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CHAPTER 9

A COMPLIMENTARY GLASS of champagne and as many canapés as I could eat made the five-hour flight to El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá go quickly. Nate took a seat across the aisle from me, two rows in front, but he passed on the free booze in favour of sleep. I couldn’t. While the miles flew by, I thought about what to say to Eduardo.

For all my confidence over his innocence, I really didn’t know him that well. After our initial meeting, our contact had been limited to me flying out to Colombia once or twice a year, and never for more than a few days at a time.

The first time I went to Cali on business after the Frost episode, seeing Eduardo had been the furthest thing from my mind. As I recall, I’d gone there to search for a missing teenager who’d run off with a man of dubious character who also happened to be her maths teacher. We’d tracked her to Colombia, and her parents thought the troubled girl might respond better to my approach than a show put on by the Colombian police.

It was only my third trip to the city, and as I’d liked the hotel where I met with Eduardo, I decided to stay there again. The Coralia Club was a well-appointed five-star on the outskirts of town, but the area was still busy enough to enjoy the nightlife. Inside was an oasis of calm with its lush tropical gardens and a large, oval-shaped pool.

On my second night there, I’d sat back in the hotel’s Ristorante Solsticio, an elegant, old-world style lounge with excellent food and discreet yet efficient service. I only had my phone for company while I stared at the menu, trying to decide between the fish and the chicken. Maybe I could order both and eat half of each? Would that look greedy? I’d considered getting room service, but my table by the window had a view over the busy street outside, and my inherent nosiness won out.

Before I could make a decision, I felt a presence behind me.

“Would you mind giving me a m—”

Oh, it wasn’t the waiter. A heavyset man with a perfectly trimmed goatee glowered down at me, dressed in a black suit and not even trying to hide the fact he had a gun under the jacket.

After a brief moment in which I started calculating whether I could get the pistol out of my thigh holster faster than Danny Trejo’s uglier brother could draw from his shoulder rig, he spoke in a way that could only be interpreted as a command.

“Mr. Garcia has requested your company this evening.”

Well, I had my gun, and I hadn’t ordered dinner yet, so I figured I might as well go. That and I didn’t particularly want to cause a scene in a very nice restaurant where I might well want to eat again sometime.

“Why not?” I pushed my chair back.

The big dude ushered me into a waiting limousine which swiftly drove south for an hour or so. Neither he nor the driver spoke during the trip, and I was left to stare out of the window, watching the roads get smaller and the scenery get greener.

Eventually, we drew up at an ornate pair of gates, set into a wall topped with razor wire that stretched into the distance as far as I could see. The gates slowly swung open, and we continued up the driveway, past a pair of gun-toting security guards who gazed at us with bored expressions.

The instant the car came to a halt, a servant rushed over and opened my door. I stepped out into the muggy evening and he ushered me towards the house, a sprawling peach-coloured affair whose three storeys wrapped around a central courtyard. Little touches, like the gold-plated doorknobs and manicured topiary, screamed look at me, I’m rich .

I was just wondering what on earth possessed someone to have a life-sized statue of an elephant covered in gold leaf smack bang in the middle of their hallway when Eduardo stepped out of a side room.

“Emerson, I’m so glad you agreed to come.” He took my hand in his, bringing it to his lips and kissing it.

“I wasn’t aware there was a choice.”

“For you, there is always a choice. But I am glad you decided not to exercise that choice in my hotel dining room.”

“I’ll admit, I thought this could be an interesting experience. Nice elephant, by the way.” A tiny bit of sarcasm might have crept into my voice.

“It’s an atrocity, is it not? But my fourth wife loves elephants, and she is good to me in many other ways, so I indulge her.”

That was one big indulgence. She must have been very good in other ways. Ways I really didn’t want to think about, what with Eduardo being old enough to be my father and all that. His Interpol file was hazy on his age, but I put him at around fifty, perhaps a little older. He clearly looked after himself and stayed in good shape, although too much time in the sun had given him a network of wrinkles on his face. His hands too. Hands were always a giveaway.

He wasn’t a big man, standing at five feet nine, give or take an inch, but he exuded a power that made everyone snap to attention when he entered a room. Like a fine wine, Eduardo had aged well. I’d done some research after my last trip and seen pictures of him in his youth, but the salt and pepper hair he sported now gave him a distinguished appearance that meant he was never short of female admirers. That day, he’d worn a pale pink linen suit. Another of his wife’s choices? I wasn’t sure about the colour, but I figured as the slightly eccentric billionaire boss of the second biggest drug cartel in Colombia, he could wear anything he wanted.

And now Eduardo led the way through to the dining room. “I heard you were staying by yourself. A beautiful woman should never dine alone, so I thought you might like to humour an old man by keeping him company.”

“It’d be my pleasure.” Even if he had practically kidnapped me to get me there.

Eduardo’s chef served up a feast of culinary delights—a light salad of quail eggs and asparagus to start followed by pigeon for the main course. And his desserts were to die for. I suspected they needed to be if he didn’t want to.

“Would you like anything else?” Eduardo asked.

“I’d better not. Your chef’s a genius.”

“Alejandro trained in Paris. I found him in a restaurant in Bogotà and made him a better offer.”

“I’d end up the size of your elephant if I ate this food every day.”

Eduardo smiled. “Life is short; I understand this better than anyone, so I might as well enjoy the best things while I can.”

The old guy made surprisingly good company, and I found myself being unusually honest with him. In our respective lines of work, there were few people we could discuss things openly with, but there we were, with him knowing what I did and me knowing what he did.

We never made any promises explicitly, but neither of us worried about the other passing on our stories to the outside world. The reason was simple—if he talked, he knew I’d kill him, and if I talked, I knew he would kill me. It may have seemed a strange basis for what was to turn into a lasting friendship but hey, it worked.

And that night, we conversed until the early hours over a couple of excellent bottles of wine. Eduardo taught me some interesting things about smuggling, and I made him laugh by describing my exploits shutting down a paedophile ring.

“...so I turned up at the police station with three of them handcuffed naked in the trunk. The cops didn’t know which bits to grab to haul them out of there.”

“You should just chop their bits off, angel. Problem solved.”

“I tried that once, but the paperwork was unbearable.”

Eventually, it got too late for me to contemplate going back to the hotel, so I stayed the night in a bedroom filled with so much gold it looked like an Indian wedding had thrown up all over it. The next morning, after I’d drawn back the gold curtains to admire the view, taken a bath in the gold-plated bathtub, and brushed my teeth with a golden toothbrush, I kidded Eduardo that I preferred silver.

Before the car dropped me back to the hotel, he told me it was one of the most enjoyable evenings he’d had in a long time.

“Would you like to do this again sometime?” he asked.

“Of course. You’re good company, for an old dude anyway.”

He leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. “In that case, I will see you on your next visit.”

We needed to be careful—it wouldn’t look good at home if the news I was consorting with a well-known drug kingpin got out. Likewise, if people in Colombia saw Eduardo with me, my connections to the DEA could have put his operation in jeopardy.

With that in mind, we’d agreed on a system. In future, I’d check into his hotel under an alias, and he would send someone to pick me up when it was safe.

Simple, but the system worked. I’d been doing exactly that for the last ten years.