by Jeff Buick
“Why me?” he asked.
“Two reasons, Eduardo. First, the guy killed your uncle. Shot him in the back. And payback is always nice. And second, there is still one more mole in your little group. And this person is feeding Pablo information: Cathy Maxwell, Alexander Landry or Bud Reid. You’re the only person I can trust.”
“What are you talking about, another mole in the group?”
Eugene explained his logic. “Crandle is Rastano’s boy. But we know someone is keeping Pablo abreast of our progress, too. And that Pablo knows we’re after him. That’s part of the reason I left El Paso, Eduardo. You guys can’t make a move without both Pablo and Rastano knowing, and I doubt we’ll ever find Pablo if he knows we’re coming.”
There was a moment of silence, then Eduardo said, “Okay. I understand. And thanks for the info on my uncle. Maybe we’ll see each other soon.”
“Maybe.”
“And, Eugene, the police know you’re driving a blue Saturn. You should get rid of it.”
“Thank you.”
Before Eugene returned to the Internet connection, he walked out into the late afternoon sun and spoke to Bill, telling him to take off and ditch the car. He thanked the driver for his time, paid him for the final day and returned to the computer screen. He desperately needed to find some kind of corroboration of one of the nine names on the DMV list.
And he was feeling confident that he knew how to do it.
Chapter Fifty-six
The guards performed their perfunctory evening check, picked up the supper dishes and let themselves out, locking the door behind them. Julie threw Shiara a nervous glance and wet her lips.
“You ready?” Julie asked.
“I guess so,” Shiara replied. She was shaking with fear.
Julie hugged her daughter and held the trembling girl close. “It’s going to be okay, honey. You father has until tomorrow. He may get what Mr. Rastano wants.”
“But once we’re in the air duct, that’s it,” Shiara said. “There’s no turning back.”
“We can’t wait until daylight. We need the darkness so we can move once we’re outside the house. We have to go tonight.”
“Okay.” Shiara was settling down, her breathing more regular, the shaking almost subsided. She would need to be relaxed in the duct or she could hyperventilate, and that would be dangerous in the confined space. “I think I’m ready,” she said calmly.
“Excellent,” Julie said, smoothing her daughter’s hair. “Then let’s go.”
They removed the screws from the grate, but this time Julie put four of the screws back in, almost flush with the wall, two at the bottom corners and two at the top. She gave them a couple of twists. Then she hooked the grate on the protruding bottom screws and let it hang down, just below the hole in the wall. Julie went first. Shiara then got on top of the dresser and, with great difficulty, entered the duct feet first. When she was completely in—her running shoes touching the soles of Julie’s running shoes—she lifted the grate up and secured it on the top screws. The procedure took just a few minutes, but the grate was almost flush with the wall and disguised the entrance to their escape route. They had decided that if the guards did come in while they were still in the ducts, that they would still stand a better chance of escaping if the avenue they had used to get out of the locked room wasn’t immediately clear.
The downside to the plan was that Julie was leading, and this was her first time in the ducts. Being smaller, Shiara had to be the one who went backwards, and carried the screwdriver. Shiara could guide her when they came to the forks, and could keep up with her mother, even moving backward. But when they came to the grate on the other end, the older woman would have to drop through onto the concrete floor. Both Julie and Shiara were intensely worried about the possibility of broken bones.
“I’ve reached the first fork,” Julie said quietly, as her hands felt the main shaft split into three different ducts.
“Take the left one,” Shiara said, her voice traveling easily through the metal tunnel.
They continued through the darkness. Julie had been warned by Shiara to watch for the sharp metal edges, and she felt every inch with quivering fingertips. She reached a second junction and Shiara again gave directions. Julie was feeling the effects of being in such a claustrophobic environment for almost an hour, and felt a newfound respect for her daughter’s bravery in searching out their route, alone and in such an unforgiving place. Finally, a glimmer of light reflected off the metal ductwork. The end was in sight. They kept moving, Shiara pushing herself backwards through the ducts, keeping her shoes in contact with her mother’s. When Julie reached the grate at the end of the duct, Shiara placed the screwdriver beside her in the duct, then they both backed up until Julie’s groping hand found it. Even moving back ten feet had been almost impossible, and she realized that if they couldn’t get out the opening, they were trapped.
“Don’t drop the screwdriver,” Shiara cautioned her mother, “or that grate isn’t coming off.”
“I’ll be careful,” Julie said. She pressed her face against the grill until she could see the heads of the screws. Then she gripped the screwdriver between her index and middle finger and slid it though the grate. It took almost fifteen minutes per screw, turning them an eighth of a turn each time, before she had loosened all four screws. When the last one fell to the floor, she grabbed the grate and pushed. It swung off its moldings and hung suspended in the air, cluched tightly in her right hand. She pulled herself forward until her head and shoulders were out of the duct and hanging over the concrete floor. A pile of boxes sat against the wall. Holding her breath, she carefully tossed the grate on top of the boxes. It landed safely without much noise. A solitary emergency beacon provided enough light to see about the room. She looked down.
The floor was at least eight feet, probably closer to nine feet, below her. There was nothing to break her fall; she was going to go head-first onto the concrete. Their escape depended on her ability to hit with her hands first and roll with the impact. If she was badly injured, hope was gone. She pushed herself farther out into thin air, until just her hips and legs were left in the shaft. The muscles in the small of her back and her abs were burning from the exertion of holding the upper half her body rigid. She gripped the edge of the shaft with both hands and pushed with every bit of strength she had.
Her legs cleared the edge of the duct and then she was falling. Falling fast and slightly off balance. The floor came up too fast and her hands were unable to break the fall. She felt the back of her head hit the concrete, and she rolled as best she could with the impact. Excruciating pain shot through her body, down her spine, through her arms and legs. Her brain felt like it was going to explode. Then there was blackness.
When Julie came to, she could hear Shiara quietly calling to her. She tried to move her right arm, but nothing happened. Then her left. She saw that hand rise, and was relieved that she wasn’t paralyzed. She tried moving her right arm again, and this time felt pressure near the small of her back. She rolled slightly to the left and tried again. She realized she had been lying on her arm, and pulled it out from under her. She raised both hands and twisted them in the air. Neither arm was broken, and her wrists seemed fine too. She heard Shiara call again, and glanced up. Shiara’s feet were sticking out of the duct. She was waiting for Julie to help her.
“I’m okay, Shiara,” Julie said quietly, now moving her legs and wiggling her toes about. She arched her back, then rolled over. The motion sent a wave of pain through her skull that almost made her scream. She moved slower, but managed to get to her feet. She was dizzy, and felt like she was going to pass out, but somehow she stayed on her feet. “Can you wait another minute, sweetheart?” she asked. “I need a little time to get my senses back.”
“Sure,” Shiara said. “Take as long as you need. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Thanks,” Julie said. She sat down again, feeling less dizzy. A couple of minutes later, she got up and st
ood beneath Shiara. “Anytime you’re ready.”
“On three?”
“On three. One, two, three.”
Shiara came out of the duct quickly. She pushed off hard to avoid catching her upper body on the sharp edges. Julie broke her fall, grabbing her legs and letting her daughter slide through her arms, then tightening her grip just before Shiara hit the floor. The impact sent Julie off balance, and she went down to the concrete again, hard on her back. Her head snapped back and hit the floor, and she was out cold for the second time in ten minutes. When she revived, her head was resting in her daughter’s lap.
“You okay?” Shiara asked, her face gray with worry.
Julie tried to move but the pain in her skull was too much. “I’ve got one hell of a headache,” she said. “But other than that, I think I’m all right.”
“Excellent,” Shiara said. She looked for and found the small window she had seen from the duct. “There’s our next challenge,” she said.
Chapter Fifty-seven
Eduardo Garcia flipped open his laptop and connected to the Internet. He went directly to the files that Eugene Escobar had given him, reading the text on the lab raid that had claimed the life of his uncle. There wasn’t much doubt about it; the author of the report considered the death to be a result of friendly fire. And Dragonfly was the shooter. He pulled up the classified file on Senator Irwin Crandle. His code name during his tenure in Colombia was Dragonfly. Eugene had been telling the truth. Somehow, for all these years, Crandle had managed to suppress the incriminating files.
He shook his head in disbelief. Crandle had been along for the ride, feeding Javier and Mario Rastano the team’s progress as they tracked Pablo. The son-of-a-bitch. Eduardo checked the clip on his government-issue revolver, and slid it into his shoulder holster. He slipped his jacket on and headed for Irwin Crandle’s hotel room. He knocked, and the senator called for him to enter. Eduardo turned the handle, and pushed open the door.
“Come in, Eduardo,” he said, turning to face the young DEA agent, a glass of whiskey in his hand. “Where’s Bud? We’ve got to get going. It’s already dark out.” He faced the muzzle of Eduardo’s .38. “What are you doing, Garcia?”
“What am I doing? What the hell are you doing? Dragonfly. I’m not sure which is worse, you selling out to Mario and Javier Rastano or killing my uncle. No matter, you’re going down for what you’ve done.”
Crandle didn’t move. Then he shrugged and sat down slowly on the edge of the bed. He took a small sip from the glass and let out a deep breath. “You have no idea what it was like,” he said. “Locked up in a windowless room, driven to and from work in cars with tinted windows, always moving to keep ahead of the narcos. They were all-powerful, Eduardo. Plata o plomo, Eduardo. Silver or lead. If you went up against them, you died. It was that simple. You could have every good intention, but that didn’t mean shit if you were dead. Do you have any idea how many good agents we lost in Colombia between 1987 and 1993? Hundreds. Hundreds of agents just like your uncle. When I linked up with Mario Rastano, it was for a good reason. It wasn’t just the money. It was for the promise that they would stop killing our men, and that they would give us a reasonable number of busts each month. It was a negotiated settlement, Eduardo. It was the best we could do at the time.”
“It didn’t work out very well for my uncle.”
“That should never have happened. You’ve got to believe me, Eduardo. I didn’t go to that lab that day to kill your uncle. Centra Spike had a couple of green guys working the surveillance gear and they failed to notify the advance team that Rastano was at the lab. One simple phone call and it never would have happened.”
“But they didn’t make that call, did they, Senator?” Garcia’s use of Crandle’s title dripped with sarcasm. “And you shot my uncle in the back.”
Crandle shrugged. “What could I do?”
Garcia reached behind his back and pulled his cuffs from their leather pouch. He threw them to Crandle. “Put them on. You’re going in.”
“We’re trying to find Pablo Escobar, you stupid shit,” Crandle hissed. “We only have a few hours.”
“What? Or your bonus from Javier Rastano disappears. Tough shit. Put the handcuffs on.”
They heard the sound of the handle twisting as someone opened the door. Garcia kept the gun leveled at Crandle, but looked over his shoulder toward the sound. Bud Reid was there, a stunned expression on his face. Garcia glanced back at Crandle just in time to see the silenced pistol, but not in time to react. The bullet caught him in the center of the forehead, crushing his frontal lobe and killing him instantly. He dropped to the carpet without a sound, blood streaming from the round hole just above his unseeing eyes. Crandle turned the gun on Reid and fired twice more, both killing shots. Reid slumped to the floor just inside the door.
“Shit,” Crandle cursed under his breath. “God damn you all to hell, Garcia. Now look at the fucking mess I’ve got to clean up.”
Chapter Fifty-eight
The streetlights were on, their soft lights casting a pale yellow glow on the stores and businesses in rural Bloom-field. A few shoppers were out, but the streets were quiet. A light still burned in The Arabian Nights, the Internet café where Eugene was ensconced in a far corner, his fingers busy on the keyboard. A stack of papers littered the table next to him, and the counter on the LaserJet printer was much higher than when he first signed on. The clerk working the front counter didn’t care; he had three hundred dollars in his pocket with which to settle up the tab. And the generous customer had told him that anything extra was his to keep.
The clerk stopped by to see how Eugene was faring, and brought a fresh coffee with him. “Everything okay?” he asked Eugene, as he set the coffee down on the table next to the monitor.
“Thanks,” Eugene said when he saw the coffee. “Yeah, everything’s fine. Just can’t seem to find what I’m looking for.”
“What’s that?” the kid asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
“I’m searching out all the chemicals necessary to process cocaine.”
“Now that’s not something you hear every day,” the young man said. He shrugged. “Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
Eugene hunkered down on the computer again, renewed with fresh caffeine in his system. But this time the answer did not elude him for long. He had started his search of the Internet with ‘Pablo Escobar’, then tried ‘cocaine,’ then ‘refining cocaine,’ until he had hit on some of the necessary chemicals in the procedure. Once he had some of the chemical names, he had pulled up webpage after webpage, and read time and time again about acetone, ether and hydrochloric acid. But now a different chemical popped up as he opened a new webpage. Potassium permanganate. The articles inside the webpage described it as a precursor chemical for the production of cocaine hydrochloride. Eugene pushed on, uncovering more on the chemical. Once he had its name, he searched the Internet using ‘potassium permanganate,’ and got a slew of relevant hits. One thing became very clear, very quickly.
Potassium permanganate was the key to producing refined cocaine. Without it, there would be no cocaine. Ten kilos of cocaine can be produced by one kilo of potassium permanganate, and the cost per kilo for the chemical was astronomical. It was a natural money-maker for Pablo. He already had the Colombian connections; getting into the business of supplying expensive chemicals to the cocaine industry was just working another part of the process. And, since potassium permanganate was not found or manufactured in Colombia, it had to be imported. Once Eugene started looking at where the chemical was made, the Canadian connection became obvious. Most of the companies marketing potassium permanganate were Canadian. Eugene scanned through the hits, jotting down the names of the producers, then opened a path to a registry office, gave them his credit card number and began profiling the directors and owners of the major producers. It took forty minutes and sixteen companies before one of the names
scrolling across the screen jarred his memory. Eugene froze the screen and grabbed the list of new Renault owners.
Roland Arnett.
The name was on the list of Renault owners, and the name was on the list of directors for Okomono Chemicals Inc., a Canadian-based, top-level producer of potassium permanganate. Eugene delved into the history of the fantastically successful company. It had a head office in Toronto and subsidiary offices in seven other countries. Colombia was one of the seven. The company regularly shipped the precursor chemical to South America, under the guise of providing a necessary ingredient for the production of computer chip boards. And when Eugene saw the chemical formula for potassium permanganate, he knew he had found Pablo. KMnO4—Okomono was an anagram of the chemical formula. Eugene cleaned up the mess around the computer and strode up to the front counter. The clerk was just putting the finishing touches on a mocha that smelled like warm chocolate. He waited until the man had exchanged the specialty coffee for cash.
“I just need a couple more things,” he said.
“Sure. Anything.”
“A set of white pages for the area, and a taxi.”
“I’ve got the white pages right here,” he said, reaching under the counter and lifting out a Rochester and Area telephone book. And you can get a cab two blocks down at the post office. There are three cabs in town, but one of them is always parked there waiting.” He glanced at the top page in the pile that Eugene had printed. “Hey, Pablo Escobar. What a guy. The most notorious gangster in the history of the world.”
Eugene glanced down at the picture. Pablo was lounging comfortably on a leather couch, smoking a cigarette. The caption under the picture read, “Pablo Escobar, at home in La Catedral.” Eugene flipped open the white pages and scanned down to where the name Roland Arnett appeared. He copied the address on the paper showing Pablo in La Catedral, and handed the clerk the remaining pages.
