Rage Of The Assassin (13 page)

The driver nodded and started the engine. The air conditioner was a relief and the trip to the Brownsville South Padre Island International Airport blessedly short. El Rey peeled off some bills from a fistful of dollars and paid the driver before exiting the cab.

He’d arranged for a charter flight to take him to New York, where the first of the three targets lived – a professor at NYU, who lived in an Upper East Side brownstone and also owned a home in the Hamptons. Recently divorced, she cut an impressive figure in the photographs and videos he’d found of her, mostly from academic conferences.

The jet was a Citation X, easily capable of the 1800-mile flight in a little over three hours, and El Rey recognized the plane’s distinctive profile as he approached the private plane terminal. After a muted discussion with a clerk behind a reception desk, a waiting attendant – a stunning brunette with legs to her ears – led him across the tarmac and up the stairs into the fuselage.

The pilot introduced himself and his copilot, and El Rey stashed his bag behind his seat. Five minutes later the flight had been cleared for takeoff and the jet was racing down the runway, pressing the assassin into the comforting folds of the leather throne as the drab sameness of Brownsville blurred by his window in a rush.

The plane lifted into the air and soared effortlessly in a near vertical ascent, and then banked over the Gulf of Mexico’s sparkling azure surface. El Rey took a sip of his water and set the crystal glass down on the polished walnut tray as he replayed the prior night in his mind. Carla had been asleep when he’d stolen into the house, and he’d felt a pang of remorse when he’d left his note and pressed a soft kiss to her face.

She’d be waking up about now, and he fully expected her to be enraged at his callous disregard for her wishes. He’d make amends when he returned. For now, he needed to focus on the task at hand, which was locating and interrogating the first of his subjects. He’d need to knock out the two in the U.S. quickly if he was to make it to Israel to find the third before his symptoms became so bad they interfered with his ability to carry out his mission. He hoped that trip wouldn’t be necessary – that either the woman in New York or the one in Baltimore was the creator of the toxin – but he had to be prepared for the worst, which meant that he was already badly behind schedule.

The flight from Mexico City had been uneventful. The Lear 65 was comfortable enough, and there was nobody around in the private terminal to be interested in a single male in his early thirties embarking on a private domestic flight at two a.m. His bag hadn’t been checked by the sleepy security worker; at his request there had been no attendant on the plane; and the pilots had studiously avoided interacting with him. He’d managed several hours of sleep on that flight and hoped to do the same on this one. Still, though, he couldn’t help but notice the faint facial twitching that had arrived with dawn.

He knew the progression he could expect from prior bouts with the neurotoxin, and he hoped that the tics, like the tremors, would abate before returning with increased severity later. But by his reckoning, it was no more than forty-eight hours on the outside before his cognitive functioning became impaired – which was more alarming than the other symptoms, because his edge was his ability to reason faster than his adversaries. If that quit, he might as well pull the trigger of the gun that would end his ordeal himself.

The morose inner dialogue was also a symptom of the neurotoxin’s insidious progress, he recognized, and he forced the negative thoughts away. The errand was straightforward: find the women, question them, and proceed as necessary.

He felt no remorse at the prospect of terminating the scientists. They were all engaged in research and development for the military industrial complex, crafting nightmare substances for their masters and fully aware of what those agents would be used for. That made them no different than soldiers, although extremely well-compensated ones – he knew from the background checks that all three were in the seven- to eight-figure net worth range, and it wasn’t because they’d won the lottery. Being the lapdog of the clandestine agencies was lucrative, and part of that was hazard pay, as well as hush money so they would never discuss their work.

El Rey didn’t judge them for their deeds – if it hadn’t been them, it would have been others – nor did he bear the creator of the toxin any grudge. They did what they had to do, and he would do what he had to. It was a simple equation.

Whether his trip would be for naught was a different matter. His greatest fear was that the antidote was something that couldn’t be easily manufactured, or that would take more time than he had, or that required specialized ingredients or equipment that he wouldn’t be able to source.

He quieted his imagination. There were always obstacles; he’d tackle them as they arose. Worrying about the unknown served no constructive purpose, and he banished the doubts, at least partly attributable to the poison working its dark magic. He knew better than to allow his imagination to run away like this, especially once he was in play – all it would do was distract him and diminish his focus, which he couldn’t afford.

The plane leveled off at forty-three thousand feet, and he pulled the shade down over the window. He took a final swig of water and replaced the glass on the tray, drew a deep breath, and willed himself to sleep. El Rey slowly drifted off to the lullaby of the muted roar of the twin turbines, and the last image in his psyche was Carla, hair spread across her pillow like an angel’s halo, slumbering like the innocent she was.

Chapter 23

La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico

Ernesto stood in the shade of a doorway and scanned the dusty street. A rooster crowed down the block in the barrio that framed the main highway that stretched north to the U.S. and meandered south to Los Cabos. The homes were all four hundred square feet and broiling in the 114 degree heat, their occupants accustomed to the oven-like conditions, doomed to a lifetime of suffering by poverty and lack of opportunity.

At twenty-six, Ernesto had lived in La Paz for four months, and detested every moment of it. He’d come over on the ferry along with dozens of others, from Topolobampo in Sinaloa. He’d grown up near Culiacán and cut his teeth when barely a teen as a street dealer for the Sinaloa Cartel. He was in Baja because he’d recently gotten a better offer from the new group Agundez had formed, which had raised his weekly take from three thousand pesos to four – or roughly two hundred and fifty dollars – and as much of the meth as he could trim from the gram baggies he sold twelve hours a day.

Ernesto spied a girl with a shapely figure several houses down and whistled at her. That was Maria, the daughter of a hotel worker, just turned fifteen, whom Ernesto had been plying with marijuana for several weeks as he enjoyed her considerable charms – in secret, of course, because her father would have gone ballistic if he’d suspected one of the neighborhood gangsters was tapping his delicate hothouse flower.

Maria waved at him and waggled her hips invitingly, her short shorts and yellow halter top offering scant concealment of her curves. He held up three fingers – he’d be off in three hours, his night shift complete, his position replaced by another just like him who ran the day crew.

La Paz, which meant “The Peace” in English, had been ravaged by a violent drug war as Sinaloa battled the upstart Agundez Cartel for territory that had previously been exclusively Sinaloa’s. For twenty years Aranas had cut deals with the mayor and governor, paying for the plaza of La Paz and all points south, but he’d been betrayed once imprisoned. The rumor was that the mayor had sold the plaza twice, accepting money from Agundez as well as Aranas, and in the process bringing mainland-style bloodshed to a region that had boasted a lower homicide rate than most of the industrialized world.

It was rumored that the mayor’s family had fled to San Diego, where he owned a vacation home on the water in La Jolla, and that he was now living on the army base, surrounded by military, fearful of being taken down by one of the angry cartels. Selling the plaza twice was a huge no-no, the penalty for which was death. That was well understood by every politician in Mexico, but the mayor had decided to risk it with Aranas incarcerated, at the direct expense of the population and any tourism the area enjoyed.

Ernesto didn’t know how much of the rumor was true, and he didn’t care. It changed nothing for him – his job was to sell the locals their drug of choice and to avoid drama. So far it had been hard to accomplish, because the barrio access road was the line of demarcation between the two cartels’ territories, with Sinaloa claiming the west side and Agundez the east.

There had been sixteen shootings in the last two days as rolling gun battles ravaged the city. The weapon of choice was the “Cuerno de Chivo” – the “goat’s horn,” the slang term for the AK-47, due to its distinctive curved magazine. The cartel shooters were indiscriminate, as well as generous with their expenditures of ammo, and the average shooting involved at least thirty rounds – the entire capacity of a full magazine, usually emptied on full auto. The last killing had been at four in the morning, near the waterfront, where two of Ernesto’s colleagues had been gunned down as they walked along the
malecon
after a hard night dealing in the clubs that fronted onto the bay.

Ernesto was already jittery from the meth that kept him alert through the night, and the escalation in violence had done nothing to calm his nerves, even though there had been no incursions into his barrio. But he knew that every minute on the street posed a risk, and he was keeping his eyes open; the old Beretta 9mm pistol stuffed into his waistband at the small of his back gave slim comfort.

Traffic had been dead for the last five hours. Nobody wanted to get caught in the crossfire of a drug war, and only the most desperate of addicts were willing to brave a trip for their fix. That would hit Ernesto in the wallet if it kept up. Standard operating procedure was to hold the street dealer accountable for any slowdown, even if due to circumstances outside his control, the assumption being that if the business lagged, it was because of something the dealer was doing – either diluting the drugs too much or robbing his customers or behaving abnormally. Ernesto knew the game, having grown up in it, and was already calculating what the lull would likely cost him if there was no pickup soon.

His burner cell phone vibrated in the front pocket of his below-the-knee shorts. He pulled it free, his eyes constantly surveying the dusty street as he raised it to his ear.

“Yeah?”

“How you doin’?” his friend Gerzain asked.

“Got nothin’ happening. You?”

“Dead, man, dead. You hear about Lala and Gumbo?”

“Yeah. Shit’s getting real now, homey. Watch yourself.”

“I hear that. You seen anything your way?”

“
Nada
. Although I heard somebody pop a few caps maybe an hour ago.”

“Oh. That was just some punkass. We set him straight.” Occasionally one of the barrio youths tried to cut into the business, which was dealt with swiftly by whichever cartel ran the neighborhood. The penalty for trying to sell a baggie of rock was death. Even so, there was a regular move by the dimmer of the locals to make some easy money, and this year Ernesto’s crew had snuffed out a dozen homeboys who’d missed the memo. All part of the game, he knew, as unremarkable as a flat tire or a spilled Pacifico.

The going price to kill a man in La Paz had dropped to two hundred dollars, a fraction of what it had been before the cartel clash. Ernesto had murdered three men since arriving in La Paz – welcome pocket money for him that subsidized his habit. They had all been strangers to him, who’d either offended the wrong person or were banging the wrong man’s wife or whose business had interfered with someone else’s. He never asked and didn’t care. He just popped them and went home.

“So what’s up, man?” Ernesto asked.

“Getting ugly, you know?” Gerzain said.

“Yeah, well–” Ernesto was cut off by the sound of an unmuffled motor as an old Nissan pickup truck swung down the dirt track and accelerated toward him. He froze for a half second and then reached for his weapon as he backed toward the door. He’d almost made it when the silence of the street was shattered by the rattle of a Kalashnikov.

The wall behind him exploded into chips of mortar as rounds slammed into the cinderblock dwelling, and then a spray of red fountained from his back as three slugs punched through his chest. His finger squeezed his pistol’s trigger as he tumbled backward into the house, but the shots ricocheted harmlessly off the building across the street as the vehicle sped off.

Maria came running once the dirt road had fallen still. Ernesto labored for breath as his savaged lungs filled with blood. His deeply tanned skin was pale from shock. She screamed at the sight of him dying, and then his consciousness faded; the final sound of his short life was her strangled cry for someone to call an ambulance.

It took almost half an hour for the police to arrive, and when they did, it was two pickup trucks with municipal cops – experts in avoiding confronting any crime that might involve risk. They emptied out of the truck, and one of them placed a call to the hospital as he studied Ernesto’s blood-soaked corpse, the street dealer’s face now covered with bluebottle flies. His passing was unremarkable and un-mourned except by a teenage girl down the way who would soon discover that she was two months pregnant with Ernesto’s progeny, and who would have to run away from home and ultimately work in a strip bar to support herself and her infant son – another casualty in a war that was an ongoing part of the Mexican condition.

Chapter 24

Mexico City, Mexico

Rafael Norteño tilted his head toward a member of the president’s inner circle as he strode down a polished marble corridor that led to his office, a burgundy ostrich-skin briefcase in one hand and a cup of Starbucks coffee in the other. He wore his thick ebony hair slicked straight back, and his expensive blue suit had been immaculately pressed and tailored to his slight frame. He paused at the door and smiled to himself when he saw the plaque announcing him as the president’s chief of staff. He’d replaced his predecessor six months earlier, and since then had made a point of arriving early most days and working well after the rest of the staffers had gone home.