The Shadow Cartel (The Dominic Grey Series Book 4)

by Layton Green

  All in all, it looked more like the backdrop to a Colombian Sound of Music than a hotbed of Palo Mayombe and drug cartels.

  They pulled into Salento, one of the prettiest towns Grey had ever seen, a handsome colonial square cradled by the rippling slopes of coffee country, mist strung like gauze across the tops of the peaks.

  Grey spoke to the driver in Spanish. “La Finca. Can you take me there?”

  The driver wagged a finger and pointed at a vintage jeep covered in stickers on the far side of the square. “They can,” the driver said. “The road is very steep.”

  “Isn’t there another taxi?” Grey asked. Getting into an unlicensed vehicle in Colombia was asking for trouble. “A four-by-four?”

  “That is the taxi,” the driver said.

  Grey and Fred exchanged a look. They had already decided Fred would stay in town and dig for information on Palo, while Grey visited the coffee farm.

  Fred smirked and spoke to Grey in English. “You’re the one who turned down the driver.”

  Outside the Bogotá airport, pollution hung in the air like secondhand smoke. Lana, dressed in jeans and a blue shawl, instructed her driver to take her to a downtown hotel that was a short walk from Cuernos, a bar and nightclub in La Candelaria. Tomorrow she would investigate the residence of Julio Ganador. Tonight she would look for Doctor Zombie.

  Cuernos was where her investigation from a year before had ended—the last breadcrumb on the trail to Señor Guiñol. The rumor on the street was that Guiñol’s people frequented the nightclub, but after weeks of mingling with the urban sharks who hung there, she never found a link, and other duties had pulled her away from the case.

  As the taxi lurched from red light to red light in the traffic-choked streets, inching through corridors of soot-stained apartment blocks, Lana soaked up the city, getting back into character. Bogotá was not a warm place, tongues and libidos loosened by a tropical breeze. It was cold, stern, and haughty, mimicking the peaks that enclosed the city like some gargantuan stone fence. A city that rewarded competence more than charm, formality more than invention, power more than money.

  She ran through the highlights of the previous investigation in her mind, in preparation for the night’s charade. Someone in that bar could lead her to Doctor Zombie, she felt it in her bones. And Doctor Zombie could lead her to the General.

  Doctor Zombie. Señor Guiñol. No one even knew his real name. The limited knowledge Lana possessed was hearsay, gathered from drug chatter and her previous investigation.

  Señor Guiñol was reputed to have been a fixture of the Bogotáno underworld during the drug wars, but dropped off the radar after the death of Pablo Escobar. Whether that meant he had lost his protection and gone to work for the General, or simply that the climate had changed, she didn’t know.

  But who was he? The CIA knew nothing, the DEA less. So a year ago, Lana had gotten on a plane to Bogotá.

  Her cover was Mariana Arboleda, a Cuban American playgirl from Miami with a trust fund and a wild streak, known to have a penchant for designer drugs, nightclubs, and men to whom violence came easily. The identity allowed her to lounge with high society types during the day and scour the bars and clubs at night.

  After swimming through the incessant traffic, pollution, noise, and crime of the city center, Lana felt as if she had stepped through a portal to another dimension when she found Usaquén, the crème de la crème of Bogotá’s neighborhoods, a gem of restored colonial architecture and leafy parks. The calm felt surreal, manufactured. A bubble of order inside the seething chaos of Bogotá, ready to pop at any time and let the barbarians stream through the gates.

  After a few weeks of martini lunches, Lana managed to ingratiate herself with a group of society women who were the wives and lovers of drug traffickers. The Bogotános possessed a strange relationship with the violence of the cartels, both loathing and glorifying them in the media, trying to understand how their entire city had been held hostage by animals. Insider stories about the narco life filled the pages of popular magazines, serial dramas about fictional cartels had become some of the most watched shows on television. It reminded Lana of the obsession in the U.S. with shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, a flirtation with the dark side of the human psyche.

  From the cartel mistresses, tittering fake blondes with enough silicone to float Detroit, Lana learned about a name whispered in cartel circles, a frightening figure known as Doctor Zombie who prowled the streets of Bogotá. He was the leader of an urban cult—yes, Lana recalled, the word cult had been used—hired by the cartels to strike terror into the hearts of politicians and rival cartels. This made sense: Bogotá had never been home to any one powerful cartel, but instead had become a battleground for their constant internecine and political wars.

  Eventually Lana pieced together a rough sketch of Doctor Zombie’s background. He had once been a respected pharmacist—since no one knew his real name, it was impossible to verify the story—who often invited his customers for coffee in the back of his shop. Respected, that was, until a jealous husband, suspicious of his wife’s lengthy visits to her pharmacist, burst into the back room and found Doctor Zombie straddling her naked body. When the enraged husband barreled forward, the good doctor injected him with a powerful sedative and fled town.

  The wife claimed to have no memory of the illicit encounter. The husband didn’t believe her story, until the police found bottles full of scopolamine extract in the pharmacist’s work room. They also found traces of the drug in the box wine he kept in the fridge, in bottles of Coca-Cola, in a plate of cookies, and even on some of the magazines displayed for his patients’ perusal.

  As the story went, the next time Guiñol surfaced was in the Bogotáno underworld, a fiendish criminal known as Doctor Zombie who used his pharmaceutical concoctions to paralyze his prey. Lana could find no mention of his crimes in Colombian newspapers or judicial records, but Guiñol might hail from a less developed part of Colombia. Or was his background story an urban myth, a distorted truth?

  The taxi passed through Chapinero, blocks and blocks of concrete apartments peppered by old churches and colonial buildings in various stages of decay. She could smell the diesel without having to lower the window. The weather was overcast as always, the dark clouds an ink stain blotching the mountains.

  A crawl through the commercial district, a brief respite from the chaos when they passed by the acacias and twisted evergreens fronting the university gardens, and then finally the hotel.

  Lana showered and poured herself into a pair of black leather pants and a clingy charcoal gray T-shirt with a plunging neckline. Applied a generous amount of crimson lipstick, teased her hair, vamped it up. Pursed her lips in the mirror and liked what she saw.

  Just before she grabbed her cropped suede jacket and left the hotel, Lana checked her email on her cell. She had a new message.

  Before leaving Miami, she had renewed her search for MIA agents who might have a Palo Mayombe angle, even widening the search to include the deceased. Nothing had come up. Frustrated, she tried “cult” and got thousands of hits. She had spent the entire night analyzing the data, focusing on agents who had gone MIA in the Southern Cone. A few interested her, and she memorized their pictures and backgrounds just in case.

  There was someone in the Deceased file who sparked her interest, a man named Devon Taylor. Devon had been sent undercover into Jonestown under the alias of John Wolverton, tasked with keeping tabs on the cult. Tragically, Devon had died at Jonestown, gunned down by one of the Reverend’s bodyguards.

  Because Devon was deceased, she might not have lingered on his file, except that when she tried to pull up his photo and background info she found it had been archived. It was probably sequestered due to age, but just in case, she had requested retrieval before leaving Miami, and the email she had just received was the response.

  She opened the email, expecting Devon Taylor’s file to pop up. Instead she got an access denied message.

 
Now that was odd. Lana had high clearance, and this man didn’t seem to have done anything, at least from what she knew, to warrant a blocked file.

  Then she smirked at herself. Wasn’t that the point? Anything damning would have been scrubbed or blocked. There was probably something embarrassing about a future president in there.

  She could ask the Deputy Director for clearance. She didn’t see how this Devon Taylor could have anything to do with the General, but with as little information as they had, it was worth an inquiry.

  She typed the request, but froze before she hit “Send,” remembering her own words.

  There was probably something embarrassing about a future president in there.

  She scoffed at her reaction. It was the Deputy Director—who had recently announced his intentions to run for president—who’d sent her after the General in the first place.

  But what if, she thought, he had sent her because the General had something on him personally? Something that had happened years ago, which the General could hold over the Deputy Director’s head if he gained the Oval Office? An unacceptable point of leverage?

  Lana didn’t think her line of reasoning had any merit. But there was only one way to find out.

  Her finger hovered over the “Send” key. What if this file contained something she wasn’t supposed to see? Something that could sidetrack her career or . . . worse?

  It was clear there was a mole involved. The only people who knew she was in Bogotá were Grey, Fred, and the Deputy Director. Could Grey’s insinuation have teeth? Was the Deputy Director dirty?

  She clarified that thought. The Deputy Director might be dirty—a relative state in their line of work—but it didn’t make sense for him to be the mole. She’d already be dead if that were the case.

  She sent the email. If there were indeed higher machinations in place, and she was walking into a hornet’s nest, she would rather know now than later.

  At least she thought she would.

  ZONA CAFETERA, COLOMBIA

  The World War II–era jeep had a square face and a canvas tarp covering the back. A child was playing with action figures in the passenger seat. Grey negotiated the fare and climbed into the rear compartment.

  At the edge of the village, the jeep rolled to a stop at an intersection. The driver didn’t move for a few long seconds, though there were no cars visible in any direction. Just as Grey was about to ask what was going on, he saw three men running towards the jeep.

  Grey swore. He shouldn’t have let the presence of a child overcome his better judgment about sitting in the back. Though he could reach through and choke the driver if needed, the space was too small to crawl through, and he couldn’t take control of the jeep in an emergency.

  He jumped out of the car, moving on a diagonal away from the jeep. Two of the men had machetes. They were twenty feet away. He focused through the adrenaline and judged their approach, the cadence of their gait, how they held the machetes, their relative positions. One was running ahead of the others. Big mistake. Grey would time his swing and step inside, then use his hold on the weapon to take the man in a circle and complete a hip throw, stripping the machete in the process. The other two might be on him, but they wouldn’t swing for fear of hitting their friend. Grey would roll away with the machete in hand, creating space, and then cut down the other two.

  “Hombre! Que haces?!”

  The driver’s words, though shouted, were a whisper at the edge of Grey’s concentration. Hey man, what are you doing?

  The men kept running, machetes swinging at their sides. They hadn’t raised them.

  “Vete adentro!” Get back inside the jeep.

  Machetes still lowered, the men ran past Grey and jumped inside the jeep, slapping hands with the driver and then turning to look at Grey.

  His face red, Grey approached the driver side window and spoke in Spanish. “I thought I paid the fare.”

  “You paid your fare.”

  Grey eyed the men, dressed in work pants and tank tops and sombreros. Field workers returning to their homes. The child was clutching a Batman doll and peering at Grey with curious eyes.

  Grey knew he should do the logical thing and pay the driver whatever it took for a private ride to the coffee farm. But then he would be costing these men their ride to their families, all because he had zero faith in humanity.

  The driver flung his arm at Grey. “Vamos!”

  The child scooted into the middle, offering Grey the window seat up front. At least someone gets it, he thought.

  With a nod at the driver, Grey climbed in next to the kid. The men in back were laughing and talking too fast for Grey to understand, but one of them passed Grey’s backpack to him from the rear.

  “Gracias,” Grey mumbled.

  The jeep climbed out of the valley on a rutted dirt road, the air cooler at the higher elevation, smelling of flowers and animal dung. The roar of the river receded as they crossed the first ridge. On the other side he saw a series of hills, knobby and rounded like the toes of dinosaurs, connected by long trails of fog.

  Blowing past men on foot and horse-drawn carts, the driver stopped to pick up more passengers along the way, squeezing them inside until the rear compartment was crammed and a group of men stood on the bumper, clinging to the back of the jeep. Each time someone new climbed aboard, Grey’s heart skipped a beat, but no one gave him a second look.

  They kept picking up passengers and piling them into and onto the jeep until Grey’s jaw dropped, twenty-three commuters in all, the last a kid on a bike who held on to the trailer hitch with one hand.

  Fifteen minutes later they reached La Finca, perched on top of a hill polka-dotted by green and red rows of coffee bushes. After hopping out of the jeep, Grey stood alone in front of a handsome country manor. A path led to another guesthouse, a barn, and a few small buildings Grey assumed were used in coffee production.

  Grey sucked in a breath of fresh air. The sky was huge, shaggy green slopes rising and falling all around, the rush of a river in the distance, birds chirping, as tranquil a place as Grey had ever seen.

  From what Grey could tell, Colombia’s coffee country was prosperous, at least compared to the rest of the country. It didn’t look like the kind of place a cult would take hold and thrive.

  But what did Grey know? Viktor could probably rattle off two dozen cults within a five-mile radius. Thinking of Viktor, Grey hoped he was making progress with his personal issues. Grey had faith. If anyone could impose his will on life, it was Viktor Radek.

  He missed Viktor’s experience and steady mind on this case, felt adrift in unfamiliar seas without him. Grey doubted he would ever feel at home in the world of cults and bizarre religions and mysterious phenomena, but that was okay. He didn’t have to be comfortable to make a difference.

  Grey booked a room for the night, so as not to raise eyebrows. He asked about the owners and was told that Doña Valencia was away for the week.

  Scratch that source of information.

  He wandered into the common room, a sprawling lounge with white plaster walls and overhead wooden beams arranged in a sunburst pattern. The room was full of tourists lounging on leather couches in front of a wood-burning stove, most of them gazing out of the glass wall on the far side of the room. Grey took a look for himself and gave a low whistle.

  The glass showcased a narrow emerald valley stretching into the mist and covered with two-hundred-foot tall palm trees whose slender trunks thrust upward like giant cornstalks. Leafy diadems topped the majestic trees, and sunlight dappled the far end of the valley.

  “Where’re you coming from?”

  He pulled his gaze away from the stunning vista to regard a tanned blond woman who might have been twenty years old. She was looking at him from a couch to his left. It took Grey a minute to remember there were normal people in the world, tourists admiring the beauty of nature and not chasing down cults and drug lords.

  He blinked. “New York.”

  “So what,
you parachuted in?” she said, her smile a camera flash against her tan. “I mean, where’d you come from before here? Bogotá, Medellín, Cali? I just arrived from Santa Marta. It was beautiful, eh? Mountains right down to the sea. Anyway, you don’t sound like the New Yorkers I’ve met in Sydney.”

  “Sorry.”

  Her laugh was short, unsure if his deadpan answer was flirtatious or not.

  Grey sat on a stone bench next to her, underneath an ornamental textile of woven horsehair. He absorbed the feel of the crowd, gauging if anyone might be useful and wondering what it might have been like to be a carefree tourist exchanging stories from the road.

  A role Grey had never played. His father saw to that, under the guise of making sure his son would never be a sissy, or gay, or weak. He made sure of it when he took Grey to a whorehouse when Grey turned fifteen, made sure of it again when later that same year he shoved Grey into the underground fighting ring in Tokyo. In fact, he had made sure of it for as long as Grey had memories.

  Grey listened for a while and then stood, mumbling a good-bye to the Australian girl. There was nothing in that room for him. No narcos, no locals. These were kids on vacation.

  He bought a Pilsen from the receptionist and took a walk on the property. Night was falling, a purple bruise on the hills. After passing the other guesthouse, he stopped when he heard a grinding noise coming from inside a wooden building with a tin roof. He stepped inside and saw a fiftyish man in a smock and an Adidas cap pouring beans into an industrial-size sifter. The man saw Grey and didn’t seem to mind, so Grey watched him work.

  Fifteen minutes later, when the batch was finished, the man stepped outside and lit a cigarette. Grey followed.

  He looked Grey over, eyes probing but not unfriendly. Almost as tall as Grey, the coffee worker was stout, with large hands and corded forearms, a flat face that looked like it could take a punch, and a ridged jaw line.