Silencer (27 page)

After passing most of Fredericksburg and a series of signs for the National Military Park, Maud told me it was time to leave the freeway.

When I’d done my junior Brecon command course as a young infantry soldier, Fredericksburg 1862 was cited as an example of how easily disorganized fighting can turn into total slaughter. Nine thousand men died as the Union tried to drive further south into the Confederacy, and by the end of the battle the town was a burned-out shell. This whole area had suffered more American dead during the civil war than in two world wars, the Korean war and the Vietnam war combined.

I drove past churches and schools that were all built on one level with plenty of space around them. They didn’t do sidewalks here, and most of the plots weren’t fenced. The dwellings were wooden, colonial-style single- or two-storey, some with verandas, some not. Everything was as shiny as it would have been before everything went tits up in 1862, but there were a whole lot more double-door garages, basketball hoops and SUVs in evidence. Small forests of mailboxes stood alongside the road, so the posties didn’t have to leave their cabs to deliver.

1687 Veld stood beside a turning circle at the end of a wooded cul-de-sac. Only the window shutters – which were the red of the Confederate flag – singled it out from its cream-painted
weatherboard neighbours. They were permanently open; they wouldn’t move even if you wanted them to. A black Nissan truck sat outside with a pair of sun-gigs hanging off the rear-view.

The front door opened the instant I pulled into the driveway. The shadowy figure who stood there in a black pullover and jeans didn’t look much like the guy I’d spent time with in ’93, and he didn’t look as if he was a big noise in the DC HQ – or anywhere else – either. This version of Dino had a crew-cut, but the dyed blond was grey. He drooped at the shoulders; the air had been let out of him.

He had to turn sideways to negotiate the four stone steps that led down to the drive, like somebody had just given him a dead leg.

I climbed out of the Chevy as he passed under his hoop. It was in the same position as the others in the development, but rusty and with rotting string.

I held out a hand. ‘All right, mate?’

The skin on his face had lost its lustre and elasticity. It didn’t crease as he tried a smile and held out his hand in return. His shake conveyed as much commitment as his call.

‘You haven’t changed, Nick.’

I was about to say something similar about him, but he shook his head. ‘No need to bullshit, man. Plenty’s changed.’ He wasn’t wrong: he looked twenty years older than he should, and his teeth were worse than Kitty’s.

He let go of my hand, bent down and tapped his left leg just above the knee. Only alloy or hard plastic made that sound.

I had the feeling I wasn’t going to get any more of that
hombre
shit from him.

He did a crablike shuffle up the steps ahead of me, a performance he seemed to have well squared away. He held the door open and ushered me in. It was gloomy. Maybe he didn’t like light, these days – or paying electricity bills.

‘Go on through, Nick.’ His high-pitched voice seemed to suit his new body better than it had the young, fit one, but it also made him sound sad and resigned. It wasn’t funny any more.

The house was open plan and sparsely furnished, almost as if a bachelor pad had been planted inside a family home. The dark-wood floor was past its best, but Mr Sheen had done his stuff. There was a faint aroma of disinfectant; at least it wasn’t that pungent flowery shit that filled my nose everywhere in Moscow.

Dino double-locked the front door before waving me through to the kitchen area – wall-to-wall pine with an industrial-sized two-door steel fridge in one corner. Six white mugs were lined up on a shelf, as straight as a row of guardsmen. Every surface was spotless. The sink was clean and dry, with not so much as a watermark.

The lone brown-leather sofa at the other end of the room looked like it had just been delivered by IKEA. The black leather La-Z-Boy beside it had clearly seen the lion’s share of the arse time. A drinks coaster and the world’s supply of remote controls had been precisely arranged on a small rectangular table by its armrest. A large flat-screen TV took pride of place,
with cable, Blu-ray and Xbox wired in with similar care. My Timberlands echoed as I headed towards the sofa.

Dino sounded so subdued as he invited me to sit that I wondered if he was on a prescription. He collapsed into the La-Z-Boy and must have pressed a button somewhere because its footrest unfolded with an electronic whine.

There was a couple of seconds’ silence in the semi-darkness, broken only by a car turning out front. Dino tapped his leg once more. ‘I was held hostage for thirteen months in ’08 – took a round as I escaped, just above the knee. Now I got this fucker.’ He tapped it again.

I didn’t bother giving him sympathy. That wasn’t what he needed. ‘Cartel?’

‘Sort of.’ He nodded. ‘Anyway, I’m pensioned off now, part of the agent-enrichment programme up in Quantico. They tell me I need to pass on my wealth of knowledge and experience to the next generation.’

‘What about your two mates? If they’d come all the way I wouldn’t have needed sat-nav.’

He didn’t see the funny side of it. ‘They’re never far away. They kinda look after me when I need them to.’ He hesitated. ‘I can’t stand the look in their eyes. I’m the guy they hope they’ll never become. They pity me.’

It was clear he wasn’t just talking about his leg.

‘A big part of the programme is explaining how this shit happened.’ He massaged his thigh, like he was kneading dough. ‘I suggest ways they can avoid getting lifted, and how they can cope with it if they do. They wheel me out on stage every two or three weeks and I do my party piece.’

If his appearance had anything to do with his time as a captive, they really must have put him through the wringer. Or maybe he was just one of those people who react badly to such things. Biology dictates destiny and all that shit.

I thought about telling him I’d been a PoW in Baghdad, and lifted a couple of times since. Maybe it would make him feel more comfortable. But maybe it wouldn’t. I didn’t know enough about him yet to be sure. I decided to let him do the talking.

‘I’d offer you a drink, Nick, but I don’t do that stuff any more. I got sodas, though.’ He managed to raise a smile. ‘And I went out this morning to get you some tea.’

‘Not that Lipton shit – the stuff in the little yellow packets?’

He nodded. ‘Sure.’

‘I’ll take a coffee.’

The button was pressed and the La-Z-Boy stood to attention.

I stayed put as he got up, taking in what I could of my surroundings in the gloom. This room was beyond spotless. It was sterile. There were no pictures of family, no end-of-course photos of our hero with ‘DEA’ emblazoned across his body armour – just a few
prints of lakes on the wall in thin aluminium frames. He’d probably bought them as a job lot with the sofa. It all had the feeling of a short-term rental that had recently had a deep clean.

Lights came on at last as he made it to the kitchen area. The floor and flat-screen gleamed, and I couldn’t see a single particle of airborne dust.

The only items that looked remotely like personal effects – and even then only because I knew something of his background – were two rows of books on a shelf to the left of the flat-screen. They were all drug-war related.

Dino leaned on the breakfast bar to take his weight off the prosthetic as the coffee percolator chugged away. ‘Milk? Cream? Sugar?’

It was hard to tell by his tone if he was bored with me or with life in general.

‘Black’s fine, thanks.’

Two guardsmen were selected from the line and filled. He passed me one, positioned his own dead centre of the coaster, then stretched out the La-Z-Boy once more.

I had nowhere to put my mug so I just kept hold of it while I waited for it to cool.

Dino sparked up as soon as the chair stopped whining. ‘What do you want from me, Nick? You didn’t say anything in those emails of yours, and you’ve come all the way from Hong Kong. It must be big-time.’

‘I need some of that agent-enrichment knowledge you’ve got tucked away in there.’ I tapped my head. ‘I need to find someone who’s being held by a cartel in Mexico. Well, as far as I know she is. It happened a few days ago. So I thought, Who’ll know the way things go down there?’

Dino nodded and took occasional sips of his brew as I started to explain the Katya situation.

‘I don’t have the name of the guy who’s got her, but they call him Peregrino …’

His arm froze mid-sip. Then he slowly replaced his guardsman on the coaster. His hand gave a mild tremor – enough for a bead of coffee to roll down the outside of the mug.

‘You all right, mate?’

He said nothing, just gave a couple of quick nods and took some deep breaths.

I tried a sip of my coffee. I’d thought I’d been talking long enough for it to cool, but I was wrong.

Dino had sorted himself out but left his coffee where it was. ‘Nick, you’ve got to know something. It’s worse than you thought. Peregrino …’ he leaned towards me, as if the walls had ears ‘… that’s his new name, like the artist formerly known as fucking Prince … He’s the son of Jesús.’

‘The big boy from Nazareth?’

‘Jesús
Orjuela
, for fuck’s sake. The Wolf. This fucker’s name is Jesús, just like his dad. He was the first and only son, remember?’

I did remember. How could I not? I remembered him staring at me through that window frame. I remembered wondering if he’d wake up at three in the morning with the same recurring nightmare.

Dino knew exactly what was going through my mind. ‘Now that’s kinda funny, Nick, don’t you think? Poetic, almost.’

It was hard to tell if he had a smile on his face or a grimace.

‘Why Peregrino?’

‘He’s supernatural, man. He’s like some fucking god down there. Remember the two sisters? They’re history. A vendetta killing, two thousand nine.’ Dino suddenly sounded relieved to have an audience. ‘The kid Jesús was at war, trying to take over the Tijuana cartel’s
plaza
. The cartel paid the Zetas to fight for them, but Jesús just kicked their ass, man. So the Zetas raped and killed the girls – even posted the killings on YouTube. It happens a lot, stays on for a day or so.’

I knew about Los Zetas. Thirty-one deserters from the Mexican Army’s Airborne Special Forces, originally linked to the Gulf cartel on the west coast, had pulled together one of the most powerful paramilitary groups in the region, and they’d been murdering, raping and hacking people’s faces off ever since.

Back in the nineties, as the DEA targeted the air and sea routes into the US, the Mexicans had developed their old marijuana-smuggling donkey trails across the border into six-lane cocaine super-highways that became known as the
plazas
. Then Escobar and the Wolf were killed, and after years as the Colombians’ drug mules, the poor relations finally started calling the shots. When their government waded in to help, it was the icing on the cake.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, had held power in Mexico City for seventy years. The police and the military weren’t complaining: they took tens of millions in bungs, and the
politicians didn’t do too badly either. Bizarrely, it brought stability to the drugs trade. The PRI would smooth things over when gang warfare broke out – like Relate, but without the tea and biscuits – and even allocated access to the
plazas
.

Everything ran like clockwork – until the Mexican voters finally got fed up with being shat on and the PRI lost the 2000 election. What followed was a total gangfuck. At least seven cartels started beating the shit out of each other, and that was just for starters. It got so bad that sometimes one half of a cartel turned on the other half.

They continued to battle with each other for control of the
plazas
, the crucial northern border cities, like Ciudad Jerez and Tijuana, and strategic ports like Acapulco – for years the holder of first prize in Mexico’s annual highest-homicide-rate contest. The Zetas – and others like them – had taken the contest to a new level. The era of the pistol-, rifle- and chainsaw-toting brigand was over; these boys were heavily armed, well-trained professionals, who’d changed sides for a slice of the action until they’d decided they wanted it all.

A succession of presidents have minced around in army uniforms for the last few years, waving an angry finger on TV and promising to wage the mother of all battles against the bad guys. The military did launch the odd lightning strike, but it was never much more than a PR stunt. Like the police, they lacked the will, training, manpower and firepower to do the cartels any permanent damage.

Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, the gangs usually just waited for them to go away. But when they did stand and fight, they won – as you do when you’re carrying M4 carbines with under-slung grenade launchers and all sorts of state-of-the-art weaponry smuggled south from the US, and RPG7s, machine-guns, fragmentation grenades and light tanks from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras, left over from the Cold War conflicts of the eighties.

As well as distributing the lion’s share of heroin from Afghanistan, Mexico itself was now also a major producer. The cartels had their fingers in every pie, and controlled more than
90 per cent of the drugs entering the US. They generated at least fifty billion US dollars a year; more revenue than almost half of the Fortune 500 companies.

Since 2006, around seventy thousand Mexican citizens had paid the price of this bonanza – decapitated and hung over motorway bridges, or left at the roadside with their entrails pouring out or their tongues ripped through their throats. No wonder the PRI were about to grab back power after twelve years in the wilderness. Better the devil you know …

Time alone would tell whether they’d be able to get everyone round the table like in the good old days.

There was no stopping Dino now. ‘The Zetas used to be the big dogs. They might tell the world they still are, and the world might think so – but everyone down there knows better. They haven’t been since that day in 2009. The Pilgrim is top of their shit heap.’