Near Death

by Glenn Cooper

  “That’s right, Sally. As bad as this epidemic was a few weeks ago, it has gotten much, much worse. The National Institute of Drug Abuse, which has been tracking usage patterns, estimates that fifteen to eighteen million Americans now have taken the drug at least one time, yet even that number, the agency admits, could be low. Whether you believe, as millions clearly do, that Bliss proves the existence of a divine afterlife or that contrary to that belief it’s a psychedelic fool’s gold, one thing is certain. The effects of Bliss in cities, towns, and neighborhoods throughout the country have been devastating.”

  “Larry, places like Willow Run, Michigan, have been hit hardest by the crisis as our reporter, Bob Tucker, found out earlier at Carlson’s Coffee Shop, a local gathering place for the shell-shocked residents of this town.”

  The reporter leaned forward across a booth in a diner and posed a question to two burly men. “Can you tell me what life has been like in this town?”

  One of the men looked him in the eye and said, “It’s been hell, worse than the last recession. We’ve got two big employers in town and both are in a tailspin. When you’ve got so many folks who just flat-out stop going to work after taking this Bliss, you can’t keep these production lines going. We’re not getting parts from other factories too. Before this started, we were running three shifts; now we’re down to one. A lot of people have lost their jobs. I don’t know any business in town that’s hiring. Most of my friends are living off of unemployment and draining their savings. We’re worried about our houses.”

  The other man banged his coffee cup down on the saucer. “You add to that the personal problem that some folks have had with Bliss. My family’s been spared, thank God, but I’ve got friends and neighbors who’ve lost loved ones.”

  “Lost to suicide?” the reporter asked.

  “Doesn’t matter if they kill themselves—once someone’s taken that stuff, they’re good as gone,” he answered.

  Out front of Gracie Mansion in New York City, another reporter stood under an umbrella. “This is Martin Flores. New York, like other major cities in America, has been particularly hard hit by the Bliss crisis. Adding to the woes of unemployment is a feeling that social decay and unrest are right around the corner. In the best of times, New York can be a tough place to live if you’re poor and disadvantaged. In times like these, no one was particularly surprised when the streets of Mott Haven erupted in violent riots last week after police attempted a mass arrest of members of a local gang who were allegedly supplying Bliss to their neighborhood. We asked Mayor Alex Strauss about the big mess in the Big Apple.”

  The mayor gesticulated behind his office desk. “The problems we had last week in the Bronx could turn into something positive if it makes people realize we’ve got to come together and fight this drug problem with community unity. The alternative is divisiveness and disorder. For me, as mayor, that alternative is not acceptable.”

  “People in that neighborhood were angry because the police were cutting off the flow of Bliss. What does that tell you?”

  The mayor hammered his fist into his palm. “It tells me that this is a dangerous, addictive drug. I’d like to see a lot more done on treatment and detoxification. I’m committed to education and treatment. That’s got to be the way forward.”

  The next shot was the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. A reporter stood rooted on one spot while a maelstrom of activity circled around her. “This is Wilma Fiorentino. Today was a day like many recent days on the New York Stock Exchange: frantic high-volume trading and sharp declines in the Dow and other indices. I asked Chief Market Analyst David Mann from JP Morgan how low the Dow could go.”

  “Well, we can’t predict where the floor will be. We don’t have any historical precedents for what’s been going on in the markets the past few weeks. We’re not in complete free fall but the parachute is very small and it has holes in it. Wall Street is looking to Washington to do something drastic on the political front and we’re not alone on this. Every country’s markets have taken a huge hit. The economy needs shock therapy and that means very decisive action from the White House and Congress to stop Bliss, stop the Inner Peace Crusade, and restore public confidence.” Cyrus switched the TV off. “I don’t want to see anymore.”

  “Alex Weller makes me so angry,” she said. “He’s a flaming narcissist. He got some megalomaniacal view of the world, of his own vision of things, which makes him blind to the pain and heartache he’s causing. And the people who’re following him as a messiah or guru either have no idea or choose not to believe that he’s a murderer. I mean, God, Cyrus, he brought his lab equipment to Bar Harbor, like a Frankenstein.”

  “He would have used Tara, I’m sure of it.” Cyrus stared at the black TV screen. “I’m going to kill him.”

  She sighed. “So, what do you want to do now?”

  He filled their glasses. “This.”

  By the time it was dark, Cyrus was very drunk and low-slung in his chair. Emily had been more moderate in her consumption but she was in no shape to drive.

  While he dozed, Emily went into his bedroom, stripped the unmade bed and looked in closets until she found clean sheets. She made a crisp, fresh bed and pulled him out of the chair. Once between the sheets, like a little boy, he automatically pulled his trousers and shirt off and dropped them on the floor where she retrieved and hung them up.

  “Give me that book,” he said drunkenly, pointing to his nightstand. It was a thin volume of poems. “I want to read a poem.”

  She sat on the bed. “Which one? I’ll read it to you.”

  The room was moving and the book was moving. He found it with difficulty and stabbed a stanza with his finger. “This.”

  When his head fell back onto his pillow she read from Philip Larkin’s Aubade. It was sad, very sad. It was about the inevitability of death.

  He snorted his drunken approval, closed his eyes and was asleep within seconds.

  It was too early for her to sleep but she slipped off her shoes and lay on the bedspread beside him and when the morning came, she was still there.

  Forty-seven

  10 DAYS

  Over Stanley Minot’s perfunctory objections, Cyrus threw himself back into work. There was an urgent Bliss Task Force meeting in Washington and he was determined to attend, rising early to catch the first shuttle, shaking off his hangover as best he could, seeing Emily off. He channeled his despondency into a rage as hot as a smithy’s forge and refused to grieve any more until Alex Weller was stopped.

  Entering the conference room, Cyrus was greeted with grim handshakes and downward gazes as other task force members awkwardly tried to acknowledge his ordeal; but he stoically refused to let the façade he’d constructed crack. He sat and opened his briefing book.

  The session was called by the DEA. There was a major new lead that required urgent action. Chris Webber, chief of intelligence from DEA, went to the podium and remotely started the projector.

  “As you know, multiple Bliss manufacturing sites have sprung up around the Americas and around the world in the past few months—but we’ve always thought there’s been one principal source, based on some chemical fingerprinting we’ve been able to do. We now have good evidence that a factory in Zapopan, Mexico, in the State of Jalisco, is that principal source. Two weeks ago, a Texas state trooper stopped an eight-ton Mercedes Benz truck with Louisiana license plates outside of Beaumont, Texas, for a minor traffic violation. The trooper wrote out a ticket and was about to let the driver and his passenger go when he noticed the barrel of a shotgun under the driver’s seat. He made an arrest and a subsequent search of the truck revealed one hundred kilos of Bliss, packaged into paper sticks, hidden inside fertilizer bags inside welded compartments. The street value of the bust was somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred million dollars.”

  There were murmurs around the table when he showed photos of a dozen large bags.

  “We resisted compromising sources of information so the bust was
kept quiet. The driver and passenger were both Americans. The driver was uninteresting, an unemployed dishwasher from New Orleans who didn’t know much about anything. The passenger was the one we focused on. His name is Doug Greene: this guy.” He showed his picture. “Around New Orleans he’s a well-known drug runner. We pushed hard, broke him down, and he talked. Apparently, this was their fourth or fifth Bliss run. The gang Greene worked for was a heavy money operation that in essence has the Bliss franchise for southeastern United States. Greene’s job was to drive the truck down to the Mexican border at Laredo and pull into a remote farm north of town right on the border line. Here’s an aerial shot. He’d meet a Mexican national there named Romo and give him a few suitcases full of cash— about ten million for the last transaction. The DEA immediately began a stakeout of the farm, including wiretaps and listening devices. The farmer is a Mexican-American who we now know is a cousin of this fellow, Romo.

  “About a week ago, we observed Romo on the property but couldn’t figure out how he got there. Then we picked up conversations about a tunnel. We raided the farm while Romo was still there and found a tunnel coming out under the dirt floor of the barn. It led a half mile due west under the interdiction fence and terminated under a storage shed on a farm on the Mexican side. We also found another ten kilos of Bliss Romo had just brought over. During questioning, Romo proved to be pretty full of himself: he came on like a big shot and hinted that he had a lot to say if we’d cut a deal. We told him we’d play as long as the information was valuable. It didn’t take long before he told us about the Guadalajara Chemical Company located in Zapopan. We immediately contacted the Agencia Federal de Investigación. I’d like to introduce Deputy Director Luis Rocha of the AFI to brief you on our planned and joint operation. If all goes according to plan, we will have dealt a major blow to Bliss trafficking.”

  Luis Rocha took Webber’s place at the podium.

  “The AFI and the Policía Federal immediately began to investigate the Guadalajara Chemical Company. It’s a small privately owned company that for the past thirty years manufactured bulk chemicals for the agricultural and pharmaceutical industries. Here it is, on the outskirts of the city in an industrial park. Lately, it’s not a very successful company. The sons of the founder weren’t so interested in the business and it’s gone downhill. We discovered the sons recently leased the business to a young chemist from Mexico City who made them an offer they couldn’t refuse, a share in profits from Bliss manufacture. The chemist’s name is Miguel Cifuentes. This is his passport photo.”

  Bob Cuccio from the FBI looked at Cyrus “You ever heard of this guy?”

  Cyrus shook his head.

  “Until just before Christmas he worked as a chemist at Harvard Medical School,” Cuccio explained. “What are the odds he and Weller knew each other?”

  “I’d say high,” Cyrus answered. “I’ll get on it.”

  Rochas continued. “Cifuentes has begun to spend money like a drug lord. He’s got a hacienda, cars, boats, even a private plane. He’s also got a private army guarding the factory. We’ve been doing surveillance the past week so we think we know the weak spots. We’re ready to go. We’re hitting the factory tomorrow afternoon.”

  After the meeting, Cyrus pulled Cuccio aside. “This is a joint raid, right?”

  “You heard Rochas. The DEA’s going to be there.”

  “Don’t you think the FBI ought to have a seat at the table?”

  “Who are you suggesting” Cuccio asked.

  “Me.”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea? You’ve just been through a lot.”

  “Let’s just say I’ve got skin in the game.”

  Cyrus disembarked from an unmarked DEA Learjet that had powered down in a remote corner of the airport in Guadalajara. He slipped on sunglasses to shield himself from the early morning glare. A customs agent checked his passport on the tarmac and asked him if he was armed. He replied that he wasn’t and was waved into a black Escalade with tinted windows that had drawn up to the nose of the plane.

  He slipped into the rear seat next. Inside was a compact, muscular man in casual, plain clothes, who extended his hand. “I’m Colonel Ramon Vazquez, deputy commanding officer of the Guadalajara division of the Policía Federal. I’m very sorry about your loss, Mister O’Malley. Let’s see if we can do something about it.”

  Cyrus was driven into a congested downtown district of Guadalajara where he and Vasquez were dropped off on a narrow back street near a tobacconist. Cyrus spotted lookouts on both sides.

  “Our men,” Vasquez said.

  Vasquez led him into an alley that ran perpendicular to the street and down a flight of concrete steps into the basement entrance of a nondescript office building. They rode an elevator up to the fifth floor into an office suite where numerous clerks, secretaries, and men with holstered pistols were working alongside a handful of American DEA agents.

  Vasquez took him into his private office and opened his desk drawer. “If you’re going with us, you shouldn’t be naked.” He handed him a Glock 25 and three loaded clips. “It’s what the Secretaria de la Defensa Nacional issues,” he said proudly. “Look on the slide.” It was engraved S.D.N. MEXICO DF, C. O’MALLEY. “I had your name added last night. It’s a gift. Use it in good health.”

  In the most crowded conference room Cyrus had ever seen, Vasquez did a run-through of the operation. There were a good thirty men in and around the table and half of them were smoking. The room was hot and Cyrus’s eyes stung from the smoke; he felt queasy too by the sickening mélange of colognes. The plan, though, was simple enough: attack with overwhelming, brutal force. There was something satisfying in its lack of nuance.

  At three in the afternoon, the Guadalajara Chemical Company was operating at capacity. The factory had a sprawling one-story footprint, a corrugated iron roof, and was situated in a light-industry area of Zapopan just north of Guadalajara. A newly installed electrified fence surrounded the compound. Outside the rear entrance, a new Sikorsky sat on a yellow bull’s-eye helipad.

  About sixty production workers were on site manning the plant’s manufacturing lines. The only product they made was Bliss. The raw materials needed to make Bliss, the reagents and amino acids, were received and processed at one end of the factory, and at the other end, unskilled workers weighed out finished product and hand-rolled tubes of colored wrapping paper around each dose. Outside, guards paced the perimeter fence with automatic weapons concealed by loose jackets.

  At the front of the factory were small offices for the managers. Inside one, Miguel Cifuentes sat at his desk talking on the telephone, placing his usual afternoon call to his wife in Mexico City to check on her and the children.

  Wealth was more of a burden than he’d anticipated. Although he no longer worried about how to satisfy his wife’s material desires on a professor’s salary, there were new concerns. Bliss had generated so much revenue that he was literally drowning in cash. He’d stopped trying to keep a tally and became reliant on accountants whom he suspected of stealing from him. His conspicuous consumption was drawing attention from authorities in Guadalajara and Mexico City, and he’d begun to pay out hefty bribes to keep local police and tax officials at bay. Fear of theft and kidnapping prompted him to spend lavishly on private security for himself and his entire family. Forced to spend long spells in Zapopan away from his family, he’d developed a nervous tic and had put on weight.

  Miguel told his wife he loved her then hung up and massaged his throbbing temples. His assistant saw he was off the line and brought in a folder of faxed invoices from amino acid suppliers in Greece and Switzerland. When he leafed through them he became incensed. “These guys are thieves,” he sniffed. “They’ve doubled their prices again. They don’t even bother to offer an explanation anymore.”

  All at once he heard the thumping sound of a helicopter approaching low. It confused him since he was sure his helicopter was already on the pad.

  He felt the percussion
a moment before hearing the blast. Then a series of higher pitched explosions, each like an exclamation point, coming from all sides. His office windows blew in, splattering him with shards of glass. Bursts of automatic gunfire punctuated the air.

  Bleeding from superficial cuts to his arms, neck, and face, he staggered to the hallway where his employees were frantically fleeing.

  “What’s happening?” he cried.

  One of the security guards ran into the building, breathing hard. He stopped in front of Cifuentes and ejected a spent clip from his machine pistol. “We’re being attacked!” he screamed. “It’s the federal police—they’re all around us!”

  “What should I do?” Miguel implored.

  “Do? Take this. Do what you have to do.” The guard pulled a revolver from his belt, slid it across the tiles to the wide-eyed chemist, and ran down the hall.

  Cyrus and Vasquez monitored the raid from their hovering chopper and listened to the battle chatter. Cyrus was frustrated at his inability to follow the rapid-fire Spanish over his headset but every few seconds, one of the DEA agents on the ground broke into English.

  Cyrus watched Vasquez’s men storm through gaping holes in the compound fence in their light-armored half-tracks. The initial wave killed a number of security guards. Others took up defensive positions behind a refrigeration unit and the rest retreated inside the cinderblock factory building. From these positions they sprayed the advancing police with automatic fire.

  Vasquez loudly groused to Cyrus that he didn’t like the way things were progressing. “I’m not interested in a long affair,” he grumbled and instructed the pilot to land in a field near the factory.

  Vasquez ordered his men to hold fire and, megaphone in hand, boomed out from behind one of the half-tracks, “This is Colonel Vasquez of the Federal Police! You are completely surrounded. Throw your weapons through the windows and start coming out with your hands above your heads. Otherwise you’ll be killed. You have one minute.”