Night of the Assassin

Chapter 2

Sinaloa, Mexico, Twenty-Five Years Ago

The flames leapt up into the night sky, their eerie flickering the only evidence that anything man-made had existed in the deserted field of marijuana plants. The shacks were ablaze, sending embers shooting into the air as they carried the captives’ hopes of survival to heaven with them.

The little girl sobbed, terrified of what was to come. Her mother, helpless besides her, howled an incoherent, primal sound into the ground next to the mutilated corpse of her youngest, while futilely struggling against the crude plastic ties that bound her bloody wrists. This had been the worst night in the toddler’s short, harsh life, and it seemed surreal to her. She hoped it was a nightmare. The dead form of her father lay sprawled besides her mother, his life extinguished in an unspeakable manner. She didn’t understand any of it. She wanted to live. She had so much to do, her life was just starting.

True, it had been a difficult existence so far, as the daughter of a dirt-poor farmer in the hills of rural Mexico; another mouth to feed in a hard environment where money was non-existent and the family lived off the land. But, as with most children, she loved her parents wholeheartedly, no matter what the circumstance; they were her universe – and she had just begun viewing the world as a thing apart from them.

As the seasons came and went, the family’s time was spent working their meager patch of land; a plot of several acres that had been in the family for over a century. They survived without any creature comforts, their power provided by an ancient gas-powered generator which was used only in emergencies – gasoline being far too precious a commodity to waste on luxuries such as lights. There was no plumbing; their water came from an artesian well. Still, it was a life, her life, and the only one she’d known in her four years on the planet – and like most organisms, she wanted it to continue as long as possible.

Then the unthinkable had happened. The men had arrived in their huge truck, and soon the shack they called home was ablaze and her sister and father were no longer of this world. And now she kneeled, crying while she murmured the only prayer she knew, hoping it would work as a talisman to keep the bad men at bay.

“Our Father, who arth in heaven…” she lisped in a soft, tremulous tone.

She swiveled her head and watched as an older man, who had just arrived after their field had been set alight, walked slowly back to his vehicle holding the hand of a young boy.

One of the remaining two men moved beside her and grabbed her mother’s hair, lifting her to her knees, her grief shrieking in gasping sobs even as she trembled in shock and fear. Her shoulders shook the shabby sleeves of her torn peasant dress, now bloody and filthy from the abuse she’d received at the hands of the animals who stood by the pair with their pistols and cowboy boots. A gunshot rang out, deafening the little girl – her mother fell forward onto the bloody dirt, her suffering ended, gone to join her husband and baby. The little girl cried to the silent god who had abandoned her, an innocent, even as she continued to recite the words she’d been assured would protect her through anything.

“Thy king done come…”

She closed her eyes against the horror of the scene and imagined a place where she would be forever young, playing in a beautiful grass field with puppies and ponies; her father, young, healthy and vibrant running beside her as her mother tossed her baby sister into the air, eliciting squeals of glee from the delighted tike. She sensed the cold menace of the gun barrel against the back of her tiny head, and redoubled her efforts to send her m’aidez to her creator.

“Thy will be-”

The lead ripped through her cerebrum, abruptly terminating her brief sojourn on earth. Her frail body tumbled lifelessly to the ground.

For her, the ordeal was over.

The men watched as the cannabis caught fire, fed by the gasoline that had been so frugally saved for the family’s power, their butchery merely another day’s work in their brutal world of enforcement of their absolute power. Both would sleep well that night, their consciences long ago having been discarded as impediments to their working for the group that would later become the Sinaloa cartel – the most powerful and brutal of the Mexican narcotraficantes. The night’s drama had been another in a long line of horrors they’d inflicted on their fellow men in order to solidify their jefe ’s control over the region. The citizenry only understood and respected one thing, and that was brute force. They were the delivery system for that primal justice, and they knew that nobody would ever miss the peasant family or question the events of that night. It was all business as usual; nobody wanted to have the men visit their home if they were too inquisitive about what had happened or where the farmer and his family had gone. The events would remain just another footnote in the brutality that was an ongoing part of the drug traffic in Mexico. There was nobody to defend the innocents, and so they perished, as countless others had before them in brutal episodes that determined nothing. Mexico’s soil was steeped in the blood of the helpless – the men knew that nobody would mourn them. They had no power, no clout, and so were disposable.

The enforcers returned to their truck, which started with a roar, and they tore off into the night down the dirt track that led to civilization, such as it was.

Sinaloa, Mexico, Twenty Years Ago

Horses galloped around the periphery of the open field. The men gathered in the center whistling at the ponies as they celebrated their temporary freedom. A sprawling mission-style hacienda sat imposingly in the distance – easily twenty-thousand feet of interior space built on a bluff overlooking a river which burbled softly below it as it carried fresh water from the mountains, so vital for the irrigation of the region’s crops, which were mainly tomatoes and marijuana.

The majority of the cannabis grown in Mexico came from Sinaloa, and it had been this harvest that had been instrumental in the creation of the modern cartel system. Originally, only a few families engaged in the trafficking of marijuana to the U.S., along with heroin of moderate quality and purity produced in modest, local fields. It had been a small business, operated like a cottage industry, tightly held with a minimum of violence other than turf wars over growing and distribution rights.

Then, in the late 1970s, the dynamics had shifted; the smuggling networks that had been engaged in this relatively benign trade took on the burden of moving cocaine through Mexico for the Colombian cartels, and then the money got much bigger as the Cali and Medellin cartels grew increasingly reliant on their Mexican smugglers to get the product to the U.S.. This naturally led to a situation where the Mexicans began getting paid in product, versus cash, driving them to become distributors, as opposed to transporters – and the money involved took another quantum jump. By the early 1990s, the Mexican cartels were handling much of the distribution for the Colombians, whose cartels had disintegrated in the late 1980s with their survivors now focused mainly on manufacturing.

Within a little over a decade, a small business had become a multi-billion dollar industry and the various factions fought it out for the rights to their geographical areas. By 1990, the Sinaloa cartel was the most powerful in all Mexico – in all the world, in fact – primarily because the ‘Godfather’ of the Mexican drug trade, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, was from Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa. It was he who ran a hundred percent of the trade through Mexico during the Seventies and Eighties, and he who had the relationships with the Colombians. In the mid-Eighties, he decided to divide up Mexico into regions, so the power that was naturally concentrated in Sinaloa remained there, with the other cartels acting as satellites to that main central group.

That changed when Gallardo went to prison in the late Eighties, which created a vacuum in the leadership and opened the door for the smaller, less important cartels to assert a better foothold. In particular, the Tijuana cartel and the Juarez cartel had jockeyed for greater sway and a larger chunk of the profits, leading to often bloody wars with their Sinaloa brethren.

The group of men watching the horses laughed easily together, cans of Tecate tempering the worst of the mid-day heat. It was fall, the storm season was largely over, but the temperatures could still reach the high nineties during the day, bringing with it substantial humidity. The oldest of the men, Don Miguel Lopez, a tall, lean man with the leathery complexion that came from a lifetime outdoors, had his left hand resting on the shoulder of a ten year old boy, already lanky from the summer’s growth spurt that had left him all arms and legs, an alien in an unfamiliar body. It was his birthday and, at ten, it was time for him to begin learning the skills he’d require to survive in an ever-competitive world. In Mexico, with a head of the household who was one of the original ranking members of the Sinaloa cartel, that translated into more than reading, writing and arithmetic. Don Miguel, the elder statesman of the group, smoothed his mustache and lifted his cowboy hat, wiping away the sweat from his brow with a soiled red cloth handkerchief he carried for that purpose, and then patted the boy’s shoulder.

“It’s time for you to learn about the way of the world. As part of your birthday, I’m handing you over to Emilio here, who will teach you everything you’ll need to know about maintaining a healthy body and mind, as well as about horses and weapons. And who knows; maybe when you’re older, he can even teach you a thing or two about women,” Don Miguel joked. The surrounding men laughed delightedly at his playful sense of fun. “My business will be demanding an increasing amount of my time and I’ll be traveling much of the year, so I’m entrusting you to Emilio’s capable hands. You’re to treat him with the same respect you would afford me. Are we clear on that? He’s your mentor, which is a position of honor, but it’s also one of responsibility, and if you fail to apply yourself it will reflect poorly on him.”

The boy nodded his understanding. He didn’t talk much – had never seen much point to it. Even at his tender age he’d discovered that it wasn’t what people said, it was what they did that counted, so engaging in what he viewed as meaningless banter served no purpose. He looked up at Emilio’s wizened face, battered by the cruel vagaries of a fickle universe, and fixed the man with his gaze – remarkable in its intensity, especially given that he was just a boy.

Emilio regarded him and then grunted, gesturing with his head for the boy to follow him. The pair walked toward the stables and, once out of view of the men, Emilio got down on one knee so as better to get his point across.

“My job is to make you a man. I know your history, and I’m here to tell you nothing matters but the present and the future. Where you’ve been? That’s meaningless. Nobody cares. The only reason the past matters is so you can learn from it. That’s the whole reason making mistakes and surviving them matters. Experience is what we call the mistakes we survive.” Emilio grinned, and tussled the boy’s hair. “And I’ve got a lot of experience. So you’re going to stick with me, eh? Every day, before you go to school, we will spend an hour together learning how to discipline your body. Every afternoon after school, you’ll spend three hours with me, learning how to discipline your mind. Once you have both under total control, we’ll proceed to the fun stuff – learning how to shoot, ride, swim, hunt, and how to stay hidden. But I can’t teach you anything until you have control over yourself.”

The boy glared at him dubiously, his dislike of the situation and his new mentor obvious. Emilio swatted him on the side of the head, just enough to get his attention.

“You see? You don’t have control. You can’t hide your emotions, so you are an open book to anyone who wants to read you. You don’t like me, and it’s obvious; so I now have power over you. You’ve given me that power by failing to contain your feelings, and I can use it to hurt you. So your first lesson is to control your emotions. If not, they’ll control you, and you’ll be blown around like a leaf, always reacting to whatever storm is taking place in your head.”

Even at ten years old, the boy had learned to listen. Emilio could see the wheels turning in his small head as he absorbed what the older man had said.

“It doesn’t matter to me whether we do this the easy way or the hard way. Either will work. If you’re interested in proving you’re stubborn, save your energy for something that matters. You want to prove something, show me you’re determined; you’ll have plenty of chances. My job is to build you into a leader, a man others will look up to, who makes smart decisions with a level head, and who never, ever loses his cool. You’ll soon figure out that it’s better to put some effort into learning what I’m teaching rather than fighting it. In the end, resisting the lessons will just be delaying the inevitable, which is getting to the fun parts. So decide. Make a choice, then eliminate all other possible outcomes. That will be your road. I hope you select a good one,” Emilio concluded, and then opened the barn door and moved inside to the bales of hay. He studied the pile and motioned with his hand to the old pitchfork leaning against the far wall.

“Happy birthday. Starting today, and every day until I tell you that you can stop, I want you to move the hay from these bales, over to this pile by the feeding trough. Spend one hour per day doing it, every morning before school.” Emilio glanced at the boy, who now regarded him impassively. The old man reached into his pocket, and produced a new stainless steel wrist watch, tearing off the tags as he examined the clasp. He looked at the time and then tossed it to the boy, who snatched it out of the air with ease.

“That’s my birthday gift to you. It’s always important to give, in order to get. I see you’re right-handed by your catch. That can be a liability over time. We’ll work together so that you can do any task with either hand, equally comfortably. If you’re ever wounded in one arm, you can use the other, and that edge could be the difference between you living or dying on the floor. Everything I do has a reason. But for now, start on the hay. Do you know how to read a clock? How to tell time on that watch?”

The boy nodded his head in the affirmative.

“Another lesson. Never tell me you know something if you don’t. I don’t mind it if you don’t know – not knowing if you haven’t been shown isn’t your fault. Not knowing because you weren’t shown because you pretended to know…that’s stupidity,” Emilio cautioned.

“I know how to tell time; how to read a clock. I’m not stupid,” the boy declared angrily.

“Ah, so he speaks. Very good. But you still haven’t learned my first lesson. By showing me how you’re feeling, either with your voice, or eyes, or body, you’re giving me an advantage over you. And I can use that to destroy you. So we’ll work on you learning to control your emotions; to be cool and collected at all times. It’s the first lesson I’ll teach you, and probably the single most valuable.” Emilio studied the boy’s features, the dark brown eyes radiating a quiet intensity. “Once you master the ability to manage your inner domain, you will have power over others, instead of them having power over you. Learning to do so is a matter of practice. The more you practice, the more composed you’ll become, and the faster you’ll progress. It’s not just about hiding your emotions from others – it’s about arresting your state. If you lose control, you lose. It’s that simple. If nothing else, always remember that. You lose.” Emilio glanced at the pitchfork, then back at the boy.

“And something tells me you don’t like losing, eh? Well, here’s another piece of experience from a lifetime of mistakes: winning takes work – usually a lot of it. And practice. And commitment. Which is where I come in. So happy birthday, treat your watch with care and it will function well for many years – and get to the hay – it’s not going to move itself.”

Emilio turned and strode out of the building and onto the dirt riding path, leaving the boy to his thoughts.

Emilio could tell he was one tough little bastard, that was for sure. It wouldn’t be easy reining him in. It was like with the horses. You had to break their spirits sufficiently so that they could learn how to behave in a productive manner, but not crush them entirely – you wanted a thoroughbred that desired to win…or it became a plow horse. Don Miguel was a smart man, and he had been clear that he expected the boy groomed to be a suitable heir to his rapidly expanding fortune. The next five or six years would be the ones that forged the boy’s character and made him into whatever he would ultimately be. Tough was good. So was stubborn. And smart. Don Miguel had stressed how intelligent the boy was, devouring every book he could get his hands on. That could be a powerful combination of character traits. Emilio would steer him in a direction where he had an outlet for his obvious simmering anger.

The Don didn’t have time to raise him and teach him what he’d need to know. Every day brought more and more threats to the Don ’s survival; the truth was, he would be in hiding much of the time, directing his affairs from a safe distance. Don Miguel was now a major player in the Mexican trafficking scheme, but with the spoils came the risks. There was a constant and never-ending supply of enemies who would cut his throat for the slightest advantage. The danger was very real and immediate. So he would leave his beloved estancia, his horses, and become a general in the ongoing war, coming home only for brief visits when he deemed it to be safe. It was an unforgiving existence that could end at any moment, but it was he life he’d chosen, and now he ran things in much of northern Sinaloa – he was becoming a fabulously wealthy man, even by cartel standards.

In the Don ’s business, there was no retiring, no quitting to pursue other interests. The trade operated according to the law of the jungle: you kept killing until something killed you. If you were the meanest and smartest predator, perhaps you’d have a long life. So far, Don Miguel had proved to be up to every challenge. That could change in a blink, but Emilio didn’t think so. He was one in a million; easily a genius, as well as utterly ruthless and clinically calculating. That combination of traits was rare, especially in a business that boasted more testosterone than a boxing club.

But the Don was also looking to the future. He realized that the boy would always be a target, no matter what pursuit he chose as an adult. Which meant that he needed to be equipped with skills that would enable him to survive in a world filled with enemies. Even if he didn’t become a predator himself, he would need to learn the lessons that would keep him from showing his soft underbelly to those that would cheerfully rip out his entrails.

Emilio was the boy’s best shot at survival. He would teach him the lessons he would need to learn well in order to stay alive, and hopefully to flourish.

He would make the boy into a man.

Starting today.