The Manuscript

Chapter 5

The tranquility of the lush jungle was interrupted by a Land Rover bounding down the dirt track. Birds abandoned their perches and took to the air, alert to any threat the heavy motorized vehicle might present. Four men sat inside, silent as they lurched through the verdant tangle.

The humidity hung heavy and oppressive. It was autumn, the rainy season, which, while nourishing for the foliage, made it miserable for humans unaccustomed to the combination of heat and moisture and pressure. The weather was one of the primary reasons most of Colombia’s population didn’t live in the rural areas, other than the violent gangs of armed predators.

As they rounded a long bend in the trail, the driver fired a staccato burst of Spanish into a two way radio. Several hundred yards ahead, two figures armed with Kalashnikov rifles waved at them as three more struggled to remove the makeshift roadblock, composed of tree trunks, that lay across the path. These were members of the ELN: the National Liberation Army of Colombia — an armed rebel group, operating in the jungles since the mid-sixties, that funded its activities by protecting the cocaine trade in the region, as well as with kidnapping, extortion, murder-for-hire, and other criminal enterprises.

Most of the world’s cocaine was now produced in Colombia, where the crops from Peru, Bolivia and the southern part of Colombia were processed in field labs like the one the vehicle approached. Regional farmers in Peru and Colombia harvested Coca leaves and created a sludge they sold to the narcotraficantes, who further refined the crude paste into blocks of pure cocaine. The annual revenues of the trade were in the neighborhood of a hundred billion dollars a year, putting it in the same class as the GDP of many prosperous countries.

The largest consumer of illegal drugs has always been the United States, which ironically also has some of the toughest anti-drug laws of any ‘first world’ country. Illegal in the U.S. since 1914, when stories of attacks on white women — all the rage in the popular media of the day — were attributed to the cocaine-crazed Negro brain. Cocaine became a wildly profitable substance to traffic in when President Richard Nixon declared his war on drugs with the passage of the Controlled Substance Act in 1970 — instantly boosting the selling price and the profit margins associated with every aspect of production and distribution.

This converted a cottage industry into a massively lucrative enterprise for any group with the wherewithal to import the drug into the U.S., which led to the ascension of cartels operated by ruthless leaders who industrialized production — leading to massive increases in supply. Coke’s popularity during the disco craze of the 1970s through to the present day club scene ensured trillions of dollars of profit for its distributors over the intervening forty years. And the windfall cash deluge showed no signs of abating; even as U.S. demand dropped over the prior five years, new markets in Europe and the former Eastern Block, as well as in Asia, had stepped in to sop up supply.

A group of heavily-armed men approached the stationary vehicle and signaled for the passengers to step out. They complied in turn and, after a brief frisking, the three new arrivals entered the small hut that acted as the offices for the camouflaged drug lab. Inside, several older Latin men in jungle fatigues were seated in collapsible field chairs at an improvised meeting table consisting of a piece of plywood atop several milk crates.

An animated discussion ensued as the three visitors proceeded to negotiate for a bulk purchase of five hundred kilos, delivered within two weeks, possession to be exchanged near the Pacific coast port of Buenaventura. Two of the buyers were members of the Russian Mafiya, who were intent upon expanding their reach from distribution in cities on the East Coast to direct importation from Colombia. Profits would jump astronomically if they bought from the lab at roughly three thousand dollars a kilo instead of at thirty thousand dollars a kilo wholesale in the U.S., so it was worth risking a trip to the source to hammer out a deal.

The nearly ten-fold profit differential had brought them into the jungle. After an hour of back and forth, they reached an arrangement whereby the Russians would supply technical advice, supervision and blueprints for the construction of several fiberglass submarines capable of reaching the coast of Mexico completely submerged and virtually undetectable. The subs would be built by their new Colombian associates and equipped with advanced electronics and climate control for the week-long voyage.

The third member of the visiting group spoke fluent Russian as well as Spanish. He acted as the translator and go-between for the two Russian buyers. He was American, and carried himself with a military bearing, in spite of the civilian clothes and longish hair. Normally, anyone looking to buy large quantities of cocaine would have disappeared forever in the rural Colombian backlands but with this escort, the Russians were assured of protection during their foray.

A deal in principal being finally arrived at and agreed to by all parties, the four wheel drive vehicle returned to Bogota with its passengers, another transaction successfully concluded with the minimum of fuss. The production and distribution businesses were becoming fragmented of late, and so it was necessary to negotiate separate arrangements with multiple groups in order to ensure a reasonably consistent supply — unlike the early years, when the trade was dominated by one or two centrally-directed cartels. The new drug supply model had morphed the industry into smaller, decentralized cells that were relatively autonomous.

The American was critical to those groups because he, and a few others, acted as the manufacturers’ representatives, taking a healthy percentage out of each transaction while avoiding the risks of engaging in the actual trafficking.

Although scattered, the business was now more efficient than ever, having evolved into specialized units of manufacturing, shipping, and distribution, with the latter two being increasingly outsourced to Mexican, and now Russian, syndicates in return for a larger sale price in Colombia. Specialization had reduced the risk to any of the separate functions, and as the industry had matured, expected confiscations by law enforcement agencies were anticipated and factored into the profit and loss projections. Gone were the cowboys of the Escobar days — that phase had ended when the 1980s had drawn to a close. Now, cocaine production was as efficient as any mature, multi-billion dollar per year business.

True, there were turf wars along the distribution channel in Mexico but the product always made it through regardless of disputes, which were invariably about territories and trafficking rights. These were settled in a violent manner, which drew unwanted attention to the trade — but at the end of the day, the cocaine profit was essential to the economies of most of the countries that produced and shipped it.

The heads of the military and police chartered with stopping the trade were often also those who benefited the most from it. So the idea that it could be quashed with more soldiers or police was naïve — it was like trying to drink yourself sober, and had been a resounding failure since it first became the tactic of choice in the nations that sat in the trafficking routes between Colombia and the United States.

Three cats purred and rubbed around Mona’s legs, trying to comfort her in her moment of grief. The animals were empathic, could sense the pain radiating from her countenance as she sat in her small apartment and sobbed for her lost employer. She’d been with him for over twenty years, which was the majority of her adult life. Now, she was on her own, adrift in a world of uncertainty, with limited prospects and a skill-set of dubious utility.

The publishing business had been undergoing a shift brought about by eReaders supplanting paper books, which had translated into slimmer margins for the publishers. Literary agents of the old school were becoming obsolete. Not because their skillsets weren’t valuable or required, but rather because an increasing number of established authors were eying the self-publishing world with a more pragmatic, jaundiced eye. They recognized the financial benefits of releasing their own books rather than putting them through the traditional distribution chain. In reality, it was a question, for an author with a name, of getting roughly seven and a half percent of the book sale price versus seventy. That ten-times-the-money equation had everyone scrambling as the industry was blindsided and traditional book stores closed down in droves. The literary market had shifted from one where paper and ink and shelf space and distribution were the draws, to one where consumers shopped online and took instant delivery of their reading material on an eReader.

That was a win for customers, but a lose for the industry, as the value of the publishers diminished in the eyes of the writers. And if the holy grail for writers stopped being a deal where they got ten percent of the money they would by self-publishing, then the value of agents, whose sole cachet was that they had access to the publishers, also diminished, creating havoc for Mona’s little world. All she’d ever done was work for Abe, other than a few brief stints as a secretary back when floppy diskettes were all the rage. Now her mentor, employer, protector and friend was gone, causing Mona to come face to face with a future of uncertainty in a difficult job market in an industry in decline.

It wasn’t as though she had an extravagant lifestyle to support, or a high burn. It was just that she’d always found saving difficult, so she was unprepared for this sudden shift in her fortunes. And she was still so shocked about Abe, she hadn’t been able to collect herself. Once home from work, everything she saw reminded her of Abe’s final moments. Just like she did, Abe lived by himself with a few pets. He had died without anyone to hold his hand during his final moments — without anyone to care that he was embarking on his final journey. She could see her future being the same. Nobody would be there to mourn her or tell her that they loved her or demonstrate that she’d made an indelible impression on their lives. She would pass from the earth, cold and alone. And so, Mona cried, for Abe as much as for herself.

Eventually, she ran out of energy, and the cats needed care. Mister Paws was purring as he scratched his head against her easy chair. Sugah Bear made a bid for attention by leaping onto her lap. The third feline, a big orange tabby named Carrot Top — after the comedian who Mona found hysterical — glared at her, aloof, from the far corner of the room, commanding her silently, with his hypnotic gaze, to prepare his dinner.

Mona decided that she deserved a treat, and so after attending to her brood, she packed herself into her coat and headed for the little Italian restaurant two blocks away, whose rigatoni Bolognese was to die for. Tonight wasn’t the night to worry about a few extra pounds, she reasoned, nor about the effects of a bottle of Chianti on her ample figure. She needed comfort food and knew where to get it.

So involved was Mona in her private drama that she didn’t register the two men who’d taken up position behind her as she walked, nor the creeping of the large, black SUV on the street twenty yards behind her.

Michael rode the subway to the lower East Side, and then changed lines to get to Brooklyn. When he arrived at his stop in Williamsburg, he exited the train and made his way to the street. He flagged down a cab and gave the driver the address — a friend’s studio apartment which his buddy kept for trips to New York. Michael had a key. He stopped in once a month to check on the place and ensure that everything still worked and that it hadn’t been burgled or destroyed by fire, or that the decade-old Nissan Sentra in the decrepit garage down the block still started — assuming it hadn’t been stolen.

His friend had extended an invitation to use both whenever he wasn’t in town, and Michael knew he wouldn’t be back in the area for another month, so the little pied-à-terre presented the perfect place to stay until he could get a feel for how bad his situation actually was.

The small apartment was located in an area that had been the recipient of the gentrification that had been taking place in most of New York since the mid-1990s. Run-down sections of walk-up housing had transformed into middle class living to accommodate those for whom the City had gotten far too expensive. He made a perfunctory scan of the street before he walked up the stairs to the front door of the building. Seeing nothing unusual, he ascended to the entry and used one of the two keys he had taken from his foyer table to open it. Up two more flights, and he was inside and safe. At least for now.

Wasting no time, he cleared a section of the computer station and plugged his laptop into the modem, waiting anxiously while his system booted up. He opened one of the three windows to blow out the stagnant air and flopped down on the couch with Abe’s bag. He extracted the manuscript and laid the tote on the floor beside him. Time to find out what all the fuss was about.

Michael read the first section for forty-five minutes. His mood shifted from curiosity, to dim anxiety, to dread. Fifty pages in, he was already beginning to appreciate just how damaging the allegations were, and if true, how relentless the subjects of the document’s claims would be to stop it from getting any exposure.

The manuscript outlined the history of a global drug trafficking, money laundering and murder-for-hire scheme that went back several decades, and which included virtually every major criminal syndicate, terrorist group, drug cartel, hostile regime, banking group and financial figure on the planet. The text was extensively footnoted and contained references to purported video footage of clandestine assassinations and murders. There were documents demonstrating the iron-clad guilt of household names, photographs and mission notes from foreign and domestic criminal activities and executions carried out by U.S. personnel, who were part of secret death squads. There were blackmail histories dating back to the 1980s, and on and on and on.

Michael stopped reading and concentrated on slowing his heart rate to something normal — he was flush with adrenaline and in borderline panic mode. No wonder Abe had been stunned by this. If even half the claims were correct, it made most of the conspiracy theories since World War II seem like a book of children’s fairy tales. It would prove, not only a global agenda to drain wealth from the U.S. via every nameable means by a laundry list of the worst criminal syndicates on the planet, but also the active participation of key figures in the government, from the president on down, from as far back as Nixon, in treason, war crimes, murder, sedition, drug trafficking, money laundering, counterfeiting, fraud and theft, to name only a few.

This was more than just dynamite and way larger than whether or not a bestseller had been born. Michael could more than understand why it would be worth killing for — if it were true. But the questions remained: was any or all of it accurate, could it be verified, what was the proof, and, probably most intriguingly, who had written it?

He went back to page one and read more carefully, pausing occasionally to take notes. At the end of another hour, he had a list of claims he could nose around for evidence of, as well as an idea of how to conduct the first batch of searches. Rubbing his eyes, he took a break and considered how to proceed.

Several things struck him as obvious. First, he’d need help on the research. Second, this was an extremely dangerous book, unless it was a work of fiction, in which case the level of detail bordered on a pathological level of invention and attention to consistency and inter-connectedness. Third, if true, he had to expect the worst — that there was now a team or teams of lethal operatives who would stop at nothing to silence any mention of the document or its contents. And he’d have to assume that he would be lucky to survive the next seventy-two hours; he would be up against CIA-level resources and monitoring capabilities.

Finally, if any or all of it was true, he was already out of time and needed to take steps which assumed he might have to disappear without any access to his resources, including his bank accounts, credit cards, or professional contacts.

In short, if Abe hadn’t died a natural death and that was just the first salvo in an all-out effort to contain the document, then everyone who had even talked to Abe since he’d received it and read it was potentially at lethal risk.

Meaning there was a fair chance that Michael was fucked.

He considered his options. Michael needed lawyers, guns and money. Well, actually, not lawyers, because they could do very little, if up against what was described in the book. But as to the rest — guns, which he had, and money, of which he had some — the question was whether he had enough.

He opened Abe’s bag and removed the bundles he’d taken from his safe, setting them on the kitchen counter as he rummaged around for a knife in the nearest drawer. Finding one, he carefully sliced open the first package.

Inside was a stack of hundred dollar bills. Thirty-five thousand dollars — his emergency funds. That had always seemed like a lot of cash. Now it looked laughable. It would fit in a couple of pockets of his cargo shorts.

Next, he removed a passport and international driver’s license.

He opened it.

Irish citizen. Thomas Derrigan. His middle and last names.

He’d long ago taken advantage of a citizenship program that Ireland offered to the offspring of Irish parents — his mother had been right off the boat from Enniscorthy as a two year old, having come to the U.S. when her parents emigrated. He’d applied for and been granted Irish citizenship and a passport, which he’d always figured could come in useful for banking or traveling purposes, especially in regions where being an American might be dangerous — such as in the Middle East. He’d just renewed it two years ago, so he had a long time before it expired.

Having dual citizenship and a second passport was one of the legal tricks of the trade he’d picked up working in the security game — where it paid to always keep your options open, to always have a contingency plan.

He unwrapped the other bundle and placed three plastic cylinders on the counter. Each tube contained twenty gold Krugerrands — all told, sixty ounces of untraceable gold. Less than four pounds in three little bundles that would fit in his shirt pocket.

This was his life savings, other than about twenty-five thousand dollars of operating cash in his bank account and a piece of property in Casper, Wyoming he’d bought over time as a retirement spot. Not a lot to show for years of working, but then again he hadn’t been particularly frugal — if you were single and male in New York, you likely had a considerable burn, unless you were a shut-in or never hoped to get laid. While Michael would have liked to have had triple what sat before him, it was what it was. He had a little more than six figures to his name, part of which would need to be converted into cash as needed. Fortunately, everybody liked gold, and it was extremely portable and easily exchanged for currency anywhere in the world.

That should be more than enough, depending upon how you defined enough.

The thought stopped him.

He needed to do a threat assessment, but before he could do so, he had to determine whether Abe had died of natural causes and whether the claims in the document could be either verified or debunked. Either would give him definitive data with which to plan. Right now, all he knew was that there was an old dead bookworm, some high tech spy-gear and probably a live surveillance effort. Obviously, these kind of variables could turn out to be life-changers. But he needed more information.

He walked over to the voice-over-IP phone his friend had next to the PC, looked up a phone number on his cell phone and then dialed on the internet phone. After a few moments, one of his buddies at the NYPD picked up.

“Detective Romer speaking.”

“Hey, Ken, it’s Michael Derrigan. How’s it hanging?” Michael asked, keeping things light.

“Super, Mike. How’s it going with you? Been a while since I heard from you,” Ken replied brightly.

“Too much work, too little cash, my friend. I haven’t had much time lately,” Michael admitted.

“What’s up, buddy? To what do I owe the pleasure on a work day? Did Vice finally bust you for male prostitution?” Ken inquired innocently.

“Yeah, the John wanted a refund and I refused,” Michael quipped. “Seriously, though, I have a client who was found dead this morning at his apartment. Heart attack, no suspicion of foul play. White male, late sixties-early seventies, lived alone with some dogs. Neighbor called it in. I was wondering if you could look into that a little closer and make sure it passes the sniff test.”

Ken’s tone changed. “Why, Mike? Tell me what I need to know. Do you have some reason to believe it might be something else?”

“We ran a sweep on his office this morning and his place had more bugs than a crack house kitchen. And Ken, it’s not like he was on Wall Street or trading in high value intel. He was a literary agent, which is about as exciting as manufacturing shoelaces,” Michael explained.

He stopped there — Ken didn’t need to know anything more. There was no point in getting him involved beyond providing confirmation that Abe’s death had been a natural one.

“So no reason for any listening devices…” Ken finished the thought.

“Exactly. I suppose it could be a competitor trying to learn what he was working on or negotiating, but that’s unlikely, given the industry.” Michael let that sink it. “Which is why I figured it might be worth having someone check the body.”

“What was the name and address?” Ken asked.

Michael told him everything he knew.

Ken would be able to do a quick system scan for bodies found in the last twenty-four hours and find Abe. Then he’d ask the coroner to do a suspicious death exam — unofficially at first, even though everyone was supposed to follow procedure. Nobody wanted to waste a ton of time on paperwork on a ‘favor bank’ call, so it was more expedient to do it casually at this stage.

Ken committed to notifying Michael whenever he had the results of the autopsy back. He figure it would be at least a day, maybe more, especially if they had to wait for a pathology report and tox screens to come in.

Michael hoped with all his heart that they would confirm he’d expired from a coronary.

Abe’s death was now under investigation; there was nothing else he could do on that score but wait, so Michael turned to the research issue. He needed fast, dependable and discreet verification by someone who’d never been within a mile of Abe’s offices and couldn’t be tied into his sweep or the e-mail. Normally, he would have used Koshi, but in light of his suspicions, Michael didn’t want to expose him to any more risk.

Instead, he called a woman he’d dated for a few weeks who was also in the security field. They’d remained friends and colleagues for years since then, even though the spark hadn’t quite been there. Samantha was very good at what she did; she worked for one of the large PI and corporate security firms as a research specialist, but he figured she’d moonlight for him and could be depended upon to keep things confidential.

Michael called her using the IP phone and gave her his short list of terms, dates and institutions to investigate. They agreed she would report back to him as soon as she had something, one way or another.

There wasn’t a lot more he could do until he knew what he was dealing with, so he unwrapped an energy bar he found in a drawer, yanked a bottle of water out of the fridge and returned his attention to reading the manuscript.

He weighed the remaining pages in his hand. Probably about two thirds left to go. Michael silently prayed that whoever had contrived the documents was given to long-winded descriptions, or went off on lengthy tangents, and that the rest of the book was fluff or obvious malarkey and didn’t contain any more realistic-sounding explosive claims. He didn’t see how it could get much more pejorative than the first third.

Unfortunately, the author wasn’t big on creative writing.

It got worse.

Far worse.