“They told me.”
“So what …?” Rodgers faded away, confused.
“I want you to understand from the beginning,” O’Farrell said quietly. “You’re going to tell me everything true, no bullshit, no fucking around. True from the very word go. Because I’m going to check and double-check and if I find just one thing wrong—” O’Farrell narrowed his thumb against his forefinger, so there was practically no space between—”just that much wrong, I’m going to dump on you. I’m going to go back to the DA and I’m going to say that Paul Rodgers is a scumbag and I don’t deal with scumbags and you can throw the book at him. Sixty-eight years old and trying to get pussy … Just think of it.”
“Jesus!” the drug runner exclaimed, physically recoiling.
It had been overdone, O’Farrell conceded; theatrical, just like Petty and Erickson. “You understand?”
“ ’Course I understand!” Rodgers said. “You think I don’t know what I got to lose!”
The bombast and swagger had gone, O’Farrell thought; so it had been worthwhile. “Good. So what is it you’ve got to tell me?”
The smile came back, a sly expression. “Haven’t we got something to tell each other?”
Careful, thought O’Farrell. He said, “Like what?”
“Like the exchange. What I get for what you get.”
“You don’t listen, do you?” O’Farrell said. “I’m not offering you shit. You’re looking at thirty-five years, and you’re going to go on looking at thirty-five years until I’m convinced you’ve leveled with me. On everything.”
“This way I got nothing! I’m dependent on you all the way!”
“Don’t you forget it,” O’Farrell said. “Forget that for a moment and you’re screwed.”
“I dunno,” Rodgers said, shrugging and looking away. “I dunno this is such a good idea.”
Would he personally be off the hook if this bastard withdrew cooperation? Probably not; Petty talked of there being a file at Lafayette Square. He said, “So what other shot you think you’ve got?”
“I need a guarantee.”
“You need a miracle.”
The man’s lower lip was going back and forth between his teeth, like Ellen’s had, in Chicago. “I just didn’t expect it to be done this way, is all.”
O’Farrell exaggerated his sigh of impatience, moving as if to stand. “Okay, so you’ve nothing to tell me! I’ve wasted my time and that makes me mad, but you’re the guy digging the grave. Enjoy life in the slammer, jerk.”
He actually began to rise and Rodgers said, “No! Wait!” He made a lowering gesture with his hand. “Okay, we’ll talk—I’ll talk. Just don’t go.”
For several moments O’Farrell remained neither standing nor sitting, appearing unsure whether to agree. Then he sat and said, “Okay. So talk.”
Rodgers swallowed and looked away, assembling his thoughts. “Been doing it for quite a while,” the man began awkwardly. “Years. Had a good run. Because I was careful, see. Word got around. Made a reputation.”
“Flying from where?” O’Farrell asked.
“Colombia, always Colombia.” Rodgers extended his hand, palm cupped upward. “They got the trade like that. Bolivia and Peru might be bigger growers, but Colombia controls the trade.”
“In what?”
“Coke, man! Marijuana too. And pills. Methaqualone.”
O’Farrell thought the man spoke like a salesman, offering his wares. Stuff that makes you feel funny. He said. “Whereabouts in Colombia?”
“All over. I guess Medellin more than most.”
“And to where?”
“All over again, in the early years,” said Rodgers. “Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, Mexico. Couple of times—three actually—I even flew into Florida. Too dangerous, though. Had to abandon the airplane every time because I couldn’t refuel.”
“Dates!” O’Farrell insisted at once. There would be an official record of abandoned aircraft.
“Dates?”
“The month and the year when you abandoned aircraft in Florida.”
Rodgers frowned with the difficulty of recall. “June … I think it was June … 1987. Then again in September that year. January eighty-eight. I’m sure about that, the nearest I came to getting busted—”
“What about later?”
“They came to me in eighty-eight,” Rodgers said. “February. I got a place on the beach just outside Fort Lauderdale. Guy comes there one day. Latin, prefers to speak Spanish. Very smooth. Says he had a proposition and I think it’s a setup, and I tell him to go to hell, that I’m a property developer and I don’t know what he’s talking about. He laughs at me, says he admires my caution. But not my business ability. Says that flying one way with cargo but back again empty is a wasted commercial opportunity, which I know it is, but what’s been the alternative? I still think he’s sucking me, so I go on playing wide-eyed and innocent. Then he asks if I’m curious how he found me, and I say I am, and he tells me it was on the personal recommendation of Fabio Ochoa—”
“Who is?” interrupted O’Farrell. He already knew but wanted Rodgers to tell him.
“One of the big guys in Colombia … and I’m talking big. An actual member of the Cartel. I’d flown for him a few times, out of Medellin,” Rodgers said. “But it still don’t mean a thing, right? It could still have been a come-on. So I say ho-hum, diddly-dee, admitting nothing. And then he knocks me sideways. Tells me his name is Cuadrado and he knows I am doing a run the next week for Ochoa—which I was—and that when I get into Medellin, Ochoa is going to meet me personally and tell me what a one-hundred-percent guy he, Cuadrado, is. Which is exactly what happens, and now it can’t be a setup with any of you guys, right?”
“What did Ochoa tell you?”
“That business was expanding. There was going to be a two-way traffic, drugs outward, weapons inward. And that the risk factor was going to be cut to nil because from now on there would only be one customer, Cuba. That it was all official, right up to Castro’s crotch in Havana, so there’d be no hassle. And that Cuadrado was in the government and I was to do everything he said.”
“You went to Cuba?”
“That collection from Ochoa was for Cuadrado,” said Rodgers. “The airstrip is at Matanzas and it is official. Government planes, government officials, all the right stuff. Cuadrado drives me into town and gives me a fat steak and a Havana cigar and sets out the whole deal. Says they’ve hit upon the perfect enterprise, giving the capitalists—he actually said that, the capitalists—what they want and with the money from the capitalists they’re going to give the oppressed in Latin America what they want, the way to gain their freedom. All bullshit—but what the hell, I’m making more money, so he can spout crap all he wants.…”
Freedom! thought O’Farrell. What did this oily son of a bitch know about freedom! Or those other sons of bitches in Havana! Freedom to them was maneuvering countries into becoming client states, dependent for arms or money or both, and then treating them like satellites. The Soviet Union had been doing that since 1917. He said, “We’re talking truth, agreed?”
Rodgers looked at him warily. “So what’s the matter?”
“Cuadrado is in the government?”
Rodgers smiled. “Works in their Export Ministry! Isn’t that a kicker!”
“And you’re a drug runner?”
The grin on Rodgers’s face faded. “So?”
“So what’s an official of the Ministry doing setting out the whole deal—your words—to the delivery boy?”
Rodgers’s face went tight at being dismissed as a delivery boy, but he cleared it quickly. “Ochoa guaranteed me. And Cuadrado has a personal problem.”
“Personal problem?”
Rodgers put an outstretched finger beneath his nose and inhaled noisily. “He got too fond of sampling his own supplies.”