Revenge of the Assassin

by Russell Blake

  “Tomorrow works for me. The sooner the better.”

  They arranged the payment details for the following morning. El Rey was advised to avoid any food or water after midnight, to reduce the likelihood of any complications from the anesthesia. The doctor went over to his station and took a digital photo of him, and then made modifications based upon the suggested procedures. El Rey stared at the new him, and while he looked similar, the difference was substantial – he was instantly reminded of the film actor from a movie that had been playing on the flight from Santiago, Chile, after he’d driven across the border from Mendoza. Something about buccaneers in the Caribbean.

  He supposed if he was going to change the way he looked, he might as well improve things to the extent it was possible. So celebrity pirate it would be. He just hoped that the healing would be faster than the doctor had indicated. No point in wasting any more time than necessary.

  ~

  When he came to after the surgery he was groggy, with his entire face wrapped in gauze. Nina and an equally stunning young woman were attending to him. Nina explained that they would be there for him twenty-four hours a day, staying in the en suite apartment in shifts. For now, he’d need to take anti-inflammatory medication along with pain relievers and antibiotics in his IV drip, so he could expect to be out of it for the next few days. Ice would also be regularly applied to reduce the swelling and subcutaneous bleeding.

  The doctor came in four hours later and said, “You will look like you lost a fight with a bear for the first week, but within ten days you’ll be mostly better, and within three weeks or so, a new man. I will check back with you today before I leave for the night, and the girls will be here round the clock. Anything you need, any discomfort you feel, just let someone know, and we’ll deal with it. No point in this being any more unpleasant than necessary,” he assured his patient, and then with a wink at Nina, he departed.

  El Rey slept most of the day, except for a few trips to the bathroom. The following morning, the doctor removed the gauze to change the dressing, and indeed, he looked like he’d been in a brutal car accident. It was to be expected, but still, wasn’t pleasant to see.

  By the end of the first week, the swelling was receding and the deep purple circles under his eyes and around his chin were fading. The small sutures from the implants were removed, and by day ten, he was looking human again, the bruising now diminished to yellowish-tinged skin that the doctor assured him would look normal within another few days. The doctor spent time with him inspecting his new features, pointing out the delicate nuances he’d created for a more natural look. El Rey had to admit that the surgeon was a truly gifted artist – it was a remarkable and natural-appearing transformation.

  The face looking back at him when he shaved every few days was similar to the one he remembered, but different enough to be another person – albeit a better looking one, which he supposed had been the doctor’s intention.

  On the sixteenth night, as El Rey stepped over the doctor’s lifeless body on his office floor to clear all traces of his surgical procedure from the computer, he was actually sad that a valuable resource like the physician had to be terminated. But in his business he couldn’t take any chances, and there was no point in dwelling on collateral casualties.

  Nina’s corpse lay upstairs in the suite, and all that remained after the computer scrub was for the second nurse to arrive at nine p.m.. After attending to her, he’d be done with Rio for good. He’d already erased the security camera footage, which was stored on a tape backup and a hard drive in a maintenance room, so once the second girl was dispatched he was good to go. Standing in the office, El Rey studied the doctor and debated pulling the Mont Blanc pen out of his eye socket and then decided to leave it in place.

  He extracted the hard disk from the computer and then painstakingly sorted through the file cabinet for any paper records of his stay. Once he’d located them, as well as the attached before and after photos, he busied himself with burning them in a metal garbage can near an open rear window and then settled in to wait for his final victim to show up. He had nothing against the night nurse, just as he’d borne Nina no grudge, but what needed to be done wasn’t a matter of like or dislike.

  By his calculations he could be in São Paolo by midnight after a short private plane ride, and then tomorrow he would be winging his way to Venezuela – his next stop before meeting with the elusive kingpin, Don Aranas. If all went well, he’d call in a few more days and be ready to meet within a week.

  Chapter 10

  Don Aranas sat on the beach in Zihuatanejo, watching as the water reflected the twinkling lights of the boats anchored off the pristine stretch of sand. He was the only patron of the luxury resort’s oceanfront restaurant, which had closed early to host a private party – for one. As agreed, his bodyguards had stayed away, although two watched Aranas sipping a Bohemia beer at the small white plastic table on the sand, peering at him through the scopes of their sniper rifles from the hotel looming behind him. If his guest arrived and harmed the Don in any way, they were instructed to blow the man’s head off – a reasonable precaution, Aranas felt, even if it technically violated his agreement with El Rey.

  He glanced at his watch in irritation – the meeting had been for nine p.m., and the assassin was now ten minutes late. Aranas was not a man who liked to be kept waiting, no matter who it was. He vowed to give it another five minutes, and then he’d finish his beer and leave – and El Rey would have bigger problems than just the Mexican government trying to hunt him down.

  A small girl, perhaps six years old, approached him from the darkness of the beach on wobbly bow legs and held up a small hand-carved turtle with a bobbing head. Aranas waved her off. He was in no mood for trinket buying. The girl was insistent and placed the turtle on the table before running off down the sand spit into the night. Aranas took a final pull on his beer, then noticed a slip of rolled-up paper protruding from the turtle’s head. Looking around but detecting nothing unusual, he carefully extracted the note and unfurled it, reading the few words before nodding and pushing to his feet.

  He took his beer and walked to the water’s edge, where the gentle lapping of the surf was almost lake-like in its lack of intensity, and began walking towards the town a mile or so away. Three minutes later, a fishing panga pulled up a few yards from him, beaching its bow in the wet sand, and the pilot gestured to Aranas to climb aboard. Once he had scowlingly done so, the boat backed off the beach, its engine frothing from the reverse thrust before it cut around in a circle and headed towards the open ocean, rapidly becoming invisible in the moonless night.

  “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 malecón in town. It would be a more productive use of both our time if you simply told me what’s requ
ired,” 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 Juárez.

  “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 the
n 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 Juárez, 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 Juárez by day, it was surely Juárez by night.