Covert Warriors

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Jack Daniel’s is like sex,” he announced. “You can never get enough.”

  “So is gold,” Sweaty said.

  Juan Carlos looked at her and smiled.

  “I like her, Carlos,” he said, raising his glass and taking a healthy swallow. “What I can’t figure out is what a redhead like that sees in a skinny gringo like you.”

  “It’s been a long time, Juan Carlos,” Castillo said. “But I think I can still kick your ass.”

  Juan Carlos looked at him for a moment, and then smiled and said, “I’ll bet you could. You know I’m just kidding, Red, right?”

  “Carlos wasn’t,” Sweaty said.

  He considered that for a moment, smiled, and said, “So you’re retired now, huh?”

  “For a couple of months.”

  “I was thinking that the last time I saw you was when you had just graduated from West Point. You were a second lieutenant about to go to flight school.”

  “I guess that’s right,” Castillo said.

  He thought: My ol’ pal Juan Carlos didn’t come here for auld lang syne.

  He came here to find out what’s going on here at Hacienda Santa Maria.

  He may have even heard about the ex-Spetsnaz “citrus experts.”

  Heard about but not seen.

  Fernando flew them here onto our strip, and Stefan told them to keep out of sight, which means they did.

  Which means I’m being interrogated.

  Does Juan Carlos think I don’t know that?

  Or doesn’t care if I do?

  “And now you’re a retired colonel.”

  “Retired lieutenant colonel,” Castillo said. “I got passed over for promotion to colonel twice. That was when they sent me to Uruguay.”

  “So what brings you to Hacienda Santa Maria?”

  “I think you know, Juan Carlos.”

  “I don’t have a fucking clue, Carlos.”

  “The Army officer who was kidnapped, Jim Ferris, is a West Point classmate of mine, an old friend. I thought—Fernando told me you’re the commandant of the Policía Federal in Oaxaca Province—you’d be the guy who would know. Maybe even tell me how I could help to get him back.”

  “You want some good advice, Carlos?”

  “That’s what I came here for.”

  “Get in your airplane and go home. Better yet, go back to Uruguay. Before you and your friends get hurt. You don’t want to fuck with these people, Carlos. They’re really bad news.”

  “So I’ve heard. Fernando told me. But I figured my old friend, now a heavy-duty Federale, could protect me.”

  “Your old friend has a tough time protecting himself,” Juan Carlos said. “You saw Lieutenant Gomez, the guy with the CAR-15?”

  Castillo nodded.

  “There’s two more guys with CAR-15s in my Suburban, and four more of them in the other Suburban. I call them the American Express,’cause I never go anywhere without them. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “You’re talking about the drug cartel people?”

  “You bet your fucking ass I am.”

  “I’ve been in Uruguay. There’s drugs in Uruguay. The cops down there don’t run around with CAR-15s.”

  Pena looked at him as if he couldn’t believe Castillo’s naïveté.

  Or stupidity. Or both.

  “Well, Carlos, let me tell you about the drugs here,” Juan Carlos said. “As opposed to in Uruguay. Where the fuck is Uruguay, anyway?”

  “On the other side of the river from Buenos Aires.”

  Got you now, Juan Carlos, ol’ buddy!

  Rule Seven in the Uncle Remus List of Rules for the Interrogation of Belligerent Bad Guys: “Make them think you’re stupid and then let them show you how smart and knowledgeable they are.”

  “Let me try to sum it up this way, Carlos,” Juan Carlos said. “This stuff starts out when some campesino in Bolivia or wherever the fuck sticks his knife in a flower, a poppy, and collects the goo that comes out. Or boils down the coca leaf. The last stop is when some junkie in the States either sucks it up his nostrils, or sticks it in his vein. By then it’s either cocaine or heroin.”

  “What are you telling me you think I don’t know?”

  Juan Carlos held his now empty whiskey glass. The maid took it.

  “Put enough in it this time,” he said in Spanish, and then switched back to English.

  “Shut your mouth for a fucking minute, Carlos, and I’ll tell you what you don’t know. At every step, from processing that shit so it becomes heroin or cocaine, the price goes up, way up. You do understand that?”

  “I wasn’t born yesterday, Juan Carlos.”

  “You could have fooled me. Now, the same thing is true in every step between the fields and the junkie’s nose. The price goes up. Way, way up by the time it gets close to the States.

  “Now, the people in this business, as you can imagine, are not very nice people. Doña Alicia would not invite them to dinner—and on that subject, thank you very much, but I can’t stay for dinner.”

  “Why not? We haven’t even started walking down memory lane,” Castillo said.

  “I got things to do, Carlos. The only reason I’m here is to try, because we go way back, to warn you what you’re fucking around with and to try to keep you alive.”

  “I can keep myself alive, thank you very much.”

  “Will you shut your fucking mouth and listen? Jesus Christ!”

  Castillo hoped the look he made indicated his feelings had been hurt.

  Proof that he had been successful came immediately.

  “For Christ’s sake, Carlos, I’m trying to help you,” Juan Carlos said, almost compassionately.

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay. Now, except for what the junkies in the States pay for their one ounce—or less—little bags of this shit, it’s most valuable just before it’s sent over the border into the States. By then it’s in bricks, generally weighing a kilo—that’s a little over two pounds.

  “Some of the people taking it across the border, after buying it at a stiff price from somebody who brought it from Venezuela or Colombia, and running the risk that we’d catch them while they were moving it from south Mexico to the border, decided it would be safer and a hell of a lot cheaper to just steal it from some other trafficker.

  “And the way to do that was just kill the other trafficker; let their bosses just guess who stole it. And the way to keep the police from interfering with the movement, do one of two things. Pay off the police—Carlos, you have no fucking idea how much fucking money is involved here. We grab some of these people with two, three hundred grand, sometimes more, in their pockets.

  “And then they realized that it would be cheaper to kill the police who were getting close than to pay them off.”

  “No shit?” Castillo said wonderingly.

  “No shit. So what we have is war here, Carlos. One ground of drug movers—they call themselves ‘cartels’—killing each other to steal, or protect the product, whether it’s cocaine or meth or heroin, and all of them perfectly willing to kill the police.

  “I don’t know where it’s going to end. I know the good guys ain’t winning. Now, as to your friend. I heard two stories, and I don’t know which one to believe. The first is that they just got in the way. By that I mean they’d been responsible for us—the Policía Federal, or the American DEA, or Border Patrol grabbing shipments. Since these shipments are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—sometimes millions—this made them mad, so they had to be killed.

  “The second story I heard is that they want to swap your colonel for a man named Félix Abrego. He’s doing life without the possibility of parole in that maximum-security prison of yours . . . what’s it called?”

  The words Florence Maximum were almost on Castillo’s lips when he caught himself, shrugged, and asked, “Leavenworth?”

  “No,” Juan Carlos said.

  “Sorry, I was a soldier, not a policeman. But I do know, Juan Carlos, that it’s firm Ameri
can policy not to do something like that. The Taliban tried it on us in Afghanistan, and it was decided that if we—”

  “Florence,” Juan Carlos interrupted him. “The Florence ADMAX. It’s in Colorado.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “What they do there, Carlos, is lock you up alone, around the clock, except for one hour a day, when they let you out of your cell to exercise, alone, in what looks like a dog kennel. You get a shower every other day.”

  “Sounds like fun. What do you have to do to get sent there?”

  “Abrego shot a few DEA agents,” Juan Carlos said. “In the States. Near El Paso. They caught him.”

  “He didn’t get the death penalty? I always thought if you killed a cop, you got the electric chair.”

  “Well, I’ll explain to you how that works in real life, Carlos. We haven’t had the death penalty in Mexico since 2005. If a Mexican in the States gets the hot seat, that’s bad for our friendly relations. Mexican politicians fall all over themselves rushing up there to save him.

  “And we don’t extradite people—neither do the French, by the way—to any place that executes people.

  “So the way it works here, if Señor Abrego had shot one of my people and got caught—that happens every once in a while—and he got tried and convicted—that also happens every once in a while—he would have gotten life.

  “And in a couple of years, after a lot of money changed hands, he would ‘escape,’ so to speak.”

  “Jesus!” Castillo said, hoping he sounded as if he was shocked to the depths of his naïve soul.

  Juan Carlos nodded.

  “So the way it’s worked out is that your judges sentence Mexicans who deserve the electric chair to life without parole in Florence. That keeps the bad guys off the streets almost as well as the electric chair—nobody has ever escaped from Florence—and keeps Mexican politicians from making members of your Congress unhappy. Getting the picture?”

  “I never heard any of this before,” Castillo said.

  “I never would have guessed,” Juan Carlos said sarcastically. “Look, Carlos. There is some good news. You don’t fuck with these people, they don’t fuck with you. What I’m saying is there’s not a goddamn thing you can do for your friend the colonel, except get yourself killed. Let whoever deals with things like swapping prisoners—the FBI maybe, or DEA?—try to get him back. You start nosing around, you’re going to get yourself killed, and probably him, too. Can you understand that?”

  “Yeah, I guess I can,” Castillo said reluctantly. “But, Juan Carlos, if you could find out anything . . .”

  “Sure. If I hear anything, I’ll let you know. By mail. I suppose if I sent a letter to . . . 1700 Arizona Boulevard, San Antonio, Texas . . . I remember Doña Alicia’s address; I’ve got a good memory for addresses and numbers, things like that . . . she’d get it to you, right?”

  “I’m sure she would.”

  “Even with you in Uruguay? Which is really where I hope you’ll be. What’s your address down there, anyway?”

  Shit, now what?

  I don’t have an address in Uruguay!

  Rule One—the First and Great Commandment—in the Uncle Remus List of Rules for the Interrogation of Belligerent Bad Guys: Never ever underestimate the bad guy!

  “If you’re going to send a letter to Carlos down there,” Sweaty said, “send it in care of me—Señorita Susanna Barlow, Golf and Polo Country Club, Km 55.5 PanAmericana, Pilar, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina.”

  “Wait, let me write that down.”

  He took a notebook and ballpoint from his shirt pocket.

  Then he asked, “Argentina? I thought you said Uruguay.”

  “We farm in Uruguay,” Sweaty said. “We play polo in Argentina. It’s only half an hour in the plane from Uruguay.”

  “Polo, huh? You play polo, Carlos?”

  “Frankly,” Sweaty said, “he’s not very good at it. Barlow is spelled B-A-R-L-O-W. You want the phone number? The country code is zero one one—”

  “I won’t be calling,” Juan Carlos interrupted. “It probably costs ten dollars a minute to call down there.”

  “Closer to seven dollars, actually,” Sweaty said.

  Juan Carlos put his notebook back in his shirt pocket.

  “Well, like I said, I have things to do,” he said. He drained his glass, nodded at everybody, and then draped his arm around Castillo’s shoulder.

  “Pay attention to what I told you, Carlos. I really want to keep you alive.”

  “I know,” Castillo said. “It’s just that I wanted to help if I could.”

  “The best way for you to help is go to Uruguay. Or Argentina. Go work on your polo game in Argentina, Carlos.”

  Juan Carlos Pena punched Castillo painfully in the upper arm, shook Fernando’s hand, nodded at the others, then quickly walked off the porch and got into his Suburban.

  Ninety seconds later, both Policía Federal vehicles had disappeared in a dirt cloud down the road through the grapefruit orchards.

  Castillo filled his wineglass, then said, “Comments solicited.”

  “A dangerous man,” former SVR Major Stefan Koussevitzky said.

  “But I think he really likes Carlos,” former SVR Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva said.

  “That makes him less dangerous?” Koussevitzky challenged.

  “I didn’t say that,” she said.

  “Are you interested in what I think?” Don Armando Medina asked.

  “Of course,” Castillo said.

  “Some of the things he said were absolutely true. If you don’t get in the way of the drug cartel people, they leave you alone. We have had no trouble with them.”

  “They aren’t stealing our grapefruit?” Castillo quipped.

  “One of their bricks of cocaine is worth more than an eighteen-wheeler trailer load of grapefruit. That’s another thing Juan Carlos said that’s true: The amount of money involved is nearly unbelievable.”

  “I was hoping I could get him talking more about the people involved. He suggested everybody involved is Mexican.”

  “He came here to tell you as little as possible beyond ‘butt out or die,’ ” Fernando said, “and that’s just what he did.”

  “You think our ol’ buddy is in with the drug people?”

  “He’s alive, isn’t he?”

  “Then why did he come here at all?”

  “Like Sweaty said, he likes you. And he was probably curious—professionally—why you showed up here.”

  “And do you think I convinced him I’m just an old soldier trying to help out an old classmate?”

  “Yeah,” Fernando said after a moment. “Don’t let this go to your head, Gringo, but that was quite a performance. You, Stefan, and Sweaty were pretty convincing.”

  “Looking stupid is easy for me,” Castillo said. “But Sweaty? Sweetheart, I could have kissed you when he asked for an address in Uruguay and you came up with Golf and Polo.”

  “ ‘ I’ve got a good memory for addresses and numbers, things like that,’ ” Sweaty quoted. “You can kiss me later. So now what?”

  “Now we get in the Mustang and go to Cozumel, and catch tomorrow’s PeruaireCargo flight to Chile.”

  “Why are we going to do that?”

  “I want Aleksandr to understand that whacking Sergei Murov or any of his people without asking me first is not one of his options.”

  “You’re going to have trouble with that,” Koussevitzky said. “He’s convinced the best way to protect himself is to eliminate anybody Vladimir Vladimirovich sends over here.”

  “If he takes out anybody, Ferris will die,” Castillo said.

  “Stefan’s right,” Sweaty said. “Aleksandr will be genuinely sorry about that, but he’ll think of your friend’s passing as unavoidable collateral damage.”

  “Well, I’ll just have to talk him out of thinking that way,” Castillo said. “Sweetheart, your call. We either leave right now, or very early in the morning.”


  “Why can’t we have dinner first, and then leave?” she asked.

  “Because I suspect Juan Carlos is going to have the radar operators at Bahías de Huatulco International Airport report to him when any airplanes take off from here. If we take off after dark, he’ll know the runway is lighted. And I don’t want him to know that.”

  “Then dinner here, looking down at the ocean,” Sweaty said without hesitation. “Afterward, we can walk on the beach, holding hands.”

  “Are you going to take Stefan and his ‘citrus experts’ with you?” Don Armando asked.

  Castillo nodded. “Stefan, yes. But if you don’t think the ‘citrus experts’ pose a danger to Hacienda Santa Maria, I’d like to leave them here. I may need them later on.”

  [THREE]

  The President’s Study

  The White House

  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.

  Washington, D.C.

  0830 17 April 2007

  FBI Director Mark Schmidt, presidential press secretary Clemens McCarthy, and Supervisory Secret Service Agent Robert J. Mulligan were already in the room when Secretary of Defense Frederick K. Beiderman walked in.

  Beiderman nodded at them, and said, “Good morning, Mr. President.”

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” President Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen said as he rose from his small “working desk.” He walked to a library table on one side of the room. “Take a look at what we have to show you.”

  Clendennen gestured to Mulligan, who handed McCarthy a large manila envelope. McCarthy walked to the table, opened the envelope, and took from it a sheaf of eight-by-ten-inch color photographs. As if laying out a hand of solitaire, he laid them one at a time, side by side, in four rows on the table. When he was finished, the table was nearly covered.

  Clendennen gestured for Beiderman to examine the pictures. He did so, then raised his head and asked, “Exactly what am I looking at, Mr. President?”

  “These photographs were taken yesterday afternoon outside suite 1002 in the Mayflower Hotel,” McCarthy said.

  “They were taken by FBI photographers, so they will stand up as evidence in court, if it ever comes to that,” Clendennen amplified.

  “Yes, sir. Who are these people, Mr. President?”