City
KING SOLOMON’S KINGDOM was humble by most drug-lord-estate standards. It wasn’t the usual Latin crime-king sprawling rancho or fortresslike hacienda. It was a modest Eichler-style house of mostly glass walls and open floor plan. The most opulent thing about it was the prime hillside real estate it rested upon. The altitude put it above the horrendous air pollution and afforded a sea-of-stars view of urban Mexico City below. The house itself didn’t have much in the way of security, but most of the homes up in the hills were part of gated enclaves each with their own security station and armed guards. The raven-black 2008 Cadillac STS-V Bolan drove told most onlookers that Bolan belonged in these hills, and he wasn’t going to bother with trying to bluff his way past the gate. Bolan parked at a turnoff located about a hundred feet below the cliff that King Solomon’s house perched upon.
It wasn’t a particularly technical climb, but a hundred feet of rock was still a hundred feet of rock and Bolan was making his ascent at night. The soldier shrugged out of his sport jacket and took off his tie. He rolled up the sleeves of the black silk shirt he wore and strapped his silenced Beretta machine pistol to the thigh of his black climbing pants. Bolan put handcuffs and a few other odds and ends in a fanny pack and looped a coil of rope over his shoulder. He kicked out of his Italian loafers, laced into his rock shoes, powered up his night-vision goggles and started to climb.
Even at midnight the rock still radiated heat from the summer day, but a warm, dry rock face was the climber’s friend. He had scouted the cliff in the morning, and he climbed more by feel than what his goggles revealed. Only one overhang provided much of an obstacle, and for a few moments Bolan hung in space seventy-five feet above the road. However, he had photographed the ledge and committed its surface to memory, so the crevices and knobs were where he expected them to be.
Bolan was at the top a full five minutes under the time he had allotted himself.
He looped his rope around a tree trunk and cast the coil down the cliffside in case he needed to make a fast rope extraction. Satellite surveillance from the Farm had informed Bolan that Dominico’s girlfriend had left at noon and not returned. The gardener had gone home around 4:00 p.m. and the maid-cook had left at 10:00 p.m. It was now 12:15 a.m., and it appeared that Guillermo Dominico was alone. Bolan scouted the outside of the house. It was literally perched on a cliff and the glass walls had been designed to take full advantage of the view. Dominico had just enough of a back porch to include a long, narrow pool lined with black lava rock with an attached hot tub. There was a barbecue area off to one side, but no walls or fence to interfere with the vistas of the Anáhuac plateau below. Bolan spent long moments watching. Through his goggles he didn’t see the ghostly beams of any laser motion sensors. It appeared Dominico felt fairly secure in his aerie and the gates and guards on the periphery that kept out the riffraff and unwanted visitors from his past.
No one had planned on some American pulling a Spider-Man in the middle of the night.
Most of the rooms were dark. The master suite glowed blue from the light of a television. Bolan stepped into the shadows of the eaves and peered into the bedroom. One look told Bolan that Guillermo Dominico and the luchador Santo Solomon were the same man. King Solomon had been working out. He hadn’t quite reclaimed the fighting physique of his luchador days, but the barn-door shoulders were no longer sagging and the paunch and jowls from his DEA surveillance photos were gone. The coin-embossed, silver wrestling mask mounted behind glass on the wall surrounded by wrestling photos and newspaper clippings were something of a giveaway, as well. Dominico sat on a folded blue yoga mat wearing a pair of sausage-casing tight biking shorts; he was sheened with sweat and twitching and grimacing as he tried to hold a very forced and uncomfortable-looking half-lotus pose in front of his seventy-two-inch HDTV. Bolan paused a moment. It wasn’t something you saw drug kingpins do every day, even supposedly retired ones.
Up on the screen a man wearing nothing but a white loincloth sat in a full-lotus position and lectured in obviously dubbed Spanish. He looked like Yul Brynner, if the actor was a six-foot-six Special Forces operator moonlighting as a yoga instructor. Beneath his dais three beautiful blond women demonstrated poses at various levels of difficulty as he lectured. Bolan bided his time and silently picked the lock on the sliding-glass door.
He had run up against some wrestlers gone bad before, and anyone who had the capacity to fake that kind of physical carnage day in and day out without using wires or computer-generated special effects could also inflict it for real outside the ring. Bolan grimaced at the tiny click the latch made as he lifted it with his pick. Dominico was oblivious. His attention was equally divided between his DVD guru and his own straining knee joints. Bolan watched as the women on the giant TV unfolded themselves effortlessly from their sitting positions and flicked out their legs into full-forward splits. Dominico’s groan was audible through the sliding glass as he made a very impressive attempt at following suit.
Bolan slid back the door and it closed behind him as he strode into the room.
Dominico’s head snapped around and he rose an inch out of his splits. “Hey!”
Bolan slammed his hands down on Dominico’s shoulders. The former crime lord groaned as the soldier leaned his two hundred plus pounds into his attack and pushed Dominico a little deeper into the splits than he’d ever gone before. He could almost hear the groin muscles and tendons pulling like piano strings being tuned to the breaking point. Dominico’s shoulders suddenly heaved as he tried to push himself up. He was a powerful man, and it was a mighty attempt but Bolan had all the leverage. Dominico was pinned in place like a bug. The only direction for him to go was down. Bolan spoke quietly from his position of moral advantage. “Try that again and you’re going to sing soprano, Santo.”
Dominico couldn’t rise and he sure as hell didn’t want to go any lower. He snarled, suspended in yogic purgatory. “Don’t call me Santo!”
Bolan raised an intrigued eyebrow. For a man about to be snapped like a wishbone Dominico was remarkably defiant. Bolan leaned a little harder. “You’d prefer King Solomon?”
“No!” Dominico’s triceps stood out like horseshoes as he bore the weight of both of them. “It’s just Memo now!” he gritted.
“Memo” was the diminutive of Guillermo, like Billy for William. Bolan decided to give it to him. He didn’t have a partner to play good cop-bad cop with so he was going to have to play both roles; that and Guillermo Dominico was giving off just about the weirdest vibe of any crime lord Bolan had ever encountered. It was going to require more study than just a quick beat down for intel. “Okay, Memo, let’s talk.”
“Hey, man…” Dominico groaned in counterpoint. “Do I know you?”
“I want to know about the operation in Culiacán.”
“What are you? FBI? DEA?”
Bolan shoved down a little harder. “Talk to me or make a wish.”
Every muscle in Dominico’s body tensed with strain. “I haven’t been to Culiacán in years!”
“There’s a farm up in the hills. Near the Tamazula River. It has a hacienda and a warehouse and an airstrip. There was a time when you flew out of it. From what I know you used to own it.”
“I got nothing going on in Sinaloa! I’m retired!”
“Drug dealers don’t retire, Memo.” Bolan leaned hard. “They just change their M.O.”
“Jesus!” Dominico shuddered with effort. “I’m retired! Ask anybody!”
“That’s not what I hear, Memo.”
