Cat looked at the familiar figure in tennis clothes, posing with a group of men and women similarly dressed. He recognized three or four well-known movie actors.
“The FBI ran this down overnight and faxed it to us. It was taken at a celebrity tennis tournament in Los Angeles five years ago. His name is Stanton Michael Prince. He ran a chain of fancy car washes around L.A. called Stan’s Detailers that were a front for cocaine dealing. The DEA busted him about a month after the photograph was taken; he jumped a two-million-dollar bail and hasn’t been seen since, not in the States, anyway. He just walked away from a very successful legitimate business, which the government took. He could afford to. Apparently, he was a wholesaler as well as a retailer. He must have been raking it in for a long time. He had no previous record and wasn’t openly consorting with any dirty people; it made him hard to nail.”
Bergman shuffled through the papers again and came up with a sheet. “The guy has an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is some piece of work. We’re still checking on the Anaconda Company, but so far it stands up as legit. Still, if this guy has anything to do with it, it ain’t legit.”
“Well, great,” Cat said, “you know who he is. Now what?”
Bergman sighed again. “We’re working on it.”
Cat gestured around the office. “I can see that, but I can also see from the way you’re all behaving that something is wrong. What is it?”
Hedger broke in. “What we’ve got here is a great big bureaucratic fuck-up.”
“What sort of fuck-up?”
Hedger looked wearily at Bergman and nodded. “You may as well tell him. Maybe it’ll get him off our backs.”
Cat looked at Bergman expectantly. “Well?”
“All right,” Bergman said, throwing up his hands, “but, again, this is strictly confidential.”
“Of course.”
“I told you we’d had reports of this big new factory in the Trapezoid.”
“Yeah, I remember that as if it were yesterday.”
“Well, it was more than just reports; we’re sure of it.”
“I figured you were.”
“The outfit — and your friend Prince may very well be the head guy — is holding a sort of international sales conference. Apparently fifty or so people have been invited from the States, Europe, and the Far East who are to be new distributors of cocaine, or maybe franchisees is a better word. They’re setting up franchises, just like McDonald’s.”
“And you know when this is?”
“Yes, it’s day after tomorrow.”
“You’re going to go in there and arrest them all, then?”
Bergman smiled sadly. “We’d like nothing better.”
“You mean that, for some reason, you can’t?”
“A couple of reasons, actually. First of all, we don’t know where the factory is located.”
“But you said—”
“Yeah, it’s in the Trapezoid. I don’t think you realize from the map just how big that is. We’re talking about thousands of square miles of jungle. It’s concealed from aerial observation by a canopy of trees and, of course, camouflage, and it would take an army years to cover it all on the ground. There’s nothing down there but a few Indians.”
“Where did you get the information you have?” Cat asked.
“From several sources, but mainly from one middle-level government official who got bought by the outfit, but didn’t stay bought.”
“Doesn’t he know where the place is?”
“No, he’s never been there. Neither has any other of our informants. However, we had worked out a way to find out where it is.”
“Had worked out?”
“Yeah. By starting at the end of the cocaine chain, in the States. The DEA busted a lawyer in Miami who’d been instrumental in laundering money and couldn’t stand the thought of going to jail, so he spilled a few beans. By keeping him on a short string, we’ve managed to get one of our people, well, sort of... accredited to this conference.” Bergman stopped and laughed. “Jesus, it sounds like we’re talking about the United Nations instead of a drug operation, doesn’t it?”
Cat brightened. “You mean you’re going to have a man on the spot, undercover?”
Gomez spoke up. “The DEA has sent us a guy — somebody who’s unknown in the drug trade, a fresh face. We couldn’t send any of the people who are stationed here; there was too great a chance of their being recognized. But this new guy is perfect, and we’ve even managed to build him a cover that should hold, if they don’t look at him too hard. You understand, this has all happened in just the past three or four days. We’re playing catch-up just as fast as we can.”
“And that’s our problem,” Bergman said. “It takes time to mount an operation like this, to get the paperwork done, to get it funded. Johnny Gomez and his people really came through for us, getting this guy down here on such short notice, and Hedger’s people managed the cover, but funding is another matter.”
“Funding?” Cat was puzzled. “You said you have a budget.”
“Well, sure, we do. But remember, the Narcotics Assistance Unit isn’t an operational outfit. The Colombians are meant to do all the work, and they’ve been moving very quickly to get a military operation mounted against this new factory, when we find it. But the American end of it, the undercover man, doesn’t come out of Colombian funds, and, strictly speaking, this isn’t a DEA operation, either, so their budget can’t cover it. Neither can Hedger’s.”
“I’m beginning to see your problem with the bureaucracy,” Cat said, “but just how expensive can bringing in one man be?”
Bergman was beginning to look embarrassed. “Well, it’s not exactly bringing him in that we can’t fund — I mean, the guy’s a DEA agent, and he’s on salary. It’s the franchise fee.”
“The what?”
“Remember, this outfit is, in effect, selling franchises.”
“Like McDonald’s.”
“Right. And when you want to open a McDonald’s restaurant, you have to buy in; you have to pay the company a franchise fee.”
“Okay, so how much is the franchise fee?”
“A million dollars.”
Cat stared at Bergman. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You have an opportunity to break up what sounds like the biggest drug operation in the entire universe, you’ve got an undercover agent in Bogotá, ready and waiting to go in, and you can’t do it because all of you together — the combined State Department, Drug Enforcement Agency, and Central Intelligence Agency can’t come up with a million bucks?”
Bergman, Hedger, and Gomez all looked sheepish. “That’s essentially it,” Bergman said. “I know it sounds crazy, when you hear about the billions in the federal budget, but it takes a great deal of doing to get any government agency to part with that much actual cash for any operation, especially if they don’t know they’ll get it back. If we were the DEA in Miami, we could use confiscated drug money, just turn it around and feed it back into an operation. But we’re not, and the notion of a million bucks in hundred-dollar bills scares the shit out of any federal employee. Nobody is going to sign for it; nobody wants to be held accountable.”
For a moment Cat stared at the wall in bemused silence, trying not to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. Then he turned back to Bergman. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “You say this DEA undercover agent is a fresh face. Does that mean he’s new on the job?”
Gomez nodded. “Yeah, he’s only been with the agency for a couple of weeks, but he has a military background.” Then he added defensively, “Look, the guy doesn’t have to be James Bond; he just goes in there with the money, buys his franchise, lets us know where the factory is, then gets the hell out.”