I trusted him completely. There was something I had to do.
I took off my watch, my old Pobeda. As I weighed it in my hand, I saw my father giving it to me. I heard his voice. I was just nine years old, so young, still in short trousers, living in the house in Estrov.
My grandfather’s watch.
I held it one last time, then swung my arm and threw it into the lagoon.
КОМАНДИP – THE COMMANDER
His name was Gabriel Sweetman and he was a drug lord, sometimes known as “the Sugar Man”, more often as “the Commander”.
He was born in the slums of Mexico City. Nothing is known about his parents but he first came to the attention of the police when he was eight years old, selling missing car parts to motorists. The reason the parts were missing was because he had stolen them, helped by his twelve-year-old sister, Maria. When he was twelve, he sold his sister. By then, it was said that he had killed for the first time. He moved into the drugs business when he was thirteen, first dealing on the street, then working his way up until he became the lieutenant to “Sunny” Gomez, one of the biggest traffickers in Mexico. At the time, it was estimated that Gomez was smuggling three million dollars’ worth of heroin and cocaine into America every day.
Sweetman murdered Gomez and took over his business. He also married Gomez’s wife, a former Miss Acapulco called Tracey. Thirty years later, it was rumoured that Sweetman was worth twenty-five billion dollars. He was transporting cocaine all over the world, using a fleet of Boeing 727 jet aircraft which he also owned. He had murdered over two thousand people, including fifteen judges and two hundred police officers. Sweetman would kill anyone who crossed his path and he liked to do it slowly. Some of his enemies he buried alive. It was well known that he was mad, but only his family doctor had been brave enough to say so. He had killed the family doctor.
I do not know how or why he had come to the attention of Scorpia. It is possible that they been hired to take him out by another drug lord. It might even have been the Mexican or the American government. He certainly was not being executed because he was bad. Scorpia was occasionally involved in drug trafficking itself, although it was a dirty and an unpleasant business. People who spend large amounts of money doing harm to themselves and to their customers are not usually very reliable. Sweetman had to die because someone had paid. That was all it came down to.
And it was going to be expensive because this was not an easy kill. Sweetman looked after himself. In fact, he made Vladimir Sharkovsky look clumsy and careless by comparison.
Sweetman kept a permanent retinue around him – not just six bodyguards but an entire platoon. This was how he had got the name of the Commander. He had houses in Los Angeles, Miami and Mexico City, each one as well fortified as an army command post. The houses were kept in twenty-four-hour readiness. He never let anyone know when he was leaving or when he was about to arrive, and when he did travel it was first by private jet and then in an armour-plated, bulletproof limousine with two outriders on motorbikes and more bodyguards in front and behind. He had four food tasters, one in each of his properties.
The house where he spent most of his time was in the middle of the Amazon jungle, one hundred miles south of Iquitos. This is one of the few cities in the world that cannot be reached by road, and there were no roads going anywhere near the house either. Trying to approach on foot would be to risk attacks from jaguars, vipers, anacondas, black caimans, piranhas, tarantulas or any other of the fifty deadly creatures that inhabited the rainforest… assuming you weren’t bitten to death by mosquitoes first. Sweetman himself came and went by helicopter. He had complete faith in the pilot, largely because the pilot’s elderly parents were his permanent guests and he had given instructions for them to suffer very horribly if anything ever happened to him.
Scorpia had looked into the situation and had decided that Sweetman was at his most vulnerable in the rainforest. It is interesting that they had a permanent team of advisers – strategy planners and specialists – who had prepared a consultation document for them. The house in Los Angeles was too close to its neighbours, the one in Miami too well protected. In Mexico City, Sweetman had too many friends. It was another measure of the man that he spent ten million dollars a year on bribes. He had friends in the police, the army and the government, and if anyone asked questions about him or tried to get too close, he would know about it at once.
In the jungle, he was alone and – like so many successful men – he had a weakness. He was punctual. He ate his breakfast at exactly seven-fifteen. He worked with a personal trainer from eight until nine. He went to bed at eleven. If he said he was going to leave at midday, then that would be when he would go. This is exactly what Hunter had tried to explain to me the night we met, in Venice. Sweetman had told us something about himself. He had a habit and we could use it against him.
Hunter and I had flown first from Rome to Lima and from there we had taken a smaller plane to Iquitos, an extraordinary city on the south bank of the Amazon with Spanish cathedrals, French villas, colourful markets and straw huts built on stilts, all tangled up together along the narrow streets. The whole place seemed to live and breathe for the river. It was hot and humid. You could taste the muddy water in the air.
We stayed two days in a run-down hotel in the downtown area, surrounded by backpackers and tourists and plagued by cockroaches and mosquitoes. Since so many of the travellers were from Britain and America, we communicated only in French. I spoke the language quite badly at this stage and the practice was good for me. Hunter used the time to buy a few more supplies and to book our passage down river on a cargo boat. We were pretending to be birdwatchers. We were supposed to camp on the edge of the jungle for two weeks and then return to Iquitos. That was our cover story and while I was on Malagosto I had learned the names of two hundred different species – from the white-fronted Amazon parrot to the scarlet macaw. I believe I could still identify them to this day. Not that anybody asked too many questions. The captain would have been happy to drop us anywhere – provided we were able to pay.
We did not camp. As soon as the boat had dropped us off on a small beach with a few Amazon Indian houses scattered in the distance and children playing in the sand, we set off into the undergrowth. We were both equipped with the five items which are the difference between life and death in the rainforest: a machete, a compass, mosquito nets, water purification tablets and waterproof shoes. The last item may sound unlikely but the massive rainfall and the dense humidity can rot your flesh in no time. Hunter had said it would take six days to reach the compound where Sweetman lived. In fact, we made it in five.
How do I begin to describe my journey through that vast, suffocating landscape… I do not know whether to call it a heaven or a hell. The world cannot live without its so-called green lungs and yet the environment was as hostile as it is possible to imagine with thousands of unseen dangers every step of the way. I could not gauge our progress. We were two tiny specks in an area that encompassed one billion acres, hacking our way through leaves and branches, always with fresh barriers in our path. All manner of different life forms surrounded us and the noise was endless: the screaming of birds, the croaking of frogs, the murmur of the river, the sudden snapping of branches as some large predator hurried past. We were lucky. We glimpsed a red and yellow coral snake… much deadlier than its red and black cousin. In the night, a jaguar came close and I heard its awful, throaty whisper. But all the things that could have killed us left us alone and neither of us became sick. That is something that has been true throughout my whole life. I am never ill. I sometimes wonder if it is a side-effect of the injection my mother gave me. It protected me from the anthrax. Perhaps it still protects me from everything else.