Black Coke (7 page)

‘Don’t take the piss.’

‘Alright then.’ She smiled. ‘The Slug and Lettuce at nine.’

North London, UK
6 April 2011

T
he shrill of his phone jolted Nathan awake. His head was throbbing. He didn’t drink often, but last night he and Caitlin had crawled from bar to bar on Upper Street until the early hours of the morning.

He fumbled for the answer button.

‘Nathan, where are you?’

Hell. It was Cedric.

‘At home.’

‘I thought we were meeting. Do you have any idea what time it is?’

‘To be honest, I don’t give a damn,’ Nathan said, surprised at how much he was enjoying saying it.

‘We can’t act without hard evidence. You know that.’

‘That was hard evidence. Anyway, I knew I should’ve done things differently.’

‘Waded in and blasted them all to bits? Come on.’

‘Give me the right team and I could take out the leaders of the Front.’

‘That’s the squaddie talking, not the Soca officer.’

Nathan looked at the letter from the LSE on his bedside table. A lectureship sounded like a nice idea. Flexible hours. Time to study what he wanted. Intellectual debates at international conferences rather than getting shot at in the middle of the jungle.

‘I’m out,’ he said.

‘You’re resigning?’

‘Thinking about it.’

‘And then what? Live in your ivory tower?’

Nathan hung up.

‘Sure told him there, bro,’ Caitlin said in a sleepy voice from the other room. ‘Although I thought you said last night you were going to stick with them after all.’

Nathan reached for the pack of painkillers and the glass of water on his bedside table. ‘I dunno. I need time.’

He tried going back to sleep, but his mind was churning over the events of the past few days. How was Manuel doing? He’d been semi-delirious when Nathan had left him in the hands of other campesinos, although he’d gripped Nathan’s hand and promised him he’d do anything for him for saving his life. His thoughts turned to George, and he felt like punching the wall. Why was George being so obstructive? Did he have a hidden agenda?

There was no point trying to sleep. He switched on the bedside lamp and picked up a book he’d been reading for his PhD: Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juárez, by a sociology professor at the University of Texas. Caitlin thought Nathan was insane doing a PhD, let alone on the same topic he worked on every day. Yet he needed the intellectual stimulation. And he wanted a way out of this job.

The author was discussing the ritualised use of violence by drug gangs: traitors shot in the neck, philanderers castrated, spies shot in the ear, people who talk too much shot in the mouth. Sometimes, if the victim was a police informer, the cartels would cut off the fingers or the tongue and place them in the victim’s mouth as a warning to others. ‘The construction of dread,’ the author called it. Its aim was to generate a climate of fear and reinforce the power of the cartels. Nathan hadn’t seen that behaviour yet from the Front, but he knew it would come soon.

He got up and went to the kitchen to prepare a strong cup of coffee. Caitlin followed him from her bedroom, wearing her purple gown.

‘What’s up?’ she said.

‘Sometimes I wonder why I ever took this job. I’m sick of the politics. George spends his time blocking everything. The directors are his cronies.’

‘Cedric isn’t.’

‘You should have seen him yesterday. Like a puppet.’

‘He helped you with the Camplones case.’

‘Took a lot of convincing.’

‘You need to do the same again.’

‘It’s different now.’ Nathan put coffee beans into the machine. ‘George is here.’

‘Not everyone’s like you.’ Caitlin smiled gently. ‘Cedric’s just a bit more subtle, that’s all. Anyway, it’s about the job, not the organisation.’

Nathan nodded. Those were Dad’s words originally when Nathan had been fed up with being a squaddie. He poured a coffee for Caitlin.

‘Maybe resigning would be a good move,’ Nathan said. ‘I could apply for that lectureship.’

‘Now that’s a good idea.’

‘Not sure they’d consider me without a finished PhD, though. I wish I could find time to complete it.’

‘Take a holiday. You haven’t had one for nearly a year.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

Nathan took his mug and went back down the hallway towards his bedroom. He stopped to study the photo framed on the wall. It was of him in Sierra Leone, posing with a group of lads in front of a captured rebel truck. Two had died the next day, hacked to death by drug-crazed child soldiers.

‘Why don’t you just put that picture away and forget about it all?’ Caitlin said, coming up next to him.

‘I can’t.’

‘It’s history.’

‘Dad’s history too.’

Caitlin followed him into his bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Spend some time at home. We could go for walks, visit some pubs, take it easy for once.’

‘Not sure about pubs right now.’

‘You’ve given them a lot, you know.’

‘Who?’

‘The forces. Soca.’ Caitlin leaned against the wall. ‘Why?’

‘Let’s not get into that again.’

The phone rang. It was Cedric’s number again.

‘Don’t resign,’ Cedric said.

‘Give me one good reason why.’

‘At least not before I’ve had a chance to convince you that we can make this work. I’m making progress with the board. If you resign, the whole investigation falls apart.’

Nathan said nothing.

‘Nathan, you still there?’

‘Yep.’

‘So?’

Nathan thought back to the board meeting, to George’s arrogant face and the sense of humiliation. Then he thought of the underground lab and the bags of drugs he’d found, of Amonite Victor examining the results of the Front’s attack with a satisfied smile, of the destroyed villages, of Manuel squirming in agony.

‘I want that promotion.’

‘We can discuss that too.’

‘I want more than a discussion,’ Nathan said. ‘I want to know why George blocked it.’

‘You have my word.’

‘Okay. I’ll be in the office first thing tomorrow.’

‘Good man. We’ll sort this out. Together.’

Nathan tossed the phone across the room onto the carpet. He was answering no more calls today, especially not from Soca.

Central London, UK
7 April 2011

N
ext day, Nathan was at the coffee machine, chatting to some of the lads from the intervention department, when Cedric called him. They met in a small meeting room, a place with no windows and just a table and two chairs.

‘Sorry about the board meeting,’ Cedric said, placing a folder on the table.

‘Forget about it. Now, what’s the plan?’

Cedric folded his pudgy hands. ‘We had a long discussion after you left. The board has agreed to bring this up again at their next meeting. In two months.’

‘Way too late.’

‘I’m pushing hard. I may take it to the home secretary.’

Nathan’s eyes opened wide. Under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, the home secretary set Soca’s strategic direction and appointed the chairman.

‘Wouldn’t that get rather messy?’ Nathan said.

‘It’s more like a threat. They wouldn’t want an argument. It would be terrible for George’s career.’

They looked at each other.

‘Be honest with me, Cedric. You wouldn’t dare.’

‘Then you don’t know me well enough.’

‘That leak to the BBC. Was it you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘The interview with George on the radio. The journalist said she’d been speaking to a senior source in Soca. Was that you?’

Cedric’s eyes glimmered. ‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re on about.’

‘Okay, I get it.’ Nathan smiled. Sometimes he forgot just how crafty Cedric could get. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘You were right.’

‘About what?’

‘This.’ Cedric slid the folder across the table to Nathan. ‘Amonite Victor. She’s still alive.’

For a long moment, Nathan didn’t move. The very mention of Amonite’s name seemed to provoke a physical reaction inside him. A tightness around his chest. A pulsing in his temples. A mixture of fury and fear. He was back in the streets of Juárez, hunting her down with a team of ex special forces operatives. Their fixer led them into a trap. Amonite killed all the others, but dragged Nathan to her torture chamber, from which he barely escaped alive.

‘Nathan?’ Cedric said. ‘You okay?’

Nathan flicked open the folder. There were photos of Amonite coming out of a pub. A poorly painted sign saying the White Lion hung loosely above the door.

‘I saw them kill her in Mexico,’ Cedric said. ‘You were there too. You saw her. We weren’t dreaming.’

‘I never trusted the Mexican police,’ Nathan said. ‘They could have replaced her with someone else. Easily done.’

‘But what’s she doing here?’

‘Pretty obvious, isn’t it? She’s expanding the Front’s empire. Is this the pub where that killing took place the other day?’

Cedric nodded. ‘The Met’s drugs squad had it under surveillance. They’re after Tony Maxwell, a big-time crack dealer in north London who runs dozens of houses. Amonite walked in, shot everyone except Tony, and left.’

‘And the Met just let her go?’

‘They didn’t know who she was. They didn’t realise there’d been a shooting until Tony stumbled out and ran off.’

Nathan grunted. ‘Bloody useless.’

‘They’ve put someone else in charge of the investigation now. Steve Willinston. A good copper. Takes no crap from the scroties. You should speak to him.’

‘Okay, chief.’ Nathan didn’t react to his boss’s uncharacteristic use of police slang. ‘What about those samples from Colombia? Are the test results back?’

‘Soon.’

Cedric got up and left the room. Nathan went to his desk. There was an email from Caitlin.

Did you get the promotion?

Nathan had forgotten to raise the issue. Cedric hadn’t mentioned it either. He deleted the email and searched the Soca database for Steve Willinston’s phone number.

‘Soca needs help catching baddies?’ Steve said after Nathan had introduced himself.

‘I’m trying to nick Amonite Victor.’

‘That’s like trying to catch the invisible man.’

‘Look, we need to meet up. Where’s the best place to start?’

‘Tony Maxwell. If anyone knows about Amonite Victor, it’ll be him.’

They arranged to meet next day.

Nathan stared blankly at his computer screen, feeling numb inside. An email popped into his inbox with the headline ‘Drugs and Development: Caught in a Vicious Cycle’. It was an article from The Guardian by Nick Crofts, a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne. Crofts said 2011 marked the 50
^th
anniversary of the global war on drugs. Nathan blinked. Fifty years? And what was there to show for it? Just massive corruption, unprecedented levels of violence, whole countries devastated, and new groups such as Front 154 popping up on a regular basis.

He read the article. Crofts argued that conflict, poverty and the drugs trade were intricately linked through a vicious circle: poor development fuelling conflict, which fuels the drugs trade, which generates profits that fuel conflict, which fuels poverty. Croft called for drug control agencies to look beyond the simple realities of drug production to the social and economic factors behind it.

Nathan filed the story in his file entitled ‘the case for legalisation’, alongside the recent front cover story in The Economist about how the drugs war was devastating Central America. He leaned back in his chair and looked around the office at his colleagues typing away or speaking on their phones. Was all this just a massive waste of time and money?

He turned back to his computer and searched for more information on the Front. There was an article on the New York Times website that the Front was extending its web of influence to the Caribbean. An anonymous source from the US Drug Enforcement Administration claimed he’d received intel that the region was becoming a hub for the Front’s drug smuggling. There was another article, this time in The Independent, asking how the Front had access to such high tech machinery such as military helicopters. It raised the question of whether there were links between the Front and the Colombian government.