He shifted in his seat. “Things have… accelerated. We thought at first that this was a simple revenge killing with a raised middle finger to the CIA in the form of dumping the victim into your shopping cart. Now it looks like a lot more is going on.”
I poured him some tea. “So do I actually get to be filled in now?”
Gary sighed. “You do. To a point. You know how the agency works.”
“Need-to-know basis. I’m surprised they didn’t make us tattoo the words on our forehead. Well, go on.”
Gary gently removed Dandelion from his pants leg, where she was busy fraying the fabric of his slacks.
“It all goes back to when we were agents down there, when General Noriega was in power. We and other teams were busy trying to take down the drug barons to remove his financial base.”
“That didn’t work too well,” I said. It’s hard to arrest criminals when the government is complicit. Even those we got rid of in more, ahem, direct ways, only ended up getting replaced that same week.
“Nor did the coups we arranged.”
We had arranged three different coup attempts led by various disaffected officers in the police and military. You can read all about them in some good history books published since the war. Well, two of them. The third coup attempt was crushed so quickly it never even made the news.
And that’s the one Gary started talking about.
“After our first two coup attempts failed, Noriega was getting paranoid and was watching his forces like a hawk. We had a hard time organizing a third, remember? But we thought we had a good one.”
“I remember.”
The leader, Carlos Pretto, was the head of a rural police district that had been left impoverished by the regime. The narcos ran the area and had brought a lot of ill will onto themselves by killing off anyone they didn’t like. Pretto was unusual among the police commanders in that he wasn’t corrupt. He tried to do his job, but with the current regime he could barely keep his job, let alone do it. And he had survived at least one assassination attempt by the narcos.
People feared the narcos but also hated them. If the police could throw off Noriega’s corruption and take a stand against the drug barons, the people might rise up. Commander Pretto also had allies in several other district stations and among the military. If he showed the nation that his police district wasn’t corrupt and got rid of the local drug barons, he could create a power base that would have a ripple effect in the other districts. Noriega would be faced with a revolt in the countryside and international embarrassment for having his drug connections proven once and for all, and he’d have his main money supply dry up. The rebels, on the other hand, would get U.S. government funding plus all the weapons they could take from local armories and from the drug militias, which were considerable. Noriega would be overthrown.
At least, that was the theory.
The reality didn’t work out so well.
Commander Pretto had been careful. In the middle of the night, he personally led a group of trusted officers into the police barracks and arrested everyone he suspected of being a Noriega spy. Then he had taken his men and swooped down on the local drug baron’s ranch.
They moved in, guns blazing, taking the drug baron’s hacienda and the drug baron himself and securing the cocaine-processing lab and a storehouse full of cocaine ready for the marketplace.
What they didn’t know was that an army patrol was coming to pick up the cocaine that very night. Just as his lightly armed police officers were celebrating an easy victory, several armored cars armed with machine guns drove onto the ranch. A fierce gunfight ensued with Pretto and his men holed up in the hacienda and the soldiers picking them off. The troops radioed for backup in the form of a couple of tanks. When Pretto saw these behemoths rumbling up the driveway, they surrendered. Pretto and his officers were summarily executed, and his men were thrown into prison, as were Pretto’s and the officers’ families. They were later saved by the U.S. troops during the invasion.
The whole thing had been hushed up. Noriega didn’t want to tell the press, which he tightly controlled, because it put him on the side of the narcos. The U.S. didn’t want to talk about it because it had been such an abysmal failure and they would have had to admit they were trying to overthrow Noriega.
“When we released the coup leaders’ families from that stinking hole they had been locked in, we offered them visas,” Gary said. “Sort of an apology. Most took them. Noriega had confiscated all of their property, and while they got their homes and land back, all other portable wealth was gone. Commander Pretto had come from one of the region’s leading families, which was probably why he had been able to keep his job despite pressure from Noriega and the narcos. His father had owned some mines, and one of his discoveries was the Volcano Stone of Panama. That got confiscated along with the rest of the family’s wealth.”
“Oh dear. And the president of Escudo Security is… ”
“Ricardo Pretto, the police commander’s son, now going under the name of Ricardo Morales. He is the oldest surviving member of the family and is the rightful heir of all that stolen property. Everyone in the company is related to one of the coup officers. We’ve known about them for years, and they’ve kept quiet until now.”
“Until Sir Edmund bought the Volcano Stone of Panama.”
Gary nodded, his mouth set in a grim line. “Montalbion didn’t know it had been stolen. The Noriega regime had faked a legal bill of sale signed by old man Pretto at gunpoint and sold it to an international dealer. From there, it passed through several private hands before being
