F Paul Wilson - Novel 04 (11 page)

“Manajate!” Carlos
muttered as he hung up and swiveled toward Alien Gold. “Our friend is
angry.”

“I’d say he’s got
a damn good right to be,” Gold said. “It’s inexcusable. We
should have been told.” He shrugged. “Could be worse, though. She
could be a diabetic. Then MacLaglen would have to learn how to give insulin
injections.”

Gold was right: It could be worse
and it was inexcusable. Bad intelligence could ruin everything. Carlos wished
he could mete out suitable punishment to the man responsible, but that was not
possible—not to someone so high in the United States government.

“MacLaglen is arriving later
to pick up his second installment. Have the cash ready.”

“Sure thing,” Gold
said, making a note in his everpresent scratch pad.

“How many more
installments?”

“One.”

Gold whistled. “He’ll
need a wheelbarrow to cart that one out in cash.”

“He won’t see a penny
of it until this is all over.”

“Come on, Carlos. What’s
this kidnapping all about? What’s our goal here?”

“All in good time,
Alien.” He wondered if he’d ever tell him that the goal was to see
President Thomas Winston either dead or out of office.

Carlos sighed and leaned back in
his chair. He pressed a button to start the automated low-back massage. Heat
and gentle, padded pistons began to ease his perpetual backache. Ah, good.

He wished he didn’t have to
shoulder this entire burden himself, but it was far too sensitive to entrust to
anyone else, even Alien.

I should have refused, he thought.
I should have kept my mouth shut when I heard about Thomas Winston’s
legalization plans.

But how could he have kept silent?
What threatened the drug trade threatened him. And threatened la compania even
more.

If only he weren’t El
Mediador.

He’d earned that title after
the 1981 summit at Hacienda Veracruz.

Carlos had impressed Jorge Ochoa at
that meeting—enough so that El Gordo called on him whenever la compania
needed someone to quell the all too-frequent flare-ups between rival subgroups.

He became El Mediador—the top
negotiator for la compania. He dealt with the low-down and high-up. He arranged
with cara de Piña Noriega to set up cocaine labs in the jungles of
southern Panama. Later he was paying the Sandanistas for the use of their
airfields to refuel la compania’s cocaine-loaded planes. All along he
took his fee in product, which he sold off through his own network in Miami.
Life was good.

But then the so-called War of the
Cartels broke out in 1988, and nothing could stop the bloodshed. Carlos tried
to get the message into their thick heads that there were enough billions to go
around, but no one was listening. His old friend Pablo Escobar went crazy,
declaring war on the rival Cali cartel, and on the Colombian govern ment
itself. Blood quite literally flowed in the streets of Medellm.

Carlos Salinas watched the carnage
with growing dismay. He had a new wife then, the beautiful Maria, and he wished
to keep her out of the line of fire. But what else did he know? He decided to
trade on his reputation as El Mediador by going into an ancillary service.

But he needed guidance. When he
learned of a young man named Alien Gold, fresh out of the Wharton MBA program,
who’d been arrested in a cocaine sting operation, Carlos got him off and
hired him. Through various fronts set up by Gold, Carlos began investing
heavily in the stocks of small independent banks up and down the East Coast.
When he gained controlling interests, he began maneuvering his own people onto
the boards of directors.

The best move he’d ever made.
Even while the war raged, the white powder flowed unabated—as did the
profits. And all that tainted money needed sanitizing. Who better to trust than
El Mediador, Carlos Salinas? And even after the Cali compania eclipsed Medellin,
the negotiating skills of Carlos Salinas remained in demand.

In 1992, Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela,
a Cali leader, retained his services to help NAFTA get through Congress. Carlos
moved to the Washington area and made sure money from the Cali compania got
into the right pockets. Of course, he took his cut, and pocketed a bonus when
the bill was signed into law.

Free trade… it was wonderful.
No more need for offshore air strips and risky flights across the border. Now
the Mexicans were moving truckloads of Colombian product into Texas every day.

And along the way Carlos Salinas
discovered that Washington was much more convenient than Miami as a center of
operations for his banking business, especially after all the high-placed
friends he’d made here during the NAFTA legislative battles.

Life got better. The landscape of
the cocaine trade was changing yearly, but so what? The cocaine princes came
and went—Pablo Escobar was dead, and most of the leaders of the Cali
compania were in jail—but Carlos Salinas remained. Did the jailings and
killings affect the trade? Not by an ounce. The only result was the
consolidation of the power of the Colombian companias into fewer
hands—mostly into Emilio Rojas’s—but no matter. As long as
drugs remained illegal, the profits would need laundering. And Carlos was here
to help… for a cut.

But there would be no cut for this
service. Instead he’d been offered a simple flat fee for stopping
President Winston’s plan: one billion dollars.

And if he succeeded,
he’d‘be more than mindnumbingly rich. He’d be a legend. If he
succeeded.

No, don’t think
if—think when. Because if he didn’t succeed…

Better not to think about that.
Better to think about how this opportunity to become a legend had dropped into
his lap exactly ten weeks ago when he received the first of a series of
anonymous calls. The caller used a voice distorter, but Carlos eventually
learned who he was. And was shocked. This was a man no amount of money could
have bought, yet he was giving him information about the president’s plan.

At first Carlos did not believe
him. Legalize drugs? All drugs? Impossible… unthinkable! Never happen.
Had to be a trick, part of some weird scheme to entrap him.

He passed the story—along
with his misgivings—to Emilio Rojas, the current head of the Cali
compania.

Rojas scoffed at first, but he
began making inquiries, tapping la Campania’s many sources, even in the
White House itself.

And Rojas learned it was true. Not
just marijuana and the occasional mushroom—all drugs. Cocaine included.

How they’d all laughed back
then, thinking what did it matter what this loco president wanted, the American
people would never accept it. But then as more information flowed in from
Carlos’s big shot source, la compania began serious research. What they
learned scared the living mierda out of them. Emilio Rojas himself made a trip
to the United States to meet with Carlos. Emilio came here.

Carlos remembered sitting in this
very room, just the two of them, and listening with a sick feeling in his gut
as Rojas told him how, with a plan promising lower crime rates and lower taxes,
backed by support from the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and the tobacco
states, this Thomas Winston just might do it. Not total decriminalization,
perhaps, but a beginning that would eventually finish most antidrug laws. And
where America went, the rest of the world would surely follow.

Rojas admitted that for a while he
and la compania had been panicked. But when they calmed themselves, they set
about making plans. They examined every possibility. No cost was too great. How
could it be? With billions of dollars coming in every month, they would spend
any amount necessary.

Although Rojas had tried to appear
calm and confident, Carlos could sense his fear, his rage. This was not some
little brawl for a bigger piece of the market—this was a war for their
very lives. This upstart gringo, this Thomas Winston, could wipe out their
global empire with the stroke of a pen.

Carlos agreed that he had to be
stopped. But how?

A bullet was the first thought, but
that was discarded immediately. Assassination would make a martyr out of
Winston—the last thing they wanted. They could hear the speeches: A
heroic president has been shot down by the evil drug lords. We must carry his
brave plan forward and put an end to these criminals so powerful and arrogant
that they will kill our president to preserve their profits! Do not let the
drug lords get their way! Honor the slain president’s commitment!
Legalize drugs now!

No… a martyred President
Winston would be an even more formidable enemy than a live and healthy one.
They had to find a way that would look like an accident—or his own fault.

La compania peered into
Winston’s past with a microscope and found many instances of youthful
wildness, but nothing that would discredit or disgrace him. It had looked
hopeless until… until Carlos’s mystery source came through with a
bit of history that Winston had thought he’d destroyed. Some U.S. agency
had unearthed it in a background check during his first run for office and
filed it away.

Carlos had passed it on, attaching
little importance to it. But it had proved to be very important.

And so the two of them had sat here
in this very safe room and devised a wonderful and terrible plan…

“It’s about drug
decriminalization, isn’t it?” Gold said.

Carlos bolted from his reverie.
“What do you mean?”

“The kidnapping. You’ve
had it poised to go for weeks. And then as soon as the President speaks last
night, boom!—you’re on the phone to MacLaglen. There’s got to
be a connection.”

Was I that obvious? Carlos wondered
as he hoisted his bulk out of the chair and waddled around the office. Or was
Gold simply too bright? That was why Carlos had brought him in.

He knew Alien would not be shocked
by a plan against his President, but the fewer who knew, the better. An old
paisa saying went: Three can keep a secret—if two are dead.

He stopped before a framed
autographed photo of Richard Nixon. It was inscribed to someone else, but that
didn’t matter. The man was what mattered.

“I am not worried about a
pipsqueak like Thomas Winston. He has no courage.” He pointed to
Nixon’s photo. “How does he have the gall to sit in the same office
as this man? Here was a president!”

“Nixon?” Gold said, his
voice jumping an octave. “He was a jerk.”

Carlos turned as quickly as his
girth would allow and pointed his finger in Gold’s face.

“When you speak of this man,
you will show respect. He is the president who first declared war on drugs in
1972. You would not be standing here if he had not. You would not be wearing
that fancy suit or driving that German sports car you prize so much. You owe
this man everything—him and all the presidents who continued the war after
him. They were men.” Carlos turned back to his photo of Nixon and stared
at that smiling face.

“Why can’t Thomas
Winston be like the others and follow in their footsteps? But no. He is a
cowardly hijo de puta who will ruin everything!”

“He hasn’t got a
chance,” Gold said. “The only thing he’ll ruin is his
political career.”

If only you knew what I know,
Carlos thought.

He returned to his desk and dropped
into his chair. The automatic massager was still on. He adjusted his back
against it for full effect but it gave him only minimal relief. He’d have
to call that Chinese girl—Tree Flower, or whatever her name was. She was
the only one who could soothe his pain. When she walked up and down his spine
with her little feet and massaged him with her toes, he found the closest thing
to heaven… next to his wife.

The thought of Maria saddened him.
He had met her on a visit home. A girl then, barely out of her teens, pure
paisa like him, no native blood, able to trace her family all the way back to
Spain. For the first time in his life Carlos had known love. He wooed her,
married her, and brought her to the United States. For ten years he knew bliss.

And then Maria began to change. She
became moody, unhappy. She moved to another bedroom. And then three weeks ago,
she rented a townhouse in Georgetown and moved out. Carlos had never thought he
could be so devastated by a woman…

But he hadn’t lost her. This
was a temporary thing. She’d come back. He could bring her back, of
course, but what good was that? He didn’t want to be her jailer. But he
was her watchdog, keeping her under round-the-clock surveillance.

“What is the latest from P
Street?” he asked Gold.

Gold shrugged. “She shops.
Goes to museums. Shops some more. Goes to the library. Shops. She’s
enrolled in a course at G.U. She—”

“What course?”

“Something in the
Women’s Studies program. I have the exact name in the report. Want me
to—?”

“Never mind.” He
sighed. “No other man?”

Alien shook his head. “Or
woman. It’s like she’s become some sort of female monk… with
an Amex card.”

Carlos knotted his fists in
frustration. La perra! He did not understand her.

Yes, he did. He knew what the
problem was: the United States. She was being corrupted. Becoming…
American. He had to get her away from the talk shows and soap operas and
magazines that put crazy ideas into her head. He had to get her back
home—to Colombia— whether she liked it or not. When he was finished
with this business here, when he was a billionaire, he would build an estate
bigger than Jorge Ochoa’s Hacienda Weracruz, where he would raise magnificent
caballos de paso, just as Maria’s father had done. And there, back in her
homeland, she would regain her senses. She would become his Maria again.

But all that was dependent on
bringing down President Winston. Everything depended on getting rid of that
cabron.

Carlos picked up the TV remote. The
sixty-inch rear projection screen buzzed to life. He saw two vaguely familiar
politicians, one white, one black, standing behind a podium at what looked like
a press conference.