Plausible Denial (8 page)

Santos
glanced at Mac and nodded.

“Okay,
you’re right, of course,” said Mac. “You’ve figured it out. We’re planning on getting
into to a shipment of heroin bricks and salting it with something that will
make the users never want to buy any of the druggie’s shit again.”

Barker
nodded, “Yep, figured.”

 “And
if they get sick enough, they will turn on the pushers and eventually on the
drug lords themselves—right up the ladder until the entire network is
disrupted. That’s our goal.”

“Yep,
well then, ricin’s what y’all need.” Barker took a theatrical sip of his
coffee. “Untraceable and easy to make. Only problem is you’ll kill anyone who
ingests even a tiny bit of it. But that’ll sure as hell get their attention.”

“And
Tom seemed okay with that?” asked Mac.

“Yep,
suspect so.”

Culler
looked over at Mac. “Can’t say as I disagree with him, and if the goal is to
get their attention, that’s the way to do it.”

“If
we decide to go that route, how would you get it into the heroin bricks?” asked
Mac.

“Well,
I’d probably use a liquid form and either pour it on the bricks and let it soak
in or, if they’re wrapped up in paper or something, y’all could use a syringe
and inject the ricin through the packing to the center of the brick. The heroin
would absorb the ricin nicely.”

Barker
scratched his head. “Heroin bricks are much like cocaine bricks. They’re a
chalky substance and weigh about a kilo each when they come out of the hills.
The bricks are actually made up of morphine hydrochloride, a fine white powder
that they press and dry in the sun before they take it out for more processing
where they have real chemists. That’d be Hong Kong in that part of the world.”

Culler
and Mac exchanged glances. Anyone using the tainted heroin would die, and many
of the users would be innocent people. Well, maybe not so innocent. They were
contributing to the drug trade, but they weren’t actually profiting from the
drug trade. They were simply users. Could they afford this kind of collateral
damage, and if not, was there an alternative—one that would still allow the
operation to succeed? They were on the horns of a dilemma.

Mac
broke the silence. “I don’t know if we can afford to do this. We’ll be killing
a lot of innocent people. Isn’t there a better alternative?”

“None
that I can see.” Barker was leaning over the bar toward them, studying his
nearly empty coffee cup. “Not if y’all want to succeed in this.”

“You
know my thoughts on the subject,” Culler said to Mac. “This is war and in war
you’ve got to accept some collateral damage, and anyone dumb enough to be
shooting up on heroin doesn’t deserve to live anyway.”

“Okay,
okay,” said Mac. “Tell you what. Bill, go ahead and mix up a batch of ricin for
us. Fill up a dozen or so syringes for injection, so we can put a couple cc’s
into each kilo brick. Then put’em into our shipment with the other stuff. We
can decide later whether to use them or not.”

“I
can certainly do that. But I’d better dilute the ricin a bit so it can absorb
better into the bricks. If we put only a couple of cc’s into each brick, it
might not saturate enough of the brick to do the job. How about I make up about
fifty syringes of about ten cc’s each?  If you inject five cc’s into each
brick in two or three places, it should do the trick nicely and be totally
unnoticeable. After all, the shit is going to have to go through another
refining process anyway when it gets to the chemists. That ought to spread out
the ricin really good.”

Mac
looked over at the unperturbed Santos and said, “Okay, let’s go with it. Go
ahead and assemble all of the gear and the ricin and get it ready for shipment
to your contact in Thailand. Now we’ve got to hit the road.”

“Don’t
ya want to shoot them weapons and check out the night vision gear.” Barker was
clearly disappointed.

“I’m
sure everything will work just as advertised. We should get back,” said Mac.

Barker
called to Ruth who was watching TV in another room. She joined them at the bar
and they said their goodbyes.

Culler
and Mac spoke very little on the drive back to Ft. Lauderdale. Culler dozed in
the passenger seat listening to his music on his I-Pod, while Mac was left
alone with his thoughts. Knowing Maggie would not approve of what was being
planned, he was not looking forward to the inevitable confrontation.

Chapter Eighteen

I
t
was after midnight when they got back home to Ft. Lauderdale. Mac dropped off Culler
at his apartment and drove east toward home. He entered the access code at the
entrance of a new gated community a few blocks from the ocean and drove through
the gates down a tree-lined winding road to the two-story Mediterranean town
home he had purchased shortly after his separation from the Agency.

The
house was dark and lonely. He turned on the TV for noise, showered, brushed his
teeth and went straight to bed. He didn’t like to sleep alone, but being single
meant he did it a lot. The scent of his most recent girlfriend, Cindy Keskiner,
a bright, attractive psychiatric nurse at Ft. Lauderdale General Hospital, was
still on the sheets and pillow. He wished she were there now and thought of
their last night together in that bed while inhaling the scent of her familiar
soap and shampoo. He had thought about calling her after he dropped off Culler,
but knew it was too late and she would already be in bed.

MacMurphy
knew it was about time to settle down with one woman and start raising a
family, but his career in the Agency had always precluded that. He recalled one
of his instructors down at The Farm telling a group of students that if CIA
case officers devoted too much time to their careers, their family life would
suffer, and if they devoted too much time to their families, their careers
would suffer, and if they tried to do both, both family and career would
suffer.

For
now he satisfied himself with cyclical affairs with local women and with
colleagues in the CIA and State Department. He was an attractive, exciting and
charming man with an exceptionally strong libido, who never had trouble finding
attractive and exciting women to join him in bed. He moved easily from one
woman to another, and frequently back again, as he moved from post to post within
the CIA.

The
closest he had ever come to marrying and settling down was with Wei-wei Ryan.
They had been together, off and on, for more than ten years. MacMurphy first
met Wei-wei when he was assigned as a case officer to Udorn Base in Northeast
Thailand, and she was a branch secretary at the CIA’s station in Bangkok.

Their
romance progressed through subsequent overseas posts in Paris, Tokyo and back
again to Paris with Wei-wei attempting to follow him wherever he was posted.
But the Agency finally put its foot down when Mac was posted to Hong Kong as
chief of station and Wei-wei tried to follow him. Rules were rules, and the
Agency was not about to permit the wife or girlfriend of any COS to work with
him in the same station. That would give “the appearance of impropriety,” in
Agency lingo.

When
Wei-wei couldn’t follow Mac to Hong Kong, she requested to be assigned back to
Paris where she had lived as a child and became fluent in the French language.
Her request was granted and she landed the much coveted job of secretary to the
COS.

When
Mac showed up in Paris on temporary duty a year later to run the operation
against the Chinese embassy, their relationship was rekindled. But when the
operation went bad and Wei-wei Ryan became the victim of Lim’s rage, and Mac
was forced into early retirement, Mac moved to Ft. Lauderdale alone

Mac
should have protected her. He was wracked with guilt over the mess he had
caused. He should have kept her out of the operation. He should have married
her. She would still be alive now and would be with him now in Florida. But for
some reason he did neither. He had always put career and duty ahead of his
personal life, and so, more out of habit than anything else, he moved on once
again.

Soon
the events of the last few days, beginning with Rothmann’s visit which cut his
vacation short in Suze-la-Rousse, took over his thoughts.

He
was excited about being back in the game with Culler Santos at his side, but
worried about the ethical aspects of what he and Culler were planning to do.
Mostly he worried about what Maggie Moore would think. She had the reputation
of being a straight-shooter in the Agency, and had kept many a young case
officer from making egregious errors in operational judgment. Being torn
between Edwin Rothmann and Maggie Moore was not a good place to be.

Chapter Nineteen

M
acMurphy
awakened early. He had slept fitfully during the night, his mind churning with
ideas, possibilities, different approaches, arguments. He drove to the airport,
turned in his rental car, and retrieved his BMW from the parking lot. He called
Santos and they agreed to meet for breakfast before heading to the office. Mac
wanted to go over the events of the previous day one more time before briefing
Maggie.

“She’s
not going to go for it, Culler. I can’t lie to her, and I don’t know how to do
this without her.”

Culler
surprised Mac with compassion. “There’s no way around it, Mac. You’ve got to
tell her the truth. She’ll never accept some cockamamie story about making
people sick. She’s too smart. And I agree, you can’t lie to her. Actually, she
probably already knows that the only way to do this is to kill a few people in
the process. You’ve just got to convince her that a little collateral damage is
worth it.”

“I
know, I know. But what if she doesn’t go along? What if she puts up a stink?”

“She
won’t. Anyway, we don’t really know how this is going to play out until we get
there. Tell her what might happen, that some people might die, but leave
everything kind of open to adjustment depending upon what happens when we get
out there.”

MacMurphy
was silent for a long while and then he looked up at his friend. “Yeah, good
advice. I’ll be as smooth as I can, but I’ll tell you what I think. I think if
we get an opportunity to poison some of Khun Ut’s heroin, we’re going to do it.

Culler
pushed his chair back and hit Mac on the shoulder.  “That’s what I like to
hear, Mac.”

Chapter Twenty

Chiang Mai, Thailand

T
he
discussion with Maggie had not gone well. She acquiesced only after Mac
appealed to her loyalty to Edwin Rothmann and asked her to reserve judgment
until after he got on the ground in Thailand and got a better feel for the
situation. She had no compunctions about taking down Khun Ut and his empire,
only about the collateral damage that would inevitably result.

So
it was with mixed emotions that MacMurphy landed at the rural airport in Chiang
Mai, Thailand, with Santos. 

Culler
had been a rock for MacMurphy ever since they met at the CIA’s covert training
base, The Farm. Santos was one of the smartest and toughest men Mac had ever
known. Trained as an electrical engineer at MIT, he was a mathematical genius
and a skilled artist locked in the body of a brute.

His
sensitivities to those around him astounded MacMurphy. Always calm and
unflappable, he had a knack for relieving tensions and cooling things down when
tempers rose. But if confronted, he would destroy anyone who threatened him or
those he cared about.

Mac
had seen Culler erupt only once. They had been hanging out with a small group
of Farm students at a nearby bar called the Tumble Inn. Everyone was feeling
mellow, and the beer and camaraderie were flowing freely when one of the female
students slapped one of the townies who was slobbering all over her.

The
townies hated the CIA students. The whole town knew that the facility was a CIA
training base, despite the CIA’s futile efforts to maintain its cover. They
considered the students pompous interlopers on their territory.

The
townie was a huge, pot-bellied, tattooed beast accustomed to bullying people in
“his” bar, and he was surrounded by an entourage of similar low-lifes who egged
him on.

Culler
had calmly stepped between his female colleague and the townie, politely asking
the townie to leave his friend alone and take his smelly group of pig farmers
to the other side of the room.

The
townie responded by smacking Santos in the face with a beer bottle, splitting
open his lip. The blow had not seemed to faze Culler. He had stepped back away
with his left foot, crossed his right foot over in front and brought it up and
around to meet the townie’s right cheek with such force that teeth and cheek
bone shattered, sending the huge man careening across the room and into la-la
land. Without missing a beat, he had turned on the others, swiftly taking out
two of them with rapid-fire, vicious kicks and punches while the remaining
thugs beat a hasty retreat toward the door.

Mac
was reminded of this fight every time he saw the angry scar on Culler’s upper
lip. Santos was the meanest, toughest guy MacMurphy had ever known, and he was
totally loyal to Mac and Maggie and Edwin Rothmann.

Chapter Twenty-One

A
t
the Avis counter at Chiang Mai airport Mac rented a dark Toyota Corolla in the
alias Bob Humphrey. He and Culler drove north to Chiang Rai along a newly
paved, four-lane highway. On the way they stopped at a roadside local
restaurant and had a lunch of Mac’s favorite Thai
gueyteow lad na
noodles
with sauce, pork, and vegetables as well as a couple of local Kloster beers.