Big Al looked at them. The big half watermelon was back on his face.
"Now I know what all those spreadsheets refer to."
"What's that?"
"fEstd es la coca, senorl Hey, I know this guy. He works for the cartels."
I was looking at a really smart-looking Latino in his early forties getting out of a car. I could tell by the surroundings that it was in the United States.
"That's Raoul Martinez," he said.
"He's part of the Colombian trade delegation."
This was getting more interesting by the minute. PIRA al ways claimed no association with drug trafficking, but the profits were too great for it to ignore. What I had in front of me now was close to admissible evidence of its direct involvement with the cartels. But that still didn't help me with my problem.
He looked through the pictures.
"You'll see Raoul with somebody else in a minute, I guarantee it." He flicked through a couple more.
"There you are: big bad Sal."
This other character was about the same age but much taller; he'd probably been a weight lifter at some stage, then ballooned out to maybe three hundred pounds. Sal was a big old boy, and very bald.
De Sabatino said, "Martinez is never without him. We used to do a lot of business with them in the old days. A nice man, a family man. We used to run cocaine up the East Coast, all the way to the Canadian border. We needed things evened out to ease the route--these guys did the necessary, and everybody was making money. Yeah, these fellas, they're all right. As we went through more picture files, I saw both men eating in a restaurant with another bloke, a Caucasian.
Big Al said, "I haven't got a clue who he is."
I was looking over de Sabatino's shoulder, concentrating hard on the screen.
Kelly perked up.
"Nick?"
"In a minute." I turned my head to Big Al.
"Absolutely no idea?"
"Not a clue."
"Nick?"
I cut in.
"Not now, Kelly."
Kelly butted in again.
"Nick, Nick!"
"Go back to the--" "Nick, Nick! I know who that man is."
I looked at her.
"Which man?"
"The one that was in the picture." She grinned.
"You don't know who he is--but I do."
"This one?" I pointed at Martinez.
"No, the one before."
Big Al scrolled back.
"Him! That one there!"
It was the white guy who was sitting with Raoul and big bad Sal.
I said, "You're sure?"
"I'm totally sure."
"Who is he?" After our experience with the video I expected her to nominate anyone from Clint Eastwood to Brad Pitt.
"It's Daddy's boss."
There was a long, palpable silence as I let it sink in. Big Al was sucking air through his teeth.
"What do you mean, Daddy's boss?" I said.
"He came to our house once for dinner."
"Do you remember his name?"
"No. I just came down for some water and he and a lady were eating with Mommy and Daddy in the dining room.
Daddy let me say hello and he said, "Big smile, Kelly, this is my boss!"
" It was a good imitation ofKev, and I saw a flicker of sadness in her eyes.
Big Al joined the conversation in nerd mode.
"Whoa!
There you go! So who's your daddy?"
I swung around.
"Shut up!" And so she couldn't hear it, I muttered angrily, "I turned up at her parents' house a week ago. Everybody was dead. He was in the DEA, killed by people he knew."
I pushed him off his seat and sat down with Kelly on my knee so she had a better view of the screen.
"Are you definitely sure he's Daddy's boss?"
"I'm sure Daddy told me. The next day Mommy and me made jokes about his mustache because he looked like a cowboy."
He did; he looked like a Marlboro man. As she pointed, her finger touched the screen, and Daddy's boss was distorted.
Having Kelly in my arms and seeing someone who might have been responsible for her father's death made me want to do the same to him in person.
I looked at Big Al.
"Let's go back through all the photos."
Big Al sat down and scrolled back through the files to the pictures of Macauley and Femahan with McGear.
"Do you know these people?" Kelly answered with a no, but I wasn't really listening to her now. I was in my own world. I'd noticed two other cars parked on the other side of the road. I looked hard at the license plates, and then I knew where the pictures had been taken.
"Gibraltar." I couldn't help mouthing it aloud.
Big Al pointed to Macauley and his mates.
"Are these terrorists from Ireland?"
"Sort of."
There was a gap while I tried to work this one out.
Big Al spoke up.
"It's obvious to me what's going on."
"What's that?"
"Well, these Irish guys were buying cocaine from the Colombians. It came by the normal route to the Florida Keys, then the Caribbean and North Africa. They then used Gibraltar as the jump-off point for the rest of Europe. They made fortunes, and at the same time we took our cut for letting them move it through South Florida. All of a sudden, though, at the end of' eighty-seven, it stopped going through Gibraltar."
"Why was that?" I was finding it hard to stay calm.
Big Al shrugged.
"Some big hullaballoo with the locals. I think they now run it from South Africa instead, into the west coast of Spain, something like that. They're linked with some other terrorists up there."
"ETA?"
"Search me. Some bunch of terrorists or freedom fighters.
Call them what you like, to me they're all just dealers.
Anyway, they help the Irish now. No doubt old Raoul organized things Stateside with Daddy's boss to ensure that the route stayed open for the Irish, because otherwise the Colombians would have given it to someone else."
"You make it sound like allocating air routes or something."
Big Al shrugged again.
"Of course. It's business." He spoke as if all this stuff was common knowledge. It was news tome.
So who the fuck was PIRA talking to in Gibraltar? Was the PIRA there in an attempt to keep the drug trafficking going?
It came back to me that in September 1988, Sir Peter Terry, who'd been instrumental in pressing for a crackdown on drug smuggling and who'd been governor of Gibraltar until earlier that year, had narrowly survived an assassination attempt at his home in Staffordshire. A gunman who'd never been caught had given him the good news with twenty rounds from an AK-47 something, as it happened, that Mr. McGear was not unaccustomed to doing. Maybe the fourth man in the photograph was getting a similar warning? And was there some sort of connection between the ending of the drug runs and the shooting of PIRA players in Gibraltar just a few months later?
Whatever, it confirmed that there were some strange things going on with some members of the DEA, including Kev's boss. Maybe they were getting a cut of the action from PIRA and Kev found out?
Big Al sucked through his teeth once more.
"You've got a brilliant package here, man. So which one are you going to blackmail?"
"Blackmail?"
"Micky, you've got a senior figure in the DEA talking with big-cheese cartel members, your terrorist fellas, and Gibraltar government, law enforcement, whoever. You're not trying to tell me these pictures aren't for the purpose of blackmail? Get real. If it's not you who's going to use them, whoever took these photographs is certainly intending to." We went through all the pictures one more time. Kelly didn't recognize any more of the people.
I asked de Sabatino if there was any way we could enhance the photography.
"What's the point? You seem to know everybody." He was right. I just wanted Kelly to look at "Daddy's boss" more closely.
There was silence for about three minutes as we just kept on flicking through.