had the money with him, and the courier tells them he was carrying the money for someone not remotely connected with the people he’s actually carrying it for. Half of the money—presuming the customs officials cannot be bribed, and they usually can—is confiscated. The owners of the currency write the loss off as the cost of doing business, and that’s the end of it.”
“You’re telling me the only thing Drug Cartel International is used for is moving money?” Castillo said.
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you,” Pevsner said. “And that’s why I was so surprised when Nicolai said he thought it likely the Tu-934A had come here. I had trouble believing your Uncle Héctor could be that stupid.”
Pevsner turned to García-Romero, who of course had recognized his name being said, and switched to Spanish.
“I just told Carlos that I had trouble believing you could be so stupid,” he said. “Now, let’s turn to that. Start at the beginning, Héctor, and tell us how this fiasco came to happen.”
García-Romero looked very uncomfortable.
“Let’s hear it, Héctor,” Pevsner said coldly.
“Valentin Borzakovsky came to me and said the Russian embassy had a problem,” García-Romero began. “He said they had reason to believe the CIA had infiltrated Aeromexpress Cargo ...”
“What won’t those evil Yankees be up to next?” Pevsner asked.
“... which the Russians use as their air-freight forwarder. Borzakovsky said the Russian embassy really needed to get something from Moscow the Americans couldn’t know about,” García-Romero finished.
“Do you think those blue beer kegs they unloaded from the Tu-934A might have contained nuclear weapons?” Castillo said jokingly.
But what the hell am I joking about?
They contained Congo-X, which is just about as bad.
“I’m not as naïve as you seem to think, Carlos,” García-Romero said. “There were radiation detectors waiting for that shipment.”
And if the needles on your radiometers had gone off the scale, and you had said anything, you and everybody who works for you in the cave would be dead and the nukes would be in Mexico.
“Go on, Héctor,” Pevsner said.
“He said there would be very little risk. Pavel Koslov of the Russian embassy—who of course has diplomatic immunity—would come here to meet the airplane, immediately load this cargo into Russian embassy trucks, and be gone within minutes.”
“How much else do you think your friend Valentin Borzakovsky, this Venezuelan businessman good friend of yours, told Koslov about what goes on here?” Pevsner asked angrily.
García-Romero didn’t respond, and instead said, “He offered me one hundred thousand euros for the service.”
“You risked everything we have here for a hundred thousand euros?” Pevsner asked incredulously.
“Do you know how much it costs to maintain this facility, Aleksandr?”
“To the penny!” Pevsner snapped. “And the last time I looked, the income made the cost look like a minor operating expense. And you risked losing all that income for a hundred thousand euros? My God, you are a fool!”
“I also thought it might be useful to have the Russian embassy owe us a favor,” García-Romero said.
“Did it occur to you, Tío Héctor,” Castillo asked, “that once you did this hundred-thousand-euro ‘favor’ for the Russians that you had jumped into their pocket, and they would be back asking for other ‘favors’ and this time there would be no euros, just the threat to expose you for what you did?”
“Or that once this happened, we couldn’t take the risk of ever using this place again?” Nicolai Tarasov put in before García-Romero could open his mouth.
“Is that all the bad news, Héctor?” Pevsner asked. “Or is there more?”
García-Romero hesitated a long moment before replying.
“There is more,” he said. “I don’t know whether you think it will be bad news or not.”
“Let’s have it.”
“My men have heard gossip that the coyotes—there were seven or eight of them—were found shot to death near the American border.”
“Dead men tell no tales,” Castillo said. “You might want to write that down, Alek.”
Pevsner’s response was not what Castillo—or, for that matter, any of the others—expected.
“Have you any further questions for your Uncle Héctor, friend Charley?” he asked matter-of-factly.
“I’ve got a couple, including one I expected you to ask,” Castillo said.
“Which is?”
“How much does your friend Borzakovsky know about Nicolai and Alek’s operations here?”
“Nothing,” García-Romero said immediately. “I swear your name didn’t come up, Aleksandr.”
I don’t believe you, Uncle Héctor, and I don’t think Pevsner will either.
Did you commit suicide when you made this deal with the Russians?
“Anything else you want to know, Charley?” Pevsner asked.
“How long is it going to take you to put all those surveillance tapes in a