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“One was Mexican. He did all the talking, and he didn’t talk much. The other two were white boys.”
Bolan cocked his head. “Americans?”
“I don’t know…I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t say anything, but they acted all cool and European and shit. They were all dressed down, but you could tell they were suits.”
“How long ago did they leave?”
“This morning.”
Bolan nodded. He might have caught a break. It was 650 miles to the closest point of the border. That was a long haul through a lot of rural Mexico. “What kind of truck?”
“I don’t know what kind of truck!”
A man lurched onto the back patio coughing and hacking. He carried a revolver in one hand and machete in the other. Salcido screamed as Bolan put a burst into the interloper’s chest and hammered him back into the hacienda. Bolan waited a moment to make sure he stayed down and then returned his attention to Salcido.
“What kind of truck?” he repeated.
“I don’t know!”
“Describe it.”
“I don’t know! A flatbed! Like farmers use! The cab was blue!”
“How big was the load?” Bolan persisted.
“It was like six packing crates.”
“How big?”
“Like the size of coffins. I didn’t ask any questions. I got paid not to ask questions. My men loaded it up and they took off.”
“How was it loaded?”
“In a pyramid, three on the bottom, two in the middle and one on top. They’re tied down and have a tarp over them.”
“Were they heavy?”
Salcido considered this. “My boy Chivo says it felt like they were loaded with rocks.”
“Any of your boys feeling sick?”
Salcido seemed confused by the question. “Sick? No, no one is sick. Why?”
Bolan ignored the question. “You say you don’t know who picked the load up or where they went?”
“No.”
“Who sent it?”
Salcido got reticent again.
Bolan strobed him.
“Hey! Shit! Man! I—”
“Talk to me and you live.” Bolan was implacable. “You don’t, I shoot you and ask someone else.”
“I don’t know who sent it! I’m just part of the pipeline!”
“Who was the part behind you?”
Salcido trembled. Bolan gave him a bit more knee in the sternum.
“King Solomon! He sent it up from Mexico City!”
It was a name Bolan had heard of in Mexican crime. He heaved Salcido to his feet and handcuffed him. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“A walk? Where?”
Bolan gave him an encouraging shove. “Into the hills.”
“Aw, shit, aw, shit…you promised. You promised!”
Bolan marched Salcido whimpering, blubbering and begging for mercy into the Sinaloan night. By the time they had gone two miles the drug lord had fallen five times and thrown up twice. Once out of fear and the second time out of exhaustion. Bolan stopped at the drop point. “On your knees.”
“Por favor, amigo! Please! Plea—”
Bolan kicked Salcido’s legs out from under him and swiftly manacled his feet and hog-tied him. Bolan stripped out of his raid suit and pulled on jeans and a leather jacket, then put most of his weapons and gear into a large duffel. He clicked on the GPS transponder. A pair of Sinaloan CIA assets would come and pick up Salcido and the gear. They would get descriptions of the three men in the truck and get police sketches out and sit on the drug lord. Bolan heaved up the BMW Dakar motorcycle he had jumped with and kicked it into life. The nuclear materials were heading north. The Executioner had only one lead, and it was forcing him to turn south. Back to Mexico City.
Back to where the whole thing had started.
CHAPTER TWO
Culiacán
Bolan plugged his laptop into his satellite link and typed in his codes. Lights blinked on the link and told him the line was secure. Moments later Aaron Kurtzman, Stony Man Farm’s genius in residence and lord of the Computer Room, blinked into life on an inset screen in real time. “What have you got for me?”
“A name,” Bolan replied. “King Solomon.”
“Guillermo ‘King Solomon’ Dominico?” It was a name Kurtzman was familiar with. He clicked keys on his side of North America and brought up DEA and FBI files. “Smuggling nuclear materials seems to be a bit out of his normal purview.”
Bolan had never personally run up against Dominico, but he knew him by reputation. “I would have said the same thing about Pinto Salcido, but Geiger counters didn’t lie and when he and I had our little talk I don’t think he was, either.”
“Well, as drug dealers go he’s a pretty interesting cat,” Kurtzman stated.
Bolan scanned the DEA files and they agreed with what he’d heard. Guillermo Dominico had appeared on the smuggling scene literally out of nowhere with a couple of planes and respectable war chest of seed money to start his business. His father had been a crop duster in the State of Nayarit who went on to buy some land and become a fairly successful grain farmer. Dominico had taken the skills he’d learned from his father and earned a reputation as a daredevil pilot who could land a plane anywhere. From the very beginning he had liked to spread his money around in the string of little towns he operated out of. Rather than a trafficker of poison he had been regarded as a kind of Robin Hood figure who snuck under the FBI’s and the DEA’s noses and brought back wealth for the people. The corrido musicians had written dozens of songs about him and turned him into a folk hero.
It wasn’t long before he had moved up into management.
“King Solomon” Dominico had become famous for his biblical and, by drug-smuggling standards, merciful judgment and punishment of those who transgressed against him. Most drug dealers simply slaughtered anyone who got in their way, and threw in some torture and atrocity to add fun and fear to the mix. Dominico had an Old-Testament, eye-for-an-eye, yet live-and-let-live philosophy. Anyone who stole from him? He cut off their left hand. Second time? Their right. Third time? Their head. To date there was no record of a second or a third transgression. If you informed on him, he tore out your tongue with tongs. As for DEA undercover agents or informants, nothing pleased him more than kidnapping them, keeping them as guests for a week or two at one of his haciendas deep in the desert and then dropping them off on the northern side of the border naked and hallucinating from violent heroin withdrawal.
Over the course of the last decade and a half he had carved himself a somewhat small, but tidy and quite profitable corner in Mexican organized crime.
He was big on Mexican pride and insisted on selling his wares north of the border. Anyone who worked for him who he caught selling locally received his judgment. Even other drug dealers liked and respected him and on several occasions “King Solomon” had been called upon to mediate disputes between the cartels. Dominico was a walking anomaly, a drug kingpin who had a code and actually walked his walk as he talked his talk. Bolan looked at the DEA file photo that Kurtzman had brought up on the screen.
Dominico bore a disturbing resemblance to a smiling, Mexican Sylvester Stallone with a beer gut.
Kurtzman was right. Smuggling nuclear materials for terrorists was not the sort of thing Guillermo Dominico would normally be involved with. Drugs, guns and kidnapping were things to be inflicted upon the yanquis, his neighbors north of the Rio Grande. For Dominico, Mexico was holy ground. Bolan just couldn’t see him trafficking in radioactive poison even if it was heading north. The other very interesting thing was that unlike most crime lords who ended up in prison or dead, according to the FBI Dominico appeared to have gone into retirement several years ago, left the state of Sinaloa and moved to Mexico City.
“I think maybe I need to go have words with King Solomon.”
Kurtzman had been afraid of that. “Well, here’s something about the boy you might not know.”
“Do tell.”
“Many people believe that King Solomon the drug lord was once the masked wrestler Santo Solomon.”
Bolan raised a bemused eyebrow. “Really.”
Bolan knew just enough about the wonderful world of Lucha Libre, or Mexican professional wrestling, to know that the original masked wrestler named Santo ran a close second to Jesus as most popular person on Earth with the previous three generations of Mexican citizenry. Untold legions of luchadors had attached the name Santo to themselves to ride his rep.
Kurtzman called up more files. “At first he called himself Silver Solomon, and his gimmick was to come into the ring tossing peso coins to the crowd as he made his entrance.” He pulled up a grainy screen capture from Mexican cable television. A man in silver tights and a silver mask stood atop the second rope of a wrestling ring. His fists were cocked on his hips and his chin lifted like Superman as he absorbed the adulation of the crowd. He was wearing a silver cape. A twenty, a five and a one peso coin were sewn in descending order on the forehead of his mask with the one set between the mask’s stylized eyebrows. He was strong-looking, with impossibly broad shoulders, but was built more like a gymnast than his freakishly muscled wrestling counterparts north of the border. Mexican luchadors engaged in a lot of high-flying maneuvers and needed a higher power-to-weight ratio.
“So then he started dedicating matches to this church, or that charity or this orphan,” Kurtzman went on, “and people started calling him Santo Solomon.”
“So what happened to him?”
“The Santo Solomon gimmick just disappeared. Some people say the guy behind the mask took on a new persona, others say he got injured and had to quit. Being unmasked is a grave dishonor in the ring, and a lot of these guys retire without anyone knowing their true identities.”
“If it’s true he’d have the seed money to buy his own planes and start his own business. Can you link them?”
“I’m working on it.”
“You say Dominico is currently in Mexico City?”
“Nice little house in the hills.”
Bolan nodded. The nuclear material was still on its way north. He didn’t have much time. “I’m on a plane.”
Mexico City
KING SOLOMON’S KINGDOM was humble by most drug-lord-estate standards. It wasn’t the usual Latin crime-king sprawling rancho or fortresslike hacienda. It was a modest Eichler-style house of mostly glass walls and open floor plan. The most opulent thing about it was the prime hillside real estate it rested upon. The altitude put it above the horrendous air pollution and afforded a sea-of-stars view of urban Mexico City below. The house itself didn’t have much in the way of security, but most of the homes up in the hills were part of gated enclaves each with their own security station and armed guards. The raven-black 2008 Cadillac STS-V Bolan drove told most onlookers that Bolan belonged in these hills, and he wasn’t going to bother with trying to bluff his way past the gate. Bolan parked at a turnoff located about a hundred feet below the cliff that King Solomon’s house perched upon.
It wasn’t a particularly technical climb, but a hundred feet of rock was still a hundred feet of rock and Bolan was making his ascent at night. The soldier shrugged out of his sport jacket and took off his tie. He rolled up the sleeves of the black silk shirt he wore and strapped his silenced Beretta machine pistol to the thigh of his black climbing pants. Bolan put handcuffs and a few other odds and ends in a fanny pack and looped a coil of rope over his shoulder. He kicked out of his Italian loafers, laced into his rock shoes, powered up his night-vision goggles and started to climb.
Even at midnight the rock still radiated heat from the summer day, but a warm, dry rock face was the climber’s friend. He had scouted the cliff in the morning, and he climbed more by feel than what his goggles revealed. Only one overhang provided much of an obstacle, and for a few moments Bolan hung in space seventy-five feet above the road. However, he had photographed the ledge and committed its surface to memory, so the crevices and knobs were where he expected them to be.
Bolan was at the top a full five minutes under the time he had allotted himself.
He looped his rope around a tree trunk and cast the coil down the cliffside in case he needed to make a fast rope extraction. Satellite surveillance from the Farm had informed Bolan that Dominico’s girlfriend had left at noon and not returned. The gardener had gone home around 4:00 p.m. and the maid-cook had left at 10:00 p.m. It was now 12:15 a.m., and it appeared that Guillermo Dominico was alone. Bolan scouted the outside of the house. It was literally perched on a cliff and the glass walls had been designed to take full advantage of the view. Dominico had just enough of a back porch to include a long, narrow pool lined with black lava rock with an attached hot tub. There was a barbecue area off to one side, but no walls or fence to interfere with the vistas of the Anáhuac plateau below. Bolan spent long moments watching. Through his goggles he didn’t see the ghostly beams of any laser motion sensors. It appeared Dominico felt fairly secure in his aerie and the gates and guards on the periphery that kept out the riffraff and unwanted visitors from his past.
No one had planned on some American pulling a Spider-Man in the middle of the night.
Most of the rooms were dark. The master suite glowed blue from the light of a television. Bolan stepped into the shadows of the eaves and peered into the bedroom. One look told Bolan that Guillermo Dominico and the luchador Santo Solomon were the same man. King Solomon had been working out. He hadn’t quite reclaimed the fighting physique of his luchador days, but the barn-door shoulders were no longer sagging and the paunch and jowls from his DEA surveillance photos were gone. The coin-embossed, silver wrestling mask mounted behind glass on the wall surrounded by wrestling photos and newspaper clippings were something of a giveaway, as well. Dominico sat on a folded blue yoga mat wearing a pair of sausage-casing tight biking shorts; he was sheened with sweat and twitching and grimacing as he tried to hold a very forced and uncomfortable-looking half-lotus pose in front of his seventy-two-inch HDTV. Bolan paused a moment. It wasn’t something you saw drug kingpins do every day, even supposedly retired ones.
Up on the screen a man wearing nothing but a white loincloth sat in a full-lotus position and lectured in obviously dubbed Spanish. He looked like Yul Brynner, if the actor was a six-foot-six Special Forces operator moonlighting as a yoga instructor. Beneath his dais three beautiful blond women demonstrated poses at various levels of difficulty as he lectured. Bolan bided his time and silently picked the lock on the sliding-glass door.
He had run up against some wrestlers gone bad before, and anyone who had the capacity to fake that kind of physical carnage day in and day out without using wires or computer-generated special effects could also inflict it for real outside the ring. Bolan grimaced at the tiny click the latch made as he lifted it with his pick. Dominico was oblivious. His attention was equally divided between his DVD guru and his own straining knee joints. Bolan watched as the women on the giant TV unfolded themselves effortlessly from their sitting positions and flicked out their legs into full-forward splits. Dominico’s groan was audible through the sliding glass as he made a very impressive attempt at following suit.
Bolan slid back the door and it closed behind him as he strode into the room.
Dominico’s head snapped around and he rose an inch out of his splits. “Hey!”
Bolan slammed his hands down on Dominico’s shoulders. The former crime lord groaned as the soldier leaned his two hundred plus pounds into his attack and pushed Dominico a little deeper into the splits than he’d ever gone before. He could almost hear the groin muscles and tendons pulling like piano strings being tuned to the breaking point. Dominico’s shoulders suddenly heaved as he tried to push himself up. He was a powerful man, and it was a mighty attempt but Bolan had all the leverage. Dominico was pinned in place like a bug. The only direction for him to go was down. Bolan spoke quietly from his position of moral advantage. “Try that again and you’re going to sing soprano, Santo.”
Dominico couldn’t rise and he sure as hell didn’t want to go any lower. He snarled, suspended in yogic purgatory. “Don’t call me Santo!”
Bolan raised an intrigued eyebrow. For a man about to be snapped like a wishbone Dominico was remarkably defiant. Bolan leaned a little harder. “You’d prefer King Solomon?”
“No!” Dominico’s triceps stood out like horseshoes as he bore the weight of both of them. “It’s just Memo now!” he gritted.
“Memo” was the diminutive of Guillermo, like Billy for William. Bolan decided to give it to him. He didn’t have a partner to play good cop-bad cop with so he was going to have to play both roles; that and Guillermo Dominico was giving off just about the weirdest vibe of any crime lord Bolan had ever encountered. It was going to require more study than just a quick beat down for intel. “Okay, Memo, let’s talk.”
“Hey, man…” Dominico groaned in counterpoint. “Do I know you?”
“I want to know about the operation in Culiacán.”
“What are you? FBI? DEA?”
Bolan shoved down a little harder. “Talk to me or make a wish.”
Every muscle in Dominico’s body tensed with strain. “I haven’t been to Culiacán in years!”
“There’s a farm up in the hills. Near the Tamazula River. It has a hacienda and a warehouse and an airstrip. There was a time when you flew out of it. From what I know you used to own it.”
“I got nothing going on in Sinaloa! I’m retired!”
“Drug dealers don’t retire, Memo.” Bolan leaned hard. “They just change their M.O.”
“Jesus!” Dominico shuddered with effort. “I’m retired! Ask anybody!”
“That’s not what I hear, Memo.”
“Heard from who!” Dominico probed.
