Ben blew out a stream of Gauloise smoke. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’d feel exactly the same way you do. I’d want Serrato dead. Him and every man who stands with him. And I’d roll over the top of anyone who tried to stop me.’
‘He’s gonna die, all right,’ Nico said in a tight voice. ‘Apart from trying to be there for Valentina, I’ve had nothing else to do for the last seven years except prepare myself for snuffing out that hijo de puta.’ He lapsed into a stream of Spanish profanities.
‘Seven years is a long time to spend hunting one man,’ Ben said.
‘Yeah, well, Ramon Serrato ain’t someone you can just walk up to and catch like a butterfly. I went back to Colombia a few times, tried to re-establish a few old contacts, asked around. I was wasting my time. It was like he’d just disappeared. Word was that he’d gone legit, like the fucker could just decide he didn’t want to be a drug lord any more and take up a new career. But nobody even knew where he was, or if they knew then they wouldn’t talk. So I went back to El Paso. Felipe and I kept in touch. The police didn’t have any use for a one-armed detective and nobody else would employ him on account of his face being all scarred from the firebomb. He was living on his disability pension in a shitty apartment, spending all his time online searching for anything he could find on Serrato.
‘Then three years ago, Felipe calls me and says he’s heard that Serrato’s left Colombia and moved a thousand miles south, to Peru. Way out in the asshole of nowhere, in the northern Amazonas region bordering Ecuador. We’re talking major rainforest, about as far from Serrato’s big-city turf as you can get. All Felipe knew was what he’d had to bribe some pissed-off ex-associate of Serrato’s to cough up, and even then the information was sketchy. Me, I didn’t care why, just wanted to find the fucker. I got on the next plane to Lima, then from there to this backwater called Chachapoyas, bought the cheapest car I could find and drove out to look for him.
‘The first nine days I spent driving from town to town, village to village. Some of these places don’t even have roads. Finally I get talking to a guy, Miguel, delivery driver for a food company, who tells me about the rich Colombian they say’s built himself this big house right out in the forest, a regular palace, he said, a few miles from a village called San Tomás. Tells me the best way to get out there is by river.
‘So I found a local floatplane pilot who could take me there. We touched down at San Tomás and then started looking for Serrato’s place. Just when I was beginning to think Miguel was full of shit, suddenly there it was in the middle of the jungle, not a house but a compound, like a fucking military base with guards everywhere and high walls all around it. We were able to make a couple of passes overhead before we got too noticed. I could see how well this “law abiding citizen” was protected, and how damn well impossible it’d be to get to him. You’d only have to get within range of the gates and you’d be shot down like a dog.’
Nico shrugged his shoulders. ‘That’s when I figured that instead of trying to get inside, I’d wait for him on the outside. Back in San Tomás, I hung around for a few days, got talking to a few folks and soon found out that nobody wanted to know about Serrato’s place, like it didn’t exist. Except Roberto, this local mechanic I met in a bar. He must’ve sussed out what my business was there. Warned me that if I kept going around asking questions the local cops would bury me. Serrato owns half of them. Then he told me about this crazy old hunter dude who lived in a hut in the woods half a mile outside the village. Said he always had a load of guns to sell, but to be careful of him ’cause he was dangerous. So I go out there and I find the place. Next thing I’m staring down the barrel of a shotgun with this wild-looking old Indian guy on the other end of it, spaced out on Christ knows what. When I showed him American dollars he calmed down some, then after a whole lot of haggling he finally agreed to sell me one of his rifles.
‘Then I was ready to start hunting Serrato. I traded in my car for a beat-up Winnebago. Drove out as near to the compound as the road could take me, camped up by day and cut through the forest on foot by night. You can hardly move without stepping on a fucking snake or getting eaten alive by bugs. Couple of times I was nearly caught by the armed patrols Serrato has combing the perimeter around the clock.’
‘But you never managed to get inside,’ Ben said.
Nico shook his head. ‘It can’t be done, man. Not by one guy on his own. I couldn’t even get to the wall. Hey, let me have the phone again. I want to try Cabeza.’
Ben handed the phone over. A couple of moments later Nico shook his head with a sigh. ‘Still no reply. Where’d that asshole wander off to?’
‘Keep going,’ Ben said.
‘This goes on for about a week, then I ran out of supplies and had to drive back to San Tomás for more. I was depressed as hell, thinking, two more days, then I give this up, it’s useless. But as I’m driving the RV back to my stakeout, suddenly I see this convoy of vehicles coming the other way – Jeeps and trucks, all tailing a black Mercedes with a man and woman in the back. As the Merc comes past the guy turns towards the window and I get a real good look at his face. It was him. Serrato. By then I knew the roads pretty well and I knew that by doubling back on myself I could pick up this track leading onto high ground where I could get a clear shot at the convoy.
‘So I rush up there and lay down in the rocks with the .30-06 bolt-action I got from the old hunter, and there’s the convoy coming round my flank about four hundred yards away. I thought I could make the shot. But my heart was beating so fast and my hands were shaking, I could hardly hold the rifle still. Plus the convoy’s throwing up a ton of dust and the sun’s glaring off the windows. When I thought I had him in the sights I pulled the trigger. Saw the car swerve over the road, slow right down and then take off again. I grabbed that aught-six and jumped back in the RV and got the fuck away from there, hollering and yelling like a crazy man cause I was so sure I’d got him. It was only later on that I found out I hadn’t. Alicia caught the bullet in the throat. She must’ve died right there in the back seat of the car. Shit.’
Nico flicked his cigarette stub out of the window and was quiet for a while, looking pensive. By now they’d descended to the level of the lower foothills, heading fast in the direction of the village of Montefrio. Ben was silent too, waiting for Nico to resume his story while trying to contain the impatience that was gnawing at his guts.
‘After Alicia’s death, Serrato just withdrew deeper into his compound. He stopped travelling by road and trebled his security. Couple of times I saw his chopper flying over the jungle, and I had this idea to get hold of an RPG to shoot him down with. But it never happened and the crooks I had to deal with tried to turn me in to the local cops, who seized my RV with all my stuff, rifle, everything. I was on the run again. Next time I tried to cross the forest to get close to Serrato’s compound I found he’d tripled the guard on the gates and the patrols too. Anyone found hanging around there would get themselves killed, or maybe taken back to Serrato and tortured to death. It was a fucking suicide mission, man.
‘What could I do? I went home and started figuring out a new plan. Instead of trying to attack him on his home ground, I’d devote my life to figuring out ways that I could pick his people off one by one. I didn’t care if it took me thirty years. If I could just get enough of them, then maybe one day, some way, I’d be able to draw Serrato out of his hole and kill him, too.
‘Back in El Paso, nothing’s happening. Time goes by, then more time. I had to take a job in a store to earn some money, and I was fucked up over Valentina and losing heart, thinking maybe I’d just have to forget about Serrato and move on, try and get my life back together somehow. Then a couple of weeks ago my buddy Felipe calls to say he’s hooked up with this other ex-cop who’s got connections we can use to set up wire taps. We still had a list of all Serrato’s old associates, the ones who were still alive or not in jail. So I head back to Bogotá and we start tapping phones, all totally illegal, but hey, this is Colombia
, right? Top of our list was a guy in Bogotá called César Cristo, vicious sisterfucking crack-head of a contract killer who back in the day was the Stingray’s favourite assassin for hire. So we’re listening in on all these calls, hours and hours of useless bullshit, when suddenly we’re hearing something unbelievable. This guy’s called Cristo in the middle of the night saying he wants him to go to Spain to do a job on one Juan Fernando Cabeza. When we heard the voice on the line, we all just fucking stared at each other, we just couldn’t believe what we were hearing. It was Serrato himself. The sonofabitch’s got balls so big, he didn’t even try to code what he was saying. It was all there: the hit, the money, the directions to the target’s home, the works. Recorded the whole thing on a hard drive.’
Nico shook his head in amazement at the memory, then went on. ‘Felipe wanted to turn it over to the authorities. I told him no way. One, the evidence was obtained illegally and was inadmissible. Two, we’d be dead by dawn if we breathed a word of this to anyone. Three, even if by some fucking miracle Serrato went down, after a year, tops, of drinking champagne and eating lobster with the prison officials, he’d walk free again. That’s how the system works. And anyhow I had my own ideas about what to do.’
‘You came to Spain to intercept the hitman,’ Ben said.
Nico nodded. ‘I didn’t know why Serrato was gunning for Cabeza, didn’t care. But for Serrato to give the order himself, I knew it had to be important. Maybe so important, that if I took out Cristo and anyone else who came after, there was a chance the Stingray himself might even show up. So I borrowed money from Felipe and flew out to Spain in a hurry. An ex-cop always knows where he can find a hot gun. I paid three hundred euros to this dope dealer in a backstreet in Granada for a forty-four and a speedloader full of hollowpoints. Then I bought this junk car and drove out to Cabeza’s place. I got there just in time. Cristo was about to kill Cabeza with that SIG, but I blew his ugly head off before he could pull the trigger. Found the sonofabitch’s Beemer up the road a ways and pitched it over the side of the mountain along with his body. That was last Saturday.’
The same day Brooke was taken, Ben thought. ‘How did Cabeza handle it?’
‘Let’s just say that after that, he didn’t need a whole lot of persuading to hide someplace safe. I drove him to the safe house in Montefrio and then came back to hang around here, set my trap and wait for the next guy to show up. Turned out the next guy was you.’ Nico shrugged.
‘Nice dummy, by the way,’ Ben said. ‘Pumpkin was a stroke of genius.’
‘Had you fooled, you gringo motherfucker.’
Ben ignored the jibe. ‘And you’re certain this safe house of yours is secure?’
‘You’re worried about walking into another trap, right?’
‘I’d be surprised if Serrato wasn’t onto you. Who else knows about the place?’
‘Felipe, nobody else. Trust me, it’s safe. I left the handgun with Cabeza, just in case; not that the fucker knows how to use it. He’s kind of a strange guy. Wears this goddamn silly pork pie hat all the time, like the one Gene Hackman wore in The French Connection? Drives me nuts. I wish he’d answer the damn phone, too.’
‘Why does Serrato want Cabeza dead?’ Ben asked. ‘Does Cabeza even know the reason?’
‘Sure he knows,’ Nico said. ‘And he’s told me what it’s all about. The English guy, Forsyte, he knew too. They were going to meet to talk about a bunch of papers that came out of this sunken Spanish warship. That’s what it’s all about, some bits of paper that must be, like, five hundred years old.’
Ben remembered what Simon Butler had said about the foreign-sounding man calling himself ‘Smith’ who’d contacted him soon after the discovery of the mysterious casket and bribed him to arrange the snatch in Ireland. Had Smith been working for Ramon Serrato? It seemed the only answer. ‘What else did Cabeza say?’ he asked Nico.
‘He said a lot of these papers were written in some kind of code.’
‘Code?’
‘You know, spy stuff. Forsyte needed a history guy with the right knowledge to decode that shit because he was pretty sure there was some big old secret there. He was bringing them to show him. Cabeza says the guy was holding onto it real tight.’
The attaché case, Ben thought. Now it was clear to him what Forsyte had been carrying around with him and protecting so carefully. ‘So Forsyte died the night before they were due to meet. And the fact that Serrato sent a killer to take out Cabeza at the same time means he was very anxious to cover up whatever was in those papers.’
Nico nodded. ‘Anxious as hell. Though killing don’t exactly come hard to Ramon Serrato, believe me.’
Ben’s mind churned. He knew enough about the history of espionage to know that spies, covert missions and encrypted intelligence had been around for as long as warfare, which was about as long as humans had walked the earth. But what he couldn’t understand was what a former Colombian drug-lord-turned-businessman might possibly want with a bunch of old codes dug up from a sunken ship.
Nico interrupted his thoughts. ‘There’s more. Cabeza said that not all the papers were written in code. One of them was a letter from the King of Spain.’
Ben looked at him. ‘A letter from the King of Spain.’
‘You heard me, man. You know how the whole of South America belonged to Spain once? So, back in those days the King of Spain, I guess because he owned everything, he used to parcel up bits of land and hand them out as rewards to folks, ten thousand acres here, fifty thousand there, just like that. The bigger the service to the crown, the bigger the piece of land they were awarded. Whole parts of Texas and California are still owned by those people’s descendants. At least, that’s what Cabeza says. What the fuck do I know?’
‘Get to the point,’ Ben said impatiently. None of this was bringing him any closer to Brooke, and he hadn’t come to Spain for a history lesson.
‘Well, Cabeza said this letter Forsyte was going to show him—’
‘The letter that he’d got from the wreck of the Armada warship.’
Nico nodded. ‘—was more than just a letter. It was a royal warrant, bearing the King’s seal. A land grant to some guy he wanted to reward back then in fifteen-something.’
‘What’s that got to do with coded documents?’ Ben said, confused.
‘Well, Cabeza says that the guy being rewarded with all this land was a Spanish spy operating in England back then. Must’ve been one hell of a good agent, because we’re talking about five hundred thousand acres.’ Nico gave a low whistle. ‘I can’t even imagine what half a million acres looks like, can you? Except this wasn’t exactly prime pasture land. It was half a million acres of jungle. Peruvian jungle. The Spanish took Peru from the Incas, right? They fucking owned the place. Peru? Think about it.’
‘Serrato lives in Peru.’
‘Right. And we know that Serrato’ll wipe out anyone who gets between him and that letter, anyone who even knows about it. Which means …’
‘Serrato’s after the land,’ Ben said.
‘That’s my guess too. He must’ve been planning this for a long time. Bet your ass that’s why he moved there in the first place. Somehow those documents are connected to him and he’s gonna use them to stake a claim.’
Nico looked at Ben. ‘Now you tell me. What does an evil motherfucker like Ramon Serrato want with half a million acres of Peruvian jungle?’
Chapter Thirty-Six
The HM-1 Panteras chopper whipped up a wide circle of dust with its downdraught as it took off from the compound, then climbed rapidly upwards into the early morning sky.
It was one of two light assault aircraft that had once belonged to the Brazilian army and were now owned by Ramon Serrato. Nobody had questioned why a perfectly respectable businessman would need a pair of armoured military helicopters still equipped with their cabin-mounted 20mm cannon.
But then, a man with Serrato’s connections didn’t tend to come in for too much official scrutiny these days, especiall
y not in these parts. As he knew very well, the praise that the Peruvian government had garnered from the US authorities back in the nineties for their efforts against organised crime and the drug trade was ancient history; in more recent years the country’s rulers had chalked up one of the worst reputations for corruption and human rights abuses in South America. It was Serrato’s kind of place, all right.
He gazed calmly through his dark glasses at the endless expanse of lush rainforest below. Next to him sat his men Vertíz and Bracca, nursing their weapons. Vertíz was silently, mechanically unloading rounds from the long, curved magazine of his Colt M4 carbine, rubbing the brass casings to a polish against the sleeve of his combat jacket and slotting them back in. Bracca was equally quiet, deeply absorbed in testing the sharpness of the huge bone-handled Bowie knife he always carried with him by shaving hairs off his muscled forearm. He kept the knife’s twelve-inch fullered blade so shiny that nobody could ever have guessed the amount of blood it had spilled in its time.
Nobody spoke at all during the hour-long journey as the almost unbroken green canopy rushed past under the chopper. Now and then the trees parted to reveal a twisting stretch of murky river; making its slow way up one of them was an ancient flat-bottomed riverboat whose wizened brown pilot craned his neck up at the passing helicopter and for a brief instant met Serrato’s mirrored gaze.
The next break in the jungle canopy was a few miles on: a man-made clearing some five hundred metres in diameter that had only very recently been created. Not a tree was left standing on the broad patch of razed earth. From the air it was almost perfectly circular, and dotted with vehicles and tiny figures. Logging crews in orange overalls and hard hats were still hard at work round its edges as a giant Tigercat machine on caterpillar tracks wrenched trees out by the roots and stacked them in a huge heap for the massive circular saws to cut up. There was no danger of the logging crews reporting to the authorities what they might have witnessed down there that day – they all worked for Serrato and they all knew the cost of a wagging tongue. In any case, he controlled a good many of the authorities too. He’d soon be making a number of them extremely rich.
The Armada Legacy bh-8 Page 20