The Shadow Cartel (The Dominic Grey Series Book 4)

by Layton Green

  Grey stepped to the first window and looked inside. He saw a room with a bulky, middle-aged Latino man sitting on a couch against the far wall. The man was looking right at Grey but gave no sign of recognition. Drool seeped out of the side of his mouth.

  “Mother of Christ,” Fred whispered.

  “Check the other side,” Grey said.

  Fred scooted to the other side of the hallway, and Grey hustled forward, peering through each window to find a person inside, in various stages of stupor. At the end of the hallway, just before another intersection, he found Lana.

  The door was locked, and there was a slot box beside it. Grey swiped his card, and the door unlocked with a click. Grey pushed it open and saw Lana lying on the couch in jeans and a blue sweater, staring at the ceiling. Beside the couch, a half-open door led to another room.

  “Watch the door,” Grey said, then ran to Lana and shook her. “Lana!”

  Her head moved slowly to face him. “Yes?”

  “It’s Grey and Fred. You know who we are?”

  “Yes,” she said, without changing her expression.

  “Then get the hell up!” Fred barked.

  Lana stood, then looked from Fred to the door and back again, as if confused.

  “Sit down again, Lana,” Grey said softly.

  She complied, and Fred and Grey exchanged a look. “Scopolamine,” Fred muttered. “She’ll do whatever we tell her and not remember a thing.”

  There was another slot box on the inside of the door, and Grey had Fred stand in the hallway while Grey tried the key card from the inside. It worked. Grey ushered Fred inside and then closed the door behind them.

  “In here, away from the window,” Grey said, moving Lana through the door into the other room, which contained two chairs and a twin bed with a woolen blanket. Beside the bed was an alcove with a toilet, a showerhead, and a drain in the concrete floor.

  Fred was muttering to himself and stalking the room. Grey’s voice was tight. “I’ll go first and take care of the guard. Wait thirty seconds and come right behind me. If Lana doesn’t cooperate—”

  He cut off at the sound of a click. Fred was closer, and by the time he moved into the first room, a man in a lab coat and jeans was coming through the hallway door, holding a needle in one hand and a tape recorder in the other. A notebook was tucked under his arm. He saw Fred, dropped the notebook, and tried to run back into the hallway. Fred caught him and dragged him inside, knocking him out with a few blows to the head. “Sick bastard,” he muttered, then injected him with his own needle.

  While Fred pulled the doctor into the sleeping area, Grey picked up the tape recorder and the notebook and gave them to Lana. “Hold these and don’t drop them,” he said, his voice husky. “You’re going to have to help us get out of here.”

  She didn’t answer.

  Fred’s eyes looked a bit wild, and Grey could see the barely controlled rage swimming in the pupils. “Same plan?” Fred asked.

  “Make it ten seconds.”

  Grey rushed down the hallway and slowed when he reached the intersection, approaching the guard from behind and not bothering to disguise his footsteps. The guard had no reason to think he was a threat.

  Just before Grey reached the desk, he reversed his grip on the torch, holding it right below the hot tip and swinging it like a baseball bat. He struck the guard in the temple, and the man slumped in his chair. Grey whisked the guard’s gun off the desk.

  Fred and Lana came down the hallway moments later. Though Lana’s eyes were glassy, her movements didn’t appear affected.

  Grey handed the gun to Fred, to maximize their resources. “I say we walk right out the front door.”

  They headed back up the stairs. When they reached the fourth-floor landing, the steel door popped open to reveal a group of robed men clustered in a white-walled hallway, all with guns and waiting to rush out. Behind them, Grey got a brief glimpse of more men in lab coats, another guard’s desk with cameras Grey assumed had betrayed their position, and a stainless steel laboratory at the far end of the hallway.

  Fred fired twice into the doorway, dropping two men in front and causing the rest to scramble backward. “Go!” Fred roared, and Grey pulled Lana up the stairs. Fred covered their back as the crowd of men poured through the doorway.

  They dashed up the stairs. Down hallways on the third and second levels, they saw more men rushing towards them, some holding guns and some carrying needles.

  By the time they reached the top floor, the stairwell below was thick with men. They reached the main courtyard just as four robed attackers raced through the opposite archway.

  Fred fired to back them up, and Grey led the rush down the hallway to their right. Grey’s stomach clenched with fear. With the front door covered, their only choice was to try to reach the hole in the roof, and this direction was new territory.

  Footsteps pounded behind them. Again, there was no shouting and no gun blasts, though Grey was sure they’d shoot if needed.

  They ran for minutes that felt like hours, darting in and out of corridors, jumping over rubble, trying to weave their way back to the section where they had entered, afraid at every turn they would run into a swarm of robed men.

  At last they reached a section Grey recognized. If he remembered correctly, they were only a few corridors from their exit. They reached a familiar courtyard, turned left, and ran straight into two robed men.

  Fred shot one of them before they could react, but the other hit Fred with two rounds, one in the leg and one in the gut. Fred managed to return fire and drop the second attacker, then hobbled on one leg to the corner and fell against the wall.

  His left knee was shattered, and purple lifeblood was pumping out of a hole in his stomach. Grey started towards him, ready to put his wounded friend on his back and carry him the rest of the way, but Fred gasped and pointed the gun at him. “Don’t even think about it. Get her out of here.”

  They both looked down at the crater in Fred’s gut. Grey knew a mortal wound when he saw one.

  “I can’t leave a man down,” Grey said.

  Fred tried to raise himself up, but his face bunched in pain and he slumped, his fingers trying and failing to keep his intestines from slipping out of his abdomen. Grey looked away.

  “You can and you will,” Fred said. “I’m not going anywhere. Do your job or we all die.” He choked on his next breath and a gob of blood poured out of his mouth.

  Grey took another step towards him. Fred switched the gun from pointing at Grey to pointing at his own temple. “Now.”

  More footsteps from the corridor behind them, this time lots of them. Fred cocked the trigger. Grey clutched at his hair and turned away. Forcing back a surge of bile, he picked up one of the dropped guns. He hated leaving Fred more than he had ever hated anything, but Fred wasn’t giving him a choice, and he was right. Fred was dying and Grey had to get Lana out of there.

  The corridor he needed was on the other side of the DEA agent. As he passed his fallen companion, Grey bent to clasp his shoulder. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  “Get the General, Grey. Put a bullet between his eyes.”

  With a numbed feeling, Grey let his hand slide away and ordered Lana, who was standing with her arms hanging at her sides, to follow him out. She obeyed without a word.

  The footsteps were right around the corner. Just before Grey left the room, Fred said, “If you make it home, tell my son I love him.”

  “You have my word,” Grey said, and then dashed down the hallway, Lana trailing behind. Seconds later he heard an exchange of gunfire, followed by a prolonged scream from Fred. Grey gritted his teeth and ran faster. Fred had given them a sliver of hope, and he had to make it count.

  They rushed through a few intersections where Grey was sure he would run into another party of robed men, but the shadows remained still. He could hear footsteps pounding in the distance, and a few of the drug addicts stumbled into his path, but he pushed them aside
and kept retracing his steps. When they reached the room with the hole in the roof, he picked Lana up and thrust her towards the wooden beam.

  “Climb out of that hole,” he ordered.

  She did as asked, agile as a gymnast. It was one of the eeriest things he had ever seen, watching someone whose mind was enthralled but whose body worked as normal.

  He followed her up and then raced across the roof, looking over his shoulder every few steps. No one appeared, and after making sure no one was waiting in the street, he dropped off the roof and helped Lana do the same.

  They sprinted down the murky streets of La Candelaria, Grey’s heart skipping a beat at every blind corner, Fred’s last scream ringing in his ears, a cold wind from the mountains pressing against their backs.

  ANDES MOUNTAINS

  PRESENT DAY

  The General strolled the perimeter of his vast coca fields, idly checking the health of his shrubs. An army of mercenaries accompanied him, peasants labored beside them in the fields, and a black helicopter squatted on a landing pad.

  The General had come to think and reflect. Hours ago, one of his lieutenants had informed him that Lana Valenciano had escaped.

  The General had lasted as long as he had not just by outmaneuvering the authorities and rival cartels, but by valuing power over wealth, and not overreaching. His true secret to success, however, was his intimate knowledge of his best customer, his progenitor, the most powerful and well-connected organization in Latin America, instiller of cult leaders and dictatorships and pseudo-Christian organizations, mover of drugs and arms and governments, chess master on a global scale, cult of all cults.

  The CIA.

  He laughed every time he pulled the strings on his former puppetmaster, using their informants against them, always the first to profit as they fomented terror and chaos around the continent. Beating them at their own game.

  For a long time, he had considered the note he’d left beside the empty cassette recorder at Jonestown the biggest mistake of his career. Still reeling from Tashmeni’s death, he thought the note would keep them off his back while he disappeared. Instead, it had left a loose end, and the General had long suspected that someone at the CIA had tied together the empty cassette recorder, the alleged death of Devon Taylor, and the gringo crime lord in Guyana.

  In the end, it didn’t matter. His true identity was now irrelevant, and the Jonestown tape gave him a powerful trump card. No one wanted that recording exposed, allowing the world to see how the CIA had all but pulled the trigger in Guyana and then wiped away the evidence. Most people knew the CIA was dirty, but the confessions of the Reverend and the taped conversations with his contact were something else altogether. Revelations of the CIA’s machinations not just below the border, but in the heartland of America, in the hearts and minds of its children.

  Just last year, as the General had suspected, he first received confirmation that someone knew who he was. Not everyone: the agent who he had now captured twice in Colombia, Lana Valenciano, had not even known his true identity.

  But someone special did.

  Someone who had sent Lana after the General on a covert mission. Someone who didn’t want him to know about the manhunt, someone who knew the truth.

  Someone who knew that the General could—and would—ruin him.

  No, it was not Lana Valenciano who had caused the General to reflect, but her superior: Jeffrey Lasgetone, the current Deputy Director of the CIA and old acquaintance of the General’s.

  Very old.

  The loss of the Bogotá operation was a minor inconvenience. He had already issued the order to strip and destroy the facility.

  The General knew he held all the cards. No one could find him. He possessed no ties to the past. There was no leverage.

  And he had the tape.

  The CIA had taught him to be self-aware and analyze his own limitations. His only weakness, as far as he could tell, was that somewhere along the way he had become fixated on Tashmeni, the only girl he had ever loved.

  He had already found a way to keep her spirit alive and honor her memory, and now, after all these years and by a stroke of fate, he had found a way to exact his revenge.

  Perhaps those dark gods in which he himself did not believe had smiled on him, rewarding him for his service. Revenge, as they say, was a dish best served cold, and the revenge of the man once known as John Wolverton would be one of the chilliest, most savory entrées ever served to a fellow man.

  Later that evening, when the General was ensconced in the study of his mountain fortress, there was an expected knock at his door.

  Ah, yes. He has arrived. “Come in,” the General called out in Spanish, in a voice laced with insipid menace. The voice of another man.

  A handsome young sicario entered the room, violence in his step, his brow dark and troubled. Lucho, a man the General had decided was going to work directly for him.

  “The man who comes back from the watery grave,” the General said in Spanish. “Welcome.”

  Lucho gave a curt nod. “Revenge keeps the heart beating, Señor Guiñol.”

  “I trust the details of our offer have been explained?”

  “Sí.”

  “And?”

  “There is one thing more I desire,” Lucho said.

  The General clinked the ice in his Scotch. “I know what you want,” he said softly, in that same oily voice. “Your sister’s murderer will be delivered.”

  Lucho’s face twitched, a movement that looked involuntary, as if he couldn’t contain his excitement. “Then we have nothing more to discuss, and it is my pleasure to serve you. And forgive me, it matters not, but the guards outside told me I was meeting with the boss.”

  The General took a long drink as he afforded Lucho an intense stare, relishing the assassin’s confusion. Then the master strategist reached underneath his jaw line, gripped the bottom of the flesh-colored mask that gave him an extra chin and thinning hair, and stripped away the face of Señor Guiñol to reveal the virile silver hair and heavy but dignified features of the General.

  “Guiñol,” Lucho whispered, comprehension dawning in his eyes. “It means a theatre of marionettes, a puppet show.”

  “Sometimes,” the General said in his powerful voice, breaking into a slow grin, “God lives in the machine.”

  BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA

  The first thing Grey did after paying cash at the anonymous pensión in Usaquén, a neighborhood as far from La Candelaria as he could get, was to kneel and meditate on the bathroom rug, using it as a makeshift tatami mat until the shaking subsided.

  The violence of the night, the shock of Fred’s death, the underground laboratory where human beings were stripped of their will and kept like cattle—it all swelled up within him, robbing him of his senses, infusing him with rage.

  He meditated not to destroy the demons inside him—he doubted their mortality—but to diffuse and control his anger, focus it with rational, white-hot purpose.

  When he calmed enough to think, he researched scopolamine on his smartphone. The dark history of the drug known as “devil’s breath” ran from Colombian Indian tribes who used the drug to bury alive the wives and mistresses of fallen chieftains, to Nazi experiments using the drug as an interrogation aid. And of course, Grey thought, the CIA had a history with the drug.

  Native to the forests around Bogotá, in recent years the use of scopolamine in Colombian street crime had escalated, not just in robberies but also with women targeted as objects of gang rapes or by-the-day “zombie” prostitution rings. There were even reports of women waking up on the side of the road with no memory and missing an organ or their infant children, with authorities claiming the women were victims of an unimaginable but growing black market. The thought of that factoid spiked Grey’s blood pressure to dangerous levels.

  He also learned that any immediate antidote involved access to chemicals that were out of his reach. The good news was that a night of rest should cleanse the system of the drug, w
hich was why the doctor had continued to dose Lana.

  He looked at her sleeping in the twin bed beside him, the peaceful rise and fall of her chest. Would she wake as Lana, or as the robot he had freed from the compound?

  The next thing he did was listen to the tape he had taken from Lana’s doctor, and then flip through the notebook he had tucked under his arm. What Grey learned gave him chills.

  At the beginning of the tape, the doctor’s voice had announced the sixth interrogation session of Lana Valenciano. Grey rewound the tape and listened to the sessions, which contained detailed analyses by Lana of the CIA’s movements in Latin America, particularly pertaining to the criminal activities of the drug cartels.

  The contents of the notebook were simpler, but even more chill-inducing. The second page contained the dates and times of Lana’s interrogations over the last two days. On the first page, Grey found the same types of notations, except the date at the top of the page was nearly twelve months old.

  A year ago.

  They had taken her before.

  Grey put his hand to his temple and let out a long breath. He had just found the leak, and it was far more insidious than they could have imagined.

  Lingering adrenaline kept him awake, and he started thinking about the photos he had found in Rolando Ganador’s house, particularly the one with the unidentified man.

  He pulled out the photo. The plaza in the background showcased an enormous baroque cathedral in the background, backed by a line of brown peaks. In the foreground, next to the two men, the gold statue of an indigenous warrior or chieftain loomed atop the fountain. Grey sensed it himself, the connection between the photo and the case. He thought of everything that had happened over the wild course of the investigation, of the appearances of the blue lady, of the contents of the Ganador place, of what he knew of the General’s methods.

  He did a Google search for the plaza depicted in the photo. Within thirty minutes he was surprised to find a match, and when he dropped off to sleep just before dawn, the effects of physical exhaustion finally eclipsing his mental agitation, a smile of grim satisfaction lifted his face.