soft snores. She quickly stripped off her clothes and threw herself onto the bed, her body racked by shuddering sobs as she cried her frustrated rage into the pillow.
Carlos Herreira gazed out at the exotic granite slabs in the massive stone yard he operated in Culiacan, Sinaloa and rubbed his hand over his beard. It had been another extremely profitable day, with a shipment of grenade launchers and assorted assault rifles bringing in eight hundred thousand dollars, three hundred of which was profit. This was his second shipment to Jalisco this week, and he mused silently that the boys in Guadalajara looked like they were gearing up to launch a major offensive against his other big client, the Sinaloa cartel.
Carlos was an equal opportunity arms merchant, beholden to no one. The cartels wanted guns and came with cash, and he was in the business of selling them. It was a simple transaction, and nobody cared that he sold to everyone. Or at least, no one begrudged him his right to do so. He was merely a conduit, a vessel through which the desired implements flowed. Carlos’ role was not to take sides, any more than the banks that laundered the cartel funds took sides. It was all green, and while cartels came and went, the money never changed.
He had been in the business for twelve years and was rich beyond his ability to imagine, yet he continued to go to work every day at the stone yard that was his legitimate operation. The constant shipments in and out were perfect cover for his far more profitable sideline, and he’d branched out and created two import/export businesses to facilitate his deadly traffic.
The first five years had been good, but nothing like the last seven, when the cartels had escalated their conflicts and created armed wings that did nothing but wage war against one another. All those new soldiers needed weapons, and when the cash was easy they generally wanted the best they could get. He’d gone from supplying battered, twenty-year-old Kalashnikovs by the crate load from Honduras and Nicaragua to the very latest high tech weaponry from the U.S., with its attendant higher margins. The escalation of violence had been good for business, there was no doubt, and there had been occasions when he’d had to scramble to find suitable trophy pieces.
That had resulted in the most profitable partnership of his life, with the most unexpected counterparty — the CIA.
At first he’d suspected it was a setup, but he’d insulated himself and done one test transaction, and then another, and then finally had crafted a deal where they supplied most of the high-end weapons he bought nowadays — fifty caliber sniper rifles, fully automatic assault rifles, grenades, semi-automatic pistols, sub-machine guns…all at prices that allowed him to make a handy profit without worrying about sourcing the goods. Every few weeks he would aggregate the requests, supply his contact at the American intelligence agency with a list, and presto, it was shopping time.
He’d been amused when he’d read about the scandal involving the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms allowing weapons from the U.S. to be smuggled into Mexico. Hell, they had been facilitating his business for seven years. His partner to the north would put together the order, and then the goods would miraculously appear on his side of the border, with the ATF turning a blind eye. When the American Congress had held hearings on the trade — the notorious ‘gun walking’ everyone knew about but pretended was a surprise — he’d gotten worried, but had been assured that it was business as usual, and that the hearings would go nowhere.
The problem was that some of the American manufactured weapons had turned up in slayings of border patrol officers on the U.S. side, sparking an outcry. His contacts had told him that things would work very much like Mexico — there would be protestations that everyone was shocked, shocked indeed, that anything like routine traffic of weapons south of the border took place while the watchdog in charge of preventing it pretended to be deaf, blind and mute. Days of grilling in congress would be met with stonewalling, and perhaps a few functionaries would have to take token falls to appease the public. They would be well compensated, so it was not rough duty. There would be vows to continue the investigation to its bitter end, which would die as soon as the cameras were turned off. Meanwhile, everything would continue to work as it had, the supply of weapons un-slowed.
The tunnels that were as regular in Tijuana as subway stations in New York had served him well, enabling him to get anything he needed from San Diego without having to worry about bribing customs agents in Mexico to look the other way — a profit-sucking annoyance he preferred to forego. Homes, warehouses and shops would receive shipments from gun dealer middlemen, and the crates would seamlessly move beneath the border to TJ, where they would be transported southeast. He had a similar arrangement in Ciudad Juarez and El Paso. It was a lucrative, risk free way for the cartels that ran the tunnel scheme to make extra money helping him help them. And after all, it wasn’t as though they had to pay a toll — the tunnels were already dug, so it was just a few hours of ferrying guns and explosives on a return trip from the cocaine, heroin, marijuana and meth trips. Same underground rail systems, just moving south instead of north.
The CIA had also proved very efficient at introducing him to Russian and Iranian syndicates that could source the more difficult to obtain items he was sometimes requested to get. Anti-tank weapons, specialized explosives like C-4 or the newer variants…whatever, they could get anything for a price. That was how he’d gotten involved with CISEN. His Russian and American contacts had introduced him to their Mexican equivalent, which had been paid to help ensure that the real traffic didn’t run into problems. Sure, token shipments were intercepted periodically for the media, but for the most part, the CIA helped get the drugs into the U.S. and the weapons out. It was perfect, really, and the only ones none the wiser were the American and Mexican public. He’d been assured that the great unwashed would believe whatever the television pronounced as the truth, so he wasn’t worried about the trade ending any time soon. It had been going on ever since the Colombians had severed their partnership with the agency, and the heads had ‘gone to prison’ — jails they controlled being the only place they were safe from agency hit men taking them out to ensure their permanent silence.
He’d always wondered why Escobar and crew had one day turned themselves in, at a time when they were among the richest men on the planet. Although the official story was that the Colombian military, augmented by the Americans, had eventually won the struggle against the Colombian cartels, the true facts were simple. There was nowhere they could be safe, except behind maximum security walls guarded around the clock. He knew for a fact that all the Cali and Medellin cartel chieftains lived in unparalleled luxury while serving life sentences, and once his contact had spilled the beans over shots of tequila one night, everything had fallen into place.
The Colombians getting out of the trafficking trade and sticking to production in-country had created an opportunity for the Mexican cartels, which had forged similar arrangements with their neighbor’s intelligence service in return for protection. The relationship was simply good business. Dope north, weapons south, with their ‘friends’ taking a cut of each, presumably to fund their less savory operations. There were many things Congress couldn’t or wouldn’t fund, and as early as the Sixties, the CIA had moved to augment its budget with narcotics trafficking. That had proved a wise move, and soon the agency was acting as conduit for drugs from Vietnam and Afghanistan, oil and cash from Iran, and eventually cocaine and heroin from Colombia and Mexico.
The phone on his desk jangled; he grabbed at it.
“Boss. You have visitors. Angel and a driver,” his number two man alerted him.
He watched as a white Cadillac Platinum package Escalade rolled through the gate leading from the retail yard and pulled to a stop outside his office. A familiar figure climbed out of the passenger side door.
It was Angel Talvez, one of
Carlos moved to the screen door that kept the bugs at bay and opened it, spreading his arms in welcome.
“Angel! It’s been too long. What? Three months, since we hit the clubs in Mazatlan?” Carlos enthused. He was a connoisseur of young strippers, the closer to their teen years, the better. Angel shared the passion for his hobby, and they’d spent many a night sampling the wares a few hours west.
“
Carlos motioned to him to enter and take a seat.
“Tequila?” Carlos asked, and then without waiting for an answer, moved to the small bar he had set up in a corner of the expansive office and poured two shots of Don Julio 1942. He turned to face Angel, glass outstretched, and found himself staring down the barrel of a silenced semi-automatic pistol.
Carlos’ eyes grew wide when he saw the look on Angel’s face. Angel shrugged a halfhearted apology for what was to come.
“Why, Carlos? Why did you fuck the
