Three Minutes Read online

  The head chemist smiled guardedly, as if afraid El Mestizo could change his mind at any time, become less understanding.

  “There aren’t many who can do this. Just a few chemists. I know of one in Cali, one in Bolivia, one in Venezuela, and there’s one more here in the Guaviare province, but much further into the forest. We kill the scent and then melt the cocaine into the leather. And when I do it, I don’t let anyone in here. But step two, bringing the cocaine back to life, that I can show you. It’s easier, and our customers receive instructions on how to do it themselves.”

  A blue plastic barrel stood in the corner near the stack of bags, smelling strongly of chemicals. Carlos picked it up, placed it on the workbench.

  “Give me the leather.” He nodded toward El Mestizo, who handed over the scrap he’d just ripped out of the suitcase. “Like this.” And then he sank the oblong piece into the chemical mixture.

  “Ether. I dip it, rub it, as if I’m washing it and, voilà . . . as you can see, it turns white. Or maybe not so much white as colorless. What do you think, maybe we should call it a whitish yellow?”

  The leather’s dark brown hue was gone. Carlos picked up another plastic container of chemicals—permanganate, sulfuric acid—and lowered the now colorless leather into it. Two layers slowly formed. A yellowish surface layer, and below that a second layer of pure water. Or, at least it looked like water.

  “Now we restore it. Bring it back to life.” He reached over to the shelf filled with test tubes and chose the one that stood closest. “A drop of this into the white. One more drop. One more. Do you see? It gets thicker, almost looks like semen. The more drops you give it the thicker the goo, as Sánchez calls it. Or maybe batter sounds better? And then, if we had more time, I would have heated the mixture to ninety-eight degrees, put it on a tray, and let it dry. In a few hours you’ll have cocaine of the highest quality, ninety-four percent, sometimes even ninety-six. We call it fish scales. They don’t have it where you come from, but there’s nothing better and it glitters, like the scales on a beautiful fish.”

  Hoffmann had come across yet another form of the drug that once controlled his life. Now he possessed knowledge that few others did. But that was not what this was about. Confidence. That was the real message. El Mestizo, who didn’t put his trust in anyone, had once again done just that, shown his confidence in him, and now seemed a little pleased with himself while waiting for the man he kept closest to realize that. It had taken two and a half years, but he was now more deeply embedded in the core of the PRC guerrillas than any other informant ever had been.

  “The river? Is it that way?”

  El Mestizo smiled.

  “Are you going for a swim, Peter?”

  “I need to wash off. Before we head back. This heat has crawled into my pores and won’t let go.”

  “You know there are crocodiles, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And in this province, you know, they don’t just bite off whatever’s sticking out, they chew.” His smile spread even wider.

  Hoffmann also smiled and headed out alone down the carved tunnel, surrounded by the screams of monkeys and buzzing of insects. Ants formed thick black ropes as they crisscrossed the path in front of him.

  A few minutes and he was there. It was beautiful. Wide, open water, he guessed seventy-five meters to the other side and a strong current in its middle. One of the many tributaries that carved the Amazon jungle into pieces, leading from nowhere to nowhere. A light wind, pleasant, cooling.

  He stripped naked and took the first steps toward the shore and then saw a log lying not far into the water. He bent down, picked up a good-size rock, and took aim. A hit. The log moved in irritation, splashed as it disappeared below the surface, and swam away, small eddies following behind it.

  He moved farther out, dipped his whole body, put his shaved head well below the surface of the water. Silence. Even more cool. It was like a cold balm against his blazing skin. He stayed in longer than he’d planned, needed a private moment without the punishing heat.

  Johnny had shown trust in him when he urged him to shoot. And again when he showed him the bags. The one person he shouldn’t trust.

  Hoffmann waded toward the shore between jagged rocks, dried himself off as best he could with his damp shirt, dressed, and looked around cautiously. He was still alone.

  The GPS receiver lay there in the fabric pocket of his vest. He took it out, pressed a button labeled mark,

  57.308326, 15.1241899

  and checked the decimal grade on the display. The precise latitude and longitude of this location—but in a coded program.

  If the coordinates ended up in the wrong hands, if someone else got hold of the figures before he gave them to his handlers in Bogotá or Cartagena, they’d have no idea what the numbers meant. They would lead them to another continent—to one of the churches he liked so much, Korsberga in southern Sweden. And which they had agreed to always use as a diversion. The real coordinates of a PRC-controlled cocaine kitchen in the Amazon jungle would only appear after his DEA handler ran them through her encryption device.

  He put the GPS receiver back in its place in his vest pocket and took a few steps back toward the water, squatted down, and rinsed his face again, staring down into a wavy mirror. Somewhere in the green behind him was the cocina. After about an eight-week wait, to keep from throwing any suspicion on his visit, the newly formed Crouse Force would crack down right here on the basis of the coordinates he’d just downloaded—and shut down this cocaine lab by force. And only a few people would be aware of what had happened, few would know how they’d been able to find their way here, the conditions necessary for an informant’s survival. Not even the powerful US politicians who initiated his mission, who reaped the benefits of it, knew that he, a convicted prisoner on the run from a European prison, was actually working for them.

  TIMOTHY D. CROUSE couldn’t cry. Not anymore. It was as if he’d run out of tears four years ago, as if they’d all run down into the ground, making a softer bed for the one who rested there. Forever.

  He didn’t cry now either. Even though he was watching images for the seventh time of another grave being filled, other human beings who no longer existed. Rage. That’s what he felt. That was why he moved away from the satellite operator, stepped over to the big screen on the wall, leaned in close to minimize reality. It didn’t work. Sánchez, the burly man with the ponytail, who was also called El Mestizo by the PRC guerrillas, had taken the automatic weapon from the dead man’s shoulder and fired it at the young men in uniform.

  One death had become five. And another patrol, probably of police, had taken an envelope, probably money, and watched while Sánchez shot them. A patrol that then started digging.

  Crouse didn’t scream. He never did. That wouldn’t solve anything. But he ended today’s visit, nodded to Roberts guarding the door outside in the corridor where they’d parted, walked faster than usual, heels hard against the polished plastic floor.

  “We’re going there, Roberts. Tomorrow.”

  “Where, sir?”

  “Where they dig graves for profit rather than grief.”

  The black car was waiting in his parking spot, just outside the entrance to the eight-story building. It wasn’t much more than a six-mile drive from NGA and Fort Belvoir to the Pleasant Valley Memorial Park. He visited the project that bore his name at least three times a week, and on his way back to the Capitol, he always stopped to be with her. With Liz. The one who held all his tears.

  “First to Liz, then to the House of Representatives, then home. That’s today’s schedule. Tomorrow we’ll arrive in Bogotá just after lunch. I just let them know I’m coming.”

  “You’re not giving me much time.”

  “Roberts?” It wasn’t often he snapped at the man he entrusted his life to. But that’s what happened now. Bodies shoveled into holes should call forth those who’d watched it. “Take care of it.”

  His driver parked by the c
hapel, next to the main road. Crouse always wanted to approach her headstone on foot, watch it grow from small and gray to something that comprised his whole world.

  She only made it to twenty-four. Outgoing. Happy. Maybe too outgoing, too happy. Though he didn’t think so at the time. On the contrary, he encouraged it without understanding how it slowly turned to a lack of boundaries. She never said no—she always followed along. She’d been fifteen years old when he confronted her about the pills the cleaning lady found in her room, and she told him they were given to her by somebody whose name she didn’t even know. More confrontations followed, and it was clear that her drug use was becoming more frequent and her behavior to get ahold of the drugs more risky.

  Beautiful green lawns surrounded a narrow, winding path toward the graves. Her headstone lay there, framed by two shrub-like trees, and was similar to the one that lay next to her plot. Mother and daughter together in life and death.

  He’d contacted an addiction counselor to help him clarify issues that Liz didn’t want to hear. Together they’d arranged an intervention. And he got his answers. The ones he didn’t want. Starting at the age of twelve, she’d tried every drug he’d ever heard of and some he hadn’t, and by then she was in the grasp of a mix of OxyContin, Valium, alcohol, and marijuana. He’d checked her into a private treatment center. After less than two weeks, her stay there resulted in new drug contacts and running away with a heroin addict nine years her senior.

  “Sir?”

  Roberts never usually interrupted him here. Not with her. When he did, it was important.

  “Yes?”

  “I apologize, but I’ve looked into it and I just can’t get an acceptable security detail together in time for tomorrow.”

  “And I’m not gonna sit in front of a television screen anymore without participating. I need to do this. Because I can. This is why the Crouse Force exists. So tomorrow, Roberts, we’re headed to Bogotá, no matter what, headed to the barracks.”

  He loved her headstone. Granite. A simple engraving—ELIZABETH CROUSE to the left, the day of her birth and death to the right.

  “Not like last time, sir? When we were also supposedly staying in the barracks, and you left the outer perimeter of the security zone to inspect where the new recruits burned down some coca plantations on the border with Venezuela? Or the time before that, when you departed with a captain from the Crouse Force to oversee the dismantling of a warehouse full of chemicals outside Cumaribo without informing me?”

  “One day and one night. Back the next day.” Crouse squatted down, straightening the vase of flowers stuck into the grass just behind the stone, the roses inside starting to wilt, but they had a few more days in them.

  “The outer security zone, five men. The inner zone, four men. Close-range zone, three men. Sir, that’s not enough in my book.”

  “If that’s what there is, then that’s what you have.” He snapped again. But this time he felt in the right. “Roberts, if you’ll excuse me?”

  The bodyguard retreated to a tree some distance away and watched while Crouse watered the heather growing in front of Liz’s mother’s stone. By the time their daughter was born they were already separated, but now some kind of connection had returned.

  The sudden breeze blew a few dry, brown leaves down onto his daughter’s grave. He ran his hand over them, as he used to do when she was little, spreading his fingers through her long hair, pushing her bangs a bit to the side, before she put them back the way she wanted them.

  She was sixteen years old when she ran away from the rehab center. He tried to get her to come home, but they didn’t speak much after that. A phone call here, an impromptu visit there, always shaky, nervous, broken. He got the call from the Sacramento police the day before her birthday. She was lying in a morgue with a steel frame beneath her head, and she looked the same age as her father. Weighed seventy-five pounds. He’d kissed her forehead and squeezed her stiff, bird-thin hand. An overdose-induced heart attack.

  He’d decided long ago. And today he did so again. He would hunt down those drugs. Not to punish anyone—but to remove the source. He was no longer driven by a desire for revenge, but by grief.

  HE STEPPED OUT of the car and into the protective darkness. There’d been a time when he feared what now engulfed him, drowning in it while it protected others—the ones who were there to attack. This darkness was like the light, leading him forward, holding on to his hand.

  Piet Hoffmann lingered in the narrow backyard. Cool, dry air. Starry sky. And from where he was standing right now he could see into the kitchen, where she was sitting at a round oak table with a glass of wine in hand, a newspaper open in front of her, alone just as she promised she’d be.

  So different from the hellish humidity and insects of the jungle. He’d taken the muddy path back to the road, and they’d exchanged their trucks for a car in Florencia, took turns at the wheel as usual. Eight hundred kilometers and neither of them had talked much, not because they’d decided not to, but they let each other be, neither one afraid of silence. He liked that about Johnny, there weren’t many who could deal with silence, remain comfortable inside it. Not even when he dropped him off at the large hacienda outside Pradera did they say anything to each other, just nodded. They’d meet again in a few hours at the brothel anyway for a new day that would need new words.

  The white plaster house with its semiworn tiled roof looked just like every other house in the district of Los Guayacanes in Comuna 5 of northeastern Cali. That’s how it had to look. An ordinary car outside an ordinary house with ordinary people on a narrow, winding street with nonexistent street lighting. He’d bought it seven, almost eight years ago on a trip here from Stockholm with Erik Wilson as his guide. His Swedish handler had been the one who told him he had to find a way out and helped him to arrange it. They’d both known that if he was ever discovered by the group he’d infiltrated on behalf of the Swedish police, or burned and abandoned by his employer, he’d have to flee with his family—immediately. Flee from his own death sentence. A couple of successful crack deals in southern Stockholm—which the Swedish police turned a blind eye to as long as he continued to provide them with useful information on organized crime—had paid for the house as well as the caretaker who looked after it for the four years it stood empty.

  Peter Haraldsson. That was the name he used on the deed. The very first time Piet Hoffmann entered into his new guise. A property transaction on another continent with a new identity. He hadn’t even told Zofia about that.

  He had lied so long that he forgot what truth felt like or how it looked. And when he’d finally been forced to tell her everything—or lose everything—he finally understood the way he’d pushed at the boundary between falsehood and truth, until he was never quite sure where a lie ended and a truth began, until he no longer knew who he was.

  Now she poured a little more wine into her glass. Picked up a pencil, wrote something. Kitchen lamplight fell so beautifully over her face, so soft, present.

  He remembered another house in Enskede, Stockholm, which after a sudden departure stood just as empty as this one had. Their home. He’d stood many times just like this outside it, just before going in, the moment equidistant between midnight and dawn. An empty house in another reality—overhanging fruit trees, wide flower beds, a lawn he should have cut more often. And a sparse hedge bordering the neighboring house that Rasmus and Hugo disappeared into as often as they could.

  Zofia. His wife. She was the one sitting inside. Sometimes it felt so strange to think that. That a man who never intended to settle down had someone he could call his wife. The first few times he said it, wife, it sounded false, contrived, as if it were something other adults had come up with. My wife. The one who waited for him because she knew he needed her to.

  “Hello.” He leaned forward, kissed her, always twice. Always an even number. Held her and felt totally relaxed, only here, only in her arms. For seven days and several hundred kilometers he’d longed for
this.

  A Swedish newspaper sat in front of her, Dagens Nyheter, she bought it from time to time when she had an errand in Bogotá. An almost completed Swedish crossword. That’s what she’d used the pencil on. She pushed out the chair next to her, gestured for him to sit.

  “Soon. Wait a second.”

  The stairs to the second floor squeaked a little more every week. If he stood on the edge of them it was quieter. Cautious steps up to the first room. Rasmus, six years old. Lying on his stomach, and with both hands under his pillow, he’d slept like that since the very first night. Smooth, slow breaths. He was the more happy-go-lucky of the two, didn’t worry as much as his older brother—this was just his reality, half of his life he’d been called Sebastian and spoken Spanish and been on the run. A light kiss on the cheek, Rasmus stirred a bit, mumbled something, then quickly returned to slow, even breaths. Next room. Hugo, eight years old. And he was dreaming, like his father. Sweating, nervously waving his arms, speaking out loud about something that was hard to make out, but with a voice that sounded hunted. Piet sat down on the narrow edge of the bed, put his hand to his son’s forehead, stroking it in a way he knew helped. Hugo worried so much and hated moving and being given a new name, I’m not a William—no matter how patiently they explained that this was his name now, that they could never use Rasmus and Hugo because someone wanted to do them harm, Mom, Dad, can’t you see it doesn’t fit—no matter what he or Zofia said it didn’t make an impact because their son refused to take it in. And at night, that’s when it weighed on him most, when he felt most hunted, because that’s exactly what they were.

  Hoffmann stood up and went to the stairs, which creaked less on his way down. Rasmus. Hugo. He was at least allowed to think of them that way.