Cocaine (24 page)

‘
Okay, okay.’

I let go and he rubbed his face.

‘
Twenty-five per cent. It’s my project, and that’s what you’re getting.’

‘
Is it now.’

‘
Do we have a deal?’

‘
Fifty per cent.’

‘
You’re in no position to bargain Jeavons.’

‘
Well fuck it, Ryan! Neither are you!’

‘
Thirty per cent. That’s my final offer. I’ll have to do all the dangerous stuff. You can get the raw materials and make the coke.’

‘
Thirty-five.’

‘
Done.’

We shook hands. It was a glorious moment. My second coke deal in four years. I sincerely hoped it would be more successful than the first.

25

July 2007 – Grasse, South of France

By ten o’clock, the moment when the agent handed me the keys and shook my hand, it was nearly ninety degrees outside. I opened the huge main door underneath the big ‘
Daillion’
sign and the three of us entered my newest purchase, bought with the funds I had taken from the recently deceased Wisemans. We spent the morning walking around my new perfume factory, just me, Stephanie and Monsieur Louveau, the chemical engineer that Stephanie had introduced me to.

Louveau tapped and tested the equipment, accompanied by what I soon learned was his trademark sucking-in of cheeks. He tutted a lot, too. Stephanie was impressed, I could tell, that this was all mine. It was enormous. Three large rooms with tiny windows stretched along the ground floor. The machinery was old but in good order, according to Louveau. There were two laboratories on the upper level together with five or six offices and a big meeting room with a highly-polished parquet floor and garishly-papered walls.

I sat down at the head of the large meeting table. Stephanie followed me in and grinned.

‘Chairman of the board’, she said.

‘Then I’m looking at the new managing director of the
Daillion
brand.’

Stephanie curtsied.

‘Is better than Sephora.’

‘Come here, Madamoiselle Daillion.’

Stephanie walked over to me, her heels click-clacking on the shiny wooden floor, and stood by my chair.

‘We are going to make a world-class brand’, I said. ‘It will be incredibly profitable. More profitable, I think I can safely say, than any other
parfumerie
on earth. As long as we do not over-indulge in our secondary product. We won’t do that, will we Stephanie?’

She leaned over and kissed me, slipping her hand onto my shoulder.

‘You ‘ave some with you?’ she asked me. ‘We could…celebrate?’

I cleared my throat as Louveau walked in. He was a tall man of about fifty with square glasses that made him look sterner than he actually was.

‘Monsieur Milton?’

‘
Oui
?’

‘We need to talk, Monsieur Milton.’

‘You can say anything in front of Stephanie.’

‘It is about money. It is about time. Time and money.’

‘What about them?’

‘You will need to pay maybe maybe three hundred thousand euros to have the operation, the
parfumerie
, is making perfume. You have the raw materials?’

‘Stephanie can source my raw materials for me. Downstairs,
parfumerie
. Up here,
laboratoires
.’

‘Fine. I can have a quote ready soon. ’

‘Soon. Is good. We’ll need to get started.’

‘Before Carlos comes?’ she whispered to me as Louveau consulted his palm-pilot.

‘Yes’, I replied. ‘Before Carlos comes.’

***

December 1990

Juan Andres sat at a table at
The Lone Star
, one of the more up-market restaurants on Barbados, just outside Holetown on the west coast. The moonlight glistened on the water that virtually lapped at his feet and he was surrounded by other diners, their presence making both Juan Andres and the man he was sitting opposite feel safe.

‘Ten grams?’

‘
Si.
Ten grams.’

‘And you say you have a hundred kilos.’

‘
Si.
’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘It is not stolen.’

‘I don’t care if it is.’

Juan Andres sipped the sparkling water in front of him.

‘Have you been to Panama City?’ he asked the man.

‘
No. Now just give me a
momentito
, okay?’

Juan Andres nodded. He watched the man stand up and walk over to the toilets, the little bag safely tucked inside his jacket pocket. They wouldn’t be greedy, he’d agreed with Mama Garcia. There was no point being greedy. They just needed to find a buyer with more than a million dollars. It would be enough. Ten thousand dollars per kilo was less than one-sixth of what they could get for it with a proper distribution network. The distributor would cut it again – even though Juan Andres had already diluted it by twenty per cent – and multiply the investment by ten, a nice thousand per cent gain on capital employed.

He was providing a valuable investment opportunity for the distributor as well as providing for his mother and himself. They could buy a lovely house inland somewhere in the Caribbean for two hundred and fifty thousand, and with the interest from seven hundred and fifty in the bank, and whatever else Juan Andres could bring in, perhaps as a life-guard or swimming instructor, perhaps as a Spanish teacher, they would have enough to be comfortable for the rest of their lives. Mama would be able to wake up every morning and look out over the sea. There would be no cartels or mayors or Suareses chasing them.

Juan Andres Montero Garcia watched as the man came out of the toilets at the back of the restaurant and made his way back to the table. He sat down slowly, avoiding eye contact.

‘
It’s good.’

‘
I told you it was.’

‘
I’ll rephrase that, my friend. It’s
too
good. Where did you get it?’

‘
Like I told you, it’s not stolen and it’s not traceable.’

‘
A hundred kilos? Not traceable?’

‘
Every time you ask a question the price rises.’

‘
Every time I need to ask a question the price falls, my friend, do you see? Where is the material?’

‘
First I need to know how much you’re prepared to pay for it. There are others, you know – ‘

‘
Of course, of course. Also from Miami?’

‘
Maybe.’

‘
Who?’

‘
How much?’

‘
I’ll give you one point five million.’

‘
It’s not enough.’

Dios mio!
One and a half million?
Juan Andres’s mind was racing. Mama would be pleased. They’d lowered their expectations once they left Colombia. The chances of getting three or four million were non-existent. But if mama were here this would be only the start of the negotiation.

‘
I will need cash and I will need two million.’

‘
Twenty thousand a kilo?’

‘
Si.
’

‘
One point six. Final offer.’

Juan Andres stood as if to go and the man instantly put his hand on his shoulder to stop him. Juan Andres looked at his hand and put his own hand on top of it.

‘
Two million’ he repeated, ‘in unmarked one hundred dollar bills. We exchange suitcases. You will receive four suitcases each containing twenty-five kilos. You will give me two suitcases in return, one million dollars in each. We can do this tomorrow.’

‘
So the product is on the island?’

‘
Perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t.’

‘
It is a very small island.’

Juan Andres opened his shirt slightly to reveal the gun resting inside. The man saw it and suddenly broke into a smile.

‘
OK. I see you’re serious,
senor
. One point seven-five. Can we shake on it?’

‘
This is a very good deal for you.’

‘
And for you.’

‘
Don’t be greedy’
said his conscience. ‘
Leave something for the next man.
’

‘
One point eight.’

‘
Deal.’

They shook hands.

‘
You have the cash?’

‘
I can get it by tomorrow.’

Neither man could trust the other. In fact, it was better if neither man trusted the other because then the actions of both men would be predictable. This predictability was what Juan Andres was counting on.

26

February 1994

The facilities within the science labs at Cambridge were fifty thousand times more conducive to the manufacture of synthetic cocaine than the double garage-block attached to the Garcia home near Villamaria. In Colombia it had taken us eight days or so to create two or three grams, a pitifully small amount. Here, in Cambridge, with our raw materials paid for, our only expense was our time. In addition, the equipment was at the upper end of high-tech and Jeavons’s ability eclipsed Juan Andres’s and mine combined, times four.

Jeavons ran a trial run to see how long it would take, and how much raw material it would consume, to manufacture one gram of pure synthesized cocaine. Unbelievably, by circumventing the process that Juan Andres and I had followed, he managed to produce the first trial batch in less than forty-eight hours.

‘Try it’, he said, at eleven o’clock at night in his locked office, the blinds drawn. He handed me a three-inch long aluminium cylinder and I looked down at the steel tray on which lay six large lines.

‘You too’, I said.

‘I’ve never tried it before, Jacobs. I wouldn’t know if it was any good or not. I can tell you it made my gums pretty numb and I still have the use of my arms and legs, so it’s not lethal.’

I took the aluminium tube from him and thought about the trial we’d given Kieran about four years before. He’d nearly died, but not from what we’d made. It had been the university cocaine, and that was what was worrying me now. Universities could sometimes be
too
efficient,
too
clinical,
too
pure. We were in a university, Jeavons was a fanatic for perfection and a very, very clever man, much clever than I was. He knew, I knew it, and that was why it was me testing the cocaine and not him.

I leaned over the tray and studied each of the lines. They were identical.

‘It’s all the same stuff?’

‘This is the distillation of our raw material.’

‘Cost?’

‘Ten pounds.’

This would give a cut value of somewhere over a hundred. It made sense already, and that was without any sort of economy of scale.