XVI PROLOGUE

gray as he approaches forty. He has the look of a beach vacationer
cleaned up for a dinner out, in an oversize blue polo shirt and a
pair of khaki cargo shorts. His clothes seem out of keeping with
both the scope of his international influence and the deal he is about
to complete, with a man he believes to be the head of a South Amer-
ican drug cartel.

“Very easy,” replies the Colombian, whom Paul refers to only
as Pepe. In the video recording of the meeting, Pepe sits down just
offscreen, on a matching couch. His disembodied voice speaks in
flawless, if heavily accented, English.

“Very few people, not too many eyes. It looks like the right
place.”

“Trust me—what’s your name again?”

“Paul.”

“Paul, trust me, it’s the right place. I’ve been here already for
quite a bit of time. And always, me and my organization, we pick
places like this. First of all, for corruption. You can buy anything
you want here. Anything. You just tell me what you need.”

“Yeah, it’s safe here,” Paul says. “If there’s a problem here, you
can fix it. I understand this type of place.”

“Everything is easy here. Just hand to hand, boom boom boom,
you can see,” Pepe says, laughing. “Well, thanks to your guy here,
now we are meeting.” He gestures at the third man in the room,
the European employee of Paul’s who goes by the name Jack. It
was Jack who made the initial connection between Paul and Pepe.

The deal Jack brokered was complex enough that, when I meet
him years later, I need him to walk me through it several times.
The Colombians, who deal primarily in the cocaine produced in
their own country, are looking to expand into methamphetamine,
which they want to manufacture in Liberia and distribute to the
United States and Europe. Paul, a computer programmer who
heads his own kind of cartel based in the Philippines, will provide
the materials to build the Colombians’ meth labs: precursor chem-
icals, formulas for cooking them into meth, and a “clean room” in
which to synthesize it all. While the labs are being built, Paul has