by Andy McNab
‘The bitch was smart enough to know she needed a new Big Swinging Dick to protect her and her family – but it wasn’t easy. She told me and the dogs that whoever she attached herself to had to be smart enough to stay at the top of the greasy pole – with her help, of course.’
‘She found someone?’
‘Sure she did. Husband number two was a big-time gang leader in Acapulco. And it was just peachy to start with. The kids were safe, the PRI were still in power, and everyone was making money. But then the cracks started to show. She came round to thinking that he also suffered from limited horizons.’
He adjusted himself in his chair and closely examined the pipe, debating another hit.
‘She formed a plan early on to get rid of him and have Jesús Junior take over, but had to wait until the boy was older – ready to rule the roost. Her game plan was royally fucked for a year or two when the PRI lost their grip and the gangs went to war. But Liseth knew there would be a power vacuum at some point. They kept killing each other, she kept waiting – and then she saw her opportunity.’
‘To kill off number two?’
‘You got it.’ This time he pointed at me instead of heading for the pipe. ‘He didn’t find his way into the firing line as quickly as she’d have liked. Rumour has it, she instructed Peregrino to give her husband both barrels, point blank in the fucking face. Rumour? I fucking know it for fact, man. She told us. We were her pets, but we were also her sounding board.’
‘We?’
‘The German Shepherds – three of the fuckers – and me. They were pampered, even shampooed and blow-dried every other day, man. Unlike me. But she also had their claws ripped out so they didn’t make any noise on her marble floors.
‘We were the only living things to hear her deepest thoughts. She’d tell us how weak her husbands were, how proud she was of her fucking son, you name it. She didn’t ask for our opinions, of course. Just our devotion. I figured it was best to act as confused as the dogs were – and to leave her with the impression all I wanted to know was when I’d be fed.
‘Anyway, she told us that sweet little Jesús left him with half a head, tied to a chair in the middle of a fucking roundabout on the Costera, to put commuters off their breakfast tacos.’
16
‘The bitch saw the future.’
The way Dino was studying the pipe you’d have thought he was valuing it for Antiques Roadshow. ‘She knew the gangs would eventually choose sides and amalgamate into full-blown cartels … and she also knew that would keep escalating the war. The bigger the cartels got, the more power they’d want. She’d seen all that shit in Colombia.
‘That was when she set her little boy on the path towards becoming a paramilitary leader. She knew there was more chance of surviving the war and winning the peace if they had no allegiance to any one of the new cartels. She did her deals behind closed doors – and Jesús followed her instructions to the letter. He became El Peregrino, like some fucking Mexican version of Allah’s favourite prophet. There are no pictures of the fuck. They knew Facebook wasn’t the answer, man. Just the name, and the awe they’ve created around it, is enough for now. But he’s fucking worshipped by those who toed the line.’
‘And those who didn’t?’
‘Those who didn’t, he fucked up the ass.’ He put down the pipe and massaged his cheeks with his hands, like he was rubbing shaving oil into a beard. His voice dropped; he was in memory mode once more. ‘Sometimes she took pictures of me on her cell to send as invitations to her Come-and-Poke-Fun-at-the-DEA-Gimp dinner parties. She dressed me up like a fucking jester, a clown, even a fucking orang-utan one time. Sometimes they’d talk about making me jump out of El Peregrino’s birthday cake … or killing me right there … Shit …’ His right hand moved to the back of his head, as if it was going to help him sort out his mental filing cabinet.
I didn’t want him to play with his thoughts: I wanted him focused. ‘What else did the She Wolf talk about?’
He came right back on track. ‘The bitch used to tell her dogs and me how she’d guided her protégé through the war – decided who to fight for, who to destroy – and what she thought of the government and the evolving cartels. They were weak, in her book – and, like I said, she despises weakness more than anything. As far as she’s concerned the weak deserve to be exploited.’
Dino’s jaw clenched. ‘That fucker Peregrino – you gotta watch him, man. He’s his mother’s son. If there wasn’t the right toy in his cereal box to complete his collection, he’d want the grocery store manager killed.
‘Yeah, sounds funny, doesn’t it?’ His smile was bleak, and slid swiftly from his face. ‘Until you find out it’s true. It really happened, when he was just fucking fourteen. A fraction older than my boys are now …’
I could see him wandering off again. ‘So she’s got him in pole position?’
‘Getting there. They even have their own cell-phone network. Jesus for Peace has telecoms towers like you wouldn’t believe – their very own fucking national encrypted communications system. That’s pole position and then some, man.’ He arched his neck and pushed his head back against the leather.
I sat back too, thinking about the investment cost, innovation and infrastructure required to build a system like that. Then I remembered my iPhone’s performance in DC: just a few miles from the centre of the world’s most powerful capital city, and only one bar of signal. ‘SIM cards and organ harvesting … It’s one hell of a portfolio …’
Dino closely scrutinized the ceiling. ‘They’ve got a whole heap of other businesses too, man. They’ve got coal mines, oil off the Gulf coast, all kinds of shit.’ His eye line returned briefly to Planet Earth. ‘But it’s just the beginning. This boy is going all the way, unless someone stops him. Liseth is set on him following in the footsteps of his Uncle Pablo. We’re talking the fucking presidency, man, Mexico’s answer to Barack Hussein Obama.’
Surreal, but it made sense to me. El Peregrino and his mum might have been Colombian once, but what the fuck did that matter? Peru had had a Japanese immigrant’s son as its president for ten corrupt and very violent years. And, as Dino said, Escobar had nearly made it to the top job in Colombia without much more of a skill set than knowing an opportunity when he saw one and not worrying too much about who he bludgeoned to death on the way. Liseth, on the other hand, had it all, and she knew it.
‘It may take another ten years, Nick, but it’s gonna fucking happen. That bitch might be one fucking crazy dog-whispering psycho, but she has a blueprint. She read Kitson, man. Two of his books, over and fucking over.’
‘Gangs and Counter-gangs and Low Intensity Operations?’
I couldn’t tell if he was surprised that I knew them.
‘I’ll never forget them, man – the covers had the first English words I’d seen for one fuck of a long time …’ He rubbed his stump to liven it up a little, and levered himself off the La-Z-Boy.
‘Peregrino is organizing all los vigilantes. He’s forming a country wide community police network that’s funded and trained by Jesus for Peace. In maybe seven or eight years, he’ll not only be the bringer of health, education and clean water to the masses, he’ll be the patron saint of protection from the cartels, gangsters, even the fucking sex offenders.
‘He’ll have the masses totally onside, because he’ll provide them with everything the government are fucking up. That’s when his fucking supernatural presence will get a face. By then he’ll be the government in everything but name. Election will be nothing more than a formality. That bitch will have him running everything down there, man – everything. Then we’ll see how far their tentacles can really reach.’
He stopped pacing and looked down at me. ‘You think that’s crazy?’
‘Sane as you and me, mate.’
He nodded. Irony had never been his strong suit.
‘Fucking right, man. I told you, Nick, she thinks differently – I know her. Everything she’s dreamed of has worked out f
or her. That’s why I wrote a paper on how to squeeze those drug fucks out of existence. We need to keep a very close eye on people like her. Kitson knew it. I know it. And you clearly know that Kitson shit, but the State Department? They got no balls to take action, man.’
Dino’s eyes drilled into me. ‘Let me tell you why I really want those cunts dead.’
17
‘He was playing polo against a team from Tijuana. Fuck knows why anybody bothered turning up. Peregrino’s team always won. That was the rule.’
Dino resumed the position on the La-Z-Boy. He wasn’t looking at me any more: he was staring at the ceiling again, like it was a cinema screen.
‘So this one day Liseth stops the game and calls Peregrino over. We’re with her, on our leashes, sitting at her feet. She says Morales, one of Peregrino’s players, has been disloyal. She don’t say how and she don’t say why. And Peregrino? He asks her jack.
‘The fat fuck steers his pony back onto the lawn, goes up to this guy and swings a mallet straight into his head. Morales has one of those polo helmets on, complete with face guard, but he still goes down like a sack of shit. Even when he hits the ground, Peregrino ain’t finished with him. He leans out of his saddle and rips the fucking helmet off this guy. By now he’s begging, screaming at him to stop, but no way. The fat fuck swings that mallet again, and again, and again … Jesus Christ, man, you ever seen what one of those things can do to a guy’s head? Imagine taking a sledgehammer to a watermelon. Blood everywhere. Brains and shit all over the grass.’
His eyes were still fixed on the scene playing out on the imaginary screen above him. I wasn’t too sure I was needed there.
‘Without even blinking, Peregrino removes a fleck from his jodhpurs and restarts the game. They play to the end. The body gets trampled to fuck. When it’s all over, Liseth’s gofers gather around it like flies. They dump it in a wheelbarrow, then about ten of them give the grass a good spray – would you believe, with bottles of fucking mineral water?’
He pushed himself upright again.
‘I was numb, man. Totally – fucking – numb. It was like nothing had happened. I felt no emotion at all. I was just unbelievably glad it wasn’t me. And I made a cold, clear promise to myself. The first chance I got not to be on the business end of that mallet, I was going to take it. You know what I’m saying.’
It wasn’t a question.
‘But later, when I got back to what I used to think of as the real world – maybe a couple of months out of hospital – that whole experience hit me like a fucking express train. Whoosh. Slammed straight into me, man. I couldn’t clear it from my head – and then it started kicking up all the other kinds of bad shit in there.
‘There’s one nightmare I keep having, man. This fucking nightmare, I’m running through the scrub, trying to escape El Peregrino. He’s in his fancy fucking polo gear, riding his fancy fucking horse. Calling for me, like he’s looking for a lost dog.
‘He finds me and he’s hitting me over the head with his mallet. I ain’t got no fucking helmet. I really go down. And he’s dismounting to fuck me up, and I’m, like, begging, covering my head. Then the bitch is there with him, high above me on her horse. She’s screaming down at me: “No one runs away from me! No one!” She’s screaming it, like, over and over. Then she’s telling her fucking psycho of a son to make it slow, man, make it painful.
‘Peregrino don’t need to be told twice. He whirls the mallet around his head and hammers it down – but now it’s not me lying there any more. I’m close by, watching my partner’s head being split open like a grapefruit by los fucking vigilantes.
‘I start reliving that shit again. What’s left of him gets showered with fucking mineral water. But it doesn’t clean the grass, just spreads the mess. It’s a total mess. I’m a fucking mess.’
‘Mate, you’re not, you’re—’
‘Yeah? So how come sometimes I’m even afraid to look up in case that fat fuck is there, ready to play polo with my head? How come I feel like I’m surrounded by a million people, all taking my breath away? Why does my heart beat so fast, Nick? Why do I get so scared when someone gets too close to me? It’s like a tornado, crushing and tearing up everything in its path.’
He turned towards me again, eyes wild.
‘I’m scared of the world, and scared of everyone in it. Every fucking day is a struggle. Every one. I want it to stop.’
‘But you escaped, yeah? That bit’s over. Done.’
‘Really? You think so? Look at me … That day – that day at the polo – I knew it was now or never. They were going to kill me for sure, one way or another.
‘A couple of nights later, the kennel girl leaves my cage open like she sometimes does while she goes to fill up my water bowl. That’s all I need. That’s it. I’m out of there. I take her down, tie her up, gag her, run. Man, do I fucking run …’
His face crumples.
‘One of those fucking dogs comes after me …’
‘I know, mate. I saw the scars.’
‘Those scars, I can handle.’ There were tears in his eyes. ‘It’s the others …’
He went silent for a while, then gave another heart-wrenching sob. ‘I thought the dogs were my friends, man. We shared everything. We even had to listen to Liseth’s psycho shit together.’
‘What happened?’
‘I guess I should have grabbed a knife or something, on my way out of there …’
I knew what was coming.
‘One of the Shepherds. I have to kill it with my bare hands. Push the poor fucker’s eyes out first. Then I run …’
He sighed.
‘Almost made it, too. Almost all the way across the polo lawn to the scrub. Eight hundred, man. I’m maybe twenty metres from cover when some fucker spots me and gives me a burst with an MG4. You know what I’m saying, you know the weapon …’
Of course I did: a Heckler & Koch 5.56 belt-fed machine-gun. I gave him a nod.
‘So I make it into the scrub but they keep hosing the area down and I take a round.’ He tapped his knee in case I needed the hollow reminder. ‘Can you believe that, man? The fucker wasn’t even aiming.
‘I manage to drag myself further into the undergrowth. It’s real dense, so I just keep crawling. Three fucking days crawling through it, until I find myself near El Veintiuno. By then I know the leg is history but, fuck it, I’m alive. So I steal a truck and get myself to Acapulco, using my good leg, until I crash into a police convoy near the coast.
‘That’s where the Feds are, man – where the tourists hang out. Not the local guys, they’d have handed me right back. The Feds make some calls, the DEA have me medevaced north, and here I am.’
Dino shook his head. His eyes never left the ceiling.
‘Except that I left a big part of myself behind. I can’t close my eyes without seeing their faces. I check windows, doors, every fucking lock and bolt, every step of the way. I’ve no fucking patience with anyone. I can’t sit still for more than five minutes unless I’m plugged into the Xbox. Shitloads of Xbox, just to keep a grip on … something …
‘I get disoriented … displaced … One day I lost it on the freeway … forgot who I was, forgot how to drive. It was like I’d completely lost my mind. For a few weeks I managed to keep it together on the outside, then got to the point where I almost couldn’t leave the house. There was no safe place in the world for me.
‘I was an easy-going guy. You knew me, man, back in the day. I was married, good kids. But when I came home, everything went haywire. I was on edge, and I mean seriously. Short temper, short fuse. The smallest thing could set me off. I’d blow up if my wife was five minutes late. Out in the field, five minutes late can get you killed! She never really understood. She said she did, but I could see the fucking pity in her eyes too …
‘I started in on our boys. I was constantly on their case. I was so trapped inside my own fucking head I couldn’t feel their pain. I had no idea what was going on around me.
‘I was still fighting a war I didn’t understand against an enemy I couldn’t kill.’
His gaze finally drifted back in my direction and he lay there staring into my eyes, looking to me for answers I couldn’t give.
18
South Union Street, Alexandria, Virginia
15.33 hrs
Ye olde towne north of the Beltway consisted of a labyrinth of brick buildings that must have been thrown together at quirky angles by a nineteenth-century feng-shui enthusiast. Most of them were now boutiques peddling high-end visitor tat or lace cushions and scented candles. A twenty-first-century Starbucks rubbed shoulders with them, doing its best to blend in. I sat inside it with a brew in a paper cup; I wasn’t sure if Dino would want to stay or go somewhere more private.
I was doing a little research on my iPhone when I spotted his truck through the rain-stained windows, heading for the marina car park on the Potomac less than a hundred metres away.
I’d suggested we met closer to the airport after he’d checked out the Academy databases. I needed to travel down to Narcopulco and get on with it.
Dino appeared with a bottle of mineral water in one hand and a plastic cup in the other. He looked a whole lot better than he had this morning, but still ragged. He sat down and straightened out his prosthetic beneath the table.
I put my iPhone down so he couldn’t see the screen. ‘Any luck?’
He leaned towards me as a couple of teenagers in sweats, rain-soaked and clinging, made their way past us to a window seat. The light had come back into his eyes. ‘A female Hispanic, mid-thirties, has been at the house.’ He tapped an index finger on the table-top in case I hadn’t tuned in to the significance of his announcement. ‘I don’t know if she’s still there, but for sure she’s not a whore. The hookers come in busloads, for the parties, but leave the next morning. El Peregrino is a possessive fucker – that’s the way Liseth has raised him. So if she’s there, he ain’t going to let her out of his sight. The fucker takes what he wants – and hangs on to it.’
