The jaú floated virtually motionless, calmly anesthetized in the lab’s circular aquarium. Alan gazed with admiration at the powerful catfish, which nature had sculptured and adapted over eons of time. He then took a deep breath, gentled pulled the jaú to the side of the aquarium, rotated it, and used a scalpel to cut a small abdominal incision—careful to make the cut minimal enough to be easily and quickly sealed with the Fishglue® Instant Skin Compound for later return to the river.

Alan expected to see eggs spurt out, or at least see a visible egg mass. Nothing had prepared him for what he did see.

Alan starred, uncomprehending. Inside the tiny slit of his cut was seemingly a plastic bag. He cut a longer slit. It was indeed a plastic bag. A thick, transparent plastic bag filled with a gray powder.

Alan grabbed the fish behind the gills with two hands, and heaved it roughly over the side of the tank and onto the nearby table. He barely thought about the weight this time. He quickly cut open the entire length of the belly and pulled out the plastic bag.

Drugs. There was no doubt about it, he was looking at a carefully-placed plastic bag filled with illicit drugs. Cocaine, heroin? he wondered. Or perhaps a designer drug like SPEA—synthetic crystallized phenylethylamine—designed to mimic the amphetamine that saturates the brain when one falls in love, generating feelings of euphoria, giddiness, and energy, but all to often dependency, sleeplessness, anxiety, irrationality and death when taken concentrated. His wife had sought to recapture the highs with another; his daughter had fallen to the other side of the double-edged sword. Alan flung the plastic bag onto the digital scale—over eight kilos of the powder. Millions upon millions of dollars in front of him.

Alan noticed his hands were now shaking. He looked again inside the body cavity of the jaú and noted something else foreign. Protruding from the stomach was a thin, polyvinyl tube that led through a regulator to another plastic bag filled with an opaque liquid—a liquid that no doubt was dripping slowly into the stomach.

A metallic gleam caught Alan’s attention. He began to search with his fingers near the dorsal nerve cord, but, although his mind was now racing as that of an energized youth, his eyes still betrayed his true progression of years, blurring at that close distance. Alan reached for his glasses and was exasperated when he smeared the lenses with blood and slime from his fingers. He cursed his stubbornness that he’d never got his vision repaired. I belong to another era, like one of the Jabutians. When he finally began anew, he was quick to recognize the implant: a remotely-operated nerve blocker attached to some key nerves, just as with the dorado, making it easy to retrieve the fish. But how does it possibly….?

Alan realized he was hyperventilating, his heart pounding. I’m too tense. I have to calm down. He took a measured breath to settle himself, then another. He used the scalpel to carefully cut away the skin between the eyes and the nose of the jaú in his search for the superficial opthalimic ramus of the trigeminal nerve. With a dissecting microscope, he meticulously followed the fine branches of this ros V nerve to the select area within the olfactory lamellae. There was the glint of something shiny. Alan sectioned this area and stuck it under the low-power microscope.

Alan knew he wouldn’t see the components of the fish’s magnetic sensory system: the magnetoreceptors would be too small for detection by even a powerful light microscope, and too rare for an electron microscope. Even school children these days knew it didn’t take many of the tiny magnetite particles to give powerful magnetic field orientation. But Alan did see what he expected. There was evidence of some fine surgery work, tiny connectors to the ros V nerve, and some microchips—all in the area where he knew the magnetoreceptors were located. This fish was bioengineered for migration.

Scientists had figured out migration quite a while ago. But no one had ever considered mechanical implants to control migration. There had been no purpose to bioengineer a single, half-million dollar fish when there were simpler ways to effect migratory patterns. Just not enough return on the investment. Until now.

Alan sat down on a lab stool, marveling at the ingenuity of the designers. Here was a fish that one could control perfectly. A high-tech, living organism engineered to follow any desired route, any time of the year. One probably mechanically and perhaps genetically altered to maximize speed, taking a catfish body and giving it the constant thrust of a strong migratory fish, as if driven by the intense reproductive instinct. A fish thta could be collected when desired. Since the jaú was traveling during the daytime, it was no doubt bioengineered to travel continuously, day and night, until reaching its destination. A fish that didn’t even need to stop to eat, not with the feeding tube going into its stomach. It may be altered in many ways, Alan realized. He’d only seen the surface of what had been done.

This, thought Alan, is the perfect delivery system. It can travel silent and unseen through country borders, past police checkpoints, even beneath Coast Guard cruisers. Swimming under its own power, without need for external control via transmissions that easily could be detected. No dog sniffing, no chemical sensors, no high-tech equipment to discover the contraband. If perchance spotted, it is just a fish. A big fish, of course, one too big to be the prey of other fish, but a nice size to serve as a sort of cargo ship. You don’t need to trust the vagaries of human nature. You don’t need human mules. No panicking at checkpoints or at airport customs. A perfect delivery system.

Alan’s mind contemplated the possibilities. There may be many such jaú. They could be taking the drugs downstream, down to the Miranda River, which empties into the Paraguay River, which becomes the Parana. Which goes all the way to the estuary near Buenos Aires.

How many days to Buenos Aires? wondered Alan. What is it, two thousand kilometers? Twenty-five hundred kilometers? Alan knew about reports of Prochilodus migrating fifty kilometer per day in the Parana River, but that was only the cruising speed—the leisurely travel rates with detours and feeding. Not the much higher sustainable speed that can be maintained for lengthy intervals. And these were bioengineered. Maybe he should be comparing the jaú to faster species, maybe even the salmons with a sustainable speed close to thirteen kilometers per hour. Without the need to feed or rest, these jaú theoretically could travel three hundred kilometers per day. And this jaú was not only specially engineered, but when delivering drugs was going with the current—not against it like other migrations!

How many days to Asuncion, Paraguay? pondered Alan. Traveling day and night? Traveling with the very strong Paraguay River current? Maybe two days? To Buenos Aires, maybe five days, maybe a week?

And once in the estuary in Buenos Aires, Alan surmised the drugs could be transferred to a fast ocean-going species like a tuna or marlin, which could transport the cargo unseen and undetected to the four corners of the world. The possibilities were endless.

Alan remembered the only non-gravid jaú he’d spotted in the recordings; it had been going upstream. Probably headed back to the distribution point. The others were headed downstream, delivering the drugs. Properly controlled, the jaú could hang idly around either site until activated for retrieval. Only one, well-paid and trusted person—or fearful person—needed to know anything about the delivery system at each major distribution and collection center. With the push of a button, evidence disappears—or keeps swimming until the crisis is over. The rivers are once again the main commercial highways, even in this age of space travel.

The drug cartels, part of a now-unified Syndicate, had played this one brilliantly. No wonder they had poured so much money into the campaign to restrict commercial and even sport fishing. After all, people knew there was organized crime money involved— the “legitimate Dons” made a point of showing how generous they were in supporting environmental causes and saving our planet. They were really protecting their interests. They didn’t want any “cargo ship” caught by accident.

Alan was riveted by the genius of the operation. Just as he was equally impressed with himself. He chuckled as he thought of some famous movie actor portraying his fearlessness in the face of danger, depicting how he brilliantly dissected the Syndicate’s scheme. How he, in this remote wilderness, had …

Cartels! Syndicate! Alan’s body suddenly seized with tension. He felt nearly paralyzed as he opened up the fish’s interior once more. He found it, of course. A tiny transmitter attached to the lower vertebrae. Alan recognized it right away: his dorado had its own transmitter. If he failed to turn his research specimen back to his biotech supplier, Projeto Peixe, or if the dorado escaped, then a satellite or land scanner could be activated, and the exact location specified. Or the government could execute one of their checks to see that he was operating in his permitted area.

This transmitter in the jaú was different; a model he hadn’t seen. Likely, Alan speculated, one that could either be remotely activated or timed to transmit at a particular time for a few, brief cycles of the wave output. Just enough to locate the fish and make sure it was correctly on route. To an outside agency monitoring transmissions, just a brief artifact. Not like the long-range miniature airplanes and other remote-control drug delivery devices that the police were continually intercepting because of the external transmissions. The jaú was different. It traveled under its own power, silently and steadily on its water highways. At most an occasional tweak for motivation or directional adjustment.

And it could be recovered quickly if a major problem should appear. A major problem like a poor fisherman in Jabuti snagging one.

The immediacy of Alan’s situation was not lost on him. I’ve got to get out of here. Should I drive to Sao Paulo? No. The Syndicate will track me. There are too powerful. Too many nearly empty two lane roads between here and the highways. Two many checkpoints. Two many informants on the way. I will never make it alive. Call the police? Yes… No! Of course, not! The local Brazilian police are notoriously unreliable. Particularly if the drugs are being manufactured or processed near here, then I can assume the local police are bought off.

I’ve got to get rid of the fish. They could be monitoring it even now. I need to dump it back into the river. Into the Miranda River, some distance from the Satobra. There is no police check point between here and there.

Alan cut the jaú into pieces, stuffed it into four garbage bags, and transported the bags to the bed of his 4×4. He locked the metal topper encasing the truck bed, though it was pointless. If the police stopped him, they would ask to unlock the cap anyway. The steel cap might be an effective deterrent to thieves wishing to lift equipment from the bed of his truck when he stopped someplace; it wouldn’t deter the police from opening it and finding the bags and handcuffing him. Probably to hold him until the Syndicate arrived.

From the dirt road to the paved two-lane, Alan interlaced three thoughts: drive fast, miss the potholes, stay alive. This is crazy, he told himself. I’m 59 years old! What in the world am I panicked for? His reasoning didn’t help. He was petrified, hyperventilating. This was, after all, the Syndicate.

Within fifteen minutes he was at the nearest bridge spanning a narrow, but deep and fast part of the Miranda. He looked out into the darkness for any sign of other cars, or movement of any kind. Then he quickly got out, unlocked the cap, and dumped the fish parts out of the bags and over the railing, tossing the garbage bags after. He got back into the truck, made a U-turn, and headed back to his home and lab.

It will be okay, he told himself. The piranhas will surely devour all traces; it was still bloody and warm. If not the piranhas, then maybe the caimans.

Alan reasoned with himself. The cartel has no reason to suspect him. The fish had been out of the river a short time. It was unlikely they were monitoring it so soon. It’d never been far from the river anyway; any transmission pings probably appeared as if still in the Satobra River. And now it was in the Miranda River downstream from the Satobra—although not exactly swimming.

This sounded very reasonable in his head. His body didn’t accept the argument. He was pumped with adrenalin, heart racing, breathing fast, sweating. He kept looking in the rearview mirror on the way back, and then, once in his field station/resident, through the windows.

Alan took a shovel and buried the drugs in a shallow depression in an area of thickets and small trees a good two hundred meters from the station. They may prove handy as evidence. He could always make an anonymous phone call to the police after he got back safely to the northern states.

He had always lived a careful life, a cautious life, a rule-filled life. His was an existence as far from the steamy underworld as one could get. Yet, here he had stumbled upon a major find involving the Syndicate itself. And now was surreptitiously burying drugs.

He went back to the station. While the rational part of his brain said to get some sleep and be refreshed for the next day, discordant thoughts kept intruding. Thoughts of the frightened people in Jabuti. Thoughts of media reports of gruesome deaths at the hands of the Syndicate. Thoughts of how isolated he was in this wilderness, and how he could be tortured for days and no one would even know he was missing. So he packed all of this belongings. Finally, near dawn, feeling disoriented and foggy, like maybe he was dreaming, or that life itself was an unreal illusion, he sat in a chair and drifted off.