19

Poppy approached the blanket-wrapped lump on the bed gingerly, as if it might rear up and bite her. She didn’t want it to wake up.

A kid. Of all things, a damn kid. Well, wasn’t that where the word came from anyway? Kidnapping? What were they going to do with a whiny, crybaby kid?

Cautiously, she pulled the blanket aside to take a look. Skinny little thing. Wearing a uniform. Probably a private school. Rich kid. But that dumb red beret—where’d she get that?

Poppy knelt so she could get a look at the face. Round, kind of cute, with chocolate smeared on her lips. Nice hair… long, dark, braided. Poppy wondered what color her eyes were, but wasn’t about to pry up a lid to see.

As she knelt there, staring at the child, a strange thought came to her. How old would Glory be now? Probably about the same age. Would Glory have looked like this little thing? She’d had dark hair and…

Poppy leaned forward and pushed up one of the kid’s eyelids—just far enough and long enough to see the color—then let it drop.

Blue eyes…

Just like Glory’s…

Poppy shook herself. This was doing her like no good at all. She hadn’t thought of Glory—hadn’t allowed herself to think of her—in years.

Glory was gone. Long gone. And there was no coming back from there.

She busied herself with trying to find a way to bind, gag, and blindfold a six-year old. All their supplies were geared for adult sizes.

20

“Damn!” Snake slammed the heel of his palm against the Dataphone—in the Mayflower Hotel this time—nearly dislodging it from the wall.

He glanced around. One passerby through the lobby stopped to stare at him for a second, then passed on. Probably thought he was talking to his stockbroker.

He shackled his rage. After all, he went online through these hotel phones to avoid detection. The last thing he wanted to do here was make a scene. But damn, he really wanted to punch his gloved fist through the Dataphone’s blue screen.

He reread the Vanduyne e-mail on his Thinkpad screen one more time, just to be sure he wasn’t seeing things, then saved the message to his hard drive.

The kid’s a goddamn epileptic! All that primo inside information on Vanduyne and his brat but not one rotten mention of epilepsy, or medicine.

A defective package—the worst!

Served him right for getting involved with someone he didn’t know. In the first place, he never would have touched an upright citizen; in the second, never an upright citizen’s kid; and third, he’d never pick up a sick package—anything could go wrong.

So what did he have on his hands now? An upright citizen’s sick kid.

He wanted to scream. He wanted to— He disconnected and walked away from the phone bank before he did something stupid. When he was cooler, he came back to another phone and punched in Salinas’s private number.

“Il Giardinello.” Snake had expected to hear Salinas’s butt boy. Alien Gold. But this voice was thickly accented.

“It’s me,” he said, snarling. “Tell your boss the package has been picked up but it’s defective. Tell him I want to talk to him now.”

“Defective? What do—?”

“I’ll tell him. I’m only going to explain it once.”

“Hold on.”

Snake waited what seemed like a long time before the guy came back on the line. “He is not here right now, but he is on his way in. He says to give me your number and wait there. He will call you back as soon as he arrives.”

Snake read off the number on the phone and hung up; then he sat back and waited. He calmed himself. No snarling during his next conversation. He didn’t like Carlos Salinas, didn’t trust him, and wouldn’t be working with him if he thought he had a choice, but you didn’t snarl at a guy who had his fingers in most of the drug trade east of the Mississippi.

21

It stank in here. Carlos Salinas could barely breathe in the thick, wet, sulfurous air. And the glare from the overhead bank of 600-watt sodium lamps spiked his eyes through his sunglasses.

And yet, Carlos Salinas was impressed. Deeply impressed.

He’d come to this tiny apartment in Southeast D.C. to inspect a business opportunity. Instead he’d found… a miracle.

“Behold my own dwarf hybrid,” said their host, a thin, bearded, middle-aged ex-hippie who wore a cowboy hat and referred to himself only as “Jeff.” Carlos knew he was really Henry Walters, age 45, who lived off Dupont Circle and had been an independent drug dealer—strictly hallucinogens—for most of his adult life. “I call it Lizard King Indica Hybrid. Look at those buds, will you? I cloned out these babies barely six weeks ago and you could start your harvest right now.”

Carlos stared at the “sea of green”— Jeff’s term— and marveled. The entire front room had been taken over by eighteen-inch plants with serrated leaves and hairy tops—“calyxes,” Jeff called them—waving back and forth in the gentle breeze from a trio of oscillating fans. They clustered in children’s plastic swimming pools that in turn sat on metal platforms. Shades, duct tape, and heavy drapes sealed the windows. Rubber tubing snaked from plant to plant, supplying water and fertilizer; heaters warmed their roots from below while the sodium lamps above bathed them in artificial sunlight twelve hours a day. A large metal tank kept the air rich in carbon dioxide for maximal growth.

“And the beauty part of the operation,” Jeff said, “is it’s all computerized. The whole room is rigged with sensors that monitor light, temperature, humidity, CO2, and water levels. The computer’s modem allows me to keep tabs on every one of my seas of green from a phone booth, and a smart interface lets me make adjustments over the wire. I’ve rigged the place with motion detectors so I know if someone’s broken in. And last, all my computers are infected with Deicide, a virus that wipes out the hard drive should the wrong dude try to access it.”

“You appear to have thought of everything,” Carlos said.

Inside his suit he was bathed in sweat. A man of his weight should not frequent jungles, even indoors. Yet despite his discomfort, he was almost mesmerized by the gentle swaying of the leaves and calyxes. They seemed almost… happy. Where had plants ever been treated so well?

A wave of nostalgia engulfed him for an instant. His first brush with the drug trade had involved marijuana. Many moonless nights on the beach west of Cartagena, transferring bale after bale of Colombian Red from trucks to trawlers bound for the Gulf Coast of the United States. The “square groupers,” as they were known, were the most profitable “catch” for those crews in the early seventies when America’s domestic marijuana was so poor.

Smuggling… it was in his blood. After all, he was a paisa. His ancestors had left the Basque regions of Spain in the 1600s and settled in the Andes, in Antioquia Province around what would later become the city of Medellin. When Spain fixed the price of gold in Colombia, his forebears smuggled it out to Jamaica where they got the higher market price. Down the centuries it became an Antioquian tradition: Sneak out coffee, emeralds, and quinine; smuggle electronics, appliances, and perfumes back in past the rapacious import duties.

True to another paisa tradition, his father had kicked him out at age sixteen, telling him: If you succeed, send money; if you fail, don’t come back.

He had succeeded.

“Yeah, the technology’s great,” Jeff was saying, drawing Carlos back to the present, “but it’s the plants that are truly awesome—four pounds of top-grade sensemilla per hundred. This ain’t no Maui Zowie, you know what I mean? The stuff I started smoking in the sixties was maybe one percent THE. Lizard King is connoisseur stuff, man—tests opt to fourteen percent. An absolutely bodacious high. Brings down a minimum of five hundred bucks an ounce.”