“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.”