The Colombian Rogue

by Matt Herrmann

  “Thank you,” the Kingsnake said when they were done. “That was . . . unprecedented. Good work. That is what happens to those who oppose us. See, we are like snakes. We look out from the shadows; we bide our time and sink in our fangs when necessary. Or when we are hungry,” he added.

  He snapped his fingers, and the four acolytes at the corners of the room held up their crates and started to reach in and toss coiled masses out into the crowd. The sluggish bodies of live snakes writhed and crowd-surfed over the hands and shoulders of the black-robed crowd.

  Juan used the distraction to slip away from Anita and make his way toward the front. He nearly tripped over the leg of the dead man now lying on the cold floor under the swarming black mass. Juan felt the sliding of a snake’s belly over his shoulder, and he reached up and facilitated its movement backward into the crowd, its cold tail brushing against the side of his hooded head. Another snake made its way toward him, flicking its tongue over his face, smelling the air and tasting him. Juan paid it no mind, pushed up his palm to allow it to navigate over and around him.

  He took another step forward and felt the writhing round body of a snake under his boot, lifted his foot and stepped over it. He was now in the front half of the room as he looked up at the large figure of the Kingsnake.

  “Anyone in our way has two choices,” he said. “Join us or die. And die they shall. Maybe in a car wreck, maybe shot while walking to work. Or maybe poisoned. We can be a powerful ally or a deadly foe. We can work with the families that secretly run countries, or we can bring them down. Some of you are businessmen and representatives. Some of you are labeled by society as criminals. On our own we can be effective, but together we are stronger and can reach farther. We can be smarter. More efficient. We can all make money and build a new world order as our influence spreads. The natural order for the world is chaos, and our actions only facilitate the arrival of the Great Chaos, the Great Snake.”

  Juan was disturbed to hear some of the fanatics in the room, like the ones who had stabbed the man with the gun, chanting and crying out in a tongue he didn’t recognize. It was an odd combination of people gathered here: crazed fanatics buying into this chaos god ideology and representatives of ruthless criminal enterprises.

  “Yes, there is profit in chaos. You can join in or you can die. No one is immune to our venom. Cartel leaders. World leaders. Peace activists. Remember my words. Remember the hissing of snakes in the dark.”

  More wild chanting and hooting shouts followed, which almost drowned out the sudden pounding on the door at the back of the room. The Kingsnake raised a hand for silence as an acolyte unlocked the door and spoke with a guard in low voices.

  The large man on the stage looked unconcerned. “What is it?”

  “It seems there is an unauthorized person in here,” the guard called out. “A man was assaulted and killed. His token was stolen.”

  The shadow of the Kingsnake’s masked face seemed to smile, if that was possible.

  Juan’s heart hammered an uneven beat.

  “I think,” the Kingsnake said, “we have already dealt with him.” His voice was loud. Triumphant. “He lies trampled and cold on the floor after he tried to assassinate me.”

  Juan wondered who the dead man had been, and thanked his spirit for taking his place. Then he felt the prick of a pointed blade digging into his back over one of his kidneys and heard Anita whisper, “Looks like I’ll get to kill you after all. You fake.”

  Juan swallowed. He turned slightly to see Anita’s masked face behind him to the left. He turned to his right and saw Paul under a mask identical to his own. It was the way his brother held his head and shoulders under the hooded robe and mask that gave him away.

  Paul leveled a gun at Juan, and Juan sensed he might not have much time left if he didn’t do something quick. The Kingsnake was talking again, but Juan could no longer understand the words as his body and mind went into survival mode. His hearing dampened to the point where he could not even hear the other sounds in the room. His eyesight tightened into a tunnel so that he could only see straight ahead. Time seemed to slow as he turned his head, searching the torch-lit darkness for a way out. He knew, of course, that there was only one way out of this room now, and it was through the door at the right of the stage at the front of the room.

  There came a flaring gush of flames again at the center of the stage, and then the Kingsnake was gone. Juan whipped his wrist around, knocking the blade from Anita’s hand before chopping her across the jaw. She stumbled backward into the crowd behind them as the two acolytes with torches stood at attention up on the stage, gazing out over the crowd. As soon as he’d sent Anita backward, Juan grabbed Paul’s wrist and wrestled it to the side. The brothers now grunted and fought each other while trying to not to stick out in the crowd.

  There was only one place the Kingsnake could have vanished to, and that was the same door Juan now had his eyes set on—there were simply too many people behind him to go out the way he came in.

  The crowd started to break out into hushed conversation. Anita managed to rise to her feet, but robed figures had stepped in front of her, blocking her way to Juan and Paul.

  “Paul,” Juan said as he wrestled with his brother’s wrist. Paul maneuvered the muzzle of the gun upward toward Juan’s chest, and Juan sidestepped out of the way. He tried to turn the gun toward the ground while Paul tried to raise it again. “Snap out of it. Why are you doing this? You killed a civilian—”

  The locked door at the back of the room opened, and the crowd turned toward the sound as one solid mass. An arm brushed his own, and Juan spun, releasing his grip on Paul’s wrist and twisting a black-robed participant around and into Paul. The gun discharged, and the man gasped, one hand clutching his chest, the other hand extended toward the ceiling.

  Juan turned and put both hands together and pulled himself through the crowd toward the stage as if he was doing the breaststroke in a sea of people. He parted through them and reached the stage. The right-side guard with the torch reached into his belt and drew out a gun. Juan lashed out his hand and gripped the man behind the heel. Ripping the heel out swiftly, the man’s foot kicked forward as his body mass fell backward. The gun fired upward, casting flaked chips of stone and mortar upon the crowd.

  People shouted as Juan pulled himself up onto the stage. As the man with the torch and the gun tried to regain his footing, Juan shoved him out into the crowd, which did not catch him as they had caught the snakes. Juan faced the acolyte with the empty snake crate in front of the side door and threw a punch across the man’s jaw. The crate fell to the stage and the man stumbled back against the door, and Juan shoved him out into the crowd as well. Then he tried the door knob, found it unlocked, and opened it. He darted through.

  It was even colder in this room, a long winding tunnel that looked like part of an old sewer system. A flashlight beam played about the darkness just ahead, and Juan quickly cleared the short distance to the figure holding it. The large man who called himself the Kingsnake turned to face Juan.

  “Good show,” Juan said, raising his elbow and jabbing the tip of the black-pommeled knife against the man’s throat under the black garment.

  “You really think you can kill me?” the Kingsnake’s voice boomed in the damp stone corridor.

  The door to the stage opened, and Juan turned, pivoting behind the large man to use him as a shield. Juan thought it odd how this man’s size and shape so closely resembled his friend, Georgi. The powerful eloquence of this man’s words, however, bore no resemblance to Georgi’s lisping voice. Also, Georgi walked with a limp, and this man’s gait was in no way impeded.

  “Let him go, Juan,” Paul’s voice called from the shadow of the doorway, the pistol again raised in his hand.

  “Better listen to him,” the Kingsnake said. “I don’t think he likes you.”

  “This isn’t you,” Juan said.

  Paul shook his head in disgust. “You are beginning to be a real pain in my ass.
”

  “Look. I know you’re undercover, but we’ve got enough to turn this man in. We’ve got enough evidence here to end this entire cult organization or whatever it is. Sam’s outside with backup. You know, your best friend? You’re done with being undercover. Consider this your extraction.”

  Paul’s voice was monotone, almost robotic, as if he’d rehearsed for this line. “I’m not undercover.”

  Juan scrunched up his eyes in incomprehension. “Yes, you are. It’s why I had to take your place on Rockwell’s team.”

  “He can’t hear you,” the Kingsnake said from in front of Juan.

  Juan now held his knife to the man’s throat out to the side. “Shut up.”

  The man hunched his shoulders like a large child with a secret, and in a gleeful, hushed voice said, “It’s the serum.”

  “I don’t care,” Juan said. “Fight it, Paul. You’re stronger than that—Ow!” Juan looked down at the front of his leg where it felt like a needle had just torn through the skin of his thigh under his robe.

  The Kingsnake chuckled and tucked a syringe into his pocket.

  Juan’s voice was edged with shock. “What did you do? What did you just give me?”

  Ahead of him, Paul was starting to close the gap between them with steady, confident footfalls that echoed through the tunnel, the gun still held in his outstretched hand.

  “Stop,” Juan said. “Think, okay? We’ve got this man outnumbered two to one, and there’s backup aboveground. Just help me tie him up. We can be the team we never got to be. We can be brothers again—”

  Paul answered by firing his gun.

  Juan felt the skin of his temple burn away as the bullet grazed it, and he realized that had he not pulled his head to the side at the last moment, the bullet would have killed him.

  Juan raised his boot and kicked the Kingsnake down the corridor into Paul, who was only feet away now. Then he turned and ran, guided by the weak glow of his flip phone’s open screen held out in front of him.

  He came upon a rusted iron door off to the side, but he could see no handle of any type, so he continued on, the footsteps behind him growing louder. His phone had already given a weak chime to alert him that the battery was low, but there was nothing he could do about it. If he didn’t find a way out of here soon, it wouldn’t matter.

  The floor seemed to drop off into nothing up ahead, and he managed to slow himself before his momentum carried him over and into the hole. Upon crouching at the edge and suspending his open flip phone over the blackness, he saw a metal ladder leading downward into a flat area filled with water. Countless snakes floated and squirmed in the water, some of which he knew by their bandings and patterns were venomous.

  The footsteps grew even louder behind him. There was no way to make it past all of the snakes without being bitten—there were too many, and his sloshing past them would only serve to agitate them. While there was a chance they might be defanged like the ones in the stage room probably were, he couldn’t take that chance. He fished out the taser, pressed and locked the trigger in place, and dropped it into the water.

  There was an electric spark, and the bodies of the snakes jumped and danced. Smoke issued from the water like the seething-hot water of a bathhouse with a charred smell in the dank air. Juan heard the frantic steps behind him and jumped down into the black water.

  He wasn’t electrocuted, and he found the water was only knee-deep. Navigating past countless snake corpses, he reached tall iron bars that reached from floor to ceiling. Scanning the bars with his flip phone screen light, his eyes found a spot between the bars that looked wider than the rest. As his phone died on him, he shoved his body sideways into the sudden pitch darkness through the gap in the bars, sucking in his stomach and clenching his abdominal muscles as he tried to force his way through. The rust-coated bars cut and scraped his skin as he brushed past, dirtying and tearing his black robe in places.

  A gunshot rang out. The bullet struck one of the iron bars as Juan was almost through, and he felt the terrible vibrations trilling through his bones. The loud tang of metal on metal reverberated through his head as he fell through to the other side, the sparks from the ricochet nearly blinding him in the absolute darkness.

  He scrambled blindly forward through the water on the other side until his knees connected with a raised stone platform. He clambered out of the water and felt around with his hands, connecting with a stone wall in front of him. A dead end.

  He was trapped.

  Paul’s voice cut through the darkness like a ghastly knife. “I’m sick of you. I’m going to hunt you down and kill you. Do you hear me? You better watch your back, brother, because I’m coming for you.”

  Juan was beginning to think the speech was unnecessary when his hands stumbled upon a metal ladder rising up along the wall to where a couple of pinpricks of light showed through the ceiling high above. He ascended it as quickly as his hands allowed, and the pinpricks of light grew ever closer. It was a manhole.

  As he reached it, he heard the sloshing of sewer water and Paul shouting from the other side of the vertical iron bars.

  “I know where you live and where you work.”

  The words chilled Juan’s core as he tried to heave the storm drain cover aside. It was heavier than he would have thought, and he did not seem to have the strength to budge its weight. His fingers wriggled in the drain holes like worms as he pushed, and at last the heavy cover pushed upward and to the side.

  Juan felt a flashlight beam on his back as he started to crawl through the hole. In the darkness below, it felt like a spotlight, and it raised the hairs on his neck. High above him the full moon smiled down at him, offering safety if he could only climb out of the sewer.

  He instinctively felt a gun being raised at him from below, and he didn’t think he’d make it through the opening in time. Hands suddenly caught him under the arms and pulled him up and out of the sewer. As his knee was dragged clear of the hole, he heard the blast of the gun below and felt his bootheel fly off the underside of his sole. He rolled over into the middle of a gray city street as a figure lifted the manhole cover and dropped it back into the groove.

  Sam looked down at Juan, his brows furrowed. “Where’s Josephina?”

  THURSDAY

  21

  Rain

  “This is bad,” Sam said.

  It was just after midnight, and it had started to rain after Juan climbed out of the sewers. They now sat in the recessed doorway of a closed restaurant under an awning. It kept them dry and was also a good place to keep watch for anyone who might be looking for them. So far, they hadn’t seen anyone.

  Juan, tired of sitting, picked up a small pebble and skipped it across a large puddle already forming on the street just below the sidewalk. “Agreed. It can’t be a coincidence that there’s no cell service here. They must be blocking the signals for half the city.”

  Juan had already told Sam most of what he had seen and done at the underground marketplace, and Sam had only nodded. They’d had a lot of time to sit here as they planned their next move.

  “You said their leader called themselves ELEPHAS?”

  “Yeah. I don’t get it. I think elephas is Latin for elephant, but all I saw were snakes.”

  “That’s the thing about cults. They don’t usually tend to make any sense to us normal people.”

  “There’s got to be something to it, though,” Juan said. “Some sort of symbology or relevance to the name.”

  Juan understood the power of legends and amassing a following of people. He had studied the early outlaws in Colombian history as well as Pablo Escobar while crafting the mythology of Juan Santiago over ten years ago. He knew that everyone had a brand, whether you wanted one or not—it was simply what people thought about you. A brand could strengthen one’s position with the people or destroy it, and it could be influenced.

  Powerful people knew that the key to authority was that your name had to stand for something. Some of the outlaws o
f old had killed and robbed dignitaries and wealthy people and thus, the poor people had rallied around their names because they stood for the upheaval of wealth in a society unkind to them. Escobar had done something similar by always keeping in the spotlight and making a public show of giving to his community and seeming like a person for the common man. Some people didn’t care if Pablo was running a criminal empire simply because they liked the way he talked. They liked his charisma. Ricky Serrao tried to emulate some of this himself, giving generously to charity on behalf of his legal businesses, but he did not possess half of Pablo’s charm.

  In stark contrast to Ricky, Juan had decided to stay out of the spotlight. As difficult as it had been with emerging technology and social media, he had succeeded, capitalizing on his common name and anonymous face so that the smuggler Juan Santiago was seen as being truly for the people. One of his favorite and easiest ways to promote his image as a hero in Cartagena had been to pay kids to spray paint the walls of the city with his name. It didn’t take long for more and more people to carry on the tradition, and he no longer had to pay people to write on the walls.

  So, in his mind, Juan was trying to figure out how an organization as powerful and twisted as ELEPHAS had come to be without raising any suspicion or prominence in the media. He wondered if perhaps Rockwell had a file on the group.

  Juan looked at Sam. “You’ve never come across the name before?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they’re not small-time. They’re the ones that are behind the killings here lately. They promote chaos, and I think they’re wanting to take over the criminal organizations of Colombia and Ecuador as a start. From the speech I heard, they want to get their claws in world order.”