Specifically, he wanted to be a drug cop.
In Byron's mind, there wasn't much difference between a guy who did Murder One-roughly defined as with premeditation, or during the course of a Class One Felony, like armed robbery-and some guy who got a kid started on hard drugs. In both cases, a life was over.
If there was a difference, in Byron's mind it was that the drug bastards were the worse of the two. A murder victim, or some convenience store clerk, died right there. Tough, but it was over quick. It usually took a long time for a drug addict to die, and he almost always hooked a lot of other people before he did. If that wasn't multiple murder, what was?
Not to mention the pain a drug addict caused his family.
Another difference was that dealing in prohibited substances-even for the clowns standing on a street corner peddling nickel bags of crack-paid a lot better than sticking up a bank did.
And that was the problem-money. It was bad in the States, where entirely too many cops went bad because they really couldn't see the harm in looking the other way for fifteen minutes in exchange for a year's pay, and it was even worse here.
Byron knew too much about the job to think that when he came to Paraguay he personally was going to be able to shut off the flow of drugs, or even to slow it down very much. But he thought that he could probably cost the people moving the stuff a lot of money and maybe even send a few of them to the slam.
He'd had some success-nothing that was going to see him named DEA Agent of the Year, or anything like that-but enough to know that he was earning his paycheck and making the bad guys hurt a little. Making them hurt a little was better than not making them hurt at all.
And that was why he was pissed now that it looked like the goddamn Highway Police were going to make him miss his plane.
He was going to Buenos Aires to see an Argentine cop he'd met. Truth being stranger than fiction, an Irish Argentine cop by the name of Liam Duffy. Duffy's family had gone to Argentina at about the same time as Grandfather Francis's parents had gone to the States.
Duffy was a comandante (major) in the Gendarmeria Nacional Argentina. They wore brown uniforms, not blue, and looked more like soldiers than cops. Most of the time they went around carrying 9mm submachine guns. But cops they were. And from what Timmons had seen, far more honest cops than the Policia Federal.
That was part of the good thing he had going with Liam Duffy. The other part was that Duffy didn't like drug people any more than he did.
Even before he had met Duffy, Timmons had pretty well figured out for himself how the drugs were moved, and why. There had been briefings in Washington, of course, before they sent him to Asuncion, but that had been pretty much second-or third-hand information. And he had been briefed when he got to the embassy in Asuncion, although he'd come away from those briefings with the idea that Rule One in the Suppression of the Drug Trade was We're guests in Paraguay, so don't piss off the locals.
It hadn't taken Timmons long to understand what was going on. Paraguay was bordered by Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina. The drugs came from Bolivia, where the cultivation of the coca plant was as common as the cultivation of corn in Kansas. It was refined into cocaine in Bolivia. Some of the refined product went to Brazil, where some was consumed and some exported. Most of it went to-actually through-Paraguay to Argentina.
Although there was a substantial, and growing, market for cocaine in Argentina-this explained Liam Duffy's interest-most of the cocaine simply changed hands in Argentina. The coke then was exported by its new owners through the port of Buenos Aires, near downtown, and the international airport, Ezeiza, some twenty kilometers to the southwest, the bulk of it going to the United States, but a good deal to Europe, and some even to Australia.
There were some imaginative ways of moving the cocaine, a crystalline powder, across borders. These ranged from packing it in caskets-or body cavities-of the deceased being returned home for burial to putting an ounce or more in a latex condom, which was then tied, swallowed by a human smuggler-or "mule"-and either regurgitated or defecated once across the border. (Unless, of course, one or more of the condoms were to rupture en route-which they often did-causing the mule severe toxicity…then death.) Most of the drug, however, was commonly packed in plastic bags, one kilogram-two point two pounds-of cocaine to a package.
These sometimes were not concealed or disguised at all, if the shippers were confident the customs officials at the border had been adequately bribed. Or the kilo bags were hidden in myriad ways-in the tires of cars or trucks, for example, or packed in a crate with something legitimate-operative word myriad.
The only way to interdict a "worthwhile" shipment was to know when it was to be made and/or the method of shipment. For example, that one hundred kilos of cocaine were to be concealed in the spare tires of a Scandia eighteen-wheeler of the Jorge Manso e Hijos truck line carrying bagged soybeans, which would cross the border at a certain crossing on a certain date.
This information could be obtained most commonly in one of two ways. It could be bought. The trouble here was that the U.S. government was reluctant to come up with enough money for this purpose and did so only rarely. The Paraguayan government came up with no money for such a purpose.
Sometimes, however, there was money as the result of a successful interdiction-any money over a reasonable expectation of a truck driver's expenses was considered to be as much contraband as any cocaine found-and this was used.
The most common source of information, however, was to take someone who had been apprehended moving drugs and turn him into a snitch. The wheels of justice in Paraguay set a world standard for slow grinding. Getting arraigned might take upward of a year. The wait for a trial was usually a period longer than that. But when the sentence finally came down, it was pretty stiff. Paraguay wanted the world to know it was doing its part in the war on the trafficking of illegal drugs.
The people who owned the cocaine-who arranged its transport through Paraguay into Argentina and who profited the most from the business-as a rule never rode in the trucks or in the light aircraft that moved it over the border. Thus, they didn't get arrested. The most they ever lost was the shipment itself and maybe the transport vehicle. So basically not much, considering that the cocaine-worth a fortune in Miami or Buenos Aires or London or Brisbane-was a cheap commodity until it actually got across the Argentine border.
What really burned the bad guys-far better than grabbing a hundred kilos of cocaine every week-was grabbing the cash after the Argentine dealers paid for it in Argentina. Even better: grabbing the cocaine and the money. That really stung the bastards.
Timmons and Duffy were working on this. Step One was to find out how and when a shipment would be made. Snitches gave Timmons this information. Step Two was to pass it to Duffy.
The Gendarmeria Nacional had authority all over Argentina. They could show up at a Policia Federal roadblock and make sure the Federals did their job. Or they could set up their own roadblocks to grab the cocaine and/or turn the couriers into snitches.
With a little bit of luck, Timmons and Duffy believed, they could track the cocaine until it changed hands, then grab both the merchandise and the money the dealers in Argentina were using to pay for it.
The problem Timmons had with this was getting the information from the snitches to Duffy without anyone hearing about it. It wasn't much of a secret that the bad guys had taps on both Timmons's and Duffy's telephones.
The only way for Timmons to get the information to Duffy without its being compromised, and in time for Duffy to be able to use it, was to personally take it to him.
Which, again, explained why Timmons was heartsick when he saw the Highway Police roadblock on the road to the airport.