After his forced departure from MI6, he had gone to work for a commercial research and strategic intelligence firm based out of London. He spent six months there, doing opposition research on political candidates and potential corporate board members. But apparently it wasn’t enough that MI6 had fired him from that job. The spiteful bastards had gone on to ruin his reputation outside of the agency as well. Word was out. If you hired Ian Williams, you were on their blacklist. And no one in Williams’s line of work wanted to anger one of the chaps at the Secret Intelligence Service.
The official break from MI6 had been years in the making. Too many pissed-off members of Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, and too many unexplained dead civilians.
After his firing, Williams had quickly reached out to his connections in Pakistan’s intelligence service. His close collaboration with the ISI had been one of the reasons MI6 had cast him away. He was now ready to cash in on that relationship.
Abdul Syed had arranged for Williams to take a job as a security consultant in Mexico City. But that was just a seed investment. A starting point for Williams to learn the country, grow his network, and infiltrate the organizations that ran Mexico: the cartels.
A glass sliding door opened and Juan Martinez, head of the Sinaloa cartel, walked towards him, whiskey glass in hand.
A national bank vice president at age forty, with family connections to Mexico’s upper crust, Juan Martinez would’ve had no problem continuing his successful and legitimate business career on his own. But Ian Williams had made a livelihood out of luring talented and ambitious men into his web. Martinez was the piece that was missing from the ISI’s new operation in Mexico.
Together, Williams and Syed had orchestrated a remarkable coup. It was one of the most swift and complete takeovers of a multibillion-dollar company in modern history. And it was almost completely bloodless. An amazing feat, given the industry norms.
But like many achievements in the world of espionage, it wasn’t something that Williams could publicize. Only ten people around the world knew anything about it.
Nine, he reminded himself. One of them had been killed last week, at a park in Virginia.
“Good evening, my friend.”
“Good evening, Mr. Martinez.” Martinez had told Williams several times to call him Juan in private, but he never did.
The Martinez family had been the aristocratic land owners in Durango for generations. Juan’s parents had moved north, to a wealthy housing district near Mexico City, when the cartels had moved into the area. It was ironic that he would end up moving back to the area to run the cartels.
Williams, having quickly grown his book of business in Mexico City, had done work for the cartels and Martinez’s bank. Williams had earned the young businessman’s trust as an advisor and problem-solver in the areas in which legitimate businesses couldn’t easily participate. Money laundering. Bribery. Extortion. A man like Ian Williams had no scruples about being the go-between. And Williams was happy to see that Martinez had the stomach to allow such flexibility.
With his business acumen, his Durango family roots, and his strong personal relationship with Williams, it was time for a promotion.
The Sinaloa cartel had, through a shell company, used Martinez’s bank for several large real estate deals in Panama. Syed had helped to influence the bank choice through one of his ISI agents in Mexico. They’d ensured that Martinez’s division would be assigned the account.
At first Martinez had wanted nothing to do with the project. He had seen enough of the cartels during his childhood in Durango. With his education and upbringing, why did he need to succumb to a life of crime? It was beneath him. Or so he thought.
But Williams had been hired by the cartel as an external auditor. Behind closed doors, he’d convinced Martinez of the benefits of taking on the job. When he’d seen some of the numbers, Martinez had realized just how obscene the profits were.
Williams had convinced Martinez that he could do better still. Let us meet with a few of the cartel men, and see if we can’t get a bigger piece of the action? Williams was already connected with one of them.
His name was Hector Rojas.
Soon Juan Martinez, with his advanced degrees and years of experience in banking, saw what Williams had been telling him. The cartel’s finances, as big as their revenues and profit margins were, were being run by amateurs. After all the articles that Martinez had read claiming that they were being run like Fortune 500 companies, he now saw what was beneath the hood and knew that he could do better.
Much better.
He was in.
Martinez and Williams soon had their hands in all of the Sinaloa cartel’s financial dealings. And the higher-ups in the cartel saw their collective worth. Martinez had made recommendations for improvement that increased the cartel’s profitability by billions of dollars without breaking a sweat.
Soon Martinez and Williams were taking personal meetings with the head of the cartel himself, a man named Vasquez. Vasquez liked Martinez immensely, seeing him as reliable, professional, and clean. He didn’t use any of the product, he didn’t drink, and he valued family. Family, and in particular the loyalty one had to family, was very important to Vasquez.
“Would you like to be part of our family?” The former leader of the Sinaloa had posed the question to Juan Martinez, with Williams standing in the background, almost two years ago.
Martinez, while disciplined and professional, was also ambitious. When he had worked as an executive in a company, he’d had the potential to rise up the food chain and one day lead that company. As a member of one of the cartels, he had now increased his risk due to the nature of the work and stepped off the golden path towards being a chief executive. He related this concern to Vasquez. Vasquez smiled.
“You know men have been killed on the suspicion that they wanted to become what I am. Yet here you are, saying it to my face.”
The men had come to an agreement. Martinez would take ownership of and operate the newly formed Durango cartel, a tiny offshoot of the Sinaloa cartel. In return, he would pay a cut to Sinaloa and continue to oversee the operations and finances of both cartels. To the chagrin of Vasquez’s family members and longtime partners, Martinez was effectively made second-in-command.
Heir to the throne.
Syed had arranged for Vasquez to be killed during an attempted arrest by the federales one month later.
Williams had been ready for it.
Martinez had been like a favored archbishop finding out that the pope had just died. A scramble. Posturing. Gossip and whispers. Uncertainty. Alliances and plans were made.
Martinez had been panicked. “We must flee. These people don’t accept me. My family… ”
Williams had forced him to hold his ground. Williams had spent months gathering loyal gunmen from the ranks of Mexican special operations, similar to the way the Zetas had formed their cadre of elite warriors. His first order of business now was to invite the upper echelon of the Sinaloa cartel — mostly members of the Vasquez family — to a meeting at the Martinez family ranch in Durango. He’d summoned them — both as an initial gesture of authority and as a way to get the upper hand.
The Sinaloa cartel was Martinez’s now.
Williams had done the talking while Martinez had sat at the head of the table, trying to look unafraid.
“I understand that we are outsiders to many of you,” Williams had said, “and I understand that many of you harbor hostility and mistrust towards me. So, I will tell you this: I don’t care. Pledge loyalty to Juan Martinez now. Maintain that loyalty. Because I will always be watching you. And you have seen what I do to those who are disloyal. There is only one cartel now. And Señor Martinez owns it.”