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The brutality and manipulation of the capos and teniente of drug cartels was well documented, but Ped had been surprised to find figures in the upper echelons of politics just as ruthless, premeditated.
The difference was that if something went down in the alleys of Bogota or Cali, there was usually a corpse or life sentence to gloat over. In politics, the convention was to be gracious to the vanquished.
Ped was sitting alone at the piano in the backroom at the Intercontinental in San Juan, conjuring up nice things to say about Kate Hunter, as he waited for her to appear on the screen of a laptop perched on the music shelf.
The Congresswoman had called the press conference after cancelling campaign gigs in Ponce and Arecibo two days out from the Puerto Rico primary, and flying back to Baltimore. Speculation among muck slingers was that Hunter was withdrawing from the contest. Fox was reporting she was devastated by the abortion revelations and switch of allegiance by the Catholic Church, and the betrayal of her long-time friend, the Commissioner. A poll by Radio WAPA in San Juan showing Garland with an unassailable lead piled on the misery.
The choice of venue for the announcement – the library of Hunter’s grand stone and slate home overlooking Lake Roland – confirmed to Ped she was throwing in the towel.
He looked at the way the room had been set up for the press conference streaming onto his laptop. A long mahogany and partridge wood table with four chairs, the Stars and Stripes and state flag of Maryland behind the central microphone, flanked by three smaller mics presumably for the husband and two sons Ped had met at debates.
Hunter walked in, followed by a woman Ped didn’t recognize. He could tell from the way she wore the conservative jacket, blouse, and skirt, they were not her normal attire.
But it was the folded sheet of paper in her hand that sent Ped’s heart racing and made the tiny muscles at the base of the hairs on his arms contract.
The woman was introduced by Hunter as a hotel housekeeper from Helena. Reading nervously from an affidavit, she said she had cleaned the suite occupied by Mr. Garland during his recent visit in Montana, and found traces of cocaine in the bathroom of an adjoining room.
Ped slumped back into the sofa. There were still two empty seats at Hunter’s table. This was going to be a drip-feed.
Witness number two for the prosecution was a clean-cut young man, the kind you’d expect to see sippin’ tea on a porch swing. He worked as a scheduler on Hunter’s campaign until he was fired after the New York primary for leaking information to the opposition. He admitted he’d been encouraged – and paid handsomely – by a man called Carl Tyler, who ran Garland’s off-book backroom operation. He said Garland used a two-team system – public front office and private backroom team that called all the shots and engaged in the dirty tricks Garland swore he’d never use, including negative advertising through third parties, push-polling and robo-calling.
Witness number three sauntered into the room pushing a squeaky hand truck loaded with dozens of books, which he stacked up on the table beside Hunter, spines facing the camera like characters in a courtroom drama. He didn’t need introducing to Ped.
Simon Heath, head librarian at Hays State Prison in Georgia.
He explained how Ped Garland had worked in the library for the last five years of his sentence, had been a model prisoner.
‘Much like that Andy Dufresne character from Shawshank Redemption. Ped helped lots of inmates with their legal affairs, badgered organizations all over the state to donate books, set up an inter-library loan program.
‘In his last year at Hays, after he’d outlined the business plan for his drug foundation to the warden, Ped was given special dispensation to order eBooks online and have a Kindle in his cell – for research purposes.
‘As I said, Ped was a model prisoner and frankly his plans for the drug foundation were so impressive, we wanted to give him all the help we could. We didn’t pay much attention to his reading list.
‘It was only when I was re-ordering copies of his book Straight Up for the prison library, I thought to look up what he’d been reading.’
Hunter took over, pointing to the stack of books beside her.
‘What we have here is a selection of hard copies of just some of the books Mr. Ped Straight Up Garland read on his Kindle in that cell.’
She started reading out the titles, as the camera zoomed in on the tower of spines.
Trust Me, I’m Lying: A Playbook for the Dark Arts of Exploiting the Media... The Cheat Code: Secret Tweaks, Hacks and Tips to Get Noticed and Get Ahead... How to Lie with Statistics...The Science of Likability: 27 Studies to Master Charisma, Attract Friends, Captivate People, and Take Advantage of Human Psychology... And my personal favorite: Faking It: How to Seem Like a Better Person Without Actually Improving Yourself.’
Ped threw the laptop across the room, tramped into the bathroom, dragged the briefcase down from the shelf. He punched in the combination, snatched one of the small resealable bags.
*****
The Pearse’s house backed onto One Tree Hill, one of more than fifty volcanic cones in Auckland. After her morning stabilizing routine of breathing and squeezing, Bec decided to add splash and dash by having a cold shower and jogging to the summit before breakfast.
A gate in the back fence opened onto the domain, not far from the road to the lookout point. Other joggers were out, along with a man walking a poodle dressed in a tartan thermal coat, and a woman being led by a Bichon Frise furball.
Sheep grazed beneath limbs of pohutukawa trees reaching across the road like the fingers of giants. Yellowing leaves clinging to the branches of massive English Oaks rustled in a breeze laden with the smell of damp wool.
Bec half-jogged, half-walked up the winding road toward the obelisk, dodging sheep shit and Chinese tourists posing for innocuous photos. It was refreshingly cool after Bali and India. Like Manhattan in October, minus the mayhem.
She didn’t make it to the summit.
Her phone beeped, indicating an incoming email. The domain name dea.govt threw her for a moment, until she remembered the sample of NuNu they’d sent from Lovina to the forensic drugs lab in Chicago.
The cocaine was the highest quality the lab had seen in more than twenty years. The analyst was ninety-eight percent sure it was produced from coca grown in the Nariño region in south-western Colombia between 1993 and 1995.
*****
The decision on who would go to Colombia had been made by the New Zealand Police, when they confiscated Jay and Bec’s passports.
Auckland to Bogota was not a well-trodden path. The quickest route was via Santiago on the Chilean airline Latam. Mike did as much research online as he could before the flight, downloaded more to read on the plane.
The latest State Department travel advisory rated Colombia a level-two risk, meaning visitors should exercise increased caution. Five districts were listed in the Do Not Travel to section, including Nariño. Violent crime such a homicide, assault and armed robbery is common. Organized criminal activities such as extortion, robbery and kidnapping for ransom are widespread.
The website of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists put things in even sharper perspective. More than 90 reporters had been killed in Colombia since the early 1990s, the latest a community radio journalist in a town called Samaniego. In Nariño.
Mike was going to need local help. He made several calls to buddies in the media and government back home, and was eventually given the name of a guy who’d spent time at the US Embassy in Bogota as an intelligence analyst for the DEA. He put Mike onto a Colombian journalist-turned-academic, Duvan Delgado, who he said wrote the book on the narcos of Nariño.
Mike was in luck. Delgado was on leave from his part-time lecturing role at a university in the capital. He arranged to meet Mike when he landed in Bogota.
CNN was screening on one of the monitors in the departures lounge at Auckland Airport. Mike caught the tail end of a report on the Puerto Rico primary, just before he boarded. Kate Hunter won 51 percent of the vote, but because of the island territory’s winner-take-all system, she claimed all 23 delegates, denying Ped Garland the two he needed to take the nomination. A political correspondent was speculating that an attack on Hunter for having a child out of wedlock hadn’t worked for Garland, whose Straight Up honesty line was being questioned.
*****
The New Zealand Warriors were playing the Canberra Raiders from Australia and the noise suggested the home team had scored another try. Jay, lying prone on the roof of the plumbing store at the back of the limo building, watched the two Rottweilers rush back to the front fence to howl at the stadium.
Tries in rugby league were followed by conversion attempts. Jay was hoping the Warriors goalkicker would add the two points and set off another eruption to keep the dogs distracted.
He tugged the rope to check it was anchored to the bracket holding an air-conditioning unit. Tailing limos from the building to the homes of travelers, then to the airport and back to the building had revealed nothing. Yawn. It was time to take the direct route, high-risk or not.
The kick went over, the crowd – and dogs – went ape-shit. Jay slipped over the edge, abseiled into the yard.
He’d only taken two steps before the din from the stadium was overwhelmed by the piercing shrill of an alarm. Followed immediately by barking. Of the blood-curdling variety.
*****
The name of Bogota’s airport wouldn’t win any prizes for brevity, but El Dorado Luis Carlos Galan Sarmiento International was ranked the best in Latin America, comfortably ahead of LaGuardia and LAX.
Best didn’t mean safest. Mike had read the headlines, heard the horror stories about Colombia. He gripped his passport, seeking reassurance from its cool, smooth surface, as he entered the terminal.
The immigration officer scrutinized the passport, his eyes lingering on Mike’s face longer than necessary.
‘Purpose of your visit?’
Mike forced a smile, tried to keep his voice steady.
‘Vacation.’
‘And where are you staying in Bogota, senor?’
Mike hadn’t thought that far ahead.
‘The Hilton.’
He’d read somewhere the chain had hotels in more than eighty countries. Colombia was obviously one of them, because the officer waved him through.
The most striking feature of Duvan Delgado – other than eyes that conveyed silent acknowledgement of the risks they were both taking – was his hair. Thick white tufts flowed over his tanned forehead and tops of his ears like drifts of snow.
‘Welcome to Colombia, Mr. Bullard. I’m afraid we need to move quickly. I have made some inquiries since you called, and I’ve located a man I believe you should meet. He is willing to talk to you on the condition of remaining anonymous.’
‘Great. Is he here at the airport?’
‘No sir. He is in Pasto, the capital city of Nariño. There’s a flight departing in 40 minutes. I went ahead and reserved two tickets.’
On the satellite bus to Terminal 2, Mike tightened the grip on his bag, and joked that the State Department should update its travel advisory for Colombia.
‘They make it sound like there could be terrorists, kidnappers behind every column, bombs in every suitcase. I feel safer here than I do at airports in the States.’
‘That might be true, sir. This airport is indeed safe. Some would argue it is the only safe place in Colombia.’
The flight to Pasto took a little over an hour. By the time they began their descent, Mike realized he’d struck gold teaming up with Delgado.
The guy was like an encyclopedia. He’d worked as a reporter for the Cali regional edition of El Tiempo, Colombia’s largest newspaper, during the 1990s and 2000s, before swapping the newsroom for the lecture theater.
When the former DEA analyst said Delgado had written the book on the narcos of Nariño, Mike hadn’t taken it literally. But he had! Unfortunately, it had been published only in Spanish.
Which made Mike think of Ped Garland’s book. He asked Delgado if he’d read it.
‘Yes, I have read it. Hijo de puta. The book is nothing more than a publicity stunt. Full of mierda. Bullshit. Cover to cover. Most of it is made up, fabricated. A convenient rewriting of history. Pedro Garland’s name is barro... mud in this country Mr. Bullard. The man made a lot of enemies. People, dangerous people with long memories. I wouldn’t mention his name out loud in Colombia, if I were you.’
‘Thanks for the tip. But I’m not here to dig up Garland’s past. My sole interest is in a particular batch of cocaine produced in Nariño between 1993 and 1995. And why it is now being sold on the streets of Bali.’
Antonio Nariño Airport was perched on a plateau six thousand feet above sea level, twenty miles from Pasto. As the plane banked left over folding hills, backbone ridges, gaping chasms, to line up for its approach, Mike got a view of the runway. It was impossibly short, like a tiny strip of band aid on the shoulder of a green giant.
His fingers dug into the armrest, and for the first time in his life, he had to close his eyes for a landing.
*****
Bec hadn’t been able to sleep, after coaxing an admission from Jay he’d tried unsuccessfully to break into the limo base. He claimed he left nothing behind to link him to what he was sure would be seen as an attempted burglary. That was beside the point, and no help.
Her thoughts were flooded with fear – of abandonment, danger, failure, a prison cell – trapping her in a state of high alert, unable to slow her heart, unwind her muscles, relax.
After editing video from their visit to the travel agency, and the drugs being planted at the Airbnb, Bec began researching cocaine production in Colombia in the early 1990s until exhaustion finally set in around 2am.
She was woken an hour later by her phone. It was an unknown caller with a 44 country code, which Bec recognized as the United Kingdom. Intrigued, she tapped Accept.
‘Hello?’
‘Is this JFK-Governor?’ The accent sounded like the woman worked for the BBC.
‘Who?’
‘Are you the person who sent me a message using the string JFK-Governor?’
Bec rubbed her eyes, shook her head to focus. That was the code she’d used in the email to Jay’s hacker contact. But he was supposed to be a guy.
‘Is this... SwordPhish?’
‘I prefer not to use names.’
‘Jay said... I expected you to be a male.’
‘I prefer to use voice transformation. How is our mutual friend?’
‘Asleep, with his tail between his legs.’ This was weird. Talking to an English woman who was probably a Canadian man. With the name of a fish.
The hacker had answers to some of her questions. The owners of the limousine company and Nyalahutan resorts in Bali, and the property in Uluwatu had gone to great lengths to mask their identities through layers of anonymous LLCs.
‘But I’ve tracked all three to one dude: Rodrigo Montoya.’
The name meant nothing to Bec.
‘What about the travel agency in Auckland. Aventura. Any luck there?’
‘Similar arrangement. The dudes used the same layers to avoid identification.’
Dudes sounded just plain wrong in a British accent.
‘Don’t tell me. The travel agency is also owned by this Rodrigo Montoya.’
‘Close, but not quite. It’s owned by a Mauricio Montoya.’
Bec thanked her... him... for the information, was about to end the call when she had an idea.
‘I don’t suppose you could ha... get... into the Aventura computer system from... wherever you are?’
‘Depends. If they went to the same lengths setting up their IT system as they did to hide their identities, it could take a while. Let me get back to you.’
Bec had been asleep less than an hour before she was woken again, this time by a call from country code 27.
‘We’re in,’ said a voice resembling the late Nelson Mandela.
Bec got the SwordPhish to navigate to the limo booking system, where they quickly identified a rogue vehicle with a registration number different to the ones Jay and Mike saw leaving the building in Penrose. It was scheduled to make two pick-ups the next day, in Mission Bay and Remuera. Bec wrote down the names, addresses and contact details of the couples to be collected, then thought of one more question.
‘Can you tell whether the bookings were handled by any particular staffer at Aventura.’
‘Let’s see. Yes. Both were logged by a Kirsty.’
