Killing Kings. Don Pendleton

office placed him in a prime position to collaborate with the most recent successors to the former Medellín Cartel, advising them on how to duck Colombia’s National Police and who to bribe at all levels of state, from the president’s office and Council of Ministers to the Senate and Chamber of Representatives, the Supreme Court and Council of State, to the civil and municipal courts of Colombia’s thirty-two departments, roughly analogous to US states.

      And in the process, naturally, from each payoff he arranged, Dueñas skimmed a handsome profit for himself. He had “arrived,” as rich North Americans liked to say, and life was good. On top of his success in government and crime, Dueñas had a trophy wife, two perfect children, and a mistress on the side, stashed in a posh apartment in suburban Envigado, where Dueñas was headed now, in his chauffeured Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan.

      His loyal wife, Adriana, thought he had a critical committee meeting to attend. In point of fact, he had a far more urgent, primal need to satisfy that only nineteen-year-old Isabella Döehring could. Just thinking of her now, Dueñas was totally and almost hopelessly aroused.

      “Drive faster, will you, Julián?” he called from the back seat.

      “Yes, sir. As you wish.”

      And yet, a short block later, his chauffeur was slowing down again, now creeping almost to a halt.

      “What’s going on?” Dueñas demanded. “What’s the holdup?”

      “It appears there’s been an accident, sir.”

      By scooting forward on his seat, Dueñas could see two other vehicles—real junkers, in his estimation—tangled in midblock ahead. Both drivers were afoot and arguing, with their arms flailing.

      “Idiots,” Dueñas grated. “Back up and find a way around this mess.”

      “Yes. I just need to—”

      Before Julián even got the Mercedes into reverse, a sudden movement to the left made Dueñas turn in that direction, startled to see three young men carrying automatic weapons, rushing toward his car. He spun away from them, trying to reach the other door, but found another trio closing in from that direction, grim-faced, with weapons leveled at their hips.

      “Jesucristo!” he blurted, as Julián—also his bodyguard—produced a pistol, cocking it. As he raised it, a blast of gunfire turned the driver’s window into a hailstorm of glass, the shards and bullets ripping off most of his head.

      And as Dueñas huddled in the back seat, with his empty hands raised against the coming storm, he realized there wasn’t even time to pray.

      Culiacán Rosales, Sinaloa, Mexico

      Arturo Kahlo finished mopping up the remnants of his lunch with a tortilla, washed the whole thing down with the remainder of his third Tecate beer and dabbed his lips with a white linen napkin. When he belched, Kahlo made no attempt to mask the sound, and grinned back at the startled diners who were bold enough to glare at him, not knowing who he was.

      If they had recognized him as a top sicario—a hit man for the Sinaloa Cartel, which was also called the Blood Alliance for its ruthless violence—they would have begged his pardon, rather than regarding him with thinly veiled disdain for his lack of table manners.

      “Que te jodan,” he cursed at them, laughing at the stunned expressions on their faces, most especially the women, who had likely never been addressed that way before—except, perhaps, in bed.

      Rising, he dropped a wad of pesos on the table, brushing back his jacket just enough to let them glimpse the Glock he wore in a hip holster. That drew gasps from a few of them. All eyes averted, suddenly preoccupied, as Kahlo left the restaurant, grinning.

      The fear that he provoked in lesser humans was intoxicating, like strong liquor or a snort of pure cocaine. Kahlo loved that power more than anything on Earth.

      Kahlo had killed so many men by now—and women, too, as he was an equal-opportunity assassin—that the faces ran together and were sometimes lost to him. The ones who mattered were rivals of his employers in the drug trade, as well as soldiers and police, their paid informers—some of whom died very slowly—minor politicians, and an Anglo judge in Dimmit County, Texas, whose murder had sent three “innocent” members of the Diablos Motorcycle Club to the Lone Star State’s death row.

      Now Kahlo moved with long strides toward his car, a Cadillac CTS that had cost its owner $60,000 before it was stolen and smuggled south from Arizona, with all of the vital numbers changed. He loved the car, and the reactions it evoked from peasants on the streets of Culiacán Rosales.

      They feared and envied him—a double boost to Kahlo’s ego.

      As he neared the sleek black car, a voice called out from behind him. “¡Hola marica! ¿Adónde vas?”

      It was nobody’s business where he went—no one but his employer, anyway—but the insult to Kahlo’s manhood set his blood aboil. Turning, he placed a hand over the butt of his Glock 21, the .45 ACP model, then froze as he found himself facing the muzzles of two shotguns that were held by young men who had to be hit men themselves.

      “You’re making a mistake,” he cautioned them. “Do you know who I am?”

      “Would we be here if we didn’t know you?” one of them replied.

      Then both guns thundered, and Arturo Kahlo vaulted backward, into endless night.

      El Centro District, Medellín

      El Centro was a dicey part of town, one of the rougher neighborhoods in Medellín, but it drew many foreign tourists to attractions such as the Parque de Las Luces, Botero Plaza, the Museum of Antioquia, the Palace of Culture and the Museo Casa de la Memoria. The last one’s name translated to House of Memory, but as he stood scanning a busy street, Rafael Barón reflected that his memories of El Centro were mostly bad.

      Still, gawkers came in droves—but if they’d done their homework, or their tour guides were true professionals, they would look elsewhere for hotels in Medellín.

      Barón cared nothing for hotels unless the men he trailed were registered at one of them, and who would be so foolish as to book a room in El Centro if he had the cash and common sense to do better?

      Tonight, Barón was staking out a dance club that was favored by some narcotraffickers and their women—seldom wives—for gathering to mix business with pleasure, as their voices were masked from any hidden microphones by the incessant hammering of of amplified pop music, sometimes interrupted by narcocorridos, songs that glamorized and celebrated the exploits of traffickers.

      Barón’s mission tonight was scanning faces, photographing some of the more infamous with his cell phone, and afterward reporting what he’d seen in detail to his DEA controllers at the Justice Building. So far he had snapped pictures of seven local dealers and a visitor from Mexico who was believed to be associated with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, but he was waiting for a big fish who could boost his daily pittance covered by American taxpayers.

      Now a jet-black Hummer limousine was pulling up outside the club. Well-dressed men and their women spilled from open doors like clowns emerging from a circus car, except in luxury, with more than ample room for anything they cared to do while rolling through the streets of Medellín. Barón lifted his cell phone, hanging back in the shadows as he snapped away, until he glimpsed a face he hadn’t seen in years and had to stop. He lowered his phone while he gaped, amazed.

      It was impossible...and yet, how could he not believe the evidence of his own eyes?

      He rushed another string of photos—click, click, click—then speed-dialed his contact and fidgeted through half a dozen distant rings before a sleepy voice answered.

      “It’s me,” Barón began. “No, I don’t know what time it is, and you won’t care when you hear this. He’s back! There’s no mistaking it. Pablo! What do you mean, which Pablo? Was there ever more than one, gringo? I’m saying it is Pablo Escobar, El Rey