I don't know what else to call it. Governments all over the planet, even the so-called democracies, have trounced on individual rights in order to be able to better compete in a cut-throat globalized economy, using the excuse of battling terrorism. That only means that an honest crook really has a harder time now. He smiled at the oxymoron. He had always worked in the twilight zone between legal and illegal. He mostly followed the rules but was not above bending them. The latter was so much easier to do in a democracy. But with the countries that had never quite made it, like Colombia, there were many more rules. Nowadays, though, even the US and the tattered remains of the EU were more fascistic than democratic.

His plane circled the city once and then came in to land at El Dorado Airport. When he built it in the 1950s, the dictator Rojas Pinilla had been criticized for extravagance since, at the time, it seemed a monster. Over the years it still had required many improvements and expansions, becoming a small city itself. Colombia's legal industries of manufactured goods, oil, coffee, and other crops (it was the world's biggest rose grower) all required air transportation because the overland routes to the ports of Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast and Buenaventura on the Pacific were windy, torturous roads through two chains of Andes, rain forests, and guerrilla territory.

As always, his limo was waiting. An uneventful ride into the city brought him into the old colonial section of Santa Fe de Bogotá with its narrow streets and throngs of city dwellers. Everyone was dressed in a dark business suit. Both the Colombian stock market and government offices were nearby.