by A. T. Grant
Ethan grinned broadly and winked at David. “I’ll see you in the terminal. I can see Flick looking for me, so I’d better get back. Perhaps we can meet for a drink later, at the hotel?”
“I’ll look forward to it.” David reached around and shook Ethan’s hand, then distracted himself from a bumpy descent by scrolling through to the flight map on his screen. He became aware of a sudden and unfamiliar sense of stillness. For reasons he had yet to divine, this was where he was meant to be.
Act II: The Traffickers
Chapter Seven
Ciudad Juarez
In all Luis Contadona’s thirty-two years he couldn’t remember anything like it. A carpet of snow was thrown across the usually dusty main street, as though the sun had given up on Mexico. From the window of the El Paso del Norte restaurant Luis watched as a beggar struggled to maintain a small fire against the swirling bitter wind, fabric thrown across his shoulders as a makeshift tent. The falling snow had turned to icy rain and a dark day into darker night as Luis had been watching. He was now even less keen to brave the elements on the way back to his hotel. He thought of his brother, Alfredo, and knew he would be awaiting his call. The satellite phone was in Luis’ room and, although he was tempted to use his mobile, it wouldn’t be safe.
Just as a swirl of starlight was fanned into the air by the vagrant, the lights in the restaurant went out. Waiters flickered in and out of a single candle’s aura as they struggled to light more. One waitress cursed the power company then checked and apologised obsequiously to Luis. He waved her aside and threw a small pile of Pesos onto the table. Luis gestured to the minder standing in the shadows behind him, who had been carefully folding and pocketing his sunglasses.
Luis pushed through the wind as he crossed the road, using the smudge of light on a horizon marked by the rough outline of shacks, power lines and concrete apartment blocks as his compass. He could already feel the cold and damp forcing its way through his thin shirt and jacket. Luis remembered the boss of the power company pleading with him to leave something for contingencies, as he had handed over his protection money. In a sudden epiphany Luis realised what he had been talking about. He drew more cash from a pocket and thrust it almost angrily into the out-stretched hand of the pleading pauper. A little further up the sidewalk he reached the crest of a ridge. Across the Rio Grande the modern city of El Paso shone back at him in gleaming accusation. Across his own town of Ciudad Juarez he could sense the many families huddled against the cold and had to fight hard to dismiss the realisation that their situations were partly his fault. Something made him turn around and look back down the street. Only the beggar was visible, his features a tableau up-lit by firelight. At a distance, he looked like a traditional native priest. As Luis peered more closely he could see the old man feeding his offering to the flames: one bank note after the other flaring briefly and rocking upwards into the dark sky. For some reason Luis wasn’t just shocked, he was scared. Turning again, he gestured brusquely to his minder, thrust his hands deeper into his pockets and hurried on.
Hotel Catalina was large, bland and pink. Without lights its looming shadow looked ghostly and ephemeral, as though it might change shape and slip away into the night at any moment. Two doormen huddled in the drive-up front porch, struggling to light cigarettes in the dark and the bitter wind. With a call from Luis’ hulking shadow they snapped to attention, a beam of torchlight seeking out the approaching figures.
“Get that light out of my face,” growled Luis and the beam fell to the ground in front of him, illuminating an uninviting mixture of slush and puddles. Water had penetrated his crocodile skin shoes and he could feel it running between his toes as he clenched them together in an effort to keep from slipping.
“I want the car here in thirty minutes. Both of you go. Check the underside thoroughly then make sure it is clean. I don’t want any surprises if we get searched. Silvio, you take over out here. I’m going upstairs to make a call. As soon as the car arrives, sort the check-out. Make sure the manager gets his usual tip.”
Luis pushed his way into the lobby, pulled off his shoes and socks, held them up to inspect the damage, cursed as water ran down his arm and threw them in disgust towards a frightened looking concierge. He padded bare-footed past the front desk and into an elevator. He glowered at his reflection in the mirror. Droplets of water glistened back at him from his full eyebrows and moustache, and a few more crowned the high forehead beneath his rapidly thinning and receding hairline. His face was an incongruous mix of too much hair and too little. He moved closer to inspect the deep diagonal cut that ran from one side of his nose to bisect his right cheek. It still looked ugly and, although he knew there would be times when such a look would be useful, tonight was not one of them. He cursed again. He had waited three hours in a poor restaurant in the old part of town for a client who hadn’t shown up. Now he would probably need to wake his brother to make his call.
Luis pulled a damp, folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket and carefully peeled back layer after layer. He was still trying to shake the paper dry as he reached his room on the top floor. He began to relax as the deep pile of a luxurious rug forced its way between his frozen toes. He placed the battered sheet under a bedside light and scanned the somewhat smeared list of US identity card-forging paraphernalia it revealed. What worried him was that these items were sat in the hotel back office, when he’d promised the manager they would soon be gone. More than this, however, was his frustration at not being able to pass on the computer disk that still sat in his other jacket pocket. The counter-fitting software it contained had cost his family a lot of time and trouble to obtain. Tonight was meant to be the first sale. The client, from another local crime family, had been offered a hefty discount.
Luis slid the disk into a briefcase beneath his bed, shook off his clothes and headed for the shower. As the heat spread down his neck and out from the small of his back he thought of his younger brother, Alfredo, who was holed up in a different hotel. Still only twenty-seven he had grown up at a time when violence was treated as a rite of passage in families like his own. Luis had spent several years clearing up after him, encouraging him to be more careful and protecting him from the enemies he regularly acquired, sometimes from within his own organisation. He wanted him to be more subtle and more business-like. Now he wondered whether his brother’s approach wasn’t the more effective. The global financial crisis had rewritten the rules of engagement. Border officials could no longer be relied on to turn a blind eye or to take a bribe, local banks were beginning to ask questions about who was opening an account and where the money was coming from, and the Mexican Government was pursuing members of his own and other crime families for everything from tax-evasion to breaking local planning laws.
The Contadona clan had for many years been all-powerful and also, to the casual eye, respectable. They controlled several factories in the Maquiladora belt of small industrial towns clustered around Juarez. Luis loved the factories. Ever since he could walk he had been a regular visitor, running up and down the assembly lines, later fascinated to work out each stage of production of whatever was being assembled for the US market at the time. There were also garment workshops where he would be teased by the girls at their sewing machines, his presence a welcome distraction from long days of sweat and ravaged fingers. For a brief period in his early twenties he had taken control of a new facility assembling mobile phones. He immersed himself in all aspects of the role and was widely regarded as a fair and competent boss. Soon, even though people were wary of his family connections, many would approach him with their personal issues. Luis found he had a skill for putting people at their ease, a skill he had misused many times since. His workers were from all over Mexico and some from further afield: Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Most were from rural backgrounds, used to long-hours in the fields for little reward, and grateful for the opportunity of a regular income and maybe, w
ith enough experience, the chance to transfer their skills to a similar operation on the other side of the US border.
Luis pulled a fresh suit and pair of shoes from the long line of similar items in the wardrobe. The room was his, although he rarely actually slept there. He felt for the zip bag on the shelf above his clothes which contained the satellite phone, redressed hurriedly then strode purposefully onto the balcony to make his call. It proved hard to get a signal, so it was only after several minutes pirouetting around, adjusting the antenna and holding the phone in various positions that he was able to punch in the numbers. Nobody answered. Several floors below, Luis could see his black Limo and his two associates leaning over the bonnet, talking. The rain had ceased and the pale glow of clearer skies was spreading slowly from the north. The line crackled.
“...Hello?”
“Alfredo?”
“Si.”
“Como estas?”
“Luis? How are you brother?”
“You should’ve been awake.” Luis slapped impatiently at the safety rail with his free hand. “I told you to wait for my call.”
“Luis, it is 5am. I waited until 3. You said you would call earlier.”
“Business,” said Luis. The word had a hundred meanings, none of which were to be questioned.
There was a long pause. Luis waited. He could hear Alfredo talking to someone, who protested at being asked to leave. A woman: just another casual pick-up, he presumed, although Luis was always wary of what his younger brother might share during such liaisons. Alfredo was surprisingly mild-mannered around women; his mother’s legacy, Luis supposed. But he also knew this made him careless.
“Luis?”
“Si.”
“It’s OK, the transaction has been completed.” The serious phrasing sounded so unlike Alfredo that Luis wanted to laugh, but he restrained himself as he knew his brother was trying hard to stick to the agreed script.
“...and the bicycles?”
“The quality is good and they can handle the volume. There is a warehouse next to the harbour in a town called Portsmouth. Everything looks clean and efficient. You’d like the bikes, Luis. They look really fast, really pretty.”
Luis ignored his brother’s tendency for sentimentality. “What about London?”
“I met our contact. He told me the bank has been co-operative. There shouldn’t be any trouble securing our investment. I’ve made the first withdrawal.”
Luis smiled. Alfredo must have done well. He nearly lapsed into familiarity - thought about making a joke - then checked as he remembered it was a business call.
“Thank you, brother. I’ll see you soon,” he concluded formally.
That night and through the next day Luis fought hard to ignore that in Ciudad Juarez normal life had ground to a halt. Schools and factories remained closed due to the cold, a lack of power, or both. The poor left their squats and self-built homes and headed for government shelters. All over town similar domestic dramas were repeated. Residents fought the snow, the wind and the freezing rain in vain. Then they secured their properties and scant possessions as best they could, wrapped the young, the old and the sick in thick blankets, and joined the slithering lines of huddled families snaking their way into the gloom. Water pipes froze or burst open. Sheet ice stopped the buses and closed the airport. The familiar sight of burned out cars abandoned as part of the detritus of civil war was replaced by contorted vehicles wrapped around road signs at the bottom of every other slippery slope.
Chapter Eight
London
Alfredo stared from his hotel bedroom onto another mute London morning. He sniffed and fumbled for a handkerchief in each pocket of his robe. England had given him a mission and a cold and he wasn’t keen on either. He cursed Luis, his brother, for being so sensible: he’d been able to find no counter-argument as the strategy was carefully outlined to him. New business needed taking care of in Europe and a family member was required to demonstrate commitment to the deal. Alfredo must lie low and couldn’t rely on the usual network of associates across Mexico to keep him safe.
Alfredo began to replay the events that had led him to discover there were limits to his excesses, even though he was the favoured son of the most powerful family in northern Mexico. He had been as usual in a nightclub, this time across the border in El Paso, drinking and womanising with the leaders of one of the most important drug distribution gangs in the region: Barrio Fuerte. The night was going well and he remembered dancing with two American girls, one of whom he was determined to bed. Young, blonde and blue-eyed, her sweat and beer soaked white T-shirt and skimpy red shorts were a wanton stereotype in a swaying sea of modest cotton dresses. She danced closer and closer to him, her taught bosom salaciously brushing his midriff. As her hand reached across and caressed his left buttock, he drew her in. Then the music stopped. People on the dance-floor fell instinctively apart and peered in random directions through the gloom. The mixture of fear and anticipation on the girl’s face instantly brought Alfredo to his senses. He was in danger. The room emptied and both girls were gone. He and his three minders peered through the cigarette smoke, fleeing human silhouettes and strobe lighting. Marcelo, their host, was walking towards them and Alfredo gestured to the others not to draw their weapons. His hands were raised in supplication and he was nervously repeating Alfredo’s name. Gennaro, the family’s most trusted lieutenant, sprang forward to frisk him. Alfredo’s eyes were drawn to the DJ’s podium. There crouched a dark, almost feline figure. He had no time to respond to the raised weapon before a laser-like flash of white and an awkward male scream from the gloom behind signalled that the night was now about survival.
Once on the floor Alfredo had rolled hard and painfully to his left, desperate for any form of cover. A bullet smashed into the wooden floor beside his right shoulder. He felt the stab of a splinter entering his neck. He rolled again, falling awkwardly from the rim of the dance-floor onto cold stone tiles. Grabbing at chair and table legs, he fashioned a rough barricade from the resulting clatter of furniture. There was an exchange of fire and then an extended silence. He could feel his heart thumping against a broken plate, trapped beneath his torso. Gennaro cursed. A cluster of heavy footsteps was followed by the sound of a scuffle and a heavy base crescendo, as a speaker crashed to the floor. Alfredo squinted as the lights went back on. He could see the assailant bent forward under the force of Gennaro’s arm-lock. Marcelo was nowhere to be seen, nor were any members of his gang. A random male figure looked as though he was clawing at a far wall, but was otherwise obviously dead.
Alfredo drifted briefly back to the present at the sight of a pretty girl’s face transferred across the side of a double-decker London bus. It looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t think why. Staring at the impossibly white smile between crimson lips, he rolled his tongue idly around the foul-tasting innards of his own mouth. He resolved to clean his teeth, but was drawn back to the bus as it occurred to him that it was light blue, rather than a reassuring London red. The world was no longer as it was supposed to be: not since that night. For want of any further distraction, or the will to do anything more constructive, Alfredo’s mind returned once more to the previous month.
“Gennaro, take him out the back, and you two get the car.” Alfredo grabbed his attacker by the hair, forcing his face upward and into the light.
His features were a curious mix of old and young: baby brown eyes beneath long dark lashes and a heavily furrowed and pitted brow. The man glared back at him defiantly, releasing a spray of spittle that peppered Alfredo’s shirt and trousers. Alfredo gestured for a gun, flipped it over, took slow, deliberate aim then smashed it into his assailant’s mouth. A mixture of blood and teeth spattered onto the floor. Gennaro followed up from the other side with a jaw-breaking right uppercut. The gunman sank to his knees and would have collapsed in a bloody heap had not Gennaro used his substan
tial weight to drag him towards an emergency exit.
Several minutes later they were well clear of the scene, on the freeway that partially encircled the city. Alfredo told Gennaro to drive slowly, so could think. He listened to the laboured, guttural breathing of the figure slumped in a rear seat of their inconspicuous blue Toyota sedan. Everyone and everything was covered in his blood. They had been unable to establish so much as a name, despite a thorough search of his jacket and trouser pockets, and could only speculate at his motive.
Alfredo made his decision. The freeway could take them south towards the Mexican border, but also north towards the Franklin Mountains. Being stopped at the border was unlikely, but also potentially disastrous, given hard-line Texan police attitudes to drug-related crime. The mountains were the obvious dumping ground.
Three-quarters of an hour later the crunch of gravel and the gathering gloom confirmed that they had left the last paved highway. They edged their way along a narrow mountain-bike trail. Alfredo stared at the city lights of El Paso below, his home town of Juarez a distant smudge of luminous yellow beyond the core of high-rise buildings and spreading suburbs.
“Stop here, Gennaro.”
They had come to a particularly steep section of hillside. The trail suddenly narrowed to no more than a footpath, descending in a series of zig-zags into the semi-darkness of a moonlit night. Alfredo opened the door, which caught the breeze and swung out over the downward slope. He lowered himself carefully onto a patch of bare earth between rocks and tussock grasses. He lit a cigarette and contemplated the view. Gennaro joined him. They stood in silence as stiff cool air rustled through the sparse vegetation and an owl called from somewhere beyond the nearest bluff. Suddenly there was another noise, halfway between a rattle and a hum. A large, nondescript beetle crash-landed onto Alfredo’s face. Gennaro laughed involuntarily as his boss stumbled down the slope, arms flailing wildly. Alfredo growled, rage supplanting his moment of fear and fuelling a thirst for revenge.