“It’s gone,” I said, my heart sinking.
“What’s gone?”
I couldn’t believe it. The message and the e-mail-both were gone, wiped clean from the in-box and the trash bin.
“Patrick, what is it?”
I closed my eyes and then opened them slowly, hoping to wake up and find that this had all been a dream, a nightmare. It wasn’t.
“Disaster,” I said. “A total disaster is what this is.”
48
Robledo’s twin engine Cessna landed at eleven thirty P.M. There were no runway lights. There was no runway. The unscheduled flight from Sao Paulo, Brazil, had touched down on an unofficial landing strip. Hundreds of such strips cut through the remote woods and grasslands of the Tri-Border region, a landlocked patch of jungle and rough country that lies along the Tropic of Capricorn, where Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil meet.
Robledo was in the eleventh hour of a southward journey that had started on a commercial jet out of JFK airport. Even though he’d slept on the flight to Sao Paulo, and even though he’d lost only two hours with the time change, he felt jet-lagged and was glad to have a driver. His name was Oscar, and he spoke only Spanish.
By midnight the four-wheel-drive SUV was approaching Friendship Bridge, a sixteen-hundred-foot span that connected Brazil to Paraguay. A sign posted at the bridge’s entrance announced that crossers were prohibited from throwing merchandise off the side. Midnight, however, was the regular shift change for the customs officers. Crews on the Brazilian side were thin, and as usual, bribes had been paid to the Paraguayan naval police at the other end of the bridge. As Robledo’s SUV rolled across the bridge, smugglers by the dozen worked fast and fluidly, taking advantage of the window of opportunity that came three times daily with every shift change. Scrambling but still drinking beer, working within a couple hundred meters of Brazil’s customs and immigration outpost, smugglers harnessed boxes of goods to long nylon ropes that dangled from the railing and lowered them onto the forested riverbank. Below, teenage boys armed with flashlights sorted through the packages in litter-strewn, knee-high grass.
Robledo knew the place well. The nightly commotion on the bridge was business as usual in a city of two hundred thousand thieves, swindlers, whores, hit men, gangsters, kidnappers, drug runners, drug addicts, extortionists, smugglers, counterfeiters, terrorists, and well-armed revolutionaries-some with causes, most without. Ciudad del Este was a veritable festering urban sore in the jungle on the Paraguay side of the Parana River. Not even the pop and crack of semi-automatic weapons in the distance was cause for alarm. More than likely, it was a test firing by just another buyer of AK-47 assault rifles from China or submachine guns stolen from the Mexican army.
“Which hotel?” the driver asked in Spanish.
“Hotel Hamburg.”
“Hamburg,
The SUV stopped in front of the hotel, and Robledo stepped out. His goal on every trip was to keep a low profile. A thirty-dollar-per-night flophouse like Hotel Hamburg blended right in with the fume-filled traffic jams and bazaarlike shops on Avenida Monsenor Rodriguez, the main drag in the center of town. From there, another five thousand shops fanned out in all directions for a twenty-block area.
Robledo’s only luggage was an overnight bag, which must have seemed odd to the late-night attendant behind the registration desk. Guests often checked into the hotel with a half dozen or more empty suitcases, leaving the next day with their take. Cheap electronics equipment and cigarettes were popular items, but only for the casual buyer. Little or no luggage was a sign of a serious player with a serious agenda-cash for weapons, sex, sex slaves, pirated software, counterfeit goods, cocaine by the ton, murder for hire, and just about everything else illegal-from phony passports to human body parts for medical transplants. Delivery could be arranged for all of it. For a price.
Robledo picked up a room key, which came with a handwritten message: his contact was waiting across the street at the bar. He dropped his bag in his room and then followed the directions in his message to the Fugaki Bar.
Late January was the height of the summer rainy season. Even after midnight, the potholes in the street remained filled with the muddy remnants of the afternoon downpour. Some of the puddles were like sinkholes, seemingly big enough to swallow up everything from an unsuspecting tourist to a truckload of counterfeit Mont Blanc pens. Robledo stepped around them, passing a restaurant called Lebanon. It was a reminder that the Tri- Border Area was home to an estimated twenty-five thousand residents of Arab descent. Born and raised in Argentina, Robledo was often taken for Hispanic, and his Spanish was perfect. Not many people were aware that Robledo’s first language was actually Arabic.
Ironically, coming off as Hispanic had actually worked to his advantage in cultivating Lebanese wealth. Robledo was the golden boy who had found a way around Abe Cushman’s unspoken refusal to take Arab money. Robledo and his contact, Gerry Collins, had found a way to slide under Cushman’s radar and bring Saudis to the Cushman trough-investors with whom Cushman could never have done business without jeopardizing his stature in the Jewish American community, and without alienating the Jewish charities that would become his unwitting principal victims. For a time, Robledo’s Arab clients loved him.
Lately, not so much.
“I don’t like to be kept waiting,” said Fahid.
He spoke in English, their common tongue, as Fahid’s Arabic and Robledo’s Lebanese were not a perfect mesh. Fahid was a badass-in any language, any culture, any country. He was the spokesman for Robledo’s largest consortium of angry Saudi investors.
“I’m very sorry,” Robledo said as he took a seat on the barstool beside Fahid. “We had some difficulties getting over the bridge. The usual midnight chaos.”
Fahid tapped the rim of his shot glass. The bartender poured him a refill and also brought one for Robledo. They belted them back in unison. Robledo’s throat burned, and his eyes hurt. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but it must have been the drink of choice for the guy who had coined the word
Fahid said, “That ‘chaos,’ as you call it, pays the light bill.”
“My apologies,” Robledo said. “Chaos was a poor choice of words. I meant ‘business.’ ”
