The Evening News by Arthur Hailey Page A

elderly man carrying a suitcase emerged. He went into the house and remained there. The newcomer's unexpected presence meant a complication and prompted a call by cellular phone to the watchers' temporary headquarters some twenty miles away . Their efficient communications and ample transport typified an operation on which expense had not been spared. The conspirators who had inspired and organized the surveillance and what was to follow were expert, resourceful and had access to plenty of money . They were associates of Colombia's Medellin cartel, a coalition of vicious , criminal, fabulously wealthy drug lords. Operating with bestial savagery , the cartel had been responsible for countless violent, bloody murders including the 1989 assassination of Colombian presidential candidate Senator Luis Carlos Gal6n. Since 19 81 more than 220 judges and court officials had been murdered, plus police, journalists and others. In 1986 , a Medellin alliance with the socialist-guerrilla faction M-19 resulted in a killing orgy of ninety deaths, including half the members of Colombia's Supreme Court . Despite the Medellin cartel's repulsive record, it enjoyed close ties with the Roman Catholic Church. Several cartel bosses boasted private chapels . A cardinal spoke favorably of Medellin's people and a bishop blandly admitted taking money from drug traffickers . Murder was not the only process by which the cartel ruled. Large-scale bribery and corruption financed by the drug lords ran like a massive cancer through Colombia's government, judiciary, police and military, beginning at topmost levels and filtering to the lowest. A cynical description of the drug trade's standard offer to officialdom was plata o plomo-silver or lead . For a while, through 1989 and 1990 during a wave of horror following the Galin assassination, cartel leaders were inconvenienced by law enforcement efforts against them, including some modest intervention by the United States. A retaliatory response, accurately described by the drug conspirators as "total war ,” involved massive violence, bombings and still more killings, a process which seemed certain to continue. But survival of the cartel and its ubiquitous drug trade-perhaps. with fresh leaders and bases-was never in doubt . In the present instance, while operating undercover in the United States , Medellin was working not for itself but for the Peruvian Maoist-terrorist organization Sendero Luminoso, or "Shining Path .”
    Recently in Peru, Sendero Luminoso had grown more powerful while the official government became in- creasingly inept and weak. Where once Sendero's domain had been limited to the Andes Mountains, Huallaga Valley and centers like Ayacucho and Cuzco , nowadays its bombing teams and assassination squads roamed the capital city, Lima . Two strong reasons existed for linkages between Sendero Luminoso and the Medellin cartel. First, Sendero customarily employed outside criminals to conduct kidnappings which were frequent in Peru, though not widely reported by the American media. Second, Sendero Luminoso controlled most of Peru's Upper Huallaga Valley where sixty percent of the world's coca crop was grown. The coca, in leaf form, was converted to coca paste-the basis of cocaine-and afterward flown from remote airstrips to the Colombian cartels . In the whole process drug money contributed heavily to Sendero finances , the group exacting a substantial tribute both from coca growers and traffickers-the Medellin connection among them . Now, in the surveillance Chevrolet, the two Colombian hoodlums were searching through a collection of Polaroid photos which Carlos, an adept photographer, had taken of all persons seen to have entered the Sloane house during the past four weeks. The elderly man who had just arrived was not among them . Julio, on the telephone, spoke in code phrases .” A blue package has arrived. Delivery number two. The p ackage is in storage. We cannot trace the order