Cybernarc Page 8

  "Well, Senor Braden,” the older man said, smiling. "Perhaps you would like to relax for a while. You have time before dinner for a swim.”

  Braden eyed the girls by the pool and grinned. "You know, Don Roberto, that’s the best idea I’ve heard yet.”

  "I will go see to the refueling and loading of Senor Braden’s aircraft,” Jose said. He left the two men by the pool and started across the lawn toward the garage. He would take one of the jeeps out to the 1,200-meter runway and supervise the operation himself. He wanted to evaluate for himself the people Braden had brought along as assistants on this flight.

  There was always a chance that the CIA contract pilot was still serving his former employers, despite his recent service to both Diamond and the Salazars. If there was even a hint of betrayal, Braden and his people would die . . . unpleasantly. That DEA agent they’d captured at the summit last week, he’d taken a long time to die, and El Tiburon had learned some new tricks from the ex-army officer who handled Roberto’s interrogations. Perhaps he would get a chance to try them out on this smug and offensive gringo.

  As Jose approached the garage he paused, aware of a new, sweetish odor. It seemed to be coming from inside. The door was open. Stealthily, Jose slipped into the building.

  Inside were several jeeps and Land Rovers, as well as two new Mowag Rolands, huge in the semidarkness. Roberto was proud of the Rolands, chunky, four- wheeled armored cars with squat turrets mounting .50 caliber machine guns. Roberto had purchased them directly from Mowag of Kreuzlingen in Switzerland, intending to use them to patrol his property along the north slope of the Sierra Nevadas. Bandits—and rivals in the drug trade—had been raiding his marijuana crops there, but the knowledge that a pair of armored cars were in the area ought to discourage that activity in short order.

  The smell was stronger inside the garage.

  Moving swiftly, Jose stepped around the rear of one of the Rolands. One of the pistoleros, a teenage boy named Rudy, was leaning against the armored car, smoking a cigarette laced with basuco.

  Jose lashed out with his hand, slapping the cigarette to the concrete floor, then grinding it beneath his heel. "Huevon!” he snapped. "Stupid prick!”

  Basuco was a crude cocaine base, similar to the crack cocaine that had already proven so deadly in the United States. Mixed with tobacco and smoked, it was cheap, addictive, and provided an intense high.

  It was also usually laced with lead from the gasoline used in its processing. There were side streets in Bogota and Colombia’s other major cities that were home to hundreds of the shambling wrecks who had addicted themselves to basuco. Lead poisoning was neither a fast nor a particularly pleasant way to die.

  "Hey, fresco, Jose—’’the boy began, a lopsided grin on his face. "Take it easy—”

  The narcotrafficante’s left hand closed on the soldier’s collar, tightening, lifting him against the hard metal of the Roland. His right hand slipped his Beretta from its holster and brought the weapon up to within a centimeter of the kid’s nose.

  "I am Senor Salazar, campesino,” Jose said, his voice filled with a venomous fury. "And you will not smoke that excrement while you work for me. When you were a punk sicario on the streets of Medellin, that was one thing. While you work for me, you will have a clear head. Claro?”

  The kid’s eyes crossed as he tried to focus them on the muzzle of the automatic. ”S-si. Claro, señor. I just . .. I mean, sometimes just for fun . . . Everybody, all my friends—

  Jose released the kid’s collar, then jacked back the slide on the pistol, chambering a round. Holding the muzzle against the kid’s upper lip, he fished into his pocket and produced a fifty-peso coin. He put it in the kid’s hand. "Toss it.”

  "Señor?”

  He brought the muzzle of the pistol up until it rested squarely between the kid’s eyes. "Toss it. Now. Don’t drop it.”

  The coin flashed in the dim light, spinning. The boy caught it, slapping it down on the back of his wrist. His hands were trembling, but somehow he kept from losing it.

  "Call it.”

  The boy was trembling now with almost epileptic fervor. He brought his wrist up, managed to pull his eyes away from the Beretta long enough to focus on the coin trapped under his hand. "La-las cabezas, ” he stammered. "Heads . . .”

  Jose stood death still for a long moment, enjoying the young basuco smoker’s terror, enjoying the power that emanated from the gun. He allowed himself a smile. The kid’s eyes squeezed shut as the fifty-peso piece clattered onto the floor.

  "You live,” Jose said, decocking the weapon at last. "This time you live. If I catch you smoking that shit again, however . .

  "No, sir! I mean, yes sir! I mean, it won’t happen again, senor—”

  "Get out of here!”

  The kid vanished through the garage door. Jose watched him go, and laughed.

  SECURITY RESTRICTIONS SHARPLY LIMITED flights into the small airfield at Camp Peary. For that reason, Senator Buchanan’s helicopter had been routed a few miles down the Peninsula, to a runway at Langley Air Force Base, just outside the cities of Hampton and Newport News. The helicopter touched down at two-thirty Monday afternoon. Weston was there with a limousine and driver, waiting to meet it.

  Buchanan stooped beneath the turning rotor blades, hurrying across the tarmac. Weston shook hands with the senator, held the limo’s rear door for him, then walked around and got in on the other side.

  Ten minutes later, the car left the base on Route 167, passing the NASA buildings and Aerospace Park. Threading the cloverleaf junction with Highway 64, it followed the signs for Williamsburg and Richmond, heading northwest up the Virginia Peninsula.

  Weston and Buchanan had a lot to talk about. Since they’d seen each other on Friday, Buchanan had briefed the President and Weston had debriefed Drake.

  And it was clearer now than ever that the good guys were losing the war on drugs.

  James Weston knew narcotics and narcotics trafficking. Recruited into the CIA thirty-eight years earlier, while he was still a political science major in college, he’d begun his career with the Company, as insiders called it, in the Office of Global Issues. Operated under the Intelligence Directorate, one of the CIA’s four major branches, Global Issues analyzed international economic and technological issues, followed the course of foreign commodities and trade, and reported to the DDI—the Deputy Director of Intelligence—on such matters as weapons transfers, international terrorism, and narcotics production.

  It was not exactly the flash-bang stuff of spy fiction. For the better part of four decades Weston’s career as a spook had been limited to analyzing data from a variety of sources no more clandestine than Pravda or Bogota’s El Espectador, and compiling reports that might— sometimes—find their way into the National Intelligence Estimate, the CIA’s data input into the NSC.

  By 1980, though, he was on the staff of the DDI, working in the Office of African and Latin American Analysis. His particular area of expertise was the drug cartels of South America. The eighties were witness to an unprecedented flood of drugs—cocaine especially— entering the United States from South America and Mexico. The pipelines crossed dozens of international boundaries; coca leaves might be grown in Bolivia or Peru, processed in the jungles of Colombia, and shipped north with the connivance of government and military authorities in Panama, Cuba, and the Bahamas. It was Weston’s job to trace those pipelines and to assess the importance of the narcotrajficantes in the economies of fifteen different nations.

  Then, in 1986, he’d been transferred to Project RAMROD. The rumor circulating among his staffers held that someone further up the ladder simply wasn’t believing the figures he was turning out on the amount of cocaine entering the States. Two hundred tons in 1985 alone? Ridiculous!

  In fact, he’d been recruited by Senator Buchanan. Group Seven, the President’s new secret narcotics task force, was interested in the possibility of adapting the military’s defunct combat robot program for narcotics work, and
Weston, with his understanding of the staggering scope of the drug problem, was a logical choice to head the project that, by that time, was being kept alive by CIA funding.

  Technically, as RAMROD’s project director, Weston no longer worked for the Agency, though he still reported to the DDI. Certainly, his current position was a lot more exciting than reading foreign newspapers or analyzing the economics of coca production in Bolivia.

  But his expertise in the drug traffic was proving more valuable than ever now*.

  "The new CIA figures will be published next week,” he told the senator. "Eighty-seven percent of all crime in this country is directly linked to narcotics. From the twelve-year-old who rips off a stereo to feed his crack habit to the Sicilian Mafia, it’s the drug trade that’s behind them. That feeds them. And it’s going to get worse.”

  "That’s what I told the President on Saturday,” Buchanan said quietly. "I gave him the results of Group

  Seven’s last study. His staff is already calling it 'the Buchanan Report.’ ”

  Weston’s eyebrows rose. "What did the President say?”

  "Say? What could he say? My God, look at what we’re predicting! Ten to fifteen more years of things going the way they are, and the President and Congress are going to have to suspend the Constitution of the United States! Arrests and searches without warrants, confiscation of all privately owned weapons, martial law, internal travel permits, federal ID cards for every citizen. Narcoterrorism—here, in America—on a scale no one in this country has ever dreamed of. Hell, I’m surprised he didn’t chuck us out of the White House bodily.”

  "I can imagine.” Weston had been shocked when he’d first heard the conclusions drawn by Group Seven’s inner circle. They were predictions, not recommendations . . . but there appeared to be no way to escape them. The flood of illegal drugs into the United States was undermining the very foundations of the country. They’d already poisoned the inner cities, where cheap crack and heroin enslaved the weak and the hopeless, where drug gangs fought full-auto gun battles in the streets for control of a few city blocks, and the local dope kings raked in millions.

  And the plague was spreading. Two weeks earlier, there’d been a firefight between members of a white motorcycle gang and a Jamaican posse in the streets of Baezley, Pennsylvania, population 8,296. Twelve people were dead and seventeen wounded; five of the deaths had been innocent passersby caught in the crossfire.

  Collateral damage.

  Twenty-seven police departments that Weston knew of were currently under Federal investigation, facing charges of corruption, bribery, and narcotics trafficking. The departments represented cities and towns with populations ranging from over one million down to 1,348, and those twenty-seven were only the tip of the iceberg. The corruption was thought to have touched hundreds of state senators and representatives, dozens of mayors, thousands of government officials, and at least three governors. And it didn’t stop with the state governments. Eighteen members of the U.S. House of Representatives, four U.S. senators, and hundreds of lawyers, lobbyists, aides, and other political figures were suspected of accepting money—disguised as campaign contributions, reelection funds, or private reimbursements—from organizations fronting for individuals ranging from street-corner pushers to Fabio Ochoa.

  The corruption, the rot seemed to be everywhere.

  Suggested courses of action ranged from invading Colombia to legalizing drugs. No one seriously wanted a war in South America that would make Vietnam seem like a skirmish by comparison. As for legalization, Group Seven’s study had concluded that legal drugs would only accelerate the cancer while doing little or nothing to stop the criminal elements who were battling for control of the American drug market.

  It seemed unthinkable, but in ten more years, fifteen at the most, Americans might well be living under what could only be described as a military dictatorship.

  It would be that, or total anarchy. There were no other choices.

  "We discussed RAMROD,” Buchanan said. "The President is interested in the possibility of using him in the field.”

  "That won’t be enough,” Weston warned. "Not by itself.”

  "Hell, I know that. But we’ve got to start someplace.”

  "Biggest problem now is Chris Drake,” Weston said. "We need him if RAMROD is going to be tested in the field. No one else has worked as well with the robot as he has. I swear, the two of them think alike. It will take months to train someone else.”

  "Poor bastard. His wife and daughter, raped and murdered in their own home,” Buchanan said. "How is he?”

  "Not. . . good. He was forced into a position where he had to act . . . or be murdered, along with his wife and kid. He acted, did the best he could, and his people were killed anyway, right in front of his eyes. When the police broke in, they found him sitting on that bed, the muzzle of a pistol in his mouth.”

  "Oh God.” Buchanan digested that a moment. "The press is having a field day with this, you know. The sanctity of home and family violated, brutalized by street-gang dopers . . .”

  "They’re also speculating that Chris was dealing on the side,” Weston said. "That he had a stash inside his house and a biker gang ripped him off because he was dealing on their turf.”

  "He wasn’t, was he?”

  "Hell no. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to make it look that way, though.”

  "My God, why?”

  Weston took a deep breath. "Obviously, because he survived SNOWDKOP.”

  "But why the charade with the biker gang, the cocaine planted in his house—”

  "Not to mention a submachine gun that’s been matched ballistically to a gang drug hit in Richmond last week. My guess is that someone figured that if Drake was murdered by himself, we’d know someone wanted him silenced. But if he and his family were the victims of a drug rip-off or random gang violence, well ... we might suspect, but we’d never know.” "Do you think they know he’s alive?”

  "I hope not. I tried to foster the idea that he was killed. I thought it might be safer that way ... for him. And for us.”

  "How’d you manage that?”

  "We got lucky. Some of the neighbors heard automatic weapons fire and called the police. They were on the scene pretty fast and managed to talk Chris down, stop him from pulling the trigger. Because of his classified work, he was carrying one of those in-ease-of- emergency-call numbers. The cops called it and got me. So I arranged with the cops to take charge of him.” "The police are cooperating then?”

  "Yeah. I just trotted out 'matter of national security’ and waved my CIA card. They went along with it.”

  "So you have him safe?”

  "At the Farm.” Weston sighed. "I couldn’t even let him go to the funeral today. Three caskets, incidentally, just in case someone was keeping count. Like Diamond.”

  "Mmm. Group Seven went over your report yesterday, James,” Buchanan said. "I should tell you, not everyone accepts your analysis. This . . . Diamond, a name Drake overheard. There’s nothing to link him with Colombia. He could be some small-time, local dealer.”

  "Bull,” Weston replied. "The SNOWDROP team was ambushed by forces working with the Salazars. American assets, probably CIA contract mercenaries, were involved. Four days later, the day after he gets back, the one survivor is assaulted in his own home. And leading the bad guys is none other than the guy who was the SEALs’ DEA liaison in Colombia . . . supposedly dead.”

  "Emilio Esposito.”

  Weston nodded. "When I debriefed Drake on Saturday, I took along Esposito’s DEA file. He looked at the file photo and told me that it was not the Esposito he knew.”

  Buchanan looked at Weston, startled. "I hadn’t heard that.”

  "I thought it best not to broadcast it. It means the real Emilio Esposito was hit somewhere between Bogota and the SEALs’ drop zone. This whole thing is too tightly organized, too big to be run by some local pusher. What we’ve seen so far spells organization to me, Senator. Big organization. And big money.�
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  "Could Diamond be DEA? Someone working with the false Esposito?”

  Weston shook his head. "Nope. CIA.”

  "Christ, James! You’re not serious!”

  "I’m afraid I’ve never been more serious. This affair has Agency written all over it. Whoever is behind it all is able to jigger schedules, deploy CIA helo and contract mercenary assets, even get at Agency records.” "What records?”

  "I went up to Langley yesterday and did some checking in their files.” He was referring to the CIA headquarters near McLean, Virginia, just inside the Capital Beltway, rather than the Air Force base they’d just left. "The evening he got back from Colombia, Drake was debriefed by two Company men. I looked up their report.”

  "And?”

  "It was classified F-5.”

  "But that means—”

  "That it’ll be buried. Correct.”

  Standard practice assigned CIA intelligence reports a letter-number combination that evaluated their reliability. The letters graded the source, from "A,” meaning completely reliable, to "E”—unreliable—and "F”—reliability unknown. By giving Drake an F, someone at Langley was saying they had no way of judging how good a source he was. The numbers, which assessed the reliability of the source’s information, ran from "1,” for information already confirmed by other sources, to "5,” improbable, and "6,” reliability cannot be determined.

  An evaluation of F-5 meant Drake’s debriefing report would be given little weight, even though his eyewitness account of the ambush suggested that there was an intelligence leak in Washington.