by Layton Green
He knew he should let it go, fly back to New York and stay in his apartment until things calmed down. But the very thought of that, of watching his back as he accepted the General’s reign of terror, wearing those shackles on his freedom, made him lean over the safe and get to work.
It was a simple but time-consuming job. First he cut through the outer layer with the circular saw, then used the hammer and chisel to work through the concrete underneath. When the concrete started to give way, he tore it in half with his hands, exposing an inner compartment shielded by a barrier of thick plastic. He returned to the saw and ripped his way through the final layer.
When the plastic split, Grey exhaled his tension and tossed aside stacks of bills to reach the rest of the contents.
It wasn’t much. A diamond wedding ring, a stack of gold ingots, a few papers that looked like real estate deeds, and a square envelope filled with photos. Grey stuffed the deeds and the photos in his backpack.
He had two rooms left to search, but it was time to go. Halfway to the back door, he got the text he was dreading from Fred.
-on their way-
Grey ran outside. The thorny bougainvillea was too high for the mats. The gate was the only option. He sprinted for the bamboo shielding the cottage, planning to hide until Rolando disappeared inside the main house, then dash to the gate and clamber over in the few seconds before Rolando realized his house had been tossed.
Foolish, he berated himself. Foolish to take so long.
At least he had the gun, and Fred was waiting outside. Grey crouched inside the thicket of bamboo and watched the gate open. With any luck, Rolando and his driver would enter the house together.
A dog barked, weakly at first and then gaining strength. Grey’s breath stopped on the intake.
The rottweiler. He had forgotten all about him. The noise of the gate must have stirred his sensitive ears awake.
The dog would either smell him or see him on the way out, and Grey would never get over the wall in time. He could shoot the dog, though he didn’t care for the thought. But a running dog was a tough target, and the noise would draw Rolando and his man. If one or both of them had a gun, and they probably did, Grey could be in trouble.
The gate was a quarter of the way open. Grey’s eyes moved from the gate to the covered motorcycle to the gate again, where he could see the signature Mercedes hood ornament entering the grounds.
And behind it, waiting to pull in behind Rolando’s car, was a black Hummer.
Grey swore.
He remembered seeing two sets of keys on a hook by the front door, and he sprinted back to the house, dashing inside to grab both sets. The dog was barking furiously.
Grey sprinted back to the cottage as the Mercedes pulled inside the property. The rottweiler was halfway across the lawn and closing fast. Grey yanked the cover off the bike, revealing an older-model red BMW. He tried the first set of keys. Wrong fit. The dog was twenty yards away. Grey jammed the second set into the ignition as he flicked the kickstand with his foot, praying the featureless keys didn’t belong to a parked car in Salento.
The motorcycle roared to life. Grey twisted his wrist and the bike shot forward. He veered straight for the dog, which snarled and sprang aside.
On his way to the electric gate, which was closing, Grey saw four Latino men in slacks and dark glasses halfway out of the Hummer and fumbling for their weapons. Rolando was leaning out of the rear window of the Mercedes, neck craned in Grey’s direction. As Grey cleared the gate, the first fusillade of bullets sprayed gravel in the street.
After executing a turn that would have thrown most riders, his shoulder two feet from the street, Grey sped towards the bakery. In his rearview he saw the Hummer reversing out of the gate. Fred started the sedan and pulled out from the curb as Grey rushed by. Bullets slammed into the rental car, shattering windows.
The Hummer flipped around to chase them. Grey skidded around the block and stopped to wait for Fred. A second later the sedan cleared the corner, and Grey heard the hiss of a popped tire.
Grey beat his hands in the air. “Get on!”
Fred ditched the car and jumped on behind Grey. His bulk weighed the bike down and would limit Grey’s maneuverability, but Grey still liked their chances. If he knew the neighborhood, he could lose the Hummer in seconds. As it was, he could improvise.
He handed the Glock to Fred and accelerated to the next intersection. Turned left, raced to the end of the street, took a right, and ran smack into a pedestrian street market stuffed with stalls and people.
The Hummer was a block behind them. Grey had no choice but to press through. He honked and revved the engine as he worked through the crowd, but the market was noisy and chaotic, filled with speakers blaring cumbia.
Fred was waving his gun and screaming at people to move, while Grey revved the engine and popped up on one wheel to intimidate the crowd. By the time the crowd shifted, they were only halfway through the market, and the Hummer had parked and was disgorging narcos.
When Grey finally got the bike through, two of the narcos had almost caught up to them. Fred had his gun leveled but it was too crowded to shoot.
The narcos had no such qualms. One of them fired, a collective scream rose, and everyone dove for cover.
Grey swerved, the bullets missed, and Grey sped away. When he was halfway down the block, accelerating on top of discarded soda cans and fruit rinds, he checked the rearview and saw two narcos shoving riders off their motorcycles near the edge of the market. They whipped the bikes around and raced after Grey and Fred.
“Two on bikes behind us!” Grey shouted.
Fred turned and loosed a volley of bullets. The narcos returned fire. At that distance and speed, with all riders ducking and weaving to avoid getting hit, the gunshots were a lottery ticket.
But the game had changed, and not in Grey’s and Fred’s favor.
As Grey sped through the neighborhood, he tried to formulate a plan through the madness. His first instinct was to find a highway, but an open road would reward speedier bikes with heavier firepower.
He opted for the city center. Bigger crowds, police, public transport. Tighter roads and the opportunity to use his skill as a rider.
The problem was, he was turned around and had no idea how to get there. “Keep ’em honest,” he yelled back to Fred, “but don’t waste your bullets.”
Fred fired off another round. “This isn’t my first rodeo. Just stay on the pavement.”
They hit a four-lane highway, and Grey accelerated to eighty, one hundred, one-twenty, one-forty. His pursuers were going even faster, and he started to lose ground. He took the next exit, ripping between a semi and an SUV, almost flipping over the side rail on the curve before righting the bike and cranking his wrist on the straightaway.
In the distance, Grey saw the metro zipping above the street, and he angled towards it. The neighborhood took a turn for the worse, and Grey had to dodge street vendors and homeless drunks teetering through the streets. High-level motorcycle riding was a combination of nerve and skill, but the sicarios pursuing them rode as well as Grey, as if they had been born on a bike and planned to die there.
“I’m low on ammo,” Fred said, and Grey grimaced. If Fred couldn’t keep them at a distance, they were in trouble. He was going to have to make a move.
They squeezed through a few alleys littered with broken bottles, almost crashed into a garbage man pulling a wooden cart, accelerated through a series of parking lots. Two bullets whizzed by Grey’s head, ruffling his hair. Fred fired another round.
Grey tried to work his way to the metro but only seemed to corkscrew deeper into the neighborhood. He slowed to weave through another, less crowded market, and Fred pulled down fruit and clothing stands to slow their pursuers. When they popped out on the other side, Grey found himself staring at a cul-de-sac surrounded by two-story apartment buildings.
Revving his engine as their pursuers appeared in the rearview, he spotted a set of steep stairs c
limbing the hillside between two of the buildings. A bullet splattered a discarded melon two feet from their bike, and Grey raced for the stairs.
The jolts from the bike bouncing off the stairs felt like a giant was shaking them. Grey flattened on the bike. A frightened walker in yellow spandex jumped out of the way, her exposed stomach jiggling like a bowl full of Jell-O. In the rearview, Grey saw the narcos navigating the stairs behind them.
The staircase spit them out in an overgrown green space. Grey made a sharp right and whipped the bike behind a breadfruit tree, cut the engine, then pointed at the top of the staircase. Fred squeezed his waist in acknowledgment.
Seconds later the first narco cleared the top of the stairs and roared into the park. Fred fired three times. He missed the first rider but hit the second square in the chest, flipping him off the bike and sending the motorcycle crashing into a park bench.
The first narco turned to spray fire at Grey and Fred, the bullets taking chunks out of the breadfruit tree. Fred fired back and then Grey raced in the opposite direction, weaving in and out of trees, the thicket of vegetation saving their lives.
During the exchange, Grey had gotten a glimpse of the mini Uzis the narcos were using. A throwback to another era and the reason Grey and Fred were still alive, since those guns had the range of a slingshot.
“Better odds now,” Fred said.
In the rearview, Grey saw Fred raise the pistol to keep the narco at bay, but nothing happened. Fred cursed. “Or not.”
Another round of bullets chased them into a neighborhood adjacent to the park. Grey turned down one alley and then another, trying not to give the narco an open shot. “The other mag?”
“Spent.”
The neighborhood became a warren of alleys and tight streets, and Grey rode like he had never ridden before, whipping through traffic and onto the sidewalk, kicking up dust and gravel, using every trick in the book. Bullets whizzed overhead and beside them. When Grey entered the next alley he saw in the rearview what he had been waiting for: a raised gun but no sound of a bullet, and a scowl of frustration from their pursuer.
An empty magazine.
The narco slowed to restock his weapon. Grey slid to a stop and pushed Fred off the bike, then whipped the motorcycle around to face his attacker. It was going to end now, one way or the other.
Grey and the narco were fifty yards apart. Grey jammed his wrist forward, shooting the bike towards his quarry. The narco stopped trying to fit the new magazine in, knowing he wouldn’t make it in time. He took the challenge, gunning his own bike.
It was a high-speed game of chicken, and as the bikes screamed forward, front wheels aligned, Grey’s green eyes locked on to the narco’s sunglasses. Grey projected his will outward, letting the narco know in a primal language that Dominic Grey gave no quarter and never, ever, thought about backing down.
Thirty yards apart, and neither had swerved. Grey hunched his shoulders and prepared for impact as best he could, knowing one of them wasn’t going to survive.
Did the narco have it in him? Grey wondered. Did he have as much battle pride as Grey, was he as driven by childhood rage?
Did he want it as bad?
Fifteen yards, and Grey whispered Nya’s name.
Ten yards and he released his chi with a scream.
Five yards and the narco swerved.
In the bat of an eye, Grey twisted his bike in time to catch the rear wheel of the narco’s bike, flipping the helmetless rider over the motorcycle and into the brick wall. The maneuver cost Grey his balance, but he anticipated the crash and slid with his bike down the alley, feeling his flesh shred. Grey let the bike go and crunched into a ball, shielding his vitals as best he could.
The narco was splayed against the wall, head twisted at an unnatural angle. Fred checked him for signs of life, whacked him in the temple with the gun for good measure, then rushed to Grey. Both men looked down at the ripped jeans and exposed pink flesh along the side of Grey’s thigh, sheets of blood seeping outward from the pores as if squeezed from a sponge.
Grey struggled to a sitting position, then flexed his limbs and digits. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“It looks like you got kicked by a team of mules.”
Grey took a long shuddering breath, his leg quivering in pain as the adrenaline started to fade. “Maybe baby mules.”
Fred pulled Grey to his feet, looked at the dead narco, then cupped the back of Grey’s head like they were in the locker room after a big game. “That’s my boy.”
They walked the bike to the other end of the alley and saw the metro bulleting towards a field of skyscrapers in the distance. Behind downtown, evening shadows were starting their slide down a forested slope.
“Once we’re in the center,” Grey said, “what do you think about our exit options?”
“For the most part, the people here hate narcos. Cops too. I think the airport’s safe if we hurry. Let’s get you cleaned up and make a run for it. Want me to drive?”
Grey eased onto the back of the battered bike, his injured thigh as stiff as a peg leg, nodding his head in reply.
Grey and Fred left the bike in an alley near Plaza Botero, under the stern shadow of a checkered Romanesque cathedral. After walking through the sculptures filling the square, they headed for the main drag, Paseo Peatonal Carabobo.
Sidewalk vendors sprayed machine-gun Spanish into the crowd, hawking pirated DVDs and a dizzying array of cheap goods. Grey and Fred picked up fresh clothes: jeans and a black T-shirt and a green Atlético Nacional ball cap for Grey, a light blue guayabera and porkpie hat for Fred.
Grey preferred the safety of the crowd, despite the fact that he was the tallest person around and his Anglo features were a beacon in the sea of black and mestizo faces. A few blocks down they found a pharmacy, and Grey picked up disinfectant, gauze, and a bandage roll for his wounds.
They changed clothes in a public restroom and took a taxi to the airport. The ride was uneventful, the airport modern and calm. Fred dropped the Glock into a trashcan on the way in. After devouring a plateful of empanadas and scouring the crowd for suspicious faces, they downed espressos while Grey tried Lana again, for the third time since the motorcycle chase.
Still no answer.
Grey put the phone away, and Fred eyed him. “So is it Miami or Bogotá? We sure as hell can’t wait around here.”
“No,” Grey murmured.
“We can’t call in Lana’s absence because of the leak. Could make her a sitting duck. Part of me says screw the CIA, let her fend for herself. The other part says we’re all on the same team, Lana’s over there without backup, and we’re committed to seeing this through.” He crushed his espresso cup. “What’s she gotten herself into?”
Grey pursed his lips and cracked his knuckles. Lana was probably mid-assignment, tracking a suspect and not in a position to answer her cell.
Then again, maybe she wasn’t.
He pondered her motives for the umpteenth time, tried to see all the angles, wondered if he could even trust the man beside him, knew they might be walking into the belly of the beast. But he knew what he had to do.
“I can see it on your face,” Fred said, then gave a weary sigh and pushed to his feet. “Bogotá it is.”
Flights to Bogotá left on the hour, and the wait was uneventful. Between cups of coffee, Grey called Viktor, and the two compared notes.
Grey could tell how excited Viktor was by the General’s use of multiple cults, and that annoyed him. Viktor got intrigued whenever he thought there were esoteric secrets in play, regardless of the danger involved.
But the professor’s insight was invaluable. They were looking for someone highly intelligent, highly organized, and willing to use faith as a weapon. Someone who manipulated entire belief systems to suit his criminal purposes.
Which meant there would be no using the General’s religion against him. No appealing to that spark of humanity, however twisted. Grey knew that if they found him, there would
be no quarter received from this elusive patriarch of cults—and none given.
Grey’s eyes got heavy as soon as the plane took off, but he pushed away his fatigue and dug in his backpack for the items he had taken from the Ganador place. Fred confirmed the papers were real estate deeds. One for the place in Medellín, another for the coffee estate, and a third for a house in Cartagena.
Grey turned to the envelope of photos. Fred crowded in next to him. All twenty-two images included the same dumpy Latino man with a bushy moustache and curly hair, his face paunchy and dissolute, eyes as hard as a slab of concrete. With him were a variety of men and a few women, alone or in pairs with the principal subject, each photo portraying a different locale. A few of the scenes depicted transactions taking place, exchanges of backpacks or black leather briefcases.
“I recognize Pablo Escobar,” Grey said, eying the common denominator to all the photos, the monster of a human being who had bombed a commercial airline, orchestrated the murder of a presidential candidate and an attorney general and more than two hundred judges, and turned Medellín into a carnival of horrors, “and that’s about it.”
He handed the photos to Fred, who took his time flipping through them, making little grunts of recognition. “Looks like Rolando didn’t like the company benefits, kept a little insurance for himself. Most of it useless now, of course.”
“So why keep it in the safe?” Grey murmured.
When Fred was finished, he selected one photo from the middle of the pile and placed it on top. He jabbed a finger at a man chatting with Pablo Escobar next to a fountain. “I recognize everyone but this guy. The rest were high-level players in the Escobar Cartel, most either dead or in jail.”
The two men in the photo were in a tiled plaza full of people, in front of an imposing two-domed baroque cathedral. Not an unusual sight in Latin America. The other man was the same height as Escobar, swarthy, stern, streaks of silver in his dark hair, the metal from a pair of eyeglasses glinting in the sun. His eyes were just as hard, maybe even shrewder, than those of the infamous cartel leader.