Cocaine by Jack Hillgate

rubber-based grey paint and the walls were white-washed. There were no windows, just two fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling which illuminated a large steel work-table and four chairs. Racks similar to those at the university lined two walls, filled with a variety of packets, cartons, tubs and bottles, each with a cryptic handwritten label that I couldn’t read.
    Juan Andres placed approximately one gram of the pure cocaine that we had removed from the Universidad del Cauca ’s opthamology department onto a sterile Petri dish.
    ‘The control’, he said, ‘is close to one hundred per cent pure.’
    ‘You’re sure?’
    ‘ Si, claro. ’
    ‘Is code’, he told me. ‘No-one else know what they say.’
    ‘Which one’s the tropinone?’
    He pointed to a large tub and took it down from one of the racks. Inside were a number of sealed packets with a stamp from a US laboratory.
    ‘These are from where I think they're from…?’
    ‘ Si. We the only people doing this in my country, trust me.’
    ‘Of course. I mean, what’s the point, when you have the real thing growing in your back-yard?’
    ‘ Exactamente . No-one here know or care if there is artificial cocaine. Is only gringos like you.’
    He grinned at me. We were both enjoying this. I opened up my bag and pulled out a sheaf of notes.
    ‘ What’s this?’ he asked me.
    ‘ The danger in this whole business is the distribution', I answered confidently. 'The danger is the competition. If you make a different product, you’re not technically in competition with the people who distill it from the leaf. And if you have localized distribution, like a mobile laboratory, then you drive around and make it to order.’
    ‘ And you put the Cartels out of business, all by yourself?’
    ‘ It’s my plan. You can come with me. I'll need a bodyguard.’
    ‘ Hah! Dios mio !’
    ‘ The end user gets a hundred percent pure, every time, which we know they don’t if they buy from a source that’s ten steps down the supply chain. This is what I spent my last year doing. Dreaming up ways to make money.’
    ‘ Thass why you come to Colombia? You should have stay in Cambridge. Good laboratories. Famous university.’
    ‘ You think they wouldn’t perhaps be a little suspicious? Out here the dollar goes a long way plus we can perform quality control testing. You said five dollars for eighty per cent pura cocaine. ’
    ‘ Si .’
    ‘ Where?’
    ‘ Cartagena. In the north. Is beautiful. Nice chicas .’
    ‘ Kieran’ll like that.’
    ‘ You not tell Kieran about this?’
    ‘ Do you trust him?’
    ‘ I think he nice guy. He just want to find woman to have sex.’
    ‘ I know. Me too.’
    We both laughed, Juan Andres held up one of the sterile packets and the words ‘start-up capital’ popped into my head.
    I had five months before the investment bank in the City could claim me as one of their own.
    Five months to do it.

    ***

    We had walked for what seemed like ten miles, but it was probably only two. Kieran and Juan Andres were much fitter than I and so I lagged behind, clomping along a dusty road that seven months before had carried a funeral cortege going in the opposite direction. The road went up and up and then suddenly dipped, the rocks getting bigger and the land greener. We were descending now, descending into a valley, a green valley filled with row upon row of three-foot high greenery, regimented, ordered, fertile.
    The dust and the rocks slowed our progress. There was only the chirping of crickets to accompany us, their song blending into the shimmering heat and making me forget where I was. There were no telegraph poles, no wires, no aeroplanes, no cars. Nothing remotely mechanical or man-made apart from the regimented green rows beckoning us forward into the bosom of Juan Andres Montero Garcia’s family.
    ‘My name’, he said suddenly, stopping for a drink of water, ‘is not Juan Andres.’
    Kieran and I exchanged a quick look of ‘I told you