The Devil You Don't Know (American Praetorians Book 4)

by Peter Nealen

I took my eyes away from Olivarez to look at him. I still had no idea who Gray was, but I’d seen enough to know that I had to take him very, very seriously. “What makes you say that?” I asked carefully.

  He smiled again, but this time it didn’t reach his eyes. “She’s not going to get you closer to El Duque. Neither will any capo, kingpin, or HVI you manage to capture. The truth is, you’re never going to find El Duque, much less kill him.”

  Something about the matter-of-fact way he said it made me leave the question of how he knew we were hunting El Duque in the first place alone and ask, “And why is that?”

  His expression didn’t change a bit. He just watched me, with that slight tilt to his head, the faint smile still on his lips. After a moment, he said, “Simple. El Duque doesn’t exist.”

  It was a bald statement, and for a moment it just hung there in the air. Finally, offering a wry, if humorless, smile of my own, I said, “Yeah, we get it. He’s a ghost. No paper trail, no big organization…he’s covered his tracks too well.”

  He leaned forward, the smile fading. “No, you don’t get it. I’m not employing a cliché, I’m being entirely literal. I am stating a fact. There is no such individual as El Duque. There never has been. He’s a fiction, a fairy tale, a bogeyman to scare intel specialists and political constituencies. He’s a made-up HVT intended to do precisely what he has done in the last few years. The fact that you’re here hunting him, blissfully unaware of everything else that’s going on around you, is proof positive of that.”

  Neither of us said anything at first. It was Jim who broke the silence. “That’s a pretty bold claim,” he said. “Are we just supposed to take your word for it? Hell, for all we know, you could be El Duque, or whoever is behind the persona, trying to throw us off track.”

  That little smile reappeared. “Call Renton,” he said. “Ask him about The Broker.” At our reaction, however muted, he said, “Oh, yes, I know about Renton. I even mentored him for about a year.”

  I couldn’t keep my eyebrow down. “So Renton knows who you are?”

  “He knows who I used to be; he knows that I left the Agency a long time ago. But does he know I’m The Broker? No. He does know enough about The Broker, however, to hopefully put your mind at ease that I’m not your fictitious target.”

  Eyeing him narrowly, I slowly pulled out what we’d started calling “The Renton Phone,” and called him. It only took a few rings before he answered. “What the hell is going on?” he asked. “Have you tracked down who grabbed Olivarez?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” I said, still watching Gray intently. “Tell me about The Broker.”

  That apparently shocked him into silence for a moment. “What does he have to do with this?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” I replied. “Is it possible he’s our boy?”

  “No,” he said immediately. “Not a chance. The Broker’s exactly what he sounds like; he’s a facilitator, and has always been strictly mercenary, at least so far as we’ve been able to tell. He’s got a knack for keeping clear of the really nasty snake-pits; I suspect that’s how he’s stayed alive this long. There really aren’t any known intersections between him and El Duque.” He paused for a moment. “Wait, did you actually meet him?”

  “I’ll have to get back to you,” I said. He started to protest, but I hung up. Let Renton stew over a lack of information for once. Petty, maybe. But I didn’t have time to discuss the whole situation over the phone at the moment.

  Gray was still watching me with that faintly amused expression. “Well?” he asked.

  “Presuming you actually are The Broker, then he’s pretty sure you’re not El Duque,” I said. “So, I think you have some explaining to do.”

  He looked at his two security guys, and jerked his head at Olivarez. They went to her, picked her up, chair and all, and hauled her out of the room. She hadn’t moved or made a sound through the entire conversation; she’d looked up when we came in, but then hung her head and stayed still after that. Apparently, she knew her days as a kingpin were over.

  “It’s genius, really,” Gray said, once they had left. He was still perfectly relaxed, even with two professional killers who weren’t his in the room with him and no security goons. “Most people want a bad guy to blame for all the world’s ills. It makes things easier for politicians, too. They can point to a Bin Laden, or an Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, or El Chapo, or La Tuta, or El Duque, and say, a la Scarface, ‘That’s the bad guy. That man is the reason why bad things are happening. If we can catch or kill the bad guy, all the bad things will end.’ El Duque fills that need. It’s a lot simpler to point to the ‘bad guy’ instead of dealing with the myriad problems, groups, and networks that are actually causing the chaos.

  “He also acts as a decoy for those in your profession. The targeted killers expend all their time, effort and resources looking for an HVT who doesn’t exist, while the real business goes on in the shadows, unremarked.” He leaned back in his chair a little more. “Tell me, what do you know about the deal that went sideways in Zacatecas? The one you were peripherally involved in?”

  “What do you know about that?” Jim asked.

  “Everything,” he replied, “and obviously a great deal more than you do. That meeting at Laguna de Masaya wasn’t about your failed hit on my good friend Alonzo Reyes in Jamapa, it was about what happened in Zacatecas and how to proceed.”

  He had my attention now. “Proceed with what?” I asked.

  “The money you were escorting was intended to support Los Hijos de la Muerte,” he said. “I don’t know how much you’ve been told about them, but they are a splinter group from the old Sinaloa Federation. They have started striking out on their own as that cartel breaks up. It’s been splintering ever since El Chapo got locked up for good in 2014, but Los Hijos is supposed to be the next big thing. Of course, the Ortegas who form the core of this new would-be narco empire are a pack of vicious hilljacks and not much more, so they need outside support. That support is coming from the group that met at Masaya.

  “There are a lot of interests profiting nicely from the carnage in Mexico, that’s been spilling into Honduras, Guatemala, and the Southwestern United States. Not the least of these interests are the Chinese. They have been extracting a lot of Mexico’s natural resources on the cheap by dealing with the cartels instead of legitimate businesses. The chaos just means better prices. Why do you think Hutchison-Whampoa runs almost every deep-water port south of the Rio Grande?”

  “So the Fusang Group…” I ventured.

  “Is a front,” he completed. “I’m glad you’ve at least heard of them; it means you haven’t been completely blinded by this wild goose chase Renton and his ‘Network’ have you on.”

  “We’ve heard of them,” I allowed, generally unwilling to offer any more than that. “We’ve also heard of a Xi Shang, who works for them.”

  He laughed. “Xi Shang is Second Department. Everyone who works for Fusang is. While officially Second Department might be focused on foreign militaries, they’ve expanded their purview in the last couple of years, not unlike the CIA post-9/11. They’ve moved into a lot of foreign influence/proxy operations recently.

  “The Chinese, through Harmon-Dominguez, were providing the money. The Venezuelans acted as fixers to link Los Hijos and the Chinese money up with Hezbollah mercenaries to act as advisors for Los Hijos’ paramilitaries. At the meeting in Nicaragua, the Venezuelans were attempting to replace the loss of the Hezbollah connection with FARC advisors.”

  “So why was MS-13 trying to stop us?” I asked.

  “Los Zetas doesn’t care for Los Hijos,” he replied. “I don’t know all the details, but loyalties and rivalries shift in Mexico as often as they do in the Middle East, maybe even more so. For instance, MS-13’s debut in the Drug War was contracting for Sinaloa against Los Zetas. Now they’ve been working for Los Zetas.”

  “What does any of this have to do with El Duque?” Jim asked.

  “Quite
simply, the focus on El Duque has ensured that you’ve missed it,” Gray said. “FARC is already sending people north to link up with Los Hijos. That bunch of Sinaloan hillbillies is about to become a good deal more dangerous. Unless, of course, you gentlemen fancy a bit of a mission-shift. Quite frankly, it would be in your best interest.”

  “So let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said, leaning back on the couch. “El Duque is nothing more than a decoy, a ruse to occupy the manhunters, to distract everyone from the real shit going on. You know this, and are somehow, through the goodness of your heart, letting us know, and telling us that we have to drop the hunt for this so-called imaginary person, who a whole lot of people are very concerned with, in order to break up this other deal that you’ve told us about.”

  “Tell me you haven’t noticed any of it,” he said mildly. “Tell me you haven’t wondered what the hell is going on, particularly when you sit and watch a meeting going on between Chinese businessmen, FARC guerrillas, Venezuelan government officials, and Mexican narcos. Tell me you didn’t think something was odd about the shipment you were escorting south, or that you thought it was completely normal to be escorting that much cash to a meeting with Mexican narcos and Hezbollah fighters. Go ahead. I’ll believe you.”

  The truth was, he was right. I’d smelled a rat since Arizona. For that matter, we’d gotten the job with Harmon-Dominguez precisely because Renton and his people smelled a rat. Could it be that they’d only gone after the rat they were supposed to, instead of what was really going on?

  As I studied Gray silently, mulling it over, pieces started to come together. If I thought back, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d chased an HVT only to find out we were chasing shadows; there had been a bad guy in Libya named Ali Belhaj, who had been active between Derna and Al Qubah. We’d chased that motherfucker for six months before discovering that he was nothing but a rabbit. He’d been a nobody, whose entire role in the insurgency had been to show up, get people talking, and run. Five high-profile attacks, including the assassination of one of the local Coalition-friendly militia leaders, had gone down while we were chasing a nobody.

  “All right,” I finally allowed, “we’ve noticed things are a little…off. But before we get into this little ‘mission shift’ idea, why tell us? What’s in it for you?”

  He didn’t say anything for a long moment. “I have my reasons,” he said. “You don’t need to know the specifics. What should be important to you gentlemen is this.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “This is simply a printout; you’ll find this on the biggest of the Dark Net wet-work boards.” It was a new copy of the reward posters that we’d found floating around. The price, however, had gone up. I wasn’t entirely sure what the exchange rate for Bitcoins was these days, but I was pretty sure that 80,500 of them was pretty fucking steep. There were going to be some very, very bad guys coming out of the woodwork for that price.

  “If you want to survive this, you’re going to have to act,” Gray said, “and act decisively. You’ve stumbled into the world’s biggest ambush, and you’re going to have to go on the offensive to get out of it alive.” He smiled again, but there was no humor in it. It was the smile of a shark. “You gentlemen are going to have to make one hell of a statement.”

  Looking at that high-denomination death sentence, I had to agree. “Who put this out?” I asked. “Do you know?”

  “Not precisely,” he answered. “There are a lot of redirects and proxies on that ad. Whoever posted it masked their IP very well, and I doubt that the originator was stupid enough to post it themselves; they would have found a proxy to do that, to further insulate themselves. My money is on Xi Shang, though. It’s got his fingerprints on it.”

  “How the fuck did he get the details, though?” Jim asked. “We didn’t even know this dogfucker existed until a few weeks ago.” Jim was a little rattled. He didn’t usually talk that much, or that passionately.

  Gray’s expression darkened. “I’ll just say that while Renton may be trustworthy, not everyone in his ‘Network’ is. It’s not like it’s some kind of secret organization; it’s a network of political and intelligence contacts with, for the most part, a common agenda. But people can have more than one agenda, and I strongly suspect that Renton’s associates have been penetrated. You should know that you were compromised before you ever even hit Nogales.”

  “That much was pretty obvious,” I said. “MS-13 knew the route and knew what Juarez was carrying before we did.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t mean the escort mission, though that was obviously leaked, presumably by Hugo Sanchez, one of Reyes’ people. He was captured and tortured by the Zetas three months ago. No, I mean that your mission to find El Duque was compromised. The underworld already knew you were coming before you’d ever crossed into Mexico.”

  “But if El Duque doesn’t exist, then why worry about somebody hunting him?” Jim asked. “Why not just let them stumble around and find nothing?”

  “Two reasons; eliminating you would only feed the legend, and intensify the hunt,” Gray said. “And you were too close to the real operation. The price really started to go up after Zacatecas. Since you’ve hit Reyes, it’s gone up even higher. You haven’t been easy to kill, so they’re getting concerned.”

  “What about Olivarez?” I asked. “What role does she have in all this? If El Duque doesn’t exist, how is she Reyes’ contact with him?”

  Gray laughed. “She’s a patsy. Reyes is smart; he knew if he got rolled up and questioned about El Duque that he’d have to have an answer. His answer was one of his rivals in the illicit side of his business. I doubt Serena has ever even heard of El Duque. But she’s crossed Alonzo’s people a few too many times, so he fingered her as his ‘contact.’ The manhunters get another dead end in their chase, and he gets rid of a rival.”

  “Assuming that you’re right, and she is of no use to us, what are you going to do with her?” Jim asked.

  “Either she’ll end up working for me, or she’ll be eliminated,” he said calmly. “She’s got too many friends in the Honduran government to turn her over to them, otherwise I might consider it. It would buy some goodwill. But she’ll be free and that goodwill wasted if I try that. Better to suborn her.”

  Jim and I shared a look. When I turned back to Gray, I said, “I’m guessing you have some ideas as to where to start on this ‘statement’ you say we need to make. I’ll admit, that price on our heads is an attention-grabber. My question is, how do we know you don’t have an agenda of your own in all this?”

  He laughed again. “Of course I have an agenda of my own!” he said. “Everyone does. Mine just so happens to coincide with yours. You may find that happens more often than you might think.” He held up a hand again, smiling. “And no, I’m not going to tell you why, not yet anyway.” He pointed to the coffee table, where there was an envelope. When I took it and shook out the 256 gig flash drive, he said, “I’d advise against putting that into any computer connected to the Internet. You don’t necessarily want anyone else knowing that you have all of the information on it, and there will be people sniffing for it.

  “It’s not a complete target package; I’m not under the delusion that you have any reason to trust a ready-made package from me. What is there is a rundown of most of the information I’ve been able to gather on the major players in Xi Shang’s scheme around Los Hijos de la Muerte. I trust you can put the information to good use. You can even verify a lot of it with Renton, but I’d caution you, don’t tell him anything that you don’t also want the people who leaked your mission to know.”

  I held up the flash drive and studied it. It was compelling. If he was telling the truth. I’d had enough motherfuckers try to play us over the last few years that I wasn’t going to just jump at it. It could still be a scam.

  But the fact was, we already knew there was a price on our heads. What Gray had told us made sense. Like he’d said, we’d already known there was some froggy shi
t going on, but I guess we’d considered it all somehow a part of El Duque’s operation. He was right; it was easier to think that there was one spider in the middle of the web, and if you could just crush that spider, the web wouldn’t be a problem anymore.

  We should have known better. We’d seen HVT after HVT go down for years, and nothing ever changed. As I looked at that flash drive, I started to feel like we had an opening. A chance to really stick it to the assholes who kept pushing the world further and further into chaos. Not that I was taking anything he said at face value. It would take a lot of work to verify everything he said, along with all the information on that drive.

  But we had hit a dead end. Gray's apparent willingness to hand Olivarez over to us suggested to me that he was being sincere when he told us that she wasn’t a direct connection—or any connection—to El Duque. I’d be having words with Renton about working Reyes over a little more. I’d thought he’d folded awfully fast.

  I pocketed the drive. We’d take his advice and make sure any computer we plugged it into was air-gapped. We had a lot of work to do, but a plan was starting to form in my head even so. It still didn't mean I was going to get complacent.

  “You said that you're willing to hand Olivarez over,” I said after a moment. “I think we'll take you up on that, actually.” He raised an eyebrow. “Consider it a matter of multi-source confirmation. If her interrogation confirms that she's got nothing to do with Reyes or El Duque, we'll be able to proceed on the assumption that you're on the level. If not...” I let the end of the thought hang in the air. Not that I had any illusions that Gray was going to be in any way, shape, or form easy to take down in the event we discovered that he'd bullshitted us.

  Of course, how he reacted to the request was going to speak volumes all by itself.

  He just smiled again. “Michael, can you bring our guest back out?” he called. “Our friends are going to take her with them after all.”

  Raoul came out of the tiny office, closed the door, and grabbed a bottle of water. He downed it in one long pull as Eddie and I watched. Only after he crumpled it and dropped it in the nearby trash can with a gasp did he finally speak.