Powder Burn

Chapter 17

Epilogue

Prologue

Bogotá, Colombia

“How are we doing on time?” Drake Webb asked his companion.

“Fifteen minutes early, sir,” Otto Glass said.

Webb wore a watch, of course—and a Rolex, at that—but demanding mundane information from lesser mortals was one of the perqs that came with a counselor’s rank in the U.S. Senior Foreign Service. Otto Glass, as chief of station for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Colombia, understood the rules and followed them.

Their limousine rolled northward, passing the Plaza de Bolívar on Webb’s left, with the stately Catedral Primada on his right. Ahead, he saw the looming Palace of Justice, surrounded by uniformed guards armed with automatic weapons.

Webb hated talking drugs with the Colombians, but it consumed most of his time. Cocaine and coffee were Colombia’s main exports to the States—one of those having sparked a war that never seemed to end. For the ten thousandth time, Webb wished that he’d been posted somewhere nice and quiet, where the worst problem he had to deal with was a silly tourist’s missing passport.

“Do you think they’ll go for it?” he asked the DEA man seated next to him.

“Yes, sir. If foreign aid’s contingent on cooperation, they don’t have a lot of choice.”

“Except the old standby,” Webb answered. “They could tell us, ‘Yanqui, go home.’”

“That’s unlikely, sir.”

“Right,” Webb agreed, and thought, More’s the pity.

Being shown the door would make one headache go away, but it would cause a slew of other problems, starting with the ignominious demise of Webb’s career. He hadn’t waded through red tape and diplomatic crap for the better part of thirty years to simply flush it all away.

He wouldn’t be the Man Who Lost Colombia, by God.

And drugs were critical to U.S. foreign policy—had been for decades. Webb knew that, agreed with all the reasons that had been explained to him when he was rising through the ranks, watching the hypocrites in Washington get ripped at parties after blasting dealers and their customers in speeches redolent of hellfire and brimstone. He fully understood political reality.

It didn’t matter that the current President’s drug czar had told America the “war on drugs” was over, that the government would focus more on education, rehabilitation and the other touchy-feely bits, rather than on SWAT teams and no-knock warrants. On the front lines, in the trenches where it mattered, Webb knew that the war on drugs was only getting worse.

And he was in the midst of it.

Ground Zero, if you please.

“Okay, sir,” Glass was saying, as their limo pulled up to the curb, suddenly dwarfed by the Palace of Justice, surrounded by green uniforms. “Step lively till we’re well inside, and everything should be okay.”

Step lively, hell. Did Glass think either one of them could outrun bullets? Or the shrapnel from a car bomb, if it came to that?

Tight-lipped, Webb said, “I’ll do my best, Otto.”

“Yes, sir.”

A second later the door opened. Webb’s bodyguards spilled from the limo, mingled with the uniforms, then Glass was out and Webb was following. They ran a gauntlet of machine guns toward the granite steps.

Webb braced himself for impact, wondering if it was true that no one ever heard the shot that killed them. Almost hoping it was true, to spare himself the last indignity of panic in the face of death.

And then they were inside, doors closed behind them, slowing to a normal walk. The welcoming committee was approaching, smiling, hands outstretched in greeting.

More red tape, Webb thought. More bullshit.

Situation normal.

“ALL POINTS READY. MOVE on my command.”

Manolo Vergara heard no tremor in his own voice as he spoke into the Bluetooth wireless microphone. Despite the rush of raw adrenaline, his hands were steady on the broom he pushed across a highly polished marble floor.

Vergara heard his soldiers answer briskly, one by one, their voices small and disembodied in his earpiece. All were ready, stationed in their proper places, waiting for his signal to begin.

The baggy coveralls draping Vergara’s slender form were large enough to hide a multitude of sins. In this case, more specifically, the denim cloth concealed a micro-Uzi submachine gun dangling from a leather sling beneath his right arm, and belt around his waist, made heavy by grenades. Each of his five commandos, likewise, had arrived for work that morning dressed to kill.

And none had been detected. No one had sounded an alarm.

A quarter century had passed since the last attack on Bogotá’s Toma del Palacio de Justicia, and that had been a full-scale frontal assault by thirty-five members of the Movimiento 19 de Abril—M-19. No one believed that such a thing could be repeated in this modern day and age.

They were correct, of course.

Outside, police and military guards ensured that no strike force could storm the Palace of Justice. Anyone who tried it would be cut down in the street or on the steps, before they crossed the threshold.

But who really looked at janitors these days?

Who gave a second thought to peasants taking out the trash?

What thirty men could not accomplish by brute force, a bold half dozen might achieve by stealth. Vergara’s handpicked team had infiltrated the building’s custodial staff one by one, over the past eleven months, performing scut work and pretending they were grateful for the opportunity to serve.

Until this day.

The order had been given. They were privileged to strike against the enemy that morning, each emboldened by the knowledge that if he should fall, his loved ones would be handsomely rewarded. Set for life, in fact.

They each had El Padrino’s word on that.

Vergara steered his broom in the direction of the conference rooms, where soon his enemies would be assembled. They were already in the building. He knew their habits, their compulsion to be punctual. He could almost smell them, drawing closer to their destiny.

Delivered by a peasant’s hand.

Perhaps there was some justice, after all.

OTTO GLASS HADN’T FELT relaxed since he was transferred to Colombia as chief of station for the DEA. But for the moment, after the predictably tense limo ride and the virtual sprint from curbside to relative safety, his stomach was beginning to un-clench.

Glass lived by one simple rule: no one was safe in Colombia, period. Sudden death could strike anyone, anywhere, at any time. And those least secure of the lot were Americans working on drug interdiction programs.

Meaning Glass and his agents, for starters.

He’d been on the job for seven months and had survived three attempts on his life, while another half dozen supposed murder plots were logged and filed from native informants. Glass wore Kevlar whenever he set foot outside his office or downtown apartment, and slept with armed guards at his door.