Killing Kings

by Don Pendleton

  Cuéllar was yelping, one arm flopping on the pavement with a shattered humerus, one sharp end of it poking through his shirtsleeve. Looking up at his captor, the drug dealer tried his best to spit but couldn’t manage it, as his mouth was too dry.

  “I need a name,” Bolan told him. “Your boss in Medellín or wherever he hides.”

  “Eat shit, gringo!” was the harsh reply.

  “The hard way? Okay, then.”

  Although averse to torture, Bolan indulged in a little hard-core persusion from time to time. He ground the heel of his boot into Cuéllar’s disabled arm. The mobster shrieked, and then sobbed before he found his voice again. “Go fuck a burro,” he gasped. “Maybe you like that, eh?”

  “Sounds like we have a failure to communicate,” Bolan replied, pulling the GI Tanto from its sheath. “Did I tell you I’m learning surgery by mail? I flubbed the second lesson, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got the hang of it by now. No anesthetic, pal? Suit yourself.” The threat to Cuéllar’s manhood was almost a bust, but the thin slice of the blade near his testicles sealed the deal.

  Five men were dead at the hacienda. The intention had been to leave the drug dealer hog-tied and ready for pickup by the DEA, but the guy had made a suicide play. Still, the bottom line? Bolan and Grimaldi departed with another name in hand.

  Chapter Four

  Envigado, Colombia

  Rodrigo Sarmiento strove to never let his temper get the best of him, but that had been an uphill fight throughout his forty-even years. In point of fact, his fits of rage were legendary, though he’d managed not to be arrested since his nineteenth birthday, when he’d nearly killed two men bare-handed in a brawl at one of Medellín’s taverns.

  He’d been drunk that night, and those he’d beaten had insulted him. His judge was understanding—once a teenage rogue himself, perhaps—and he’d suspended Sarmiento’s six-month sentence, but the incident had taught Rodrigo something: he must never lose control to that extent again—or if he did, it must not be in front of witnesses.

  That case had been his introduction to the Medellín Cartel; he had been approached by a man employed by Carlos Lehder, an associate of Pablo Escobar and founder of the paramilitary group Muerte a Secuestradores—Death to Kidnappers—created to annihilate the predators who preyed on cartel members and their families. Today, of course, Lehder was gone like all the rest, sentenced to life plus 135 years in Florida, that time reduced to fifty-five years in exchange for testimony against Manuel Noriega, then whisked off into the US Federal Witness Protection Program.

  Such was life. Today Rodrigo Sarmiento grappled with his own problems, and they might kill him yet.

  “More bad news from the north?” Omar Roldán, between sips of Sarmiento’s ultra-rare Glenfyne single malt whisky, one of the last bottles produced before the Scottish distillery closed forever in 1937. It cost 39,000 Colombian pesos per liter—roughly $13,000—but Sarmiento could afford it and considered it a bargain at that price.

  “The only news I hear these days is bad,” Sarmiento answered. “Someone in Texas has slaughtered Cuéllar and his men.”

  “All of them?”

  “Every one, plus three gunmen and several workers out of Mexico. Serrano is demanding reimbursement for his people and the product that was left behind and burned. Can you believe it? These stupid sons of whores burn the shipment like it’s nothing, worthless.”

  “Maniacs. If they had tried to sell it back to us—”

  “Then we’d have it back and they’d be dead. Now tell me something that I don’t know, Omar. What about Don Pablo’s so-called resurrection?”

  Roldán shifted in his chair, another sign of more bad news about to land on Sarmiento. “Boss, I regret to say there’s nothing yet.”

  “Nothing? This has been going on for weeks, and you’ve accomplished nothing?”

  “On the contrary,” Roldán replied. “We’re keeping up surveillance on Escobar’s brother, widow, son, daughter and all their other relatives. His mother’s dead, of course, but we’ve made deals with guards in all the prisons where his ex-associates are serving time, in case somebody writes or visits them, but so far...nothing, as I have said.”

  “And these supposed sightings of the man himself?” Sarmiento asked.

  Roldán shrugged. “Sometimes the witnesses report him being on his own, but he’s also been seen—if we accept it—in the company of men and women, once entering Pies Llameantes in El Centro.”

  “And the staff there?”

  “We have questioned all of them, as well as customers that night, traced from their credit-card receipts. A few of them admit to seeing someone who resembled Escobar, but they either ignored him at the time or passed it off as an illusion. If you’ve ever seen the club at night—”

  “Yes, yes, I know.”

  Pies Llameantes—Flaming Feet—was a nightclub known for pounding music, psychedilic light shows and a crowd that surged from wall to wall. The owners bribed police and fire marshals to get away with breaking rules on maximum capacity, as well as the sale and use of party drugs at their venue. Some of the top bands in Colombia played there, and during breaks, the club’s sound sytem was cranked up with canned music loud enough to shake the fillings out of teeth.

  “So it’s a bust,” Sarmiento said, disgusted. “We are under attack from Medellín to Texas, and no one who should have answers knows a thing. Is that your story, Omar?”

  “Boss, it is not a ‘story,’ as you call it. I’ve impressed upon my men—”

  “Your men?”

  Roldán flushed guiltily, a child caught with his hand inside the cookie jar. “I meant to say your men, Rodrigo. Obviously, we are all your men.”

  “I hope so, Omar, for your sake. If I thought there was any reason not to trust you...but that is absurd, eh?”

  “Ridiculous,” Roldán agreed at once, forcing a laugh that might have issued from a casket with a live man mistakenly sealed inside. “My loyalty to you is golden, boss.”

  “Not gold-plated, then? The cheap kind that will turn your skin green if you wear a shoddy ring too long?”

  “Sir, please—”

  Sarmiento raised a hand to silence his subordinate, putting on a smile that seemed to stretch from ear to ear. It was a predatory smile, much like a shark’s when its small eyes rolled back and it prepared to strike.

  “You’ll find me this bastard, this impostor, Omar?”

  “Absolutely. I assure you.”

  “Soon rather then later, eh? You’d best get started now. Pretend your life depends on it.”

  José María Córdova International Airport, Medellín

  Bolan and Grimaldi flew to the country in a Learjet 60XR confiscated by the DEA and out on loan to Stony Man via a paper company that kept the veil of secrecy in place. Its cockpit seated two; its midsize cabin eight.

  Despite the cabin’s paneled, padded luxury, Bolan sat up front with Grimaldi for most of the five-hour, 2,200-mile trip from San Antonio to Medellín, laying plans for what they planned to do upon arrival. Their luggage was secured in the back, and their mobile arsenal was concealed in the subfloor compartment, where the Learjet’s former owner, now locked up at FCI La Tuna, in El Paso County, Texas, had once stashed an abundance of coke.

  After clearing Immigration and Customs with fake passports and nothing to declare, they checked in at the Hertz counter and Bolan signed for a Ford Mustang, sixth-generation, with a ten-speed automatic transmission and a five-liter V8 engine that generated 460 horsepower and 420 foot-pounds of torque. It handled like a dream when he got behind the wheel, stopping before they left the airport to collect their hardware from a DEA resident agent posing as a security agent.

  The airport lay twelve miles southeast of downtown Medellín, but Bolan and Grimaldi were not going there directly; instead they headed to Envigado. Their destination was an offi
ce block on Avenida Las Vegas, within the Villagrande section of the town.

  “That beats all,” Grimaldi said, as they approached the nine-story structure. “Las Vegas. Man, that takes me back.”

  Bolan had met Grimaldi for the first time in another Vegas, the Nevada tourist trap, when Jack was working as a private pilot for the Mafia. The Executioner needed to blow the desert gambling Mecca in a hurry, so he’d climbed aboard Grimaldi’s chopper uninvited, taking both the flyboy and his whirlybird hostage. From that dicey beginning had evolved a camaraderie that saw Grimaldi sign on as an aide to Bolan’s private war against the Syndicate that had destroyed his family. Around the same time, Bolan had crossed paths with Hal Brognola, who had been tasked to find him by the FBI, and the rest, as someone might have said, was history, written in blood.

  “So, this is it?” Grimaldi asked, when they had parked downrange from the address they’d squeezed out of Manolo Cuéllar in Texas. “Somewhere in there, we’ll find the guy who runs The Office?”

  “I’m inclined to doubt it,” Bolan answered. “But it couldn’t hurt to duck inside and have a look around.”

  Grimaldi echoed him. “‘It couldn’t hurt,’ he says. Unless we walk into a hornet’s nest and wind up getting stung.”

  “You’re not allergic, are you, Jack?”

  “To what, Sarge, a bullet in the head? No special allergy. I drop dead just like anybody else.”

  “You want to test that theory?”

  “Hey, I thought you’d never ask.”

  Avenida Las Vegas, Envigado

  Carolina Cabrera was thirty-three years old, a one-time beauty pageant runner-up from Bogotá who’d briefly tried her hand at television news announcing, then changed paths in life. At five foot eight, a well-proportioned and athletic 127 pounds, with green eyes and natural red hair passed down from European ancestors, she didn’t need a man to tell her she was still a show-stopping beauty. Despite all that, she was low maintenance, dressed casually unless business demanded suits or formal wear, and met life on her own terms, day by day.

  After a few years in the rat race, that was now the only way she knew or cared to live.

  As for her other life, the one that drew her into mortal danger more often than not...well, every woman had her secrets, didn’t she?

  If anyone had asked, after the fact, why she had focused on two Anglo strangers in the lobby office block where she worked for Horizon Enterprises LLC, Cabrera might have said that they looked out of place, although that wasn’t strictly true. They dressed the part of stylish and successful businessmen—well-groomed, strong in appearance and exuding confidence. Thirty to forty foreigners passed through the offices upstairs on any given day, at least half of them from the north, making deals for timber, coffee, oil or other things they couldn’t talk about, except in certain company.

  What set her off?

  It might have been the way they spoke in muted tones, preventing her from eavesdropping, even when she moved up beside them to peruse the wall-mounted directory of firms gathered beneath one roof. Likewise it could have been the slight bulges beneath their suit jackets, nearly concealed by stylish and expensive tailoring, but visible—however slightly—to perceptive eyes.

  But most of all, the men felt wrong. If she’d seen them in a saloon, perhaps, or entering one of the companies that fronted for black-market trade in gems and precious metals, animals on the endangered-species list, or most particularly drugs, then Cabrera would have said they fit right in. There was a chance she might have shrugged them off, dismissed them from her mind as insignificant.

  However, in this time and place, they sounded a slightly discordant note, which only ears finely attuned as hers could hope to register. In this building of upscale offices, she knew of only one firm—more importantly, one man—whom they might possibly have come to see.

  And he belonged to her.

  He was hers alone.

  How should she deal with them? The thought of leaving them alone, to seek her man and possibly force a confrontation with him, never entered Cabrera’s mind. She didn’t take them for men who worked for drug dealers. They definitely weren’t Colombians, although the nation’s population, swiftly nearing fifty million, was diverse in terms of race. Although she could not overhear their whispered words per se, she’d found they spoke no Spanish to each other and revealed no accent that betrayed Latino origins.

  Were they North Americans, then? She felt it was almost certain, and dismissed the notion of Canadians, based on the armament they carried, hidden on their persons. Granted, some Canadians did own and carry firearms; some were even known to shoot each other on occasion, in the heat of passion or to simplify illicit enterprise. But overall, gun-toting seemed to Cabrera a pastime more suited to Americans.

  In which case, were they lawmen of some kind? If so, that posed a problem for her, but she thought the difficulty might be solved by pulling strings in Bogotá. On balance, though, they moved without the customary, ingrained swagger she typically expected of American agents abroad, be they in harness to the FBI, the DEA, the CIA or the DIA. Such men often assumed they were superior to all others around them, even when they held no jurisdiction and had skimped on studying the local rule of law.

  So she was stumped, but absolutely, positively had to know what they were doing here, whether or not they posed an active threat either to her or her man. And there was only one way that she knew of to resolve that mystery.

  She’d simply have to ask.

  Cabrera saw them head for one of the lobby’s elevators. There were three in all, placed side by side. Only within the past year had the building’s owner finally dispensed with elevator operators dressed in uniforms, adding a few names to the city’s unemployment roll but making businesspersons feel more confident that they could speak in confidence while riding up and down, scheming to give rivals the shaft.

  All three elevators served eight of the building’s floors, but only one—placed farthest from the lobby’s street entrance—could take a visitor up to the ninth floor, and that trip required a special key. The ninth floor was her own preserve, her man’s, but strangers wouldn’t know about that roadblock to their plans for dropping in without an invitation.

  Cabrera didn’t know, therefore, if they were waiting for the middle elevator out of simple ignorance, or if they truly sought some other company besides the one she served. What she could see, and marked it well, was that no other passengers lined up to join them for the ride upstairs.

  That cleared the way for her, and she picked up her pace, arriving just in time to join them in the elevator car before its door hissed shut behind her. When the shorter of the two men scanned the car’s control panel and frowned, she read his disappointment at discovering that there was no button numbered nine.

  “We need to talk,” she told the strangers.

  “What about?” the taller of the two asked.

  “This elevator doesn’t reach the floor you want,” Cabrera said.

  “Psychic?” asked the shorter one.

  Ignoring his question, she told them both, “And you shouldn’t try to go there, anyway.”

  “Why’s that?” the taller one asked.

  “Something bad might happen to you.”

  “See?” the other said. “Psychic.”

  “What makes you say that,” Mr. Tall inquired.

  “It might be intuition,” Cabrera said. “Or maybe I’m the bad thing.”

  Smiling for the first time since she’d laid eyes on him, the tall one replied, “Okay. Let’s have that talk.”

  * * *

  The elevator took them back to the lobby. When the door opened, the redhead looked around, apparently saw nothing to concern her and said, “How about outside? Let’s take a walk.”

  “Or we could ride,” Bolan replied.

  “You have a car?”

 
“He didn’t mean a bicycle for three,” Grimaldi quipped.

  “A sense of humor’s often helpful,” she said. “But not always.”

  “Ouch!” Grimaldi feigned a pouty face.

  They crossed the lobby, three abreast, the woman in between them. When they hit the street, Bolan nodded in the direction of their rented Mustang, saying, “Over there.”

  “You like to draw attention?” she asked.

  “Sometimes,” Bolan answered.

  “Okay. Come on and show me what she’s got.”

  “Someplace you want to go?” Bolan inquired.

  “Just box the block. This won’t take long.”

  “Sounds like a lot of dates I’ve had,” Grimaldi said.

  Once they reached the Mustang, Bolan popped its locks with his key fob, and Grimaldi started to climb into the back seat, but the woman caught his arm and held him back. “I’ll sit back there,” she said. “Saves me from getting a stiff neck talking to both of you.”

  “All right by me,” Grimaldi said, and pulled the shotgun seat forward, smiling as her rising skirt revealed a glimpse of inner thigh.

  When she was settled, Bolan sat in the passenger’s side seat and let Grimaldi take the Mustang’s wheel.

  “You’re the chauffeur?” the redhead asked.

  Flicking a glance up toward the rearview, Grimaldi replied, “I drive all kinds of things.”

  When she leaned forward, the lady suddenly had a pistol in her hand. Bolan made it a Bersa Thunder Plus, .380 caliber. At that range, she should have no problem nailing both of them repeatedly before they reached their own holstered sidearms.

  “A carjacker? You must be kidding me,” Grimaldi said.

  “Just drive. Each of you pass your weapons back to me, left-handed if you please. Don’t make me kill you over nothing.”

  “How about we introduce ourselves before we dance?” Bolan said.

  “That can wait. Do as you’re told, please.”