he’d given his word. Still too quickly, he went on, “I agree to the arrangement.”
“I’m glad we’ve had this meeting,” the ambassador said. “I feel it has clarified a number of points.” The main one being that you can’t contemptuously treat me like some cigar-chewing peasant.
“I think so, too,” Belac said, wanting to recover. “I think there are other points that maybe need clarifying, too.”
“Such as?”
“That mutual trust we spoke about,” Belac said heavily. “I think it would be very unfortunate if there stopped being mutual trust between us.”
“So do I.” An open threat, Rivera recognized, uneasily.
“It would be regrettable for any other sort of penalties to be considered by either of us, don’t you think?” Belac said.
“I’m not sure I’m following this conversation,” Rivera said. His voice remained quite firm, he decided, gratefully.
The Belgian sat regarding the other man without speaking for several moments. He said, “It is important that we understand each other.”
“There’s no misunderstanding on my part,” Rivera assured him. “I sincerely hope there’s none upon yours.”
“There won’t be, from now on,” the Belgian said.
The encounter concluded, Belac’s departure duly noted by the CIA surveillance team, witli Rivera firmly believing himself to be the victor.
Which he had been, far more than he knew.
Belac had done nothing about obtaining the American-manufactured, American-equipped computer system listed among the top ten items barred from export to any communist country.
Belatedly Belac approached a hi-tech consultant in California through whom he had previously dealt—always by telephone or letter—for technical advice upon such things. And upon the consultant’s advice Belac finally did approach Sweden. The company was named Epetric, was headquartered in the very heart of Stockholm, and was regarded as the most amenable to rule bending as well as one of the best hi-tech corporations in the country.
Precisely because it was such a state-of-the-art organization as well as being so amenable to rule bending, Epetric was prominent on the list of suspected technological infringers not just in the CIA but in the U.S. Customs Service as well. The combined pressure of both agencies resulted in Washington warning Stockholm that unless they did more to control the technology flood. Swedish industries, and particularly companies like Epetric, would be denied by federal legislation the legal American computer exports upon which the industry, worldwide, depended.
Stockholm resented the threat but could not deny the hemorrhage, and the cabinet decided that the country had to show itself a less open technological doorway.
Nine months before Belac approached Epetric—months, in fact, before there had ever been contact between the Belgian and Jose Gaviria Rivera—Swedish customs investigators had succeeded in suborning an informant within the contracts and finance department of the Epetric company.
His name was Lars Henstrom.
Paul Rodgers felt life was sweet; sweet as a little nut. Sweeter in fact. What was sweeter than a little nut? Angie maybe. She sure as hell was sweet; tits she had—no silicone, either—made those bimbos in the skin mags look like grandmothers or bag ladies. And not just the tits. Rodgers, who’d bucked a few in his time flying in Nam and then for Florida, before it went bust, reckoned there hadn’t been a trick invented in the sack that Angie didn’t know; guessed she might have invented a few of them.
And not just the joy of Angie, since he’d wised up. There was the paid-for-cash condo in Naples, as an investment, and the paid-for-cash beach house where they lived at Fort Lauderdale, and the paid-for-cash Jaguar XK6, the latest convertible model, and those discreet safe-deposit boxes in Miami and Tampa and Dallas and New York, everything nicely spread around, solid as those unquestioning banks. Yes sir, life was sweet; sweet as a little …
Rodgers didn’t bother to finish the thought, frowning at the cumulus buildup ahead, a boiling, churning foam of blackened cloud already split apart by lightning. The forecast—the best he could get, that was, before lifting off from the dirt strip outside Cartagena—had warned of occasional seasonal turbulence. Sure as fuck this wasn’t occasional seasonal turbulence. This was a full-blown storm, the kind that every so often strutted the Caribbean, blowing down the tarp shacks and uprooting a tree here and there and giving those vacationing jerks paying $300 a day the hurricane story of a lifetime when they got back to Des Moines or Billings. Except that it wasn’t a hurricane. Just an awkward fucking storm just when he didn’t want one, right in the way of where he wanted to go.
“Shit!” Rodgers said with feeling. Briefly—but only briefly—life wasn’t quite so sweet anymore.
The wise money said to fly around it. The engines of the DC3 were already chattering like they had teeth and twice he’d thought they were going to cut out altogether. Rodgers bet the entire fucking aircraft was held together with no more than string, spit, and chewing gum.
If he went head-on into what was up ahead, he was going to end up in the matchstick-making business and that wasn’t the business he was interested in building into a career. Which course, then? Wise money again said even more abruptly to go eastwards, over Haiti, and hope he could get around the blockage and still cut westward to come down on the Matanzas airstrip.
Except the bastard Colombians had short-changed him on the fuel, knowing the gauge was faulty and that he couldn’t really challenge them. It was fucking amazing: every run worth a minimum of $50 million, and they had to cheat on nickels and dimes.
Westward then? Less chance of being driven out into die Atlantic, with nothing between him, paella, and die bullfights of Spain but three thousand miles of empty ocean. But the Americans were shit-hot around the Gulf: not just radar on the ground but AWACs planes in me air and spot-the-druggie training forming a permanent part of all air-force and naval exercises.
The DC3 began to buck and shudder, the stick sluggish in his hands and me rudder bar spongy underfoot. Decision time. Rodgers turned west; there might be a lot of guys in white hats, but this way there was also Mexico, and if the fuel got crucial, there were more safe illicit airstrips than fleas on a brown dog.
Rodgers had always had a nasty feeling about having to ditch in the sea and get his ass wet. Besides, there was the cargo to think of: almost five hundred kilos of high-purity cocaine could be better used on dry land—even if it weren’t the dry land upon which he was supposed to put down—than to clear the sinuses of the sharks and barracudas.
He still intended, if he could, to deliver in Cuba.
Rodgers kept right against the storm edge—able to see clear sunlight to his left, rain-lashed blackness to his right—riding the up and downdrafts, teeth snapping together with the suddenness of the lifts and drops. The ancient aircraft groaned and creaked in protest, those sounds overwhelmed by the crashing of the storm outside.
One of his wipers quit—fortunately not that of his immediate windshield—and then he went too close and was engulfed in the cloud, and the crack of the lightning strike was so loud it actually deafened him, making his ears ache. On the panel his instrumentation went haywire; the compass was whirling like a roulette wheel and the artificial horizon showed him falling sideways, although the altimeter had him at two thousand feet. If that were his correct height, then he’d been driven too low, Rodgers realized: dangerously too low. Not necessary to worry too much. He’d be difficult to detect, mixed up in this sort of shit.
Rodgers had the cans off his ears, held by the headpiece around his neck; through them came the occasional screech of static and in a sudden but brief moment of absolute clarity he picked up Miami airport sending out a general warning of a severe and unexpected storm in the Caribbean basin, setting out its longitude and latitude.
“Thanks a bunch, fella!” Rodgers said aloud. If anything in the goddamned airplane worked and he had any charts, he might have been able to find out how far, and how deep, he was into the storm.
The bright sunshine to port dazzled Rodgers, making him blink, and he turned out toward it, wanting to clear the cumulus and prevent the plane breaking up. The transition, from practically uncontrolled bucking to level-flying calm, was startling, and Rodgers heard his own breath go from him, unaware until that moment how tense he had been.
