“Look what I brought for you, Charlie,” Victor said as he brought the boy closer to Evan. “Another English speaker.” They were very close now. “Charlie, shake hands with Evan.”
The other boy dutifully raised his hand in greeting, but Evan hesitated. The kid had filthy hands, and there was no toilet paper out here. Figure it out.
He offered a fist for a knuckle-knock, and Charlie took him up on it.
Victor said, “Charlie, I want you to take charge of Evan.”
Charlie didn’t like the idea at all. He said something to Victor in Spanish, and Victor responded in a harsh tone. After a pause, Victor unleashed some more words, and Charlie caved.
Victor explained, “For the first few days, you work the same bag. Today you will learn, Evan. Tomorrow, you are half responsible for Charlie’s double production. You don’t want to fail. Show him, Charlie.” Victor made a spinning motion with his forefinger, and Charlie turned to display crosshatched scars on his lower back. He showed them just for a few seconds, and then he turned back.
“Tell our new friend how you earned those,” Victor encouraged.
Charlie cleared his throat and spoke to Evan’s feet. “From the whip,” he said. “Because I didn’t work fast enough.”
“ Exactamente,” Victor said, smiling. “There are many scars here. I like giving scars.” As if reading Evan’s mind, he bent low till he was face to face with him. “And no matter how badly I make your back bleed, the pictures will always look just fine.”
Jonathan and his team gathered around the computer screen, examining the satellite imagery that Venice had gotten them via an encrypted sat link. “Mother Hen, those are some great pictures,” Jonathan said into the radio. “I don’t suppose you see any blond-headed kids on your screen, do you?” Back in the War Room, Venice would have these images displayed on the ninety-six-inch high-definition screen.
“I’m looking,” she said. “I haven’t had access to the sat link for much longer than you have.”
The imagery they were looking at now was just a few minutes old, and it showed a cocaine factory of a scale that Jonathan had never seen before. This one stretched for dozens of acres across difficult terrain, and showed a level of organization that Pablo Escobar could only have dreamed about. No longer burdened with the need to hide their activities from the government, they could incorporate efficiencies that were normally reserved for legitimate manufacturing. There appeared to be a central headquarters area, the details of which were difficult to discern because of the thick jungle canopy, but with penetrating imagery technology, they could clearly make out fourteen covered structures of various sizes, thirteen of which were built in a rough rectangle around a central structure that was four times larger than the next largest building.
Southeast of the city-why not call it what it looked like? — stretched the acres of coca bushes and the teeming population of workers, several dozen in total. While the detail was amazing, this commercial version of the highly classified technology available to the armed forces allowed only a bird’s-eye view, directly from above. State-of-the-art versions allowed digital enhancement to convert such images to ground-level views, making facial recognition possible from two hundred miles in space.
“Zoom in to about thirty feet,” Jonathan instructed as he squinted at the screen. “Let me see one of the workers.”
“Which one?”
“Your choice.”
While it was possible to manipulate the images from the laptop, it was far simpler for Venice to do it with her controls. The image moved to a section of the screen where the thirty-foot elevation would actually give them a view of four workers. In a single frame.
“I’m seeing children,” Harvey said. “Are you seeing children?”
“Turning you on?” Boxers jabbed.
“Fuck you.”
“Can it,” Jonathan snapped. He keyed his mike. “We’re seeing a workforce of kids, Mother Hen. Is that what you get from the big screen?”
“Oh, my God, that’s terrible,” Venice said.
Jonathan took that as a yes.
“Okay, back off to a hundred feet again.” The children seemed to fall away into the screen, and they saw the southwestern corner of the factory. Jonathan touched a spot on the screen with the tip of a retracted ballpoint pen. “Let me see this building right here,” he said to Venice. “Get me to ten feet.”
As the image started to move, Boxers asked, “You want to see the thatched roof?”
“Exactly.” The building he was calling up was the only structure in the compound that had been built outside the jungle canopy. It was therefore easy to see construction details.
When the image stopped moving, and the software finished its resolution process, the picture of an open- sided hut was as clear as if it had been snapped by a visitor. As he’d expected, the roof was made of what appeared to be palm fronds. Admittedly, though, he didn’t know one plant from another.
“Why is the thatched roof important?” Harvey asked.
“Because they burn really good,” Boxers said.
Harvey’s jaw dropped a little. “What exactly are we planning to do?”
“Win against ridiculous odds,” Jonathan said. Then, to Venice: “Go ahead and pull out again and let me see the compound. Just enough altitude to give me all the buildings.”
“Are we looking for something in particular?” Venice asked.
“We’re looking for stores of gasoline,” he said. He’d keyed his mike for Venice, but the answer was intended as much for Harvey as for her. “Cocaine manufacturing is a bizarre process,” he went on. “If people knew how it was made, they’d never in a million years shove it up their nose. After they stomp on the leaves, they soak the shit in sulfuric acid for a while, and then after another step or two, there’s a long soak in gasoline. Up here, I figure they’ve got to have a pretty good supply.”
“Gasoline, eh?” Venice said in his ear. “You should have said something earlier. Watch this.” The image on the screen blinked as it refreshed, and then it turned from a picture as you’d normally see it to something more akin to a photographic negative. It jumped a couple more times. And then rotated.
Harvey asked, “What the hell is going on?”
“That’s Venice being Venice,” Boxers said.
Jonathan added, “You learn over time not to ask questions. It’s best just to sit still until she’s finished. She’s good enough with this computer shit that electrons are actually afraid of her.” In anticipation of the show that always accompanied one of Venice’s digital accomplishments, Jonathan unplugged his earpiece from the radio and ran the audio connection through the laptop’s speakers.
“Quit talking about Venice,” he said. “She can hear us all now.”
“Ha, ha, very funny,” she said.
They listened to the clatter of her computer keys as the image on the screen continued to shift and change colors. For the first part of this dizzying display, she trolled around the outline of the main building, zooming in and out of different quadrants. When one quadrant showed a yellow-orange aura, she said, “There it is.”
“There what is?” Jonathan asked.
“Just wait,” she said.
She zoomed away from the main building and then shifted to the others in the compound. Through the canopy, they appeared more as outlines than real images, but the footprints of the huts were plainly visible. The screen shifted from building to building, pausing for a second or two, and then moving on to the next. She zoomed out and then in, at what seemed to be random intervals, and finally, she paused at one hut, perhaps the smallest of them all. She zoomed in closer, and as she did, a similar yellow aura appeared on the screen.
“There’s your gasoline storage,” she said.
Boxers blurted out a laugh.
“You’ll tell us how you know this?” Jonathan asked. He didn’t for a moment question the accuracy-Venice was always right-he just wanted to know how she got there.
“Did you forget what SkysEye was designed to do?” she asked.
Then he saw it. He had in fact forgotten. “Petroleum research,” he said.
“Bingo. The program is designed to search for petroleum compounds. Don’t ask me how it does it-something about the light signature of vapors-but there you go.”
