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.
Cardenas had the animal instincts of shy game; he knew his forest, he could sense danger, he never failed to settle a score. He had only one weak point, and a lawyer whose too-regular visits to Madrid had been spotted by a computer surfer far away in Washington had exposed it. When Conchita, who had raised Letizia alone after they parted, died of cancer, Cardenas had got his daughter out of the nest of pit vipers, which was the world in which he was condemned to live because he knew no other.
He should have made a run for safety after the destruction of Eberhardt Milch in Hamburg. He knew it; his antennae did not let him down. He just refused. He hated a place called "abroad," and could run his division of bribed foreign officials only through a team of youngsters who moved like fish among the foreign coral. He could not do that and he knew it.
Like a jungle creature, he moved constantly from refuge to refuge, even in his own forest. He had fifty bolt-holes, mainly within the zone around Cartagena, and he bought use-and-throw prepaid cell phones like candies, never making more than one call before heaving the communicator into a river. He was so elusive that sometimes the cartel took a day or so to find him. And that was something the highly effective Colonel Dos Santos, head of intelligence in the anti-drug division of the Policia Judicial, could not do.
His bolt-holes tended to be working cottages, obscure, plainly furnished, even spartan. But there was one indulgence he cherished; he loved his TV. He had the best and newest model of plasma screen, the sharpest aerial dish, and they traveled with him.
He liked to sit with a six-pack of beer flicking through the satellite channels or screening movies on the DVD player below the screen. He loved the cartoons because Wile E. Coyote made him laugh, and he was not by nature a laughing man. He liked the cop dramas because he could deride the incompetence of the criminals, who were always caught, and the uselessness of the detectives, who would never have caught Roberto Cardenas.
And he loved one taped newscast that he played over and over again. It showed a lovely but haggard young woman on a pavement at Kennedy Airport. Sometimes he would freeze-frame and stare at it for half an hour. After what he had done to enable that clip of film, he knew that sooner or later someone would make a mistake. THE MISTAKE, when it came, was in Rotterdam, of all places. This very ancient Dutch city would hardly be recognized by any merchant who had lived there a hundred years ago or even a British Tommy who had marched through it in a welter of flowers and kisses in early 1945. Only the small Old Town still retained the elegant mansions of the eighteenth century, while the gigantic Euro port was modern, a second city of steel, glass, concrete, chrome, water and ships.
While most of the unloading of enormous quantities of oil to keep Europe functioning is accomplished at sea islands of pipes and pumps far out of reach of the city, Rotterdam's second specialty is its container port; not quite as large as Hamburg but just as modern and mechanized.
Dutch customs, working with the police and, in the time-honored phrase "acting upon information received," had exposed and arrested a senior customs officer by the name of Peter Hoogstraten.
He was clever, devious and intended to beat the charge. He knew what he had done and where he had banked the payoff money, or, more precisely, where the cartel had banked it for him. He intended to retire, and he intended to enjoy every penny of it. He had not the slightest intention of confessing or admitting a single thing. He intended to play his "civil rights" and his "human rights" down to the last card on the table. The only thing that worried him was how the authorities knew so much. Someone, somewhere, had blown him away; of that, he was certain.
Ultra-liberal though the Netherlands prides itself on being, it plays host to an enormous criminal underworld, and, perhaps because of the extreme permissiveness, a very large part of that underworld is in the hands of European foreigners and non-Europeans.
Hoogstraten worked primarily for one such gang, and they were Turks. He knew the rules of the cocaine trade. The product belonged to the cartel until it rolled out of the sea-container port onto the highways of the European Union. Then it belonged to the Turkish mafia, who had paid fifty percent up front, with fifty percent on delivery. A consignment intercepted by Dutch customs was going to hurt both parties.
The Turks would have to re-place their order, while refusing to pay any further money. But the Turks had customers who had also placed orders and demanded delivery. Hoogstraten's skill at clearing sea containers and other cargoes was invaluable and paid extremely well. He was only one asset in a procedure that, between Colombian jungle and Dutch dinner party, could easily have twenty layers of different participants, all needing to be paid a cut, but he was a crucial one.
The mistake occurred because of Chief Inspector Van der Merwe's private problem. He had been in the Royal Dutch Customs all his working life. He had joined the criminal investigation division within three years of entering the profession and had intercepted a mountain of contraband over the years. But the years had taken their toll. He had an enlarged prostate and drank far too much coffee, which exacerbated his weak bladder. It was the source of smothered grins among his younger colleagues, but, as a sufferer, he could not see the joke. Halfway through the sixth interrogation of Peter Hoogstraten, he simply had to go.
It should not have been a problem. He nodded to the colleague beside him that they would all take a break. The colleague intoned, "Interview suspended at…," and switched off the digital recording machine. Hoogstraten insisted he wanted a cigarette and that meant he had to go to the "Smoking Permitted" area.
Political correctness forbade it, but civil rights allowed it. Van der Merwe longed for his retirement to the country house outside Groningen, with his beloved vegetable garden and orchard, where he could do what he damn well liked for the rest of his life. All three men rose.
Van der Merwe turned, and the tail of his jacket disturbed the file that lay in front of him on the table. The buff file turned ninety degrees, and a paper inside peeked out. It had a column of figures on it. In a second it was back inside the folder, but Hoogstraten had seen it. He recognized the figures. They were from his bank account in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Nothing crossed his face, but a light came on inside his head. The swine had penetrated banking secrecy details. Apart from him, only two sources could know those figures and which bank, half of whose name had been showing for a fraction of a second. One source was the bank itself; the other was the cartel who filled that account. He doubted it was the bank, unless the American DEA had broken through the computer firewalls protecting the accounts.