“Sorry for the drama, but I didn’t like the looks of the scopes trained on you from the hotel. I thought I was clear about this,” El Rey said, throttling back the large outboard when they were nine hundred yards from shore.
Aranas studied the man’s dim outline at the stern, a baseball cap pulled down low over his brow and a week-old beard masking most of his lower face. He was completely unremarkable, which Aranas supposed was the point. He noted the night vision scope on the bench next to him, along with a black waterproof nylon bag that was ominously long.
“My security head wanted some options if you gunned me down on the beach,” Aranas replied, shrugging.
“Out of courtesy, I didn’t kill the snipers, however I’d prefer if we could operate with a little more trust. I’ve done work for you before, always satisfactorily, so you should have no reason to doubt me,” El Rey said.
“Fair enough.”
“Now that you have me here, what is this situation that requires me to come out of retirement? And why will nobody but me suffice, out of all the available contractors in the world?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“For twenty million, of course I can. But I didn’t fly halfway around the world to speculate. We have five minutes before I drop you off over at the malecon in town. It would be a more productive use of both our time if you simply told me what’s required,” El Rey said reasonably, his soft voice barely audible over the burbling of the outboard.
“The president has decided to renege on our arrangement. We had agreed before he was elected that we would continue to receive a certain preference, as with his predecessor, but once he was elected he seemed to forget who put him in office, and has been favoring interests that are hostile to mine. That is a material breach of our agreement, and it cannot be allowed to stand,” Aranas explained. “If you follow the news, you’ll see that quite a few of my group’s shipments have been apprehended lately, whereas my adversaries, the Zetas and the Jalisco cartels, are enjoying an almost magical bout of good fortune. I suspect they made El Presidente a better offer, but that’s not how these things are supposed to work. You keep your side of the bargain when you make a deal with me. He has reneged, and I need you to extract an appropriate penalty.”
“You want me to execute the president of Mexico,” El Rey said dispassionately. “Do you agree to my fee?”
“I do. I believe on our last contracts you received half in advance and half upon successful completion of the sanction.”
“Yes, however this requires that I come out of retirement and pull off something extraordinary with the security forces on high alert. I saw the botched attempt in Tampico. I will require fifteen million dollars in advance, and five upon successful completion of the hit. In return, our president will be dead within sixty days — no later. At that point our business is concluded, and I will be in permanent retirement. Is that acceptable?” El Rey offered, not so much asking as stating.
Aranas smoothed his hair where the light breeze off the ocean had ruffled it.
“I can wire transfer fifteen million tomorrow to any account you want, anywhere in the world. Alternatively, I can arrange for you to receive it in cash, or in gold. Your preference. Just make sure you take the miserable shit-rat out — no mistakes or excuses,” Aranas warned.
“I will call you tomorrow morning with wire routing instructions. I would prefer Swiss francs, if that is acceptable? I’m sure you have the ability to convert before you transfer. And don’t worry, I will keep my end of the bargain. He will be dead inside of two months.”
El Rey throttled up the motor and swung the boat back in the direction of the harbor, cutting through the small waves effortlessly at high speed. It was impossible to carry on any further conversation due to the wind and engine noise. Which was fine. There was nothing more to say.
The boat pulled up onto the beach in front of a string of open air seafood restaurants, and Aranas climbed over the bow and hopped agilely onto the sand.
“I’ll await your call,” he said, and the assassin nodded before gunning the motor and heading back to the dark waters of the open sea. Aranas watched as he disappeared and nodded to himself. If anyone could pull off this hit, it was El Rey.
Aranas fished his cell phone from his shirt pocket and noted that he had sixteen messages. He’d felt it vibrating nonstop in the boat, but part of his arrangement with the assassin was no phone calls, so he’d erred on the side of discretion. It was bad enough the man had spotted the two jackasses with the rifles — two of his very best men. He hadn’t wanted to show any further bad faith.
Aranas punched the redial button and issued terse instructions. He wanted to be in the air within half an hour. His chartered jet was sitting at the airport, waiting for him and his security detail. He’d had about enough of this little fishing hamlet, between the beach and the boat ride.
After tossing his empty Bohemia bottle in a gray plastic trash receptacle, he moved up the shore towards the waterfront walkway, confident that his men would be there within a few minutes.
A group of five drunken gringos staggered past him, laughing loudly at some private joke as they moved down the strand in search of a party. Aranas eyed the two leggy teenage blondes, wearing miniskirts so short that they more resembled Tshirts than dresses, cackling with glee as they passed a fedora back and forth, their boyfriends’ expressions already tequila-glazed. Ah, youth. It was wasted on the young.
Aranas ambled past the boat ramp and towards the pedestrian shopping area that was closing down for the night. As he trudged along, he reflected on his brief meeting with the assassin, the ephemeral El Rey, seemingly more phantom than human, judging by his miraculous string of successful executions. Twenty million dollars was a lot of money, but Aranas wasn’t in a bargain-hunting mood, and in the scheme of things, it was loose change to the cartel kingpin. El Rey was absolutely correct in his assessment of the current situation — the disastrous attack on the motorcade had served to escalate the conflict, and now the president’s security forces were in a state of agitated high alert. Meanwhile, every day, shipments worth many times the twenty million were in jeopardy due to the law enforcement focus on his cartel.
The man was right. It would require a small miracle to pull the hit off successfully. And these days, miracles cost.
It would be money well spent, of that he was sure.
Aranas spotted the two silver Suburbans his men had rented pulling along the beach drive and hiked in their direction. The assassin’s reputation and legacy of kills notwithstanding, Aranas was certain of one thing after their brief encounter.
He was very glad that El Rey wasn’t targeting him.
The following morning, a young man with almost impossibly attractive features lounged by the pool at a private beachfront villa in Ixtapa, taking in the breathtaking beauty of the pristine ocean while munching contentedly on a fruit plate. A porter in white linen stood a discreet distance away in the shade of the house, sensitive to the slightest indication that the guest required anything at all.
El Rey tapped a few keys on his laptop computer and then reached over to the small marble table for a wireless headset. He placed the fruit on the ground next to him and waved the man off — he needed privacy for the call he was about to make. The attendant bowed and scurried into the house, leaving the area empty except for a brave herring gull that had landed, eyeing the pool curiously.
After another series of keystrokes, the young man heard a distinctive ringing in the headset, followed by a now unmistakable voice.
“Yes?”
“Good morning. The funds should be sent to the following account, care of a correspondent bank in Germany.” El Rey then slowly recited the wire information, listening attentively as Aranas repeated it.
“I have one other assignment I would like you to consider. Before you make your final arrangements for the discussed contract,” Aranas said once he’d noted the banking details.
This wasn’t part of the
deal.
“I thought I was clear. I am retired. This is my final transaction.”
“I know, and I understand. But if you’d like to make an easy five million, you might want to at least hear me out,” Aranas dangled as bait.
El Rey sighed. Things were never simple with the cartel bosses. They were volatile and impetuous, he’d found. Still, five million was a substantial contract price if the job was straightforward. “What is it you wish me to do?”
Aranas gave him a name. ‘Chacho’ Morenos, the head of the Familia Morenos cartel that was battling for control of Juarez.
“He has made my life uncomfortable in a critical gateway to the United States. For a man of your abilities, this would be an easy sanction. Almost beneath you. But for five million…”
“Very well. Transfer twenty million today — the full value of the second contract plus the agreed fifteen — and I shall make it so within a matter of a few weeks, if not days. I’ll need to nose around and get a feel for the lay of the land. Because of the last-minute nature of this, I will undoubtedly also incur higher expenses.”
“I have no doubt. Which is why I am willing to be so generous. That, and it seems prudent to clean the whole house while I have a competent sanitizer…”
“I shall get in touch once I’ve dispatched this secondary target. I’ll look for the transfer,” El Rey said and then disconnected.
He had put the call through an IP-masking software package that bounced his address all over the planet, so he was untraceable. The bank account the money was going to was in the name of a Lithuanian shell company with accounts in Luxembourg, and there would be two further transfers to an account in the British Virgin Islands, where his funds were ostensibly investment proceeds for a hedge fund registered there, and the trail would end within another week when that fund purchased a number of credit default swaps from a hedge fund in Ireland that would expire, worthless. The money would be effectively laundered, and once in Ireland, it was clean — the proceeds of legitimate investments in the unregulated centi-trillion dollar derivatives market. Nobody would bat an eye over a measly twenty million.
El Rey shut down his computer and set it to the side, on the table, and resumed his fruit breakfast, pausing to sip some freshly squeezed orange juice and pomegranate nectar the staff had obligingly prepared for him.
By the end of the day, with his savings, he would be worth forty million dollars. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Now all he needed to do was take out one of the most heavily protected cartel bosses in the world and execute the president of Mexico.
He took a bite of pineapple. That had been one of the things he’d missed living in Argentina. Fresh pineapple.
It would be an eventful few months.
Chapter 11
The air in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande River from El Paso, Texas, stank of sour exhaust and raw sewage. The downtown was dilapidated and reeked of disrepair; the ancient school buses that were the public transportation belched toxic fumes into the atmosphere as they groaned past platoons of impoverished workers on their way home from long shifts in the maquiladoras plants that dotted the city. Trash choked every gutter of the broken sidewalks; colorful chip bags and ice cream wrappers mingled with cigarette butts and sludge that the pedestrians moved cautiously around, ever mindful of random ruts and holes awaiting the unsuspecting. If there was a sorrier sight than Juarez by day, it was surely Juarez by night.
Handcarts wedged between battered cars served all manner of food for the work crowd; the odor of hot dogs and frying mystery meat wafted like a cloud past the bus stop where the young man waited patiently, reading a newspaper by the storefront light while he kept a wary eye on the bar across the street — a known hangout of the enforcers who worked for the Familia Morenos cartel, and a poor choice to frequent unless suicide was high on one’s wish list.
Juarez had earned the dubious distinction of being the most dangerous city on the planet that wasn’t in an active war zone. Fully forty percent of the population had evacuated over the prior five years, while the Sinaloa cartel and the Juarez cartel battled over the trafficking hub that led into the United States. The murder rate was a minimum of eight deaths per day, with bursts of executions during an active conflict easily driving the number into the double digits.
The armed wing of the Juarez cartel, La Linea, comprised former police officers and military specialists from the Mexican Special Forces, as well as street gang members. La Linea was especially feared, even among the routinely savage Juarez crew, because of their penchant for decapitations and mutilation. They had borrowed a page from the U.S.-backed regime in El Salvador during the Eighties, which regularly left the mutilated bodies of its victims in prominent areas as a warning to would-be rivals, and to keep the population subdued with fear. Hardly a week went by without a grotesquely butchered corpse being left in a central location. The papers had grown so accustomed to the slaughter that there was a sense of boredom to the daily stories of slayings and beheadings — it took a significant event to make a dent in the jaded sense of apathy that floated over the doomed city like a haze.
For the past two years, Sinaloa had battled it out in the city streets with the Juarez cartel, culminating in Sinaloa having appeared to have won the war after a particularly bloody massacre that claimed the lives of over fifty people in a single day. But other rivals to the throne quickly threw their hats in and joined the killing frenzy in a bid for power, and the result was that the town had remained a death zone, with a population that didn’t venture out at night for fear of armed onslaughts. The cartel factions also augmented their income by conducting kidnappings and murder-for-hire, as well as slavery, car theft, fraud, burglary…anything that could be done at the point of a gun for profit, making life in Juarez a kind of living hell for the innocent residents who were the natural prey for the criminal syndicates.
El Rey watched as groups of tired females clung to each other while waiting for their bus. In addition to all its other sins, Juarez had earned a position of disrepute for the serial murder of thousands of young women, attracted to the city by the promise of work in the multitude of factories that were the region’s only saving grace.
Multinational conglomerates had discovered the value of assembling their North American products on the border, leveraging the dirt-cheap labor cost in Mexico to create windfall profitability — all part of the miracle of globalization. But the workforce, which was mainly young women, had drawn predators in the form of organized serial killing gangs, in which the police and the local power elite were strongly suspected. Even after the official four hundred or so cases had been solved and attributed to bus drivers, street gangs and deviant killers, the unofficial estimate remained closer to five thousand, with mass graves their legacy. The government had been quick to proclaim the spree over seven years earlier, and yet women still disappeared with regularity, and the word on the street was that the killers were still active.
At one time, the city had boomed to an estimated two million population, but the constant violence had driven many from the region, and it had shrunk by seven hundred thousand. Blocks of abandoned homes and businesses abounded, mute testament to the impact of the cartel warfare that defined the area.
With the United States just across the river, Juarez remained a critical junction for drug trafficking, and so it was that new contenders continued to move into town to take on the entrenched players. The Morenos gang had appeared eighteen months before with a splash, and had immediately begun a campaign of systematic brutality that rivaled the most brazen and vicious in Mexico. The town was divided up into the equivalent of fiefdoms where the local warlords reigned supreme, with the most dangerous to Aranas’ Sinaloa group run by ‘Chacho’ Morenos, one of the most influential power players in the region, having forged a coalition with Aranas’ sworn enemies in the Zetas cartel.
None of which particularly bothered the young man, who was himself one of the earth’s most dangerous preda
tors. El Rey had spent ten days in Juarez so far, plying the street criminals with cash to gain their confidence, buying drugs and a few weapons, which were both in plentiful supply. He’d maintained an aura of the underworld by claiming to be a high-end male prostitute for rich gringos, which his new movie-star features lent credence to, as did his choice of clothing, deliberately selected to maximize his flamboyant cover. He knew from experience that prostitutes were largely invisible in criminal circles, and so quickly had entre to many establishments that would have immediately questioned a young, fit male who wasn’t in the cartel game.
He’d learned that the second in command of the Familia Morenos liked to let off steam in the bar across the street, which was flanked by cars filled with armed sentries, as well as several police cars. Juarez was a city where money bought influence, including police guards to diminish the appeal of an assault. El Rey knew that there were thousands of soldiers in the town chartered with keeping the peace, but until recently they’d been strangely unable to locate the Sinaloa cartel’s outposts. That had all changed when the new regime had come into the government, and now Sinaloa was on the run, forced to keep a low profile. This had helped the Morenos solidify power in what would have been an impossible way just six short months earlier, when Sinaloa had maintained a stranglehold on the streets. Now the Juarez situation was in flux, and the Morenos’ ascent had emboldened other groups to come to town and challenge one and all for a piece of territory.
El Rey understood why this was an impossible circumstance for Aranas — it called into question his authority and created competitors in what had been a relatively stable corridor. The entire situation had been exacerbated by the armed forces cracking down on his group, telegraphing the message that it was open season on Sinaloa. In the delicate world of cartel power, any hint of disequilibrium invited in rivals, which was exactly what had happened. Aranas made five million dollars every evening in Juarez alone, so El Rey completely understood the reasoning of wanting his Morenos problem taken care of while he was available.
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