Against All Enemies

17 SOME HAVE MONEY AND GUNS

Jorge Rojas stared absently through the oval-shaped window and sighed. They were at 41,000 feet now and his Boeing 777’s Rolls-Royce Trent 800 engines had been reduced to a purr by the well-insulated cabin. That was quite remarkable, since the 777 had the largest-diameter turbofan engines of any aircraft — and it should have big engines, he mused, given its cost. He had spent nearly $300 million on this VIP airliner, the world’s largest twin jet and often referred to as the “triple seven.” He could fly nearly halfway around the world before they had to land for refueling. If he was in a hurry, his pilot and copilot, veteran and distinguished officers of the Mexican Air Force, could get him there at.89 mach. The jet, like his many homes, was a testament to his success and a magnificent retreat. He’d taken delivery of the plane and had it flown from the Boeing plant in Seattle to the Lufthansa base in Hamburg, where it was furnished with an entirely customized cabin that followed his very specific and ambitious requests. While he could fly up to fifty passengers in a first-class seating area, most of the plane had been converted into his airborne home and office, complete with a master bedroom suite trimmed in knotty, warm tones of black-ash burl. The travertine-stone bathroom had a six-head shower and sauna for up to four, along with a jet tub. The adjoining office had been furnished with antique French pieces secured to the floor. Even his bookcases had little racks that protected the volumes from sliding off. While the furniture was old, the technology was state-of-the-art: printers, scanners, computers, Wi-Fi networks, webcams, and anything else his onboard information-technology expert thought he needed. Opposite his desk was a conference table with a flat-screen television and computer display projector, along with posh, heavily padded leather seats that his guests repeatedly sighed into and admired. Outside the office was a media room with yet another widescreen television and full-size sofas and recliners, along with a full-size wet bar manned by Hans DeVaughn, a World Class — winning international bartending champion that Rojas had recruited while in Spain. The World Class competition was recognized as the Oscars of the bartending industry, and Hans — with his knowledge, skill, and creative flair — had beaten more than six thousand bartenders from more than twenty-four different countries. In fact, all seven of Rojas’s attendants had been found during business trips to Europe, and they had their own modest-sized but functional quarters that included a shower and train-style bunks for much longer trips. Finally, the private kitchen with convection oven and stove was a spectacular affair that his longtime chef J.C. had helped him design. The man had insisted on having all his accoutrements, no matter where they traveled. A few of Rojas’s very special VIPs liked to remark that were they aboard America’s Air Force One, they’d be “slumming it” when compared to Rojas’s flying palace. The King of Jordan had jokingly said he was disappointed that the jet lacked a private swimming pool.

“Don’t laugh,” said Rojas. “The Russians had saltwater pools on their Typhoon-class submarines. But rest assured, the next plane I buy will be bigger — and you will have your swimming pool!”

“No need for that. What you have already is simply spectacular.”

Rojas was indeed wrapped in a cocoon of expensive leather and wood accents polished to a remarkable shine, J.C. was preparing for them a luscious early-evening dinner, and, admittedly, he had more money than he could ever spend in a thousand lifetimes. Hell, the North and South American indexes were even rallying to five-month highs. Life was spectacular. He should not be feeling so dour.

Alas, Miguel was growing up too quickly, and while Rojas had helped find for his boy a lovely girlfriend, part of him regretted that, because this girl — who reminded him so much of his precious Sofía — would now become the center of the boy’s life. Rojas smiled inwardly. He was simply feeling the pain of a father coming to terms with his son’s independence. That was all. Logic needed to trump emotions. Easier said than done, though. When he saw them together, looking so young and vibrant and beautiful, he could not help but see himself and Sofía. He was jealous, of course, jealous of his son’s youth and the fact that he’d found someone to love when Rojas had lost the love of his life. Was it right to feel that way? To envy your own son?

Across the cabin sat Jeffrey Campbell, an old friend from USC who’d founded Betatest, a company involved in the early stages of applications for several cell-phone platforms. Campbell had made millions and was expanding his business into South America with Rojas’s help. They’d both played on the soccer team and had once dated twin sisters, which became quite a sensation on campus, as those two young vixens were well sought after by legions of students.

“You look a million miles away,” said Campbell.

Rojas smiled weakly. “Not quite a million. How’re you feeling?”

“I’m all right. I always thought I’d go before him. It’s not easy to bury your kid brother.”

That last sentence stung Rojas. “Of course not.”

Campbell’s brother, also a college athlete, who had never smoked a single cigarette in his life, had contracted lung cancer and suddenly passed away. He was thirty-eight. His doctors suspected that he’d been exposed to depleted uranium when his M1A1 Abrams tank had struck an IED while in Iraq, but proving that and trying to gain reparations from the military would be difficult.

Rojas’s older brother had died when he was only seventeen and Rojas had been fifteen. They’d grown up in Apatzingán, then a much smaller town in the state of Michoacán in southwest Mexico. Their father had been a farmer and rancher who on weekends repaired farming equipment and the taxis for a company that operated in some of the cities. He was a broad-shouldered man with a thick mustache and tan felt hat that some people joked he wore to bed. Their mother, whose large brown eyes and thick brows could form an expression that chilled Rojas to the bone, toiled endlessly on the farm and kept their home impeccably clean. His parents had instilled in him a work ethic that tolerated no distractions, one that also gave him little patience for those who chose to shuffle nonchalantly through their lives.

The night had been cool and crisp, the wind sweeping down from the mountains and swinging the fence gate to and fro, since the latch had rusted off. The three gangsters were standing there, backlit by a waning moon, waiting for Rojas’s brother, Esteban, to emerge and confront them. They were dressed in dark clothes, with two wearing hoods like grim reapers. The tallest stood farther back, like a sentinel charged with recording the incident for eyes more powerful than his.

Rojas came out onto the porch and grabbed his brother’s wrist. “Just give it back to them.”

“I can’t,” said Esteban. “I already spent it.”

“On what?”

“On fixing the tractor and the water pipes.”

“That’s how you got the money?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you do this?” Rojas’s voice was beginning to crack.

“Because look at us! We’re peasants! We work all day, and for what? Hardly anything! They work for the cartel and in five minutes they make what we have in a month! It’s not fair.”

“I know, but you shouldn’t have done it!”

“Okay, you’re right. I shouldn’t have stolen their money, but I did. And now it’s too late. So now I have to talk to them. Maybe they will let me work it off.”

“Don’t go.”

“I have to get this over with. I can’t sleep anymore. I have to make a deal with them.”

Esteban yanked his arm free and started down from the porch, heading across the dirt trail toward the fence.

Rojas would watch him make that walk over and over in his nightmares. He marked every footfall, every shifting shadow edging across his brother’s corduroy jacket. Esteban was tugging nervously on the sleeves of that jacket, pulling the fabric deeper into his palms. Rojas had always looked up to his older brother, and never once had he seen him afraid.

But those hands tugging on the sleeves …and his gait, carefully measured but the boots dragging deeper than they usually did …told him that his hero, his protector, the boy who had taught him how to fish, skip rocks, and drive a tractor, was very much afraid.

“Esteban!” Rojas cried.

His brother spun and raised a finger. “Stay on the porch!”

Rojas wanted nothing more than to either accompany his brother or run back into the house and alert his parents, but they had gone into the city to celebrate their wedding anniversary, and Rojas’s father had boasted about saving up enough money to treat his wife to an expensive meal.

One of the gangsters said something to Esteban, who fired back a retort, his voice rising. Esteban neared the gate, and oddly enough, the gangsters refused to come past it, as though there were some force holding them back.

It was not until Esteban pushed past the gate and stepped into the dirt road beyond that they surrounded him. Rojas thought of the shotgun their father kept under his bed. He thought of rushing out there and blasting each of those evil boys in the face. He could no longer watch his brother being accosted by these cabrones.

He remembered the candy that Esteban had brought home last week, a real luxury to them, and he realized that even that had been purchased with the stolen money.

“Here,” Esteban had said. “I know how much you love chocolate.”

“Thank you! I can’t believe you got some!”

“I know. Neither can I!”

And after they’d finished eating all the chocolate and were lying in their bunk beds, staring up at the ceiling, Esteban had said, “You should never be scared of anyone, Jorge. People will try to intimidate you, but no one is better than anyone else. Some have money and guns. That is the only difference. Don’t be scared. You need to be a fighter in this life.”

“I don’t know if el padre would go along with that,” he’d said. “He told us to be scared of the gangs.”

“No! Never be scared.”

But Rojas was scared, more than ever now, as he’d watched the gangsters begin shouting at his brother.

The shortest one shoved Esteban, who returned the shove and screamed, “I’ll pay back the money!”

And then the tallest one, the sentinel who’d remained a few steps behind and had not said a word, reached into his jacket and produced a pistol.

Rojas gasped, tensed, reached out—

The gunshot made him flinch and blink as Esteban’s head snapped to one side and he dropped to the ground.

Without a word, Rojas ran into the house, into his father’s bedroom, and snatched up the shotgun. He rushed back outside. The three gangsters were already sprinting across the field, toward the moon hanging low on the horizon. Rojas banged past the gate and screamed after them. He fired the shotgun twice, the boom echoing off the house and hills. The gangsters were well out of range. He cursed, slowed to a halt, and struggled for breath.

Then he turned back to his brother, lying motionless in the dirt. He rushed to his brother’s side, and the shotgun fell out of his hands. The gaping hole in Esteban’s head sent shudders through him. His brother stared back with a weird reflection in his eyes, and later on, in the dreams and nightmares, Rojas would see the moon in those eyes, and against that moon, cast in silhouette, stood the sentinel, raising his pistol. Rojas would struggle to see the boy’s face, but he never could.

He put his head down on his brother’s chest and began to cry. Neighbors found him there a few minutes later, and eventually his parents arrived. The wailing of his mother carried on throughout the night.

That was another lifetime, thought Rojas, running a finger along the burled-wood arm of his seat. The rags-to-riches story was a cliché, he’d been told, yet he defied anyone to classify his present life as a cliché. As much as he still loved and admired his brother, Rojas understood now that Esteban had made a grave and foolish mistake. Rojas had spent nearly half of his life searching for the boy who had killed Esteban, but no one had come forward to help.

“Well, Jorge, I can’t thank you enough for this. For all of this. I mean, I’ve never actually met the president of a country before.”

“I’ve met many of them,” Rojas said. “And you know what? They are just men. People will try to intimidate you, but no one is better than anyone else. Some have money and guns. That is the only difference.”

“Some have private jets, too,” Campbell added with a grin.

He nodded. “I like to travel.”

“I’m sure you’ve been asked this question before, but I’m always intrigued by people like you. What do you think contributed the most to your success? Was it discipline or just smarts? Luck? A little bit of everything? I mean, you’ve told me the story of the small town where you grew up. And now you’re literally one of the richest people on the planet. That article in Newsweek said your estimated worth is at least eight percent of Mexico’s gross domestic product. It’s just …staggering. Who would’ve thought this in college, right?”

“You’ve done pretty well, too. Don’t sell yourself short.”

He nodded. “But nothing like this. So, as I look around your beautiful jet, I ask you, how’d you get here?”

“Buying businesses, making wise investments …I don’t know, really. Friends helped the most.”

“Don’t be coy.”

“I’m serious. The friendships I’ve made are what’s become most important, and you’ll see that when we get to Colombia.”

Campbell considered that and finally nodded, and it seemed Rojas had successfully ducked the question. But then Campbell said, “Do you think it was school? Doing well in school?”

“Sure, that’s it. Friends and school.”

“But that doesn’t answer the real mystery.”

Rojas frowned. “Oh, what’s that?”

“How so many of your companies have been able to weather this economic downturn. If memory serves, not a single one of your companies has had to file for bankruptcy. Given this volatile market, that’s incredible.”

Rojas allowed himself a faint grin. “I have good people working for me and an army of lawyers to protect me and my investments.”

“The Subways you have in Mexico are making more money than those in the United States, yet the people in Mexico have less disposable income. How do you do it?”

He began laughing. “We sell a lot of sandwiches.” And then he cast his mind back to a board of directors meeting he’d had in the previous month, where his team had presented on the year’s earnings for the chain of car dealerships he owned with locations throughout all of Mexico. Many people were unaware that the country often had the largest car production and sales in the world. The numbers, however, had been disappointing, yet Rojas had been able to assure his people that dealer incentives would not only remain but increase tenfold.

“But how can they do that with this tremendous drop in sales?” asked his CEO. It was a fair question, and the dozen or so people seated at the long conference table focused their attention on Rojas, who stood at the head and said, “I’ve been in direct talks with the manufacturers, and I promise you that your incentives will increase.”

They shrugged in disbelief. But Rojas made it happen. And the calls and e-mails flooded in: “Thank you! Thank you!”

One manager even remarked that Señor Rojas “has a magical vault filled with magical money that saves lives and protects families and schools.”

The truth was, indeed, often said in jest, and the vault contained within the mansion at Cuernavaca just outside Mexico City was, in fact, piled from floor to ceiling with dollars and pesos. Walls and walls of cash. Millions and millions — money that would be deftly laundered through the networks and the shell companies and deposited in overseas accounts in addition to bolstering Rojas’s legitimate businesses, his dealerships and restaurants and cigarette manufacturers and telecom companies.

Because the one business that not only weathered rough economic times but even flourished was the drug trade. At times Rojas wished he could detach himself from the business that had helped build his empire. It had been a painstaking challenge to keep his identity and involvement in the cartel a secret. Neither his wife nor his son knew anything about the Juárez Cartel and how Rojas, then a senior in college, had become involved with the business.

Rojas had met a grad student named Enrique Juárez, who his colleagues and professors said was a genius in recombinant DNA gene technology and the insulin manufacturing process. Juárez wanted to establish a pharmaceutical company in Mexico to take advantage of the cheap labor. So impressed was Rojas by the business proposal that he invested a huge portion of his life savings (nearly $20,000) for a partnership in the company. GA Lab (Genetics Acuña) was established in Ciudad Acuña (population 209,000) along the banks of the Rio Grande, south of Del Rio, Texas. Juárez had explained the process of their operation: The first contract was to produce the A chain with twenty-one amino acids and the B chain containing thirty amino acids as the precursor to the synthesis of human insulin.

Once the A and B amino-acid chains were grown, GA would ship the material back to the United States, where it would be stitched into circular DNA strands called plasmids, using special enzymes to perform molecular surgery, the next step in the insulin manufacturing process.

The contracts came in. The business took off, and during the next five years both Rojas and Juárez drew six-figure salaries. Rojas clearly saw the advantage of owning a pharmaceutical company with a legitimate front, and he began to hire people behind Juárez’s back to produce black-market versions of drugs such as Dilaudid, Vicodin, Percocet, and Oxycontin, all of which produced more money than the insulin side of the business.

One Friday night, over a long dinner and even more heated debate, Juárez stared at Rojas through his thick glasses and said, “Jorge, I don’t like the direction you are taking our company. There’s too much at stake now. Too much to lose. I don’t care how much we make on the black-market drugs. If we get caught, we lose everything.”

“I know what you’re saying. That’s why I’m prepared to buy you out of the business. You can take the money and start up a new venture. I’ll make you a very generous offer. I don’t want to see you unhappy. We started this with some great ideas and a lot of praying. Let me free you up to do something else.”

“I created this business. It was my brainchild from the start. You know that. I’m not going to hand it over to you. We were partners, but you’ve never consulted me on any of this. You’ve gone behind my back. I can’t trust you anymore.”

Rojas stiffened. “You’d be nothing without my money.”

“I won’t sell you this business. I’m asking you to stop risking everything.”

“You need to accept my offer.”

“No, I don’t.” Juárez rose, wiped his mouth, and stormed away from the table.

The next morning he attempted to fire all of the scientists and lab personnel Rojas had hired.

Rojas told him to go away, take a week off, go skiing in Switzerland. He was not thinking clearly. Juárez finally resigned himself to the pressure and took the vacation. Unfortunately, while there he died in a terrible skiing “accident,” and had left all of his money and property to his elderly mother, who immediately struck a most agreeable deal with Rojas.

The Juárez Cartel had been unofficially named after the city where the operation did most of its business, but the striking irony was that the man responsible for its birth also bore the same name. Rojas had begun with a small pharmaceutical company, which he expanded into many more businesses, which in turn helped him to create companies that could help launder money while purchasing huge swaths of real estate that cut through some of the most populated cities in Mexico.

He recognized that the quickest way to achieve expertise in new enterprises was to bypass time-consuming learning curves and buy up successful preexisting companies in that market. His understanding of finances and how to move and sell product led to the rapid — even extreme — growth of his empire. However, his organization was not without problems. Three of the cartel’s highest-ranking members began running the drug-smuggling operations into the ground based on their egos and hubris, thus he’d been forced to “remove” them from power. The decision — like the one concerning Juárez — still haunted him, but he knew if he didn’t act swiftly, the operation would go down, and he along with it.

In more recent years he’d purchased land in New York City and made millions by flipping such parcels. He bailed out book and magazine publishers and bought stock in them. He often flirted with the idea of simply handing over the entire cartel and its businesses to Fernando Castillo, who would provide stable and keen leadership. Rojas had been ready to make a clean break, but then the world’s economy had nose-dived, and he’d been forced to reinforce his companies and build back his earnings by remaining the clandestine leader of what now had become the most profitable and powerful drug cartel in Mexico.

How did he do it?

He thought of leaning toward Campbell and telling him the truth. “Jeffrey, this world is unfair. This world took my dear wife from me. And because of that, I can’t play by the rules. I have to take chances like my brother did. So I’m doing what I have to do. Doing what good I can in the world, but I know that other lives are being ruined, that good people are dying, but many more are being saved. This is the ugly truth of me. The terrible secret. At least you don’t have to live with it …Only I do.”

J.C. arrived with their dinner — freshly made fajitas that filled the cabin with an aroma that made Rojas dizzy. He thought of Miguel, who’d soon be heading off with his young lady for a short vacation.

What would that day be like? The day his only son learned the truth?