Return of the Assassin (Assassin Series 3) (18 page)

“How did he give you the slip?”

“Sneaky. Disappeared into the airport and then left with a girl. He was planning on ditching us. If it wasn’t for the chips, we’d be screwed.”

“We saw that coming though, didn’t we? So, advantage us, at least on this round. Maintain a loose surveillance, but keep it low-key. As long as we know where he is, there’s no reason to crowd him. He should be making his way south at some point tonight or tomorrow. We know what hotel he’s going to in Comitán, so this is more to ensure he stays out of trouble. Let’s allow him to believe he was successful in losing us. Maybe we’ll learn something interesting about our young assassin.”

“The men are in a different vehicle than the one they used at the airport, so he won’t spot them. Clever bastard, I’ll grant him that.”

“He’s the best there is. That’s why we’re using him.”

“I’ll call if anything happens.”

“You have the number.”

~

The Jetta bounced down a rutted dirt road an hour outside the city. The slanting glare of the setting sun made the going more treacherous, as did the cows that appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the track. He rounded a bend and spotted the blue enameled gate he was looking for. An old man lounged near it, smoking a cigarette, and nodded when the car pulled up.
El Rey
rolled down the window and peered into the gloom.

“Rudolfo?”

The man nodded and moved to the gate, swinging it open without comment.
El Rey
eased down the drive, through clusters of thick trees, and then pulled into an open area. His headlights shone on a small prop plane at the end of a dirt strip, with two men standing by the tail. He rolled to a stop and shut off the engine.

When he got out of the car, he shook hands with the taller of the men.

“Nicely done, Rudolfo.”

“Things went as expected?” Rudolfo, a thin, youngish man with long hair and expensive clothes, asked.

“Yes. Fortunately, we were ready for them. Any hitches on this end?”

Rudolfo shook his head and gestured at his companion. “This is Alvarez. He’s an experienced pilot who’s spent most of his life in these parts and will fly you to your destination, where I’ve arranged for all the items you asked for. When you land, you’ll find a package in the car I got for you that contains directions and the gear. It’s a silver Tsuru.” Rudolfo handed him a key.

“How long will it take to get there?”
El Rey
asked.

Rudolfo patted the side of the prop plane. “Under an hour, even in this thing. Alvarez will wait for you in town and fly you wherever you want to go tomorrow. ” Rudolfo paused, looking the assassin over. “Welcome to Chiapas. The world is your oyster.”

“Thanks. I transferred the funds to you this afternoon. They should be in your account by now. Is there anything else I need to know?”

“It’s supposed to rain tonight and part of tomorrow. Other than that, as always, it’s a pleasure. Let me know if you’ll require anything else,” Rudolfo said. “I’ll take care of the Jetta. Will you need it anymore?”

“No.”

El Rey
handed his bag to Alvarez, who stowed it inside the small cabin while
El Rey
climbed into the co-pilot’s chair. Once they were buckled in, Alvarez turned to him.

“You ever fly a plane?” he asked in a gruff voice.

“I could fly this one if I wanted.”

“Good to know.”

Two minutes later they were soaring over the field, the drone of the motor drifting away from the primitive airstrip like a lover’s lament in the hot summer night.

Dogs barking on the periphery of the ranch eight miles outside of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, announced the arrival of a new day, followed almost immediately by roosters crowing their morning symphony. As dawn broke, several of the night sentries returned to the stables that served as their headquarters, their tour over once it was light. Cameras mounted in key locations allowed the security team to maintain vigilance with only six men for the final two hours of the shift, providing relief for the lucky few who could rest while their brethren prowled the grounds.

Isidro Lucio was one of the founding members of Los Zetas cartel, an ex-special forces soldier who had deserted to go to work for the
narcotraficantes
, who paid vastly higher wages and afforded individuals of a certain moral ambiguity an opportunity for virtually limitless wealth. He was a veteran of Los Zetas’ evolution, from bodyguards to private army to what was now commonly understood to be the most technically sophisticated and powerful drug cartel in Mexico. It had been a long and arduous road, and many of his colleagues had been killed along the way, either by rival groups or in skirmishes with the Mexican military.

Isidro was one of Los Zetas’ top planners, responsible for the most savage attacks that had made the cartel infamous. In particular, public outrage had been stoked by the massacre at the Royale Casino in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2011, where over fifty people perished, mostly women. Fifteen of his men had entered the gaming establishment and opened fire with automatic rifles, spraying bullets indiscriminately into the crowd. The atrocity had been exacerbated when the men had doused the entrance with gasoline and set it alight, trapping everyone inside.

Isidro rolled over and stroked the naked back of Conchita, his latest girlfriend, a nineteen-year-old dancer from Monterrey who looked sixteen and had the longest legs he’d ever seen. Isidro felt every day of his forty-three years after a late night of cocaine and tequila that had finally ended at three. He peered blearily at the clock and moaned softly. Seven a.m.. Today would definitely be an extended siesta day.

Conchita stirred at the rough caress of his hand and rolled towards him. “Why do we have to wake up?”

“You don’t, my angel. But I need to go. I’ll be back in the afternoon. Keep the bed warm for me,” Isidro said, his head splitting to the point where even the girl’s bountiful youth couldn’t entice him.

He shifted his legs to the edge of the bed and stood unsteadily. In the bathroom, he fumbled around for a pill bottle and dry swallowed a Xanax and two aspirin – an always reliable treatment for a hangover. Reaching into the back of the medicine cabinet, he found another bottle and took an amphetamine that would act as a morning eye-opener.

Standing under the shower, he let the water rinse away the prior night’s debauchery, the drugs coursing through his system making him feel at least somewhat human again.
Thank God for chemical supplementation
, he thought as the warm spray streamed down his chest.

His hands felt the two bullet scars automatically and then traced over the long one that ran over his right ribs, the souvenir of a bar fight from his late twenties. The other man had gurgled his life onto the floor when he’d jammed a broken bottle into his throat, but not before his switchblade had cut a deep slice in Isidro. That time had been over a woman, he remembered. The gunshot wounds had been business. But all things considered, given the vast wealth he’d amassed from his endeavors, they had been a small price to pay.

Finished with his morning ablutions he donned his clothes – jeans, red ostrich-skin cowboy boots, a long-sleeved pale blue linen shirt and a white cowboy hat. As he cinched the oversized belt buckle into place, he paused to pat his stomach. Still relatively flat for his age. Given the mileage on the chassis, he was holding up well. He cast another glance at Conchita’s naked form slumbering on his vanilla Egyptian cotton sheets and smiled to himself.

He’d definitely have to make it back early.

~

Men had arrived on private planes all yesterday, in twos and threes – no jets, only prop jobs in order to avoid attracting undesirable scrutiny. The area near the border was notoriously poorly monitored on the Mexican side, and discreet flights landing on anonymous dirt strips attracted no attention. Several accommodating rural ranches had hosted a few quiet night landings, and by the time morning rolled around, a strike force of twenty hardened men were assembled and ready to move against their objective.

This group was part of the Sinaloa cartel’s equivalent of Los Zetas – a seasoned team of ex-marines and police operatives who carried out the dirtier of the armed attacks at the cartel’s behest. Numbering over three hundred, these twenty were the most ruthless of the group, with years of combat experience battling Los Zetas, as well as the military.

The men gathered at a safe house in Nuevo Laredo, where they checked their weapons – M4 and M16 assault rifles pilfered from the military, several sniper rifles, two anti-tank rockets, and enough ammunition to invade a small country. Even though this was deep in Los Zetas’ backyard, the Sinaloa cartel still had supporters in place, who assisted with ongoing attacks against Los Zetas when the opportunity presented itself. The owner of the house, Fernando Lopez, was a respected local attorney who augmented his considerable income by helping Sinaloa on the sly. It was a dangerous game, but then again, just living in the city was dangerous, and it had afforded him a lavish lifestyle and financial security to last ten lifetimes.

Their armaments checked, the men changed out of their street clothes and donned the uniforms that had been arranged for them, then moved in an organized fashion to four SUVs, a van and two work trucks that had been stolen and modified for the outing. They had good intelligence that their target would be appearing that morning at a junkyard that specialized in more than just auto dismantling, providing the perfect opportunity to terminate him. But the
Don
’s orders had specified something other than a simple execution, requiring more creativity and finesse – and what the
Don
wanted, he got.

The neighborhood was just waking up as the big motors roared to life. One by one, the vehicles pulled off, the drivers communicating by cell phones as they moved down the quiet streets, weaving their way towards the strike zone.

~

Isidro’s three SUVs moved through the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, en route to his first meeting of the day at the legitimate business front of one of the smugglers responsible for getting Los Zetas’ cocaine and meth into the U.S..

Just on the other side of the Rio Grande, Laredo, Texas, was the third largest border city in America, after San Diego and El Paso, and a primary corridor for drug smuggling. In spite of the best efforts of the DEA and the border patrol, tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana moved across every year, and the Mexican cartels were now largely understood to have substantial presences in whole swatches of the U.S. border towns their traffic depended upon.

Los Zetas had grown from its beginnings as a private army for the Gulf Cartel into a multi-national entity, with operations in Mexico, the United States, Guatemala, Africa, Central America and Argentina. It had developed into a de-centralized operation that was the second largest volume mover of drugs in the world, trailing only the Sinaloa cartel. But eschewing complacency, Los Zetas had continually expanded its disciplines and had branched out from the drug trade into murder for hire, kidnapping, extortion, slavery, and any other criminal activity where a substantial profit could be made.

The cartel counted in its ranks mercenaries from areas as divergent as South Africa, the Balkans, and Guatemala – the latter, ex-special forces soldiers known as kaibiles, recognized as some of the toughest fighters in the world. The kaibiles were notorious throughout Central America for their brutality – as part of their training they bit the heads off live chickens, drank blood, and underwent a training program so rigorous that only ten percent of the entrants made it through.

Los Zetas ruled Nuevo Laredo with a savage grip, having taken the territory away from the Gulf cartel in one of the bloodiest struggles in cartel history. Since then, even in a business where trafficking corridors were hotly contested and new competitors surfaced daily, Los Zetas maintained its ruthless lock on the city, which was widely understood to be out of the Mexican government’s control. The cartel was a law unto itself in the region, and Isidro was as safe from prosecution in the Zetas-run border town as anywhere on the planet.

The drug lord was in the lead SUV, a white Cadillac Escalade with highly polished chrome wheels, and his security entourage trailed him in a pair of tan Chevrolet Suburbans. The cartels favored big SUVs because of their ability to carry armed men behind their heavily tinted windows, and they could negotiate the often rural conditions of the roads in the areas they operated. Even in the most cosmopolitan areas of Mexico, dilapidated dirt tracks were never more than fifteen minutes away, and many cartel activities took place in the shadows, on farms and ranches and private tracts of unimproved land.

A raucous melody emanated from the Escalade’s stereo, an accordion vying for supremacy against a dissonant horn section whenever the slightly off-pitch tenor of the vocalist took a rest. Isidro lounged in the rear seat, reading a spreadsheet of the week’s tally, with an armed guard sitting next to him and another in the passenger seat. The expensive suspension softened the harsh bumps of the uneven pavement as they rolled through the streets, moving along less-trafficked secondary routes to avoid rush hour.

“Shit. What the hell is this?” the driver complained as he approached a flagman directing traffic onto a smaller side road. A highway department truck sat ahead, with a crew of four men lounging around in orange vests and yellow hard hats, munching on breakfast as they prepared to put in a few hours of grudging work. Emergency cones blocked the primary artery in both directions, and the gloved hand of the flagman pointed them down an alley surrounded by industrial buildings.

The big vehicle made the turn, and then a gray van cut across the alley mouth behind it, pulling to a stop and blocking the way, preventing the two Suburbans from following.

The chatter of automatic weapons fire from the van battled with the cacophony from the Escalade’s stereo, and Isidro only just had time to register alarm when a hole punched through the windshield of the Cadillac, and a sniper round blew the driver’s head apart, spraying bloody tissue and bone fragments across the back seat. The big truck swerved as it lost momentum and scraped along the brick building facades before coming to a halt in the middle of the alley as another round shattered the windshield and tore the passenger seat gunman’s jaw off.