“So he was high when he told you this?”
“At thirty-five thousand feet. Feeling no pain.”
There should be photographs of Cuadrado in CIA files, O’Farrell calculated. And the Agency should have sources in Havana to provide some background material as well. “So what else did he tell you?”
“That the scheme was foolproof. All the ordering—the drugs too, after delivery to Cuba—would travel as diplomatic cargo; get that!” Rodgers laughed.
“How did the weaponry come, loose or crated?” O’Farrell asked.
“Crated; nearly always crated.”
“That couldn’t be diplomatic cargo.”
“Sea,” Rodgers said at once. “Like the man said, it was perfect. The majority of the supplies came from Europe, by ship. Sometimes they were rerouted during the voyage. But always to somewhere safe, where there was no hassle.”
From the Cuban—the communist—point of view, it was perfect, O’Farrell conceded. “So that’s how it happened?”
“Smooth as silk,” Rodgers said.
“How many trips did you make, running guns?”
There was another frown, for recall. “Thirty,” the man said. “It has to be thirty at least; more I guess. I didn’t really count.”
The switch, from past to present tense and then back again, was all part of the finger-snapping, macho shit, thought O’Farrell. You my man? Black jive, in addition. Christ, what an asshole Rodgers was! Scum. Scum that got scoured out, cleaned away. Everything fumigated afterward. Stuff that makes you …
No. Wrong. And for more than one reason. He was trying to shrug off the responsibility for what he was now committed to do, shrug it off onto another offense, onto something vaguely involving his family and an innocent, gullible, long-lashed, round-cheeked little guy who played with plastic spacemen. Billy, the risk to Billy, couldn’t be his shield, his excuse. He’d made his own decision, in a brown-dirt village square with squawking chickens and crying, pleading villagers in front of two calm-eyed, calm-limbed CIA officers. Black and white: wrong and right. Like this was wrong. He said, “Where?”
A vague shrug. “Everywhere.”
“What do you mean, everywhere?” The voice almost too loud, too demanding.
“Just that, man.”
Man. O’Farrell said, “You got a bad memory? Forgotten what we talked about, maybe?”
“What the hell do you want?”
“Where! That’s what I want! Where!”
A shrug started, then stopped. “Colombia itself, a lot of times. There are guerrilla groups there, you know? FARC and M-19 …”
“I know,” O’Farrell said shortly. “Where else?”
The hesitation this time was not for recall, O’Farrell gauged. This time the fucker was running the other delivery places through in his mind, trying to calculate which would cause least offense.
“I did a run to Brazil, place near Porto Alegre.” Rodgers appeared proud of the choice; the evasion.
Brazil was a drug-producing country; it would have been small-time stuff, a few handguns to allow the local traffickers to strut their stuff, bang-bang you’re dead. “And?” Very quiet, like it didn’t really matter, but looking directly at Rodgers to show he wasn’t impressed by this bullshit.
“Mexico! Two or three to Mexico!”
Another producer. A border country, though, where there were frequent shoot-outs and investigating agents—Americans—had been blown away; blown away by weapons this shithead had flown in. “And?”
“Other places.”
“What other places!”
Another half shrug. Then, reluctantly: “Matagalpa.”
“What about Managua?”
A full shrug this time. “Okay, man! So what the fuck!”
“You supplied the Nicaraguan government!”
“I flew a plane down, I flew a plane back. I’m a delivery boy; you said that. Who the fuck knows who I supplied?”
“It’s a communist government; this country is supporting the rebels.”
“And in Chile it supports the government of Ugarte Pinochet, who makes Adolf Hitler look like a wimp! And in Uruguay it supported a Nazi who ran the fucking country! And in the Philippines we supported—for how many years, man?—a guy who peed his pants all the time he watched blue movies and a wife who had more pairs of shoes than the world’s got feet! Come on! We talking actuality here or we talking fairy tales!” Rodgers had to stop for breath. “Don’t give me philosophy, okay? I did Nam and I learned my philosophy: smart guys survive, dumb guys die. That’s all you gotta know. Aristotle and Plato? Forget ’em. Off the wall, all of them. Only one philosophy in life. Number one: número uno. Everyone else—all the governments, all the leaders—are out to fuck you, because you know what their philosophy is? Number one, that’s what. The smart guy’s philosophy of life. You do Nam?”
No, thought O’Farrell, I didn’t do Nam. I served in Vietnam, served three extended tours. He said, “I was there.”
“You ever know such shit?” Rodgers’s hands were out, palms again, an inviting gesture. “You ever know such shit in your life! I mean what the fuck were we there for?”
“A principle,” O’Farrell said, and wished he hadn’t.
“Principle! What fucking principle!” Rodgers erupted. “You know what the South Vietnamese were doing while our guys were getting blown up and killed or maimed or losing their minds because they couldn’t understand what the fuck they were there for? The South Vietnamese were cheating us and robbing us and laughing their balls off at us and having the greatest fucking time of their lives, that’s what they were doing! Same philosophy, Asian version. Número uno.”
“I believed—believe—it was important.”
“You wanna tell me the final score? Like, was it a win, or a loss, or a draw?”
Peace with honor, thought O’Farrell, remembering his reflections on the way to Florida. Not reflections; very much the sort of cynicism that this bastard was offering, but from a different side of the fence. He had lost control of the interview; he didn’t know, at that moment, how to continue it. Hurriedly he said, “Ochoa supplies the drugs?”
“Usually. The stuff I got caught with came from the Milona family, in Cartagena.”
“And the guns come from Europe?”
“That’s what Cuadrado told me,” Rodgers said. “And when we really got the thing under way, I several times saw crates brought from the port to Matanzas with Czech lettering.”
No proof, O’Farrell thought, in an abrupt flare of hope. He’d heard a fairly convincing story of a drug-and-gunrunning enterprise, but so far there was nothing tying in the Cuban ambassador to Britain. And without that proof, he didn’t have to proceed; wouldn’t proceed. He said, “What was the system? Where did the drugs go? Who got paid the money after the drug sale?”
“Europe,” Rodgers said at once. “America too. Everywhere.”
“A city. Give me a city,” O’Farrell said.
“London.” Rodgers said finally. “That’s what Cuadrado told me, that London controlled the European arms sellers who were reliable and who could get everything. He boasted their guy was in the government, too, just as he was. I tell you, Havana’s put a lot of thought into this.”
“Does London handle the drugs as well?”
Rodgers frowned doubtfully. “Never quite understood that,” he admitted. “I got the impression that wasn’t how it was done, but I don’t know.”
“What about the guy in London?” O’Farrell pressed. “What about a name?”
Rodgers shook his head. “No name, ever. Just that their man knew the business. Was highly respected.”