marched Salcido whimpering, blubbering and begging for mercy into the Sinaloan night. By the time they had gone two miles the drug lord had fallen five times and thrown up twice. Once out of fear and the second time out of exhaustion. Bolan stopped at the drop point. “On your knees.”
“Por favor, amigo! Please! Plea—”
Bolan kicked Salcido’s legs out from under him and swiftly manacled his feet and hog-tied him. Bolan stripped out of his raid suit and pulled on jeans and a leather jacket, then put most of his weapons and gear into a large duffel. He clicked on the GPS transponder. A pair of Sinaloan CIA assets would come and pick up Salcido and the gear. They would get descriptions of the three men in the truck and get police sketches out and sit on the drug lord. Bolan heaved up the BMW Dakar motorcycle he had jumped with and kicked it into life. The nuclear materials were heading north. The Executioner had only one lead, and it was forcing him to turn south. Back to Mexico City.
Back to where the whole thing had started.
CHAPTER TWO
Culiacán
Bolan plugged his laptop into his satellite link and typed in his codes. Lights blinked on the link and told him the line was secure. Moments later Aaron Kurtzman, Stony Man Farm’s genius in residence and lord of the Computer Room, blinked into life on an inset screen in real time. “What have you got for me?”
“A name,” Bolan replied. “King Solomon.”
“Guillermo ‘King Solomon’ Dominico?” It was a name Kurtzman was familiar with. He clicked keys on his side of North America and brought up DEA and FBI files. “Smuggling nuclear materials seems to be a bit out of his normal purview.”
Bolan had never personally run up against Dominico, but he knew him by reputation. “I would have said the same thing about Pinto Salcido, but Geiger counters didn’t lie and when he and I had our little talk I don’t think he was, either.”
“Well, as drug dealers go he’s a pretty interesting cat,” Kurtzman stated.
Bolan scanned the DEA files and they agreed with what he’d heard. Guillermo Dominico had appeared on the smuggling scene literally out of nowhere with a couple of planes and respectable war chest of seed money to start his business. His father had been a crop duster in the State of Nayarit who went on to buy some land and become a fairly successful grain farmer. Dominico had taken the skills he’d learned from his father and earned a reputation as a daredevil pilot who could land a plane anywhere. From the very beginning he had liked to spread his money around in the string of little towns he operated out of. Rather than a trafficker of poison he had been regarded as a kind of Robin Hood figure who snuck under the FBI’s and the DEA’s noses and brought back wealth for the people. The corrido musicians had written dozens of songs about him and turned him into a folk hero.
It wasn’t long before he had moved up into management.
“King Solomon” Dominico had become famous for his biblical and, by drug-smuggling standards, merciful judgment and punishment of those who transgressed against him. Most drug dealers simply slaughtered anyone who got in their way, and threw in some torture and atrocity to add fun and fear to the mix. Dominico had an Old-Testament, eye-for-an-eye, yet live-and-let-live philosophy. Anyone who stole from him? He cut off their left hand. Second time? Their right. Third time? Their head. To date there was no record of a second or a third transgression. If you informed on him, he tore out your tongue with tongs. As for DEA undercover agents or informants, nothing pleased him more than kidnapping them, keeping them as guests for a week or two at one of his haciendas deep in the desert and then dropping them off on the northern side of the border naked and hallucinating from violent heroin withdrawal.
Over the course of the last decade and a half he had carved himself a somewhat small, but tidy and quite profitable corner in Mexican organized crime.
He was big on Mexican pride and insisted on selling his wares north of the border. Anyone who worked for him who he caught selling locally received his judgment. Even other drug dealers liked and respected him and on several occasions “King Solomon” had been called upon to mediate disputes between the cartels. Dominico was a walking anomaly, a drug kingpin who had a code and actually walked his walk as he talked his talk. Bolan looked at the DEA file photo that Kurtzman had brought up on the screen.
Dominico bore a disturbing resemblance to a smiling, Mexican Sylvester Stallone with a beer gut.
Kurtzman was right. Smuggling nuclear materials for terrorists was not the sort of thing Guillermo Dominico would normally be involved with. Drugs, guns and kidnapping were things to be inflicted upon the yanquis, his neighbors north of the Rio Grande. For Dominico, Mexico was holy ground. Bolan just couldn’t see him trafficking in radioactive poison even if it was heading north. The other very interesting thing was that unlike most crime lords who ended up in prison or dead, according to the FBI Dominico appeared to have gone into retirement several years ago, left the state of Sinaloa and moved to Mexico City.
“I think maybe I need to go have words with King Solomon.”
Kurtzman had been afraid of that. “Well, here’s something about the boy you might not know.”
“Do tell.”
“Many people believe that King Solomon the drug lord was once the masked wrestler Santo Solomon.”
Bolan raised a bemused eyebrow. “Really.”
Bolan knew just enough about the wonderful world of Lucha Libre, or Mexican professional wrestling, to know that the original masked wrestler named Santo ran a close second to Jesus as most popular person on Earth with the previous three generations of Mexican citizenry. Untold legions of luchadors had attached the name Santo to themselves to ride his rep.
Kurtzman called up more files. “At first he called himself Silver Solomon, and his gimmick was to come into the ring tossing peso coins to the crowd as he made his entrance.” He pulled up a grainy screen capture from Mexican cable television. A man in silver tights and a silver mask stood atop the second rope of a wrestling ring. His fists were cocked on his hips and his chin lifted like Superman as he absorbed the adulation of the crowd. He was wearing a silver cape. A twenty, a five and a one peso coin were sewn in descending order on the forehead of his mask with the one set between the mask’s stylized eyebrows. He was strong-looking, with impossibly broad shoulders, but was built more like a gymnast than his freakishly muscled wrestling counterparts north of the border. Mexican luchadors engaged in a lot of high-flying maneuvers and needed a higher power-to-weight ratio.
“So then he started dedicating matches to this church, or that charity or this orphan,” Kurtzman went on, “and people started calling him Santo Solomon.”
“So what happened to him?”
“The Santo Solomon gimmick just disappeared. Some people say the guy behind the mask took on a new persona, others say he got injured and had to quit. Being unmasked is a grave dishonor in the ring, and a lot of these guys retire without anyone knowing their true identities.”
“If it’s true he’d have the seed money to buy his own planes and start his own business. Can you link them?”
“I’m working on it.”
“You say Dominico is currently in Mexico City?”
“Nice little house in the hills.”
Bolan nodded.
