Authors: Jack Hillgate
I crossed the street, still holding my cigarette, and stopped outside her place of work with my back to her. I pulled out my mobile telephone and pretended to take a call.
‘
Oui, oui
’, I said to my non-existent caller. ‘
Je cherche le CD. Charlotte Gainsbourg. Cinq-cents-cinquante-cinq. Oui, c’est ca. FNAC? Ou est FNAC? ‘Allo? ‘Allo?’
I shut the phone with a quiet ‘
merde’
, but just loud enough for her to hear. I smelt her perfume now, coming towards me.
‘
Excusez moi, monsieur? Vous cherchez FNAC?
’
‘
Oui mademoiselle
’ – I looked at her badge – ‘
Stephanie
.’
‘
C’est juste par la.
’
She pointed to the large FNAC sign a hundred yards up the road on the left. I smiled and nodded. It was enough. A first contact. She didn’t have a wedding ring and I was a good fifteen years older than her, but that made the whole thing far more exciting. I hadn’t spoken to a pretty woman for a few weeks apart from a prostitute on the
Promenade des Anglais
in Nice, and then it was solely to enquire of the price of a blow-job. For research purposes only, I added wickedly; a comparative study of twelve European cities. ‘Oh’, she replied, telling me thirty euros and sounding rather proud when I told her that that was much more expensive than Prague.
Waiting for Carlos had made my brain go soft. I needed to sharpen it again. I hadn’t actually slept with a woman for two years but as I walked up Rue d’Antibes I stopped at FNAC and turned to see if Stephanie was still there, to see whether she would be watching me, to ensure I didn’t miss the unmissable, enormous entrance right in front of me, but she was gone.
*********
Juan Andres Montero Garcia stopped running when he saw the hut. Rickety and windowless, it didn’t belong in the jungle, but someone must have put it there for some reason. He took the
Makarov
out of its holster and crept slowly towards it. He had lost Suares and his men a good ten minutes ago, but he had kept going just in case. He knew they would not be able to out-run him, but if he didn’t change direction then they would simply radio ahead and have another team pick him up. So he turned right and ran ten minutes eastwards. The hut was locked with a single brass padlock, which he opened within seconds. Flat on his stomach, the rough grass prickling him through his uniform, he swung the door open, pistol raised. Nobody. The hut was eight foot by six and he noticed that there was a window masked by a makeshift shutter. He walked in and opened it to let in a little more light.
He saw what at first sight looked like medical supplies, covered by a plastic sheet and cocooned in polystyrene.
Tropinone?
He remembered a lecture given in Bogota in the second year of his chemistry degree by a jolly man with a clean-shaven face who mopped his brow constantly. Here in the hut there were several heavily-insulated packets of the stuff. He stared at them, trying to recall the exact words the clean-shaven professor had used. He remembered he had been making some point about the synthesisation of alkaloids and then he had made a joke about everyone becoming rich. It was coming back to him.
Tropinone was an alkaloid, synthesised during the First World War by an Englishman as a synthetic precursor to atropine. If one converted the tropinone into 2-carbomethoxytropinone and reduced this to ecgonine, one could, with difficulty and under microbe-free laboratory conditions, proceed to convert the ecgonine into pure, synthetic cocaine. No need for coca leaves, no need to be in the Colombian jungle, no need to be in South America. No need to run the risk of transporting an illegal substance across thousands of miles, no need to cross borders, no need to centralize.
He remembered something about the expense of the synthesis being a barrier to entry, but laboratory techniques were improving all the time, and the clean-shaven man had said that he would give an Alpha to whomsoever could manufacture a gram of synthetic cocaine for less than the cost of buying it in the street a few hundred yards from the university in Bogota. Everyone, including Juan Andres Montero Garcia, had thought he had been joking.
He couldn’t risk lighting a fire, so when night fell he ate the snake raw. It rained heavily, which meant he had enough to drink, and the hut provided good shelter. It would only be for one night because he knew he could not stay there any longer. Someone would visit the hut at some point, although why anyone would keep tropinone in conditions as filthy as this was a mystery, unless, of course, the people keeping it had no idea what it actually was. The sterile packets had been made up by someone in a laboratory, and Juan Andres was careful not to leave any prints on the packet he inspected. He could see the remains of a quality-control stamp, and although he could not read every letter of it clearly, he was sure that the packet did not originate in Colombia and was probably produced, packaged and sealed in the United States of America.
The road was getting worse, which slowed our progress considerably, but it meant I had time to ask Juan Andres about his time at the
Universidad de los Andes
in Bogota. He was impressed, or at least he seemed to be, that I had studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge. We compared syllabuses as best we could and I told him that if I hadn’t got a third I might have wanted to take my studies further. In comparison, Juan Andres came fourth in a class of three hundred. He was far more gifted than I, but once he had finished his course he had needed to work. He didn’t have the luxuries afforded to English students in the 1980s: the student grants, the absence of tuition fees, the swelling pots of research funds and the birth of Silicon Fen.
Kieran had been asleep for more than two hours, his headphones firmly clamped to his ears to block out the noise of the bus and the content of our conversation. If he had listened he would have heard about the constituent parts of the Tripos examinations that I had had to endure at Cambridge: Chemistry, Evolution and Behaviour, Geology and Materials and Mineral Sciences. Juan Andres told me about the thesis he wrote in his second year, something to do with peptides, and then, before I could ask him about my idea, our bus pulled into the last town in Ecuador, Tulcan, close to the border with Colombia, and we all had to get out and walk.
6
Colombia’s location and racial profile were part of the clue as to why it owned the ‘cocaine’ brand. The countries to the south and south west, Ecuador and Peru, were Indian countries, similar to Guatemala. Their people were generally honest, hardworking and were descended from stock that pre-dated Christopher Columbus, hence the strange ancient dialects, larger hearts as a result of the altitude and shorter, squatter bodies as a result of the meager diet. These were not as sophisticated a people as the Spanish, nor as ruthless. The Kings and Queens of Spain sliced their way across the Continent, introducing the notion of currency rather than barter, and international trade.
The coca leaf grew in abundance in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, but it was only Colombia of these four that embraced European culture and values. Venezuela had oil, Brazil had samba. They didn’t need cocaine, and the Spanish-descended inhabitants of both countries, often a mixture of Spanish, negro and
Indio
, called
triguenos
, could pass for the same people you would see on the streets of Seville or Madrid. They could pass relatively anonymously into those parts of the United States that sold
frijoles
instead of fries.
A perseverance with international trade is what maintained the Cartels in the late twentieth century. The creation of wealth from the export to rich countries of a commodity readily available in poorer ones. The wide northern Caribbean coast, principally the stretch from Cartagena to Santa Marta and Barranquilla, the proximity to the Panama Canal and the myriad of island tax havens only a short boat-trip away were the Cartels’ natural allies. From these islands, a twenty-five metre motor-yacht under a Cayman Islands flag could venture relatively easily into port in Miami under the guise of a holiday charter and deliver its cargo. It was so simple, so obvious, that it was surprising that anyone with a bit of working capital wasn’t making an investment into this particular strand of the export market.
As we walked towards the guards at the border checkpoint I deliberately lagged behind Juan Andres and Kieran, just in case they were stopped. I watched as Kieran grinned at the bored young soldier in his camouflage gear and then as Juan Andres produced an Ecuadorian passport, not a Colombian one. He didn’t smile. The guard quickly stamped their documents and waved them through and he did the same with me a few seconds later. The three of us were now in the border town of Ipiales, in south-western Colombia, only a bus-ride, albeit a very long one, from Juan Andres’s home in Villamaria.
‘How much you carrying?’ asked Kieran, grinning, his hand near his balls and only just out of earshot of the machine-gun toting Colombian border guards. ‘I got about a half of black.’ He tapped his crotch and winked.
‘
What?’
‘It’s in my shorts. Getting’ greasy down there.’
Juan Andres smiled, so I smiled too. A half of black in Kieran’s shorts. I had more than two thousand dollars in mine, in hundred dollar bills. I also kept two hundred in my shoes, two hundred in my pants and one hundred in my wallet. Another two thousand was tightly rolled inside a small plastic tube that was too large to stick up my arse, so I kept it inside a dirty pair of boxers in the bottom of my bag.
‘This little baby’s come all the way from Canada’, said Kieran, pulling out a small block of dark-brown hashish wrapped in cling-film, his eyes widening.
‘Put it away for fuck’s sake.’
‘Is not a problem’, said Juan Andres, still smiling. ‘We can smoke it later. Get rid of the evidence. Right, Ryyy-an?’
‘
Claro que si
’, I replied, with the false confidence of a man that had watched other people smoke, snort, eat or inject a wide variety of illegal narcotics but had himself never tried anything stronger than
Pro Plus
.
‘
How far do we walk?’ I asked, looking up at the blazing sun, small globules of sweat already forming under my shirt just in time for dusk and the mosquitoes.
‘
Quieres agua
?’ said Juan Andres, handing me a green metal water bottle. ‘You thirsty?’
‘Thanks.’ I took a swig.
‘Is five ‘clock. Is getting dark soon. Maybe we catch taxi to Popayan.’
‘That nice?’
‘Is beautiful, but not like before earthquake. 1983. Lots of people dead.’
He hailed a taxi.
***
He woke in the hut at dawn and stretched for five minutes, working his body back into shape. The previous day he had run at full pelt through the jungle for perhaps half an hour and jogged the same distance again. His calves were throbbing and he craved salt and so Juan Andres licked the sweat from the skin on his forearms to compensate. He listened, carefully, for the sound of anything human or mechanical, but all he could hear were birds chirping and cawing, mosquitoes trying to get their last meal of the night, and large four-legged animals creeping through the underbrush.
If he headed south again he could make for Ecuador or Peru, but Suares would be expecting that. It was the easy way out, the shortest route. He had to leave the hut and the tropinone and he had to do it now, this morning, whilst dawn was breaking. Navigating by the sun was easy, especially after his training. If one watched the sun rise, as Juan Andres did that morning whilst he checked his Makarov and his Uzi were in perfect order, then one had an even sharper sense of direction and time.
If he had been able to look inside the cocaine factory, the one he had run away from, he could have ascertained whether the production line was the standard one, working from the raw coca leaf, or whether it was something more technical, involving alkaloids and men with degrees in chemistry, just like him. It was unlikely that they would deliberately store tropinone in a hut such as the one he was now leaving. The sun would bake it and it wasn’t guarded. No, it was probable that they had no idea what it was, and that it had arrived as part of a shipment of something else.
No-one had ever asked Juan Andres if he wanted to use his technical and academic qualifications in the
Narcotrafficos
. Suares, he felt, considered a degree as something to be disdained, probably because Suares hadn’t been to university and neither had ninety-nine per cent of his men. Juan Andres had never trusted Suares, but now he knew he could trust no-one. It was not surprising that Suares had never told Juan Andres that he, Suares, was working with the Cartels as opposed to trying to shut them down, but it
was
surprising that he had never attempted to corrupt Juan Andres in the same way that he had corrupted Pepe. Why involve one, and not another? Was he incorruptible? Or was it to maintain a semblance of plausible deniability, or possibly morale?