Pablo's Ghost (Strike Force X Book 1), page 5
Gilberto Garavito only cared about the last part. More specifically, he cared about who grew the coca leaves, processed them into paste, and then refined them into powder that that would turn tremendous profits for his jefe and himself upon delivery to the United States. In that pursuit, he had allied himself with a demented genius, falling into line with a bizarre plan to revive a martyred icon, still loved and admired in Antioquia by throngs that rivaled those who'd feared and hated him in life.
Sometimes, Gilberto saw himself as the midwife at the rebirth of Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, founding father of the former Medellín Cartel and Colombia's late "King of Cocaine."
Except that now, "late" was a relative description, swiftly fading like a morning mountain mist.
This evening, as dusk fell over Antioquia, Gilberto and a dozen of el jefe's soldiers stood outside a warehouse in the Bello suburb of La Gabriela, fronting on the Medellín River. Inside, a roughly equal number of selected targets were at work packaging kilos of pure cocaína for shipment into Panama, from there to the Bahamas, and beyond that island chain to Florida.
Gilberto and his master had decided that the shipment would be theirs, increasing the substantial fortune of their new revived cartel. But first, its present owners must be laid to rest.
"All ready?" Garavito scanned the faces of his twelve sicarios, each man in turn nodding agreement that he was prepared to strike and take no prisoners.
Nine of the soldiers carried automatic rifles, mostly Russian AK-47s, although two of them preferred M4 carbines, a shorter, lighter version of the standard U.S. military issue M16A2 assault rifle. The other three held Benelli M4 Super 90 combat shotguns, semiautomatic weapons loaded with eight twelve-gauge buckshot rounds a piece. Aside from shoulder weapons, each carried at least one sidearm, holstered for convenience on their hips or tucked away in armpit rigs.
Gilberto, as their leader in the absence of their resurrected master, had opted for a Belgian-made FN P90 submachine gun, futuristic in its compact bullpup design with an integrated reflex sight and fully ambidextrous controls. The SMG weighed 5.7 pounds and measured less than twenty inches overall. Its unique top-mounted magazine held fifty of manufacturer FN Herstal's small-caliber, high-velocity 5.7×28mm ammunition, firing at a full-auto rate of nine hundred rounds per minute, with a muzzle velocity of 2,350 feet per second and an effective range of 220 yards. His backup weapon was a vintage Bren Ten semiautomatic pistol chambered for 10mm Auto rounds developed in the 1980s and still widely praised as one of that era's best pistols, with a muzzle velocity of 1,600 feet per second.
Most of the individuals they would confront inside the warehouse were grunt labor, clad in skimpy underwear to keep them from secreting any drugs about their persons, but Gilberto knew that half a dozen guards, at least, stood ready to defend the plant. With all that had occurred of late, that number might be larger now.
"Remember," he advised his soldiers. "Cause no damage to the llello. It is worth more than your life or mine. As for the guards and workers, all must die."
More nods around the ring of hard-faced men who stood before him. Satisfied, Gilberto led them toward the backdoor of the warehouse, seemingly unguarded, though he'd seen the CCTV cameras mounted above the loading dock.
The door was locked, of course. One of his shotgunners stepped forward, quickly aimed, and fired four breaching rounds into the door's deadbolt and hinges, then stepped back, reloading as the others rushed inside, Gilberto Garavito bringing up the rear.
More gunfire followed rapidly, Gilberto's point man dropping in his tracks while the remainder blasted anything that moved. The slaughter lasted less than ninety seconds, leaving bodies strewn about the open space, its concrete floor and walls painted with crimson jets of blood.
And in the middle of the room, a long table stood undefended now, heaped with kilos of marching powder shrink-wrapped in plastic. Gilberto did a hasty count, came up with fifteen hundred packages, and did the mental math: $45 million wholesale in Miami or New York.
He smiled, knowing his master would be pleased.
Los Colores, Medellín
Raül Sandino stood two inches taller than his average countryman at five foot seven and seemed taller still in his brigadier general's uniform of the Colombian National Police. Twin ten-pointed golden stars adorned his epaulets, each stamped with his homeland's elaborate coat of arms.
An Andean condor surmounted the seal, holding an olive crown in its beak, talons protruding from beneath a scroll bearing the nation's motto: Libertad y Orden ("Liberty and Order"). Below the bird and scroll, Colombia's tricolored national flag draped each side of a shield divided into three sections. The topmost has a pomegranate flanked by cornucopias, one spilling gold and silver coins, the other various tropical fruits. In the middle, a spearpoint supported a Phrygian cap. Below, two old-time sailing ships cruised past the Isthmus of Panama, severed from Colombia in 1903.
Besides that finery, Sandino wore a peaked cap bearing yet another Colombian seal, the hat adding two more inches to his height. A dozen medals glittered on his jacket underneath pole-mounted vapor lamps as he approached his audience with Medellín's new man of mystery, alleged by some to be no less than Pablo Escobar reborn.
Sandino had his doubts on that, to say the least, but he had happily accepted a retainer from the man of mystery, a sum sufficient to serve Raül Sandino as a healthy pension when he finally decided to retire. Not that the payment satisfied him absolutely, mind you. If the man he'd come to meet succeeded, Brigadier Sandino stood to wind up in his golden years a billionaire.
Los Colores, in northwestern Medellín, is a suburb located west of Calle 59 and the Quebrada Iguana River. Sandino's limousine stood idling in the driveway of a mini mansion set on manicured grounds, made noonday bright by floodlights mounted underneath the eaves. Two men stood waiting for him on the broad porch as Sandino left the car, both eyeing him impassively, holding their automatic rifles in a rough approximation of port arms.
They looked him over as Sandino reached the porch, apparently perceived no threat, and one of them opened the tall front door, a houseman on the other side, waiting to serve as escort to a library well stocked with books which, if Sandino was a decent judge, had never been perused.
The man who stood before him certainly resembled Pablo Escobar, as far as Brigadier Sandino could recall from photographs published when he—Sandino—was a teenager. He'd never glimpsed the cocaine baron personally, but he'd read Escobar's file and knew that if the drug lord had survived his final showdown with police he should appear significantly older now, a figure in his early seventies. His host tonight seemed to be closer to Sandino's age in fact and smiling as he scrutinized his guest.
"Hola," he said in greeting.
"Buena noches, Señor…" Sandino faltered, stuck on the selection of a name.
"Please call me Pablo. I believe that friends should be familiar in their private dealings, eh?"
"Of course, Pablo." Somehow, Sandino managed without choking on the name. "Gracias for the invitation to your home."
"I hope we shall see much more of each other as our business grows and prospers, Brigadier."
"Raül, please."
"Si. But of course." The smile worn by his undead host seemed genuine enough, but in the circumstances, who could say?
The Pablo lookalike, who seemingly defied not only point-blank execution but the normal wear and tear of age, moved toward a wet bar on the library's east wall. "Aguardiente Antioqueño? Rum, perhaps? Tequila? Beer, if you prefer?"
"Antioqueño, por favor."
Sandino's host poured each of them a generous measure of the liquor considered Colombia's national drink, carried the glasses to a central table flanked by leather-covered easy chairs. They sat, Sandino with his cap resting upon his knees, sipping the liquid fire.
The mansion's owner followed suit, then smiled and said, "Let us discuss how we may make each other what the gringos feign to denigrate, dismissing it as 'filthy rich'."
Castilla, Medellín
"Muéstrame las armas." Not a man who wasted time on "please" or "thank you" in a conversation with subordinates, Filipe "El Tigre" Ortiz demanded presentation of the weapons he had come to purchase for his war in Antioquia.
The vendor, a Colombian named Julián Gamboa, bobbed his head and led Ortiz, trailed by his right-hand man, Isidro Buendia, to stand before a table covered by lumpy oilcloth. Drawing the shroud aside, Gamboa gestured toward the military hardware laid out for display.
"As you requested, Señor Tigre. You will find it all in order."
Ortiz studied the lineup, pleased by what he saw, but shunning any outward sign of satisfaction.
The arsenal included ten AKS-74U carbines, folding stock versions of the Russian AK-74 assault rifle, measuring 19.3 inches to the parent weapon's 37.1 inches, thirteen ounces lighter, chambered for the same 5.45×39mm rounds. The carbine's shorter barrel—8.3 inches versus 16.3—reduced muzzle velocity by 145 feet per second and shaved effective range back from 550 yards to 330, but that hardly mattered. Regardless of size, the weapons still fired at a cyclic rate of ten rounds per second, and no one ever mistook the carbine for a long-range sniper's rifle.
Besides the AKs, there were half a dozen shotguns, equally divided between Mossburg 500 pump-actions and Russian-made Saiga 12 semiautomatics, all twelve-gauge, the Saigas fed from detachable box magazines holding ten to thirty rounds apiece.
Gamboa had also provided eighteen pistols, mostly Glocks, although he'd tossed in three Berettas and one outsized Desert Eagle .44 Magnum designed in Israel, manufactured by Saco Defense, an armaments subsidiary of America's General Dynamics Corporation.
Guns aside, a wooden crate set at the table's far end held what looked to be a couple dozen hand grenades, turned out by Instalaza Corporation based in Zaragoza, Spain, marketed worldwide as the Alhambra brand.
The pièce de résistance was another Russian-made weapon, an RPG-7. The rocket-propelled grenade launcher was portable, reusable, unguided and shoulder-launched, designed for anti-tank warfare, but it could serve as well against armored trucks, civilian vehicles or buildings. Its optimum effective range was 360 yards, its 40mm rockets wired to self-detonate at one thousand yards if they missed their targets. Six of those lay in a row beside the launcher, each nearly as long, with its propellant charge, as the thirty-seven-inch launcher itself.
"Bueno," Ortega said at last, nodding for Isidro Buendia to deliver final payment. While Gamboa counted rumpled bills, El Tigre said, "I take for granted that you speak to no one else of this transaction, eh?"
Gamboa lost count, glanced up at his customer, came close to blanching if that had been possible, given his dark complexion. "No one, sir! Of course not!"
Ortega considered that, finally nodded. Said, "I hope not, since your life and those of everyone you love depend upon your silence."
"Si, Señor! I understand completely."
"In which case, you are excused."
Gamboa hastened to depart. Ortega waited until he had cleared the room, then told Buendia, "Mátalo and bring the money back. We'll need it, and I wouldn't trust that worm as far as I can piss against the wind."
Buendia nodded, grabbed a pistol from the table, checked its load, and followed their supplier into outer darkness.
Ortiz had obtained more weapons than his crew of fifteen men required, but he preferred having too many, rather than to find himself caught short. A snatch of dialogue from a Clint Eastwood western movie came to mind, a one-armed sheriff's deputy explaining why he carried to revolvers. "I never want it said," the character declaimed, "that I got killed for lack of shooting back."
From Castilla, four miles north of downtown Medellín, El Tigre planned to launch a war. His overlords, commanding Mexico's dominant Guadalajara Cartel, expected positive results with no excuses for failure. The rising threat from one who claimed to be infamous Pablo Escobar reborn—or risen from the depths of Hell where he belonged—must be eliminated if Ortiz planned on returning home again.
Failing at that, El Tigre knew he might as well pick up the Desert Eagle .44 and turn it on himself right now. Death by his own hand would be preferable to the fate his jefe would devise for one who let him down on such a grand scale.
Ortiz was not worried about failure in the abstract. So far, he had always taken adequate precautions to avoid it and survive whatever trials he faced. There was no reason he should fail this time, despite the heavy odds arrayed against him. Only one thing truly troubled El Tigre.
He had no clue what it might take to kill a ghost.
Pablo—the real one—was deceased. Ortiz knew that as certainly as he knew that his given middle name, sadly misplaced, was "Angel."
No, there was no walking revenant or zombie to be hunted and destroyed, only a man who had somehow convinced others of his investment with some supernatural authority to warp the rules of time and space. That legend, having taken root already from the slums of Antioquia to Bogotá's exalted halls of government, was his real enemy. How he might slay it, bury it beyond recall, was anybody's guess.
Buendia came back from the warehouse parking lot bearing the heft roll of cash Ortiz had given to Gamboa moments earlier. Ortiz accepted it, pleased to discover that the banknotes were not damp or stained with blood,
"The body?"
"Being taken care of as we speak," Buendia said. "There'll be no trace of him until we're all long gone, if then."
"Bueno. Let us collect the tools, then, and begin to finalize our plans."
Los Colores, Medellín
"Diga me," the man who called himself Don Pablo Escobar instructed. "Tell me."
"Sí, jefe." Gilberto Garavito carefully described his raid against the target he had been assigned in Bello, with a head count of the adversaries executed and a tabulation of how much the captured cocaína ought to net when it was moved to buyers in the States.
"No difficulties, then?" his lord and master asked.
"One of our men suffered a minor flesh wound to the leg," said Garavito. "Simón Obregón."
"Yes. I remember him."
"El doctor has him now. It's trivial. We should expect a full recovery."
"All good news, then."
"Sí, jefe."
"What about the Mexicanos, Gilberto?"
"The Mexicans? Which Mexicans, Señor?"
"Which Mexicans? The ones who have invaded Medellín, amigo. Why are you not briefing me on their activities?"
Garavito blinked, mouth working like the spastic jaws of a grounded catfish, before he stammered in reply, "Jefe, I am afraid…that is to say…."
"I hope you are afraid," his leader interrupted. "It severely disappoints me that I hear from others what I'm paying you to tell me in advance."
"Disculpas, jefe. Lo siento mucho."
"Save your apologies. It's information that I need."
Caught off-balance, clearly terrified of making matters worse, Gilberto hazarded a guess. "Guadalajara, sí? I warned you that they would attempt to stop us, Pablo."
"Did you warn me they were here, Gilberto? In my own backyard right now? Did you advise me that they've sent their most respected contractor, with no less than fifteen sicarios?"
"El Tigre?"
"Sí. The very same."
"I will investigate immediately, jefe. That is, if you trust me to continue."
"I insist upon it," his commander answered back. "Rest not until you know their whereabouts, full strength, and any necessary details of their plan. I want them rubbed out. Muerto. Gone as if they never lived at all."
"It shall be done, jefe."
"I will not tolerate a second disappointment, Gilberto."
"No, jefe. I begin at once."
"And don't return without the information I require of you."
As Garavito hastened from his presence, grateful to be breathing when his night of triumph might have ended with a scream of agony, the man Gilberto knew as Pablo Escobar reborn allowed himself another glass of Aguardiente Antioqueño to enjoy in solitude.
His name, as Garavito must have realized by now, although too awed to challenge the pretense, was not and never had been Pablo Escobar. In fact, he had been christened Jorge Torrenegra thirty-seven years ago and was a distant cousin of the man all Medellín had once hailed as a benefactor and a martyr or reviled as Satan in the flesh. When Escobar went down for good in 1993, Jorge had grown accustomed to his kin remarking on his physical resemblance to the famous relative he'd never met in life.
Life in Colombia offers three prospects for advancement: politics, back-breaking labor, or cocaine. Taking his cue from Escobar, Jorge had picked the latter path. The first two shipments he had personally carried into the United States, risking his life or major prison time, established Torrenegra as a minor player in the llello trade. The next few gave him breathing room while he devised a master plan, dropped out of sight to undergo a course of plastic surgery that would enhance his born resemblance to the cocaine king while adding years to Jorge's visage rather than subtracting them, as most patients desired.
His doctor in Cali had been surprised, remarking that Jorge was his first patient who desired to look older, while creating scars—and most specific scars, at that—rather than stripping them away. That observation, casual at first, had sealed the surgeon's fate and Torrenegra had removed his file, complete with its before-and-after photographs, erasing any link between himself and the late doctor, said to be the victim of a bungled office robbery.
Today, Torrenegra had become a living legend—or a dead one, resurrected by some means never explained—to people ranging from Colombia to Mexico and farther north. None knew precisely what to make of him, the legend he had spun around himself, but Torrenegra had elicited responses from old friends, whatever enemies his distant cousin had not slain, from politicians and police. Victory was within his grasp, but he could still lose everything through one egregious mistake.
