He glanced out the window at the streets of the city. The trip had been a long time coming, and he didn’t want anything to go wrong. He had put too much time into the preparation, and he knew that the administration was counting on bringing this in. Winning the war on drugs was one of the key planks of the president’s re-election campaign, and doing that started at the source. This—or rather, the jungles that made up the Amazonian rainforest—was where it all began.

State had promised the president that it would deliver the victory he had promised, and it was Cochrane’s job to get the ball rolling.

* * *

David Fitzpatrick watched as the cars honked at one another outside the tinted windows of his SUV. Bogotá was full of the hustle and bustle of a modern metropolis. Fitzpatrick knew enough about Colombian history to know that it had transformed over the course of the last thirty years. The influence of the narcotraficantes—Pablo Escobar and the Gentlemen of Cali and all the others—had waned from their apogee in the eighties and nineties, and, although cartel tentacles still slithered up from the jungles and slums of Medellín, it was much less overt today. But, Fitzpatrick knew, it was still there.

That was why he was so nervous.

“Anything?” Frank Probert said from the back.

“Looks clear.”

“You still shitting yourself?”

“You forget where we are? It’s Bogotá, man.”

Fitzpatrick would have preferred the meeting with the South Americans to have taken place behind the wire. He and Martinez had tried to persuade Cochrane that it needed to happen at the embassy, but the ambo had insisted that it had to be on Colombian turf. The optics were better with the Americans going to their hosts, he said, rather than insisting that the Colombians and Mexicans come to them. The accord had already been derided in the local press as evidence of revived gringo imperialism, and Cochrane had said that he didn’t want to make that worse.

“He’s stubborn,” Fitzpatrick said.

“Who?” Probert said. “Cochrane?”

“You know I told him this was a stupid idea?”

“I know he got hot at you.”

“You know what he said? ‘I’ve been travelling around the city every day for the last three months and nothing has happened.’ You believe that? I told him that the fact he had done a stupid thing with no consequences didn’t mean that doing that stupid thing would always have no consequences.”

“Maybe he was just lucky before.”

Fitzpatrick nodded. “That’s what I said.”

“And?”

“You know what he’s like. He just waved it off. I told him those times before were different. He wasn’t on his way to sign an accord that was practically a declaration of war on the cartels then, not like he is now.”

“And still no dice.”