TWO LINES

Two white lines on a black coffee bag... A Peruvian engineer asks for nothing extraordinary: an honest opportunity, a legal way to rebuild his life after an unjust dismissal. What he has, however, is knowledge nobody else possesses — a formula capable of turning the coca leaf into a fortune. That knowledge will carry him from Lima to Culiacán, from a Soviet bunker buried in Côte d'Ivoire to the hushed villas of Calabria. From Mexican cartels to corrupt generals, from the Italian 'Ndrangheta to intelligence services that never sleep, every ally turns out to be a threat, and every success brings the fall a little closer. And at the centre of it all: a cup of coffee. An everyday gesture, almost innocent — until it becomes the signature of an underground empire. Gerardo Villanueva never thinks of himself as a criminal. He is a consultant. An adviser. A man who reads the law carefully and stays on the right side of it. That is the story he tells his wife, and the one he tells himself — right up to the morning when he can no longer tell the difference between what is legal and what he can live with. A thriller about the thin line between a career and a crime, and about what it costs a man to be the only person in the room who understands how something works. The documents reproduced at the end of this book are real. Inspired by true events.