The Bannerman Solution (The Bannerman Series) (49 page)

Molly knew where Anton was headed. She placed a
hand on the young agent's arm. “You're not on a surveil
lance, Doug. You're live bait. Whatever Palmer Reid is
up to, his first sign that we're on to him will be when you
fail to report in. Can't you see that?”

“Mr. Loftus doesn't operate that way.”

“Can you say that about Mr. Reid?”

Doug Poole's heartbeat answered for him.

Molly picked up a fresh napkin and dipped a corner
of it into Doug Poole's catsup. She folded the napkin
and stuffed it into his breast pocket. “That's
catsup from
a Billy McHugh cheeseburger. As far as you're con
cerned, it's better than lamb's blood.”

Doug Poole blinked, confused.

Anton had seen Molly do this before. An effective bit
of theater. “Miss Farrell has just offered you a consider
able gift, my young friend. If you accept it, whatever
else may happen, the angel of death will pass over your
house.”

Poole ran his fingers over the bulge. He felt just a bit silly. He also felt safe. “What do you want from me, Mr.
Zivic?”

“When first we talked, you were not afraid. Today
you are. Tell us why this is
.”

Lesko stuffed his laundry into one of the machines,
borrowing some detergent from a box another tenant
had left behind. That done, he took Loftus's service
revolver from his own back pocket, shook out the car
tridges, and handed both to Loftus. Better safe than
stupid.

“Talk to me, Robert,” he said.

“What I'm going to do,” Loftus snapped the weapon into his shoulder holster, “is tell you a story. What you
have to do is try to listen, believe what I'm telling you,
and not draw any conclusions on your own. People
drawing conclusions is how we got into this situation in
the first place.”

“So tell.” Lesko backed away a prudent distance.

“Two years ago, back in that barbershop, there was a
young guy wearing a suit, the one they listed as an unidentified Hispanic male. He was one of ours.”

Lesko remembered. The good-looking one who had
moved for a gun and died first. “He was undercover?” Lesko frowned. He could have lived without knowing
that.

“Not exactly. We put him there but they knew it.”
Loftus hesitated as if looking for the simplest way to
explain this. “Would it surprise you to know,” he asked
finally, “that the agency skims a lot of money off the
South American drug traffic?”

It didn't. Not unless it was the DEA. “What agency?”

“It's not really that clean. Basically we're talking
CIA, but it's the old-line CIA, the guys who are used to
making their own rules. Several of their operations have
been folded into the National Security Agency, where
it's easy to get lost.”

“And who gets all this money?
The CIA or dirty
agents?”

“You're drawing conclusions, Lesko. Try not to do
that.”

“I'm listening.”

“No matter how much manpower this country puts
up to stop drug traffic, the best they're going to do is
slow it down. The DEA does its best and those guys are mostly all straight. The CIA works with them. The CIA
people, no matter what you might
think of them, are
mostly straight, too, but you have to understand they
have different priorities. They have their own activities,
having nothing to do with drugs, that have to be funded.
The days are long gone when the CIA didn't have to
account for the money it spent. So for certain activities
that are too sensitive to tell a bunch of Congressmen
about, it looks for other ways to fund them.”

No shit, thought Lesko. He felt a yawn coming on.

“Now, almost none of this is spy-novel stuff,” Loftus
continued. “I'm talking activities that are necessary but politically dicey. The best example would be domestic
activity, which is forbidden by law even though you and
I know there's no way an intelligence service can oper
ate without at least some of its activities coming back
across the borders of this country. One source of the
funding, the major source lately, comes from protecting some of the more reliable drug traffickers in return for a slice of the pie. Like I said, we're not ever going to stop
them. The thinking was that we might as well get some
use out of them.”

“All in the name of patriotism, right?”

Loftus's face  hardened.  “Let's not  talk  morals,
Lesko. We all make hard choices. You want to talk morals, we'll talk about where your cop oath says you
can take personal revenge.”

He had a point, Lesko supposed. But at least Lesko
hadn't taken any money. “Are you going to tell me, with
all this drug money around, none of you guys lined your
own pockets?”

Loftus looked at him evenly. “There might have been some spill. I wasn't going to flush it down the
toilet.”

Lesko said nothing. Busting balls was not the way to
keep Loftus talking. “The guy at the head of this is
Palmer Reid, right?”

“Yes.”

“And Donovan found out?”

“No. Don't get ahead of me, Lesko.”

“Then back to the reliable drug-traffickers: That was
Elena?”

“She was one of them.”

“I want to know about her.”

Lesko listened without interrupting for the next five
minutes.

Her full name, Loftus told him, was Elena
Betancourt although she also used the name Elena
Brugg. Both were legitimate. She was born in Zurich
during the war to a Bolivian mother who'd been sent to
school there. The mother got pregnant by a Swiss na
tional named Karl Brugg and married him. After the
Nazi surrender, mother and daughter returned to La
Paz for a visit. The Betancourts, old-line Spanish blood,
kept her there and got the marriage annulled. The Betancourts were landowner Catholics, the Bruggs
were financial wheeler-dealers and the nearest thing, in
their eyes, to Jews.

Elena was raised as Elena Betancourt, but her
mother always told her that she had a whole other fam
ily in Switzerland. Elena grew up, got sent to Wellesley
for her education but promptly transferred herself to
her mother's school in Zurich . . . “I told you she was
ballsy” . . . and renewed ties with her Swiss father and
his family. After graduating, she returned to La Paz but
she spent her vacations in Switzerland.

The Betancourts grew coffee and corn. They also
grew coca leaves and allowed their tenants to grow
crops of their own just as they'd been doing for hun
dreds of years. The production of coca was and still is
perfectly legal. It was also their most reliable cash crop.
The end uses of coca were also legal right up until co
caine fell into disuse as a medication/anesthetic and gradually became the drug of fashion, with no law against its use. Then several things happened in the
mid-sixties. One was a near-collapse of the Bolivian
economy after a series of coups in which Palmer Reid was very much involved. Next, the bottom fell out of
coffee and corn prices so the Betancourts had to greatly
increase their production of coca paste for export. They were still not getting rich. What really made the profits
start rolling in was the classification of cocaine as a con
trolled substance under the Harrison Narcotics Act. Co
caine was now both hip and hard to get. Supply-and-
demand took over. Prices quintupled almost overnight.

When Bolivia's best cash crop was declared illegal by
the U. S. government, growers throughout South Amer
ica were hardly in a position to abandon that source of
income. If one grower did, his neighbors would not. The
transition from the legal to the criminal was a gradual process. By their own lights, and in fact by their own
laws, the
Bolivian growers were never criminals at all. America's drug epidemic was America's problem. No
one was forcing Americans to snort cocaine.

Elena, by this time, being sophisticated, educated and multilingual, was a natural choice to become the
connection between her family's interests and the in
ternational marketplace. She dealt with the Colombians
who bought the raw paste, refined it and distributed it. She also handled the family's banking and investment
interests through the Bruggs, who were not at all in
volved in drug trafficking but who could hide assets and
launder cash with the best of the Bahnhofstrasse
gnomes.

Big profits led to greed and greed led to a numbingly
brutal war of attrition between rival factions. Under attack, Elena fought fire with fire, hiring guns of her
own as guards, avenging hijackings and murders when
ever the attackers could be identified, but it was a losing
battle because her position was essentially defensive.
Palmer Reid, meanwhile, saw that some of these enor
mous profits could be used to fund his own activities. Elena was approached, in part because of her overseas connections, and offered protection in return for front
ing certain of their transactions and channeling funds
back to them through Switzerland. Palmer Reid ended up with an untraceable cash flow that was bigger than the total of U. S. foreign aid to Bolivia.