Try any kind at all.
The bottom line: nobody but his captors knew where he was being held or what they’d planned for him. Ransom kidnapping was a modern plague in Mexico, an average of thirteen hundred cases yearly, victims often slain by their captors after payoffs were received. Over the past decade, abductions nationwide had doubled, many of the latter crimes committed by cartels as a side business or by dedicated gangs that did no other work.
If he’d been snatched for ransom, there would be demands for cash, counter demands for proof of life, and that could drag on through long-winded haggling. The up side: if that was why he’d been abducted and confined, Brognola stood a fifty-fifty chance of coming through alive.
On the other hand...
The way they had him laid out made him think of torture, what some spooks and politicians euphemized with double-talk about “enhanced interrogation.” That suggested his abductors might know more about him than the simple fact that he’d been in the middle of a law enforcement conference about border security.
And if they went that route, the up side disappeared. He would end up like Kiki Camarena from the DEA, in Michoacán, or Daniel Mitrione of the CIA, in Uruguay.
With slow death on the menu, Brognola knew he had to do everything within his power to escape. But what power, and how?
If he could only free one hand...
Somebody’s coming.
The big Fed could hear a door open and close then heavy steps descending what he thought were wooden stairs. It sounded like one man...and was he humming to himself as he descended?
Yes.
To Brognola, it sounded like that old José Feliciano song about Christmas.
For Christ’s sake. “Feliz Navidad.”
* * *
El Psicópata was subconsciously aware of humming, but he made no effort to curtail it. He was safe at home, immune to interruptions from the world outside, free to behave as he saw fit, indulging in the only pastime he truly enjoyed.
He leaned toward happy tunes, which might strike some people as paradoxical, but the internalized music had seen him through some rugged times, beginning with the earliest of childhood memories. He’d been too young to understand or to mourn losing his parents in the auto accident that—he had later learned from yellowed newspapers and bootlegged autopsy reports—had turned them into twisted skeletons of blackened ash.
From his first home, which he could not recall, he had moved on to a state-run orphanage in Zacatecas—picture sodomy endured from older boys and staffers, whippings when he first complained before discovering that silence was expected of him—then to foster homes that ran from bad to worse.
A dictionary had enlightened him that “foster” was a verb, meaning to stimulate, encourage and promote. Each so-called home, for him, had stimulated fear, encouraged pain, promoted nightmares, till he woke one morning and decided something had to change if he was going to survive.
He’d torched the fourth place after moving silently from room to room wielding a butcher’s knife. The police had been too blind, stupid or apathetic to see past the fire that had left his foster “parents” and their spoiled brats in the same shape as his birth parents. As a result, they’d sent him to another home. While that childless couple was sincere enough, eager to please, the damage suffered by El Psicópata prior to meeting them was irreversible. He’d aged out of the system twelve months later and was on his own, determined to avenge himself upon the world that never wanted him.
From Zacatecas City he had traveled the twelve hundred miles due north to Ciudad Juárez. He’d started out hitchhiking along MX 45 and taught himself to drive by watching Good Samaritans who stopped for him. A few miles south of Torreón he’d killed a honeymooning couple, left them to the desert as a sacrifice and driven on in their car. When he was halfway to Delicias, a fellow hitchhiker attracted him and learned that there were no free rides. Two cars and three more sacrifices later, he’d rolled into Ciudad Juárez, running on gasoline fumes, and abandoned his last ride—a little something in the trunk—near an industrial park.
Already, the Chihuahuan capital had earned a lawless reputation, luring gringo tourists with its reputation as a town where “anything could happen” and frequently did. Low-paying jobs were plentiful in Ciudad Juárez, permitting him to put a roof over his head, but when it came to “honest work,” El Psicópata had little patience. It was easier to jack-roll drunks and gringo tourists straying off the city’s beaten paths. Some managed to survive his avid ministrations, others died, and no one of importance seemed to care.
Within another year he had accumulated enough cash to purchase an old house one mile from a Petróleos Mexicanos oil refinery in far southwestern Ciudad Juárez. It had six rooms on the ground floor and, down below, a basement that he’d transformed into a workshop and playroom.
He had not earned his nickname yet. That came later, after Juárez courted infamy for murders by the warring drug cartels and the rising death toll from feminicidio striking down prostitutes. Journalists from the United States described it as a “playground” for serial killers.
Not a single killer obviously. Who could work that long and hard, achieve so much, within a few short years? But as El Psicópata came into his own, adopted a creative signature, collected certain souvenirs that pointed to a single hand at work, his legend grew. He hadn’t bothered keeping score, could only estimate how many souls he’d reaped so far, before his life had taken a dramatic turn.
El Psicópata had been hunting, chose a teenage prostitute who presumed to call herself Chantelle Amor, but hadn’t noticed when her pimp observed him and—against all odds and common sense—reported him to a detective from the FIA. The lawman came for him alone, another strange anomaly, and literally caught him red-handed.
Another deviation, then. Instead of arresting him, baring the secrets of his subterranean rec room and packing him off for sixty years at La Palma prison, Lieutenant Chalino Prieto, El Psicópata’s personal savior, had had a better idea.
A sadist without boundaries, it seemed, could earn protection by performing certain favors for the FIA and for cartels that had their own armies but sometimes wished to shirk responsibility for certain acts of mayhem. They’d be offloaded to independent operators with a history of dodging the police. Some cast-off prostitutes, police informants, possibly a lover or a relative of some soldier in disfavor with his boss who’d benefit from sampling the sorrow of loss but hadn’t earned extermination yet.
In short, a homicidal psychopath was useful in Juárez, and by no means the only one at large.
The present sacrifice was not El Psicópata’s normal prey. He favored females younger than himself, although his sacrifices had included men, as well, a few minors, a handful of old indigens. This one was different: a former man of substance by the look of him, though he’d come down to nothing in the end. Captain Prieto, promoted since striking his bargain with El Psicópata, left nothing with this one to identify him, and it mattered not.
His orders were simple: make it seem as usual, disposal offering no pointers to the truth, assuming the remains were found.
Which left him worlds of what gringos described as “wiggle room.”
He could afford to take his time and relish the experience.
Hacienda de las Torres
Bolan scanned his target from a block out, through his Leupold BX-1 binoculars. The neighborhood—at least this part of it—was seedy and presumably a menace after dark. It was an hour off from sunset, too long since Brognola had been lifted from El Paso. Bolan planned on teaching local predators to walk in fear, just like their decent neighbors and the tourists who occasionally strayed into this part of Ciudad Juárez.
Assuming they could walk—or breathe—when he was done.
In any case, he had a message to deliver and he didn’t need a living gofer to carry it back home.
The district took its name from Avenida de las Torres—Avenue of the Towers—running north-south for miles, directly through the dark heart of Juárez. In this section, the towers ran toward blocks of public housing that were barely habitable, high-rise breeding grounds of crime. Life was cheap here, thanks to teenage gangs and cartels fighting over turf, not caring who got caught up in the crossfire.
Bolan wasn’t looking at one of the housing projects now. His target was a warehouse owned and operated by members of the Juárez Cartel, defended—so they thought—by what appeared to be a couple dozen thugs with weapons openly displayed, and probably an equal number on the inside.
He had no good reason to believe that either of the two warring cartels had snatched Brognola from El Paso. Even with persistent leaks and the payola rife in Washington, only a chosen few, all at the highest level, knew about the covert operations he directed. The number who could offer up specifics to the enemy would hardly fill a large booth at a pricey restaurant. More to the point, if someone had been selling Stony Man’s secrets, a blow should’ve been struck against the Farm, not Hal Brognola, when he was at a conference more than halfway across the continent.
There had been attacks on Stony Man, costing the on-site team and Bolan dearly, but he had no fear of that being repeated anytime in the foreseeable future.
No, he was starting with the drug cartels because, between them, they controlled Juárez in every way that counted. Sure, the cartels existed in Chihuahua by the sufferance of federales and the politicians who appointed them, but gangland overlords, by definition, had to know what was occurring in a city they controlled or hoped to claim.
Bolan was certain of one thing: someone in Ciudad Juárez knew why Brognola had been snatched, who had abducted him and where he could be found, either alive or dead. The clock was running and, to get results without undue delay, Bolan was starting at the top.
Not literally at the gated dwellings of Kuno Carillo or Rodolfo Garza yet, but by the time those top-flight narcotrafficantes got his message, he’d be knocking at their door—and maybe blowing down their houses.
First things first.
When every second counted toward survival but you had no leads on the solution to a lethal problem, cool heads normally prevailed. Which didn’t mean that “cool” and “calm” were synonyms.
Juárez was on the verge of an apocalypse. Its self-appointed rulers simply didn’t know it yet.
Chapter Four
Avenida de las Torres
“Say that again,” Ignacio Fuentes ordered.
“Sir?” The warehouse manager wore a confused expression on his flabby face.
“The number. Repeat it to me.”
Glancing at a note in his now trembling hand, the manager—a flunky named Jorge Reyes—read, “Eleven thousand ninety-eight.”
Fuentes rose from his chair and stalked around the battered office desk. “You are wrong!” he snarled. “My calculator doesn’t lie.”
“But—”
“Stop! The shipment was precisely weighed before delivery. Twelve thousand kilos, idiot. Now you tell me that you’ve lost two kilos, worth a thousand times more than your life and those of all your family from Michoacán? Is that what you want me to tell Mr. Carillo?”
“N-n-no, sir.”
“Good. So you will be the one to tell him, eh, you bastard? Then he tells me to make you and everyone you care about die screaming while he watches.”
Reyes was quaking now and close to tears. “No, sir, please! There must be some mistake. My counting—”
Fuentes interrupted him, demanding, “Are the kilos packaged now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All of them? In your senility, you haven’t managed to misplace two? Let them slip your mind, perhaps?”
“No! That would be impossible!”
“Then let us count them once again. Together.”
“Yes, sir. As you wish.”
Fuentes leaned so close to Reyes that spittle struck the scrawny weasel’s face as he shouted, “I wish you would do your job correctly the first time, without making me go back and hold your hand while you repeat it.”
“I am so sorry, sir.” He was definitely weeping now.
“I quite agree. You’re very sorry, you useless prick. Now come on, let’s—”
An explosion rocked the warehouse, made Fuentes stagger against his whipping boy. Immediately he heard cartel soldiers shouting orders to the warehouse workers, freezing them in place, and three men armed with automatic weapons passed him on the run, headed in the direction of the warehouse loading dock. Gunfire erupted a split second later and then another blast—closer, louder—shoved Fuentes backward with its shock wave.
He could not see the attackers but he whipped out his Beretta M-9 pistol to be ready for them all the same. He thought they had to be from the Sinaloa Cartel, but until he had a chance to question one of them—
A third blast shook the warehouse, blinding Fuentes with a gust of smoke and dust. At the same instant something struck his head and dropped him to all fours and he bellowed curses in his rage.
Calle Nigeria
Kuno Carillo sipped tequila, watching soccer on the Hisense hundred-inch Ultra HD flat-screen commanding one wall of his study. He glanced up at the approach of his houseman, Pepe Díaz, carrying a cordless phone in one hand, an apologetic grimace on his face.
“Excuse me, sir. It’s Mr. Fuentes. He says it is very urgent.”
Carillo took the phone and waved Díaz away before he spoke to his lieutenant. “What is it, Ignacio? I’m watching Club Léon whip Club Tijuana’s ass.”
“The warehouse, Kuno!” Fuentes blurted. “I’m standing here, watching it burn with our last shipment of cocaine from Lapaz and half of our soldiers still inside it.”
Bolting to his feet, Carillo shouted, “What? Explain!”
“Somebody hit us. Jorge got the count wrong and I was about to watch him do it over when the place exploded. Bombs. I heard three before some shit from the ceiling knocked me down. It’s lucky I got out.”
“Lucky for you.” Carillo spat. “Where’s Jorge?”
“Dead and baking like potatoes,” Fuentes replied before a fit of coughing stifled any further word.
“Who’s there with you right now?”
Fuentes recovered from his spasm, croaking out, “Five soldiers. I hear sirens coming now, police and firefighters.”
“To hell with them. Get back here with the soldiers who can travel. Don’t get tied up answering any fucking questions.”
“Yes, Kuno.” A change in sound and breathing told Carillo that his second in command was running but still speaking into the phone. “You need to hear about the note, though.”
“What note?” Carillo asked. “Explain yourself.”
“A piece of paper was found stuffed in the mouth of a soldier near the loading dock. He took a head shot before all the other shit started to go down.”
“Go on.”
Over the phone Carillo heard car doors open and close, and an engine revving up before Fuentes replied, “It’s just three words, all in English. It says, ‘Give him back.’”
Carillo was silent for a moment, dumbfounded. Then he asked, “What’s that supposed to mean? Give who back? Who wants him back and why?”
“How should I know?” Fuentes responded. “I just read the note to you. I didn’t write the damn thing.”
The cartel leader heard his lieutenant’s vehicle pass oncoming sirens, fading slowly as his driver left the cruisers and firetrucks behind. Struggling not to shout at Fuentes, he demanded, “Which soldier found the note and brought it to you?”
Fuentes hesitated for a beat then said, “Arturo Tamayo, my cousin.”
“Is he there with you?”
“In the car behind. Kuno, he’s family.”
�
�I need to speak with him. That’s all, Ignacio.”
Another fleeting hesitation before Fuentes said, “I understand. Of course.”
“Come straight here. If the police ask later, I’ll tell them you were here when all this happened.”
The warehouse wasn’t in Carillo’s name. He’d wisely taken that precaution, even standing underneath the FIA’s umbrella of protection in Juárez.
He cut the connection, fearing to stay on the phone too long these days, when anybody could be eavesdropping. Placing the handset on a coffee table, he retrieved the Hisense TV set’s remote control and switched it off.
Carillo would be questioning Ignacio’s cousin, keenly aware that some people who “found” the evidence of crimes were guilty in their own right. Should that prove to be the case, the Fuentes family would soon become extinct.
But if Tamayo passed the test...then what?
The note said “Give him back.” That meant no more to Carillo than if it had been a snatch of scripture from the Bible or a random line of poetry. So far, he knew only one thing: he’d lost twelve thousand kilos of uncut cocaine, along with an uncertain number of his soldatos at the factory.
The lives were one thing. The money was another. He would exact a fitting punishment for both thefts of his property, destroying all of those responsible in various creative ways. And if he never understood the cryptic message stuffed into a dead man’s mouth, so be it.
There were basic principles to be upheld.
Calle Naucalpan
Sergeant Miguel Vergara of the Federal Ministerial Police cradled a Russian AK-101 assault rifle in his tattooed arms, pacing along a metal catwalk overlooking a cocaine-cutting plant maintained by the Sinaloa Cartel in the crime-ridden Juárez district called Colonia Guadalajara Izquierda.
Vergara was on guard duty tonight, but normally kept books for the cartel he’d infiltrated as an undercover agent ten months earlier. Unmarried, with no family to miss him if it went awry somehow, he had embarked upon the risky project from a sense of public duty—and, let’s face it, hoping for advancement to a higher rank. Only one officer inside the FMP—Colonel Jerónimo Bravo—was presently aware of his assignment. It had been Bravo’s idea, in fact, put into motion without the knowledge of his own superiors, and it was rife with peril.
Lethal Vengeance Page 4