The Armada Legacy (25 page)

But snaring the man himself was like trying to catch a lizard – grab his tail and it would just come away in your hand, and it would quickly grow back afterwards. For every drug dealer they brought in, Serrato would employ two more; every cocaine plant they burned down would simply be rebuilt elsewhere, only larger and more productive.

In retaliation Serrato declared war on the police, mounting a blitzkrieg campaign of bribery, intimidation and murder. Two of Nico’s unit were blown up by car bombs in their own driveways; a third was abducted from a Bogotá nightspot, castrated and crucified on a tree; several more succumbed to payoffs and corrupted the investigation beyond measure by stealing or tampering with evidence, as well as by passing false intelligence to the department.

Within a year, the unit was falling to pieces and the investigation’s run of hard-won little victories against the Stingray’s drug empire dried up. In the meantime Serrato was forging ever closer networks with his buddies in government, men as influential as they were corrupt. He used prostitutes to entrap members of the police top brass, then blackmailed them into his power.

In the end, the investigation had been hopelessly whittled down to just two men and a woman: Nico, his partner Felipe Morales and a female detective named Laura Garcia. All had been approached with offers of bribery, then threatened when they refused. Even when mysteriously ordered by their superiors to call off the investigation they’d persisted in their off-duty time, convinced that a breakthrough in the case might be just round the corner.

The breakthrough had finally arrived in the shape of Enrico Gomez, a former Serrato employee turned snitch, who promised to provide information that would get Serrato and the whole upper circle of his empire, several notable politicians included, indicted and jailed for the rest of time. The snitch was demanding an extortionate price in return, but in their enthusiasm Nico, Felipe and Laura had figured that the Colombian authorities would be willing to negotiate.

Their enthusiasm had been their downfall. Within twenty-four hours of the revelation of their hot new lead to their superiors, Detective Garcia had been kidnapped from her apartment, gang-raped and shot in the face. The cops had had to identify the body using her fingerprints. The same day, Detective Morales narrowly escaped death and was left with terrible scars and an amputated left arm after his home was engulfed by an incendiary bomb.

Meanwhile, Nico Ramirez had had a call from his distraught wife Valentina to say the children had gone missing from their school.

The mutilated bodies of Carlos, eight, and Daniela, ten, had been dumped in the street outside Police Headquarters shortly afterwards.

The triple hammer blow had ended the operation at a stroke.

‘That was the end of everything,’ Nico said, gripping the steering wheel tightly as he sped down the mountain road towards Granada. Montefrio was still a long way off, and the leaden sky was threatening snow again. ‘It was over. I couldn’t stay in the police anymore. Couldn’t stay in Colombia anymore. First chance we could, we emigrated to Texas.’

‘What about your wife?’ Ben asked.

Nico sighed. ‘We didn’t even speak to one another for a year after it happened. I was flat down on the ground, drinking myself to death. Valentina didn’t do much of anything at all, except sleep most of the time. One day it was like I woke up out of a coma or something. I threw away the bottle. Started with the weights and the fitness training, knew what I had to do. But Valentina’s spirit was just too broken. She kept getting worse until I couldn’t look after her on my own any more. The doctors have all these fancy names for the thing that’s wrong with her. She’s in a sanatorium in El Paso now. The folks there are wonderful, you know, and they say that one day …’ Nico sniffed and quickly darted his hand to his eye to wipe away a tear before it rolled down his cheek. ‘That one day Valentina might recover and become herself again. They say there’s a chance.’

‘Is there?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. Seven years, I keep going back to see her and I don’t see any change. On a good day, she just lies there and I don’t know what she’s thinking or feeling. On a bad day … well, bad days are bad. They can’t let her have anything metal because she’ll try to cut herself. Sometimes she’s like she wants to die.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said.

‘I’m sorry too, man. It was because of me this all happened, because of my job, because I was so driven to catch that piece of shit that I exposed my family to danger. I just have to pray she gets better. She’s all I have left in the world. I guess that if she ever recovers, I’ll be all she has too.’ Nico glanced across at Ben. ‘That’s why I can’t lose my life doing this, you understand? If it wasn’t for Valentina I wouldn’t give a damn. But I just can’t leave her all alone like that.’

Ben took out his cigarettes and offered one to Nico. ‘Don’t you ever think,’ he said as they lit up, ‘that maybe you should quit this vendetta and just go home to take care of her? What if something does happen to you?’

Nico looked at him sharply. ‘Is that what you’d do, man? Give it up and go home?’

Ben blew out a stream of Gauloise smoke. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’d feel exactly the same way you do. I’d want Serrato dead. Him and every man who stands with him. And I’d roll over the top of anyone who tried to stop me.’

‘He’s gonna die, all right,’ Nico said in a tight voice. ‘Apart from trying to be there for Valentina, I’ve had nothing else to do for the last seven years except prepare myself for snuffing out that
hijo de puta
.’ He lapsed into a stream of Spanish profanities.

‘Seven years is a long time to spend hunting one man,’ Ben said.

‘Yeah, well, Ramon Serrato ain’t someone you can just walk up to and catch like a butterfly. I went back to Colombia a few times, tried to re-establish a few old contacts, asked around. I was wasting my time. It was like he’d just disappeared. Word was that he’d gone legit, like the fucker could just decide he didn’t want to be a drug lord any more and take up a new career. But nobody even knew where he was, or if they knew then they wouldn’t talk. So I went back to El Paso. Felipe and I kept in touch. The police didn’t have any use for a one-armed detective and nobody else would employ him on account of his face being all scarred from the firebomb. He was living on his disability pension in a shitty apartment, spending all his time online searching for anything he could find on Serrato.

‘Then three years ago, Felipe calls me and says he’s heard that Serrato’s left Colombia and moved a thousand miles south, to Peru. Way out in the asshole of nowhere, in the northern Amazonas region bordering Ecuador. We’re talking major rainforest, about as far from Serrato’s big-city turf as you can get. All Felipe knew was what he’d had to bribe some pissed-off ex-associate of Serrato’s to cough up, and even then the information was sketchy. Me, I didn’t care why, just wanted to find the fucker. I got on the next plane to Lima, then from there to this backwater called Chachapoyas, bought the cheapest car I could find and drove out to look for him.

‘The first nine days I spent driving from town to town, village to village. Some of these places don’t even have roads. Finally I get talking to a guy, Miguel, delivery driver for a food company, who tells me about the rich Colombian they say’s built himself this big house right out in the forest, a regular palace, he said, a few miles from a village called San Tomás. Tells me the best way to get out there is by river.

‘So I found a local floatplane pilot who could take me there. We touched down at San Tomás and then started looking for Serrato’s place. Just when I was beginning to think Miguel was full of shit, suddenly there it was in the middle of the jungle, not a house but a compound, like a fucking military base with guards everywhere and high walls all around it. We were able to make a couple of passes overhead before we got too noticed. I could see how well this “law abiding citizen” was protected, and how damn well impossible it’d be to get to him. You’d only have to get within range of the gates and you’d be shot down like a dog.’

Nico shrugged his shoulders. ‘That’s when I figured that instead of trying to get inside, I’d wait for him on the outside. Back in San Tomás, I hung around for a few days, got talking to a few folks and soon found out that nobody wanted to know about Serrato’s place, like it didn’t exist. Except Roberto, this local mechanic I met in a bar. He must’ve sussed out what my business was there. Warned me that if I kept going around asking questions the local cops would bury me. Serrato owns half of them. Then he told me about this crazy old hunter dude who lived in a hut in the woods half a mile outside the village. Said he always had a load of guns to sell, but to be careful of him ’cause he was dangerous. So I go out there and I find the place. Next thing I’m staring down the barrel of a shotgun with this wild-looking old Indian guy on the other end of it, spaced out on Christ knows what. When I showed him American dollars he calmed down some, then after a whole lot of haggling he finally agreed to sell me one of his rifles.

‘Then I was ready to start hunting Serrato. I traded in my car for a beat-up Winnebago. Drove out as near to the compound as the road could take me, camped up by day and cut through the forest on foot by night. You can hardly move without stepping on a fucking snake or getting eaten alive by bugs. Couple of times I was nearly caught by the armed patrols Serrato has combing the perimeter around the clock.’

‘But you never managed to get inside,’ Ben said.

Nico shook his head. ‘It can’t be done, man. Not by one guy on his own. I couldn’t even get to the wall. Hey, let me have the phone again. I want to try Cabeza.’

Ben handed the phone over. A couple of moments later Nico shook his head with a sigh. ‘Still no reply. Where’d that asshole wander off to?’

‘Keep going,’ Ben said.

‘This goes on for about a week, then I ran out of supplies and had to drive back to San Tomás for more. I was depressed as hell, thinking, two more days, then I give this up, it’s useless. But as I’m driving the RV back to my stakeout, suddenly I see this convoy of vehicles coming the other way – Jeeps and trucks, all tailing a black Mercedes with a man and woman in the back. As the Merc comes past the guy turns towards the window and I get a real good look at his face. It was him. Serrato. By then I knew the roads pretty well and I knew that by doubling back on myself I could pick up this track leading onto high ground where I could get a clear shot at the convoy.

‘So I rush up there and lay down in the rocks with the .30-06 bolt-action I got from the old hunter, and there’s the convoy coming round my flank about four hundred yards away. I thought I could make the shot. But my heart was beating so fast and my hands were shaking, I could hardly hold the rifle still. Plus the convoy’s throwing up a ton of dust and the sun’s glaring off the windows. When I thought I had him in the sights I pulled the trigger. Saw the car swerve over the road, slow right down and then take off again. I grabbed that aught-six and jumped back in the RV and got the fuck away from there, hollering and yelling like a crazy man cause I was so sure I’d got him. It was only later on that I found out I hadn’t. Alicia caught the bullet in the throat. She must’ve died right there in the back seat of the car. Shit.’

Nico flicked his cigarette stub out of the window and was quiet for a while, looking pensive. By now they’d descended to the level of the lower foothills, heading fast in the direction of the village of Montefrio. Ben was silent too, waiting for Nico to resume his story while trying to contain the impatience that was gnawing at his guts.

‘After Alicia’s death, Serrato just withdrew deeper into his compound. He stopped travelling by road and trebled his security. Couple of times I saw his chopper flying over the jungle, and I had this idea to get hold of an RPG to shoot him down with. But it never happened and the crooks I had to deal with tried to turn me in to the local cops, who seized my RV with all my stuff, rifle, everything. I was on the run again. Next time I tried to cross the forest to get close to Serrato’s compound I found he’d tripled the guard on the gates and the patrols too. Anyone found hanging around there would get themselves killed, or maybe taken back to Serrato and tortured to death. It was a fucking suicide mission, man.

‘What could I do? I went home and started figuring out a new plan. Instead of trying to attack him on his home ground, I’d devote my life to figuring out ways that I could pick his people off one by one. I didn’t care if it took me thirty years. If I could just get enough of them, then maybe one day, some way, I’d be able to draw Serrato out of his hole and kill him, too.

‘Back in El Paso, nothing’s happening. Time goes by, then more time. I had to take a job in a store to earn some money, and I was fucked up over Valentina and losing heart, thinking maybe I’d just have to forget about Serrato and move on, try and get my life back together somehow. Then a couple of weeks ago my buddy Felipe calls to say he’s hooked up with this other ex-cop who’s got connections we can use to set up wire taps. We still had a list of all Serrato’s old associates, the ones who were still alive or not in jail. So I head back to Bogotá and we start tapping phones, all totally illegal, but hey, this is Colombia, right? Top of our list was a guy in Bogotá called César Cristo, vicious sisterfucking crack-head of a contract killer who back in the day was the Stingray’s favourite assassin for hire. So we’re listening in on all these calls, hours and hours of useless bullshit, when suddenly we’re hearing something unbelievable. This guy’s called Cristo in the middle of the night saying he wants him to go to Spain to do a job on one Juan Fernando Cabeza. When we heard the voice on the line, we all just fucking stared at each other, we just couldn’t believe what we were hearing. It was Serrato himself. The sonofabitch’s got balls so big, he didn’t even try to code what he was saying. It was all there: the hit, the money, the directions to the target’s home, the works. Recorded the whole thing on a hard drive.’

Nico shook his head in amazement at the memory, then went on. ‘Felipe wanted to turn it over to the authorities. I told him no way. One, the evidence was obtained illegally and was inadmissible. Two, we’d be dead by dawn if we breathed a word of this to anyone. Three, even if by some fucking miracle Serrato went down, after a year, tops, of drinking champagne and eating lobster with the prison officials, he’d walk free again. That’s how the system works. And anyhow I had my own ideas about what to do.’