“I apologize for our late arrival,” said Rojas. “But after that madness in Paris, passing through customs was nearly a three-hour ordeal.”
“I understand the delay,” said Rodriguez. “Now, I’ve set us up in the library. I won’t turn in until ten this evening, so we have plenty of time. We can also move to the observatory, if it’s not too cold. I’m sure you’ll chew my ear off with the reports on your holdings, more than I’d ever want to know about petroleum, coffee, and coal …I want to tell you that we’re doing much better than the last time we talked.”
“Yes, we are,” said Rojas, his tone brightening.
The president started off.
Campbell turned to Rojas and grinned. “This is incredible.”
“Of course,” said Rojas. Then he added in a whisper, “And when we’re finished, you’re going to have a government contract, trust me.”
“Excellent,” Campbell said with a gasp.
They shifted past the entrance foyer, whose walls displayed fine pieces of framed art, including several paintings of Antonio Nariño himself, along with ornate furniture dating back several hundred years. This kind of history and opulence no longer moved Rojas to an outward reaction, but he enjoyed watching Campbell’s eyes grow even wider the farther they ventured into the palace.
His phone vibrated. He checked the text message from Fernando Castillo: I’m here now with Ballesteros.
Rojas nodded inwardly. Ballesteros had been having a very rough time of it, and Rojas was glad they were here now in the country to help his loyal supplier. Ballesteros’s enemies were about to suffer the full wrath of the Juárez Cartel.
Colonel Julio Dios of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the largest and oldest insurgent group in the Americas, settled down onto his cot inside the tent. This was his fiftieth birthday, and he’d spent the day drinking and celebrating with his men. Ah, the word men was being too generous. Most of his force was comprised of boys, really, barely eighteen, some only fourteen or fifteen, but he had trained them well, and they were fiercely loyal to him and his mission to further squeeze the cocaine producers for more money so they could expand and better equip their force. They were hardly ready for a military coup against the government of Colombia, but Dios speculated that in several years, FARC forces could rise up and attain a decided victory. They would finally bring down the corrupt president and his intolerable regime. For now, though, they would increase their funding by more heavily taxing the drug producers. The relationship he had with one producer in particular, Juan Ramón Ballesteros, had been an ad hoc alliance of convenience, with Ballesteros often trading cocaine for weapons. FARC made sure to steer itself clear of any involvement in the actual production and transportation of the drugs, and he provided Ballesteros with the added security he needed to the keep local and federal law enforcement authorities off his back.
But while Ballesteros was expanding his business, Dios and his comrades were being aggressively hunted down, their numbers beginning to dwindle, their fate seemingly tied to the generosity of Ballesteros and other drug traffickers like him. That, Dios had decided, needed to change, and so he had been putting more than a little pressure on the drug man, whose stubbornness would soon get him killed.
Dios cupped his head in his hands. He was ready to enjoy a long and restful night.
He neither heard nor saw the man enter his tent, only felt the hand go over his mouth and the white-hot pain flood into his chest. When he finally looked up through the grainy darkness, he saw only a figure dressed in black, the face covered by a balaclava with only one eye cut out — or was that a patch lying beneath the other eyehole?
“Ballesteros sends his regards. You don’t fuck with us. Ever. Your boys will know that now …Go see God …”
The man punched him in the chest again, more white-hot pain, and suddenly Dios had no control over his arms and legs. He wanted to cough. Couldn’t. He started to take a breath. Couldn’t. And then …
As he left the tent with blood-covered gloves, Fernando Castillo thought about the other men who were being killed at the exact same moment, six other high-ranking FARC leaders who would all be murdered with notes pinned to their chests “asking” for their renewed cooperation and “patience.” The Juárez Cartel had spoken.
“You will lead them. You will bring the jihad back to the United States — and you must use the contacts you’ve made with the Mexicans to do that. Do you understand?”
Those were Mullah Abdul Samad’s orders, and every decision he made was directed toward completing that mission. No matter how much he loathed what he was about to do, he would not forget Mullah Omar Rahmani’s words.
Samad had traveled alone in the black Mercedes limousine. Niazi and Talwar were watching Spanish soap operas back at the Charleston Hotel, where Ballesteros had put them up in suites — all seventeen of them. Fourteen of Samad’s fifteen fighters had arrived in the city, and it was Allah’s will that he, Niazi, and Talwar had escaped from that jungle house after the attack by FARC paramilitary troops. Thus far there had been only one setback: the death of Ahmad Leghari in Paris. That Ballesteros could not use the submarine to get them into Mexico was an issue that could be addressed, but most crucial was the border crossing into the United States. If Samad could strike a deal now with the Juárez Cartel, then the most challenging leg of his journey would be addressed. If not, there would be other plans set into motion, and Rahmani had said that he was already in contact with at least one other cartel. He’d feared that contacting several cartels at once might alert Rojas, and so they would advance slowly, subtly.
The limousine driver, a young man no more than twenty-one, took him up across the broad cobblestone driveway and toward the entrance of a spectacular colonial-style mansion set into the foothills and overlooking the entire city. This, Ballesteros had said, was yet another of his boss’s vacation homes, worth millions in a good real estate market, and Samad, being a man of simple means and simple resources, could not help but despise the ostentation of it all, from the dozens of dormer windows to the six different fountains set across the circular driveway to the marble statues that suggested he’d arrived at a museum rather than a private residence. They stopped before a pair of wooden doors hand-carved with leaf patterns accented in gold and finished in a deep walnut. The driver stepped out and opened the door for Samad, who slid outside. He would be unrecognizable to even his trusted lieutenants, were they to glimpse him from afar. The beard and hair had been severely trimmed, and he’d purchased a very Western business suit along with a leather attaché. He was, to any Colombian, a successful-looking foreign businessman who on the weekends enjoyed the outdoors, as suggested by his rough-and-tumble beard and lean frame.
A slightly hunchbacked man with gray mustache and dressed in a butler’s uniform met him at the door and led him onto a back terrace, where the man Samad had come to see was alone before a wrought-iron table, reading the daily edition of La República Bogotá, a glass of orange juice waiting at his side.
“Señor Rojas? Your guest has arrived,” said the butler in Spanish.
The newspaper lowered to reveal a man shockingly young for his position. Samad tried to hide his surprise as the man rose, raked fingers through thick black hair with the barest touch of gray, then reached out to offer Samad a firm handshake.