the bloodshed. Corliss didn’t disagree. Scientists like the two men who were taken weren’t plucked from their labs in a hail of bullets by Pfizer or Bristol-Myers. Especially not when they had skill sets that were highly prized in the wild frontiers of illegal narcotics.
Frontiers that were changing by the day, and not for the better.
Initially, it was mostly about getting people with the right technical expertise to help produce mass quantities of popular synthetic drugs, chemists who could create, say, methamphetamine from its precursor chemicals, ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, without blowing themselves up in the process. With tighter regulations complicating the sale of the base chemical ingredients—much to the chagrin of the big pharmaceutical companies’ army of lobbyists—alternatives had to be found. Corliss remembered participating in the arrest of an American chemist in Guadalajara a few years back, in the days when Corliss was running the DEA field office in Mexico City. The man, an embittered out-of-work chemistry teacher, was working for the cartels and had earned himself a small fortune by figuring out how to use legal, off-the-shelf reagents to engineer meth precursors from scratch. The perks—the cash, the women, the booze, and, yes, the drugs—were an added bonus that sure as hell beat grading papers and dodging switchblades at his local high school.
Beyond the actual designing and manufacturing of the drugs, scientists were also proving invaluable in dreaming up original ways of smuggling them across borders. One of Corliss’s strike teams had recently intercepted a shipment of Bolivian powdered mashed potatoes. It had taken the agency’s scientists a couple of weeks to discover that two tons of cocaine had been chemically infused into it. A month later, a similar shipment of soya oil had yielded another mother lode.
Chemicals had mysterious, hidden qualities.
Unlocking them and putting them to work in original ways could make a world of difference—and billions in profits—for the cartels.
Hence the need for brainiacs with the technical chops to make it happen.
Hence the kidnappings.
So far, the investigators didn’t have much to go on. No suspects had been nabbed, and CCTV footage and witnesses had pegged them as white and beefy, and that was about it, since the men had worn fabric face masks and caps. One witness, however, had gone further, referring to them as “biker-gang types.” That wasn’t a big break in and of itself, not in Southern California, where biker gangs were rampant and big into drug dealing—they’d actually started the whole meth craze—but it was significant in other ways.
The rules of the game had changed.
Over the last decade or so, the Mexican cartels had taken over drug trafficking across the United States, bringing a ferocious new level of violence with them. Not content with their long-established role as the nation’s major supplier of marijuana, their growth exploded after the so-called War on Drugs of successive U.S. administrations that targeted Colombian traffickers severely curtailed the latter’s activities through the Caribbean and into southern Florida. The Mexicans stepped in to fill the gap. They started by taking over the distribution of cocaine from the harried Colombians, then they broadened their horizons. They went from mules to principals and took over the supply chain. And they weren’t content with just pumping coke and heroin into the United States. They forged ahead and embraced the drugs of the future—the ones you could make anywhere, the ones users could enjoy without too much hassle. It was the Mexican cartels that saw the real potential in methamphetamine and took it from being nothing more than a crude biker drug with limited use in the valleys of Northern California and turned it into the biggest and most widespread drug problem now facing America. Other synthetic drugs—easy-to- swallow pills that didn’t need all the cumbersome paraphernalia—were soon following suit.
The Mexican cartels were now calling the shots from Washington to Maine, bringing in eighty percent of the illegal drugs that entered the country, with local bikers, prison gangs, and street gangs as their foot soldiers. At last count, the DEA had tracked the cartels’ operations to more than two hundred and fifty cities across the country. Their reach was limitless, their ambition voracious, their impudence unbounded. They didn’t seem to blink, even though they were basically at war with the U.S. government—an undeclared war that was affecting American lives far more than the wars being fought in the deserts thousands of miles to the east.
A war that had left deep scars on Corliss.
Scars he’d never forget.
Mementos of that savage night in Mexico, like the pain that was now throbbing across his spine, a reminder that always reared its malignant head when it was least welcome.
The speculation that a Mexican cartel was behind the violent kidnapping of the scientists was supported by the fact that the DEA and other law enforcement agencies had made significant inroads into shutting down hundreds of meth labs across the United States. This had driven production south of the border, where the narcos had set up superlabs far from the reach of the Mexican authorities and where the talents of the missing scientists were a more likely fit. Furthermore, this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Other researchers had gone missing. In four earlier, separate incidents, chemists working for pharmaceutical corporations had been grabbed while doing fieldwork in Central and South America. No ransoms were ever demanded. The men were never seen again. Then things escalated. Two other incidents followed, this time on Corliss’s side of the border. A university chemistry professor in El Paso, a little over a year ago. Then another, a few months later, just outside Phoenix, snatched along with his lab assistant in an early morning swoop.
And now this.
Bang in Corliss’s jurisdiction.
A vicious, deadly shoot-out on an idyllic stretch of the Pacific coast.
A shoot-out that had snared Corliss’s interest even more than it naturally merited, given that he was heading the local DEA field office.
He knew it wasn’t just any narco.
He’d suspected it was Navarro the second he heard the news. Unlike his colleagues at the DEA, Corliss had never bought the story that Navarro had been killed by internal cartel bloodletting. He knew the monster was still alive, and when he’d dug deeper into the missing scientists’ areas of expertise, as he’d done for the previous kidnappings, he’d been left in no doubt. It fit a pattern, a common thread that ran through all their work, one only he had picked up on, one he’d kept to himself.
For now.
Raoul Navarro—El Brujo, meaning the shaman, the black arts practitioner, the sorcerer—was still after it. Corliss was sure of it.
The burn in his spine intensified.
Which meant one of two things.
The bastard was getting desperate. Or he was getting close.
Either way, it was bad news.
Or, maybe . . . it was an opportunity.
An opportunity for retribution.
The retribution that Corliss had been hungering for since the day Raoul Navarro and his men came for him.
His hands shaking and sweaty, Corliss reached into his desk drawer and pulled out the small, innocuous plastic bottle. He glanced furtively at the door to his office as he fished out a couple of capsules, making sure no one was on his way in to see him, then flicked them into his mouth and swallowed them without water. He didn’t need anything to chase them down with. Not anymore. Not after being on the pills for all these years.
He didn’t have any proof that it was Navarro, of course. He wasn’t about to voice his suspicions either. He’d been there, done that, years ago, and he knew what watercooler chatter was going on behind his back. He knew that his colleagues and his superiors had little time for what they viewed as his delusional obsession with the man who’d ruined his life, the man who’d taken away what he held dearest on this earth.
He didn’t care what they thought.
He knew El Brujo was still out there. And, as it did for most of his waking life and a big part of his sleeping one, the mere thought of it whipped up a storm in the pit of his stomach.
He stared at the muted screen again, his numb eyes taking in yet another loop of the same footage, and thought about the part of the story that he was most sensitive to: the pain and destruction the armed raid will have left behind. The new widows and orphans. The partners, parents, and children who’d probably never know what
