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heroin
would absorb the ricin nicely.”
    Barker
scratched his head. “Heroin bricks are much like cocaine bricks. They’re a
chalky substance and weigh about a kilo each when they come out of the hills.
The bricks are actually made up of morphine hydrochloride, a fine white powder
that they press and dry in the sun before they take it out for more processing
where they have real chemists. That’d be Hong Kong in that part of the world.”
    Culler
and Mac exchanged glances. Anyone using the tainted heroin would die, and many
of the users would be innocent people. Well, maybe not so innocent. They were
contributing to the drug trade, but they weren’t actually profiting from the
drug trade. They were simply users. Could they afford this kind of collateral
damage, and if not, was there an alternative—one that would still allow the
operation to succeed? They were on the horns of a dilemma.
    Mac
broke the silence. “I don’t know if we can afford to do this. We’ll be killing
a lot of innocent people. Isn’t there a better alternative?”
    “None
that I can see.” Barker was leaning over the bar toward them, studying his
nearly empty coffee cup. “Not if y’all want to succeed in this.”
    “You
know my thoughts on the subject,” Culler said to Mac. “This is war and in war
you’ve got to accept some collateral damage, and anyone dumb enough to be
shooting up on heroin doesn’t deserve to live anyway.”
    “Okay,
okay,” said Mac. “Tell you what. Bill, go ahead and mix up a batch of ricin for
us. Fill up a dozen or so syringes for injection, so we can put a couple cc’s
into each kilo brick. Then put’em into our shipment with the other stuff. We
can decide later whether to use them or not.”
    “I
can certainly do that. But I’d better dilute the ricin a bit so it can absorb
better into the bricks. If we put only a couple of cc’s into each brick, it
might not saturate enough of the brick to do the job. How about I make up about
fifty syringes of about ten cc’s each?  If you inject five cc’s into each
brick in two or three places, it should do the trick nicely and be totally
unnoticeable. After all, the shit is going to have to go through another
refining process anyway when it gets to the chemists. That ought to spread out
the ricin really good.”
    Mac
looked over at the unperturbed Santos and said, “Okay, let’s go with it. Go
ahead and assemble all of the gear and the ricin and get it ready for shipment
to your contact in Thailand. Now we’ve got to hit the road.”
    “Don’t
ya want to shoot them weapons and check out the night vision gear.” Barker was
clearly disappointed.
    “I’m
sure everything will work just as advertised. We should get back,” said Mac.
    Barker
called to Ruth who was watching TV in another room. She joined them at the bar
and they said their goodbyes.
    Culler
and Mac spoke very little on the drive back to Ft. Lauderdale. Culler dozed in
the passenger seat listening to his music on his I-Pod, while Mac was left
alone with his thoughts. Knowing Maggie would not approve of what was being
planned, he was not looking forward to the inevitable confrontation.
     
     
     
    Chapter Eighteen
     
     
    I t
was after midnight when they got back home to Ft. Lauderdale. Mac dropped off Culler
at his apartment and drove east toward home. He entered the access code at the
entrance of a new gated community a few blocks from the ocean and drove through
the gates down a tree-lined winding road to the two-story Mediterranean town
home he had purchased shortly after his separation from the Agency.
    The
house was dark and lonely. He turned on the TV for noise, showered, brushed his
teeth and went straight to bed. He didn’t like to sleep alone, but being single
meant he did it a lot. The scent of his most recent girlfriend, Cindy Keskiner,
a bright, attractive psychiatric nurse at Ft. Lauderdale General Hospital, was
still on the sheets and pillow. He wished she were there now and