We Three Kings

His thin body was still shaking…but not from the cold.   Looking around at the four walls in this confined space, Joey could not tell if he was in a prison cell or a very bad hotel room.  There were no bars…no chill except from his nerves…no noise from a radio or TV…just quiet. 

          FBI Agent, George Sullivan, was leading the investigation and had intentionally isolated Joey Gondolfo in a fairly comfortable interrogation room, with a cot, wash basin and toilet facilities, as well as a table and two chairs, all of which were bolted to the floor. 

          “Let him stew about it a while, Jim.  I believe we will have our information before too long.  Let’s hope he even has enough information to help us.  Molini is not going to be of any use to us…old school tough guy…we will have to get it from the kid.  Keep an eye on him.”

          Jim Harrison glanced in through the one way glass and saw a wiry but extremely agitated young man sitting on the edge of the cot.  “He’s OK.  I will make sure he is watched.”  Harrison motioned with a wave of his hand to the Officer assigned to assist and the man immediately responded with a thumbs up.

          “We cannot keep this up much longer, Jim.  Wednesday afternoon we will make a hard move on the Gondolfo kid.  I think he will break…he is too young to spend his life in prison.  We can get him on accessory to murder, up to seven counts, several States involved.  That ought to shake him up, encourage him to give us something on Rubella.  Without the head man, it is just another drug bust.  I know Interpol would love to tie him to Saddam Akbar as well but the key to that will be the person who supplied Akbar.”

          Saddam Akbar had operated out of a palatial house in the implausible site of Umm Qasr in Southeastern Iraq.  His suppliers had been furnishing him top grade Opium from two plants in Afghanistan along the border with Iran, one near Herat and the other further South outside Zaranj.  Anderson’s Special Forces Unit, led by Hardin Kelly, had destroyed both sites so completely that Akbar was forced to deal with Anthony Riley again for the manufactured product, TR7, a less expensive and relatively undetectable chemical substitute for cocaine.

                                                   ***

          After their alacritous departure from the board meeting at the Jennings Pharmaceutical facility in San Francisco, Riley, Mandrake, together with his chemist, Sean Pfister and his pilot, Jim Dixon, fled to a previously arranged safe house on the Island of Ramkin off the coast of Tripoli.  That is where things started going wrong all over again for the erstwhile genius turned illicit drug manufacturer.  The lure of millions of dollars in profit for the sale of a relatively inexpensive combination of chemicals was too strong a temptation for the bitter Anthony Riley.

          Sean Pfister had set up his lab for producing additional product in the mansion on the Island, which also served as a residence for them.  When Riley pushed for immediate results, Pfister inadvertently miscalculated the simple application of water for dilution causing usage of the end product to result in severe hallucination and death.  When representatives of his two customers arrived on Ramkin to seek an equitable adjustment for their losses, Pfister did not survive.

      &nbs