Rage of the Assassin: (Assassin Series #6)

by Russell Blake

  Three men exited the van and unloaded their supplies from the back, and then a pair of them lowered a ramp and eased a rectangular mini-dumpster onto the pavement. When they were finished, they closed the van up and locked it before moving to the building’s rear maintenance exit.

  “Hey, Julio. How’s it going?” the janitor leading the way called to the guard. He’d been working at the museum for a month and a half, and routinely shared cigarettes and stories with the guard after his cleaning duties were done.

  “You know. Same old. Coming loaded for bear today, are you?” the security man asked, eyeing Roberto’s companions and their trash container.

  “Yeah. I got bitched at yesterday, so I need to haul a bunch of garbage away. You can search it, as usual, when we’re through.”

  “I look forward to it with every beat of my heart,” the guard joked, and all the men laughed at the ridiculous notion. The guard would only do a cursory inspection, they knew, to ensure that they weren’t making off with any relics, which had never happened in the facility’s history. “Who’s your crew? Haven’t seen them before.”

  “Oh, sorry. My cousin Octavio, and his friend Cruz.”

  The pair of laborers waved, and the guard nodded as he unlocked the service entrance. “You know the drill. Stay away from the displays. Don’t trigger any alarms. Be out within three hours.”

  “You got it.”

  Once inside, the men went about their business of cleaning, figuring that the guard was monitoring their movements from the security center. Toward the end of the shift they moved the rolling dumpster into a maintenance area, and the man using the fake name Roberto unlatched the side panel.

  Ten minutes later the cleaning crew rolled the trash-filled dumpster out of the museum. The sleepy-looking guard did a quick look through of the waste they were carting away and nodded to Roberto. “Got any smokes?” he asked.

  Roberto told his men to load up the van and shook two Marlboro reds loose from a well-fingered pack. “What time do you get off today?” he asked as he lit their cigarettes.

  “The usual. Nine.”

  “Pretty easy duty, huh?”

  The guard blew smoke at the morning sky. “Nothing ever happens here. Easiest job I’ve ever had. Staying awake’s the hardest part about it.”

  Roberto dropped his partially smoked butt on the ground and ground it out. “Well, I’ve still got work to do. See you mañana.”

  “You got it.”

  Across town at one of the main federal buildings a similar scene played out, as a faux cleaning crew delivered its precious cargo into position, taking care to ensure that the messages stenciled on the sides of the box were plainly visible.

  The same event took place at the main hospital, where the crew pushed several of the bins due to the large size of the facility. They were interrupted while removing their box from the dumpster by a male nurse who rounded a corner, surprising them.

  “What’s that?” the nurse asked, eyeing the box.

  The nearest janitor smiled as he approached, his hands empty. At the last instant a switchblade materialized in the cleaner’s hands, and he drove it without hesitation through the nurse’s eye, deep into his brain.

  When Roberto was back behind the wheel, he waited until he was through the museum gates and off the grounds before retrieving a cell phone and placing a call.

  “Everything’s in place. Armed and ready.”

  “Any complications?”

  “No. Nobody suspects a thing.”

  Don Aranas’s voice sounded alert in spite of the early hour.

  “Good. You’ve done well.” Aranas paused, and when he spoke again, his voice had an ugly edge to it. “Get well clear of there. Within an hour, the games begin. Ditch the vans and head out of town – it’s only a matter of time before they have security footage of your faces. I want you back in Culiacán by then.”

  “We’re on our way.”

  Chapter 22

  Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico

  El Rey walked across the bridge spanning the Rio Grande and then stood in line at the U.S. border crossing as a beagle with a hangdog expression sniffed at his pant legs. An American immigration official, who looked more Hispanic than El Rey, asked him a few perfunctory questions and then stamped his Canadian passport and motioned to the next traveler.

  He continued through the complex and out to where dozens of taxis waited. He took the first in line and slid into the back, placing his duffle beside him on the hot bench seat. The driver glanced at him in the rearview mirror and El Rey sat forward. “Airport.”

  The driver nodded and started the engine. The air conditioner was a relief and the trip to the Brownsville South Padre Island International Airport blessedly short. El Rey peeled off some bills from a fistful of dollars and paid the driver before exiting the cab.

  He’d arranged for a charter flight to take him to New York, where the first of the three targets lived – a professor at NYU, who lived in an Upper East Side brownstone and also owned a home in the Hamptons. Recently divorced, she cut an impressive figure in the photographs and videos he’d found of her, mostly from academic conferences.

  The jet was a Citation X, easily capable of the 1800-mile flight in a little over three hours, and El Rey recognized the plane’s distinctive profile as he approached the private plane terminal. After a muted discussion with a clerk behind a reception desk, a waiting attendant – a stunning brunette with legs to her ears – led him across the tarmac and up the stairs into the fuselage.

  The pilot introduced himself and his copilot, and El Rey stashed his bag behind his seat. Five minutes later the flight had been cleared for takeoff and the jet was racing down the runway, pressing the assassin into the comforting folds of the leather throne as the drab sameness of Brownsville blurred by his window in a rush.

  The plane lifted into the air and soared effortlessly in a near vertical ascent, and then banked over the Gulf of Mexico’s sparkling azure surface. El Rey took a sip of his water and set the crystal glass down on the polished walnut tray as he replayed the prior night in his mind. Carla had been asleep when he’d stolen into the house, and he’d felt a pang of remorse when he’d left his note and pressed a soft kiss to her face.

  She’d be waking up about now, and he fully expected her to be enraged at his callous disregard for her wishes. He’d make amends when he returned. For now, he needed to focus on the task at hand, which was locating and interrogating the first of his subjects. He’d need to knock out the two in the U.S. quickly if he was to make it to Israel to find the third before his symptoms became so bad they interfered with his ability to carry out his mission. He hoped that trip wouldn’t be necessary – that either the woman in New York or the one in Baltimore was the creator of the toxin – but he had to be prepared for the worst, which meant that he was already badly behind schedule.

  The flight from Mexico City had been uneventful. The Lear 65 was comfortable enough, and there was nobody around in the private terminal to be interested in a single male in his early thirties embarking on a private domestic flight at two a.m. His bag hadn’t been checked by the sleepy security worker; at his request there had been no attendant on the plane; and the pilots had studiously avoided interacting with him. He’d managed several hours of sleep on that flight and hoped to do the same on this one. Still, though, he couldn’t help but notice the faint facial twitching that had arrived with dawn.

  He knew the progression he could expect from prior bouts with the neurotoxin, and he hoped that the tics, like the tremors, would abate before returning with increased severity later. But by his reckoning, it was no more than forty-eight hours on the outside before his cognitive functioning became impaired – which was more alarming than the other symptoms, because his edge was his ability to reason faster than his adversaries. If that quit, he might as well pull the trigger of the gun that would end his ordeal himself.

  The morose inner dialogue was also a symptom of the neurotoxin’s ins
idious progress, he recognized, and he forced the negative thoughts away. The errand was straightforward: find the women, question them, and proceed as necessary.

  He felt no remorse at the prospect of terminating the scientists. They were all engaged in research and development for the military industrial complex, crafting nightmare substances for their masters and fully aware of what those agents would be used for. That made them no different than soldiers, although extremely well-compensated ones – he knew from the background checks that all three were in the seven- to eight-figure net worth range, and it wasn’t because they’d won the lottery. Being the lapdog of the clandestine agencies was lucrative, and part of that was hazard pay, as well as hush money so they would never discuss their work.

  El Rey didn’t judge them for their deeds – if it hadn’t been them, it would have been others – nor did he bear the creator of the toxin any grudge. They did what they had to do, and he would do what he had to. It was a simple equation.

  Whether his trip would be for naught was a different matter. His greatest fear was that the antidote was something that couldn’t be easily manufactured, or that would take more time than he had, or that required specialized ingredients or equipment that he wouldn’t be able to source.

  He quieted his imagination. There were always obstacles; he’d tackle them as they arose. Worrying about the unknown served no constructive purpose, and he banished the doubts, at least partly attributable to the poison working its dark magic. He knew better than to allow his imagination to run away like this, especially once he was in play – all it would do was distract him and diminish his focus, which he couldn’t afford.

  The plane leveled off at forty-three thousand feet, and he pulled the shade down over the window. He took a final swig of water and replaced the glass on the tray, drew a deep breath, and willed himself to sleep. El Rey slowly drifted off to the lullaby of the muted roar of the twin turbines, and the last image in his psyche was Carla, hair spread across her pillow like an angel’s halo, slumbering like the innocent she was.

  Chapter 23

  La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico

  Ernesto stood in the shade of a doorway and scanned the dusty street. A rooster crowed down the block in the barrio that framed the main highway that stretched north to the U.S. and meandered south to Los Cabos. The homes were all four hundred square feet and broiling in the 114 degree heat, their occupants accustomed to the oven-like conditions, doomed to a lifetime of suffering by poverty and lack of opportunity.

  At twenty-six, Ernesto had lived in La Paz for four months, and detested every moment of it. He’d come over on the ferry along with dozens of others, from Topolobampo in Sinaloa. He’d grown up near Culiacán and cut his teeth when barely a teen as a street dealer for the Sinaloa Cartel. He was in Baja because he’d recently gotten a better offer from the new group Agundez had formed, which had raised his weekly take from three thousand pesos to four – or roughly two hundred and fifty dollars – and as much of the meth as he could trim from the gram baggies he sold twelve hours a day.

  Ernesto spied a girl with a shapely figure several houses down and whistled at her. That was Maria, the daughter of a hotel worker, just turned fifteen, whom Ernesto had been plying with marijuana for several weeks as he enjoyed her considerable charms – in secret, of course, because her father would have gone ballistic if he’d suspected one of the neighborhood gangsters was tapping his delicate hothouse flower.

  Maria waved at him and waggled her hips invitingly, her short shorts and yellow halter top offering scant concealment of her curves. He held up three fingers – he’d be off in three hours, his night shift complete, his position replaced by another just like him who ran the day crew.

  La Paz, which meant “The Peace” in English, had been ravaged by a violent drug war as Sinaloa battled the upstart Agundez Cartel for territory that had previously been exclusively Sinaloa’s. For twenty years Aranas had cut deals with the mayor and governor, paying for the plaza of La Paz and all points south, but he’d been betrayed once imprisoned. The rumor was that the mayor had sold the plaza twice, accepting money from Agundez as well as Aranas, and in the process bringing mainland-style bloodshed to a region that had boasted a lower homicide rate than most of the industrialized world.

  It was rumored that the mayor’s family had fled to San Diego, where he owned a vacation home on the water in La Jolla, and that he was now living on the army base, surrounded by military, fearful of being taken down by one of the angry cartels. Selling the plaza twice was a huge no-no, the penalty for which was death. That was well understood by every politician in Mexico, but the mayor had decided to risk it with Aranas incarcerated, at the direct expense of the population and any tourism the area enjoyed.

  Ernesto didn’t know how much of the rumor was true, and he didn’t care. It changed nothing for him – his job was to sell the locals their drug of choice and to avoid drama. So far it had been hard to accomplish, because the barrio access road was the line of demarcation between the two cartels’ territories, with Sinaloa claiming the west side and Agundez the east.

  There had been sixteen shootings in the last two days as rolling gun battles ravaged the city. The weapon of choice was the “Cuerno de Chivo” – the “goat’s horn,” the slang term for the AK-47, due to its distinctive curved magazine. The cartel shooters were indiscriminate, as well as generous with their expenditures of ammo, and the average shooting involved at least thirty rounds – the entire capacity of a full magazine, usually emptied on full auto. The last killing had been at four in the morning, near the waterfront, where two of Ernesto’s colleagues had been gunned down as they walked along the malecon after a hard night dealing in the clubs that fronted onto the bay.

  Ernesto was already jittery from the meth that kept him alert through the night, and the escalation in violence had done nothing to calm his nerves, even though there had been no incursions into his barrio. But he knew that every minute on the street posed a risk, and he was keeping his eyes open; the old Beretta 9mm pistol stuffed into his waistband at the small of his back gave slim comfort.

  Traffic had been dead for the last five hours. Nobody wanted to get caught in the crossfire of a drug war, and only the most desperate of addicts were willing to brave a trip for their fix. That would hit Ernesto in the wallet if it kept up. Standard operating procedure was to hold the street dealer accountable for any slowdown, even if due to circumstances outside his control, the assumption being that if the business lagged, it was because of something the dealer was doing – either diluting the drugs too much or robbing his customers or behaving abnormally. Ernesto knew the game, having grown up in it, and was already calculating what the lull would likely cost him if there was no pickup soon.

  His burner cell phone vibrated in the front pocket of his below-the-knee shorts. He pulled it free, his eyes constantly surveying the dusty street as he raised it to his ear.

  “Yeah?”

  “How you doin’?” his friend Gerzain asked.

  “Got nothin’ happening. You?”

  “Dead, man, dead. You hear about Lala and Gumbo?”

  “Yeah. Shit’s getting real now, homey. Watch yourself.”

  “I hear that. You seen anything your way?”

  “Nada. Although I heard somebody pop a few caps maybe an hour ago.”

  “Oh. That was just some punkass. We set him straight.” Occasionally one of the barrio youths tried to cut into the business, which was dealt with swiftly by whichever cartel ran the neighborhood. The penalty for trying to sell a baggie of rock was death. Even so, there was a regular move by the dimmer of the locals to make some easy money, and this year Ernesto’s crew had snuffed out a dozen homeboys who’d missed the memo. All part of the game, he knew, as unremarkable as a flat tire or a spilled Pacifico.

  The going price to kill a man in La Paz had dropped to two hundred dollars, a fraction of what it had been before the cartel clash. Ernesto had murdered three men since arriving in
La Paz – welcome pocket money for him that subsidized his habit. They had all been strangers to him, who’d either offended the wrong person or were banging the wrong man’s wife or whose business had interfered with someone else’s. He never asked and didn’t care. He just popped them and went home.

  “So what’s up, man?” Ernesto asked.

  “Getting ugly, you know?” Gerzain said.

  “Yeah, well–” Ernesto was cut off by the sound of an unmuffled motor as an old Nissan pickup truck swung down the dirt track and accelerated toward him. He froze for a half second and then reached for his weapon as he backed toward the door. He’d almost made it when the silence of the street was shattered by the rattle of a Kalashnikov.

  The wall behind him exploded into chips of mortar as rounds slammed into the cinderblock dwelling, and then a spray of red fountained from his back as three slugs punched through his chest. His finger squeezed his pistol’s trigger as he tumbled backward into the house, but the shots ricocheted harmlessly off the building across the street as the vehicle sped off.

  Maria came running once the dirt road had fallen still. Ernesto labored for breath as his savaged lungs filled with blood. His deeply tanned skin was pale from shock. She screamed at the sight of him dying, and then his consciousness faded; the final sound of his short life was her strangled cry for someone to call an ambulance.

  It took almost half an hour for the police to arrive, and when they did, it was two pickup trucks with municipal cops – experts in avoiding confronting any crime that might involve risk. They emptied out of the truck, and one of them placed a call to the hospital as he studied Ernesto’s blood-soaked corpse, the street dealer’s face now covered with bluebottle flies. His passing was unremarkable and un-mourned except by a teenage girl down the way who would soon discover that she was two months pregnant with Ernesto’s progeny, and who would have to run away from home and ultimately work in a strip bar to support herself and her infant son – another casualty in a war that was an ongoing part of the Mexican condition.