The Threateners Read online

  I saw that Madeleine was studying Mark thoughtfully. Suddenly she snapped her fingers.

  “Lapis! That’s it! Lapis means ‘stone’ in Latin, doesn’t it?”

  I said, “Great. There’s nothing like a classical education, I always say.”

  “And stone is ‘stein’ in German. Mark Stein. Mark Steiner.” She went on without waiting for my comment: “And stone is also piedra in Spanish. Don’t you get it?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Keep trying.”

  I saw that Mark was listening with a total lack of expression.

  “Piedra, for God’s sake!” Madeleine said impatiently.

  "Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Marcus Piedra. It was in all the papers and all over TV a couple of years ago.”

  I said, “It doesn’t mean a thing to me. Who’s Marcus Piedra?”

  “That’s why his face looked so familiar! It was on the dustcover of his book, The Evil Empire. Somebody down in South America didn’t like what he’d written and put a price on his head, a million dollars. As far as I know, the reward has never been withdrawn."

  I glanced at Mark. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might be a writer, but I guess they come in all shapes and sizes. Hell, I’d beat on a typewriter a bit myself, once, in between bouts with a camera.

  “I always wanted to make a quick million,” I said. “But I thought the name was Rushdie and the book was called The Satanic Verses and the price offered by a certain bearded Iranian gent, since defunct, was five million. Sounds like our friend here is dealing with a bunch of Latin cheapskates. What kind of a takeout man can you get for a mere one mil?"

  “The Latins obviously got the idea from the Rushdie case,” Madeleine said.

  “Not necessarily.” Mark spoke at last. “Bounties and bounty hunters go far back in history. Many an ancient king offered a reward for the head of someone who had annoyed him. And Gregorio Vasquez has as much power as many ancient kings, or even our more modem ayatollah, the only difference being that Khomeini dealt in Mohammed, and Vasquez deals in cocaine. The point seems to be that it is not safe for irreverent writers to criticize either religion—and if you do not believe that cocaine is a religion, you should interview some true believers, as I have done.”

  “Cocaine?” I sighed. “Oh, God, here we go again! You mean that government character I almost shot is just another dope hound?”

  “Morton’s organization is concerned with illicit substances, yes. Actually, it is a task force that was originally constituted to deal with the South American threat, but has widened its target area in response to recent developments. ’ ’ “That figures,” I said. “A bureaucrat like Morton is always going to find an excuse to widen his target area.” I drew a long breath. “Maybe I have the wrong attitude, but I can’t help remembering that the world has a few other things besides dope to worry about. It scares me, the way we’re all getting obsessed with a bit of feel-good powder to the exclusion of everything else."

  Madeleine was frowning. “But don’t you agree that the trade must be stopped?”

  I laughed at that. “Stopped? Who the hell is stopping anything? My God, I’m not in favor of the stuff! If they were stopping it, I’d have nothing to say, I’d be all for them.” I drew a long breath. “But the whole business reminds me of a guy I went hunting with once. The flies were pretty bad around camp, the way they get in those mountains in the fall, and some of them even bit a little—deerflies or something— but what the hell, if you spend any time outdoors at all, you learn to put up with a few bugs. What drove me nuts wasn’t the flies, it was that jerk fighting a hysterical pitched battle with every fly that came near him. My God, I couldn’t drink or eat or sleep in peace for him chasing winged insects frantically around the lousy camp. Just like the way, these days, I can’t seem to do a simple job in the line of duty without running into a bunch of single-minded fanatics who don’t give a damn how important my mission is. If I’m not helping them eradicate the traffic in chemical evil, I’m just something in the road and they’ll drive right over me. Or try. ” I made a wry face. “Granted it’s a menace, but like I said it’s not the only menace we have to deal with these days. We do have a few other minor problems, like AIDS and nukes and starvation and oil and war and terrorism. I could bear having these crusaders in my hair if they were accomplishing something. But they aren’t stopping it, any more than that frantic hunting partner of mine was stopping the buzzing insects. I think he managed to get one horsefly or deerfly or whatever they were in one whole evening of waving his arms like a windmill. That seems to be about par for the course, with flies or drugs.”

  Madeleine said, “That’s a pretty negative attitude, Matt. Do you have a better answer to the problem?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s simple. Create a world in which living will be such a pleasure that nobody’ll need to resort to chemical joy. Nothing to it. The market for drugs will collapse and we’ll all be happy. Next question?”

  She made a face at me. Mark Steiner cleared his throat. “I gather you have not read my book, Matt.”

  I shook my head. “I’m afraid I hadn’t even heard of it until just now. I must have been incommunicado on a mission somewhere when your big fuss took place. Sorry about that.” I looked at him for a moment. “Are you hiding out here in Santa Fe to do another book, a sequel to The Evil Empire, perhaps? What’s this one called, The King of Coke?”

  As long as he’d been Mark Steiner, his accent had been minimal and his attitudes had been Yankee and it had been possible to kid him safely. But now he’d dropped his Americano act for the moment, and the real Marcus Piedra seemed to be a stuffier Latin type, with more strongly accented English, who liked to be taken seriously.

  He spoke stiffly: “I am working on a sequel, yes. My first book was an intensive study-in-depth of the relevant countries of South America with emphasis on the political, economic, and social effects of the trade in drugs, particularly cocaine.” There’s nothing quite as pompous as an author explaining his own book to a heathen who hasn’t read it. He went on: “I reported on the illicit organizations involved, like the Medellm cartel in Colombia, and I suggested that rather than being independent kingdoms of crime, they had recently become only parts of a greater illicit empire that included the whole continent of South America, plus Central America, ruled by an upstart former lieutenant of the Ochoas—”

  I interrupted. “What’s an Ochoa?”

  Mark looked impatient at my ignorance. “That is the Medellín family that, with certain associates, manages the big Colombian drug cartel that gets all the publicity. However, a few years ago some of those associates, led by an older gentleman named Gregorio Vasquez Stussman, a man who had for many years been satisfied to serve the cartel in a subordinate capacity, formed a new organization. No one expected it to survive against its entrenched opposition, and as a matter of fact little was heard of it for a while, but gradually it began to emerge as a giant criminal conglomerate that has quietly managed to gain effective control of all the South American drug operations, including the Medellin group. ” He gave a grim little laugh. “ ‘Quietly’ may not be the proper word. There was considerable violence, but there is so much violence connected with drugs anyway that a little more went almost unnoticed except, of course, by the people directly concerned, who were suitably impressed. A measure of the effectiveness of Vasquez’s tactics, and the ruthlessness of his companions, is that by murder, kidnapping, torture, and intimidation on the one hand, and liberal financial inducements on the other, he has managed to gain power over some very tough and wealthy and important people on both sides of the law—people one would have said would be quite immune to threats or bribery.” He looked up. “May I have another beer?”

  I waited until Madeleine had brought it; then I asked, “At what point did Mr. Vasquez Stussman become interested in you?”

  “When my first book came out, of course.” Mark took a swig of Carta Blanca from the bottle and wiped his mouth with the bac
k of his hand. “As a matter of fact, his violent reaction to Empire was what led me to consider a sequel. It seemed like overreaction. To be sure, he had reasons not to be happy with me, I had given his drug super-cartel unfa-vorable publicity and revealed some unpleasant truths about him, but it was done. The book was in print; it would not be withdrawn no matter what happened to me. To have me killed for writing Empire would be mere childish retaliation, and he is not a childish man. Clearly he was offering a million dollars for my death, not because he was so very angry at what I had written, but because he was afraid of what I intended to write next. Which told me that there was something to be written next. I looked for it and found it.”

  He drank some more beer, and glanced toward the fire as the cedar snapped again. I got up and kicked a couple of coals off the floor and put the screen in front of the fireplace, although I always feel that a fire burning behind a screen is half-wasted.

  Madeleine said impatiently, “Well? Don’t keep us in suspense!”

  Mark said, “As a matter of fact, that title you suggested, Matt, is inaccurate, and so were the geographical limits suggested in Empire. Vasquez’s combine is no longer dealing merely with cocaine. He’s not satisfied with being the king of coke, he’s reaching for control of cannabis in all forms from marijuana to hashish to ganja, and of all significant opium-morphine-heroin operations, not only in South America—where the opium poppy doesn’t do very well, although it’s being tried—but elsewhere in the world, like the Golden Triangle and the Golden Crescent.” He glanced at me, saw me looking blank, and explained: “The Golden Triangle is the Southeast Asian poppy-growing countries of Burma, Laos, and Thailand. When their production started to lag in the late 1970s, the slack was taken up by the Southwest Asian countries of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran; the so-called Golden Crescent. This is what Vasquez did not want me to put into a book: the fact that he is well on the way to having a worldwide monopoly of the more popular mind-altering drugs. He also feared that I would reveal his motive in creating this monopoly.”

  Madeleine stirred. “Is there a mystery? Everybody wants to be rich.”

  Mark shook his head. “The Medelín people take care of their own and they have fantastic amounts of money to spread around. Vasquez had become wealthy enough, working for them in an administrative capacity. No, it was not the money. However, his son, Jorge, a pilot for a small Colombian airline owned by them, also flew occasional smuggling runs for them—moonlighting, I suppose you would call it. One of Papa Vasquez’s duties had been to set up a smuggling route through the Bahamas with a transshipment point on one of the smaller islands, Roman Cay, that boasted an airstrip of sorts. He had made financial arrangements with the proper Bahamian authorities—one might call them improper Bahamian authorities—to ensure that the operation on the island would be ignored; and he had organized a small fleet of speedboats to carry the shipments across the Florida straits to a ‘safe’ marina in the Florida Keys. One day son Jorge was called upon to take over a run from a pilot who was indisposed. Flying into Roman Cay with a sizable shipment of cocaine, he ran into an unexpected welcoming committee. Secretly, the U.S. had put pressure on the government in Nassau, and the Bahamian police, accompanied by some American agents of the DEA, were waiting to arrest him. However, as Jorge was coming in to land, somebody fired a burst from an automatic weapon. It hit nothing; it is believed that one of the Bahamian officers who’d been paid by Gregorio was trying to warn Jorge off; but the effort backfired badly. The armed and trigger-happy officials on the ground all opened up at the first sound of gunfire . Riddled, the plane crashed and burned, incinerating Señor Vasquez, Junior. This did not meet with the approval of Señor Vasquez, Senior; and of course he blamed the U.S. of A.”

  I said, “Why not? Everyone else does.”

  "Actually," Mark said, "the DEA agents present claimed that they had not fired a shot, but this was ignored. In Vasquez’s view, that great, overbearing bully, Uncle Sam, had coerced the officials of a small independent neighboring nation into betraying their contractual obligations to him, and their honor as gentlemen, and murdering a fine young man whose only crime, if it could even be called a crime, was transporting some merchandise to American citizens who, whatever their government’s irrational attitude might be, were eager to have it and willing to pay well for it.”

  Madeleine said, “I’d think Mr. Vasquez would be mad at either the Bahamians who did the shooting or the cartel that sent his son into a trap."

  Mark shook his head. “The Bahamians he considers beneath contempt, mere tools in the bloody hands of the wicked USA. As I’ve already indicated, he did turn against the Medellin people; but like the late ayatollah, he reserves his big hate for the Great Satan, as Khomeini liked to call you. And he’s going to fix you, amigos. He is going to get a stranglehold on all the major sources of drugs in the world. And then he is going to destroy the U.S. by flooding the country with drugs at bargain prices that no one can resist. ”

  There was a short silence. I grimaced. “Well, like his bounty routine, it’s not exactly a new idea. I seem to remember that the British used opium in just about the same way, in China a century or two ago. So Vasquez is going to turn us into a nation of helpless hopheads? Cute.” I frowned. “Can he do it? I mean, does he have the power to control all the members of his far-flung conspiracy well enough to make them forgo the fantastic profits to which they are accustomed and market their products at more reasonable, and popular, prices?"

  Mark shrugged. “Quien sabe? Who knows? I address that question in my book, but I’m afraid my answer is inconclusive. I do believe he thinks he can do it, and he is not a man given to deluding himself. But there is another, equally important question to which you Americanos can probably give a better answer than a transplanted Peruvian.”

  “And that question is?” I asked.

  “Given the opportunity, will the American people destroy themselves in this way?”

  He glanced at Madeleine, who said, “If truly cheap drugs became readily available, there would certainly be a lot of people flying high at first In the long run . . .” She shook her head dubiously. “I really don’t know. ”

  I said, “Hell, there’s a liquor store on every street comer now, and we aren’t all running around drunk; and it isn’t the price of Scotch, or beer, that’s keeping most of us sober most of the time. I think Mr. Vasquez is kidding himself, with the help of a whole lot of guys and gals like Dennis Morton, whose livelihood depends on making us, and maybe themselves, believe that drugs can sink the good ship America and only they can save Old Glory from drowning in a sea of coke and hash. Well, I’ve spent a good deal of my life working for this country in various risky and unpleasant ways and my impression is that it’s a fairly tough country inhabited by fairly tough people who may have some bad habits but aren’t about to commit national suicide on some bargain-basement happy dust. Wow, listen to me, you’d think this was the Fourth of July or something! So Vasquez put a price on your head after your first book came out.”

  Mark laughed shortly. “In a way, he did me a favor. Who was going to read a dull nonfiction work about distant South American problems? My American publishers printed a few thousand copies and thought they’d probably be stuck with many of those; but the press got wind of the reward and, as with Rushdie, turned my book into a big best-seller. The publicity brought me to the attention of Dennis Morton’s superiors, who hadn’t bothered to read Empire when it first came out. They decided that I was someone to be protected since I seemed to have considerable amounts of potentially useful information beyond what I’d already revealed— protected at least until I could be wrung dry. Now they keep telling me that it is my patriotic duty to jettison, or at least postpone, my new book and turn all my data over to them for appropriate action. Patriotic? To what country? I am a Peruvian citizen, amigo, and no official of my country has requested enlightenment. In fact, we left Lima very hastily after being warned that I was to be arrested and silenced, p
resumably at the request of some very influential and wealthy Peruvian gentlemen. I have no proof, but I am certain that Vasquez, the source of their drug-based wealth, put them up to it. So I told your Yankee officials: make me an American citizen and then we can discuss my patriotic American duty. But that branch of your government is apparently not willing to cooperate, at least not rapidly. In the meantime, I told them, the information is probably still available where I found it. If you want it, I said, why do you not simply obtain it from the source, as I did?" He gave me a wry look. “Why is it that these law enforcement agencies always expect us journalists to do their work for them and then turn it over to them gratis?"

  I laughed at that. It was the ancient complaint of the working press. “So they’re giving you a hard time, but at least they’re keeping you alive after a fashion, right?”

  “Yes, and while they could not keep Ruth from being abducted, they did find her and set her free, although it was a close thing and the hounds brought down and killed the man who had gone in to liberate her.”

  I said, “I suppose the idea of the kidnapping was to trade her for your notes and tapes and whatever.”

  “Yes.”

  His voice was curt; he didn’t want to be asked if, had the lady not been liberated, he would have made the trade. It’s not a choice we ever have to make, thank God. The standing orders are rigid: no matter who dies, we don’t deal, ever.

  Madeleine said, “And then you were moved out here, to keep you safe.”

  Mark said grimly, “Yes. Safe until they found us again.” “If you don’t mind my asking,” she said, “I get the impression you haven’t been married very long, but you said your daughters were eleven and thirteen. . . ."

  “Ruth is the mother of the girls, but I am not the father. Her husband was in the U.S. Foreign Service, stationed in Peru. He died in a car-bombing incident about four years ago. I had met him and become friends with the whole family while covering various diplomatic functions in my capacity as a journalist. After Richard Harrington’s death . . .” Mark shrugged. “Please do not think there was anything between Ruth and me before that; but afterward . . . Anyway, we were married. I consider her children as my own; and I flatter myself that they accept me as an adequate substitute papa. Please do not judge Ruth by the little you have seen of her. She has never really recovered from the trauma of the kidnapping; she has lived with fear ever since. Fear not so much for herself as for her children."