by Jeff Buick
“What was that about?” a fellow worker asked as Garcia passed her in the hall.
Eduardo shook his head and grinned. “Maybe a nutcase. He thinks Pablo Escobar is alive.”
The woman laughed. “Now that’s a good one.”
Garcia grabbed a coffee and stirred in some cream and sugar. He walked carefully to his windowless office and dropped his notebook on his desk. A small stack of paperwork, ready for inputting into the mainframe, sat on the edge of his desk. He ignored it and opened a new file, turning to the notes he had jotted down during the forty minutes with Eugene Escobar. He filled in all the necessary blanks, then typed the gist of the meeting in his own words, being accurate and refraining from peppering the interview with his own feelings or emotions. As silly as the whole meeting probably was, his superiors would eventually cast an eye over the report, and the last thing they wanted to see was his opinion of whether this was important or not. Stick to the facts and you got promoted. Get emotional or opinionated and you rot in your cubicle. It was kind of an unwritten rule at EPIC. He finished the report, inserted his DEA number at the bottom of the page, his electronic signature, and hit the enter button. Then he drained the last of his coffee and dug into the pile of paper on the edge of his desk.
Agent Eduardo Garcia had no idea what wheels he had just set in motion.
Chapter Twelve
When Eduardo Garcia hit the enter button on his computer, two things happened. His report was saved to the hard drive on EPIC’s mainframe computer, and the file was scrutinized by ghost programs from every agency with ties to the El Paso center. Red flags immediately went up in two of those agencies. One was at DEA Headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. The other was in Langley, home of the Central Intelligence Agency. Within nanoseconds of each other, the report was downloaded and sent to specific personnel at each agency. It was almost lunch time on the eastern seaboard, but both agents who had flagged reports that included Pablo Escobar’s name were in.
Alexander Landry was chairing a meeting with the divisional section chiefs from Atlanta and Chicago when Garcia’s report was electronically transferred through the system and into his mailbox at the DEA headquarters in Arlington. Landry’s executive assistant, Gwen Allen, read the report and immediately walked a paper copy of it into his office, cleared his desk and placed it front and center. She returned to her private office, just outside his, placed a call to their corporate travel agent and booked a seat on the first available flight to El Paso. When Landry passed her office after concluding the meeting, she flagged him down.
“Something very interesting in from EPIC,” she said. “It’s on your desk. I’ve already booked your flight and I’m in the middle of clearing your calendar for the next two days.”
“Better be good, Gwen,” he said gruffly.
Alexander Landry was a bear of a man, six-four with a sturdy frame that carried two-hundred and fifty-five pounds of muscle and precious little fat. He had a barrel chest, and the rest of his body was in proportion. Long arms, coursed with thick tendons over well-toned muscles, ended with hands the size of baseball gloves. His waist tapered to a size thirty-six, and he usually wore loose-fitting khakis or suit pants that hid his thick legs. Since his five-year stint with the marines, Landry had always worn his blond hair short and kept his rugged face clean-shaven. His eyes were cool blue and intelligent. He had spent the last twenty-three years with the DEA, eleven of those years in Colombia. From all the years in South America, Spanish was his preferred language, although English was his native tongue.
Landry retreated to his office and picked up the two-page report. His face remained impassive as he read Garcia’s account of Eugene Escobar’s visit. Once he was finished, he switched off his computer, grabbed his briefcase and locked his office door behind him. Gwen was on the phone when he stuck his head into her office. She quickly put the other party on hold.
“One thirty-six departure,” she said. “Had to book you business class. Sorry. That’s all they had.”
He nodded. “Thanks. I’ll be on my cell phone if you need me.” Despite his size, Landry disliked flying business class. The DEA didn’t blow its budget on expensive airline tickets or three hundred dollar lunches. At least, Alexander Landry didn’t.
His Lexus ES300 was underground, on the fifth level close to the elevator, and he thumbed the key fob as he pushed through the fire door into the parkade. The beep was loud in the enclosed space, and he disliked using the automatic opener for that reason. Today he didn’t even notice it. A packed suitcase was in the trunk, a precaution he now made standard practice after flying out on short notice with nothing but his choice of clothes for the day. It included three outfits, a fresh set of toiletries and a new pair of black Nunn Bush shoes. He slipped the key in the ignition and gunned the motor. Forty-three seconds later he swiped his card key at the exit, then swung out into traffic, heading for Washington National Airport. The fifty-three-year-old section chief placed a quick call to his wife at their upscale Forest Hills home, and gave her the news. She took it well, considering tomorrow was their son’s twenty-first birthday and dinner plans were already in place. He hung up feeling a pang of guilt. Maybe retirement wasn’t so far off, he thought.
Alexander Landry was section chief of the Bogotá field office during the wild ride that was the late ’80s and early ’90s, reporting directly to Joe Toft, who ran the entire DEA operation in Colombia. Despite their efforts, cocaine was flowing out of Medellín and Cali unimpeded. Between Carlos Lehder, the Ochoa brothers, Pablo Escobar and José Rodríguez Gacha, the flow was staggering, and seemingly unstoppable. Colombian police forces and the army were intimidated by the cartel’s use of plata o plomo, and most opted to accept the bribes rather than the bullet. Justice was sheared off at the knees as judges and other officers of the court were murdered. Car bombs exploded in the streets and the murder rate went through the roof. And amid all this carnage were the DEA and the CIA. Their mandate was to stop the flow of cocaine into the United States. Easier said than done.
Landry pulled into the parking lot at Washington National, his mind on Pablo Escobar. Of all the cartel leaders, Escobar was by far the most violent. In reality, he was probably a psychopath, incapable of feeling the pain his victims suffered as he executed them. His word was law, and in a country careening out of control as Colombia was in the ’80s, the law was ruthless. There was no known estimate of how many people Pablo Escobar had ordered killed. His hit men, or sicarios as they were known, went about their job with complete impunity from the law. Murder was not only acceptable, it was expected. If you crossed the drug lords, you died. This was the insanity he had lived through for eleven long years.
Landry reached his gate and scanned the crowd for his CIA counterpart. He knew she would be en route to El Paso, just as he was. He didn’t see her, but that meant nothing. She was coming, he knew it. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that; they had knocked heads so many times in the past, yet he had great respect for her intelligence and ability.
The boarding crew announced his flight, and he joined the short line of business-class passengers. Eugenio Escobar. Pablo’s cousin. The past was rearing its ugly head.
Cathy Maxwell, thirty-eight and one of the highest ranking women in the CIA covert ops sector, was at her desk at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, when the communiqué arrived from El Paso. It took three minutes and twenty-one seconds for the two-page report to leave the printer and reach her office. She scanned the contents of Garcia’s report and glanced up at Donald Adams, her assistant.
“Get me on the next flight to El Paso,” she said. He nodded and was gone. Maxwell re-read the report, then pulled open her bottom desk drawer and dug through a slew of files. She reached for the one with labeled “International Accounts.” She scanned down the long list of individual accounts at different world banks, watching the left column for small check marks, then scrutinizing the account opposite the mark. The ninth one was the account she was searching for. Sh
e dragged her index finger across the page to the latest activity on the account. One withdrawal of eight million dollars on January 19 and another for six million on March 9. The dates were within the time frames provided by Eugene Escobar. She leaned back in her chair and ran her hands through her shoulder-length hair, thick, wavy and chestnut brown with red highlights. The hair suited her fine, as did the soft facial lines—both belied her inner strength. More than one person had found out in other ways how cunning and persuasive she could be. The smarter ones took one look at her deep brown eyes and instinctively knew better. She withdrew the sheet of paper from the file, copied it and replaced the original just as Donald appeared at her door.
“One thirty-six out of Washington National or two forty-seven from Dulles?”
She did the math. A trip to her house was an absolute necessity, as her daughter Elsie had a half day at school and was bringing home her report card. She’d promised to be home in the afternoon so they could go over it together. “Dulles,” she said, grabbing her car keys and heading out the door.
“I’ll arrange for your ticket to be at the Delta counter,” Donald said as she banged through the outer doors and was gone.
Cathy Maxwell was a woman to both fear and respect. Her academic background was a Master’s in Science, majoring in chemistry at MIT, and her physical qualifications were ‘best of class’ at Quantico in her tenure as a student with aspirations to become a field operative. She joined the DEA nine days after her twenty-fourth birthday and, partly because she was fluent in Spanish, she was immediately shipped out to the Bogotá field office. It was July of 1991 and narco activity in Colombia was rampant. The Ochoa brothers ruled northern Colombia, with Rancho Ochoa spreading over thirty-five thousand acres between Cartagena and Barranquilla. Pablo Escobar was just settling into his new digs at La Catedral prison on a hill overlooking his home town of Envigado. She’d visited the drug lord in his lavish ‘cell’ and came away realizing that Pablo’s incarceration was a joke. In fact, Escobar had pissed off so many groups and individuals that the only place he was safe from retaliation was inside the grounds of La Catedral. Inside six months, Cathy Maxwell was a jaded agent, working what she knew to be a losing battle. The drug lords were simply too powerful. So she targeted them in her field of expertise: the supply of chemicals necessary to process the raw coca leaf into cocaine.
And that put her head to head with the cartel kingpins, especially Pablo Escobar. While both Pablo and the Ochoa brothers moved thousands of kilos of processed cocaine into the United States, it was Pablo who bribed government officials and procured the chemicals the labs needed to cook the coca leaves. Without acetone, ether and potassium permanganate there was no product. And the Americans knew it. So rather than concentrating entirely on stemming the flow from Colombia, they allocated some resources to keeping the most important chemical—potassium permanganate—out of Pablo’s hands. Cathy Maxwell was promoted and put in charge of the chemical aspect of the CIA’s covert battle against the Colombians. She did her job well, perhaps too well, as the cartels targeted her and her family for death. They missed her, but they didn’t miss her parents. Cartel sicarios paid her parents a visit at their Boston home, slicing both of them into unrecognizable pieces. The Bogotá station chief had walked into her office, closed the door behind him, and told her the grim facts about her parents. Cathy Maxwell was a changed woman. Bringing down Pablo Escobar became the focus of her life. It was common knowledge around DEA offices that two days after her parents’ funeral she had stormed into La Catedral and confronted Pablo Escobar. He had been surrounded by bodyguards.
She had stood two feet in front of him, and said, “I’m going to surgically remove your nuts and stuff them up your nostrils, you sick, fat little fuck.”
That elicited a stream of laughter from the guards and one of them grabbed her from behind. She spun around, pulled down on the man’s arm and wrapped her elbow around his neck as his body doubled over. She twisted and a sickening snap cracked through the room. His body crumpled to the floor at Pablo’s feet. The guards pulled guns and moved toward her, but Pablo held up his hand.
“We’ve got quite the little tiger here,” he said. “Unfortunately for you, I’m a guest of the Colombian government at this time, and it would create quite the headlines if you were to kill me while in custody. I think my nuts are safe while I’m here.” He walked back to one of the many soft couches in the living room that formed part of his jail cell. He waved his arm and the guards escorted Cathy Maxwell from the room. Not a word was ever mentioned about the guard.
She steered off the Dolley Madison Boulevard onto Route 695, driving more from memory than actually watching the road. McLean, Virginia was a heavily wooded and very secluded bedroom city within throwing distance of Langley, and a reasonable drive to downtown D.C. A few of the agency’s top brass lived in the exclusive subdivision, but not many could afford it. Cathy and her husband had paid just shy of a million for their ten-year-old colonial style home on Sugarstone Court. She pulled into the driveway and killed the engine of her BMW 540i. No minivans in her driveway, she vowed, grabbing her briefcase and hoofing it into the house.
“Hi, sweetie,” Darren Maxwell said as she pushed open the front door. He met her and they embraced. “Missed you this morning.”
“Missed you too,” she said. “You writers have the life. Up at noon, tap away on the keyboard for a couple of hours, and then spend the rest of the day telling everyone how difficult writing is. I wish.”
“It’s true,” he said, trying to look hurt. Darren Maxwell was forty-one, three years her senior, in excellent physical condition, and an attractive man whose hair just beginning to gray at the temples. At six-one, he was four inches taller than she, but knew that size meant nothing when dealing with a wolverine. Truth was, ever since they met in Colombia, her with the CIA and he on assignment for Time magazine, they had been madly in love. Three kids had failed to douse the fires. Their oldest, Elsie, was in grade two, and the twins were in pre-school. Darren wrote his articles from home, giving the kids one full-time parent.
“I have to fly out today,” she said, her arms still encircling his waist.
“Where?”
“El Paso. Some guy walked into EPIC this morning, told the DEA agent he was Pablo Escobar’s cousin and that the son-of-a-bitch is still alive. The report was fielded by Langley about forty minutes ago.”
Darren pushed back from her slightly.
“You know how it works. When Escobar’s name pops up, especially when someone says he’s alive, I have to check it out.”
“Hi, Mommy.” A smiling little girl in jeans and a yellow top came racing around the corner. Her hair was in pigtails and both front teeth were missing. The tooth fairy had been in a very generous mood when she visited and had coughed up big bucks for the ‘prime chiclets’ as her father called them. Elsie had stashed the money in a jar and was saving for a new bike.
“Hi, Elsie,” Cathy said, dropping to her knees and giving the little girl a hug. “Is this your report card?” she asked, taking the offered paper.
“Yes, and I did really, really well.”
Cathy went over the report card with her daughter line by line, reading the teacher’s comments and showing great pleasure at the series of ‘excellent’ marks issued for understanding, effort and work habits. They agreed that a deposit of five dollars to the bike jar was appropriate for such a stellar performance, but Cathy reminded her daughter that the real reward wasn’t the money, but achieving the marks. She spent another half hour with Elsie and her two younger sisters, quickly packed and headed out the front door for the airport.
“How long will you be gone?” Darren asked, leaning on the hood of her car as she dropped her suitcase in the trunk.
“A couple of days tops. I’ll call you once I’ve met with Escobar’s cousin.”
“Okay, take care.” Darren kissed her and watched as her car rounded the curve and disappeared behind the thick stand of trees th
at sheltered their home from the road.
Pablo Escobar alive. Not good news.
Chapter Thirteen
Eduardo Garcia looked up from the pile of paperwork on his desk. A huge man was framed in the doorway, blocking any light from the hallway. Garcia dropped his pen on the papers and leaned back in his chair, irritated at the interruption. The man was dressed in khakis and a golf shirt, but the white skin had Garcia thinking that the man spent little time on the links.
“Can I help you?” he asked, allowing irritation to creep into his voice.
“Eduardo Garcia?”
“Yeah. That’s me.”
“Alexander Landry,” the man said, letting a business card slip from his fingers. It dropped on Garcia’s desk, face up. Landry watched as the young agent leaned forward and read the fine print under Landry’s name. Deputy Administrator, United States Division.
Garcia hit the front of his knees on the desk as he jumped to his feet. He ignored the pain, and said, “Mr. Landry. Welcome to El Paso.”
“Thank you,” Landry said wryly. “Eugenio Escobar, where is he?”
Garcia swallowed hard. “I’m not sure, sir. At his hotel, I think.”
Landry leaned forward, his huge hands on Garcia’s desk, his face close to the young agent. “Want to find out, Agent Garcia? I’d really like to speak with the man.”
“Yes, sir,” Garcia said, reaching for Escobar’s file.
“Comfort Suites El Paso,” Landry said before Garcia could open the file, reciting the phone number without taking his eyes off Garcia.
Garcia dialed the number, sweat stains beginning to grow under his arms. Christ, what if Escobar wasn’t at the hotel? What if he had left town, made a run for it? His career was over. A moment later the ringing stopped and a man’s voice answered. “Mr. Escobar?” Garcia asked.
