Cocaine (17 page)

‘
My son…he has bad memories. I have these memories’. She tapped her head for emphasis. ‘You boys, you think you understand. But when your whole
life’
– she shouted the word – ‘is
mierda
, then you…you need to do bad things to make life good. You see what I say? The cocaine, is bad thing. Is drug. I know is drug. Juan Andres knows is drug.’

She patted the battered brown satchel that rested on her lap.

‘
One hundred twenty-two thousand dollar.’

Kieran I looked up, curious.

‘
We need this. This is call working capital…our funds. To sell the cocaine and charter a boat. We need money.’

Next to her feet was another bag, a nondescript black sports holdall similar to the one Kieran had. In fact, I think I had assumed it was Kieran’s, until that is, she opened it.

‘
This is Makarov’, she said holding up a dull metal pistol. ‘Russian. No serial numbers. You know how to use this?’

I shook my head. I looked at Kieran. His eyes gleamed.

‘
Cool.’

‘
Cool? Kieran?’

‘
Look English, it’s cool, OK? You wanna split a million bucks or dontya?’

‘
Can I hold it?’ I asked.

She passed it over to me and removed two more identical pistols from the bag.

‘
We have lots of ammunition’, said Juan Andres. ‘We must be prepared to deal with bad people. Very very bad people.’

I could imagine a camera panning away from us at that moment, from the terrace in the moonlight in the hidden valley in the middle of nowhere in Colombia. The camera would see three men holding pistols and an older woman passing out cartridges of bullets. We were hot, sweaty and probably caked in a residue of coca leaf and mud. Tomorrow, Mama Garcia had said, would be the day that we ran the plough over the whole twenty-acre goldmine, digging up the remains of the last crop. Then we would have a fire, a big fire, but only if the wind was blowing in the right direction. We did not want the smoke to drift out of the valley and the two miles to Villamaria, into the mayor’s office where he would be waiting, his perfectly-manicured hands resting on his imposing desk, for the next crop from the Garcia household of which he expected his usual fifty per cent share.

We had to destroy the evidence, we had to package the remaining cocaine. We had nearly eighty kilos. It was enough, said Juan Andres. We would mix it with something to increase the quantity to one hundred. One hundred plastic bags, each worth anywhere between thirty and forty thousand dollars each. Between three and four million dollars. It would take me at least ten, maybe fifteen years to earn half a million dollars, which was to be my cut. There were risks in life. Everything worth doing had a risk of failure attached. I weighed up my risk-profile now, just like I would be taught to do at the bank that was expecting me in four months’ time.
‘What a young enterprising man’
I could hear them say, chuckling so hard that their pin-stripe suits creased.
Sixteen weeks. I had sixteen weeks. ‘
Would have done the same in your shoes, Ryan.’
Yeah. Sure you would.

The camera had panned back so
far that we were now tiny little fireflies glowing in the dark. I could see the headlines:
‘Englishman jailed for cocaine smuggling
.’

Like a speck now, a tiny addition to the lights shining all over South America, burning brightly, lights to hatch plans by, lights to smoke by
, lights to burn by.

18

May 2007

Jack Wiseman looked rather smug the next time I saw him.

‘Is something wrong?’ I asked him, nestling into his spongy sofa with one of Jan’s Kit Kats.

‘No, George. Nothing’s wrong.’

I noticed that one of the computers was gone and that there were now two blank spaces on the walls. Two of Jan’s hideous oils, one of which was sitting in the back of the wardrobe of my apartment, had been given as placatory gifts. I wondered who else George had had to placate.

‘Business going well, Jack?’

‘Fine.’

He managed to look even smugger. The television was switched to
Bloomberg
and I could see the markets were having a bad day. The screen ticker flashed red every few seconds as a succession of corporate names made their way across, their ticker codes a mystery, their falling values evident. A bad day on the markets meant a good day for Jack and his fail-safe capital protection scheme.

‘You must be very busy at the moment’, I ventured.

‘Just going out dear’, I heard Jan say. ‘Put some diesel in the minivan.’

‘Alright, love. Don’t be long.’

I heard the door click shut and I removed the Taser from my jacket pocket.

It was small and light and Jack barely had a chance to ask what it was or even open his mouth before I depressed the trigger and fired five hundred volts into him. The little grips from the wires that shot out and attached themselves to his skin burned into his flesh, but he did not make a sound as he slumped onto the sofa, trembling like a fish pulled out of a river, gills flapping, gasping for life.

I
slipped on a pair of surgical gloves, went straight to the desk and took his key. I unlocked the filing cabinet and looked down at the orderly files. Jack Wiseman had received close to a million pounds sterling from a combination of Bill the Australian, Arabella and the Germans. The money was held in a Luxembourg account under the name ‘North Pole Holdings S.A.’. The apartment was held in the name of ‘North Pole Property S.A.’, a simple special-purpose offshore vehicle. I wondered if Jan did the filing because it was so neat. There was an invoice for two tickets to Barbados, via Heathrow, although I could not find the tickets themselves. I left the invoice in a prominent position on the desk. I would need it later.

I looked round when I heard a crash. Jack had fallen onto the floor and he must have cracked his head on the coffee table because a tiny trickle of blood was staining the Persian rug from his right temple. He was unconscious. I felt sorry for Jan but it was their own fault. If one left a tiny imprint then one could vanish without anyone knowing. And when it was discovered that Jack and Jan had ripped off another set of gullible investors it would be assumed that they had simply fled to Barbados. The account had one million four hundred and sixty thousand pounds. Like most of Jack’s life, it was run over the internet. I would have to set up a transfer into one of my numbered accounts. I could find out Jack’s passwords via a cookie search and by raiding his hard-drive.

The bodies would dissolve quickly in the solution I had prepared. Even bone and teeth.
No-one would know. I would rent the apartment from the dormant Luxembourg company to which I would pay no rent. Stephanie would live there. My environment would be perfectly controlled again. We would wait for Carlos together and we would have the necessary working capital.

I heard the key turn in the lock and I waited until I could see the white
s of Jan’s eyes.

19

November 1990

I read about the fire in the newspaper on our way to Cartagena.

‘
At approximately nine o’clock yesterday morning the municipal fire truck arrived at the farmhouse to quell the roaring blaze, which it is thought was sparked by a faulty electrical circuit in the garage. The owners of the property, a local family, the Garcias, much respected, do not appear to have been at the property at the time. There is speculation that what could be an act of arson is the result of a family grudge, one that claimed Mr Garcia’s life twenty-four years ago. The Mayor of Villamaria, Guillermo Baron, expressed outrage…’

Mama Garcia started to laugh.

‘
Ironico
.’

‘
You OK?’

‘
We have the insurance. Is same as seventy thousand dollars.’

Suddenly I saw the funny side.
We were up front in the Jeep Cherokee pulling Juan Andres and Kieran in the four-berth Marauder 400, the new model that she’d bought for the equivalent of four thousand dollars after Juan Andres died.

‘
Insurance’, she said to me. ‘Always,
Ryyy-an
. Remember.’

‘
Si, claro.
’

She laughed some more.

‘
You like our holiday?’

‘
It’s the strangest holiday I’ve ever been on, Mrs Garcia.’

She was very cheerful for a woman who had
just burned down her own house, destroyed her livelihood and then set off with two gringos in a jeep and a caravan for a ‘holiday’ on the north coast. We had driven all night, taking the main route through the centre, past Bogota and onwards towards Cartagena. We were packing three pistols, an Uzi sub-machine gun, enough rounds to take on an army, one hundred kilos of eighty per cent pure cocaine which Juan Andres said counted simply as ‘pure’, and about one hundred and forty thousand dollars in cash, all strategically hidden in the caravan. We even had the defibrillator.

‘
An old woman’s last wish’, she said, her smile fading now, ‘to see the sea. To feel the salt on my face.’

‘
And the official story is that we’re just here for the ride?’

‘
Si
. You just here for the ride.’

Her enthusiasm and confidence
were infectious and I was glad to surf on her Prozac-like wave in order to stop darker thoughts from swamping me. She did not seem to care that her son was meant to be dead, or that if we were stopped at any point we might have to use the Uzi or the Makarovs. She was just an old lady from Villamaria sitting in a jeep with a caravan in the rear-view mirror.

Juan Andres did most of the driving and Kieran and I slept in two small but surprisingly comfortable single beds in the
Marauder
. By the time we awoke the sun was streaking through the flimsy curtains and we had passed by Medellin, Bello, Turbo and Monterio. We were the closest I had ever been to Panama as the sea suddenly appeared to our left, which we followed for forty miles until we reached the outer limits of our destination, Cartagena, on the north-western tip of Colombia, looking out to Panama to the West and the Caribbean Sea to the North.

After skirting round the old town and the old fortified city we
found a spot for the caravan and the jeep in a parking lot filled with rental cars. It was about noon and Juan Andres and Mama Garcia said that they would stay in the caravan. Its bulky lines did not look out of place against the back-drop of mobile homes and yachts. The water, our escape route, was close enough to touch.

‘You go’, said Mama Garcia. ‘Walk.’

‘But what do we
do
?’

‘You sit on the beach and wait for guys to turn up selling tours to Rosario Island.’

‘What?’

‘Then you ask about who is good to charter a yacht, fifteen metre. Say you have captain.’

‘Who’s the captain?’

‘Juan Andres.’

‘They’re gonna want one hell of a deposit.’

‘You say you want to visit
Isla Rosario
. You say you want to cruise the Caribbean coast. You say, you say two weeks. We let them keep caravan and Jeep as collateral.’