“What’s her name?” Budge knew the name. He wanted to make Winsor say it. He wanted a moment to think. He was sure Winsor was lying. But how could he deal with this?
“Chrissy something-or-other,” Winsor said. “Some sort of Wop last name.”
“Oh, yes,” Budge said. “She talks a lot.”
Winsor nodded. “Too damn much,” he said. “I want her to disappear.”
“Send her away somewhere, you mean? Different assignment at one of your companies?”
Winsor studied Budge a long moment. “You’re playing dumb, aren’t you? Didn’t I mention blackmail? This is dead-serious business.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“I want a permanent solution to this. I want this problem eliminated. Permanently, absolutely, and eternally.”
“Kill her?”
“That’s part of it. But there has to be a way we can do it so it won’t cause us any damage. I can help by setting her up for it.”
And with that, Winsor explained what he had in mind.
Now, behind Budge in the little jet, Winsor was fastening his seat belt. They were close enough now to see the smokestacks of the old smelter. Budge eased back on the throttle and began a slow pass over the graded earth landing strip to make certain it looked safe. He noticed a large panel truck parked beside the doors of the only new-looking building on the grounds—a slope-roofed box with metal walls. The only other vehicles visible were a black sports utility vehicle parked next to the strip, with a red convertible looking tiny beside it. But nothing on the strip itself made it look riskier than landing on dirt always is.
It turned out to be a smooth one. Budge rolled the jet up to the cars, shut off the engines, and watched the three men waiting with the vehicles.
Rawley Winsor climbed out of the plane and looked at Budge. “Stay in the plane,” Winsor said. “I’ll either be right back, or I’ll send someone for you.”
Two of the men stood by the door and greeted Winsor with bows and signs of respect. The other one—wearing a Mexican army fatigue uniform and the symbols of a colonel—stood aside, studying the Falcon 10. He grinned at Budge.
“Una Dessault,” he said, his tone full of approval. “Una Falcona Diez?”
“Exactamente,” Budge said, returning the grin. “En Ingles, una Falcon Ten. Quiere usted ver la enterior?”
The colonel’s grin widened. He did, indeed, wish to see the interior. But Winsor cut off the conversation, climbed into the SUV with his greeters, and they drove off to where the truck was parked near the smelter. Budge gave them time to get there, climbed out of the jet, stretched, yawned, made sure all was secured, and followed them at an unhurried walk.
A fourth man was sitting behind the wheel of the truck. He nodded to Budge, said, “Como esta?”
“Bien. Y usted?”
The driver shrugged.
Budge walked through the doorway into the new building.
There wasn’t much in it. Winsor and the two who had greeted him so warmly were clustered at an odd-looking structure mounted atop two pipes jutting from the floor. Each of these supporting legs was equipped with a wheel, which Budge guessed would open and close some sort of pressure valves. If that guess was right, he presumed those valves would control the flow of something—natural gas, air, fluids—that was being forced under pressure into the larger pipe that these two legs supported. Budge estimated the large pipe had an interior diameter of eighteen or twenty inches, and it had its own set of valve wheels. The butt end near Budge was closed with a stainless-steel screw-on cap with a plate on it that read PIG LAUNCHER, and, in smaller print, something that looked like MERICAM SPECIALTY PRODUCTS. From that terminal the pipe angled downward and disappeared out the back wall of the building.
Budge’s guess about the legs—literally “pipe stem legs”—being sources of pumped pressure was quickly confirmed. Air hoses from a new-looking gasoline engine and pressure pump were connected to them. The engine running, the pump was working, and one of Winsor’s greeters, clad in blue coveralls, seemed to be showing Winsor which levers opened which vents to deliver the pressurized air into the pipe.
Budge spent a moment trying to fathom what all this meant, decided he lacked any helpful knowledge, and looked around the room. The uniformed Mexican stood beside a wall, studying him. Behind the Mexican was an orderly stack of sacks, apparently of sturdy white plastic. Two other men, shirtless, wearing sandals and dusty overalls, had one of the sacks open and were spooning white stuff from one of the sacks into a cup. He weighed the cup on a scale sitting on the floor beside them and then poured it carefully into a funnel stuck in a hole in what looked to Budge like a slightly oversized soccer ball—bright yellow and seemingly equipped with a large screw-out cap. A long double row of such balls was lined against the wall. They adjoined a stack of tubes, metallic-looking but perhaps plastic. Each was about three feet long with their ends screwed on like bottle caps. Budge studied the balls and tubes, concluded they were about the size to fit inside the pipe.
For what purpose? It seemed likely to Budge that the white powder in the sack was cocaine, and the purpose was to fit the balls full of it into the pipe and use the air-pressure system to push them to wherever the pipe went. Which must be to that rich and self-indulgent North American dope market. Which must mean the pipe extended under the U.S. border and thus was invisible to the watchful scrutiny of the U.S. Border Patrol with its helicopters and drone aircraft patrols.
If that guess was right, it eliminated some of the uncertainty for Budge. That cocaine, even if it was cut with some sort of diluting powder, would be worth many, many millions. The last he’d read about the drug trade listed high-quality uncut coke at thirty thousand dollars a kilogram in New York. Maybe less now, or maybe more. With Rawley Winsor involved in this project, the stuff here was probably pure.
No wonder this project now had such high priority for Winsor. And no wonder he seemed desperate to keep the War on Drugs alive and well. Legalizing marijuana, or any of the stuff Congress liked to call “controlled substances,” would eliminate the multibillion-dollar profits and quickly reduce the market size. Users would be buying in licensed government stores, with the profits and taxes going into rehabilitation programs. Even worse for the drug barons, the glamour of doing something illegal would be gone for the teenagers, and there’d be no reason left for the drug gangs to hire them to push the stuff in school yards and keep the list of customers multiplying.
Winsor was walking up, frowning.
“I told you to stay with the plane,” he said.
“I did,” Budge said. “Then I had to take a leak, get a little exercise, and I decided to see what was keeping you so long.”
“You stepped into something that you may wish you hadn’t. Sticky stuff,” Winsor said. He glanced at the uniformed Mexican. So did Budge. The Mexican, looking embarrassed, glanced away.
“What’s the difference,” Budge said. He waved across the floor. “This is interesting. What’s in the sacks? Something illegal, I’d bet. And what’s with the pipe gadget there?”
Winsor glared at him. Then he shook his head. “Nothing you want to talk about,” he said. “Not ever.”
“If somebody ever wanted to talk about it with me, all I could say is I’m no expert but it looks to me like Rawley Winsor has something going with the Mexicans to reopen that old smelter, reopen a pipeline to bring in the fuel, and start using the equipment for something or other. Get some engineer or geologist to find out what. Maybe Mr. Winsor’s going to be drilling for oil. Something like that.”