Chapter Ten
Medellín, Colombia
Jairo Dueñas had come far since he’d created Los Pepes at the tender age of nineteen years. At forty-seven years old, everything he’d ever dreamed of was either already his or was within his grasp.
Los Pepes, properly, had called itself Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar, which in English translates to “Persecuted by Pablo Escobar”—an image the group had adopted, seeking public sympathy, although the message was not strictly true. Los Pepes was a group of vigilantes who waged war against the former Medellín Cartel, posing as warriors of the people while, in fact, they sought to claim Escobar’s wealth and drug trade with the US for themselves.
That hadn’t quite worked out as planned, of course. Escobar had died sixteen months after his escape from La Catedral Prison, trapped by agents of Colombia’s Bloque de Búsqueda—Search Bloc—and the ever-present DEA. Some said he’d been assassinated, but it hardly mattered. Only Escobar’s death had been important, followed by the swift unraveling of his cartel. Godfathers in the cruel Cali Cartel had dominated cocaine traffic for the next five years, and then they in turn had been killed or sent to prison for their crimes.
In recent years, however, Dueñas had recouped his losses from the earlier conflict, entered politics and now served with the Office of the Inspector General of Colombia, tasked with overseeing other arms of government, ensuring that they functioned properly and honestly.
Well...maybe not so much the latter part.
Dueñas’s office placed him in a prime position to collaborate with the most recent successors to the former Medellín Cartel, advising them on how to duck Colombia’s National Police and who to bribe at all levels of state, from the president’s office and Council of Ministers to the Senate and Chamber of Representatives, the Supreme Court and Council of State, to the civil and municipal courts of Colombia’s thirty-two departments, roughly analogous to US states.
And in the process, naturally, from each payoff he arranged, Dueñas skimmed a handsome profit for himself. He had “arrived,” as rich North Americans liked to say, and life was good. On top of his success in government and crime, Dueñas had a trophy wife, two perfect children, and a mistress on the side, stashed in a posh apartment in suburban Envigado, where Dueñas was headed now, in his chauffeured Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan.
His loyal wife, Adriana, thought he had a critical committee meeting to attend. In point of fact, he had a far more urgent, primal need to satisfy that only nineteen-year-old Isabella Döehring could. Just thinking of her now, Dueñas was totally and almost hopelessly aroused.
“Drive faster, will you, Julián?” he called from the back seat.
“Yes, sir. As you wish.”
And yet, a short block later, his chauffeur was slowing down again, now creeping almost to a halt.
“What’s going on?” Dueñas demanded. “What’s the holdup?”
“It appears there’s been an accident, sir.”
By scooting forward on his seat, Dueñas could see two other vehicles—real junkers, in his estimation—tangled in midblock ahead. Both drivers were afoot and arguing, with their arms flailing.
“Idiots,” Dueñas grated. “Back up and find a way around this mess.”
“Yes. I just need to—”
Before Julián even got the Mercedes into reverse, a sudden movement to the left made Dueñas turn in that direction, startled to see three young men carrying automatic weapons, rushing toward his car. He spun away from them, trying to reach the other door, but found another trio closing in from that direction, grim-faced, with weapons leveled at their hips.
“Jesucristo!” he blurted, as Julián—also his bodyguard—produced a pistol, cocking it. As he raised it, a blast of gunfire turned the driver’s window into a hailstorm of glass, the shards and bullets ripping off most of his head.
And as Dueñas huddled in the back seat, with his empty hands raised against the coming storm, he realized there wasn’t even time to pray.
Culiacán Rosales, Sinaloa, Mexico
Arturo Kahlo finished mopping up the remnants of his lunch with a tortilla, washed the whole thing down with the remainder of his third Tecate beer and dabbed his lips with a white linen napkin. When he belched, Kahlo made no attempt to mask the sound, and grinned back at the startled diners who were bold enough to glare at him, not knowing who he was.
If they had recognized him as a top sicario—a hit man for the Sinaloa Cartel, which was also called the Blood Alliance for its ruthless violence—they would have begged his pardon, rather than regarding him with thinly veiled disdain for his lack of table manners.
“Que te jodan,” he cursed at them, laughing at the stunned expressions on their faces, most especially the women, who had likely never been addressed that way before—except, perhaps, in bed.
Rising, he dropped a wad of pesos on the table, brushing back his jacket just enough to let them glimpse the Glock he wore in a hip holster. That drew gasps from a few of them. All eyes averted, suddenly preoccupied, as Kahlo left the restaurant, grinning.
The fear that he provoked in lesser humans was intoxicating, like strong liquor or a snort of pure cocaine. Kahlo loved that power more than anything on Earth.
Kahlo had killed so many men by now—and women, too, as he was an equal-opportunity assassin—that the faces ran together and were sometimes lost to him. The ones who mattered were rivals of his employers in the drug trade, as well as soldiers and police, their paid informers—some of whom died very slowly—minor politicians, and an Anglo judge in Dimmit County, Texas, whose murder had sent three “innocent” members of the Diablos Motorcycle Club to the Lone Star State’s death row.
Now Kahlo moved with long strides toward his car, a Cadillac CTS that had cost its owner $60,000 before it was stolen and smuggled south from Arizona, with all of the vital numbers changed. He loved the
