“My orders were to have you accompany me. We have a Gulfstream V waiting at the airport that can hit Mexico without refueling. I urge you to reconsider.”
“I don’t care what your orders were. I am retired. If I decide to meet with Don Aranas, it’s out of respect for his position, not because of any orders. Give me a number, and if I decide to, I will call and arrange a meeting within a week. It will be just the two of us. Nobody else. And the price will be very high. Twenty million U.S.. There will be no negotiation. That’s what it will take to bring me out of retirement if I choose to do so. If I decide not to, I won’t call, and you can tell Don Aranas that I have respectfully declined.” El Rey motioned with the gun. “You are still alive for one reason. I want you to take that message back to him. If you’re unwilling to, say so, and I can arrange for you to join your men in the gutter.”
The man nodded and then slowly reached into his jacket pocket for a pen and a scrap of paper — a parking stub. He watched El Rey studying him, and then, after considering it for a few moments, scrawled a number on the back of the ticket. He replaced the pen in his jacket and then held the slip out to El Rey.
“Place it on the ground and then turn around and walk out of here. Keep walking until you get to the main street and then cross into the park. Walk to the far side, and from there, do whatever you want. But be assured of one thing. If I ever see you, or any of your men, again, I will kill you like a dog, without hesitation. Nothing personal. You know how it is,” El Rey said, speaking softly, as was his custom.
The man nodded. “I’ll take him the message.”
He bent down and placed the parking ticket on the ground and then turned as instructed. El Rey slammed him in the base of the neck with the heavy steel pistol, and he tumbled to the ground. Picking up the stub, he calculated that the man would be out for at least fifteen minutes — plenty of time to get to his apartment, grab his gear, and disappear forever.
When the man came to, he was being shaken awake by a uniformed police officer. A blue glow flickered on the street from the roof lights of the squad cars. A harsh glare illuminated the building’s battered facade from the headlights of the four gathered cars. A huddle of cops stood outside by the two corpses, which had been covered with a tarp. El Rey was gone.
He told the police that he’d been assaulted and mugged, and that the last thing he remembered was being told to move into the building. He knew nothing about the two dead men — perhaps they’d happened along and tried to help him. He didn’t know. He’d been unconscious throughout whatever had happened and vaguely remembered a pair of large men, rough-looking, perhaps homeless — he struggled to give as good a description as he could muster, but it was all blurry and had happened so fast.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have his wallet — not surprising, given that he’d just been robbed; but he could get his passport brought to him with a phone call to a colleague at the airport. The officers took him into the precinct and processed his statement, and a doctor checked him perfunctorily. No concussion — just a sore neck and a bad headache. He was allowed to make his call, and within a few minutes the shift chief got a phone call from the head of the Mendoza police force.
Four hours later, the Gulfstream lifted into the night sky and banked north, paralleling the Andes on its way up the coast.
Chapter 7
Cruz sat with his advisory team in the conference room, Briones seated by his side, as they strategized on how best to take down the bodega, which they’d been watching for a week. It was obvious to them that the facility was being used as a distribution point for drugs and arms, and the only real questions that remained were ones of timing and logistics.
Briones glanced at his notes. “As suspected, the contraband comes in during the day, apparently from two suppliers, both of which are small construction supply companies that don’t have any other customers. We haven’t been able to get close enough for hundred percent confirmation, but it appears that one of them is dropping off crates of weapons, and the other, drugs. Most likely meth, because the vehicles that are arriving to pick it up at night are well known local meth distributors who specialize in trafficking in the barrios. Could be some marijuana, too, but that’s not a big concern. Guns and meth are,” Briones summarized.
Cruz stood. “We need to coordinate taking down the two vendors as well as the bodega, preferably all at the same time. I’m not nearly as worried about the individual dealers making the pickups. There will be ten more to replace them when we drag them off the street, so the overwhelming priority has to be the supply. Cut off the supply, and most of the problem goes away.” He turned his attention to Briones. “Let’s talk about defenses.”
“It’s relatively low-key. At night, there are only three security men, and we haven’t seen any inside, so neutralize them and it’s a clean sweep. There are usually more men there during the day — workers and legitimate delivery people, so the odds of collateral damage increase with a daytime strike. I’m recommending going in just before dawn, when the night shift will be the most tired, and doing a stealth takeout of the sentries,” Briones concluded.
One of the men at the table shook his head. “It’s not going to sit well with the press if we just gun down the guards with no warning or opportunity to allow them to surrender.”
Cruz nodded. “I’d normally have a problem doing so, but these men are carrying automatic weapons that are illegal in Mexico and are playing host to known cartel street dealers. Our last operations involved considerable police and army casualties, and I’ve about had it with our men being butchered to give these animals a chance to lay down their arms. They almost never do, and all we are doing is giving them warning so they can dig in and kill our forces. I’m done with that. If you’re carrying around an AK-47 and distributing drugs that are killing kids, you don’t need a warning. You need a coffin. That’s going to be our new policy. Zero tolerance.”
The man persisted. “Will the attorney general buy off on that? Doesn’t it violate their rights?”
“On this mission, we will be presenting it as a fait accompli. It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. If you have a problem with that, then you can be the one to go visit the families of the dead officers when these bastards gun them down after they’ve gotten their warning, and explain why the killers deserved a chance. We’ve identified all three as low-level enforcers for the Sinaloa cartel — men who are known killers. These men are butchers. We know it. I’m saying we cut them down before they can do more damage. If you’re uncomfortable with that, I can have you re-assigned to a different group. Make up your mind,” Cruz warned.
The man backed down, shaking his head. “I just don’t want any fallout that could hurt us later.”
“Let me worry about that. Now, Lieutenant Briones will take over and go through the plan for the attack. We’ll hit it tomorrow morning and then get the area cleaned up so that we can take the day crew captive and arrest the delivery trucks as they arrive with their cargo.”
A drowsy rooster crowed in the distance, sensing that dawn was approaching. The guards at the bodega lounged around the back of the building, weary after yet another long night of inactivity, their weapons by their sides as they sat playing cards. Only two more hours to go, and then they’d be off until eight the next night for another eleven hours of tedium.
Two hundred yards away, a pair of marine snipers stealthily moved through a vacated junkyard to a position where they’d have a clear line of fire. Their weapon of choice for the exercise was the M-16 rifle, with an accuracy that was perfect at such a range. They had the guns set to single fire, confident in their ability to dispatch the three men sitting around a white plastic Pacifico beer table near the bodega’s main entry.
Their earbud com lines crackled and a quiet voice told them to be ready to fire if the men moved for their weapons. They steadied their rifles against an old Dodge Dart’s rusting fender and prepared to engage.
A loud voice boomed from
the public address system of an armored Federal Police truck that roared around the corner on the dirt road that led to the bodega, followed by three police cars with their lights off.
“Do not move. Do not attempt to reach for your guns. This is the Federal Police. We have you surrounded.”
The men froze momentarily, then dived for their rifles. The first man’s head exploded in a froth of blood and brains, spackling the wall behind him. The second man’s chest shredded in seconds, peppered by smoking holes, the dark stain of exsanguination spreading before he hit the ground. The third guard made it to his weapon as the slug intended for him missed by scant millimeters, and taking cover, fired a burst in the direction of the police truck before a sniper round tore his esophagus apart, taking most of his C3 vertebrae with it.
The assault was over almost before it started. The three corpses lay immobile in the sticky dirt. Briones got out of the lead vehicle, approached the lock with bolt cutters, and made short work of the chain securing the gate in place. A squad of combat-equipped Federales jogged into the storage yard, followed by the coroner’s van. The instructions were clear. Photograph the carnage, then get the bodies out of there and clean any trace of the battle up so the day crew had no idea there was a problem until it was too late.
Half an hour later, the scene had been sanitized, and the only evidence of the slaughter was the hanging gate chain and the line of police vehicles preparing to pull away. A small group of curious locals had gathered up the road, drawn by the gunfire, but the officers quickly dispersed them, warning them to stay away from the area. Most were night watchmen at other buildings, although a few lived in the ramshackle hovels that were a perennial on the periphery of any rural industrial area in Mexico — squatters whose desperation had forced them to construct meager shelters from discarded or pilfered materials, and who lived without the benefit of water, electricity or plumbing.
This human flotsam shuffled back to wherever it called home, driven by the warnings of the police. Nobody wanted to bring any more trouble down on their heads than the universe had already visited upon them, so their curiosity took a back seat to self-preservation.
One man, a security guard at a plumbing supply warehouse a block from the yard, made a surreptitious call on his cell as he made his way back to his lonely watch, murmuring a summary of what he’d seen into the phone before terminating the call.
The day crew never appeared that morning, and neither did the delivery trucks.
As the day wore on, it became obvious that the raid had somehow been leaked to the higher-ups in the scheme, who had taken appropriate measures to cut their losses and terminate operations. It was always a risk for the police, in any incursion, because the industry was always on guard and lived with the expectation that it would have to fold up its tent and move to greener pastures at any moment.
In the end, Cruz and Briones were both stymied by the exercise because while they’d seized thirty-five kilos of methamphetamine, two hundred pounds of marijuana, eighteen automatic Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles and twelve FN Five-seven pistols, they’d failed to stop the driving force behind the operation — the cartel lieutenants who had set up the bodega in the first place. And so, within a few days, the operation would switch to another warehouse somewhere close by where more of the insidious cargo would be distributed, and aside from a few dead enforcers, nothing had changed.
It was frustrating, but all part of the job, and both men tried to keep it from getting to them. They had achieved a good outcome — they’d stopped a local drug and gun distribution scheme with zero police casualties, and dealt a blow to the forces of evil. All in all, not a bad day’s work, although when Cruz made it home that day he’d seemed somewhat dejected to Dinah. She’d sensed his frustration and suggested dinner at one of his favorite restaurants, followed by a bottle of passable Mexican cabernet from the Guadalupe Valley.
As they had sat on the floor in front of their small fireplace upon their return, holding each other while savoring their wine, Cruz had again silently remarked to himself that he was extremely fortunate to have found such a beautiful and wonderful companion to share his life.
Sometimes all you could do was live to fight another day and cherish the good around you.
Sometimes that was enough.
Chapter 8
Three miles off the coast of Costa Rica, Gato Negro, a two hundred forty-eight foot super yacht with its own helicopter, cruised north at fourteen knots, its stabilizers working to ensure that the passengers were not troubled by any rolling. There wasn’t much chance of that in the four foot waves — the ship’s forty-two foot beam and aluminum construction made her as stable as an oil rig in all but the worst conditions. A staff of sixteen full-time crew worked diligently to ensure that she was always ready for use, year round, whenever her owner decided to take in some salt air.
She flew a Bahamian flag, registered there by a corporation specifically formed for that purpose, whose shares were held by a Panamanian trust, which was in turn the asset of a Hong Kong corporation. Ownership of the Hong Kong entity was murky at best, with its shares technically owned by a bank, whose owners in the Isle of Man were not a matter of public record. A team of highly specialized attorneys worked full time to ensure that the dizzy network of intertwined entities remained impenetrable. The Byzantine web of structures was one of the more powerful financial conglomerates in the world, counting dozens of casinos, real estate holding companies, hotels, pawn shops, nightclubs, hedge funds and two insurance companies in its stable of assets.
Especially useful were the groups of casinos on Indian land in the western United States, whose receipts were colossal even in times when the massive parking lots were empty. Apparently, some things were recession-proof businesses, and between the gambling establishments and the nine hundred motels that sat forgotten by freeways, staggering quantities of dollars made their way to the related credit unions and banks that processed the syndicate’s money.
Some of the top finance graduates from American universities devised impossible to follow schemes to obfuscate the moving parts of this improbable empire, the magnum opus of the top narcotics boss in the world — Don Carlos Aranas. Aranas had been a man of vision, having taken a page from the American mafia’s playbook and worked towards sanitizing his income from the drug, human trafficking, murder-for-hire and kidnapping trades, by diversifying into legitimate businesses. Now, decades after having taken over the Sinaloa cartel when ‘The Godfather’, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, had gone to jail immediately following his dividing Mexico into the current decentralized scheme of smaller regional cartels, Aranas was a man with no home, who divided his time between Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Venezuela.
Not surprisingly, well-publicized efforts to bring down the number-one drug lord in the world had all failed. Aranas was incredibly resilient, having even escaped from a maximum security prison when he’d been apprehended in the early Nineties. While details were murky, as were most facts surrounding him, legend had it that Aranas had co-opted everyone in the prison, from the head of security on down, and on the day of his escape had simply hidden in a laundry cart pushed by the director of the guard shift, who had been thoughtful enough to then drive him to a nearby dirt airstrip, where a twin engine King Air prop plane had winged him to points unknown.
The total revenue of the Mexican drug cartels was a hotly disputed topic, with no agreement. For understandable reasons, hard numbers were difficult to come by. Some estimates placed the number at twenty billion. Others at fifty billion. Reality was that both numbers were laughably low, and that between all the cartels the real revenue number was closer to a hundred billion a year, wholesale.
Officials in the U.S. tried to downplay the number, as they did with virtually all statistics, preferring to massage them for their own devices. Just as unemployment was officially pegged in the eight to nine percent range through elaborate sleight of hand, and the GDP number was inflate
d by accounting hijinks, so too was the scale of the illegal drug business. Most experts privately agreed that the true ultimate street value of all drugs that passed from Mexico into the U.S. was closer to three hundred billion dollars a year, with two thirds of that sticking to the American side as the drugs were cut and distributed from the large wholesale distribution points and passed down to the street level dealers. Regardless of whose numbers one believed, the glaringly obvious fact was that, for whatever reason, the top man in the world was invisible to all law enforcement authorities and passed across national borders without hindrance.
Three deck hands cleaned the hull of one of the larger ship’s tenders — a thirty-two-foot Cabo Express Aranas liked to use for fishing, which was mounted across the rear of the yacht’s second-story deck, leaving the first free for entertaining. A massive crane swung the boat over the side and into the water whenever he was in the mood to use it to explore shallower waters for elusive game fish.
Aranas was almost sixty years old, which made him ancient in the drug business. Most of his rivals and peers had long since expired or had been incarcerated, and yet Don Aranas enjoyed glowing good health and virtually limitless prosperity. The ship was furnished with a fully-equipped gymnasium, and Aranas made a habit of taking an hour of exercise at least five days a week. What was the point of becoming one of the wealthiest men in the world if you threw it away with a sedentary lifestyle and poor habits, he reasoned. His intention was to live to a ripe old age, confounding his enemies and pursuers in the process. So far, the odds favored him. No photograph existed that was more current than twenty years old, and he no more resembled the images circulated of him than did his captain — a state of affairs he encouraged.
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