True to another paisa tradition, his father had kicked him out at age sixteen, telling him: If you succeed, send money; if you fail, don’t come back.
He had succeeded.
“Yeah, the technology’s great,” Jeff was saying, drawing Carlos back to the present, “but it’s the plants that are truly awesome—four pounds of top-grade sensemilla per hundred. This ain’t no Maui Zowie, you know what I mean? The stuff I started smoking in the sixties was maybe one percent THE. Lizard King is connoisseur stuff, man—tests opt to fourteen percent. An absolutely bodacious high. Brings down a minimum of five hundred bucks an ounce.”
“How many plants in this room?” Carlos said.
“Two hundred.”
Carlos glanced at Alien Gold, his lean and lupine chief bean counter. “Alien?”
Gold stood near the door, his arms folded across the front of his Armani suit, the sodium lights reflecting off his blond hair and the wire rims of his glasses. “That’s sixty-four thousand per crop,” he said without hesitation. “At roughly eight crops a year, figure half a mill per room per year.”
Carlos looked at Jeff. “That is a good living. Why do you need me?”
“I want to expand,” Jeff said. “Look. Grass is a thirty something-billion-dollar industry. I can’t produce it fast enough to keep my customers happy. I’m ready to move up to warehouses.” He extended his arms over his tiny jungle as if blessing it. “Imagine it, man. A twenty thousand-square-foot sea of green. Cosmic!”
“You are not afraid of President Winston legalizing your crop?”
“Never happen. This is a growth industry, and I need a banker—somebody with connections… you know, for security and such. You’re that guy.” Gold’s cell phone beeped before Carlos could reply.
He saw a troubled look steal over the young MBA’s features as he muttered monosyllables into the receiver. “Everything is all right?” he said as Gold turned toward him.
“It’s Llosa,” he said. “He just got a call from your new contractor saying something about the package being defective. He insists on speaking to you right away.”
Defective? Carlos felt a sudden tightness in his chest. Had something gone wrong? Had the child been hurt? He prayed not.
“Have Llosa tell the contractor to give a number and wait. I’ll call him from my office.”
As Gold passed on the instructions, Carlos turned toward the door. “We must go,” he said.
“That’s it?” Jeff said. “I took a risk bringing you here, you know.”
“We will be contacting you.”
“I’d like an answer soon,” Jeff said. “After all, I ain’t getting any younger.”
“You must be patient,” Carlos said, giving the man’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Otherwise you could be worried about getting older, eh?”
Jeff blanched behind his beard. “Hey, I didn’t mean any—”
“You will be contacted,” Carlos said, smiling grimly as he walked out into the cooler, fresher air of the dirty hallway. He didn’t like to be rushed.
22
“Any details from our friend that you didn’t mention?” he said to Gold when they were seated in his Lexus and his driver was gliding them back to Georgetown.
Gold shook his head. “No. Pretty damn enigmatic.” His voice took on a whiny tone. “Just like the rest of this kidnapping thing. If you’d let me in on the big picture, maybe I could help.” As much as Carlos trusted Gold, this “big picture” was best left under wraps.
“All in good time. Alien,” he said. “But tell me: What did you think of that little demonstration back there?” Carlos did not really want to talk about marijuana— he was more concerned about the “defect” in the package MacLaglen had picked up—but he did not want to listen to Alien’s whining about not being trusted.
“A warehouse-sized setup like that could be very profitable But I hope you’re not considering investing—”
“Not me,” Carlos said. “But I can connect him with some money people—”
“And take a cut.” Gold smiled. “That’s my man. For a moment there I was afraid you were thinking about getting back into handling product.”
“No.” Carlos shook his head slowly. “I’ve handled more than enough in my day.” How many years had he been in the trade? Certainly half his life—and he was looking down the barrel at fifty.
His first brush with cocaine had come when he joined up with fellow paisa Pablo Escobar, who was transshipping kilos of the white powder from Chile to the U.S. in spare tires. Cocaine was a small business back then, a cottage industry run out of Chile. But everything changed when Pinochet took over in 1973. The cocaine refiners fled to Colombia and into the arms of Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa… just about the time cocaine use exploded in the U.S.
Colombia, Medellin, the world—especially Carlos’s world—would never be the same.
Carlos had done his share of mule work in “Los Pablos,” but along the way he became the group’s peacemaker. He discovered a knack for bringing warring factions together, striking a deal, and letting each feel that the other party had given up more.
And so when Jorge Ochoa—“El Gordo”—called a summit meeting of all the major players in the cocaine trade, it was only natural for Pablo Escobar to send Carlos Salinas to represent his interests.
April 18, 1981, the day he landed on Ochoa’s private mile-long airstrip at his estate on the Caribbean coast near Barranquilla. Jorge Ochoa—“the Fat Man”— personally came down to the air strip to greet them and bring them up to the main house. Hacienda Veracruz, as Ochoa called his estate, was the size of a small province, with its own zoo, a private bullring, and a stable of prized caballos de paso—walking horses.
The traders arrived as suspicious competing factions, feudal lords, viciously protective of their individual fiefdoms; they left with an agreement to pool their resources and their product in a combined effort to keep the lines of supply wide open into their biggest market: the United States. Later the Americans would say that this meeting marked the birth of the Medellm cartel. True, he guessed, but none of them ever referred to themselves as a cartel. They were la compania.
“Call him,” Carlos told Llosa as he entered the sumptuous back office of his restaurant. Llosa dialed, then handed him the receiver of the Louis XVI-style telephone.
When Carlos recognized MacLaglen’s voice, he did not let him speak. He said, “Hold now while we check the line.” He signaled to Llosa to run a scan. Llosa was good at this.
Carlos Salinas shifted his two-hundred-eighty pounds in the oversized chair as he waited. His back was killing him.
Even though only a handful of people knew his private numbers, Carlos hadn’t accepted an incoming call in years. Who knew where they were originating? His research had assured him that MacLaglen was just as careful as he, but even public phones could no longer be trusted. America was turning into a fascist state. Almost as bad as his homeland.
So he always called back, using his secure line—and never to a cellular phone. Even his own line was suspect; he constantly had it checked and rechecked.
He wondered which of MacLaglen’s favorite phones he was calling from. He knew most of the man’s habits, his favorite hotel lobbies and street phones, his accomplices, Paul Dicastro and Poppy Mulliner. He probably knew more about Michael MacLaglen than anyone else in the world.
Carlos could have used some of his fellow paisas for this job. After all, kidnapping was an art in Colombia. But he’d decided an American would be better. He did not want any Colombians involved should anything go wrong.