The room was quiet.

Then the distinguished-looking silver-haired lady in the navy blue linen outfit raised her hand again. She looked clearly concerned.

“I’m sorry, everyone,” she said softly. “I seem to be taking over this meeting. But I have to ask: What would you say is the solution, Sergeant? Is there one?”

“Ma’am, I don’t begin to suggest I’m smart enough to have the answers. But there are highly intelligent people who have spent a lot of time studying exactly that. And, as part of that, they have stated the obvious: We could follow the model of Thailand.”

“I am not familiar with that,” the distinguished lady said.

“In 2003, Thailand began embracing Mao Zedong’s example. The Royal Thai Police reported that in a three-month crackdown, some twenty-two hundred drug runners were summarily shot and by year’s end another seventy thousand arrested. Those seventy thousand were lucky. Chairman Mao’s com munists, calling illegal drug users and suppliers social parasites, just outright killed them all.”

Professor Hargrove’s inbred buddy called out somewhat indignantly, “That’s never going to happen here.”

Byrth nodded. “I agree. Nor is the other option, what the economist Milton Friedman, among others, calls for-legalize drugs and end the war. Get rid of today’s Prohibition, which is what some of those on that side call it.”

“That won’t happen either,” the inbred buddy called out, this time somewhat disappointedly.

“And I agree again.”

“So, what do we do?” the silver-haired lady said softly.

Byrth was quiet a moment, before he answered with: “Dante said, ‘The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintained their neutrality.’ “And I agree with that,” Byrth said after another moment. “As well as with those who’ve said that the illegal drug problem is (a) not going away and (b) is going to get worse if we do nothing-that is, ‘maintain neutrality.’ And these brighter minds have said that the solution is very simple. The laws are already in place. Start with real border security. Start applying RICO-that’s the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which has been successful at so many levels. Use all the other laws on the books. And use those twenty-five billion dollars a year as funds to enforce the laws. Nothing more, nothing less.” He paused, and sighed audibly. “I believe I’ve overstayed my welcome up here. I’ll say one final thing: Continue your fine support of those in law enforcement. Thank you very much for your kind hospitality.”

He turned to Commissioner Coughlin. “And for your hospitality, Commissioner.”

He handed back the microphone to him.

The room, with the notable exception of Professor Hargove and his pal, erupted in applause. D. H. Rendolok was pounding his table and calling out, “Hear, hear!”

Coughlin said into the microphone, “If there are no other questions…” He waited a long moment, and when no one raised a hand or called out, he added, “Then we’re adjourned till next time. I hope to see everyone again then.”

As Payne was standing and taking a sip from his fresh drink, Professor Hargrove said in another stage whisper, “Better start next time without me. What unmitigated bullshit propaganda…”

Payne walked around to that part of his table, then suddenly found that his left shoe had become snagged on the thick woolen carpeting. Luckily, he caught himself and his very full cocktail glass from falling.

But it had been an absolute shame that his trip caused him to dump a perfectly good Famous Grouse onto the head of Professor Stanton Hargrove, the distinguished chair of Marsupialia Studies in the Biology Department of Bryn Mawr College. Some even managed to strike his inbred buddy.

X

[ONE] 4606 Hatcher Street, Dallas Wednesday, September 9, 9:06 P.M. Texas Standard Time There were only the women and children and teenagers now with Jorge Ernesto Aguilar and his TEC-9 in the kitchen of the old wooden house.

Almost all were either whimpering or outright sobbing. Each toddler, in nately understanding that something was terribly wrong with Momma, cried uncontrollably. The mothers made what limited efforts they could to try to soothe them. They could see that El Cheque was becoming more and more agitated by all the commotion.

Minutes earlier, Miguel Guilar, after grabbing the older male by the back of the shirt collar, had taken him and a length of medium-size chain and a lock back to the smallest of the house’s five bedrooms. Juan Paulo Delgado had done the same with the teenage boy, but had gone to the master bedroom, which he considered to be his room when in town. Both handcuffed men had protested loudly and made some effort to resist being moved. And both men had been quieted when struck on the side of the head with the black Beretta semiautomatic pistol.

And so began the women’s whimpering and sobbing and uncontrollable crying.

While it was the least of their immediate problems, the women could see that the house was squalid. It clearly had been a long time, easily years, since there had been any kind of upkeep-never mind preventative maintenance-performed on the sixty-year-old house. The same could be said for any house-cleaning. The dirty appliances in the kitchen had last been replaced when the fashionable color had been a dark avocado green. The single kitchen sink, chipped and rusty, was filled with filthy dishes and glasses. The countertop suffered the same misfortune as the floor-both had linoleum that had separated at the glued seams and both had places where the linoleum had been ripped away long ago, revealing the raw plywood beneath.

Dirt had actually piled up in the corner of the kitchen by the back door, where there was an industrial-size thirty-gallon plastic garbage can. The trash was overflowing.

The women had found that the bathrooms were no better. Worse, there was no running water. The toilet tank, which had no top, had to be filled manually from a heavy plastic ten-gallon water bottle.

And soon they would learn the same was true, if horribly worse in other ways, in the bedrooms.

In the master bedroom, Juan Paulo Delgado led the teenage boy to a back corner. The room was furnished with a somewhat new queen-size bed-it was Delgado’s bed, after all-a bedside table, and an older set of dresser drawers. A crudely cut sheet of plywood was nailed over the window.

Delgado kicked the boy’s feet out from under him. The teenager, unable to break his fall because his wrists were still zip-tied behind his back, yelled as he fell and struck the floor forcefully, smacking his head on the matted green shag carpeting. It stunned him to the point where he just lay there groaning softly.

Nearby, there was a black iron natural gas heater bolted to both the floor and the wall. Delgado began threading the chain around one of the heater’s iron feet, then took the two ends and made a single wrap around each of the teenager’s wrists. Then he took the small steel padlock and, removing all the slack in the chain so that the links squeezed the boy’s flesh, ran its hasp though the two loops of chain and snapped it shut.

He turned and walked over to the dresser, which had three rows of two drawers. He opened the bottom right one and was relieved that no one had touched his stuff. He removed a handheld digital voice recorder and a roll of duct tape.

He tossed the roll of tape over by the boy’s head.

He then walked over and put the recording device on the bedside table.

I’ll make two, Juan Paulo Delgado thought.

One with him making noise and one with his mouth taped shut.

Then Delgado went back out into the kitchen.

All eyes turned to him. He saw that the pretty girl in the tight jeans and pink shirt had fire in her eyes. Others’ eyes showed a mix of anger and fear. Clearly, everyone had heard the teenage boy’s yell and the sound of his fall, and then the quietness.