Bio-Strike

FOURTEEN

The body of Felix Quiros did not quite go to the rodents. Nor was it exactly found by other members of the Quiros clan.

His executioner would later be amused to hear that they split the difference.

First cousins to one another, third cousins to Felix on opposite sides of his lineage, foremen at his auto salvage yard, and low-level functionaries in the criminal family business, Cesar and Jorge were far from quick to attach his three-day absence from the yard to the notion that any harm had come to him, and even slower to associate it with the scuttling, scratching noise they heard down the aisle of junkers.

Every so often, Felix would shoot down across the border to those Tijuana bars where the young putas came three for the price of one, bring them to a hotel room, turn them on to some dope or ecstasy, get fucked up, and drop out of sight for days on end. Cesar and Jorge were well aware of his bad habits and guessed they had been the guys taking care of the scrapyard’s daily operations ever since Enrique handed it to Felix in an attempt to give him a firm set of responsibilities and keep him from running into trouble, but he’d kept on doing it anyway. Just let him get his hands on a little cash, and you could count on him going no-show until he’d blown every cent of it looking for degenerate kicks.

Felix was here, he wasn’t here, Cesar and Jorge didn’t think it was of much consequence either way. They knew about their own obligations. They had the keys and entry combinations to every part of the scrapyard and usually found that it was less trouble to manage things without his high-hat bullshit. When he’d asked them to participate in that score connected with the Salazars’ goods from Mexico, they’d told him he was a maniac and refused. Because Felix was the illegitimate son of Enrique’s sister, Cesar and Jorge kept from voicing their opinions of him except between themselves, though the pair had a strong feeling that whatever they thought about the twit was hardly anything that wouldn’t have occurred to his uncle a hundred times, and that nobody would have faulted them too much for anything they said. Still, you had to observe certain proprieties.

When Cesar finally noticed the sounds at around noon, it barely aroused his interest. A dumping ground like this, acre upon acre littered with decaying vehicles filled with half-eaten hot dogs, burritos, candy bars, Twinkies, ice cream cones, soft drink containers, and other rotting trash people left inside them, a place like this was home to every sort of creature you could name. And then some. After a while, you didn’t actually have to see them to know which ones were nearby. You could identify them just by the sounds they made.

That scratchy rustle, Cesar immediately knew it was a sign of rats. Some people, ones who didn’t have the same experience with them as Cesar, who didn’t spend as much of their goddamn lives around them as Cesar, thought they mainly came out at night, but here in the yard you could expect them to appear at any hour of the day. You got used to them being nuisances, used to seeing them dart between the cars, used to hearing them scavenge for food. They’d crawl in through broken windows or holes in the undercarriages, even climb into the trunks and chew through the upholstery of the backseats to enter the junkers. Bring an egg sandwich from the luncheonette for breakfast, a gray, ugly fucker that was bigger and meaner than a Chihuahua was liable to catch a whiff, come right out into the open, right into your trailer or shed if there was a space wide enough for it to crawl through. Sit there staring at you with the shiny beads of its eyes like it expected you to hand over the food. At a certain point, Cesar and Jorge had got to chucking empty beer and soda cans at the rats to scare them away, but some were so bold they’d stay right where they were unless you caught them smack in the head, rearing up on their hind legs, baring their white needle teeth like they were daring you to take another pitch, give it your goddamn best. Finally, Jorge started shooting them on sight when they get too close… and not with a BB gun, either. Jorge, he’d hit them with rounds from his nine mil, bam, bam, bam. Said that someday he would come in with an Uzi and chop away at the bastards until every last one was blown to pieces.

So it didn’t seem exceptional at first, that sound. This was a little after twelve noon, maybe eighty degrees out, a warm day for November, the sun baking straight down on the wrecks to recook the spoiled food and crap inside them, raising a stink into the air that got the rats salivating. You could spend the rest of the day trying to scatter them, banging new dents into the already battered auto bodies with bats and crowbars, risk getting bitten if you weren’t careful. And for what good reason?

Bearing this in mind, Cesar was initially inclined to overlook the skritch-scratch of their claws and the gnawing of their teeth, having been headed toward the office trailer for the phone number of this guy who repaired the heavy equipment, wanting to call him down to look at a forklift that had gone kaput.

But then he’d hesitated and found himself turning toward the noise. No question, a lot of rats were making it. Very definitely a whole lot. It gave him the creeps, thinking about them teeming somewhere just out of sight behind the wall of cars. Maybe some other kind of animal had wandered into the yard and dropped dead. A bird, a cat, a fucking coyote, Christ only knew. It had happened in the past, and what you wanted to do in that case was clean things out, torch the car if need be, or before you knew it, a whole section of the yard would be swarming with all kinds of vermin. Worms, flies, maggots, a disgusting situation.

So what Cesar had done was reach into his pocket for his flip phone, buzz Jorge over at the recycling plant, and tell him to haul ass over with his niner.

It took him maybe ten minutes to show, a crowbar in his hand, his pistol in a belt holster under his hanging shirttails. And when he did, Jorge agreed Cesar’s feelings were merited.

“Sounds to me like there’s a lot of goddamn rats back there,” he’d said, and passed the crowbar to Cesar. “Better clean it out or we gonna have some kind of infestation.”

Which was, of course, almost word for word what Cesar himself had been thinking.

The noise leading them forward, they inched their way between twisted front panels, jutting bumpers, partially unhinged doors, and fallen wheel covers. It was like being inside an oven here, heat shimmers above the stacked auto bodies. The scratching was very loud, and you could hear the rats squealing excitedly. And the stink, Jesus, that odor of broiling garbage was enough to make Cesar’s stomach clench.

Suddenly Jorge grabbed his shoulder and steered him to the right. He had his gun in his free hand and was pointing it at the back of an old Buick sedan.

But Cesar had already seen the rats. There had to be dozens of them. Fat ones with pale, slopping bellies that dragged underneath them. Smaller ones not much larger than mice. They were squirming over, under, and around the trunk. Crowding on its closed lid, climbing on each other’s backs, a frenzied jumble. They did not seem to notice the two men. Or maybe they were too worked up to care about them.

A sound of horror and disgust wringing from his throat, Jorge swung his pistol downward and pumped three rounds into the carpet of rats on the ground. Cesar saw a rat explode as it flopped into the air. The rest that had been clustered near the rear wheels and bumper went scrambling away, but a few of them still clung to the trunk lid, pawing at its flaked, peeling finish.

Jorge raised the gun and fired. Another burst of fur, blood, and guts. Something warm splashed Cesar’s cheek, and he winced with aversion. And then the rats were springing from the trunk, tumbling from it, scattering in every direction.

“We gotta see what’s inside!” Jorge yelled, his face sweaty, gesticulating at the trunk with his niner.

The crowbar against his thigh, Cesar stepped reluctantly toward the Buick. He glimpsed a hairless tail slip out of sight under its chassis, shuddered, and stopped.

“Yo, c’mon, open the fuckin’ thing!”

Cesar nodded without saying anything. He worked the flat end of the steel bar under the trunk lid between the latch and corroded rubber weatherstripping. Then he pushed down on the crowbar with both hands, using his full weight for leverage.

It took very little prying to disengage the trunk’s rusted latch. The lid popped creakily.

The stench that rose with the moist, warm air that had been trapped inside was sickening. Cesar gagged and clapped his palm over his nose and mouth. Then Jorge reached across his chest and pushed the lid open the rest of the way.

They stared into the compartment as another blast of foulness gusted over them.

The corpse was saturated in a reddish stew of blood and other juices. Its clothes were gummy, and the fluids had seeped into the trunk’s lining. Cesar and Jorge saw a pale hand, a bloated stomach under the scrunched-up shirt and jacket.

Two large rats had managed to burrow through to the compartment. They withdrew their smeared, gummy snouts from inside what was left of the skull and squinted out into the bright daylight.

The dead man might not have been recognizable except for his clothes. The same familiar clothes he’d been wearing when they’d last seen him.

Their eyes wide, Cesar and Jorge exchanged a glance of shared incredulity.

Felix Quiros’s whereabouts had been discovered, and Tijuana this sure as hell wasn’t.

Blood for blood. That was how he felt it had to be.

Enrique Quiros sat alone in the San Diego office with the words Golden Triangle Services fronting the outer hallway, his designer glasses folded in his shirt pocket, elbows propped on his desk. He was leaning forward into his hands, eyes closed, the balls of his palms pressed against their lids.

Never in his life had he felt so tired.

It had been an hour since he’d returned from the salvage yard and seen the ghastly remains of his nephew. Dumped inside that trunk. Packed into that trunk with his own blood. And the smell. It seemed to linger in Enrique’s nostrils even now, so strong it was almost a taste at the back of his tongue. In his car driving back downtown, he had found an unopened roll of breath mints and popped one after another into his mouth, chewing each in seconds, crushing them between his teeth. That hadn’t helped. He’d stood by the car just briefly. A minute or less. But he thought the stench of Felix’s decomposing flesh would stay with him for a very long time to come.

Head in hands, he massaged his eyes. On the desktop near his right arm was a small leather case that he had withdrawn from a concealed safe elsewhere in the office suite. Inside it was a plastic ampule and a wrapped, sterile syringe. His reward from El Tío for having relayed a matching kit to Palardy, and a sure means for revenge against the man culpable for his nephew’s death.

Although Enrique was not a scientist, he had a solid layman’s understanding of the incredible biological weapon he’d been given. The clear liquid sealed inside the ampule was a neutral, harmless medium for transport and administration of the microscopic capsules suspended within. But a single drop held a concentration of hundreds, perhaps thousands of microcapsules. And since each of those capsules was a tiny bomblet packed with trigger proteins that would allow the Sleeper virus infecting every human being to “awaken,” that drop would be sufficiently potent to kill the target of an attack many times over. All that was required for the virus to mutate into its lethal form, attach itself to a specific genetic feature, and amplify, was its victim having a sip of water that had been implanted with the trigger, a bite of food… or, Enrique thought darkly, a mint of the sort he’d been crunching down in the car.

And the fluid medium was only one among many methods of getting a trigger into the human body. If your desire was to take out a single individual, you could introduce it to whatever he was having for lunch. If you wanted to be rid of his family as well, you might inject their Thanksgiving turkey before the holiday dinner. Widen the bull’s-eye to include a larger group of people, and you’d distribute the trigger across a sweeping number of routes. Instead of the food on the table you could saturate an entire population’s food supply — and beyond. Spread it over their farm soil, dump it into their reservoirs, float it through the air they breathed. Turn their environment into an extension of your weapon.

Enrique supposed the release of a powdered or aerosol medium would give the best shot at effecting a mass exposure. In fact, he had heard El Tío had done exactly that with the Sleeper virus itself. Just as whispers had reached him that Alberto Colon, who had died from mysterious causes last month, was El Tío’s first pigeon to die from a precision bio-strike.

Enrique had little doubt that the rumors concerning the virus’s dissemination were true. Whether those about Colón were accurate, he didn’t know. But it seemed a novel coincidence that the Bolivian president-elect had been poised to threaten the South American coca growers and suppliers from whom El Tío’s distribution network — of which the Quiros family was a part — obtained the majority of its product.

Right now, however, Enrique had something else to occupy his thoughts. A very personal affair had to be settled. And though he was inclined to stick with his initial feelings about how to do it, he wanted to deliberate on them further, confirm that he wasn’t allowing himself to make a dangerous blunder.

The difficulty now was that he was used to making calculated, rational decisions when it came to business. But in his business, things weren’t always that clear. Actions might be rational and emotional without contradiction. Violence could send simultaneous, definitive messages to both the heart and brain. And there were traditions that must not be violated. Matters of honor and loyalty.

He pictured Felix in the trunk of that car. His head blown to pieces and gnawed by rats. His flesh cooking in a soup of his own blood.

An effective message right there.

Enrique lifted his head from his hands, straightened, slipped his glasses back on, and sat quietly staring at the wall. The poor, brainless kid had overstepped. His stunt had hit the Salazars where it hurt. What choice did Lucio have except to retaliate? Enrique and his people had been aggressively cutting into his market, and because Lucio knew they were backed by El Tío’s international organization, he’d had to accept it, become resigned to shrinking profits. Success brought competition; it was a basic law of trade. However, he would not let himself be muscled aside, could not allow everything he’d built up to be usurped. He had to protect his interests. And if Lucio believed Enrique had condoned Felix’s move, as Lathrop said he did, he would be especially pressed to show it was a big miscalculation. Show where he drew his limits. Show a steep price had to be paid by the transgressor of those limits.

Enrique understood this. He appreciated that Felix had brought about his own fate with his deeds. And in a way, he’d also dictated the steps Enrique now must take, irrevocably linked him to a chain of action and consequence whose end could not be foreseen. Even in his sorrow over what had happened to Felix, Enrique resented him for that. And he suspected he always would. Were it not for him, this whole thing would never have gotten started.

But Felix had been his nephew. He could not let Lucio Salazar get away with his murder. Because it would make the Quiros family look vulnerable and invite further trouble, despite their powerful affiliations. And family was supposed to look after each other.

Enrique glanced down at the leather case on his desk, remembering the night he’d met Palardy at the harbor. To be involved in the assassination of somebody with Roger Gordian’s fame and stature, even if his connection couldn’t be verifiably established… it was insane. There again, his hand had been forced. He’d had to play along with El Tío, knowing very well that his almighty friend might otherwise become his most formidable enemy.

He scowled. To a greater or lesser extent, maybe all actions you took were predetermined. He didn’t know. He wasn’t a philosopher. But what he did know was that Felix’s killing demanded retribution, and that the contents of the ampule would ensure it was achieved. A drop of it, one drop administered to the food or drink Lucio Salazar was renowned for consuming with boundless passion, and the Sleeper inside him would begin its ferocious process of incubation. Disease would rage through his body, eating away his cells and tissues like the hungry little creatures in that old Pac-Man game. His suffering would make death a craved relief. And Enrique would have full deniability. Moreover, only the merest few would even suspect Lucio had been murdered.

But how would it send a message? How would it demonstrate that Enrique Quiros — college-educated, soft-spoken Enrique — had the qualities to control and build upon the empire he’d inherited from his father? That he was a man who stood on his honor and loyalty? A man who could conduct himself with strength?

Blood for blood. In his world, that was how it had to be. It was a principle that was understood from the brothers and sons who would be Lucio Salazar’s successors, down the line to his street-level dealers and enforcers.

Lucio could not die in bed of some untraceable sickness.

If Enrique was to be respected, his hands would have to drip red.

Taking a deep breath, he turned his eyes from the leather case and reached across his desk for the telephone.

Lucio Salazar’s wristwatch read ten minutes past two in the afternoon when he received an unexpected and somewhat puzzling telephone call from Enrique Quiros.

Their conversation, such as it was, lasted just over sixty seconds.

A pensive frown on his face, Salazar replaced the receiver on the end table beside him. Then he sat back in his couch, turning his head to look out at the rippling blue surf far below, his hand moving from the cradled receiver to the large gold charm around his neck.

He was thinking that this was maybe the third time they had exchanged words since Enrique had taken over the family operation from his father, their last direct contact having occurred the year before, when they had gotten together to smooth over a territorial dispute between a couple of their lieutenants. At the time, he’d expected Enrique to assume airs, him having gone to that top college and all, but it turned out he’d been reasonable and respectful. Well, okay, sort of lacy, too, but he hadn’t come up the hard way like his old man, dodging lawmen on both sides of the border with carloads of bootleg whiskey and cigarettes. Most important to Lucio, he’d conducted himself okay, showed integrity, before and after. They had reached a compromise agreement that satisfied everyone involved, cemented it with a handshake, and Enrique had observed it to the letter. Since then — this was over a year ago now, you wanted to be accurate — there hadn’t been any problems between them, except for a few minor bumps and bounces they’d settled through intermediaries. Not until his prick nephew Felix had jacked Lucio’s shipment of black tar and slaughtered his people outside that fucking tunnel.

Lucio fingered his charm, a representation of Saint Joseph, patron of workingmen and heads of families — categories he very much fancied encompassed his position in the great order of things.

On the phone, Enrique had said he wanted to go man-to-man, resolve their problems before they got any further out of hand, turned into a crisis that damaged their relations beyond repair. Meet at Balboa Park over by that reflecting pond in the Spanish City two nights from now, neutral ground, a public place where they’d be free to talk without worrying about bugs or taps. He’d suggested they bring their guards to keep lookout, not bothering to elaborate, which would have been tactless. Obviously, guards would be a precaution against any surveillance the law enforcement community might have going on one or both of them, but the foremost reason for his suggestion was to dispel any concerns Salazar might harbor about the meet being a setup of some kind.

And that had been it. No mention of why Enrique was suddenly anxious to reverse the course toward war that he himself had set or how he planned to compensate the Salazars for their losses. This had raised Lucio’s eyebrows. Even if Enrique assumed the reason for the meet was clear and preferred getting into details about it in person at the sit-down, some stated acknowledgment that a grievous wrong had been committed had been due. And although the omission had not elicited any comment from Lucio, he’d tucked it away in a mental back pocket as he’d accepted Enrique’s proposition.

Night after next, Balboa Park, eleven o’clock sharp. You got it.

And they’d hung up.

His face lined with thought now, Lucio continued to gaze out at the satiny water beyond the strand edging the Del Mar cliffs, his hand tugging away at his Saint Joseph pendant.

He would keep his appointment at the park. Absolutely. He’d given his word that he would attend, and it would be to the mutual benefit of their families to reach a settlement and resume their activities without battling around. But that did not mean he was about to make a mark of himself. If Enrique had a razor blade in the casserole, he intended be prepared, bring along a few surprises of his own. There were still two days until the meet, two days for him to conduct some research, do whatever possible to gain some insights into what was happening inside Enrique’s camp, get the lowdown on whether he might have a hidden agenda. And it only made sense that the first step in his investigation should be to contact Mr. Lowdown himself.

Grabbing the phone off the table again, he set it on his lap, lifted the receiver, and hit the speed dial button that would put him in touch with Lathrop.