Gold stood near the window. He spread his hands and shrugged, offering his that’s-news-to-me expression.

“Damn right it is,” MacLaglen said. “Why didn’t anyone know about this?”

Good question, Carlos thought. He’d received excellent in-depth intelligence on the President and his doctor friend, all of it free. That something this important could have been overlooked annoyed him. Well, as the saying went, you get what you pay for.

“Or did somebody know about it,” MacLaglen was saying, and Carlos could hear the anger rising in his voice, “and neglect to tell me?”

“Calm yourself, Miguel. No one neglected to tell you anything. It was somehow missed. It is not, after all, something that one parades around. Certainly for a man of your talents this is not an insurmountable difficulty.”

“Don’t give me that. This is a major glitch. It shows incompetence right at the source. What else don’t we know, señor?”

“I have the utmost confidence in you, Miguel. I am certain everything will be fine.”

“This means more contact with the package’s point of origin. It broadens the interface. The more contact, the more chance of something going wrong.”

Carlos was growing impatient with MacLaglen. Time to put him in his place. “I have three words for you, Miguel: Deal with it.” Cold silence on the other end of the line. Carlos let it continue for a few seconds. He’d used the stick; now for the carrot.

“By the way,” he said cordially, “you are due the second installment. You may pick it up today, at which time I will inform you of phase two.”

“I’ll be over around five.” The line went dead.

“Manajate!” Carlos muttered as he hung up and swiveled toward Alien Gold. “Our friend is angry.”

“I’d say he’s got a damn good right to be,” Gold said. “It’s inexcusable. We should have been told.” He shrugged. “Could be worse, though. She could be a diabetic. Then MacLaglen would have to learn how to give insulin injections.”

Gold was right: It could be worse and it was inexcusable. Bad intelligence could ruin everything. Carlos wished he could mete out suitable punishment to the man responsible, but that was not possible—not to someone so high in the United States government.

“MacLaglen is arriving later to pick up his second installment. Have the cash ready.”

“Sure thing,” Gold said, making a note in his everpresent scratch pad.

“How many more installments?”

“One.”

Gold whistled. “He’ll need a wheelbarrow to cart that one out in cash.”

“He won’t see a penny of it until this is all over.”

“Come on, Carlos. What’s this kidnapping all about? What’s our goal here?”

“All in good time, Alien.” He wondered if he’d ever tell him that the goal was to see President Thomas Winston either dead or out of office.

Carlos sighed and leaned back in his chair. He pressed a button to start the automated low-back massage. Heat and gentle, padded pistons began to ease his perpetual backache. Ah, good.

He wished he didn’t have to shoulder this entire burden himself, but it was far too sensitive to entrust to anyone else, even Alien.

I should have refused, he thought. I should have kept my mouth shut when I heard about Thomas Winston’s legalization plans.

But how could he have kept silent? What threatened the drug trade threatened him. And threatened la compania even more.

If only he weren’t El Mediador.

He’d earned that title after the 1981 summit at Hacienda Veracruz.

Carlos had impressed Jorge Ochoa at that meeting—enough so that El Gordo called on him whenever la compania needed someone to quell the all too-frequent flare-ups between rival subgroups.

He became El Mediador—the top negotiator for la compania. He dealt with the low-down and high-up. He arranged with cara de Piña Noriega to set up cocaine labs in the jungles of southern Panama. Later he was paying the Sandanistas for the use of their airfields to refuel la compania’s cocaine-loaded planes. All along he took his fee in product, which he sold off through his own network in Miami. Life was good.

But then the so-called War of the Cartels broke out in 1988, and nothing could stop the bloodshed. Carlos tried to get the message into their thick heads that there were enough billions to go around, but no one was listening. His old friend Pablo Escobar went crazy, declaring war on the rival Cali cartel, and on the Colombian govern ment itself. Blood quite literally flowed in the streets of Medellm.

Carlos Salinas watched the carnage with growing dismay. He had a new wife then, the beautiful Maria, and he wished to keep her out of the line of fire. But what else did he know? He decided to trade on his reputation as El Mediador by going into an ancillary service.

But he needed guidance. When he learned of a young man named Alien Gold, fresh out of the Wharton MBA program, who’d been arrested in a cocaine sting operation, Carlos got him off and hired him. Through various fronts set up by Gold, Carlos began investing heavily in the stocks of small independent banks up and down the East Coast. When he gained controlling interests, he began maneuvering his own people onto the boards of directors.

The best move he’d ever made. Even while the war raged, the white powder flowed unabated—as did the profits. And all that tainted money needed sanitizing. Who better to trust than El Mediador, Carlos Salinas? And even after the Cali compania eclipsed Medellin, the negotiating skills of Carlos Salinas remained in demand.

In 1992, Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, a Cali leader, retained his services to help NAFTA get through Congress. Carlos moved to the Washington area and made sure money from the Cali compania got into the right pockets. Of course, he took his cut, and pocketed a bonus when the bill was signed into law.

Free trade… it was wonderful. No more need for offshore air strips and risky flights across the border. Now the Mexicans were moving truckloads of Colombian product into Texas every day.

And along the way Carlos Salinas discovered that Washington was much more convenient than Miami as a center of operations for his banking business, especially after all the high-placed friends he’d made here during the NAFTA legislative battles.

Life got better. The landscape of the cocaine trade was changing yearly, but so what? The cocaine princes came and went—Pablo Escobar was dead, and most of the leaders of the Cali compania were in jail—but Carlos Salinas remained. Did the jailings and killings affect the trade? Not by an ounce. The only result was the consolidation of the power of the Colombian companias into fewer hands—mostly into Emilio Rojas’s—but no matter. As long as drugs remained illegal, the profits would need laundering. And Carlos was here to help… for a cut.

But there would be no cut for this service. Instead he’d been offered a simple flat fee for stopping President Winston’s plan: one billion dollars.

And if he succeeded, he’d‘be more than mindnumbingly rich. He’d be a legend. If he succeeded.

No, don’t think if—think when. Because if he didn’t succeed…

Better not to think about that. Better to think about how this opportunity to become a legend had dropped into his lap exactly ten weeks ago when he received the first of a series of anonymous calls. The caller used a voice distorter, but Carlos eventually learned who he was. And was shocked. This was a man no amount of money could have bought, yet he was giving him information about the president’s plan.

At first Carlos did not believe him. Legalize drugs? All drugs? Impossible… unthinkable! Never happen. Had to be a trick, part of some weird scheme to entrap him.

He passed the story—along with his misgivings—to Emilio Rojas, the current head of the Cali compania.

Rojas scoffed at first, but he began making inquiries, tapping la Campania’s many sources, even in the White House itself.