ered a shrill yelp and collapsed, its forepaws scratching for traction, the two rear legs useless. Valdez turned, holstering the gun.
“Finish him,” he said mildly. “He did not do it.” What was left of Romero died with a thrust from the boning knife through the heart.
The three men from Bogotá did not try to hide what they had done. That task could be left to Romero’s deputy, Carlos Sonora, who could now take over. The experience of clearing up would be salutary and a guarantee of future loyalty.
The three took off their splashed plastic raincoats and rolled them up. All were soaked in sweat. As they left, they were careful to step clear of the foaming muzzle of the dying dog. It lay snapping at thin air, still a yard short of the tidbit that had brought it from its lair. It was a human nose.
Escorted by Sonora, Paco Valdez paid a courtesy call on General Jalo Diallo, who received them in his office at Army HQ. Explaining that this was the custom of his people, Valdez brought a personal gift from Don Diego Esteban to his esteemed African colleague. It was an elaborate flower vase of finely turned native pottery and delicately hand-painted.
“For flowers,” said Valdez, “so that when you look at them you can think of our profitable and comradely relationship.”
Sonora translated into Portuguese. The skinny one fetched water from the en suite bathroom. The beefy one had brought a bunch of flowers. They made an attractive display. The general beamed. No one noticed that the vase accommodated remarkably little water, and the stalks of the flowers were rather short. Valdez noted the number of the desk telephone, one of the few in town that actually worked.
The next day was Sunday. The party from Bogotá was about to leave. Sonora would drive them to the airport. Half a mile past Army HQ, Valdez ordered a halt. On his cell phone, operated by MTN, the one local service provider, used only by the elite, the whites and the Chinese, he called the desk phone in General Diallo’s office.
It took a few minutes for the general to walk through from his adjacent residential suite to his office. When he answered, he was a yard from the vase. Valdez pressed the detonator in his hand.
The explosion brought down most of the building and reduced the office to brick rubble. Of the dictator, a few fragments were found and later taken back to Balanta territory for tribal burial among the spirits of the ancestors.
“You will need a new business partner,” Valdez told Sonora on the road to the airport. “An honest one. The Don does not like thieves. See to it.”
The Grumman was ready for takeoff, fully fueled. It passed north of the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha, where Sam noticed and reported it. The coup in West Africa made the BBC World Service TV news, but it was a reported item without video so it did not last long.
A FEW DAYS EARLIER, there was another newscast that raised no eyebrows, but it was on CNN out of New York. Ordinarily the deportation from Kennedy of a young Colombian student back to her studies in Madrid after the dropping of charges against her in Brooklyn might not have rated coverage. But someone pulled strings somewhere, and a crew was sent.
There was a two-minute report on the evening news. By nine p.m. it had been discontinued on editorial grounds. But while it lasted, it showed the ICE car drawing up at international departures, and two marshals escorting a very pretty young woman with a subdued manner across the concourse until they disappeared through the security barrier, where the group was not stopped.
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 Cárdenas 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, Cárdenas 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.
Cárdenas 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, Cárdenas 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 Policía 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 Cárdenas.
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 tha
t 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.