Silencer

by Andy McNab

  I did remember. How could I not? I remembered him staring at me through that window frame. I remembered wondering if he’d wake up at three in the morning with the same recurring nightmare.

  Dino knew exactly what was going through my mind. ‘Now that’s kinda funny, Nick, don’t you think? Poetic, almost.’

  It was hard to tell if he had a smile on his face or a grimace.

  7

  ‘Why Peregrino?’

  ‘He’s supernatural, man. He’s like some fucking god down there. Remember the two sisters? They’re history. A vendetta killing, two thousand nine.’ Dino suddenly sounded relieved to have an audience. ‘The kid Jesús was at war, trying to take over the Tijuana cartel’s plaza. The cartel paid the Zetas to fight for them, but Jesús just kicked their ass, man. So the Zetas raped and killed the girls – even posted the killings on YouTube. It happens a lot, stays on for a day or so.’

  I knew about Los Zetas. Thirty-one deserters from the Mexican Army’s Airborne Special Forces, originally linked to the Gulf cartel on the west coast, had pulled together one of the most powerful paramilitary groups in the region, and they’d been murdering, raping and hacking people’s faces off ever since.

  Back in the nineties, as the DEA targeted the air and sea routes into the US, the Mexicans had developed their old marijuana-smuggling donkey trails across the border into six-lane cocaine super-highways that became known as the plazas. Then Escobar and the Wolf were killed, and after years as the Colombians’ drug mules, the poor relations finally started calling the shots. When their government waded in to help, it was the icing on the cake.

  The Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, had held power in Mexico City for seventy years. The police and the military weren’t complaining: they took tens of millions in bungs, and the politicians didn’t do too badly either. Bizarrely, it brought stability to the drugs trade. The PRI would smooth things over when gang warfare broke out – like Relate, but without the tea and biscuits – and even allocated access to the plazas.

  Everything ran like clockwork – until the Mexican voters finally got fed up with being shat on and the PRI lost the 2000 election. What followed was a total gangfuck. At least seven cartels started beating the shit out of each other, and that was just for starters. It got so bad that sometimes one half of a cartel turned on the other half.

  They continued to battle with each other for control of the plazas, the crucial northern border cities, like Ciudad Jerez and Tijuana, and strategic ports like Acapulco – for years the holder of first prize in Mexico’s annual highest-homicide-rate contest. The Zetas – and others like them – had taken the contest to a new level. The era of the pistol-, rifle- and chainsaw-toting brigand was over; these boys were heavily armed, well-trained professionals, who’d changed sides for a slice of the action until they’d decided they wanted it all.

  A succession of presidents have minced around in army uniforms for the last few years, waving an angry finger on TV and promising to wage the mother of all battles against the bad guys. The military did launch the odd lightning strike, but it was never much more than a PR stunt. Like the police, they lacked the will, training, manpower and firepower to do the cartels any permanent damage.

  Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, the gangs usually just waited for them to go away. But when they did stand and fight, they won – as you do when you’re carrying M4 carbines with under-slung grenade launchers and all sorts of state-of-the-art weaponry smuggled south from the US, and RPG7s, machine-guns, fragmentation grenades and light tanks from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras, left over from the Cold War conflicts of the eighties.

  As well as distributing the lion’s share of heroin from Afghanistan, Mexico itself was now also a major producer. The cartels had their fingers in every pie, and controlled more than 90 per cent of the drugs entering the US. They generated at least fifty billion US dollars a year; more revenue than almost half of the Fortune 500 companies.

  Since 2006, around seventy thousand Mexican citizens had paid the price of this bonanza – decapitated and hung over motorway bridges, or left at the roadside with their entrails pouring out or their tongues ripped through their throats. No wonder the PRI were about to grab back power after twelve years in the wilderness. Better the devil you know …

  Time alone would tell whether they’d be able to get everyone round the table like in the good old days.

  8

  There was no stopping Dino now. ‘The Zetas used to be the big dogs. They might tell the world they still are, and the world might think so – but everyone down there knows better. They haven’t been since that day in 2009. The Pilgrim is top of their shit heap.’

  ‘His dad would have been bursting with pride.’

  ‘He was twelve when you zapped the old man. We should have taken him out too.’ Dino sighed. ‘He’s nearly thirty now. His birthday’s coming up. November sixteen. I know how I’d like to celebrate …’

  He took a swig and so did I, but I wouldn’t be drinking any more. The coffee was as weak as the tea would have been.

  ‘Damn right.’ Dino put his mug down and gave his leg another tap. ‘He owes me.’

  He gazed into the middle distance for a moment. I thought he might have spotted a dust particle.

  ‘I was lifted in Nuevo León state, about fifty Ks south of the border. You know about los vigilantes, Nick?’

  I knew insecurity dominated the lives of Mexican ‘real people’. Caught between warring cartels with the law-enforcement agencies doing fuck-all to help, the locals had had to take things into their own hands. They couldn’t afford to pay for organized protection, so had to police their own backyard against sex offenders, thieves and murderers. It was basically every man for himself.

  ‘So one day a couple of kids, six, seven years old, were kidnapped from a park. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time, only been in the area for two minutes when the car was rammed – simply because it was an unknown. They dragged us out, and started fucking us up.’

  Dino’s eyes burned as he relived the moment. ‘They went for us with lumps of concrete, Nick, iron bars … You name it, they fucking piled in with it. They took a shovel ten fucking times to my friend’s head, man. He left three fucking kids behind … Fucking animals …’

  I let him struggle with the images in his head for a while, but not so long that I lost him. I’d seen this shit before and knew tonight could end up with me not learning a thing I wanted to know. At the same time, he had to work it through so we could get to where I needed to be.

  ‘Sounds like a fucking nightmare …’

  ‘They frisked the body for cash and found his badge. Straight away some bright fuck in the crowd knew there was money to be made. Maybe they could sell me to the paramilitaries, or even to a cartel.

  ‘It wasn’t exactly music to my ears, man – but as long as they kept moving me, I was alive. And back then I thought living was all that mattered.’

  He slumped back in the La-Z-Boy, his head resting on the cushion. ‘They chose to sell me to Peregrino’s fucking religious maniacs. Jesús de la Paz – Jesus for Peace. You get it? Fucking hilarious.’ He wasn’t smiling.

  ‘So what did they do – sell you on?’

  He shook his head, a look of infinite sadness in his eyes. ‘He gave me to his fucking mother as a present.’ His face contorted. ‘Locked me up like a fucking animal in a cage. Over a year, man, a fucking year. She treated the fucking dogs better. She’d bring me out, parade me around, no clothes or some fucking fancy dress, beaten, on a chain, all kinds of shit. To their friends, to other cartels – their very own DEA gimp, ha-fucking-ha. Kicked about, used as an ashtray, a fucking footstool.’ He had to stop: he’d run out of breath.

  I leaned in. ‘They didn’t try to trade you back to the DEA?’

  ‘For what? I had more value to her as a toy, a fucking curiosity for her amusement. I pretended I was Italian-American and didn’t understand Spanish. I expected to be interrogated for infor
mation, but the fucks are so arrogant they couldn’t give a shit what a low-life grunt would know that could possibly help them. Why the fuck should she care? They’re untouchable down there. Neither of those fucks even saw me as a fucking human being.’

  He drifted off into his own tortured world.

  ‘That fucking bitch … Liseth … Remember her, Nick? Yeah, Liseth … We thought she might need some protection without the Wolf around, didn’t we?’

  His eyes darted towards me.

  ‘The trophy wife?’ I grinned at him. ‘I can remember you wanting to fuck her …’ It wasn’t saying much. He’d wanted to fuck anything in a skirt back then.

  ‘We got that shit completely wrong. She’s a praying mantis, man. You remember we were told that Jesús used to read the classics? You believe it, that fat fuck reading Voltaire? You remember, Nick?’

  I could only nod: nothing was going to stop him now. ‘I learned all about that bitch, lying there in my cage, playing the dumb-ass. She was the one that got the Wolf into all the politics and philosophy shit. She was the one that made him think everybody needed encouragement – got him to believe he was the defender of civil liberties – leaving herself plenty of space to fuck everybody over.

  ‘And now that fuck of a son is one dangerous, fucked-up individual – and, have no doubt, Jesús de la Paz is one dangerous, fucked-up organization. But believe me, man, Peregrino is just the poster-boy for all that shit. The bitch runs the show.’

  He hit the La-Z-Boy button and hauled himself to his feet. ‘I had thirteen fucking months of her in my face. She has that boy of hers on a tighter lead than her dogs. He makes no move without her say-so.’

  He started limping up and down the room. I didn’t know if it was anger or cramp. ‘For her, the Wolf was really just a pussy. That, in her mind, was why the cartels got fucked over. But she’s taking care of business, man. She might have started off as some street kid with a great ass, but she used it, man – she used it to get places. She used it to get an education and a position in life. But that doesn’t make her any less of a dangerous motherfucker.’

  He stopped pacing and stared at the floor, mumbling away to himself. His breathing was quicker and shallower by the moment.

  ‘If you hadn’t done the job for her, she’d have either killed her old man herself or got him to fuck Escobar up the ass and take control. Like I said, man, she’s a praying mantis. But you’re the one who needs to do the praying.’

  9

  ‘You know where they are?’

  ‘Right there in Narcopulco.’

  ‘Narco-who?’

  ‘It’s what they’re calling Acapulco, these days. They live outside of town.’

  ‘Is that where they kept you?’

  He nodded, eyes still rooted to the floor.

  I let him try to process the pictures bouncing around in his head. They would have been there ever since Liseth and her crew had worked their magic on him.

  He headed back to the La-Z-Boy a lot more slowly this time, and didn’t bother activating the footrest before collapsing into the chair. ‘These fucks, they’ve got to be stopped, Nick. It’s not just Mexico that’s fucked, man, but us up here as well. We got a war going on that’s bigger than Iraq and Afghanistan put together, right on our fucking stoop. It’s banging on the front door, man, and it’s only going to get worse. We ain’t seen nothing yet.’

  He lost interest in the floor and lifted his head. He looked sadder than ever. ‘The fucking drugs, man. They’re ripping the heart out of this country.’ His eyes wobbled like they were on springs. ‘Robbing people of their … family … friends … self-respect …’

  He slumped back in the black leather and ran his hand over the little hair he had left. ‘You know what? Before I got lifted, I was really going places. Things were going good for me. But look at me now, a fucking exhibit at an academy freak show …’

  His eyes burned.

  He leaned forward and cradled his face in his hands. He looked like he was crying.

  ‘Nick, I’m kind of wiped out. It’s been a long day for me. I’m going to hit the sack, OK?’ He raised his head once more. ‘You’re in the guest room.’ He pointed to the far end of the house, across the hallway and past the front door. ‘You need anything, go get it. There’s a bathroom, all that kinda thing.’

  I stood up as he limped away. ‘Thanks, Dino. Maybe you can help me with the stuff I need to know in the morning, yeah?’

  He headed for the stairs, not looking back. ‘Sure, sure. No problem. Later.’

  I binned the brew in the spotless sink and scouted around for the teabags. There wasn’t a kettle. I switched on one of the infrared hob rings and quarter-filled a saucepan from the tap, then threw three of the Lipton’s bags into a fresh mug. I rinsed my old one, gave it a wipe, and replaced it carefully in the parade line. If it was a millimetre out, it might push him over the edge. I’d seen it happen.

  I opened the fridge door to find not very much. Two half-empty packs of cold cuts, four cans of Mountain Dew, a plastic carton of 2 per cent milk, and that was it.

  The interior light gave me a glimpse of something on the nearby wall – pencil marks charting two kids’ heights as they grew up. James and Jacob were obviously growing fast. The last recorded score for James was on his ninth birthday, and for Jacob, the smaller one, on his seventh, six months ago.

  I went to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Dino – you want anything from the shop, mate? I’ve got to go and get a toothbrush, that kind of shit.’

  ‘No … no … I’m good …’ The bout of coughing that followed said otherwise. ‘Take my key. It’s on the table in the hall. Lock up tight on the way out.’

  I got back from the mall about an hour later with washing and shaving kit and some clothes, the normal urban-armour stuff: cheap jeans, dark blue wash-and-weep shirts, underwear and socks. I’d also treated myself to a foot-long Philly cheese Subway and a party-size bottle of Coke.

  I heard Dino bumping around upstairs, but not for long. I fell asleep, fucked over by jet-lag.

  10

  I was woken by a cry in the night.

  It was followed seconds later by a desperate-sounding sob.

  I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat there for a moment, rubbing my face back to life. Then I stood up and reached for the light switch. I couldn’t find it, so felt for the door handle instead, stumbled out into the hallway and had better luck there.

  I went up the stairs and put my ear to Dino’s bedroom door. I heard another muffled sob, then muttering, garbled words and numbers. Not much of it made sense until he started to scream.

  ‘No! Please … No! No! Don’t … please … don’t, please! Liseth … please, tell him, no!’

  I stood there as the screams subsided.

  This time I heard the numbers more clearly: ‘8 – 1 – 8 – 2 – 8 – 3 …’

  Then the sobs took over once more.

  I turned the handle and went inside. It was dark, but in the glow from downstairs I could see him kneeling on the floor next to his bed, swatting invisible insects from his face.

  I put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Mate, it’s OK … Dino, it’s OK. Just a dream, that’s all.’

  He opened his eyes. He wrapped an arm around my leg, pulling me towards him.

  ‘It’s OK, you’re at home. It’s safe.’

  He seemed to come to his senses, released his grip and crawled back onto the bed. But I could see enough to know he was absolutely distraught.

  There was a half-empty glass of water on the bedside cabinet. I passed it to him. ‘Here, have some of this.’

  He took it from me and raised it to his lips. Then he cleared his throat, looking embarrassed. ‘Thanks, man. Thank you.’

  ‘You taking medication, mate? Anything I can get you? More water?’

  He shook his head, like he was trying to clear the demons that had sparked this outburst. ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Couple of m
inutes. You only just woke me.’

  ‘I was having a nightmare? I can’t even remember what it was about.’ He tugged his soaking wet sweatshirt away from his skin as I got to my feet.

  ‘It happens. You OK now?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Sure. Thanks.’

  ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

  ‘Yeah … OK, man … Thanks for the drink.’

  I retreated to the landing and closed his door behind me. I understood the pain in his head. And it made me feel mightily relieved that I wasn’t one of those poor fuckers who couldn’t process the trauma, then cut away from it.

  11

  My body kept telling me I still needed sleep, but I fought not to close my eyes again.

  I tapped my iPhone: 01.18.

  I didn’t want to lie there and think too much about Dino’s pain. It wasn’t going to help him, and it certainly wasn’t going to help me. I decided to go walkabout to keep my head busy.

  I made my way into the living room and flicked on the light. Everything was as sterile as we’d left it. Dino hadn’t sneaked back down and emptied a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. The kitchen, too, was spotlessly clean. I noticed a door off to the left and opened it, as you do when you’re being nosy. It was an office.

  Dino’s PC stood on a desk in the corner. The pinboard behind it was covered with printouts and newspaper cuttings. When I moved closer, I could see some were in Spanish, some in English. The headlines I could understand spoke of Mexican gang shootings and murders. I couldn’t read the Spanish captions but the pictures were mostly of decapitated bodies sprawled in dusty streets.

  To the left of it was a corkboard with a montage of photographs: the usual mishmash of family snaps, some black-and-white, some colour, all showing a life that Dino had once had. Wedding pix, with Dino centre stage – a Dino I recognized a whole lot better than the one upstairs. The bride was blonde and good-looking, a touch of Angelina Jolie about her. Then the two boys, at all the different stages: big ears; no teeth; birthday parties; school teams.