‘Look, Henry-‘
‘Settle down, everybody.’ Piaggi looked at the eight kilos of material on the table before turning back to Tucker. ‘I’d love to know where you get this stuff.’
‘I’m sure you would, Tony, but we already talked about that. Can you handle it?’
‘You gotta remember, once you start this sort of thing, it’s kinda hard to stop it. People depend on you, kinda like what do you tell the bear when you’re outa cookies, y’know?’ Piaggi was already thinking. He had contacts in Philadelphia and New York, young men – like himself, tired of working for a mustache with old-fashioned rules. The money potential here was stunning. Henry had access to – what? he wondered. They had started only two months before, with two kilograms that had assayed out to a degree of purity that only the best Sicilian White matched, but at half the delivery price. And the problems associated with delivery were Henry’s, not his, which made the deal doubly attractive. Finally, the physical security arrangements were what most impressed Piaggi. Henry was no dummy, not some upstart with big ideas and small brains. He was, in fact, a businessman, calm and professional, someone who might make a serious ally and associate, Piaggi thought now.
‘My supply is pretty solid. Let me worry about that, paisan.’
‘Okay.’ Piaggi nodded. ‘There is one problem, Henry. It’ll take me a while to get the cash together for something this big. You should have warned me, man.’
Tucker allowed himself a laugh. ‘I didn’t want to scare you off, Anthony.’
‘Trust me on the money?’
A nod and a look. ‘I know you’re a serious guy.’ Which was the smart play. Piaggi wouldn’t walk away from the chance to establish a regular supply to his associates. The long-term money was just too good. Angelo Vorano might not have grasped that, but he had served as the means to meet Piaggi, and that was enough. Besides, Angelo was now crab shit.
‘This is pure stuff, same as before?’ Morello asked, annoying both of the others. .
‘Eddie, the man isn’t going to trust us on the cash and fuck us at the same time, is he?’ Piaggi asked.
‘Gentlemen, let me tell you what’s happening here, okay? I got a big supply of good stuff. Where I get it, how I get it, that’s my business. I even got a territory I don’t want you fooling with, but we ain’t bumped heads yet on the street and we’ll keep it that way.’ Both of the Italians nodded, Tucker saw. Eddie dumbly, but Tony with understanding and respect. Piaggi spoke the same way:
‘You need distribution. We can handle that. You have your own territory, and we can respect that, too.’
It was time for the next play. ‘I didn’t get this far by being stupid. After today, you guys are out of this part of the business.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, no more boat rides. I mean you guys don’t handle the material anymore.’
Piaggi smiled. He’d done this four times now, and the novelty had already worn off. ‘You have no argument from me on that. If you want, I can have my people take deliveries whenever you want.’
‘We separate the stuff from the money. We handle it like a business,’ Tucker said. ‘Line of credit, like.’
‘The stuff comes over first.’
‘Fair enough, Tony. You pick good people, okay? The idea is we separate you and me from the drugs as much as possible.’
‘People get caught, they talk,’ Morello pointed out. He felt excluded from the conversation, but wasn’t quite bright enough to grasp the significance of that.
‘Mine don’t,’ Tucker said evenly. ‘My people know better.’
‘That was you, wasn’t it?’ Piaggi asked, making the connection and getting a nod. ‘I like your style, Henry. Try to be more careful next time, okay?’ .
‘I spent two year’s getting this all set up, cost me a lot of money. I want this operation to run for a long time, and I’m not taking any more chances than I have to anymore. Now, when can you pay me off for this load?’
‘I brought an even hundred with me.’ Tony waved towards the duffel bag on the deck. This little operation had grown with surprising rapidity as it was, but the first three loads had sold off for fine prices, and Tucker, Piaggi thought, was a man you could trust, insofar as you could trust anyone in this line of work. But, he figured, a rip would have happened already if that was what Tucker wanted, and this much drugs was too much for a guy running that kind of setup. ‘It’s yours to take, Henry. Looks like we’re going to owe you another … five hundred? I’ll need some time, like a week or so. Sorry, man, but you kinda sandbagged me this way. Takes time to front up that much cash, y’know?’
‘Call it four, Tony. No sense squeezing your friends first time out. Let’s generate a little goodwill at first, okay?’
‘Special introductory offer?’ Piaggi laughed at that and tossed Henry a beer. ‘You gotta have some Italian blood in you, boy. Okay! We’ll do it like you say, man.’ Just how good is that sapply of yours, Heary? Piaggi couldn’t ask.
‘And now there’s work to do.’ Tucker slit open the first plastic bag and dumped it into a stainless-steel mixing bowl, glad that he wouldn’t have to trouble himself with this mess again. The seventh step in his marketing plan was now complete. From now on he’d have others do this kitchen stuff, under his supervision at first, of course, but starting today Henry Tucker would start acting like the executive he had become. Mixing the inert material into the bowl, he congratulated himself on his intelligence. He’d started the business in exactly the right way, taking risks, but carefully considered ones, building his organization from the bottom up, doing things himself, getting his hands dirty. Perhaps Piaggi’s antecedents had started the same way, Tucker thought. Probably Tony had forgotten that, and forgotten also its implications. But that wasn’t Tucker’s problem.
* * *
‘Look, Colonel, I was just an aide, okay? How many times do I have to tell you that? I did the same thing your generals’ aides do, all the littler dumb stuff.’
‘Then why take such a job?’ It was sad, Colonel Nikolay Yevgeniyevich Grishanov thought, that a man had to go through this, but Colonel Zacharias wasn’t a man. He was an enemy, the Russian reminded himself with some reluctance, and he wanted to get the man talking again.
‘Isn’t it the same in your air force? You get noticed by a general and you get promoted a lot faster.’ The American paused for a moment. ‘I wrote speeches, too.’ That couldn’t get him into any trouble, could it?
‘That’s the job of a political officer in my air force,’ Grishanov dismissed that frivolity with a wave.
It was their sixth session. Grishanov was the only Soviet officer allowed to interview these Americans, the Vietnamese were playing their cards so carefully. Twenty of them, all the same, all different. Zacharias was as much an intelligence officer as fighter pilot, his dossier said. He’d spent his twenty-odd-year career studying air-defense systems. A master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in electrical engineering. The dossier even included a recently acquired copy of his master’s thesis, ‘Aspects of Microwave Propagation and Diffusion over Angular Terrain’, photocopied from the university archives by some helpful soul, one of the unknown three who had contributed to his knowledge of the Colonel. The thesis ought to have been classified immediately upon its completion – as would have happened in the Soviet Union, Grishanov knew. It was a very clever examination of what happened to low-frequency search-radar energy – and how, incidentally, an aircraft could use mountains and hills to mask itself from it. Three years after that, following a tour of duty in a fighter squadron, he’d been assigned to a tour of duty at Offutt Air Force Base, just outside Omaha, Nebraska. Part of the Strategic Air Command’s war-plans staff, he’d worked on flight profiles which might allow American B-52 bombers to penetrate Soviet air defenses, applying his theoretical knowledge of physics to the practical world of strategic-nuclear war.
Grishanov could not bring himself to hate this man. A fighter pilot himself, having just completed a regimental command in PVO-Strany, the Soviet air-defense command, and already selected for another, the Russian colonel was in a curious way Zacharias’s exact counterpart. His job, in the event of war, was to stop those bombers from ravaging his country, and in peace to plan methods of making their penetration of Soviet air space as difficult as possible. That identity made his current job both difficult and necessary. Not a KGB officer, certainly not one of these little brown savages, he took no pleasure at all in hurting people – shooting them down was something else entirely – even Americans who plotted the destruction of his country. But those who knew how to extract information did not know how to analyze what he was looking for, nor even what questions to ask – and writing the questions down would be no help; you had to see the man’s eyes when he spoke. A man clever enough to formulate such plans was also clever enough to lie with enough conviction and authority to fool almost anyone.