Cardenas thought back to the report from Luz on the advice of Barrow. Twenty years, an exemplary sentence. No viable defense, an open-and-shut case, no Domingo de Vega to say it was all his idea.
While Cardenas was thinking, Cal Dexter reached with his right hand to scratch his chest. For a second, his fingers went behind his jacket lapel. Cardenas came forward, ready to draw his hidden Glock. Mr. Smith smiled apologetically.
"Mosquitoes," he said. "They will not leave me alone."
Cardenas was not interested. He relaxed as the right hand came out. He would have been less relaxed had he known the fingertips had touched a sensitive Go button on a wafer-thin transmitter clipped to the inside pocket.
"What do you want, gringo?"
"Well," said Dexter, impervious to the rudeness of the address.
"Unless there is an intervention, the people behind me cannot stop the justice machine. Not in New York. It cannot be bought and it cannot be diverted. Soon, even the mercy of keeping Letizia out of harm's way in Brooklyn will have to be terminated."
"She is innocent. You know that, I know that. You want money? I will make you rich for life. Get her out of there. I want her back."
"Of course. But, as I say, I am but a pawn. Perhaps there is a way."
"Tell me."
"If the UDYCO in Madrid were to discover a corrupt baggage handler and he were to give a full and witnessed confession that he chose a suitcase at random after the usual security checks and inserted the cocaine to be retrieved by a colleague in New York, then your lawyer could ask for an emergency hearing. It would be hard for a New York judge not to drop the case. To go on would be to refuse to believe our Spanish friends across the Atlantic. I honestly believe that is the only way."
There was a low rumble, as if storm clouds were gathering out of a blue sky.
"This… baggage handler. He could be discovered and forced to confess?"
"He might. It depends on you, Senor Cardenas."
The rumble grew louder. It separated into a rhythmic whump-whump. Cardenas repeated his demand.
"What do you want, gringo?"
"I think we both know that. You want a swap? That is it. What you have in return for Letizia."
He rose, tossed a small pasteboard card to the carpet, walked through the patio doors and turned left. The snaking steel-cord ladder came around the corner of the hotel roof, flailing in the downdraft.
He jumped to the balustrade, thought, I'm too goddamn old for this, and leapt at the rungs. He could sense above the roar of the rotors that Cardenas was coming out onto the terrace behind him. He waited for the bullet in the back, but it never came. At any rate, not in time. If Cardenas fired, Dexter would not have heard it. He felt the rungs bite into his palms, and the man above leaned back hard and the Black Hawk went up like a rocket.
Seconds later, he was lowered to the sandy beach just beyond the walls of the Santa Clara. The Black Hawk settled as two or three dog walkers gawped; he ducked into the crew door, and the helicopter rose again. Twenty minutes later, he was back inside the base. DON DIEGO ESTEBAN prided himself on running the Hermandad, the supreme cocaine cartel, like one of the most successful corporations on the planet. He even indulged in the conceit that the governing authority was the board of directors rather than himself alone, even though that was palpably not true. Despite the huge inconvenience to his colleagues of spending two days dodging the tailing agents of Colonel Dos Santos, he insisted on quarterly meetings.
It was his custom to name, by personal emissary only, the hacienda, one of fifteen he owned, where the conclave would take place, and he expected his colleagues to arrive un-followed. The days of Pablo Escobar, when half the police were in the cartel'spocket, were long gone. Colonel Dos Santos was an unbribable attack dog, and the Don both respected and loathed him for it.
His summer meeting he always held at the end of June. He convened his six colleagues, omitting only the Enforcer, Paco Valdez, El Animal, who was summoned only when there were matters of internal discipline to be attended to. That time, there were none.
The Don listened with approval to reports on increased production from the peasants but without any rise in price. The production chief, Emilio Sanchez, assured him enough pasta base could be grown and bought in to meet any needs from other branches of the cartel.
Rodrigo Perez was able to assure him that internal thievery of the product prior to export was down to a reduced percentage, thanks to several hideous examples that had been made of those who thought they could cheat the cartel. The private army, mainly recruited from the jungle-living former terrorist groups known as FARC, was in good order.
Don Diego, playing the benign host, personally refilled Perez's wineglass, a signal honor.
Julio Luz, the lawyer/banker who had been completely unable to make eye contact with Roberto Cardenas, reported that the ten banks around the world who helped him launder billions of euros and dollars were content to continue and had not been penetrated or even suspected by the forces of banking regulation.
Jose-Maria Largo had even better news on the merchandising front. Appetite in the two target zones, the USA and Europe, was now climbing to unprecedented levels. The forty gangs and sub-mafias who were the clients of the cartel had placed even larger orders.
Two big gangs, in Spain and Britain, had been rounded up en masse, tried, sentenced and were out of the field. They had been smoothly replaced by eager newcomers. Demand would be at record levels for the coming year. Heads leaned forward as he produced his figures. He would need a minimum of three hundred tons of pure delivered intact to the handover points on each continent.
That put the focus on the two men whose job it was to guarantee those arrivals. It was probably a mistake to snub Roberto Cardenas, whose international network of on-the-payroll officials in airports, docks and customs sheds across both continents was crucial. The Don simply did not like the man. He gave the star role to Alfredo Suarez, the maestro of transportation from Colombian source to northern buyer. Suarez preened like a peacock, and made his servility to the Don plain.
"Given what we have all heard, I have no doubt that the six-hundred-ton delivery figure can be met. If our friend Emilio can produce eight hundred tons, we have a twenty-five percent margin for loss by interception, confiscation, theft or loss at sea. I have never lost anything like that percentage.
"We have over one hundred ships served by more than a thousand small boats. Some of our dedicated ships are big freighters, taking on our cargoes at sea and being relieved of them before arrival. Others take the cargo from dockside to dockside, assisted at both ends by officials on the payroll of our friend here, Roberto.
"Some of these carry sea containers, now used worldwide for freight of every kind and description, including ours. Others in the same group use secret compartments created by the clever little welder of Cartagena who died a few months ago. His name escapes me."
"Cortez," growled Cardenas, who came from that city. "His name was Cortez."
"Precisely. Well, whatever. Then there are the smaller craft, tramp steamers, fishing boats, private yachts. Between them, they carry and land almost a hundred tons a year. And finally we have our fifty-plus freelance pilots who fly and land or fly and drop.
"Some fly into Mexico to hand over to our Mexican friends, who bring the cargoes over the U.S. border in the north. Others go direct to one of the million creeks and bays along the southern coast of the U.S. The third category flies across to West Africa."
"Are there any innovations since last year?" asked Don Diego. "We were not amused by the fate of our fleet of submarines. A massive expenditure, all lost."
Suarez swallowed. He recalled what had happened to his predecessor who had backed a policy of submersibles and an army of one-journey mules. The Colombian Navy had traced and destroyed the subs; the new X-ray machines being deployed across both target continents were reducing successful in-stomach shipments to under fifty percent.