Page 323 of The Black Trilogy

“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.

CHAPTER 10

AS I SIPPED one final gin and tonic on the plane, I ran through my story. I didn’t want to accuse Eduardo of anything, but at the same time, I needed to push him enough to get a genuine reaction when I told him one of the attackers gave my team his name. That was how I’d know whether he was mixed up in this.

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