Hell of a world, I suppose. You take the good with the bad, the bad with the downright ugly. Like the large tattoo Casey Anthony had placed on her shoulder in the weeks after little Caylee supposedly went missing.
Bella Vita. “Good Life.”
Brought me back to the gang from Honduras, or some other Central American country: La vida por las maras. “The life for the gangs.”
I took a sip of espresso and turned to Mariana. “Which part of Colombia are you originally from?”
“The southwest part of the country, near the Pacific coast.” Her voice was soft and warm. “Outside Cali.”
I nodded my head in sympathy. Much of the southwest region was controlled by the leftist guerrillas or right-wing paramilitaries and remained extremely dangerous.
“You have no family in Colombia?”
Slowly she shook her head. “My father, he died when I was an infant. He worked for the Cali Cartel. He was really just a boy when he first impregnated my mother, and still just a boy when he was killed by the Medellín Cartel. It is said that he is one of the last men killed personally by Pablo Escobar.”
“And your mother?”
“She died when I was older, maybe sixteen. My mother, she was sick all the time after my father died. But she would never go to hospital. She feared they would kill her if she went. Escobar had promised to kill my father’s whole family. Even after Escobar himself was killed, my mother continued to think he would find her. She was—how you say?—paranoia.”
“You have any siblings?”
She bowed her head. “Two brothers. They took care of me for a few years after our mother died. Then they took a job as smugglers. It is a truly awful story. They were best friends, my brothers, only a year apart. They’d been together their entire lives. Then they went to the States.…”
Their names were Mateo and Hernán, she told me. Mateo was the older brother; he was the one who convinced Hernán to quit his job at the flower plantation to go to work for a man named Leandro.
The job was easy.
The job paid well.
The job involved traveling.
On their first trip, they would fly to Newark, New Jersey, where they would be met by a man who would give them money in exchange for the cocaine they were carrying. Each brother had swallowed more than a hundred balloons before boarding a flight from Bogotá to the United States.
When they arrived at Newark Liberty International, the man they were told to expect was not waiting for them. They didn’t know what to do. They each had a stomachful of cocaine balloons but little cash. They decided to take a room at the Howard Johnson Hotel near the airport and try to contact Leandro for further instructions.
Only when they called, Leandro’s number had been disconnected.
They would later learn through their lawyer that the man who was supposed to meet them—a guy known only as Paco—had spotted a tail and called Leandro to tell him he couldn’t meet the Silvas at the airport. Leandro, coked up and paranoid himself, got scared and made for Venezuela, cutting off all contact with Colombia.
The brothers were left on their own.
Bellies stuffed with balloons of cocaine.
Nothing to do but wait.
The morning after they arrived in Newark, the younger brother, Hernán, began complaining of chest pains.
Mateo told him he’d be fine. “Just hang on while we figure something out.”
But by late afternoon, Hernán was convinced he couldn’t wait anymore.
His chest felt as though someone had parked a car on top of it.
He was sweating profusely.
He felt pain down his left arm.
Hernán begged his brother to take him to the hospital, but Mateo refused. “Are you loco? They’ll take X-rays and we’ll be busted for sure. We’ll each spend twenty-five, thirty years in federal prison. No way.”
As Hernán became more desperate, he told Mateo that he’d go to the hospital alone.
But Mateo wouldn’t budge: “If they catch you,” Mateo told his brother, “they will catch me. And I’m not taking that chance. Just man up and wait.”
But Hernán couldn’t wait. He was sure he was dying. So he rolled himself off the bed and went for the door.
When he did, Mateo tackled him, struck him, dragged him back to the bed.
Hernán screamed and Mateo struck him again.
Then Hernán struck back.
The two brothers engaged in a long and bloody brawl that resulted in broken bones and broken mirrors and broken lamps—and a hell of a lot of noise.
Enough noise for other residents to call the front desk.
Enough noise for the front desk to notify the police.
Enough noise for the police to break down the door.
As soon as the police stepped into the hotel room, Hernán confessed. He pleaded to the uniformed officers for medical attention. Cried out that he was going to die.
The police placed both brothers under arrest. They took Hernán to Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, Mateo to the Essex County Jail.
From there, the DEA took over the investigation. The U.S. Attorney’s Office brought the matter to a federal grand jury and obtained a multiple-count felony indictment. Six months later, the Silva brothers pleaded guilty and were sentenced to two decades each.
They were now serving out their sentences at the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, New York.
As for Hernán, turns out it was a false alarm. No balloons had broken in his stomach.
He’d just suffered a bad case of indigestion.
Doctors suggested that the airplane food was to blame.
Chapter 37
“There he is,” I said with no small measure of relief.
Mariana craned her neck to view the embassy, then stood and started across the street.
Grey headed in the other direction, and I witnessed Mariana catching up with him just as he turned the corner and vanished from sight.
I leaned back in my chair and scanned the narrow street. A stray dog, a dog more ribs than meat, scurried unnoticed along the sidewalk past a group of skinny young men with mustaches and backward baseball caps loitering in front of a liquor store. Before the dog reached the corner, it sniffed around some overstuffed black garbage bags piled at the curb, clearly searching for something to eat. When it didn’t find anything, the stray silently moved on up the street until it was out of sight.
When Mariana returned a few minutes later, she said, “The café at El Museo del Oro in half an hour.”
Twenty minutes after that, I spotted Grey at a table in the far corner of the restaurant at Colombia’s famous Gold Museum, which was located downtown in the historic hamlet of La Candelaria—Bogotá’s “Old City”—a neighborhood of museums, universities, and churches.
The building itself was awe-inspiring, a state-of-the-art facility housing the world’s largest collection of pre-Hispanic gold relics. As I took a seat across from Grey, I thought of the old treasure hunter on Seven Mile Beach in Grand Cayman. What he wouldn’t do to see this place, to spend a few precious minutes on the top floor in the museum’s eight-thousand-piece “gold room.”
Grey slid a menu across the table to me, opened with, “I recommend the chicken soup and red bean stew.”
“It’s awfully good to see you too,” I said.
He still hadn’t so much as smiled, yet it was all I could do to suppress my own grin. A hell of a thing, old friends. Sometimes you don’t realize you’ve missed them until they’re right there in front of you again.
“What are you doing in Bogotá, Simon?”
“I need a—” Here comes that damn word again. “—I need a favor, Grey.”
“Well, I figured that. The question is, what kind of favor? And what kind of trouble is it going to get me into?”
I tried to read him, but if Grey’s face were a book, it’d be scribbled in Ancient Greek. Physically, he was the same man he’d been a decade ago. Still fit and handsom
e, the only difference a smattering of gray hair that only made him look more distinguished. But for all I knew, in other ways he could have changed immeasurably over all those years.
“You’ve been watching the news?” I said. “The home invasion in L.A.? The abduction of that teenage girl, Olivia Trenton?”
He nodded. “The Bureau likes the father for it.”
“Yeah, well. I don’t.”
I told Grey about Grand Cayman and Costa Rica and what Mariana Silva had overheard, how her captors had been talking about a mara that came into a lot of money in connection with a job in California.
When I finished he said, “These Central American gangs, they don’t actually travel to the United States to kidnap women for the cartels. You know that.”
“Of course I do.”
“They take girls traveling abroad. If they wanted Olivia, they would have taken her while she was in the Caribbean. They wouldn’t have waited two months, then executed a home invasion in Southern California.”
I held up a hand. “Look, I realize there has to be more to it. And I admit that I don’t know what that is. But I intend to find out. This is too much of a coincidence.”
He sighed. “This has been all over the news for something like seventy-two hours. The talking heads have been doing nothing but speculating. They do have televisions up there in San José these days, don’t they? Mariana’s captors could have heard about the home invasion themselves from Wolf Blitzer or Soledad O’Brien on CNN.”
“Don’t you think I’ve thought of that?”
He leaned back in his chair. “If you thought of it, what are you doing here?”
A waiter came by and Grey ordered something off the menu.
I said, “Just coffee, por favor.” Then I turned back to Grey, told him something I thought he of all people would understand. “I have a gut feeling about this.”
Grey flashed his teeth, though it was more of a smirk than a smile. “The old law enforcement fallback, huh? Didn’t you have to turn in that gut when you turned in your gun and your badge?”
“I haven’t exactly been sitting on my ass for the past decade,” I said, maybe a tad too defensively.
“No, I know that. But you also haven’t worked on a team in that time. When you decide to follow your gut instincts as a private dick, you don’t necessarily put others in danger. When you involve, say, the DEA, and ask for help going up against the Colombian cartels, you don’t do it based on a ‘gut feeling.’ You go on cold, hard facts.”
“That’s all I’m asking for, Grey. I’m not here to request suppressive fire. I’m here in the hopes that you can provide me some information that might just lead me to Olivia.”
“You mean, you want me to give you just enough information so that you can go out and get yourself killed. Just enough rope to hang yourself, right? That’s what you’re asking for.” When I didn’t respond, he added, “I thought you didn’t deal with these types of cases anyway. I thought you only handled parental abductions.”
I tried to hide my anger but I’d discovered long ago I’m no good at it. In a gruff tone I hadn’t intended, I said, “I’m expanding my business.”
He took a sip of his soft drink. “That’s the entrepreneurial American spirit I know and love.”
“Will you help me?”
“Have I ever said no to you, Simon?”
“Only when I’ve asked you to pay for the drinks.”
This time Grey’s smile was genuine. “Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let me be completely honest with you.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Aside from spraying the coca fields with herbicides every once in a while, we don’t deal a whole hell of a lot with the farmers or the workers who cut and package the stuff. And we certainly don’t concern ourselves down here with the small-time couriers. We go after the big boys and we hit them where it hurts—in their wallets.”
“You focus on the money laundering.”
He touched his finger to his nose. “It’s all about the pesos down here. That said, it would help if we knew which group we were dealing with.”
“Mariana specifically used the word ‘cartel,’ but I’m not sure she understands the distinction between the cartels and the insurgents and the paramilitaries.”
“I’m not sure there is a distinction to understand anymore,” Grey said. “Narco-trafficking is how every group in Colombia makes its money. If we had Girl Scouts down here, they’d be farming the coca fields instead of selling Thin Mints and Do-si-dos.” He paused. “But if we were to begin with the most active area, I’d suggest starting in the Valle del Cauca.”
“All right, then. We’ll begin there.”
The waiter arrived and set two bowls down in front of Grey, and Grey said, “If you don’t mind—first I’m going to enjoy my chicken soup and red bean stew.”
I told him to have at it, then ordered another cup of joe.
Chapter 38
When we returned to my hotel room, Grey went to the window and drew the curtains closed. He said, “You really are out of practice, aren’t you?”
“The maids must have opened them,” I said, though I wasn’t sure. Maybe I wasn’t as cautious as I used to be. If that were the case, Grey was right; I had no right asking for anyone’s help. My slipups could easily get someone killed.
Grey went to the map of Colombia, which I’d finally tacked to the wall. “All right,” he said. “I’m going to try to do this without giving you an unnecessary history lesson.” He pointed to an area abutting the Pacific coast. “This here is the Valle del Cauca. As you can see, it stretches inland and includes the city of Cali. You probably remember the Cali Cartel, a seven-billion-dollar-a-year operation.”
“Of course.”
“Then you know it doesn’t exist anymore. But when it and Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel began fragmenting in the ’90s, that made room for the Norte del Valle Cartel, which has recently breathed its last breaths, due at least in part to our arrests of its leaders and seizures of billions of dollars. Essentially, we cut off its head—and its neck, just to be sure it couldn’t grow another one.”
“Which leaves…?”
“Micro-cartels, which are nearly impossible to keep track of. So here on the Pacific coast, we have a valley just west of the Andes that remains the epicenter of the country’s armed conflict. We have the left-wing guerrillas and the right-wing paramilitaries and the Colombian army and a countless number of drug traffickers all fighting one another over the territory. It’s the ultimate hellscape, Simon. If Olivia was sold to be a smuggler, that’s where she’d be, somewhere in this region. But you go in there, I guarantee you’ll never come out again.”
“I thought you were going to help me.”
“I am helping you, Simon. I’m saving your life by explaining to you that once Colombia has someone in its mouth, it either chews them up or swallows them whole. But it does not spit them back out, not unless you’re dealing with a kidnap-for-ransom, which this may have been at the start but isn’t anymore.”
“What if we contact a professional negotiator and put out the word that we’re willing to pay more?”
“They’ll smell a trap. Olivia will become too hot a potato, and they will slice her up and feed her to the peasants.”
“Christ,” I said, slapping a lamp off the desk. “I’d read in the Times that the homicide rates here in Colombia are at an all-time low.”
“They are, Simon. Which still leaves Colombia as one of the most dangerous and violent countries in the world. The only country in South America with more murders per capita is Venezuela—and it only recently attained that honor. And it’s doubtful they’ll keep it for very long.”
Grey stepped past me and picked the lamp up off the floor, set it back on the desk.
“Look,” he said, “this country has received a lot of support from the States under Plan Colombia. The Department of Justice has been assisting Colombia’s efforts to strengthen its justice system, and we’ve been
crucial to its recent progress in combating terrorist groups from both the left and the right. But this is a nation in transition, Simon. Fewer murders are being committed for political reasons, but more murders are now being committed for control of the drug trade. Dismantling the cartels may have resulted in slightly less cocaine reaching the States, but one major consequence of that is more cocaine remaining inside Colombia. Rural violence is down, but urban violence is on the rise.”
“What does that have to do with finding Olivia?”
“Everything, Simon. It has everything to do with finding Olivia. Five or ten years ago, we could go to one cartel and ask them for information on another and they’d gladly give it to us, if not for a free pass, then to put their competitors out of business. Same with the rebels. Today, we don’t know who the hell’s who anymore. The drug trade’s being operated by goddamn street gangs, two-bit organizations that were more than happy to pick up the scraps left behind by the major cartels. How many groups right now do you think are trying to find ways to get drugs into the United States? How many men right now do you think are competing to be the next Pablo Escobar? If Olivia’s in Colombia, then one of those men has her—and those men are amateurs, and they will cut off her head the minute they begin feeling the heat.”
I felt dizzy. Too much caffeine and nothing to eat.
I looked into Grey’s eyes and instead of my friend, I saw the FBI agent in charge of Hailey’s investigation all those years ago. He seemed small and weak and cowardly. I heard his voice as clear as though he were here now, standing right in front of me just as he did in our living room in Georgetown. He was telling me he had no leads.
But you do, I thought. You’re just too goddamn scared to see where they might take you.
“… leave you some equipment?” Grey was saying. “Simon? Simon?”
Payoff Page 14
