Valdez had brought two assistants with him. One was short but immensely broad and beefy, the other tall, skinny and pockmarked. They each carried a grip that went uninspected. All experts need their tools.
The Enforcer appeared an easy guest. He demanded a vehicle of his own and a suggestion for a good lunch restaurant out of town. Romero proposed the Mar Azul, out on the banks of the Mansoa behind Quinhamel, for its fresh lobster. He offered to drive his guests there personally, but Valdez waved away the proposal, took a map and left, with the beefy one at the wheel. They were away most of the day.
Romero was bemused. They did not seem interested in his foolproof procedures for cargo-reception and onward-transmission routes to North Africa and Europe.
On the second day, Valdez declared that as lunch by the river had been so splendid, they should all four repeat the outing. He mounted the SUV beside the beefy one, who replaced Romero's regular driver. Romero and Skinny took the rear seats.
The newcomers seemed to know the route well. They hardly referred to the map and drove unerringly through Quinhamel, the unofficial capital of the Papel tribe. The Papels had been bereft of influence since President Vieira, who was one of them, had been chopped to bits with machetes by the Army a year earlier. Since then, General Diallo, a Balanta, had been the dictator.
After the town, the signposted road to the restaurant left the main highway and went down a sandy track for another six miles. Halfway down, Valdez nodded to the side, and the beefy one swerved into an even smaller track toward an abandoned cashew farm. At this point, Romero began to plead.
"Be quiet, senor," said the Enforcer quietly. When he would not stop protesting his innocence, the skinny one drew a slim boning knife and held it under his jaw. He began to weep.
The farmhouse was little more than a shack, but it had a chair of sorts. Romero was too distressed to notice that someone had screwed its legs to the floor to stop it from rocking.
The zone chief 's interrogators were quite matter-of-fact and businesslike. Valdez did nothing but stare from his cherubic little face at the surrounding cashew trees, overgrown and unharvested. His assistants hauled Romero out of the SUV, into the farmhouse, stripped him to the waist and tied him to the chair. What followed took an hour.
The Animal started, because he enjoyed it, until the questioned one lost consciousness, then he handed over. His acolytes used smelling salts to restore consciousness, and after that Valdez simply asked the question. There was only one. What had Romero done with the stolen cargoes?
An hour later, it was almost over. The man in the chair had ceased to scream. His pulped lips uttered only a low moan in the form of a "No-o-o-o-o-o" when, after a brief pause, the two tormentors started again. The beefy one did the hitting, the skinny one the cutting. It was what they were best at.
Toward the end, Romero was unrecognizable. He had no ears, eyes or nose. All the knuckles were crushed and the nails removed. The chair sat in a pool of blood.
Valdez noticed something at his feet, stooped and threw it out through the open door into the eye-searing sunlight outside. In seconds, a mangy dog approached it. There was a dribble of white saliva around its jaws. It was rabid.
The Enforcer pulled an automatic, cocked it, drew a bead and fired once. The slug went through both hips. The foxlike creature uttered a shrill yelp and collapsed, its forepaws scratching for traction, the two rear legs useless. Valdez turned, holstering the gun.
"Finish him," he said mildly. "He did not do it." What was left of Romero died with a thrust from the boning knife through the heart.
The three men from Bogota did not try to hide what they had done. That task could be left to Romero's deputy, Carlos Sonora, who could now take over. The experience of clearing up would be salutary and a guarantee of future loyalty.
The three took off their splashed plastic raincoats and rolled them up. All were soaked in sweat. As they left, they were careful to step clear of the foaming muzzle of the dying dog. It lay snapping at thin air, still a yard short of the tidbit that had brought it from its lair. It was a human nose.
Escorted by Sonora, Paco Valdez paid a courtesy call on General Jalo Diallo, who received them in his office at Army HQ. Explaining that this was the custom of his people, Valdez brought a personal gift from Don Diego Esteban to his esteemed African colleague. It was an elaborate flower vase of finely turned native pottery and delicately hand-painted.
"For flowers," said Valdez, "so that when you look at them you can think of our profitable and comradely relationship."
Sonora translated into Portuguese. The skinny one fetched water from the en suite bathroom. The beefy one had brought a bunch of flowers. They made an attractive display. The general beamed. No one noticed that the vase accommodated remarkably little water, and the stalks of the flowers were rather short. Valdez noted the number of the desk telephone, one of the few in town that actually worked.
The next day was Sunday. The party from Bogota was about to leave. Sonora would drive them to the airport. Half a mile past Army HQ, Valdez ordered a halt. On his cell phone, operated by MTN, the one local service provider, used only by the elite, the whites and the Chinese, he called the desk phone in General Diallo's office.
It took a few minutes for the general to walk through from his adjacent residential suite to his office. When he answered, he was a yard from the vase. Valdez pressed the detonator in his hand.
The explosion brought down most of the building and reduced the office to brick rubble. Of the dictator, a few fragments were found and later taken back to Balanta territory for tribal burial among the spirits of the ancestors.
"You will need a new business partner," Valdez told Sonora on the road to the airport. "An honest one. The Don does not like thieves. See to it."
The Grumman was ready for takeoff, fully fueled. It passed north of the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha, where Sam noticed and reported it. The coup in West Africa made the BBC World Service TV news, but it was a reported item without video so it did not last long. A FEW DAYS EARLIER, there was another newscast that raised no eyebrows, but it was on CNN out of New York. Ordinarily the deportation from Kennedy of a young Colombian student back to her studies in Madrid after the dropping of charges against her in Brooklyn might not have rated coverage. But someone pulled strings somewhere, and a crew was sent.
There was a two-minute report on the evening news. By nine p.m. it had been discontinued on editorial grounds. But while it lasted, it showed the ICE car drawing up at international departures, and two marshals escorting a very pretty young woman with a subdued manner across the concourse until they disappeared through the security barrier, where the group was not stopped.
The soundtrack narrated simply that Ms. Arenal had been the victim of an attempt by a criminal baggage handler in Madrid to use her suitcase on a trip to New York as a vehicle for a kilogram of cocaine that had been discovered in a spot check at Kennedy several weeks earlier. The arrest and confession in Spain had exonerated the Colombian student, who had been freed to return to her fine arts course in Madrid.
It made no waves, but it was spotted and recorded in Colombia. After that, Roberto Cardenas replayed the segment frequently. It enabled him to see the daughter he had not set eyes on in years, and it reminded him of her mother, Conchita, who had been truly beautiful.
Unlike many of the top echelon of the cocaine trade, Cardenas had never developed the taste for ostentation and luxury. He had come from the gutters and fought his way up through the old cartels. He was one of the first to spot the rising star of Don Diego and realize the benefits of centralization and concentration. This is why the Don, convinced of his loyalty, had taken him into the newly formed Hermandad at an early stage.