Rage Of The Assassin (3 page)

“How’s the back?” one of the prisoners asked as Cifuentes moved past his cell.

“Oh, you know. Some days are better than others.”

“Don’t try to lift anything heavy. That’s a killer,” the prisoner advised. This inmate was a lieutenant with the Knights Templar Cartel, rumored to have murdered hundreds with his own hands, but he was always courteous to the guards, Cifuentes included. Cifuentes had confided to him the prior day that his sciatica was flaring up, and the cartel killer had offered some advice on home remedies to alleviate the suffering. Cifuentes often carried requests for special tequilas or drug cocktails for him, so the inmate viewed him with the same benevolence he would have reserved for a trusted servant.

“The walking helps. But no fast moves,” Cifuentes agreed.

The prisoner barked a harsh laugh. “Not many places to run to in here, are there?”

“True words, my friend,” Cifuentes said with a wave, and continued on his round, anxious to return to his comfortable seat and portable radio.

When he reached the last cell on the wing he froze, open-mouthed.

It was empty.

Which was impossible.

He raised his handheld radio to his lips and whispered into it, not daring to raise his voice lest the other prisoners hear him. “Dispatch, I’m at C-121. Is the prisoner in the infirmary or something?”

The speaker crackled and a terse voice emanated from it. “Repeat.”

“C-121 is empty. Where’s the inmate?” Cifuentes didn’t dare use the man’s name, even in the security of the compound.

Static hissed from the radio, and he turned the volume down. It wouldn’t do to have the cell block riled up, and there were few surer ways to do so than to introduce the unexpected. When the radio crackled back to life, it was a different voice, which Cifuentes immediately recognized as the shift supervisor.

“Prisoner is supposed to be in his cell.”

The blood drained from Cifuentes’s face and he swallowed hard as he raised the radio and murmured into it, “Negative. There’s nobody here.”

The pause seemed to last forever.

“Are you sure?”

Cifuentes’s voice cracked when he spoke. “Positive.”

He waited a few moments for instruction, and then the sirens klaxoned overhead and all hell broke loose.

The unthinkable had happened.

Don
Aranas had escaped.

Chapter 3

Guards waited outside Aranas’s cell while the warden and a team of high-ranking officials stood in the enclosed space, studying every surface as they fumed. How were they supposed to announce that the most wanted man in Mexico had vanished into thin air? The political repercussions would be staggering, not to mention that most of their careers would be effectively over.

“I want this cell completely dismantled. He couldn’t have gotten far. When did you sound the perimeter alarms?” the warden barked at his subordinate.

“Right after the report that he wasn’t in his cell.” Which wasn’t completely true – before putting out the alert, the shift supervisor had double-checked to verify that the prisoner hadn’t had an emergency medical problem and been transported to the infirmary. That had taken ten minutes, but there was no need to bore his boss with the extent of the lag – what was done was done.

“And when was he last seen?”

“Half an hour earlier. No more than forty minutes, on the outside. We’re still checking.”

“Damn it. We need to put out an APB and alert all law enforcement immediately,” the warden griped. Any hope of containing the news had just evaporated. If the crime lord had managed to make it outside the prison, he could be just about anywhere in one of the world’s most populated cities by now. “And the security cameras on the block?”

“They’re being reviewed, but nobody saw anything, from early reports.”

“Warden? Might want to look at this.” One of the police officials was standing by the bathroom area, pointing at the shower stall. Nobody mentioned the cabinets and other furnishings in the cell, nor that the prisoner’s humble abode was essentially a private luxury suite. Some things were best not to belabor.

“What is it?”

“Looks like a seam to me.”

The warden squinted at the area in question and then called over his shoulder to his assistant. “Bring a flashlight.”

Five minutes later the men had dislodged a piece of flooring eighteen inches square and were peering down a dirt shaft, where a knotted rope dropped into the darkness. The warden reluctantly placed the call he’d been dreading, and the city’s security force went to red alert as a squad of heavily armed police arrived to explore what was undoubtedly a tunnel.

A team of elite Federal Police arrived in full combat gear, and after taking in the situation, the leader ordered the room cleared and prepared his group to lower themselves into the void. They secured their lines and rappelled down the vertical shaft, their helmet lights illuminating the way, until the leader’s boots thumped against the dirt tunnel floor forty feet below the prison. The rest arrived at the bottom moments later. The gunmen swept the darkness with their M-16 rifles, sensing nothing moving, but cautious nonetheless.

The leader used hand signals and two of the team switched on high-power LED lamps. The beams reflected off steel struts that supported wood beams overhead, and the leader murmured into his helmet mic.

“Christ. There’s even an AC duct in here.”

The group moved further into the tunnel, where fifteen feet from the descent shaft a set of railway tracks stretched into nothingness. The leader swept the area with one of the lamps and pointed into the gloom. The men nodded and began making their way along the subterranean passage.

An hour into the exploration they arrived at the far end, where a modified motorcycle lay abandoned, its drivetrain hooked to a makeshift railway car capable of accommodating at least three men. The lead officer glared at the chute leading upward and shook his head. He already knew what he’d find when they ascended to ground level: an abandoned building or construction site. There was no other explanation for how so much dirt could have been excavated without anyone noticing – either it had been hauled off or used as compaction for a new build, both of which would raise eyebrows unless it was an active construction project.

His worst fear was realized as he climbed the rungs of a well-traveled ladder that had been built into the shaft wall and surfaced in a gloomy cinderblock room, the walls unfinished gray, the ground dusty and filled with debris.

He radioed in his position, and within minutes dozens of similarly attired officers had taken over the site, a partially completed office complex that the building permit said had been started a month after
Don
Aranas had taken up residence in his cell.

When the warden heard the news, he looked shocked, as did the men gathered around him. Aranas had achieved the impossible right under his nose. Later, it would surface that the prisoner hadn’t ever been moved from his cell, as protocol dictated in order to reduce tunneling risk; nor had it been considered to keep him on anything but the ground floor – both violations of basic prisoner handling that would cost everyone involved their jobs.

By the time the airports had been alerted, several hours had passed, which would cause further consternation when it was broadcast by an investigative reporter. With that sort of institutional incompetence, Aranas could have breezed around town, had a nice dinner, and taken in a few table dances before boarding the private plane that had no doubt spirited him away.

International outrage from countries where Aranas was also a wanted man had little effect, no more than did calls for everyone’s head. In the end, the man who’d proved impossible to jail had shown his captors to be idiots, disgusting a population so jaded by political corruption that many were surprised that he’d ever seen the inside of a prison in the first place.

Chapter 4

Yesterday, Washington, D.C.

A wall-mounted television blared CNN to an audience of six men seated around a mahogany conference table. A blonde with a trace of a New England accent, shellacked hair, and a vapid expression earnestly read the teleprompter with just the appropriate amount of outrage.

“Our investigation has determined that at least three of the most lucrative petroleum leases in Mexico were not awarded in what anyone could consider a fair or balanced matter. Charges of favoritism and bribery are widespread, although government officials in Mexico, who have launched their own investigation, assured our reporters that there was no evidence of impropriety.”

The man at the head of the table exchanged a dark look with the attendee next to him, a graying official with a neatly trimmed beard. Nobody believed the Mexican investigation was anything but a whitewash operation, just as so many of their own country’s tended to be. It was the way of the world, and this group was long over any illusion that governments did anything but mislead and lie. After all, that was their job, and they were specialists.

When the program segment drew to a close, the bearded man switched it off and a younger staffer with steel-rimmed square spectacles and an oil slick of hair combed over a premature bald spot hit the lights. The man at the head of the table sat back and took his time, looking at each of the assembly before clearing his throat.

“What the fine folks at the network don’t know is that the usual story about paying for favorable influence is just the tip of the iceberg. Of course our companies attempted to do the same thing, through the usual channels, but they were stonewalled.”

“Why?” the bespectacled staffer asked.

“We think there’s something bigger in play here. When the usual suspects suddenly lose interest in feathering their nests, it flies in the face of experience. Especially down there. So we did our own nosing around, and what we discovered isn’t good.”

Radcliff Arlington was a senior official with a division of the U.S. clandestine apparatus that officially didn’t exist. It didn’t report to Congress, wasn’t on the books anywhere, and had no formal budget. And yet it was one of the most powerful cabals in the capital, part think tank and part operational group that implemented the directives of its superiors without question. Today the managing council was turned to Mexico, but its interests were varied and global. Loosely, their function was to determine what risks and opportunities existed to further American interests. But those interests usually had little to do with the taxpayer and everything to do with what was best for the network of corporations that operated the government for their mutual enrichment.

“So who did the end run around our people?” asked the bearded man, Stanford Hope. “What happened? I thought we bought the bidding and had it locked up.”

“Care to take the floor, Lawry?” Arlington inquired. The so-named analyst flipped a folder open and peered at it with a frown.

“One third of all the contracts have gone to front organizations we believe are ultimately controlled by the Chinese. It’s a little more sophisticated than usual, but that’s where our bets are placed. The shell corporations span the globe, of course, but the money’s definitely from China, so whether they’re domiciled in Slovenia or Macau is irrelevant.

“That spells trouble, obviously, gentlemen. The Chinese have been extremely active over the last few years funding infrastructure in Latin America – the new canal in Panama, bridge loans and highway projects in Argentina, dams in Central and South America. And they’re doing the same thing in Africa. We believe this is a game changer – I don’t need to remind anyone that Mexico’s our backyard. If they can beat us there, it’s over for our influence.”

Heads nodded. It went without saying to the men around the table that whatever was best for the oil, pharmaceutical, and financial interests that helped fund the group’s black budget was best for the world. The growth of Chinese and Russian influence in blocking American hegemony was considered the number one threat to the de facto American empire that had been carefully crafted post World War II, using a combination of military threat and central bank warfare. That the U.S. had military bases in ninety percent of the world’s nations wasn’t common knowledge – but that it used its various pet financial creatures, its development banks, to prey on other countries and convince their leadership to indebt themselves with dollars they could never hope to pay back, thus putting them under the American government’s thumb, was even less well understood.

The men in the room were the second generation that orchestrated the machinations, who coordinated the strategy and tactics required to run the world their way, for lack of any other explanation. While democracy and freedom were touted as excuses for most of their campaigns, the truth was they only liked either idea if the countries involved did as they were told and sacrificed the well-being of their populations so U.S. companies could profit.

It was a simple approach, if unpalatable to the great unwashed. Arlington and his ilk didn’t question the legitimacy of their actions or their presumed right to operate the planet like their personal fiefdoms, and a large part of their efforts went to convincing the public that not only did groups like theirs not exist, but that the constant military offensives and destabilizations around the world were anything but what they clearly were. Other nations weren’t fooled, but that didn’t matter – as long as Joe Public on Main Street believed, he would continue paying his taxes and slaving in a system that was working against him.

Hope leaned forward, his expression that of a man struggling with constipation. That was his usual demeanor, so nobody paid any attention. He was brilliant, if morose most of the time, and lived alone with seven cats, his life devoted to his work.

“We must take countermeasures, but we believe that the Mexican government is talking out of both sides of its mouth. More so than usual, I might add.”

Arlington nodded. “The purpose of this meeting is to explore our options. Nothing’s off the table: assassinations, false flags, even invasion, if necessary. But we cannot allow China to eat our lunch in Mexico, or we’re their bitch. Do I make myself clear?”