Killing Kings Read online

  Uribe saw two workers who’d been trapped inside there, clothes in flames as they ran pell-mell through camp, screaming, colliding with his soldiers and their fellow workers. His soldiers were all firing now—he wasn’t sure at what or whom—their weapons raising a cacophany that deafened him.

  And they were dying, too.

  From somewhere in the mountain forest that surrounded them, at least one enemy was picking off his men with rifle fire. Uribe couldn’t spot the sniper yet, since muzzle-flashes only showed to full advantage after dark, and most assault rifles were made with flash hiders attached, in any case.

  What he could see was the annhilation of his camp’s defenders, cut down one by one to lie unmoving on the ground. From time to time, another high-explosive round landed, one caving in the north wall of his personal quarters, another setting fire to quad bike all-terrain vehicles clustered underneath a camouflage tarpaulin that was covering the compound’s motor pool.

  The tarps might shield Uribe’s camp from airborne spies, but they did nothing to secure it from attackers on the ground.

  Reduced to crawling in the dirt on his hands and knees, Uribe wondered how he could escape this manmade hell alive. If Sarmiento chose to blame him for the damage—he, the boss, sitting safely in Envigado, while his reinforcements dawdled in transit—Uribe would plead his case, or simply flee the country if his plight seemed hopeless.

  Wait!

  He saw something, someone, the only upright figure moving now amid the smoking ruins of the rural camp and drug lab. Squinting through the haze as dusk approached, he marked the gunman as a stranger and a gringo—no one he had ever seen before.

  The bastard was responsible for all of this, but if he moved a little closer, if the smoke would only clear a bit, Uribe might drop him yet.

  Kneeling, the Colombian held his pistol in both hands, waiting to take his adversary when the man advanced a few more yards and turned to face him, thus presenting a larger target. Any moment now...

  But when the shooter swiveled in his tracks and fired his rifle, not seeming to aim, it was too late. The bullet struck Uribe’s right shoulder, shattered its ball-and-socket joint, and laid him on his back, gasping in agony. He could barely feel the fingers of that hand, but knew he’d lost his pistol somewhere as he fell.

  His enemy stood over him, eyeing his prey as if he were a specimen in a terrarium. The first question that came to mind, through his pain and delirium, took time for Uribe to speak aloud.

  “Are you...from Pablo?”

  “No,” the gringo answered. “But he’s the reason that I came to see you.”

  “Oh?”

  “How long until your backup gets here, Ciro?”

  Blinking at the sky above, all that Uribe knew to say was, “Soon, I think.”

  “Okay, then. We haven’t got a lot of time to spare.”

  Chapter Six

  Horizon Enterprises LLC, Envigado

  Carolina Cabrera reported for work as usual—her second, undercover job, that was—trying to tell herself she hadn’t made a devil’s bargain with the men she knew as Matt Cooper and Joe Gaynor. At the moment, with their conversation still fresh in her mind, she found her own justification of the trade-off hard to swallow.

  All right. They were killers, and made no bones about it, but she believed Cooper’s explanation—sketchy as it was—that the government that paid her salary had sent them to Colombia with investigation and potential wet work to accomplish “off the books.”

  If Cabrera was honest with herself, the thought of drug traffickers dying didn’t bother her in the least. She’d never personally killed a criminal—not yet, at least—but on the present course she set, the likelihood of that event occurring had certainly increased. More to the point, she was withholding her cooperation in the plot from her superiors in Bogotá, uncertain whether someone at the US Embassy was already aware of the campaign in progress.

  As Cabrera understood it—and assuming she could trust her new associates—Cooper and Gaynor had been dispatched by someone, somewhere in the States, to trace the recent tales of Pablo Escobar returning from the grave, identify the stories’ source and learn what was behind it all. Their secondary goal was to thwart the mayhem between “undead” Pablo’s forces, if he had any, and those he was reportedly annihilating day by day since his alleged return.

  For Cabrera’s part, she was no closer to solving the gothic mystery than she had been after the first reported sighting. No one on her radar, no trafficker in the DEA’s extensive database, bore any serious resemblance to the late and unlamented Escobar. Granted, nearly all of them were male, Latino, mercenary and at least selectively sadistic—all of them sociopaths—but there the grim resemblance to Don Pablo ended.

  None of those she’d studied were dead ringers—pun intended—for the late King of Cocaine, either at forty-four, when he was virtually slain on camera, or as he should be now, if still breathing at seventy.

  Using her elevator key to reach the ninth floor, Cabrera hoped Cooper and Gaynor—whatever their true names might be—might solve the mystery, eliminate the phantom who haunted Medellín, and get the hell out of Colombia before she was entrapped by their cover design and sacrificed.

  Meanwhile she still had work to do for Sarmiento at Horizon Enterprises, the shell company that masked his cocaine trafficking and sundry other crimes. With any luck, the information she’d imparted to her new, unwelcome colleagues should be sending shock waves through The Office very soon.

  * * *

  Rodrigo Sarmiento was already present, having arrived earlier than usual, when Cabrera let herself into Horizon’s public quarters. He was on the landline in his private office, with the door ajar, as she locked the outer door behind her. No walk-ins were welcomed at Horizon Enterprises. Its established clients always called ahead for an appointment, and were met by one of Sarmiento’s people in the lobby. Even night cleaners were admitted and observed by a Sarmiento soldier, who wouldn’t hesitate to savage anyone he thought might be a spy. Only the firm’s eight registered employees had keys to the special elevator’s ninth-floor stop, and on the sole occasion one of them had been dismissed, his key was confiscated on the spot.

  As for that ex-employee’s whereabouts, nobody from the DEA, the National Police or the Colombian Attorney General’s Technical Investigation Team could locate him.

  Another mystery.

  Stowing her handbag in the backroom locker set aside for her, Cabrera passed by Sarmiento’s office door, both coming and going. While she dared not linger there, and couldn’t make out much of what he said, she caught the phrase “How many dead?” and “What about the merchandise?”

  Cabrera didn’t need a crystal ball to guess what that was all about. She’d sent Cooper and Gaynor to the location of a coke-processing camp, hidden from prying eyes within the Cordillera Central. Evidently they had wasted no time in attacking and presumably demolishing the site. Now Cabrera wondered whether both of them had come away from that unscathed. If not, she told herself, at least the pair of them would trouble her no more.

  And why did that thought burden her with sudden guilt?

  Avenida Poblado, Medellín

  Local residents described Poblado Avenue as Medellín’s Mile of Gold. It stretched from Poblado Park southward, dead-ending into the Santafé Mall. Along that route were various high-end shops, fine-dining restaurants, office towers and the Gran Casino Medellín, one of ten gambling houses that fleeced all comers without apology, around the clock.

  Those in the know may also note, in passing, a financial institution that appeared small by comparison with its more ostentatious neighbors, hardly living up to the title emblazoned on a small plaque by the street entrance: Banco del Gran Antioquia.

  Bolan might have overlooked it, but for Carolina Cabrera’s tip-off.

  Few international financiers were familiar with
the BGA, and fewer still invested with it. Those who did, however, understood the rules of play and knew exactly who was handling their cash.

  The BGA was a creation of La Oficina de Envigado, formerly the Medellín Cartel, but it did not discriminate. Any established and important drug traffickers were welcome to park billions at the bank, which doubled as a complex laundry, cleansing dirty money and recycling it through loans, investments in legitimate concerns, and so on. Most of those clients were Colombian, Bolivian, Peruvian or Mexican, with their combined wealth estimated to be in the stratospheric trillions of US dollars. Outsiders granted entrée to the BGA since its inception had included Russian oligarchs, a sheikh or two, along with two notorious arms dealers known for backing both sides in the planet’s endless wars, and a Frenchman who lived better than most kings of old from the proceeds of human trafficking.

  “You’d never know they’re sitting on gazillions in that joint,” Grimaldi said, eyeing the BGA from one block south, their rented Mustang at a metered curb.

  “They aren’t,” Bolan told him. “Most of it’s in the computer banks, flitting around the world so fast that nobody can track it.”

  “Huh. Hackers would have a field day.”

  “Or die trying,” Bolan said. “Last one who tried, they found him in Haifa.”

  “Israel?”

  “The very same.”

  “Weird place to hide,” Grimaldi commented.

  “He wasn’t hiding. Someone tipped police anonymously. He was staked out on a railroad track like something from The Perils of Pauline, except nobody came along to turn him loose.”

  “Jesus.”

  “They might not have identified him, but his driver’s license came out at the autopsy.”

  “Came out?”

  “Like a suppository might. Then photographs, before and after, turned up on some Dark Web sites, and suddenly nobody felt like hacking BGA.”

  “Because they hack you back,” Grimaldi quipped.

  “Some cash was lost, of course,” Bolan went on. “The bank’s administrators paid it back double. The clerk whose password had been stolen by the hacker—no apparent link between them—choked to death a couple of weeks later, in the cafeteria.”

  “Hey, talk about a hostile work environment.”

  “It doesn’t get much worse.”

  But they were going in regardless, with an aim toward raising hell.

  They knew from Cabrera’s briefing that the manager of record and the public face of BGA was Rudolf Kugler, born in Barranquilla, overlooking the Caribbean, exactly fifty years ago tomorrow. Bolan and Grimaldi now intended to surprise him with a gift that kept on giving: shutting down his operation for at least a little while, leaving Kugler to sort it out with his superiors—or, if he didn’t like the odds on that, his other choice would be to surrender to some version of WITSEC, either in the US or in Colombia.

  “Kugler,” Grimaldi mused. “That’s German, right?”

  “Colombian, with German roots,” Bolan replied. “Starting about five hundred years ago, all kinds of immigrants from Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe started crossing over, hearing the climate felt a lot like home. More thousands came during and after World War II.”

  “Nobody thought they might be undesirables?” Grimaldi asked.

  “Most of them weren’t. They farmed, ran shops and breweries. Then in the eighties, quite a few of their descendants traveled back to Europe. Others stuck around, including certain politicians.”

  “And I understand that Carlos Lehder had a thing for Hitler, too. Ran his own Nazi group, if I recall.”

  “And Chile had a place they called ‘Dignity Colony,’ had Nazi beauty pageants and no end of child molesters till it made the headlines and shut down, around 2002.”

  “Point taken,” Grimaldi said. “Are we ready to go in and meet Herr Kugler now?”

  “There’s no time like the present,” Bolan said.

  * * *

  BGA president Rudolf Kugler never thought of Nazis in his daily life, and rarely spared a thought for Germany itself, abandoned by his ancestors during the early seventeenth century. As he approached his own half century, he thought about his bank first, its investors and the profits he had earned for them since he had been in charge.

  A distant second was his family: a wife of twenty years, their three children and five grandchildren. If someone was brash enough to ask about them—at a business luncheon, say—Kugler would sing their praises, even though his sons had disappointed him repeatedly in years past, and their children were undisciplined at best. Of course he “loved” them—whatever that meant—but they were often in his way, intrusions and obstructions to his truly vital business.

  That was managing the BGA and making certain his investors got the high rates of return he’d promised them.

  Some nights, when he’d drunk too much cognac, Kugler realized that he was president in name only of the financial institution that had been his life since 1992. He’d worked his way up from a posting as a certified accountant, watching as the officers ahead of him in line fell out in one way or another: heart attacks, a fatal one-car traffic accident, a suicide that had suspicious overtones. Kugler had no idea what waited down the line for him, or whom he might offend to bring it on without intending to, but what the hell, as his great-grandfather might have said.

  All men began to die the moment they were born.

  He shook hands with Jean-Pierre Boucher, an agent for the BGA’s most prized client in Paris. Kugler knew that Jean-Pierre’s principal made his living from the flesh trade—he had even seen a copy of the file stolen from Interpol—but what was that to him?

  If law-enforcement officers could not punish such crimes—or if they chose not to—it was beyond Kugler’s purview. Whatever punishment awaited such men had to bide its time until the pimp and kidnapper wound up in Hell, assuming such a place even existed.

  Kugler walked Boucher to the street exit, then turned to find his personal assistant, Margalida Gossaín, waiting for him with a pair of men he didn’t recognize. They looked American, which was a strike against them at the outset. Then again, for all he knew, they might be from the Mafia or one of the two major parties in the States.

  So many groups had secrets to be kept these days, and fortunes to conceal.

  “President Kugler,” his assistant said, “I’m pleased to introduce Matthew Cooper and Joseph Gaynor, oilmen from the states of Texas and Louisiana.”

  Snake oil was more like it, Kugler thought, but he would hear them out, even though instinct told him they had no connection to petroleum beyond watching a gas-station attendant fill tanks on their luxury cars of choice.

  Kugler shook hands with each of them in turn, smiling, and led them to his glass-walled office in the southeast corner of the BGA’s first floor. When they were seated, the Americans facing Kugler across his massive teakwood desk, he asked them, “How may I assist you, gentlemen?”

  “First,” the man with the piercing blue eyes said, “we wish to offer you congratulations on your birthday, coming up tomorrow.”

  Kugler nearly lost his practiced smile at that. “My birthday? But how did you know?”

  “We know all kinds of things,” the second man said.

  “For instance,” his companion added, “the best way you can guarantee that birthday rolls around on schedule.”

  Now a chill began to slide down Kugler’s spine. “What do you want from me?” he asked.

  “We want to transfer our accounts to these four numbers in the Caymans and in Switzerland,” the one his soon-to-be ex-assistant had introduced to Kugler as Cooper said.

  “Accounts?” Kugler replied, hoping they didn’t hear the tremor in his voice. “There must be some mistake. I know all of the bank’s investors personally, gentlemen, and both of you are total strangers to me. You have no accounts open at
BGA.”

  “Pretend we do,” the one called Gaynor said. “Pretend they’re all ours, why don’t you?”

  “This is—”

  “An absolute necessity,” the blue-eyed American stated, cutting him off. “A few computer clicks should get it done, no more than twenty, thirty minutes at the far outside for all of them.”

  “But I cannot—”

  “Survive another day?” The American frowned at him, not quite a scowl. “Your call, I guess. If you’d prefer, we can blow out your candles here and now.”

  The two Americans’ hands slid inside their jackets, where President Kugler thought he glimpsed two holstered pistols.

  “Wait! Perhaps it can be done. But with security in place, I cannot guarantee the money will remain wherever I send it.”

  “That’s not your problem,” Gaynor said. “Somebody at the other end of those numbers you’ve got is standing by to move the transfers out and scatter them around, soon as they land.”

  “And do these other people recognize the risk that they are taking?”

  “Think about your own risk. And start typing on that keyboard while you still have time.”

  “Then we’ll just take a ride,” he added, “until the dust settles. We can have a chat.”

  * * *

  In fact, it took less time than Bolan had supposed it would to clear out most of BGA’s computerized holdings. The various recipient accounts were being monitored by Aaron Kurtzman and his cyber staff at Stony Man, transferred once more as soon as they arrived, divided and dispersed, vanishing into lines of coded gibberish, and then disappearing down a rabbit hole.

  When that was done, President Kugler looked vaguely pale and sick. He followed the next order: walking Bolan and Grimaldi to the vault. While most of BGA’s deposits were computerized, the bank kept several millions readily available, in both US dollars and Colombian pesos—what a very rich man might consider petty cash. Kugler procured a satchel and watched them pack it with $100 bills until its clasp would barely close. Then Grimaldi asked him, “You feel like early lunch, Kugey? I do.”