Revenge of the Assassin (Assassin Series 2) (12 page)

“My security head wanted some options if you gunned me down on the beach,” Aranas replied, shrugging.

“Out of courtesy, I didn’t kill the snipers, however I’d prefer if we could operate with a little more trust. I’ve done work for you before, always satisfactorily, so you should have no reason to doubt me,”
El Rey
said.

“Fair enough.”

“Now that you have me here, what is this situation that requires me to come out of retirement? And why will nobody but me suffice, out of all the available contractors in the world?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“For twenty million, of course I can. But I didn’t fly halfway around the world to speculate. We have five minutes before I drop you off over at the
malecón
in town. It would be a more productive use of both our time if you simply told me what’s required,”
El Rey
said reasonably, his soft voice barely audible over the burbling of the outboard.

“The president has decided to renege on our arrangement. We had agreed before he was elected that we would continue to receive a certain preference, as with his predecessor, but once he was elected he seemed to forget who put him in office, and has been favoring interests that are hostile to mine. That is a material breach of our agreement, and it cannot be allowed to stand,” Aranas explained. “If you follow the news, you’ll see that quite a few of my group’s shipments have been apprehended lately, whereas my adversaries, the Zetas and the Jalisco cartels, are enjoying an almost magical bout of good fortune. I suspect they made
El Presidente
a better offer, but that’s not how these things are supposed to work. You keep your side of the bargain when you make a deal with me. He has reneged, and I need you to extract an appropriate penalty.”

“You want me to execute the president of Mexico,”
El Rey
said dispassionately. “Do you agree to my fee?”

“I do. I believe on our last contracts you received half in advance and half upon successful completion of the sanction.”

“Yes, however this requires that I come out of retirement and pull off something extraordinary with the security forces on high alert. I saw the botched attempt in Tampico. I will require fifteen million dollars in advance, and five upon successful completion of the hit. In return, our president will be dead within sixty days – no later. At that point our business is concluded, and I will be in permanent retirement. Is that acceptable?”
El Rey
offered, not so much asking as stating.

Aranas smoothed his hair where the light breeze off the ocean had ruffled it.

“I can wire transfer fifteen million tomorrow to any account you want, anywhere in the world. Alternatively, I can arrange for you to receive it in cash, or in gold. Your preference. Just make sure you take the miserable shit-rat out – no mistakes or excuses,” Aranas warned.

“I will call you tomorrow morning with wire routing instructions. I would prefer Swiss francs, if that is acceptable? I’m sure you have the ability to convert before you transfer. And don’t worry, I will keep my end of the bargain. He will be dead inside of two months.”

El Rey
throttled up the motor and swung the boat back in the direction of the harbor, cutting through the small waves effortlessly at high speed. It was impossible to carry on any further conversation due to the wind and engine noise. Which was fine. There was nothing more to say.

The boat pulled up onto the beach in front of a string of open air seafood restaurants, and Aranas climbed over the bow and hopped agilely onto the sand.

“I’ll await your call,” he said, and the assassin nodded before gunning the motor and heading back to the dark waters of the open sea. Aranas watched as he disappeared and nodded to himself. If anyone could pull off this hit, it was
El Rey
.

Aranas fished his cell phone from his shirt pocket and noted that he had sixteen messages. He’d felt it vibrating nonstop in the boat, but part of his arrangement with the assassin was no phone calls, so he’d erred on the side of discretion. It was bad enough the man had spotted the two jackasses with the rifles – two of his very best men. He hadn’t wanted to show any further bad faith.

Aranas punched the redial button and issued terse instructions. He wanted to be in the air within half an hour. His chartered jet was sitting at the airport, waiting for him and his security detail. He’d had about enough of this little fishing hamlet, between the beach and the boat ride.

After tossing his empty Bohemia bottle in a gray plastic trash receptacle, he moved up the shore towards the waterfront walkway, confident that his men would be there within a few minutes.

A group of five drunken
gringos
staggered past him, laughing loudly at some private joke as they moved down the strand in search of a party. Aranas eyed the two leggy teenage blondes, wearing miniskirts so short that they more resembled Tshirts than dresses, cackling with glee as they passed a fedora back and forth, their boyfriends’ expressions already tequila-glazed.
Ah, youth. It was wasted on the young
.

Aranas ambled past the boat ramp and towards the pedestrian shopping area that was closing down for the night. As he trudged along, he reflected on his brief meeting with the assassin, the ephemeral
El Rey
, seemingly more phantom than human, judging by his miraculous string of successful executions. Twenty million dollars was a lot of money, but Aranas wasn’t in a bargain-hunting mood, and in the scheme of things, it was loose change to the cartel kingpin.
El Rey
was absolutely correct in his assessment of the current situation – the disastrous attack on the motorcade had served to escalate the conflict, and now the president’s security forces were in a state of agitated high alert. Meanwhile, every day, shipments worth many times the twenty million were in jeopardy due to the law enforcement focus on his cartel.

The man was right. It would require a small miracle to pull the hit off successfully. And these days, miracles cost.

It would be money well spent, of that he was sure.

Aranas spotted the two silver Suburbans his men had rented pulling along the beach drive and hiked in their direction. The assassin’s reputation and legacy of kills notwithstanding, Aranas was certain of one thing after their brief encounter.

He was very glad that
El Rey
wasn’t targeting him.

The following morning, a young man with almost impossibly attractive features lounged by the pool at a private beachfront villa in Ixtapa, taking in the breathtaking beauty of the pristine ocean while munching contentedly on a fruit plate. A porter in white linen stood a discreet distance away in the shade of the house, sensitive to the slightest indication that the guest required anything at all.

El Rey
tapped a few keys on his laptop computer and then reached over to the small marble table for a wireless headset. He placed the fruit on the ground next to him and waved the man off – he needed privacy for the call he was about to make. The attendant bowed and scurried into the house, leaving the area empty except for a brave herring gull that had landed, eyeing the pool curiously.

After another series of keystrokes, the young man heard a distinctive ringing in the headset, followed by a now unmistakable voice.

“Yes?”

“Good morning. The funds should be sent to the following account, care of a correspondent bank in Germany.”
El Rey
then slowly recited the wire information, listening attentively as Aranas repeated it.

“I have one other assignment I would like you to consider. Before you make your final arrangements for the discussed contract,” Aranas said once he’d noted the banking details.

This wasn’t part of the deal.

“I thought I was clear. I am retired. This is my final transaction.”

“I know, and I understand. But if you’d like to make an easy five million, you might want to at least hear me out,” Aranas dangled as bait.

El Rey
sighed. Things were never simple with the cartel bosses. They were volatile and impetuous, he’d found. Still, five million was a substantial contract price if the job was straightforward. “What is it you wish me to do?”

Aranas gave him a name. ‘
Chacho
’ Morenos, the head of the
Familia
Morenos cartel that was battling for control of Juárez.

“He has made my life uncomfortable in a critical gateway to the United States. For a man of your abilities, this would be an easy sanction. Almost beneath you. But for five million…”

“Very well. Transfer twenty million today – the full value of the second contract plus the agreed fifteen – and I shall make it so within a matter of a few weeks, if not days. I’ll need to nose around and get a feel for the lay of the land. Because of the last-minute nature of this, I will undoubtedly also incur higher expenses.”

“I have no doubt. Which is why I am willing to be so generous. That, and it seems prudent to clean the whole house while I have a competent sanitizer…”

“I shall get in touch once I’ve dispatched this secondary target. I’ll look for the transfer,”
El Rey
said and then disconnected.

He had put the call through an IP-masking software package that bounced his address all over the planet, so he was untraceable. The bank account the money was going to was in the name of a Lithuanian shell company with accounts in Luxembourg, and there would be two further transfers to an account in the British Virgin Islands, where his funds were ostensibly investment proceeds for a hedge fund registered there, and the trail would end within another week when that fund purchased a number of credit default swaps from a hedge fund in Ireland that would expire, worthless. The money would be effectively laundered, and once in Ireland, it was clean – the proceeds of legitimate investments in the unregulated centi-trillion dollar derivatives market. Nobody would bat an eye over a measly twenty million.

El Rey
shut down his computer and set it to the side, on the table, and resumed his fruit breakfast, pausing to sip some freshly squeezed orange juice and pomegranate nectar the staff had obligingly prepared for him.

By the end of the day, with his savings, he would be worth forty million dollars. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Now all he needed to do was take out one of the most heavily protected cartel bosses in the world and execute the president of Mexico.

He took a bite of pineapple. That had been one of the things he’d missed living in Argentina. Fresh pineapple.

It would be an eventful few months.

The air in Ciudad Juárez, across the Rio Grande River from El Paso, Texas, stank of sour exhaust and raw sewage. The downtown was dilapidated and reeked of disrepair; the ancient school buses that were the public transportation belched toxic fumes into the atmosphere as they groaned past platoons of impoverished workers on their way home from long shifts in the
maquiladoras
plants that dotted the city. Trash choked every gutter of the broken sidewalks; colorful chip bags and ice cream wrappers mingled with cigarette butts and sludge that the pedestrians moved cautiously around, ever mindful of random ruts and holes awaiting the unsuspecting. If there was a sorrier sight than Juárez by day, it was surely Juárez by night.

Handcarts wedged between battered cars served all manner of food for the work crowd; the odor of hot dogs and frying mystery meat wafted like a cloud past the bus stop where the young man waited patiently, reading a newspaper by the storefront light while he kept a wary eye on the bar across the street – a known hangout of the enforcers who worked for the
Familia
Morenos cartel, and a poor choice to frequent unless suicide was high on one’s wish list.

Juárez had earned the dubious distinction of being the most dangerous city on the planet that wasn’t in an active war zone. Fully forty percent of the population had evacuated over the prior five years, while the Sinaloa cartel and the Juárez cartel battled over the trafficking hub that led into the United States. The murder rate was a minimum of eight deaths per day, with bursts of executions during an active conflict easily driving the number into the double digits.

The armed wing of the Juárez cartel,
La Linea
, comprised former police officers and military specialists from the Mexican Special Forces, as well as street gang members.
La Linea
was especially feared, even among the routinely savage Juárez crew, because of their penchant for decapitations and mutilation. They had borrowed a page from the U.S.-backed regime in El Salvador during the Eighties, which regularly left the mutilated bodies of its victims in prominent areas as a warning to would-be rivals, and to keep the population subdued with fear. Hardly a week went by without a grotesquely butchered corpse being left in a central location. The papers had grown so accustomed to the slaughter that there was a sense of boredom to the daily stories of slayings and beheadings – it took a significant event to make a dent in the jaded sense of apathy that floated over the doomed city like a haze.

For the past two years, Sinaloa had battled it out in the city streets with the Juárez cartel, culminating in Sinaloa having appeared to have won the war after a particularly bloody massacre that claimed the lives of over fifty people in a single day. But other rivals to the throne quickly threw their hats in and joined the killing frenzy in a bid for power, and the result was that the town had remained a death zone, with a population that didn’t venture out at night for fear of armed onslaughts. The cartel factions also augmented their income by conducting kidnappings and murder-for-hire, as well as slavery, car theft, fraud, burglary…anything that could be done at the point of a gun for profit, making life in Juárez a kind of living hell for the innocent residents who were the natural prey for the criminal syndicates.

El Rey
watched as groups of tired females clung to each other while waiting for their bus. In addition to all its other sins, Juárez had earned a position of disrepute for the serial murder of thousands of young women, attracted to the city by the promise of work in the multitude of factories that were the region’s only saving grace.