W. E. B. Griffin - Presidential Agent 07 (23 page)

Then he walked quickly onto the veranda, and the moment Castillo stood up, wrapped him in an affectionate hug.

Castillo saw that Fernando was smiling, and knew it was not at the display of affection but rather at Castillo’s discomfiture.

“Good to see you, Juan Carlos,” Castillo said.

“How the hell long has it been?” Juan Carlos said. “Too fucking long, that’s for goddamn sure.”

“How about a glass of wine, Juan Carlos?” Castillo asked in Spanish. “Or something stronger?”

“A little Jack Daniel’s would go down nicely,” Juan Carlos said, continuing in English. “But not until after I meet the girlfriend. You’re right, Fernando, she’s spectacular!”

“Swe . . . Susanna, say hello to an old friend, Juan Carlos Pena.”

“Hola,”
Sweaty said. “Nice to meet you, Susanna Barlow.”

“And this is Stefan Koussevitzky,” Castillo said. “And this is Lester Bradley. My grandmother sent him down to see if he can straighten out the hacienda’s computers.”

Max instinctively stood up.

Sweaty laid a gentle hand on the dog’s back, and in Hungarian said, “It’s okay, baby.”

“What the fuck is that?” Juan Carlos said. “I’ve ridden smaller horses.”

“Meet Max,” Castillo said.

Juan Carlos looked at Svetlana. “What was that language you was speaking?”

“Hungarian. I’m Uruguayan but my parents immigrated there from Hungary.”

Juan Carlos nodded. “I noticed the funny accent.”

“I’m surprised you don’t know there’s three kinds of Spanish, Juan Carlos,” Castillo said. “Castilian—Spanish-Spanish; Southern Cone—the Spanish spoken in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile; and the Spanish spoken in Mexico, Central America, and the rest of South America. Susanna speaks the Southern Cone variety.”

“I heard that,” Juan Carlos said. “Uruguay, huh? Is that where you two met?”

“Yeah,” Castillo said.

A maid appeared, and Fernando told her to bring whiskey.

“So,” Juan Carlos asked, “what brings you to Hacienda Santa Maria, Señorita Barlow?” Before she could reply, Juan Carlos added: “Barlow doesn’t sound very Hungarian, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“It used to be Böröcz,” Sweaty said. “Which no one could pronounce, much less spell, in Spanish. So we changed it.”

“You were telling me what you’re doing here,” Juan Carlos said.

“Stefan and I are looking at those,” Sweaty said, pointing to the grapefruit grove. “When Carlos told us his family was in the citrus business—I have some pastureland I’m thinking of converting—and then that he was coming here, I imposed on his hospitality. Really imposed on it. I brought a half a dozen citrus experts with me. Stefan’s the expert’s expert.”

“I didn’t know they grow grapefruit in Uruguay,” Juan Carlos said.

“They don’t grow much, but some. Maybe I can change that.”

“And your expert’s expert is another Hungarian? Koussevitzky doesn’t sound like he’s a native of Uruguay.”

“Actually, I’m Israeli,” Koussevitzky said. “Or was. Now I’m an Uruguayan citizen.”

“They grow grapefruit in Israel?”

“All the citrus fruits, our—
their
—biggest market is Italy and France,” Koussevitzky said.

“I’ll be damned. I never heard that,” Juan Carlos said, and then asked, “What were you doing in Uruguay, Carlos?”

“I was an assistant military attaché of the American embassy.”

“‘Assistant military attaché,’ huh?” Juan Carlos parroted. “Sounds pretty snazzy.”

“It’s what the Army does with officers who are not going to get promoted, and don’t have enough time in to retire,” Castillo said. “They send them to an embassy until they have enough time. The only good thing about it was that I met Susanna in Montevideo.”

“So you’re retired now?” Juan Carlos said.

The maid came to them with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and accoutrements on a tray. When she poured the Tennessee whiskey into a glass, Juan Carlos gestured for her to add more.

“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.

“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.”

“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 American 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.