Monitor Fourteen showed first the Mercedes, and then, a minute later, the Expeditions moving up a road in the hill surrounding the dry lake.
“They’re wearing their ninja suits?” Castillo thought out loud.
“There’s probably clothing for them to wear over their tactical suits in the trucks,” Barlow said.
The monitor now switched back and forth between the moving vehicles, and what was happening in the cave. General Sirinov himself drove the front-loader back aboard the Tu-934A. The ramp was raised. The monitor followed Sirinov and two men Castillo guessed were the pilots to the stainless-steel elevator and showed them getting in.
“Nothing much happened after this,” García-Romero said. “Those three men—you said you knew one of them?”
“How far is that—are we—from the Mex-U.S. border?” Castillo asked, ignoring the question.
“At the closest point, seventy-five, eighty miles,” García-Romero said.
“And McAllen-Matamoros, that area? What’s that, five hundred miles?”
“Probably,” García-Romero said.
“The ninjas came back, right? And the Venezuelan ‘businessman’?”
García-Romero nodded. “They returned about four hours after what you just saw.”
“So that means they got the barrels across the border near here,” Castillo said. “How would they do that, Tío Héctor?”
García-Romero hesitated for a moment, but finally said, “There are people who make a profession of getting people across the border. ...”
“People and drugs, right?”
“Yes, Carlos, sometimes drugs. They call them ‘coyotes.’”
“What?” Svetlana asked.
“A coyote is something like a cross between a wolf and a German Shepherd, sweetheart,” Castillo said. “With all of the bad, and none of the good, characteristics of both. They attack calves, lambs, dogs, cats, rabbits, and sometimes children. Their numbers are increasing, and there doesn’t seem to be much that can be done to control them. In other words, they’re sort of a canine drug cartel.”
“You really don’t like people involved with drugs, do you, baby?” she asked softly.
“Moving right along, Héctor,” Castillo said, “would it be reasonable to assume that somewhere near the border, some of these coyotes had been pre-positioned, either by the Venezuelan businessman or the guy from the Russian embassy, to move those two barrels into the United States?”
“If they wanted to move those barrels into the United States, that would be the way to do it. Do we know that they wanted to do that? What’s in those barrels, anyway?”
“We know they moved those barrels into the States. What we’re trying to figure out is how and where. And you don’t want to know what’s in those barrels, Tío Héctor. Believe me.”
“They somehow got one of the barrels to Miami, sweetheart?” Svetlana suggested. “And shipped it from Miami to Colonel Hamilton? And later left the other where your border guards would find it?”
“Yeah. Probably to make us think the first barrel was smuggled into Miami from Cuba.”
García-Romero began: “I had no idea anything like this—”
“Let me see if I have this right,” Castillo interrupted him. “Borzakovsky came to you ... Wait. Let me back up. You’re in charge of Drug Cartel International, right, Tío Héctor?”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing from you what you’re suggesting, Carlos,” García-Romero said. “I am not in the drug business; this airfield is not a transshipment point for drugs.”
“When you accuse Héctor of that, friend Charley,” Pevsner said in Russian, “you’re accusing me. And that’s something I cannot accept, even from you.”
“Okay, then, tell me what goes on here,” Castillo said.
“Nicolai has already told you,” Pevsner said. “There are people who need large amounts of currency shipped from place to place.”
“And I’m supposed to believe those large amounts of money are not connected with the drug business? Come on, Alek