a decent burial in a proper churchyard. But he was intrigued by the cause of death in one so young and hailing from a poor but devotedly respectable household.
Just after three, he swung his long, thin legs out of bed and reached for a robe. There was a sleepy “Where are you going?” from beside him. “I won’t be long,” he replied, knotted the belt and padded through to the dressing room.
When he lifted the handset, the reply took two seconds. If the duty operator was sleepy at that hour of the night when the human spirit is at its lowest, she did not show it. Her inquiry was bright and eager.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
The light on her console told her exactly who was calling. For his part, the man from Chicago still had to remind himself that he could have anything he liked anytime of the day or night simply by asking for it.
“Would you raise the director of the DEA, in his home or wherever he is?” he asked. There was no surprise from the operator. When you are That Man, if you want to exchange pleasantries with the President of Mongolia, it will be arranged.
“I’ll have him momentarily,” said the young woman far below in the comms room. She tapped fast at a computer keyboard. Minuscule circuits did their job, and a name flashed up. A query as to private phone number produced ten digits on the screen. They referred to a handsome town house out in Georgetown. She made the connection and waited. At the tenth ring, a bleary voice answered.
“I have the President for you, sir,” she told him. The middle-aged public servant became unbleary very quickly. Then the operator transferred the boss of the federal agency known formally as the Drug Enforcement Administration on the line to the room upstairs. She did not listen in. A light would tell her when the men were done and she could disconnect.
“Sorry to trouble you at this hour,” said the President. He was immediately assured it was no trouble at all. “I need some information, maybe advice. Could you meet with me this morning, nine o’clock, in the West Wing?”
Only courtesy made it into a question. Presidents issue instructions. He was assured the director of the DEA would be in the Oval Office at nine a.m. The President hung up and went back to bed. At last he slept.
In an elegant redbrick house in Georgetown, the lights were on in the bedroom as the director asked an uncomprehending lady in curlers what the hell that was about. Senior civil servants, roused personally by their supreme authority at three a.m., have no choice but to think something has gone wrong. Perhaps badly so. The director did not return to sleep but went down to the kitchen to fix juice and coffee and do some serious worrying.
ACROSS THE ATLANTIC, it was dawn. On a bleak gray and rain-slashed sea off the north German port of Cuxhaven, the MV San Cristobal took on her pilot. The skipper, Captain José-María Vargas, had the helm, and the pilot beside him gave murmured instructions. They spoke in English, the common language of the air and the sea. The San Cristobal turned her nose and entered the outer roads of the estuary of the Elbe. Sixty miles later she would be guided into Hamburg, Europe’s biggest river port.
At 30,000 tons, the San Cristobal was a general freighter flying the flag of Panama. Forward of the bridge, as the two men stared into the murk to pick up the buoys marking the deep channel, was row upon row of steel sea containers.
There were eight levels of them belowdecks and four above. Lengthwise, there were fourteen rows from the prow to the bridge, and the vessel was wide enough to take eight from side to side.
Her papers would say, quite rightly, that she had begun her voyage in Maracaibo, Venezuela; then proceeded east to complete her cargo with a further eighty containers of bananas at Paramaribo, capital and sole port of Suriname. What the papers would not say was that one of those last sea containers was very special because it contained bananas and one other consignment.
The second cargo had flown in a tired old Transall cargo plane, bought very secondhand from South Africa, out of a remote hacienda in upstate Colombia, over Venezuela and Guyana, to land at an equally remote banana plantation in Suriname.
What the old cargo plane had brought had then been stacked, brick