The Devil's Elixir

by Raymond Khoury

  Munro was right.

  We had to get out of there before it was too late. But—

  More gunfire pummeled the walls around me.

  “That’s not what we’re here for,” I rasped into the mike, my eyes locked on my wounded prey. “I’ve got to try and—”

  “—and what,” Munro rasped, “carry him out? What, are you Superman now?” A long burst ripped through my comms set, like a jackhammer to my eardrums, then his manic voice came back. “Just cap the sonofabitch, Reilly. Do it. You heard what he’s done. ‘It’ll make meth seem as boring as aspirin,’ remember? That’s the scumbag you’re worried about wasting? You happy to let him loose, is that gonna be your contribution to making this world a better place? I don’t think so. You don’t want that on your conscience, and I don’t either. We came here to do a job. We have our orders. We’re at war, and he’s the enemy. So stop with the righteous bullshit, pop the bastard, and get your ass out here. I ain’t waiting any longer.”

  His words were still ricocheting inside my skull as another volley of bullets raked the back wall of the lab. I dove to the floor as wood splinters and glass shards rained down around me, and took cover behind one of the lab’s cabinets. I flicked a quick glance across at the scientist. Munro was, again, right. There was no way we could take him with us. Not given his injury. Not given the small army of coke-fueled banditos bearing down on us.

  Dammit, it wasn’t supposed to go down this way.

  It was meant to be a swift, surgical extraction. Under cover of darkness, me, Munro, and the six other combat-ready guys that rounded off our OCDETF strike team—that’s the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, a federal program that drew on the resources of eleven agencies, including my own FBI and Munro’s DEA—were supposed to sneak into the compound, find McKinnon, and bring him out. Him and his research, that is. Straightforward enough, especially the sneaking in part. The thing is, the mission had been ordered up hastily, after McKinnon’s unexpected call. We hadn’t had much time to plan it, and the intel we were able to put together on the remote drug lab was sketchy, but I thought we still had decent odds. For one, we were well equipped—sound-suppressed submachine guns, night vision scopes, Kevlar. We had a surveillance drone hovering overhead. We also had the element of surprise. And we’d been pretty successful in raiding other labs since we’d first arrived in Mexico four months earlier.

  Quick in and out, nice and clean.

  Worked like a charm for the in part of the plan.

  Then McKinnon sprang his eleventh-hour surprise on us, caused Munro to go apeshit, got hit in the thigh, and screwed up the out part.

  I could now hear frantic shouts in Spanish. The banditos were closing in.

  I had to make a move. Any longer and I’d be captured, and I didn’t have any illusions about what the outcome of that would be. They’d torture the hell out of me. Partly for info, partly for fun. Then they’d bring out the chainsaw and prop my head in my lap for a photo op. And the worst part of it is, my noble death would all be for nothing. McKinnon’s work would live on. In infamy, by all indications.

  Munro’s voice crackled back to life, blaring deep inside my skull. “All right, screw it. It’s on your head, man. I’m outta here.”

  And right then, my mind tripped.

  It was like a primeval determination bypassed all the resistance that was innate to me and brushed aside everything that was part and parcel of who I was as a human being and just took control. I watched, out-of-body-experience-like, as my hand came up, all smooth and robotic, lined up the shot right between McKinnon’s terrified eyes, and squeezed the trigger.

  The scientist’s head snapped back as a dark mess splattered the cabinet behind him, then he just toppled to one side, a lifeless mound of flesh and bone.

  There was no need for a confirmation tap.

  I knew it was final.

  My gaze lingered on the fallen man for a long second, then I rasped, “I’m coming out,” into my mike. I took a deep breath, popped the strikers off two incendiary grenades and lobbed them at the pistoleros who were hunting me down, then sprang to my feet, laying down a wall of gunfire behind me as I bolted toward the exit. I stopped at the back door of the lab, took one last look at the place, then I burst out of there as the whole place went up in flames behind me.

  III

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA SIX MONTHS AGO

  In his corner office on the twentieth floor of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building, Hank Corliss stared at his monitor and continued to grind over the latest morsel of background information he’d unearthed. Then he leaned back, swiveled his chair around so he could face the window, and frowned at his trembling fingers.

  It’s him.

  Again.

  Corliss clenched his fists, tight, and took in some long, deep breaths, trying to corral the fury that was galloping through him.

  I have to do something.

  I have to put an end to this.

  I have to make him pay.

  His knuckles were bone-white.

  Corliss—the Special Agent in Charge of the LA field division of the DEA and the OCDE task force’s executive director—turned and glanced at the plasma screen that sat on the shelves across from his desk. Four days later, coverage of the recent outrage was still all over the airwaves, although it had now degenerated from the endless, repetitive loops that cable news networks somehow managed to thrive on into even more mindless and less relevant peripheral pieces.

  He blew out a weary sigh and adjusted his posture, feeling a familiar pain lighting up in his spine. He shut his eyes to try to push it back and mulled over what he’d just read.

  The attack had taken place up the coast from Corliss’s office, at the Schultes Ethnomedicine Institute. Overlooking the rolling surf thirty miles northwest of Santa Barbara, the institute was a state-of-the-art research center that was devoted to finding new cures for all kinds of diseases—or, to put it more accurately, to uncovering old cures that had eluded the modern world. Its researchers—physicians, pharmacologists, botanists, microbiologists, neurobiologists, linguists, anthropologists, and oceanographers, among others—roamed the globe, “bioprospectors” seeking out isolated indigenous tribes, spending time with them, and ingratiating themselves to their medicine men in the hope of prying from them the ancient treatments and cures they’d been handed down over generations. It was home to a world-class collection of MDs and PhDs who were great outdoorsmen and adventurers in addition to being outstanding scientists, real-life Indiana Joneses whose survival skills came in handy when it came to trekking deep into Amazonian rainforests or climbing up to oxygen-starved villages high in the Andes.

  Their survival skills hadn’t been too useful that fateful Monday.

  At around ten A.M., two SUVs had driven up to the institute’s entrance gate. The security guard manning it had been shot dead. The SUVs had carried on into the facility unchallenged and pulled up outside one of its main labs. A half-dozen armed men had coolly marched into the building, shot up the place with snub-nosed machine guns, grabbed two research scientists, and whisked them away. Another guard had, by sheer coincidence, stumbled upon them as they were coming out. In the gunfight that ensued, the guard, as well as a resident who got caught in the crossfire, had been killed. Three other bystanders had been injured, one badly.

  The kidnappers, and their victims, were gone. There had been no ransom demands as yet.

  Corliss didn’t expect any.

  Early speculation from the detectives on the scene was that drug dealers were behind the kidnappings and the bloodshed. Corliss didn’t disagree. Scientists like the two men who were taken weren’t plucked from their labs in a hail of bullets by Pfizer or Bristol-Myers. Especially not when they had skill sets that were highly prized in the wild frontiers of illegal narcotics.

  Frontiers that were changing by the day, and not for the better.

  Initially, it was mostly about getting people with the right technical expertise to h
elp produce mass quantities of popular synthetic drugs, chemists who could create, say, methamphetamine from its precursor chemicals, ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, without blowing themselves up in the process. With tighter regulations complicating the sale of the base chemical ingredients—much to the chagrin of the big pharmaceutical companies’ army of lobbyists—alternatives had to be found. Corliss remembered participating in the arrest of an American chemist in Guadalajara a few years back, in the days when Corliss was running the DEA field office in Mexico City. The man, an embittered out-of-work chemistry teacher, was working for the cartels and had earned himself a small fortune by figuring out how to use legal, off-the-shelf reagents to engineer meth precursors from scratch. The perks—the cash, the women, the booze, and, yes, the drugs—were an added bonus that sure as hell beat grading papers and dodging switchblades at his local high school.

  Beyond the actual designing and manufacturing of the drugs, scientists were also proving invaluable in dreaming up original ways of smuggling them across borders. One of Corliss’s strike teams had recently intercepted a shipment of Bolivian powdered mashed potatoes. It had taken the agency’s scientists a couple of weeks to discover that two tons of cocaine had been chemically infused into it. A month later, a similar shipment of soya oil had yielded another mother lode.

  Chemicals had mysterious, hidden qualities.

  Unlocking them and putting them to work in original ways could make a world of difference—and billions in profits—for the cartels.

  Hence the need for brainiacs with the technical chops to make it happen.

  Hence the kidnappings.

  So far, the investigators didn’t have much to go on. No suspects had been nabbed, and CCTV footage and witnesses had pegged them as white and beefy, and that was about it, since the men had worn fabric face masks and caps. One witness, however, had gone further, referring to them as “biker-gang types.” That wasn’t a big break in and of itself, not in Southern California, where biker gangs were rampant and big into drug dealing—they’d actually started the whole meth craze—but it was significant in other ways.

  The rules of the game had changed.

  Over the last decade or so, the Mexican cartels had taken over drug trafficking across the United States, bringing a ferocious new level of violence with them. Not content with their long-established role as the nation’s major supplier of marijuana, their growth exploded after the so-called War on Drugs of successive U.S. administrations that targeted Colombian traffickers severely curtailed the latter’s activities through the Caribbean and into southern Florida. The Mexicans stepped in to fill the gap. They started by taking over the distribution of cocaine from the harried Colombians, then they broadened their horizons. They went from mules to principals and took over the supply chain. And they weren’t content with just pumping coke and heroin into the United States. They forged ahead and embraced the drugs of the future—the ones you could make anywhere, the ones users could enjoy without too much hassle. It was the Mexican cartels that saw the real potential in methamphetamine and took it from being nothing more than a crude biker drug with limited use in the valleys of Northern California and turned it into the biggest and most widespread drug problem now facing America. Other synthetic drugs—easy-to-swallow pills that didn’t need all the cumbersome paraphernalia—were soon following suit.

  The Mexican cartels were now calling the shots from Washington to Maine, bringing in eighty percent of the illegal drugs that entered the country, with local bikers, prison gangs, and street gangs as their foot soldiers. At last count, the DEA had tracked the cartels’ operations to more than two hundred and fifty cities across the country. Their reach was limitless, their ambition voracious, their impudence unbounded. They didn’t seem to blink, even though they were basically at war with the U.S. government—an undeclared war that was affecting American lives far more than the wars being fought in the deserts thousands of miles to the east.

  A war that had left deep scars on Corliss.

  Scars he’d never forget.

  Mementos of that savage night in Mexico, like the pain that was now throbbing across his spine, a reminder that always reared its malignant head when it was least welcome.

  The speculation that a Mexican cartel was behind the violent kidnapping of the scientists was supported by the fact that the DEA and other law enforcement agencies had made significant inroads into shutting down hundreds of meth labs across the United States. This had driven production south of the border, where the narcos had set up superlabs far from the reach of the Mexican authorities and where the talents of the missing scientists were a more likely fit. Furthermore, this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Other researchers had gone missing. In four earlier, separate incidents, chemists working for pharmaceutical corporations had been grabbed while doing fieldwork in Central and South America. No ransoms were ever demanded. The men were never seen again. Then things escalated. Two other incidents followed, this time on Corliss’s side of the border. A university chemistry professor in El Paso, a little over a year ago. Then another, a few months later, just outside Phoenix, snatched along with his lab assistant in an early morning swoop.

  And now this.

  Bang in Corliss’s jurisdiction.

  A vicious, deadly shoot-out on an idyllic stretch of the Pacific coast.

  A shoot-out that had snared Corliss’s interest even more than it naturally merited, given that he was heading the local DEA field office.

  He knew it wasn’t just any narco.

  He’d suspected it was Navarro the second he heard the news. Unlike his colleagues at the DEA, Corliss had never bought the story that Navarro had been killed by internal cartel bloodletting. He knew the monster was still alive, and when he’d dug deeper into the missing scientists’ areas of expertise, as he’d done for the previous kidnappings, he’d been left in no doubt. It fit a pattern, a common thread that ran through all their work, one only he had picked up on, one he’d kept to himself.

  For now.

  Raoul Navarro—El Brujo, meaning the shaman, the black arts practitioner, the sorcerer—was still after it. Corliss was sure of it.

  The burn in his spine intensified.

  He’s getting wilder, more bold, more reckless, he thought.

  Which meant one of two things.

  The bastard was getting desperate. Or he was getting close.

  Either way, it was bad news.

  Or, maybe . . . it was an opportunity.

  An opportunity for retribution.

  The retribution that Corliss had been hungering for since the day Raoul Navarro and his men came for him.

  His hands shaking and sweaty, Corliss reached into his desk drawer and pulled out the small, innocuous plastic bottle. He glanced furtively at the door to his office as he fished out a couple of capsules, making sure no one was on his way in to see him, then flicked them into his mouth and swallowed them without water. He didn’t need anything to chase them down with. Not anymore. Not after being on the pills for all these years.

  He didn’t have any proof that it was Navarro, of course. He wasn’t about to voice his suspicions either. He’d been there, done that, years ago, and he knew what watercooler chatter was going on behind his back. He knew that his colleagues and his superiors had little time for what they viewed as his delusional obsession with the man who’d ruined his life, the man who’d taken away what he held dearest on this earth.

  He didn’t care what they thought.

  He knew El Brujo was still out there. And, as it did for most of his waking life and a big part of his sleeping one, the mere thought of it whipped up a storm in the pit of his stomach.

  He stared at the muted screen again, his numb eyes taking in yet another loop of the same footage, and thought about the part of the story that he was most sensitive to: the pain and destruction the armed raid will have left behind. The new widows and orphans. The partners, parents, and children who’d probably never know what h
appened to the disappeared. The innocent whose lives would be altered forever.

  He reached for his phone and hit a speed dial key.

  His star operative answered promptly.

  “Where are you?” Corliss asked.

  “The marina,” the man informed him. “About to sit down with an informant.”

  “I’ve been reading up on the scientists that were grabbed up at that research center.”

  “Those cabróns are getting out of hand.”

  “I don’t think it’s just any old cabrón,” Corliss specified.

  The man paused for a second, clearly thrown by it, then said, “You think it’s him?”

  “I’m sure of it.” Corliss visualized the Mexican kingpin—and triggered a deluge of painful imagery that would be hard to push back.

  His fingers tightened around the handset, its casing creaking under the strain. “Come in when you’re done,” he finally said. “I’ve been doing some thinking. Maybe there’s a way to nail his ass.”

  “Sounds good,” Jesse Munro replied. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  SATURDAY

  1

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA PRESENT DAY

  The doorbell chimed shortly after nine A.M. on a lazy, sunny Saturday morning.

  Michelle Martinez was in her kitchen, emptying a dishwasher that had been stacked far beyond anything the laws of physics could explain while accompanying the rousing choral outro to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge” that was belting out from the radio. She looked up, used her forearm to sweep back the chestnut-brown bangs that kept playing games with her baby blues, and gave a gentle yell in the direction of the living room.