Revenge of the Assassin

warehouse somewhere close by where more of the insidious cargo would be distributed, and aside from a few dead enforcers, nothing had changed.

It was frustrating, but all part of the job, and both men tried to keep it from getting to them. They had achieved a good outcome — they’d stopped a local drug and gun distribution scheme with zero police casualties, and dealt a blow to the forces of evil. All in all, not a bad day’s work, although when Cruz made it home that day he’d seemed somewhat dejected to Dinah. She’d sensed his frustration and suggested dinner at one of his favorite restaurants, followed by a bottle of passable Mexican cabernet from the Guadalupe Valley.

As they had sat on the floor in front of their small fireplace upon their return, holding each other while savoring their wine, Cruz had again silently remarked to himself that he was extremely fortunate to have found such a beautiful and wonderful companion to share his life.

Sometimes all you could do was live to fight another day and cherish the good around you.

Sometimes that was enough.

Chapter 8

Three miles off the coast of Costa Rica, Gato Negro, a two hundred forty-eight foot super yacht with its own helicopter, cruised north at fourteen knots, its stabilizers working to ensure that the passengers were not troubled by any rolling. There wasn’t much chance of that in the four foot waves — the ship’s forty-two foot beam and aluminum construction made her as stable as an oil rig in all but the worst conditions. A staff of sixteen full-time crew worked diligently to ensure that she was always ready for use, year round, whenever her owner decided to take in some salt air.

She flew a Bahamian flag, registered there by a corporation specifically formed for that purpose, whose shares were held by a Panamanian trust, which was in turn the asset of a Hong Kong corporation. Ownership of the Hong Kong entity was murky at best, with its shares technically owned by a bank, whose owners in the Isle of Man were not a matter of public record. A team of highly specialized attorneys worked full time to ensure that the dizzy network of intertwined entities remained impenetrable. The Byzantine web of structures was one of the more powerful financial conglomerates in the world, counting dozens of casinos, real estate holding companies, hotels, pawn shops, nightclubs, hedge funds and two insurance companies in its stable of assets.

Especially useful were the groups of casinos on Indian land in the western United States, whose receipts were colossal even in times when the massive parking lots were empty. Apparently, some things were recession- proof businesses, and between the gambling establishments and the nine hundred motels that sat forgotten by freeways, staggering quantities of dollars made their way to the related credit unions and banks that processed the syndicate’s money.

Some of the top finance graduates from American universities devised impossible to follow schemes to obfuscate the moving parts of this improbable empire, the magnum opus of the top narcotics boss in the world — Don Carlos Aranas. Aranas had been a man of vision, having taken a page from the American mafia’s playbook and worked towards sanitizing his income from the drug, human trafficking, murder-for- hire and kidnapping trades, by diversifying into legitimate businesses. Now, decades after having taken over the Sinaloa cartel when ‘The Godfather’, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, had gone to jail immediately following his dividing Mexico into the current decentralized scheme of smaller regional cartels, Aranas was a man with no home, who divided his time between Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Venezuela.

Not surprisingly, well-publicized efforts to bring down the number-one drug lord in the world had all failed. Aranas was incredibly resilient, having even escaped from a maximum security prison when he’d been apprehended in the early Nineties. While details were murky, as were most facts surrounding him, legend had it that Aranas had co-opted everyone in the prison, from the head of security on down, and on the day of his escape had simply hidden in a laundry cart pushed by the director of the guard shift, who had been thoughtful enough to then drive him to a nearby dirt airstrip, where a twin engine King Air prop plane had winged him to points unknown.

The total revenue of the Mexican drug cartels was a hotly disputed topic, with no agreement. For understandable reasons, hard numbers were difficult to come by. Some estimates placed the number at twenty billion. Others at fifty billion. Reality was that both numbers were laughably low, and that between all the cartels the real revenue number was closer to a hundred billion a year, wholesale.

Officials in the U.S. tried to downplay the number, as they did with virtually all statistics, preferring to massage them for their own devices. Just as unemployment was officially pegged in the eight to nine percent range through elaborate sleight of hand, and the GDP number was inflated by accounting hijinks, so too was the scale of the illegal drug business. Most experts privately agreed that the true ultimate street value of all drugs that passed from Mexico into the U.S. was closer to three hundred billion dollars a year, with two thirds of that sticking to the American side as the drugs were cut and distributed from the large wholesale distribution points and passed down to the street level dealers. Regardless of whose numbers one believed, the glaringly obvious fact was that, for whatever reason, the top man in the world was invisible to all law enforcement authorities and passed across national borders without hindrance.

Three deck hands cleaned the hull of one of the larger ship’s tenders — a thirty-two-foot Cabo Express Aranas liked to use for fishing, which was mounted across the rear of the yacht’s second-story deck, leaving the first free for entertaining. A massive crane swung the boat over the side and into the water whenever he was in the mood to use it to explore shallower waters for elusive game fish.

Aranas was almost sixty years old, which made him ancient in the drug business. Most of his rivals and peers had long since expired or had been incarcerated, and yet Don Aranas enjoyed glowing good health and virtually limitless prosperity. The ship was furnished with a fully-equipped gymnasium, and Aranas made a habit of taking an hour of exercise at least five days a week. What was the point of becoming one of the wealthiest men in the world if you threw it away with a sedentary lifestyle and poor habits, he reasoned. His intention was to live to a ripe old age, confounding his enemies and pursuers in the process. So far, the odds favored him. No photograph existed that was more current than twenty years old, and he no more resembled the images circulated of him than did his captain — a state of affairs he encouraged.

His nephew, Javier, approached him in the lower salon, where he was watching a DVD on the seventy-five- inch plasma screen television, and wordlessly handed him a small cell phone. He stared at it momentarily, and then nodded to Javier, who discreetly departed. Aranas muted the volume and paused the film, and the only sound was the almost imperceptible hum of the twin diesel power plants two stories below him.

“Yes,” he said into the phone.

“Don Aranas. I apologize for terminating several of your men in Argentina. I did so before knowing who they were or what their errand was.”

“It is of no consequence. They should have been more careful.”

“Yes. Well, I have given your request considerable thought, and I think it would be worth meeting to have a more meaningful discussion,” El Rey said.

“That’s a problem. I don’t meet. Anyone. Ever.”

“I understand, however I don’t come out of retirement ever, either. If you want me to do something I never do, I think that we all need to be prepared to make concessions. Would you not agree?”

Aranas’ anger flashed to the surface for a moment, but he quickly won the struggle to control it. He needed El Rey. These were unusual times. Perhaps flexibility was in order.

“What did you have in mind?”

“Did you receive my message about my fee?”

“Yes, yes. I have no problem with it, although for that amount of money, success had better be guaranteed. I heard about your adventure in Baja. That sort of outcome isn’t an option,” Aranas warned.

“That was the only instance of a failure in an otherwise exemplary career, and frankly it would have been rectified if the client had still been around to pursue it. As things worked out, it wasn’t a priority any longer, so it seemed more prudent to remove myself from the equation,” El Rey explained.

“You insist on a meeting. Again, what do you have in mind?”