The Colombian Rogue

by Matt Herrmann

  “Like the hissing at the restaurant?” Cali asked.

  “Yeah. At first I thought it was the sound of a fuse burning. But reports from the staff and the people at the front of the restaurant said it sounded more like a snake.”

  “That’s an odd thing to hear before you die,” Juan said. “I’ve heard of people hearing footsteps or chimes before they die. Even whispering voices. But never a snake hiss.”

  “Yeah. But you don’t believe in that stuff, do you?” CG asked. “I mean, hauntings and ghosts and all that?”

  Juan shrugged. “Colombians are a superstitious people. Who’s to say a ghost isn’t responsible for all these deaths?” He grinned.

  “Ghosts don’t plant bombs,” Sam said.

  “Were there any marks on the healthy guys who died?” Juan asked. “Maybe they were poisoned.”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been able to find autopsy reports on any of the bodies. I’ll see what I can dig up.”

  Juan stifled a yawn as if this was all procedural stuff he had gone through many times in the past, when in fact this was all new to him. “What about the guys who got gunned down in the streets? You got any images of the shooters?”

  After some typing, an image appeared of a man on a motorcycle turning down an alley. His left hand was bare and hanging behind him as he made the turn. Juan looked down at his own left hand, at the scar both he and his brother had shared since they were kids.

  Juan noticed Sam’s gaze dart over to him and saw the mistrust in the man’s eyes.

  “Even got the same scar as you, Paul. Why would someone be impersonating you?” Sam asked, addressing everyone in the room.

  “I made some enemies while undercover,” Juan said, hoping it would suffice. He nodded to Rockwell to back him up, but the man didn’t add anything.

  Sam grunted. “I hope it was worth it, whatever you were doing.”

  “Me too,” Juan said with a dry laugh, glancing again at Rockwell.

  It was common knowledge among the team that Juan had concussion-based amnesia and couldn’t remember much from before he was extracted from two years of deep cover. Only Rockwell knew Juan’s real identity, and for the time being was validating Juan’s cover.

  “How am I going to operate when the bad guys and the good guys will be looking for me now that my doppelgänger is killing bad guys and civilians?” Juan asked.

  “I’ll do what I can to smooth things over with the other agencies,” Rockwell said. “What we need is to track down where that imposter is heading next and get a jump on him before the next time—before any more civilians get hurt or killed.”

  “I’ve got some contacts,” Juan said. “I can reach out to them.”

  “Do it,” Rockwell said. Then, to the rest of the team, “Go home. Take the day off. I’ll clear it with Captain Aguilar. Do whatever you need to recharge your batteries.”

  They got up to leave. As Juan was heading for the door, Sam caught him by the arm. “You still coming over tonight to hang out?”

  Paul had been Sam’s best friend. And two years later, Juan had replaced Paul on the anti-drug task force. From the start, they hadn’t hit it off too well. There were two people Juan knew he needed to be concerned with in regard to his identity. The biggest danger was Sam Merin.

  Being Paul Ramírez’s best friend and working together on operations the world over, the two had forged a bond that Juan could not replicate no matter how hard he tried. Just recently he had been making it a priority to hang out more with Sam so he could get a better feel for the man. Juan also hoped that Sam would grow more accustomed to the new Paul.

  Juan knew this was a moot point if the real Paul actually came back to join the team—then Juan would be found out—but Juan didn’t know if that day might actually come. It seemed that Paul had gone rogue; he was killing people and had severed all communication with his CO. Juan had heard of agents going bad and had watched countless TV shows and action movies with that premise, but he’d never expected to actually see it himself. From everything Juan had heard, Paul was the perfect agent. How could he have suddenly “gone bad?”

  And now Rockwell had tasked Juan with tracking Paul down with the team in tow. How was he going to bring Paul in and keep the team in the dark about what was really going on?

  I’ll figure it out, he told himself as he’d told himself many times since, assuming the mantle of his brother Paul.

  Juan slapped Sam on the shoulder. “Of course, man. I’ll be there at 6.”

  4

  Calls

  Four months ago, Juan Santiago had been one of the biggest players in the cocaine industry in the seaside city of Cartagena, Colombia. Through meticulous means and by trusting no one with his real identity, he was able to build his smuggling empire from nothing, keeping the face behind the name Juan Santiago a complete mystery. The process had been neither fast nor easy.

  His only business rival was a man by the name of Ricky Serrao, nicknamed “Bloody Ricky” due to the graphic death that came to those who stood in his path, from courtroom judges to snitches within his own organization. While none of these deaths could be attributed to Serrao due to lack of evidence, the Cartagena Chief of Police Captain Javier Aguilar had declared it a city-wide priority that the man be put to justice. Serrao, meanwhile, pleaded innocent of all charges, maintaining that he was a businessman. He loved the spotlight, and he especially enjoyed making a show of publicly writing big checks to charities.

  Cartagena was only big enough for one smuggler, so it was only a matter of time before either Juan Santiago or Ricky Serrao eliminated the other. After finally confronting Ricky on a hellish night a couple months ago involving a drug trip and rescuing his then-girlfriend from the man’s basement, Ricky Serrao had fled the country. But Ricky had mentioned something about a mysterious new third party trying to take over. Now it was just Juan and this new player. All Juan had to do was call up his team and get his operation back up and running again. He had good, reliable people working for him.

  It should have been simple.

  But walking down the street, a burner phone in his hand, the scowl on his face indicated it was anything but simple. He had already called several of the lieutenants and couriers he had employed over the years. None of them had answered the phone numbers scrawled on the torn sheet of notebook paper he kept tucking into and out of his pocket after each failed call.

  Someone’s got to answer, he thought. They can’t all be gone or dead.

  The people he was trying to contact knew him not by Juan or Paul, but by names such as Diego and Franco and Leon. They thought he was just another cog in the great Juan Santiago’s master plan that made them enough money to keep doing their part. Juan Santiago was a fair man to work under.

  So why isn’t anyone answering?

  He walked down a street that normally bustled with tourists. Now it was a tent city—at least on the sidewalks.

  “Spare some coins?” an old man asked, an empty coffee tin in his outstretched hand.

  Juan dug into his pocket and dropped a few coins into the tin. “Why are you out on the street? Are the homeless shelters full?”

  The old man gave a wheezy cough. “Shelter’s been closed for a couple months now.”

  “Why?”

  He used to make a point of regularly walking the streets to see the people he helped. In the business of working at the joint ops center and trying to track down Paul in his free time, he’d temporarily forgotten the less fortunate living in the city.

  “Don’t know. Guess Juan Santiago doesn’t care about us anymore.”

  Juan frowned at the man. “I don’t think that’s it.”

  “How do you figure?” The man coughed, and Juan saw a bad rash on his hand. Juan had made sure that the shelters always had a doctor who could make rounds once or twice a week to tend to the sick.

  “I’m sure something has taken his attention elsewhere. He’ll be back.”

  The old man looked at two barefoot
children sitting on the curb, their stomachs tight across their ribs as they stared across the street at nothing.

  Juan drew a couple bills from his wallet and handed them to the man. “Get yourself something to eat. And feed those two kids as well.”

  A woman in rags came out from under a tent stitched together from blankets and clothing. Three children followed her.

  “What about them?” the man asked.

  “I am sorry,” Juan said, stepping back from the scene.

  “You have more money. I saw it in your wallet.”

  “A few bills.”

  “Your clothes do not have holes in them, sir. You must have more.”

  Juan walked away from the street filled with the homeless. The fact of the homeless shelters closing greatly concerned him, and he knew a person who could help him clear up what had happened. While his accountant was responsible for transferring money from his offshore account each quarter, a woman named Marta withdrew it from a local bank and distributed it among several stash houses throughout the city. She was also the one responsible for taking the money from the stash houses and delivering it to the homeless shelters and orphanages. Marta volunteered at both, so it was easy and safe for her to transport the money.

  He dialed her number.

  “Hello?” a woman’s hushed voice said.

  “Marta? It’s . . .” Juan glanced down at his sheet of paper. “Diego.”

  “Diego? Oh, Diego—”

  “Look, can you talk now?”

  In the background, Juan could hear the clanging of pots and pans. A man was shouting something about bread rolls and soup.

  “I’m at work, but I have a moment.”

  “What happened to the money that goes to the shelters?”

  “The bank account was closed. I couldn’t withdraw any money.”

  “What? When was this?”

  “About a month or two ago. Since I couldn’t get hold of you, I didn’t know who else to tell. Tell Mr. Santiago I’m sorry.”

  Shit.

  He’d have to try to get hold of his accountant, who he’d never actually met. Since Juan didn’t have the man’s phone number, he’d already sent an email, but it had bounced back as undeliverable.

  “It’s okay, Marta. Where are you now?”

  “Barranquilla. I’m working at a bar.”

  A man shouted something in the background, and Marta said she had to go.

  “Wait,” Juan said. “I know it’s unlikely you’ll see him, but there’s a man running around with my face, and he’s killing people. If you see or hear anything about someone who looks like me, can you please let me know?”

  “Um, okay. I really got to go. Bye, Diego.”

  “Bye Marta.”

  Juan knew he had to have sounded weird with that request, but he didn’t have much to go on in tracking Paul down. The guy was a ghost. If CG didn’t get lucky in somehow tracing Paul down, Juan didn’t know how he was going to find him. And he had to be the one to find him, or his identity could be exposed.

  Juan felt exhausted after being called in to the joint ops center early in the morning; he was ready for a nap, so he walked back to his apartment.

  It was a simple apartment, one of several dingy apartments he had lived in while running his operations as Juan Santiago. It wasn’t in the nicest neighborhood, and was the left side of a duplex. His neighbors were rarely home, and he’d never met them which was fine with him. Juan was a man used to keeping to himself.

  He had only the bare necessities: a sofa, a dinner table and two chairs, a bed. He kept his clothes in a makeshift dresser consisting of several cardboard boxes sitting on the bedroom floor. If he had to leave in a hurry, there wasn’t anything here holding him back.

  He had an old gray car sitting out front, and it usually started on the first try. It had been the cheapest vehicle on the lot, and had fit his bill. Juan wasn’t used to splurging—it was harder to fit in that way, and Juan Santiago was a mysterious, faceless person. How Ricky Serrao had finally found out what his competitor looked like was still a mystery to Juan.

  Oh well.

  He tucked the thought away in a corner of his mind with the rest of the stuff he didn’t have time to think about. He set a phone alarm for a couple hours so he’d have plenty of time to get to Sam’s house, and then he closed his eyes.

  Just before he was about to fall asleep, his phone chimed. He looked at it and saw a text from Cali.

  It’s weird that someone’s out there who looks just like you.

  Juan replied with, Yeah.

  He tried to fall asleep after that, but he mostly just tossed and turned.

  5

  Shoot

  The tin can disappeared. One moment it was sitting on the crate, then it was gone.

  “Congratulations. You finally hit it.”

  Juan looked at Sam and laughed, lowering his left hand. Smoke was still streaming from the muzzle as he set the gun on the shooting bench next to the rifles.

  “How many shots did it take?”

  “Twenty-eight,” Juan said.

  “Twenty-eight,” Sam repeated.

  “Well I’d like to see you do better with your left hand,” Juan said as he walked downrange to collect their targets. This was not a formal range. In fact, it was just a grassy stretch of land behind Sam’s rental house. It was almost fifty yards long if you stood against the back of the small house. Trees lined both sides of the makeshift shooting range.

  Behind the crate, a wide wooden backstop collected their bullets. After their extensive exercise this afternoon with various rifles and handguns, the backstop had collected twenty-seven missed shots. Aside from Juan’s left-handed 50-yard attempt to best his own personal record of thirty-four attempts, the rest of their shots had been on target, whether it had been a circle drawn in permanent marker, a human-shaped silhouette, or an aluminum can.

  It had been good practice.

  Juan stooped behind the crate, leaning against the side as he held up the silver can with a hole punched clean through both sides. He could just barely read the words written in marker on the outside. Green beans.

  He walked back and threw it like a basketball at the plastic trash can against the house next to the grill. Sam feinted to the side, then jumped and grabbed the can in midair and shoved it down into the trash can with a grin.

  “Hey I had that,” Juan said.

  “Oh yeah? Well just to be safe, I didn’t want to wait for you to shoot it twenty-seven more times.”

  “You’re not going to let me live that down, are you?”

  “Nope,” Sam said. He stepped inside the small attached garage and dug around in a refrigerator. “Brats alright?”

  “Sure.”

  Sam was being too nice to him. Was he playing some game? Trying to catch Juan doing something Paul wouldn’t do so he could call him out again? Or had hanging out with Sam over the past couple weeks really mellowed the man out? Juan hoped it was the latter, but Sam always seemed so temperamental. He never knew which Sam he was going to get when he talked to him. Earlier at the joint ops center, Juan had clearly sensed some tension, especially when the picture of Paul’s scarred hand had appeared on the screen.

  Sam opened the grill lid and turned on the gas at the source. “I know how you like sausage,” he said. “Remember that deer chili we made that one November back home?”

  Juan looked at him, trying to gauge whether Sam was joshing him. He had learned from prior experience not to blindly pretend to remember something he didn’t. Sometimes his friends liked playing games on him at his expense.

  He knew that “home” for Sam was some small town in a state called Oklahoma. Juan had never been to Oklahoma, let alone the US. Maybe someday he would, though. His love of American TV and movies had instilled a desire to see it in person.

  “I still can’t remember that kind of stuff from my past,” Juan said lightheartedly.

  There was a subtle whoosh as the flames took. Sam shut the grill
lid. “Damn concussion. Reminds me of the possums me and the guys would bash sometimes late in the fall.”

  “Sounds violent.”

  “Says a guy operating in Colombia,” Sam laughed. “Damn things were a nuisance on my granddad’s orchard. Fools would get drunk on the apples that fell. They’d ferment after a while of sitting there and were irresistible to the animals. The deer—you should have seen the deer that would wander up and start munching on them. One morning my granddad found a buck lying on his back with his legs up in the air, his hooves just pawing at the sky.”

  “That’s funny,” Juan said. “He bash it, too?”

  “Nah. You only do that to the smaller animals. Possums and raccoons and the like. I’m no poacher, either, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m a conservationist.”

  Juan had never hunted an animal for sport; hunting was generally banned in Colombia. You could fish in some places, but that was about all, as far as he knew. “I’m just messing with you,” Juan said as he sat at a picnic table next to the grill.

  “Some of the guys back home were asking about you when you were undercover. They said they never saw a guy who could shoot like you could. Well, except me, of course,” Sam chuckled. He cut the brats out of the packaging with a pocketknife. “You remember Donny and Malcolm?”

  Juan shook his head.

  “Army buddies of mine who retired early from the service to live life in the sticks again. Good guys. Mal—that one time he said you looked like a Mexican on account of you being shorter and your skin color, and then you drew your gun and shot a beer bottle off a fence post at thirty yards.” Sam laughed. “Guy about shit his pants. And the way he was apologizing to you afterward that he didn’t mean nothin’ by what he said. Good times.”