The Manuscript (9 page)

His glanced at his laptop. He methodically powered it down and packed it into Abe’s satchel.

Done. Twelve minutes. At least he hadn’t lost his edge.

Setting the duffle and Abe’s bag by the front door, he opened the hall side-table drawer and removed two keys and an extra ammunition clip for his Glock. No need to check the gun. He knew the magazine was full.

Finished, he did a final scan of the apartment, checking his mental inventory to ensure he hadn’t forgotten anything. No, that was it. He went to his windows and peered out, scanning the street below for hostiles. Nothing. Michael took one last look around the apartment and glanced back to the street below. Everything looked clean.

Time to make the move.

Confident he had everything he needed, he shouldered the duffle and grabbed the satchel, taking care to double lock the door behind him.

As he exited the building, he pretended to be talking on his cell phone, looking around absently while engaged in a virtual discussion.

Still no sense of surveillance. That was good.

Michael made his way down the block at a leisurely pace, looking for all the world like just another one of the city’s struggling worker drones. At the intersection, he appeared undecided, and then choosing a direction, turned a corner and quietly disappeared.

Chapter 5

The tranquility of the lush jungle was interrupted by a Land Rover bounding down the dirt track. Birds abandoned their perches and took to the air, alert to any threat the heavy motorized vehicle might present. Four men sat inside, silent as they lurched through the verdant tangle.

The humidity hung heavy and oppressive. It was autumn, the rainy season, which, while nourishing for the foliage, made it miserable for humans unaccustomed to the combination of heat and moisture and pressure. The weather was one of the primary reasons most of Colombia’s population didn’t live in the rural areas, other than the violent gangs of armed predators.

As they rounded a long bend in the trail, the driver fired a staccato burst of Spanish into a two way radio. Several hundred yards ahead, two figures armed with Kalashnikov rifles waved at them as three more struggled to remove the makeshift roadblock, composed of tree trunks, that lay across the path. These were members of the ELN: the National Liberation Army of Colombia – an armed rebel group, operating in the jungles since the mid-sixties, that funded its activities by protecting the cocaine trade in the region, as well as with kidnapping, extortion, murder-for-hire, and other criminal enterprises.

Most of the world’s cocaine was now produced in Colombia, where the crops from Peru, Bolivia and the southern part of Colombia were processed in field labs like the one the vehicle approached. Regional farmers in Peru and Colombia harvested Coca leaves and created a sludge they sold to the
narcotraficantes
, who further refined the crude paste into blocks of pure cocaine. The annual revenues of the trade were in the neighborhood of a hundred billion dollars a year, putting it in the same class as the GDP of many prosperous countries.

The largest consumer of illegal drugs has always been the United States, which ironically also has some of the toughest anti-drug laws of any ‘first world’ country. Illegal in the U.S. since 1914, when stories of attacks on white women – all the rage in the popular media of the day – were attributed to the
cocaine-crazed Negro brain
. Cocaine became a wildly profitable substance to traffic in when President Richard Nixon declared his war on drugs with the passage of the Controlled Substance Act in 1970 – instantly boosting the selling price and the profit margins associated with every aspect of production and distribution.

This converted a cottage industry into a massively lucrative enterprise for any group with the wherewithal to import the drug into the U.S., which led to the ascension of cartels operated by ruthless leaders who industrialized production – leading to massive increases in supply. Coke’s popularity during the disco craze of the 1970s through to the present day club scene ensured trillions of dollars of profit for its distributors over the intervening forty years. And the windfall cash deluge showed no signs of abating; even as U.S. demand dropped over the prior five years, new markets in Europe and the former Eastern Block, as well as in Asia, had stepped in to sop up supply.

A group of heavily-armed men approached the stationary vehicle and signaled for the passengers to step out. They complied in turn and, after a brief frisking, the three new arrivals entered the small hut that acted as the offices for the camouflaged drug lab. Inside, several older Latin men in jungle fatigues were seated in collapsible field chairs at an improvised meeting table consisting of a piece of plywood atop several milk crates.

An animated discussion ensued as the three visitors proceeded to negotiate for a bulk purchase of five hundred kilos, delivered within two weeks, possession to be exchanged near the Pacific coast port of Buenaventura. Two of the buyers were members of the Russian Mafiya, who were intent upon expanding their reach from distribution in cities on the East Coast to direct importation from Colombia. Profits would jump astronomically if they bought from the lab at roughly three thousand dollars a kilo instead of at thirty thousand dollars a kilo wholesale in the U.S., so it was worth risking a trip to the source to hammer out a deal.

The nearly ten-fold profit differential had brought them into the jungle. After an hour of back and forth, they reached an arrangement whereby the Russians would supply technical advice, supervision and blueprints for the construction of several fiberglass submarines capable of reaching the coast of Mexico completely submerged and virtually undetectable. The subs would be built by their new Colombian associates and equipped with advanced electronics and climate control for the week-long voyage.

The third member of the visiting group spoke fluent Russian as well as Spanish. He acted as the translator and go-between for the two Russian buyers. He was American, and carried himself with a military bearing, in spite of the civilian clothes and longish hair. Normally, anyone looking to buy large quantities of cocaine would have disappeared forever in the rural Colombian backlands but with this escort, the Russians were assured of protection during their foray.

A deal in principal being finally arrived at and agreed to by all parties, the four wheel drive vehicle returned to Bogota with its passengers, another transaction successfully concluded with the minimum of fuss. The production and distribution businesses were becoming fragmented of late, and so it was necessary to negotiate separate arrangements with multiple groups in order to ensure a reasonably consistent supply – unlike the early years, when the trade was dominated by one or two centrally-directed cartels. The new drug supply model had morphed the industry into smaller, decentralized cells that were relatively autonomous.

The American was critical to those groups because he, and a few others, acted as the manufacturers’ representatives, taking a healthy percentage out of each transaction while avoiding the risks of engaging in the actual trafficking.

Although scattered, the business was now more efficient than ever, having evolved into specialized units of manufacturing, shipping, and distribution, with the latter two being increasingly outsourced to Mexican, and now Russian, syndicates in return for a larger sale price in Colombia. Specialization had reduced the risk to any of the separate functions, and as the industry had matured, expected confiscations by law enforcement agencies were anticipated and factored into the profit and loss projections. Gone were the cowboys of the Escobar days – that phase had ended when the 1980s had drawn to a close. Now, cocaine production was as efficient as any mature, multi-billion dollar per year business.

True, there were turf wars along the distribution channel in Mexico but the product always made it through regardless of disputes, which were invariably about territories and trafficking rights. These were settled in a violent manner, which drew unwanted attention to the trade – but at the end of the day, the cocaine profit was essential to the economies of most of the countries that produced and shipped it.

The heads of the military and police chartered with stopping the trade were often also those who benefited the most from it. So the idea that it could be quashed with more soldiers or police was naïve – it was like trying to drink yourself sober, and had been a resounding failure since it first became the tactic of choice in the nations that sat in the trafficking routes between Colombia and the United States.

********

Three cats purred and rubbed around Mona’s legs, trying to comfort her in her moment of grief. The animals were empathic, could sense the pain radiating from her countenance as she sat in her small apartment and sobbed for her lost employer. She’d been with him for over twenty years, which was the majority of her adult life. Now, she was on her own, adrift in a world of uncertainty, with limited prospects and a skill-set of dubious utility.

The publishing business had been undergoing a shift brought about by eReaders supplanting paper books, which had translated into slimmer margins for the publishers. Literary agents of the old school were becoming obsolete. Not because their skillsets weren’t valuable or required, but rather because an increasing number of established authors were eying the self-publishing world with a more pragmatic, jaundiced eye. They recognized the financial benefits of releasing their own books rather than putting them through the traditional distribution chain. In reality, it was a question, for an author with a name, of getting roughly seven and a half percent of the book sale price versus seventy. That ten-times-the-money equation had everyone scrambling as the industry was blindsided and traditional book stores closed down in droves. The literary market had shifted from one where paper and ink and shelf space and distribution were the draws, to one where consumers shopped online and took instant delivery of their reading material on an eReader.

That was a win for customers, but a lose for the industry, as the value of the publishers diminished in the eyes of the writers. And if the holy grail for writers stopped being a deal where they got ten percent of the money they would by self-publishing, then the value of agents, whose sole cachet was that they had access to the publishers, also diminished, creating havoc for Mona’s little world. All she’d ever done was work for Abe, other than a few brief stints as a secretary back when floppy diskettes were all the rage. Now her mentor, employer, protector and friend was gone, causing Mona to come face to face with a future of uncertainty in a difficult job market in an industry in decline.

It wasn’t as though she had an extravagant lifestyle to support, or a high burn. It was just that she’d always found saving difficult, so she was unprepared for this sudden shift in her fortunes. And she was still so shocked about Abe, she hadn’t been able to collect herself. Once home from work, everything she saw reminded her of Abe’s final moments. Just like she did, Abe lived by himself with a few pets. He had died without anyone to hold his hand during his final moments – without anyone to care that he was embarking on his final journey. She could see her future being the same. Nobody would be there to mourn her or tell her that they loved her or demonstrate that she’d made an indelible impression on their lives. She would pass from the earth, cold and alone. And so, Mona cried, for Abe as much as for herself.

Eventually, she ran out of energy, and the cats needed care. Mister Paws was purring as he scratched his head against her easy chair. Sugah Bear made a bid for attention by leaping onto her lap. The third feline, a big orange tabby named Carrot Top – after the comedian who Mona found hysterical – glared at her, aloof, from the far corner of the room, commanding her silently, with his hypnotic gaze, to prepare his dinner.

Mona decided that she deserved a treat, and so after attending to her brood, she packed herself into her coat and headed for the little Italian restaurant two blocks away, whose rigatoni Bolognese was to die for. Tonight wasn’t the night to worry about a few extra pounds, she reasoned, nor about the effects of a bottle of Chianti on her ample figure. She needed comfort food and knew where to get it.

So involved was Mona in her private drama that she didn’t register the two men who’d taken up position behind her as she walked, nor the creeping of the large, black SUV on the street twenty yards behind her.

Michael rode the subway to the lower East Side, and then changed lines to get to Brooklyn. When he arrived at his stop in Williamsburg, he exited the train and made his way to the street. He flagged down a cab and gave the driver the address – a friend’s studio apartment which his buddy kept for trips to New York. Michael had a key. He stopped in once a month to check on the place and ensure that everything still worked and that it hadn’t been burgled or destroyed by fire, or that the decade-old Nissan Sentra in the decrepit garage down the block still started – assuming it hadn’t been stolen.

His friend had extended an invitation to use both whenever he wasn’t in town, and Michael knew he wouldn’t be back in the area for another month, so the little
pied-à-terre
presented the perfect place to stay until he could get a feel for how bad his situation actually was.

The small apartment was located in an area that had been the recipient of the gentrification that had been taking place in most of New York since the mid-1990s. Run-down sections of walk-up housing had transformed into middle class living to accommodate those for whom the City had gotten far too expensive. He made a perfunctory scan of the street before he walked up the stairs to the front door of the building. Seeing nothing unusual, he ascended to the entry and used one of the two keys he had taken from his foyer table to open it. Up two more flights, and he was inside and safe. At least for now.