White Cargo

by Stuart Woods

  He ordered dinner from room service and ate it while absently watching a soccer match on television. When that was over, the Cosby Show came on, but in Spanish.

  He cursed himself for telling them what he knew before he had extracted more in return. In bed, he thought about Meg and wondered where she was, what had happened to her. There had still been no word whatever from her. He thought about Jinx, too. The story of what had happened to Drummond’s daughter tore at him. He felt he had gotten close to Jinx, but now she might be in Leticia, or she might have disappeared with the jet and would now be in some other country, even farther from his reach. He phoned Meg’s house. No answer. He did not sleep much that night.

  • • •

  The next morning he dressed and waited for Bergman to call. By noon he had read all the English-language newspapers available in the hotel, and he was beginning to pace. At two o’clock he started to telephone Bergman but decided the hell with it. He caught a cab to the embassy.

  He got through the gates with his passport, but the receptionist insisted on calling Bergman to confirm his appointment. Then, frowning, she passed the telephone to Cat.

  Bergman was on the line. “What are you doing here? I said I’d call you.”

  “I can’t just sit in a hotel room and wait,” Cat said, not without heat. “What’s going on?”

  “Look, all hell has broken loose around here. I just can’t talk to you right now.”

  “I want to know what’s happening,” Cat demanded. “Now send somebody down here to get me, or I’ll call the Ambassador.”

  Bergman put his hand over the phone for a moment, and Cat could hear a muffled exchange with someone else. He came back on the line. “All right, I’ll send someone down.”

  Cat waited impatiently, and ten minutes later Candis Leigh appeared, smiling. In the elevator, she said, “I like the way you don’t take any crap from these people.”

  “What’s going on?” Cat asked.

  “There isn’t time to tell you,” she said as the elevator doors opened. “Just keep it up, and you’ll be all right. Don’t let them push you around.”

  She led the way to Bergman’s office. There were a half dozen people in the room, most of them on telephones. Bergman of NAU, Gomez of DEA, and Barry Hedger were sitting on the sofa, huddled over what seemed to be several departmental telephone books.

  Bergman waved him to a chair, then ignored him. “What about Marv Hindelman?” Bergman was saying to Hedger. “Assistant Attorney General.”

  “It would never work,” Gomez replied. “He’s too far down the totem pole, and anyway, I hardly know him.”

  “Why don’t we see the Ambassador?” Hedger asked. “Get him to call the Secretary of State.”

  Bergman shook his head. “He wouldn’t do it, not on a funding request. Even if he did, not even the Secretary could get it moving in time.”

  “It looks like we’re fucked,” Gomez said. “I’ve got my guy stashed at the Hilton, but I can’t let him walk into that meet empty-handed.”

  The three men fell silent. There was only the low hum of other men speaking Spanish into telephones.

  “What’s going on?” Cat asked.

  Bergman sighed. “We checked out Empire Holdings, the company you told us the Gulfstream is registered to, and ran the description you gave us against the board of directors.” He shuffled through the papers on the coffee table and came up with a photograph.

  Cat looked at the familiar figure in tennis clothes, posing with a group of men and women similarly dressed. He recognized three or four well-known movie actors.

  “The FBI ran this down overnight and faxed it to us. It was taken at a celebrity tennis tournament in Los Angeles five years ago. His name is Stanton Michael Prince. He ran a chain of fancy car washes around L.A. called Stan’s Detailers that were a front for cocaine dealing. The DEA busted him about a month after the photograph was taken; he jumped a two-million-dollar bail and hasn’t been seen since, not in the States, anyway. He just walked away from a very successful legitimate business, which the government took. He could afford to. Apparently, he was a wholesaler as well as a retailer. He must have been raking it in for a long time. He had no previous record and wasn’t openly consorting with any dirty people; it made him hard to nail.”

  Bergman shuffled through the papers again and came up with a sheet. “The guy has an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is some piece of work. We’re still checking on the Anaconda Company, but so far it stands up as legit. Still, if this guy has anything to do with it, it ain’t legit.”

  “Well, great,” Cat said, “you know who he is. Now what?”

  Bergman sighed again. “We’re working on it.”

  Cat gestured around the office. “I can see that, but I can also see from the way you’re all behaving that something is wrong. What is it?”

  Hedger broke in. “What we’ve got here is a great big bureaucratic fuck-up.”

  “What sort of fuck-up?”

  Hedger looked wearily at Bergman and nodded. “You may as well tell him. Maybe it’ll get him off our backs.”

  Cat looked at Bergman expectantly. “Well?”

  “All right,” Bergman said, throwing up his hands, “but, again, this is strictly confidential.”

  “Of course.”

  “I told you we’d had reports of this big new factory in the Trapezoid.”

  “Yeah, I remember that as if it were yesterday.”

  “Well, it was more than just reports; we’re sure of it.”

  “I figured you were.”

  “The outfit—and your friend Prince may very well be the head guy—is holding a sort of international sales conference. Apparently fifty or so people have been invited from the States, Europe, and the Far East who are to be new distributors of cocaine, or maybe franchisees is a better word. They’re setting up franchises, just like McDonald’s.”

  “And you know when this is?”

  “Yes, it’s day after tomorrow.”

  “You’re going to go in there and arrest them all, then?”

  Bergman smiled sadly. “We’d like nothing better.”

  “You mean that, for some reason, you can’t?”

  “A couple of reasons, actually. First of all, we don’t know where the factory is located.”

  “But you said—”

  “Yeah, it’s in the Trapezoid. I don’t think you realize from the map just how big that is. We’re talking about thousands of square miles of jungle. It’s concealed from aerial observation by a canopy of trees and, of course, camouflage, and it would take an army years to cover it all on the ground. There’s nothing down there but a few Indians.”

  “Where did you get the information you have?” Cat asked.

  “From several sources, but mainly from one middle-level government official who got bought by the outfit, but didn’t stay bought.”

  “Doesn’t he know where the place is?”

  “No, he’s never been there. Neither has any other of our informants. However, we had worked out a way to find out where it is.”

  “Had worked out?”

  “Yeah. By starting at the end of the cocaine chain, in the States. The DEA busted a lawyer in Miami who’d been instrumental in laundering money and couldn’t stand the thought of going to jail, so he spilled a few beans. By keeping him on a short string, we’ve managed to get one of our people, well, sort of . . . accredited to this conference.” Bergman stopped and laughed. “Jesus, it sounds like we’re talking about the United Nations instead of a drug operation, doesn’t it?”

  Cat brightened. “You mean you’re going to have a man on the spot, undercover?”

  Gomez spoke up. “The DEA has sent us a guy—somebody who’s unknown in the drug trade, a fresh face. We couldn’t send any of the people who are stationed here; there was too great a chance of their being recognized. But this new guy is perfect, and we’ve even managed to build him a cover that should hold, if they don’t look at him too hard. You und
erstand, this has all happened in just the past three or four days. We’re playing catch-up just as fast as we can.”

  “And that’s our problem,” Bergman said. “It takes time to mount an operation like this, to get the paperwork done, to get it funded. Johnny Gomez and his people really came through for us, getting this guy down here on such short notice, and Hedger’s people managed the cover, but funding is another matter.”

  “Funding?” Cat was puzzled. “You said you have a budget.”

  “Well, sure, we do. But remember, the Narcotics Assistance Unit isn’t an operational outfit. The Colombians are meant to do all the work, and they’ve been moving very quickly to get a military operation mounted against this new factory, when we find it. But the American end of it, the undercover man, doesn’t come out of Colombian funds, and, strictly speaking, this isn’t a DEA operation, either, so their budget can’t cover it. Neither can Hedger’s.”

  “I’m beginning to see your problem with the bureaucracy,” Cat said, “but just how expensive can bringing in one man be?”

  Bergman was beginning to look embarrassed. “Well, it’s not exactly bringing him in that we can’t fund—I mean, the guy’s a DEA agent, and he’s on salary. It’s the franchise fee.”

  “The what?”

  “Remember, this outfit is, in effect, selling franchises.”

  “Like McDonald’s.”

  “Right. And when you want to open a McDonald’s restaurant, you have to buy in; you have to pay the company a franchise fee.”

  “Okay, so how much is the franchise fee?”

  “A million dollars.”

  Cat stared at Bergman. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You have an opportunity to break up what sounds like the biggest drug operation in the entire universe, you’ve got an undercover agent in Bogotá, ready and waiting to go in, and you can’t do it because all of you together—the combined State Department, Drug Enforcement Agency, and Central Intelligence Agency can’t come up with a million bucks?”

  Bergman, Hedger, and Gomez all looked sheepish. “That’s essentially it,” Bergman said. “I know it sounds crazy, when you hear about the billions in the federal budget, but it takes a great deal of doing to get any government agency to part with that much actual cash for any operation, especially if they don’t know they’ll get it back. If we were the DEA in Miami, we could use confiscated drug money, just turn it around and feed it back into an operation. But we’re not, and the notion of a million bucks in hundred-dollar bills scares the shit out of any federal employee. Nobody is going to sign for it; nobody wants to be held accountable.”

  For a moment Cat stared at the wall in bemused silence, trying not to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. Then he turned back to Bergman. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “You say this DEA undercover agent is a fresh face. Does that mean he’s new on the job?”

  Gomez nodded. “Yeah, he’s only been with the agency for a couple of weeks, but he has a military background.” Then he added defensively, “Look, the guy doesn’t have to be James Bond; he just goes in there with the money, buys his franchise, lets us know where the factory is, then gets the hell out.”

  Cat leaned forward and looked at the three men. “Listen to me,” he said. “I want to do it. I want to go to this ‘conference.’”

  Everybody was silent for a moment, then Bergman spoke up. “Mr. Catledge,” he said, “I know how concerned you are about your daughter, and I agree that she might, indeed, be at the factory with this guy Prince, but you must understand that you are not the person to go in there and try to get her out. You are completely unqualified for such an operation.”

  “Am I?” Cat asked. “I think I’m as qualified as the guy you want to send in there. I have a military background—I was an officer in the United States Marines.”

  “It’s not as simple as that, Mr. Catledge; there’s the matter of cover. We couldn’t get that together in time.”

  “I already have a very good cover, thank you, prepared by Hedger’s people—passport, credit cards, a business identity, and backup. And I am, as you put it, a fresh face. Has Gomez’s man had any special training for the job?”

  “Well, no, except for a small-arms refresher.”

  “I’m pretty handy with small arms,” Cat said. “Ask Hedger.”

  Hedger rolled his eyes. “That’s true. I made Marksman, in the Corps, but he fired Expert.” He smiled a little smile. “Of course he told to carry a small arm through an airport metal detector, too.”

  “So, I made a mistake,” Cat said. “I have a history of learning from my mistakes.”

  “Mr. Catledge—”

  Cat would not be interrupted. “In addition, I am one hell of a lot more motivated than your DEA man—my daughter is being used by these people for a purpose I’d rather not, but can’t help, think about.”

  “That’s the problem,” Hedger said. “You’re liable to be more interested in her than calling in the troops.”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Cat said, exasperated, “we’ll be in the middle of a goddamned jungle! I’ll need the troops!”

  “Mr. Catledge,” Bergman broke in, “this is an impossible notion. We—”

  “And finally,” Cat continued, “I have one qualification that neither your man nor any of you has.”

  Bergman looked at Cat, betraying amusement, but his interest was piqued. “And what would that be, Mr. Catledge?” he asked.

  Cat permitted himself a small smile. “I have a million dollars in cash,” he said.

  Hedger leaned forward. “In cash, you say?”

  “In hundred-dollar bills.”

  Bergman tried to interrupt, but Hedger waved him down.

  “How long would it take for you to lay your hands on it?”

  “Half an hour.”

  Hedger looked at Bergman. “We need a million bucks, he’s got a million bucks.”

  Bergman nodded. “Listen, Mr. Catledge, you loan us that money, and I promise you, our man will do everything in his power to get your daughter out.”

  “Not a chance,” Cat said. “Your guy isn’t going to want a strange woman on his hands. He’s going to want to get his ass out of there alive when the balloon goes up, and I won’t give you a goddamned nickel to put him in there.”

  “Mr. Catledge, be reasonable,” Bergman said plaintively. “I am a federal official. I do not have the authority to send a private citizen into a dangerous situation on a government mission.”

  “What government mission?” Cat demanded. “It’s the fucking Colombians who are going in there, and do you think they give a shit who tells them where it is? You don’t have to send me, just tell me how to get there, and I’ll go of my own volition. I’ll sign a release, if it’ll make you feel better—take full responsibility for myself and my daughter.”

  Cat stood up. “I’ll tell you something else. If you people have anything to do with sending the Colombian military into that place before I have an opportunity to get my daughter out, and she is harmed as a result, I’ll hold each of the agencies you represent and each of you personally responsible. You’ve already seen the press on what happened to me and my family—just imagine the coverage I’m going to generate if you get Jinx killed.”

  The three men sat, speechless, staring at him. The other men on the telephones had stopped talking and were listening now.

  “This is your situation, gentlemen,” Cat said finally. “Without my money, you’ve got no operation—or, if you do find a way to get it together, you’ve got me, in Lyndon Johnson’s memorable phrase, outside the tent, pissing in. On the other hand, use my money, let me go instead of your man, and you’ve got what you want—a crack at a gigantic narcotics operation and a chance to be heroes. You’ll all be having lunch at the White House with Nancy Reagan.” Cat sat down again. “And if it goes wrong, I won’t be around to tell the tale.”

  Bergman, Hedger, and Gomez stared at him, still saying nothing. Finally, Bergman turned to Hedger. “
You’ve known this guy longer than I have. Does he have what it takes to pull this thing off?”

  Cat looked at Hedger, whose eyes had never left him. He waited nervously for an answer. Now it all turned on the word of the man Cat reckoned hated him more than anybody else in the world.

  “I don’t know,” Hedger said, finally, “but I’ll tell you this much—he’s the most ruthless sonofabitch I ever knew.”

  24

  WAITING AGAIN. CAT STOOD AT THE WINDOW OF HIS ROOM and watched clouds float past the green mountains that hung over the city. He had been back at the hotel for an hour. The phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “This is Buzz Bergman. You’re on. We’ll get together tomorrow to talk more, but tonight you have to be vetted by these people. Here’s Johnny Gomez to explain.”

  Cat waited silently. It surprised him that the hand holding the telephone was trembling slightly.

  “It’s Johnny Gomez, Cat. Now listen carefully. There’s a nightclub on the top floor of the Tequendama—that’s where you’re staying, right?”

  “Right.”

  “There’s a Cuban review playing up there—the famous one from the Tropicana Hotel in Havana; it comes to Bogotá every year. Call the club for a reservation. Say your name is Ellis, you’re a friend of Mr. Vargas, you want a table for one. Got that?”

  “Yes. I’m Ellis, friend of Vargas.”

  “Right. You’re to take a hundred thousand dollars in hundreds, okay?”

  “Yes. What happens after I get there?”

  “Relax and enjoy the show; I hear it’s terrific. Somebody will introduce himself as Vargas and ask for the money. He’ll give you instructions on what to do next. He may ask you some questions. The guy who has introduced you to these people is a lawyer in Miami named Walter L. Jasper, called Walt. He does some work for your company in Florida, you got to know him over the last six months or so, and he invited you into this deal. Jasper is five-ten, weighs a hundred and fifty pounds, blond hair going gray, has a one-inch, crescent-shaped scar at the outer corner of his left eye, prominent. He has described you to them, said he knows you well enough. That’s all he’s told them, so if they ask a lot of questions, fake it. We’ll get your answers back to Jasper, so you won’t be crossed up, okay?”