Midnight Trust

by M. L. Buchman

  Tanya followed quickly.

  As she passed the counter, Estela handed her the fifty-dollar bill.

  In the kitchen, the enforcer had the other man bent over a wooden prep table, his hands Zip Tied behind his back. In moments, he’d been patted down and several weapons and a small sheaf of fifty-dollar bills were sitting on the table. The weapons and money went into a bag. Gagged and ankles bound, the enforcer tossed the man into a corner of the walk-in refrigerator.

  Tanya followed them in.

  “Get comfortable,” she told the man. “This is only the beginning of La Frio Purga.” She held up the fifty in front of the man’s face for him to read. Across Grant’s forehead, the pen had reacted with the hidden ink and the words were now clear: “I am a criminal for el Clan del Golfo.”

  She handed the bill to the enforcer.

  As he’d been trained, he fished out the man’s ID card and held it up along with the bill close by the man’s face. He snapped a picture with his phone and forwarded it to the inbox Fred had made. Then the enforcer stuffed the bill and the man’s ID back into his pocket.

  The automatic system Smith had set up pinged back an immediate “received” message. Daniela’s enforcer returned to reading his newspaper in the corner of Estela’s restaurant. A backup sat in the other corner in case more than one clan member carrying the marked fifties came in at a time.

  Moments later, Tanya’s phone vibrated with a message.

  “Nineteen in the first twenty minutes,” was Smith’s message.

  Twenty minutes? That’s all she’d been waiting? It had felt like an eternity, wondering where the flaws were in her plan.

  Estela stood close by the refrigerator door when Tanya emerged.

  “I have known him for twenty years. He always tells me he worked construction.”

  “He is also a soldier for the Clan,” Tanya told her.

  Estela slammed the refrigerator’s big door on him. “How long do I have to keep that trash in my refrigerator?”

  “Most of the day, I’m afraid. If we let a single one get out or turn them over to the police, they might get word out of what we’re doing. Better if they just disappear for the day.”

  “The Cold Purge,” Estela patted a hand on the closed refrigerator door. “I like it very much. Maybe I will offer to make him a raspado when I let him out.”

  Tanya laughed. After a day of sitting in a refrigerator, being offered a cone of shaved ice with fruit syrup would be the final insult.

  She headed out the door as Smith reported that the count across western Medellín was up to thirty of the Clan’s men. None of the top three had been caught, of course. But Daniela had identified twenty “key personnel” that they wanted to be sure to take down. Three of those had already been caught in the restaurant sweep—a very good start indeed.

  Tanya sent a message to the full team: Phase III running. Phase III encompassed the Tier III people—mostly runners and thugs, the “enlisted” men of el Clan del Golfo.

  For the rest of the day, it would continue on auto-pilot. Unless something went very wrong, there would be no need for the team to be called and they could now focus on Phase II—the twenty people who were the leaders’ closest cronies, the “officers.” The Tier I “generals” would be the final nut to crack.

  Typically this kind of operation was run the other way, take out the top first. The problem was, then all of the little people would scatter.

  She and Sofia had cooked up this idea.

  They’d both liked it because they could think of a hundred different things that could go wrong.

  Chad hated watching the takedown of three of the Clan’s people at a faux-American burger joint in Pajarito.

  Pork burger with crispy pork rinds—okay, he’d have to be coming back to try that. But horse burgers and yucca fritters, how was that authentic US of A? His downfall was that they had pizza on the menu, and he hadn’t had breakfast yet though it was already midmorning. Tanya had sent him off to deal with Sánchez at daybreak, which had taken longer than planned.

  The two slices told him just how faux this place was. He should have known better than getting pizza at a burger joint in Colombia. Even lamer than horse burgers. All it did was make him homesick for a Detroit-style deep-dish pizza from Cloverleaf with the works. Best he’d ever had anywhere—and he’d tried pizza in over thirty countries. Medellín didn’t even make top half.

  The Pajarito neighborhood sat high in the hills three miles north of the safe house in Comuna 13. It was their operation’s furthest outlier and Chad wanted in on the action.

  But Tanya had been very clear about that: Let Daniela’s enforcers do their job. Don’t interfere unless there’s trouble.

  And there hadn’t been any at all. Her enforcers had it down. Not as smooth as a Delta, of course, but these guys weren’t slouches. They grabbed the Clan’s people and put them on ice without a single customer in the restaurant doing more than glancing over, puzzled to see others moving into the back kitchen. It was happening so smoothly that the chances of any ripples running out into greater Medellín were pretty much zero.

  Where was the fun in that?

  Phase III running, pinged in on his phone.

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  Outside the restaurant, he stepped into the taxi that was waiting for him—a taxi driven by yet another of Daniela’s people. She apparently owned the allegiance of most of the city’s taxi and bus fleet. Lady was real smart—they were the connective glue of gossip in any city.

  “Your honey has it down,” Duane climbed in from the other side, coming from his own observation station for Phase III.

  “She’s not my honey.” That’s a phrase they’d both used too many times for the sweet things they found in bars and on beaches.

  Duane looked at him, “Haven’t had much chance to talk. Is it getting serious?”

  The taxi driver pulled out, watching him in the rearview as much as he was watching the madness that Colombians called “driving” out the windshield.

  “C’mon, dude, what’re you feeling?”

  “Feeling? You’re asking about feelings? What the hell has Sofia done to you, bro? Besides, I…” Chad knew exactly what he was feeling. Didn’t have any damn words for it, but he knew what it was. Kind of. A life of Detroit street girls and Spec Ops bar babes did nothing to prepare a guy for whatever the hell Tanya was doing to him.

  Now both guys were watching him.

  The taxi driver rolled right through a stop sign, not that such an action was unusual in Medellín. But he did it in front of a bus, which was unusual. Colombia’s traffic psychosis had a very well-defined pecking order: trucks never stopped for anyone, buses came next, and SUVs outranked mere cars like the battered Chevy Spark subcompact they were presently squeezed into. Below cars came motos, then bicycles. Pedestrians were somewhere down with stray cats and dogs. Walking in Medellín, especially after dark when streets became raceways, was taking your life in your hands. Gridlock was your best bet for a safe crossing any time of day or night.

  Subject change time. “The Phase II guys are going to be much more challenging, which means we should get to have some fun.” Daniela had identified the twenty dudes who actually ran the day-to-day operations for most of el Clan del Golfo. He was careful not to mention the plan or any names to the taxi driver, just in case. Word wouldn’t be out on the street yet about what was going down and they wanted to keep it that way for as long as possible.

  Chad scanned down his list.

  “Shit!”

  “What?” the taxi driver actually twisted around to look back at him despite pushing hard through a stale red light.

  “They already took out the first two on my list.” Each pair on the team was supposed to have five targets on the Top Twenty list of key players. Suddenly he was down to three.

  “But that’s good,” Mr. Taxi still wasn’t doing such a hot job of looking where he was going.

  “No! It means that my girl—�
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  He ignored Duane’s raised eyebrows. So he’d never heard Chad call any woman that. Big deal.

  “—is probably going to finish the day with a higher body count than I am.”

  The driver laughed. “You’re right. That’s not good. We’ll work double time. What’s the first address?”

  Chad gave it to him.

  “That’s under the cable car. It will take some time to get there.”

  Chad leaned low enough to look up at the cable car through the windshield. Medellín had started putting these in around the city. The trains couldn’t climb the hills. And there was only the one set of escalators—the steep section up to Comuna 13. But cable cars didn’t care about heights and could span distances for the farther back communities like Pajarito.

  Each gondola could handle eight passengers. Once traveling on the cable, it moved along at five meters per second—about ten miles an hour.

  “Is the address exactly under the cable car?”

  “Sí.” The driver missed several pedestrians by millimeters as he took their lives into his hands and dodged around a truck.

  “Cable moves slower than a parachute landing,” Duane seemed to have the same thought.

  “Yeah,” Chad waved at a racing bus in time for the taxi driver to avoid imminent death. “Drop us at La Aurora station. Wait for us two blocks downhill from the address.”

  Inside the cable car station, it took only a little bit of acting the noisy, drunk-in-the-morning Americans to convince the line of people waiting to board that they should take the next gondola.

  As soon as the door closed, Duane reached into his pack and pulled out a minimal profile descending harness. Chad fished out the same and a length of 8 mm ultra-light climbing line.

  Twenty seconds later, Chad had overridden the gondola’s safety mechanisms and popped open the doors, which improved the view nicely. It was a lovely morning and the ocean-fresh air tasted good. Even a few hundred feet up and the smells of the city faded away. They rigged the midpoint of the line around a seat post and latched their descenders onto either side.

  From their packs, they also pulled Glock sidearms, which they clipped to the harnesses, and a pair of FN P90s—both rigged with subsonic rounds. They spun on five-inch-long sound suppressors to avoid announcing their presence any more than could be helped. The P90 was ideal for this situation. Its compact bullpup design meant that they could carry an exceptional close-quarters-combat rifle in a twenty-inch pack.

  Ready, they had a chance to look around.

  “Great view,” Duane noted.

  “Sweet!” Chad wasn’t about to be outdone for cool and casual. And it was beautiful. They were descending from one of the highest points in the entire city and the view swept from the far north where the Bello neighborhood marked the eastward turn of the Aburrá Valley. Directly below was the land of red brick. Ahead and farther below, the glass of downtown shone in the morning sun. South and west, the steep rise of other districts seemed to each glow with their own colors. One hillside was dominated by bright blues and golds, another by gentle tropical pastels. The parks stood out as dark green patches and the tops of the Andean peaks at this northernmost end of the range slipped quietly behind the city as the gondola descended quickly.

  “Ten seconds?” Duane asked casually.

  Chad picked out the right building, which matched the aerial image on his phone. It wasn’t hard. In an area of tightly packed buildings and crowded, climbing streets, their target covered the area of a dozen buildings. Behind high walls, a small tropical paradise surrounded a huge swimming pool. The only one in this whole area.

  “Sounds about right,” Chad acknowledged, by which time they were down to five seconds remaining.

  They almost out-casualed each other enough to miss the jump as they finally rose from their seats and stood with their backs just out the door and their toes on the threshold. Chad glanced over his shoulder, estimated speed of the gondola, their height, and how fast the descender would let them down.

  No need to even glance at Duane, they made the same estimates from the same training.

  They kicked back hard in perfect unison and let the rope fly.

  Three seconds of near free fall, Chad kept his eye on the swimming pool.

  Half pressure on the descender’s brake lever to slow his fall.

  Partial release.

  Hard brake.

  Let it go at the last second.

  He landed in the pool, feet first in the shallow end.

  Releasing the descender completely, he let the end of the rope slip away even as he swung his rifle into position.

  Duane went into the deep end and completely disappeared from view.

  Couldn’t happen to a better man.

  But Duane hung on to the rope, anchoring it in place. Because Chad had released his end, it slithered up and around the seat post in the departing gondola car. Moments later it splashed down in the pool with a snake-like hiss. When the car reached the next station, it would be empty and the door would be open. Unless the people in the next gondola were dumb enough to talk about the two guys who had jumped out carrying rifles, no one would ever know what had happened.

  Without being conscious of it, Chad had assessed the state of the patio area as he’d descended.

  Before the splash had even settled, he’d fired silenced rounds into the three guards standing discretely around the area. They barely had time to look surprised before he dropped an additional round into each and they collapsed to the stone flagging.

  The man eating breakfast at a glass table froze with his fork in midair.

  Weighted down by his gear, Duane resurfaced by plodding up the slope from the deep end, coiling the line as he went.

  “Could cover me, bro.”

  Duane looked up in surprise. “Why? You got it handled. Besides, I’d hate to leave behind a good chunk of line.”

  Chad shook his head to clear the water out of his ears as he climbed the steps and scanned the rest of the pool area.

  A very hot babe came out the door dressed in nothing more than the towel she was carrying in her hand and bikini bottoms that were so brief they barely deserved the name.

  Spotting Chad, she opened her mouth to scream.

  “I wouldn’t be doing that,” he called out as he aimed at her voice box, ready to cut it and her spinal cord with his next shot.

  She was smart enough to choke off her cry and close her mouth. Then she very slowly moved up to the target still frozen in midbreakfast while facing Chad. She bent down as if to kiss him on top of the head.

  Then stood back upright with a handgun that must have been in the target’s back waistband.

  Chad sighed and shot her in the face just as Duane fired a pair of rounds into her cold heart right through one of those lovely breasts.

  The target was smart enough to place his fork on his plate and his hands flat on the table as the woman slowly collapsed to the deck beside him. The subsonic 5.7 mm rounds of the P90s didn’t have the knockdown power of a full load behind a 9 mm or a .357, but she wasn’t any less dead before she hit the ground.

  It took less than a minute to hide the bodies in the small pool house and lock the door. Another to check the house. No one else there, but a surveillance system showed that there were several more guards outside.

  Down in the garage, they found a nice selection of options.

  “Too bad the Lamborghini doesn’t have three seats.”

  “It is,” Duane agreed sadly.

  Duane took the wheel of the up-armored Range Rover with tinted rear windows. Popping the garage remote, he rolled out onto the street, raised a hand as if to wave to the outdoor bodyguards—also blocking their view of his face—and turned down the hill. He punched the remote to close the garage door again. No one would think to check inside for a while—hopefully the rest of the day.

  Two blocks later they pulled up alongside the taxi and dumped the bound-and-gagged target into the taxi’s trunk. />
  The driver headed off to a hangar that Daniela had rented at the south end of Olaya Herrera Airport in the heart of Medellín. The airport lay in almost the exact center of the city, making it very convenient.

  “Well, we had a nice swim. What’s next?” Duane commented as soon as Chad had climbed into the front seat.

  “How do you feel about horses?”

  “Why?”

  “No reason. That’s the next target’s nickname.” Chad tapped the next address into the dashboard’s flat screen system.

  “Think it’s that he’s hung like a horse?” Duane headed south across Iguana Ravine to climb up into the El Moro neighborhood.

  “We can find out if you’re feeling voyeuristic.”

  “Rather be voyeuristic about what the hell is going on with you and Tanya.”

  Shit! Chad had thought he’d successfully left that subject behind.

  Tanya had finally fallen back to the safe house suite to sit with Fred Smith.

  She and Silva had swept in to take down Number Fourteen on the twenty-person Phase II list, and found him in a meeting with Sixteen, Seventeen, and Nineteen. Small teams of Daniela’s people had been sent to take out the few key players who weren’t in Medellín today, but they’d been told not to act until the three leaders had been taken down. A special team had been sent out to the Gulf of Urabá to clean out the sales team that one of Smith’s drones had traced back to their lair while the Twin Otter had flown away from them.

  “We’re running out of targets fast,” Fred noted as he worked the lists.

  Four of them had gone down fighting—Tanya had taken out one of those, Carla two, and Kyle another.

  “What’s the count on the Phase III guys?”

  Fred chortled happily. “La Frio Purga has a hundred and eighty-seven of the ‘enlisted ranks’ so far. Your ploy with the fifties worked brilliantly. We’re gutting their operation today. If we continue this for the rest of the day, we could easily get two-fifty.”

  “That’s great.” But Tanya had trouble putting much enthusiasm into it.