Russell Blake - Revenge of the Assassin

“I have no doubt. Which is why I am willing to be so generous. That, and it seems prudent to clean the whole house while I have a competent sanitizer…”

“I shall get in touch once I’ve dispatched this secondary target. I’ll look for the transfer,” El Rey said and then disconnected.

He had put the call through an IP-masking software package that bounced his address all over the planet, so he was untraceable. The bank account the money was going to was in the name of a Lithuanian shell company with accounts in Luxembourg, and there would be two further transfers to an account in the British Virgin Islands, where his funds were ostensibly investment proceeds for a hedge fund registered there, and the trail would end within another week when that fund purchased a number of credit default swaps from a hedge fund in Ireland that would expire, worthless. The money would be effectively laundered, and once in Ireland, it was clean — the proceeds of legitimate investments in the unregulated centi-trillion dollar derivatives market. Nobody would bat an eye over a measly twenty million.

El Rey shut down his computer and set it to the side, on the table, and resumed his fruit breakfast, pausing to sip some freshly squeezed orange juice and pomegranate nectar the staff had obligingly prepared for him.

By the end of the day, with his savings, he would be worth forty million dollars. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Now all he needed to do was take out one of the most heavily protected cartel bosses in the world and execute the president of Mexico.

He took a bite of pineapple. That had been one of the things he’d missed living in Argentina. Fresh pineapple.

It would be an eventful few months.

The air in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande River from El Paso, Texas, stank of sour exhaust and raw sewage. The downtown was dilapidated and reeked of disrepair; the ancient school buses that were the public transportation belched toxic fumes into the atmosphere as they groaned past platoons of impoverished workers on their way home from long shifts in the maquiladoras plants that dotted the city. Trash choked every gutter of the broken sidewalks; colorful chip bags and ice cream wrappers mingled with cigarette butts and sludge that the pedestrians moved cautiously around, ever mindful of random ruts and holes awaiting the unsuspecting. If there was a sorrier sight than Juarez by day, it was surely Juarez by night.

Handcarts wedged between battered cars served all manner of food for the work crowd; the odor of hot dogs and frying mystery meat wafted like a cloud past the bus stop where the young man waited patiently, reading a newspaper by the storefront light while he kept a wary eye on the bar across the street — a known hangout of the enforcers who worked for the Familia Morenos cartel, and a poor choice to frequent unless suicide was high on one’s wish list.

Juarez had earned the dubious distinction of being the most dangerous city on the planet that wasn’t in an active war zone. Fully forty percent of the population had evacuated over the prior five years, while the Sinaloa cartel and the Juarez cartel battled over the trafficking hub that led into the United States. The murder rate was a minimum of eight deaths per day, with bursts of executions during an active conflict easily driving the number into the double digits.

The armed wing of the Juarez cartel, La Linea , comprised former police officers and military specialists from the Mexican Special Forces, as well as street gang members. La Linea was especially feared, even among the routinely savage Juarez crew, because of their penchant for decapitations and mutilation. They had borrowed a page from the U.S.-backed regime in El Salvador during the Eighties, which regularly left the mutilated bodies of its victims in prominent areas as a warning to would-be rivals, and to keep the population subdued with fear. Hardly a week went by without a grotesquely butchered corpse being left in a central location. The papers had grown so accustomed to the slaughter that there was a sense of boredom to the daily stories of slayings and beheadings — it took a significant event to make a dent in the jaded sense of apathy that floated over the doomed city like a haze.

For the past two years, Sinaloa had battled it out in the city streets with the Juarez cartel, culminating in Sinaloa having appeared to have won the war after a particularly bloody massacre that claimed the lives of over fifty people in a single day. But other rivals to the throne quickly threw their hats in and joined the killing frenzy in a bid for power, and the result was that the town had remained a death zone, with a population that didn’t venture out at night for fear of armed onslaughts. The cartel factions also augmented their income by conducting kidnappings and murder-for-hire, as well as slavery, car theft, fraud, burglary…anything that could be done at the point of a gun for profit, making life in Juarez a kind of living hell for the innocent residents who were the natural prey for the criminal syndicates.

El Rey watched as groups of tired females clung to each other while waiting for their bus. In addition to all its other sins, Juarez had earned a position of disrepute for the serial murder of thousands of young women, attracted to the city by the promise of work in the multitude of factories that were the region’s only saving grace.

Multinational conglomerates had discovered the value of assembling their North American products on the border, leveraging the dirt-cheap labor cost in Mexico to create windfall profitability — all part of the miracle of globalization. But the workforce, which was mainly young women, had drawn predators in the form of organized serial killing gangs, in which the police and the local power elite were strongly suspected. Even after the official four hundred or so cases had been solved and attributed to bus drivers, street gangs and deviant killers, the unofficial estimate remained closer to five thousand, with mass graves their legacy. The government had been quick to proclaim the spree over seven years earlier, and yet women still disappeared with regularity, and the word on the street was that the killers were still active.

At one time, the city had boomed to an estimated two million population, but the constant violence had driven many from the region, and it had shrunk by seven hundred thousand. Blocks of abandoned homes and businesses abounded, mute testament to the impact of the cartel warfare that defined the area.

With the United States just across the river, Juarez remained a critical junction for drug trafficking, and so it was that new contenders continued to move into town to take on the entrenched players. The Morenos gang had appeared eighteen months before with a splash, and had immediately begun a campaign of systematic brutality that rivaled the most brazen and vicious in Mexico. The town was divided up into the equivalent of fiefdoms where the local warlords reigned supreme, with the most dangerous to Aranas’ Sinaloa group run by ‘ Chacho ’ Morenos, one of the most influential power players in the region, having forged a coalition with Aranas’ sworn enemies in the Zetas cartel.

None of which particularly bothered the young man, who was himself one of the earth’s most dangerous predators. El Rey had spent ten days in Juarez so far, plying the street criminals with cash to gain their confidence, buying drugs and a few weapons, which were both in plentiful supply. He’d maintained an aura of the underworld by claiming to be a high-end male prostitute for rich gringos , which his new movie-star features lent credence to, as did his choice of clothing, deliberately selected to maximize his flamboyant cover. He knew from experience that prostitutes were largely invisible in criminal circles, and so quickly had entre to many establishments that would have immediately questioned a young, fit male who wasn’t in the cartel game.