Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

“Alexander, do you think you can find the man who killed my daughter?”

I looked at him, nodded.

“Find him, find who did it, Alex,” Colin said, his voice breaking.

“It might well be the man they have in custody,” I said.

“Find out the truth,” Mr. Patawasti said.

“I will,” I said.

Mrs. Patawasti and the boys left so Mr. Patawasti and I could agree on terms. He’d pay me three hundred quid a week plus my airfare and any other expenses I’d need. I tried not to see it as a way out of my difficulties. A case. I was working for a family friend. I was doing them a favor using the skills I’d learned in the peelers. Everything I’d promised myself never to do again. But it wasn’t me. It was altruism. Victoria. The fact that it would be the perfect excuse for getting out of Ireland, getting money, away from Douglas, away from the RUC, was beside the point.

I went home and read all the documents. Mr. Patawasti had given me Victoria’s personal effects, employment documents, apartment receipts, company personnel profile, a copy of the Denver County Police report. Victoria had been shot during a struggle in her apartment. According to her cleaning lady, a number of things were missing. The police theory was that the assailant, Hector Martinez, had botched the robbery, killed Victoria. During the struggle his Mexican driver’s license had fallen out of his jacket or trouser pocket. It was too soon for forensic evidence, but the circumstantial evidence was pretty good. He had two previous convictions for theft and had fled the jurisdiction once on a grand theft auto rap. He’d been living with his brother and they’d picked him up easily. Martinez’s lawyer, Enrique Monroe, had been denied bail for his client. Martinez was considered a flight risk. Pretty damning, but clearly the note writer believed they had the wrong man. Either that or he wanted to muddy the waters to get Mr. Martinez off or implicate someone else. Worth checking out. I called John and asked him to do some snooping for me, using the police computers.

John met me in Dolan’s that night. He was happy. I’d given him a lot to do.

“Ok, Alex. Envelope and letter normal office stuff. No help there. But the font is New Courier 2. An updated version of Courier that is only available on the latest packages of WordPerfect. It’s been out about three months and is only in office suite packages. No, don’t ask, I already checked. Victoria’s employers, the Campaign for the American Wilderness, do indeed run WordPerfect rather than Word. And yes, they have the latest release. However, so do tens of thousands of other businesses. Hundreds in Colorado. Tough getting through to CAW, spoke to a college student, they’re moving the whole office from Boulder to Denver, Denver’s not set up yet and they only have a skeleton staff. But anyway, yeah, it’s not impossible the note writer could be someone who worked with her in Boulder and printed it out there.”

I grinned at him. He’d done well. Everything I’d asked. If you kept John on message, he could be pretty efficient.

“Aye, well, that’s plenty, that’s more than enough, it’s up to me now,” I said.

“Listen, you’ve got to admit that I’ve been a help,” John began.

“Yeah,” I said suspiciously.

“Well, I’ve always wanted to go to America and the peelers owe me months of leave, and I work at the station only a day or two per month, for whatever reason,” John said.

“Maybe because of your stupid haircut, it looks like you should be on the cover of romance novels, not writing traffic tickets or—” I began but John cut me off.

“Let me finish, Alexander. My point is, I’ve been a big help to you, British Airways are doing two-for-one flights, you need me. I want to come with you,” John blurted out.

I looked at him. That big goofy face. Grinning. I didn’t see why not. He just might be able to help with the legwork. Watson to my Holmes. He was a peeler, after all, my best friend, and I didn’t want to go alone.

Blue meets blue at the curve of the Atlantic Ocean and the sky. America looming. An hour away. But I’m not here, I’m somewhere on the other side of the world.

The peaks, high valleys of the western Himalaya. The highest mountains on Earth. Formed fifty million years ago when India crashed into the continent of Asia and pushed them up.

I close my eyes and I can see them. Glaciers in Kashmir. Tarn lakes in Ladakh. Snow over the opium fields of the Hindu Kush.

I am crawling in my airplane seat. My body is craving heroin.

A village. Cooking fires. A weather-beaten old man down among his crop. He lovingly removes his penknife and scores the bud of the opium plant. The flower’s botanical name is Papaver somniferum . The Sumerians and ancient peoples of the Indus valley called it Hul Gil, the “flower of joy.” When the Aryans came to India, they discovered that the flower allowed you to see Brahma, the creator of the Universe.

Only a few weeks ago, red and yellow petals bloomed at the tips of tubular green stems. The old man is content. The petals have fallen away, but the plants have survived the snow. The egg-shaped seed pod is unharmed. Under the penknife an opaque, milky sap oozes out. This is the opium in its crudest form.

He calls his sons. The sap is extracted by slitting the pods vertically. On exposure to the high mountain air the sap turns darker and thicker, becoming a brownish-black gum. The family collects the gum, laughing, making a real harvest of it, the older boys molding it into bricks or cakes and wrapping them in plastic bags.

The big money isn’t in opium, but even so, the villagers are content to sell their crop to experts who will know what to do next. On a bright January day, a mule train shows up and takes the village supply of opium over the Afghan border and into Pakistan. The opium refinery is a rickety factory in a residential neighborhood of Lahore. The opium is mixed with lime in boiling water. The morphine is skimmed off the top, reheated with ammonia, boiled and filtered again. The brown morphine paste is heated with acetic anhydride for six or seven hours at 85 degrees centigrade. Water and chloroform are added to precipitate impurities. The solution is drained and sodium carbonate added to solidify the heroin. The heroin is filtered through charcoal and alcohol. Purification in the fourth stage, involving ether and hydrochloric acid, is notoriously risky and can blow up the lab. But assuming everyone survives, it is filtered again and stamped ready for shipping. The final fluffy white powder is known to everyone as number four. It has taken ten kilos of opium to make one kilo of heroin, but it’s worth it. One kilo of number four costs about a hundred thousand dollars.

The first person to process heroin was C. R. Wright, an English researcher who synthesized it in 1874 at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. He thought it was too dangerous to use. In 1897 Heinrich Dreser of the Bayer Pharmaceutical Company was presented with two new drugs, acetylsalicylic acid and diacetyl morphine: the first became known as aspirin, the second, heroin. Dreser tested both, deciding there was no future for the former, but the latter he called heroin, for it would be the “heroic” cure-all drug of the twentieth century.

From that heroin-refining factory in Lahore to a cargo flight carrying expensive cashmere shirts from Karachi to Newark Airport in the United States. It comes in under the noses of customs inspectors (who are too swamped to inspect every shipment of textiles from Pakistan to the United States) and makes its way to a warehouse in Union City, New Jersey. From Union City to a van traveling west.

The imaginary journey of my ketch. Aye, something like that or more likely a ship rather than a plane. But how to get it? I’m not fool enough to smuggle what’s left of my own supply with me. I have to get it in Denver. As soon as I get in. Fast. Now.