The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman by Stephen Leather Page A

wooden leg gets caught trying to drive his Morris Minor off the Channel ferry with a boot full of cannabis. At the touch of a button CEDRIC will spill the beans on how many midgets are involved in smuggling, how many have only one eye, if any are dead ringers for Long John Silver and if any are to be found sitting on a pile of cushions at the wheel of a Morris Minor. You get the picture? But CEDRIC is a victim of the truism faced by all the miracles of silicon chip technology – garbage in, garbage out. The information that comes out is only as good as the facts that are fed into it. And nowhere within CEDRIC’s memory banks was the name Laing, Ronnie, and there was no mention of a blue Rolls-Royce Corniche with a white soft top and personalized number plates. Tap in a description of a tall, willowy, middle-aged man with blond hair, deep set blue eyes, green-rimmed glasses, a wide gold band on his wedding finger, maybe include his passion for young girls, and CEDRIC might give you a handful of near misses but the one thing he wouldn’t give you is Laing, Ronnie, because Laing, Ronnie, had never been caught with so much as an aspirin in his possession, in fact Laing, Ronnie, had never been caught period.
            He arranged to bring drugs into the country, he financed drug deals, he sold drugs on to wholesalers, but he never came within sniffing distance of anything that would raise the eyebrows of a lab assistant in a police forensic laboratory. Most of the cash he made went straight into Channel Island banks and was then laundered through Kyle’s expanding business empire, so he didn’t even have to account for suitcasefuls of fifty-pound notes in his Hampstead home. Ronnie Laing was now way past the stage where he had to finance supermarket robberies to make a quick killing.
            The chances of the long arm of the law grabbing Laing by the silk collar were slimmer than a turkey’s of surviving Christmas. He was insulated at two levels: a courier brought the drugs in and a middle-man, either trusted or scared witless, would handle the arrangements, never ringing Laing, only speaking when spoken to. On the few occasions a deal had gone sour it was only the couriers who ended up getting caught, and they knew it was more than their lives were worth to talk.
            Getting drugs into Britain is a lot easier than most people think. From the simple trick of using false-bottomed suitcases to swallowing condoms full of heroin, much of it simply walks through the green ‘nothing to declare’ channel with throngs of sunburnt holidaymakers.
            The customs can’t and don’t search everybody and a professional courier at work is harder to spot than a Herpes carrier. A sniffer dog is only good for fifteen minutes before getting bored, or stoned, or both. The West German police reckon they can train a wild boar to do the job all day long, but the British depend on the services of just twenty-nine dogs, which equals about seven hours concentrated sniffing a day. Not much of a deterrent.
            Getting the drugs over on the Channel ferries is even easier, which is why undercover drugs police officers pose as passengers, hoping that couriers will relax their guard while in the ship’s bars and restaurants. No, they don’t catch many, which is hardly surprising. If your car’s sills were packed with heroin you’re hardly likely to offer the barman a few grams in exchange for a double vodka and tonic and a packet of pork scratchings.
            There’s always the possibility that a zealous customs officer might take it into his head to drill a hole in the sills, just on the off chance, so a better way is to dissolve the drug, especially cocaine, in warm alcohol and soak it into the carpets of the car, maybe into the upholstery and the car blanket as well for good measure. Dry them out, drive through customs and then extract the drug with more warm alcohol. Filter, evaporate off the alcohol and