He looked up at Condley, his face again tight with an undefined anxiety, and pulled a map from his folder, laying it on the table. “All right, I don’t know why they gave me the authority to tell you this, but here’s the deal. For years the Thais have turned their backs on what I guess we’d have to call a drug highway that runs through their country, connecting opium grown in Burma—or, what the hell, Myanmar, I guess we call it now—to export outlets in Viet Nam.”

Archer began running his hand over the map as he spoke. “The Burmese end of it has been run by a couple of warlords just off the western border of Thailand. Generally in this area, right here. They grow it, harvest it, and process it into heroin in their own labs. Very sophisticated operation. They then transport it through Thailand and turn it over to the Vietnamese side right here in Bangkok.”

“How do they transport it?” interrupted Condley.

“Trucks,” shrugged Archer. “At night.”

“Avoid the rush hour,” said Muir. “Sort of like UPS.”

“Exactly like UPS,” said Archer, returning to the map. “The Vietnamese pick it up in Bangkok, shoot along the highway across the Cambodian border and then down to Sai Gon, keep some of it for their trouble, and ship the rest out of Sai Gon Harbor to parts unknown.”

“Load and reload?” asked Condley.

“No load or reload. They swap the trucks on every trip, two trucks each direction,” said Archer. “The Burmese drivers get out of the loaded trucks, the Vietnamese drivers pay for the load and get in. The Vietnamese drivers take the new load of heroin into Viet Nam, the Burmese take the money and the empty trucks back to, whatever they call it, Myanmar, and the beat goes on. It all happens pretty fast, in the middle of the night.”

“Why don’t you stop it?” Muir, incredulous, asked the question.

“Lots of payoffs inside the Thai government and among some very powerful families,” said Archer immediately. “Some pretty important people involved. Same in Viet Nam. This isn’t an action that’s actually supported by either government, but some highly influential people have been getting rich off it. Megarich. The official position of the Thai government is that it isn’t happening at all. And their quiet position to us is that it doesn’t really concern them directly, so they’d rather not get into a brawl with the Burmese on one side of them and the Vietnamese on the other. Kind of like airspace, except it’s roads. The stuff isn’t grown here, and it isn’t sold here. It just passes through.”

“Not to mention that stopping it would, shall we say, reduce the revenues of certain, as you called them, pretty important people?” quipped Muir.

“So Brandywine is involved,” said Condley.