Betrayal

Chapter 25

They stopped at five o’clock, this time at the banks of a larger stream, swollen to almost river-size by the rain, which had started again a few hours earlier. They were both soaked completely through, but at least it was warm — the temperature felt like a steady ninety degrees throughout the day, with all the attendant mugginess high humidity brought.

The mosquitoes swarmed as the evening wore on, and they paused to spray themselves again before continuing their forced march. She’d never seen anything like the bugs, not even in Belize — known as the mosquito coast for good reason. But compared to Myanmar, Belize was Toronto; the jungle around them was literally swarming with every variety of bloodsucking parasite known to man, as Matt had been quick to point out during one of their hushed discussions.

They hadn’t come across another living soul all day, but Matt seemed preoccupied with listening for others in the jungle, giving her the distinct feeling that he hadn’t been joking about the drug syndicates and human traffickers being their biggest obstacle to making it out alive.

She repeated the ritual with the breakfast bars and the water, then they sat in the shadow of a rock overhang, which provided slim shelter from the downpour, but more than the trees did. They listened together to the steady drumming of rain on the leaves, a hail of precipitation that seemed to be never-ending.

“You never told me where they got you from,” he began, eyeing her as she chugged more water.

“No, I didn’t.”

“You’re not CIA, I know that. What are you then? Freelance?”

“In a manner of speaking,” she answered, uninterested in pursuing it.

“What did they offer you to do this?”

“None of your business.”

“Whatever it is, I can double it.”

She ignored him, preferring to strip her Beretta and clean it during their break.

“You know about the diamonds. What did they tell you?”

“Guess.”

“Ha. Let’s see. If I was them, I’d tell a story about how I’m the bad guy, and they’re out to set an example. Am I close?”

“You tell me.”

“Who recruited you?”

“Again, none of your business. I don’t want to discuss it.”

“Was it Scarface, the great man himself? Or did he use an intermediary? He’s a coward at heart, so I’ll bet he used a cutout. Unless he’s desperate by now. If so, you met him. Creepy bastard, isn’t he?”

She stared at him with dead eyes.

“So what was the story? How did he explain away two hundred million in diamonds being handled by the CIA in Thailand? That must have been quite a yarn.”

He smiled at her, and she noticed that his eye color shifted from brown to green in the light. Little flecks of gold in the irises created the illusion of them glinting, sparkling.

She relented. “Two hundred? They told me fifty. You stole the diamonds from the CIA, which was supporting insurgency in Myanmar. A formerly trustworthy career officer gone rogue out of greed. Sad story.”

“Not bad. Of course, nothing near the truth, but hey, why let that stop anyone? Why tell you anything even resembling it? Fifty, two hundred, whatever. The only problem being that it isn’t true.”

“Sure it isn’t.”

“You actually believe that tripe? Then I’ve got a bridge to sell you. How about this — tell me which sounds more realistic. That the CIA was funding Myanmar insurgents with diamonds, for unknown reasons. Or that a faction of entrepreneurial CIA scumbags decided to get into the drug business over forty years ago, and the diamonds were just another payment to heroin traffickers in the Golden Triangle.”

She didn’t show any emotion, but she didn’t like what she was hearing.

“During the Vietnam war, some of the power players in the CIA figured out that they had the means and the wherewithal to become the world’s largest drug trafficking entity. Back then, drugs in the United States were illegal, but not a huge problem. Because there wasn’t any consistent supply. These guys decided to solve that problem by opening up a shipping operation from Vietnam — heroin from the Triangle, in return for guns and cash. The traffickers in the Triangle could sell the guns to the Viet Cong, so it was a great scheme. Of course, the only ethical hiccup was that American soldiers were being killed with weapons the CIA was supplying, but hey, can’t have everything. That’s why the heroin supply in the United States boomed once Vietnam was under way. And they didn’t stop at getting an entire generation of hippies addicted. They also made sure that it was the drug of choice for many of the GIs who were fighting in a conflict they wouldn’t ever be allowed to win. It was perfect, and this little club in the CIA made a fortune.

“The pipeline was a simple one. Cash and weapons on army transport planes to Southeast Asia, then heroin on the return journey, concealed in the coffins of dead GIs. The CIA hooked up with the Italian mob for distribution in the States, and the rest is history. There were a few competitors that got involved as it went along — ex-GIs who knew what was going on because they’d been in on it while stationed in Vietnam, and who decided to set up their own railroads using the same technique, but the CIA squashed those once they got large enough to make headlines. It was all good business — they had other bad guys to point fingers at, and meanwhile the top echelon was getting rich.

“Occasionally a shipment would get intercepted as the traffic grew, but they could always blame it on one of these fall guys or claim it was an off-the-books op or a sting. They also got involved in the traffic to Europe — their problem was that once they were taking literally a hundred percent of the Triangle’s production, they needed addicts to sop up the supply. A classic supply/demand issue.”

“Are you trying to tell me that some faction of the CIA has been running heroin for forty years? Please. Try something more believable,” she sneered.

“More than forty, and not just heroin. Of course, as time marched on, the old hands retired or died, and then new blood took over. We are talking about billions of dollars per year, here. You could work for the CIA, and if you were part of the clique, retire a multi-millionaire, easily, all tax free. It was quite a racket.”

“And where do you come in?”

“I found out about it. I wasn’t one of the in-crowd. They kept everything very hush-hush, all need-to-know, but I figured it out when I was making regular runs into Myanmar and Laos with bags of diamonds and handing them to obvious drug lords. They fed me the same insurgents bullshit, but I soon discovered that there was no insurgency of any meaningful kind in Myanmar. Not over half a billion a year’s worth, anyway. And the CIA screwed up — I became trusted by the drug lords over time, and they began to rely on me to create a market for the diamonds — to create liquidity for them in Thailand. Of course, many of the diamonds made it to Europe for conversion, but a fair number stayed in the Far East.”

“I thought this was all recent.”

“Another lie. It’s been going on for decades.”

“So you were bringing them the diamonds. A courier.”

“Much more than that. I became their conduit. They would have me hold onto ten million’s worth of diamonds and convert them into dollars. That’s where Pu came in. I’d developed him as a snitch over ten years ago, and he had all the contacts to make the diamonds disappear — at a slight discount, of course.” He shifted uncomfortably and continued. “I wanted to know what I was really involved in. Once I saw the lie and figured out that something was going on that had nothing to do with legitimate company business, I started nosing around, and the more I dug, the uglier it got. These guys don’t just take the supply from here. They also have the market cornered for heroin from Afghanistan. Which currently produces two times the world total demand for heroin. So they have a price problem. They either need a much larger market of addicts — which they’re working hard to create in Europe and Russia — or they need to have total control over the supply, so they can maintain margins.

“Anyway, when I figured out that I’d devoted the last decade of my life to operating the largest illegal drug operation on the planet, I had what you might call a crisis of confidence. It wasn’t what I had signed up for…let’s just say it wasn’t how I saw myself.”

She nodded, a twist of anxiety budding in her gut.

“I decided to put a stop to it. Single-handedly. When I had a particularly large diamond run to make — four months’ payment — I simply took the money and ran. The drug lords were furious. I told them that the Americans hadn’t sent the diamonds because they wanted a twenty-five percent price reduction, which threw the entire scheme into disarray. The drug lords went nuts and immediately went out and started talking to competitive criminal syndicates — most notably, the Russian and Chinese. So now the CIA had a real problem. They’d lost two hundred million in stones, which they’d gotten from trading weapons to Africa in return for the diamonds. Have you ever heard of blood diamonds?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know they come from countries nobody is supposed to trade with because they are generally exchanged for guns and bombs and tanks and planes that are used for genocide. The diamonds are typically mined by slave laborers who live in starvation conditions. Starting to see the similarities? You have these slaves on one side who are producing the diamonds, which are traded for arms the CIA sourced using drug-trafficking proceeds, and then the diamonds are exchanged for the drugs that are then sold worldwide, generating more cash with which to buy weapons to trade for diamonds. It’s a perfect rinsing machine. But then I stuck my nose in it and spoiled everything. Needless to say, losing two hundred million threw a hitch in the group’s cash flow — that was probably a month’s worth of profit, but it’s not like you can just snap your fingers and easily turn the cash into diamonds — it takes some time to source that many stones. I knew that when I did it. But most importantly, their losing control of the drug supply threatens their whole ugly empire. It could shut them down.”

“So your version is that you’re on the side of God and right, and you stole the diamonds to shut down an illegal CIA-run trafficking enterprise?”

“Exactly. I may have some moral confusion — what they call ‘elasticity’ in the biz — but I know that being involved in heroin trafficking is about as despicable as it gets. There’s no gray area in there. Once I knew what was going on, I had two choices — I could either continue as before, or I could do something about it.”

“And wind up two hundred million richer.”

“Yes. As you can see by the lavish lifestyle I crafted for myself in the Myanmar mountains, money is supremely important to me. It’s just a bitch finding somewhere to park the Bentley and land the Citation in the middle of the jungle. Especially when you’re living in a shack and pooping in a hole.”

Jet had grown uneasy as she listened to Matt’s version, which sounded far more plausible than Arthur’s. But if he was telling the truth, what could she do about it?

As if reading her mind, Matt started in again. “What did they pay you to do this?”

“Pay me? You think I’m doing this for money?” she spat, and then she told him the whole thing. All of it. Her child, the Mossad, Arthur’s ultimatum.

Matt studied her face as she recounted the story, saying nothing until she was done. He looked off into the distance, his focus a million miles away, then fixed her with an intense gaze.

“You know you’re never going to get your daughter back. There’s no way he’ll let you live.”

She nodded. “I’m starting to get that feeling.”

“He’s one of the heads of a multi-generational drug trafficking ring. This is not a man who will think twice about having you executed the second he has the diamonds.”

“If you’re not lying.”

He shook his head and snorted. “Hey, I know: how about we wait until you see that there are two hundred million dollars in diamonds in my safe deposit box, not fifty. Will that go far in convincing you?”

“What are you doing with a monster like Pu?”

“He was a means to an end. And you saw how much love there ultimately was between us. He was just a few seconds away from plugging me. Come on. Think this through. You know I’m telling you the truth. I couldn’t invent this shit.”

She stood and moved out of the shelter of the rocks, the rain having eased over the last few minutes, and paced in front of him.

“I don’t see a lot of options here.”

“Funny you should say that. Because I see nothing but possibilities. But only if we work together.”

“Work together?”

“Let me tell you what I’m thinking…”