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but a couple of grand was nothing to him; the man was a multimillionaire. But Pierce was still going to give it back. He didn't like being indebted to anyone, especially Andrews. After all, he was hardly as naive as he'd been when he'd met the man.
    That had been the summer of his sophomore year at Columbia. He'd answered an ad in the student newspaper that had said: "Help wanted, international travel, Spanish required." The telephone number had been Andrews'. It hadn't taken Pierce long to figure out that the job involved being an accessory to an international marijuana smuggling scheme, and at first he'd wanted nothing to do with it. But Andrews had convinced him that he would act only as an intermediary, setting up the time and place of exchanges, delivering messages. For Pierce, no money and no drugs 'were involved.
    The summer job had meant four trips to Santa Marta, Colombia, and had earned him $3,200 tax free. That fall, he and Andrews had gotten an apartment together. Those days had been a time of almost childlike innocence, when drugs were new and mysteriously mind-expanding, instead of mind-destroying; when only the cops carried guns; when cocaine was only a rumor; and when those in the business lived by the countercultural motto: You go to be honest to live outside the law.
    Andrews had majored in business and philosophy and had continued operating his importation and distribution network while attending classes. He'd reaped windfall profits from his cannabis connections, and by the end of the academic year he was already starting to invest his profits in legitimate businesses, some of them small, high-risk, high-tech ventures involving the manufacture of what was then a virtually unknown product called the microchip.
    Pierce remembered Andrews as generous, but obsessed with amassing wealth. He'd once confided to Pierce that it was a mystery to him why so many of their friends seemed ambivalent about seeking their own pots of gold. Pierce knew that Andrews considered him one of them, and that Andrews would soon move on to a new circle of friends.
    Maybe it was his unstable childhood that had provoked the search for quick wealth. He remembered Andrews telling him that he was lucky to have grown up with a father who came home from work every day and a mother who stayed at home to raise the family. Andrews's memories were of a father who was in the air force and a mother who worked in a mill. His mother, he'd once told Pierce, had been obsessed with her fading youth and had started drinking after his father walked out for good. By age ten, Andrews was living in the homes of relatives and family friends, and by thirteen he was working his first job after school each day.
    The next fall, his senior year, Pierce saw less and less of his former roommate. Andrews arrived on campus driving a new Porsche he'd paid for with cash, and he no longer needed to share the rent with anyone. A couple of years after graduation, Pierce saw an article in Esquire listing Raymond Andrews as one of the top twenty-five young millionaires in America. There was little doubt at that point that his old roommate's ambitions were quickly being fulfilled, and that he was no longer relying on New York pot smokers.
    Over the years, he'd read about Andrews' success in commodities and foreign currency investments. He'd financed two blockbuster movies and others that had fared well. He had been president and major stockholder of World Cable Network before selling his interest and buying an airline which he'd taken from insolvency to prosperity in three years, renaming it Tropic Air. He owned a real estate development company, large land holdings, restaurants, a shopping mall, and God knew what else. He was a financial whiz, worth more than three hundred million . . . and counting. But he was much more than just another wealthy, successful businessman. He considered himself a man of vision, one who saw a future in which mankind emerges from conflict and