should call at this moment," said the youthful and dynamic Colombian detective. "I got a match this morning."
His explanation of how the match was made was stranger than Dexter's arrival, which Dos Santos viewed as a mere coincidence. DNA technology had come late to Colombia due to the parsimony of governments prior to the presidency of Alvaro Uribe. He had increased the budgets.
But Dos Santos read feverishly every publication dealing with modern forensic technology. He had realized earlier than his colleagues that one day DNA would be an awesome weapon in identifying bodies, living and dead (and there were a lot of the latter). Even before his department's laboratories could cope, he had begun to collect samples as and when he could.
Five years earlier, a member of the Drug Squad's rogues' gallery had been in a car crash. The man had never been charged, never convicted, never imprisoned. Any New York civil rights lawyer would have had Dos Santos's badge for what he did.
He and his colleagues, long before the Don created the cartel, were convinced this man was a major career gangster. He had not been seen for years, and certainly had not even been heard of for two. If he was as big as they suspected he was, he would live constantly on the move, shifting from one disguise and safe house to another. He would communicate only by use-once-and-throw cell phones, of which he probably had fifty, constantly renewed after use.
What Dos Santos did was go to the hospital and steal the swabs that had been used on the crash victim's broken nose. When the technology caught up, the DNA was identified and filed. Fifty percent was in the sample sent from Washington with a request for help. He delved into a file and laid a photo on the desk.
The face was brutish, scarred, cruel. A broken nose, pebble eyes, buzz-cut gray hair. It had been taken over ten years earlier but "aged" to show how the man ought to look today.
"We are now convinced he is part of the Don's inner circle, the one whose agents pay off the corrupt officials abroad who help the cartel bring its product through the ports and airports of America and Europe. The ones you call the 'Rats.'"
"Can we find him?" asked the man from SOCA.
"No, or I would have already. He comes from Cartagena, and he is an old dog now. Old dogs do not like to move far from their comfort zone. But he lives under deep cover, invisible."
He turned to Dexter, the source of the mysterious DNA sample of a very close relative.
"You will never find him, senor. And if you did, he would probably kill you. And even if you took him, he would never break. He is hard as flint and twice as sharp. He never travels; he sends agents to do his work. And we understand the Don trusts him totally. I fear your sample is interesting but takes us nowhere."
Cal Dexter looked down at the impenetrable face of Roberto Cardenas, the man who controlled the Rat List. The loving papa of the girl in Madrid. IN THE extreme northeast of Brazil is a vast land of hills and valleys, a few high mountains and much jungle. But also there are enormous ranches of up to half a million acres, grassland well watered by the myriad streams running down from the sierras. Because of their size and remoteness, their estate houses are realistically reached only by air. As a result, they each have one airstrip and sometimes several.