The Armada Legacy bh-8 Read online

  ‘I was in the British Army,’ Ben said. ‘I’m retired now.’

  ‘I knew there was something. You’re hard to kill. Some things a man doesn’t forget, right? Skills, training, all that stuff. And believe me when I say you’re gonna need them all if you want to go up against Ramon Serrato.’ A glimmer of hate passed behind Nico’s eyes as he spoke the name.

  ‘And why would I want to do that?’

  ‘Oh, you will, man. You will.’

  ‘Sounds like you need to tell me more about this Serrato.’

  ‘You’re talking to the right guy. I study Serrato like Einstein studied physics. Born into the slums of Mexico City in 1969. Grew up fighting for scraps as the youngest of four deadbeat punk brothers and the only one who made it past the age of twenty-five. Could have ended up like them, but he pulled himself up out of the barrio by washing pots and serving tables to put himself through law school. Moved to Bogotá, set up in business and became a millionaire by the age of twenty-six. Taught himself the social graces: well read, speaks perfect English, dresses immaculately, excellent classical pianist, appreciates art and sculpture and all that kind of shit. Nowadays he lives in Peru. His business is real estate development and exports: bananas, coffee, wine, you name it.’

  Nico paused and looked as if he wanted to spit. ‘At least, that’s how he likes to appear. But to those of us who hunted the fucker and never caught him, and to the families of the hundreds of people he slaughtered back when he was capo of the biggest, most ruthless goddamn drugs cartel in Bogotá, he was known as the Stingray.’

  Stingray, Ben thought. Connections lit up in his mind. ‘Roger Forsyte was poisoned with a rare type of venom. Stingray venom, from South America.’

  ‘Serrato’s trademark. Legend was, he kept a tank full of rays at his mansion in Bogotá, used to extract the poison from them. It was how he killed his special enemies. The rest he just slaughtered like animals.’ The Colombian lowered his eyes. ‘Like he did to my little Daniela and Carlos.’

  Ben looked at him. ‘Your children?’

  Nico swallowed. ‘Yeah, my beautiful children. Serrato had them butchered, because of me. Because I was the first cop who ever had the balls to get close to catching him. I never did. But I will one day. I don’t care if it takes me the rest of my life. I will.’

  ‘So that’s what this is, a vendetta?’

  ‘Nobody deserves to die like Serrato deserves to die. If you’d seen the things he’s done, you’d want him dead too. The things he did to women, like he hated them all so bad …’ Nico shook his head in disgust. ‘There was a coke dealer in Bogotá called Feliciano Betancourt, flashy, good-looking dude, real ladies’ man, who made the mistake of breaking in on Serrato’s territory one time. They took him from his house in the middle of the night, along with this pretty girlfriend of his. We found out later she was a waitress at the restaurant he’d been eating in that night. I mean, Betancourt was filth, but the girl didn’t even have anything to do with anything. That didn’t stop Serrato from getting his guys to work her face over with a blowtorch. After she’d been raped by about twenty of them. We found her body in the Bogotá River the next day.’

  Ben looked down at his feet and felt sick. This was the man Nico was saying had Brooke.

  ‘Others were the wives of his enemies, or their daughters. One of those poor bitches he had hung up from a warehouse ceiling and sliced into strips like a fucking kebab. Another one he chained up in a barrel and—’

  ‘All right,’ Ben said tersely. ‘I get the idea.’

  ‘But he ain’t gonna do any of that to your woman,’ Nico said emphatically. ‘No way.’

  As much of a relief as it was to Ben’s frazzled nerves to hear it, something about the Colombian’s certainty struck him as strange. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means she’s alive, man,’ Nico said. ‘I know she’s alive.’

  The words hit Ben like an electric current wired up to his whole body. He reached out and gripped the Colombian’s arm. ‘How do you know that? How? Why?’

  ‘I know it, because I don’t have a life of my own any more,’ Nico said. ‘For three years while I was a cop and for seven years since I quit my job, Ramon Serrato has been my whole life. It’s been my fucking mission to know everything about him, everything he does. I know why he had the English guy Forsyte killed, what he took from him. And I know what he wants with—’

  ‘What he wants with Brooke? You have to tell me.’

  Nico shook his head. ‘It ain’t something you can tell. To understand some things, it takes more than words, man.’

  ‘Then show me.’

  ‘Need a cellphone. Mine’s full of water.’

  Without hesitation, Ben took out his own and handed it over. Nico bent over it for a few moments, pressing keys as he searched online for something. It didn’t take him long to find. He grunted, ‘There. Look,’ and passed the phone back to Ben.

  Ben grasped the phone tightly in his hands and stared in complete disbelief at the image on the screen.

  The photo was of a woman. She was posing by a pool, pouting seductively for the camera. A golden tropical sunset backlit her auburn curls. Her skimpy green swimsuit matched her eyes and clung wetly to the few parts of her it didn’t reveal.

  He blinked. It couldn’t be. But it was. He was looking at a picture of Brooke.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  ‘That’s one beautiful looking woman, no?’ Nico said wistfully.

  Ben thumbed the phone’s tiny keys to zoom closer in, but the picture quickly lost resolution and the focus dissolved into blocks of pixels like a Cubist painting. He zoomed out again and stared hard.

  No, wait. It wasn’t Brooke. The woman’s features were slightly different; the cheekbones higher, the lips fuller, the nose a tiny fraction longer.

  They could have been twins.

  Ben’s mouth had gone dry and his head was spinning. He looked up at Nico in confusion.

  ‘Her name was Alicia Cabrera,’ Nico explained. ‘She was an actress in Colombia’s most popular soap opera and before that, as you can see, she was a model. At the age of twenty-nine she gave up her acting career to become Señora Alicia Serrato.’

  ‘She was Serrato’s wife?’

  ‘He was crazy for her. And I mean crazy. He chased after her with flowers and gifts until she said yes. He owned her like some kind of trophy until the day she took a bullet that was meant for him.’

  ‘Fired by you,’ Ben said.

  ‘Yeah, fired by me. I tell myself that short of killing the fucker it was the best way I could hurt him. It was a quick death for her, and that’s more than he gave to my kids.’ Nico paused. ‘But an innocent woman died because of my mistake, and that’s something I don’t forgive myself for. I know God don’t forgive me for it either. I’ll pay for it all through this life and into the next.’

  Ben said nothing. He could see the genuine pain in Nico’s eyes.

  ‘But you understand now, right? Why I asked you what your woman looks like?’ Nico pointed at the image on the phone. ‘This is how I know she’s got to be still alive. Serrato could have killed her with the others, but he didn’t. Why? Because he wants his Alicia back. He wants things the way they were before. You see now?’

  ‘So Brooke is … in Peru? With Serrato?’

  ‘Bet your life.’

  ‘That’s insane,’ Ben said. But the look of absolute sincerity on Nico’s face was making him feel very cold.

  ‘Insane, sure. But I know this fucker as well as I know myself. Better. Serrato’s a lunatic. A very smart, very devious lunatic. This is his fantasy. He’ll never let her go. He’ll use all his power to make her his woman.’

  ‘Make her his woman,’ Ben repeated.

  ‘You know what I’m talking about,’ Nico said, looking Ben in the eye. ‘If she lets him have her, he’ll just keep her there like a pet. But if she refuses him, and goes on refusing him, then sooner or later he’s going to lose patience. And when Ramon Serra
to loses patience with you, you’re worse than dead, man.’

  Ben was silent for a long time. His blood felt like ice water in his veins.

  ‘Trust me. I know this guy. You have to believe what I’m telling you.’

  As terrifyingly crazy as it sounded, Ben did believe it. The only question now was what to do.

  ‘Give me back the phone,’ Nico said. ‘I got to check on Cabeza.’ The tiny image of Alicia Serrato vanished from the screen as Nico punched out a number. He pressed the phone to his ear, listened and frowned. ‘Not answering. Damn it, I told him to stay close to the phone.’ After waiting a few more moments he left a message. ‘Professor Cabeza, this is Nico. I thought we agreed you’d stay put? Call me back as soon as you get this, okay?’

  ‘Where is he?’ Ben asked when Nico gave him back the phone.

  ‘In this cheap holiday place I rented near Granada, in a village called Montefrio. It was somewhere safe for him to lie low while I came back here to wait for the next bastard Serrato sent to kill him. I took care of the guy, made sure he was okay, and now he goes wandering off somewhere like a goddamn fool.’ Nico stood up impatiently and went over to the fireplace to check his hanging clothes. Satisfied they were dry, he tossed away his towel and hauled on his black combat trousers, then the military cold-weather shirt.

  ‘I’m trying to put all this together,’ Ben said. ‘What makes Cabeza a target? What’s he done?’

  ‘I’ll tell you everything. But not here. I’m worried that he’s not returning my call. I gotta go back to Montefrio.’

  They didn’t speak much as they trekked back across the lake, keeping to the thicker ice and skirting round the hole that the snowmobile had vanished into. Then it was the long, difficult hike back up the steep wooded slope and through the forest back to Cabeza’s house. Ben went first, picking the best path and letting Nico follow up behind with the gun.

  The snow around the base of Cabeza’s walls was puckered with little oblong holes where hot cartridge cases had melted through. The garage doors were wide open and swaying in the wind. ‘The snowmobile was his,’ Nico explained, walking inside the shadowy space underneath the house. Two cars were parked there, one a shiny Nissan soft-roader that looked exactly like the kind of car a mild-mannered academic would own, and next to it an ancient Subaru four-wheel-drive with all-terrain tyres, a torn canvas soft top, a roll cage and a motor winch mounted on the front. ‘That piece of shit there is mine,’ Nico said. ‘Now let’s move. We got no time to waste.’

  It was clear enough to see that Nico was operating on a tight budget. As the Colombian drove the dented, rusty Subaru out into the daylight, blue smoke belching from its exhaust, Ben gazed at the bullet-riddled ruin of his rental Volkswagen and wondered how they were ever going to get back down the mountain in Nico’s banger. Somewhere far in the back of his mind he was also wondering whether any rental firm in Europe would ever let him have a car again – he’d lost count of the number he’d wrecked.

  But more than anything else, he was wondering where Brooke was at this moment: what she was doing; what might be happening to her. The thought of her trapped in the personal lair of some half-crazy drug lord wouldn’t stop whirling around his mind. He was desperately anxious to get off this mountain.

  ‘Sorry about your car,’ Nico muttered, then drove the Subaru over the snow to where the fallen tree trunk had blocked Ben’s way and made him walk the rest of the distance to the house. Only now did Ben notice that the tree had been deliberately sawn partway through. ‘You put that there, didn’t you?’

  ‘Now we got to move the fucker,’ Nico said from the cab, flinging open his door and pointing at the winch. ‘Grab that hook, man.’

  Ben looped the thick steel winch cable round the tree and the grinding, creaking motor hauled it across the snow until there was a gap wide enough to drive through. Ben retrieved his bag from the wrecked Volkswagen, climbed into the Subaru and they set off down the track.

  Nico was set on making maximum progress despite the conditions. As the car ploughed through snow and slewed from side to side on sheet ice, he used Ben’s phone one more time to check on Cabeza. There was still no answer. Nico frowned, shook his head and then began to fill Ben in on the rest of his story.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Back in the day, the Colombian explained, he’d been part of the special detective team assigned to catch the notorious ‘Stingray’ and bring him to justice. In the beginning they’d scored some minor victories against the elusive drug baron’s operations, rounding up a number of his associates, shutting down several of his key supply routes and accompanying paramilitary units to outlying areas to locate and destroy his cocaine plants. At one point, Nico told Ben, they’d had no fewer than thirty-two of Serrato’s goons locked up in the Policía Nacional headquarters in Bogotá.

  But snaring the man himself was like trying to catch a lizard – grab his tail and it would just come away in your hand, and it would quickly grow back afterwards. For every drug dealer they brought in, Serrato would employ two more; every cocaine plant they burned down would simply be rebuilt elsewhere, only larger and more productive.

  In retaliation Serrato declared war on the police, mounting a blitzkrieg campaign of bribery, intimidation and murder. Two of Nico’s unit were blown up by car bombs in their own driveways; a third was abducted from a Bogotá nightspot, castrated and crucified on a tree; several more succumbed to payoffs and corrupted the investigation beyond measure by stealing or tampering with evidence, as well as by passing false intelligence to the department.

  Within a year, the unit was falling to pieces and the investigation’s run of hard-won little victories against the Stingray’s drug empire dried up. In the meantime Serrato was forging ever closer networks with his buddies in government, men as influential as they were corrupt. He used prostitutes to entrap members of the police top brass, then blackmailed them into his power.

  In the end, the investigation had been hopelessly whittled down to just two men and a woman: Nico, his partner Felipe Morales and a female detective named Laura Garcia. All had been approached with offers of bribery, then threatened when they refused. Even when mysteriously ordered by their superiors to call off the investigation they’d persisted in their off-duty time, convinced that a breakthrough in the case might be just round the corner.

  The breakthrough had finally arrived in the shape of Enrico Gomez, a former Serrato employee turned snitch, who promised to provide information that would get Serrato and the whole upper circle of his empire, several notable politicians included, indicted and jailed for the rest of time. The snitch was demanding an extortionate price in return, but in their enthusiasm Nico, Felipe and Laura had figured that the Colombian authorities would be willing to negotiate.

  Their enthusiasm had been their downfall. Within twenty-four hours of the revelation of their hot new lead to their superiors, Detective Garcia had been kidnapped from her apartment, gang-raped and shot in the face. The cops had had to identify the body using her fingerprints. The same day, Detective Morales narrowly escaped death and was left with terrible scars and an amputated left arm after his home was engulfed by an incendiary bomb.

  Meanwhile, Nico Ramirez had had a call from his distraught wife Valentina to say the children had gone missing from their school.

  The mutilated bodies of Carlos, eight, and Daniela, ten, had been dumped in the street outside Police Headquarters shortly afterwards.

  The triple hammer blow had ended the operation at a stroke.

  ‘That was the end of everything,’ Nico said, gripping the steering wheel tightly as he sped down the mountain road towards Granada. Montefrio was still a long way off, and the leaden sky was threatening snow again. ‘It was over. I couldn’t stay in the police anymore. Couldn’t stay in Colombia anymore. First chance we could, we emigrated to Texas.’

  ‘What about your wife?’ Ben asked.

  Nico sighed. ‘We didn’t even speak to one another for a year after it happ
ened. I was flat down on the ground, drinking myself to death. Valentina didn’t do much of anything at all, except sleep most of the time. One day it was like I woke up out of a coma or something. I threw away the bottle. Started with the weights and the fitness training, knew what I had to do. But Valentina’s spirit was just too broken. She kept getting worse until I couldn’t look after her on my own any more. The doctors have all these fancy names for the thing that’s wrong with her. She’s in a sanatorium in El Paso now. The folks there are wonderful, you know, and they say that one day …’ Nico sniffed and quickly darted his hand to his eye to wipe away a tear before it rolled down his cheek. ‘That one day Valentina might recover and become herself again. They say there’s a chance.’

  ‘Is there?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. Seven years, I keep going back to see her and I don’t see any change. On a good day, she just lies there and I don’t know what she’s thinking or feeling. On a bad day … well, bad days are bad. They can’t let her have anything metal because she’ll try to cut herself. Sometimes she’s like she wants to die.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said.

  ‘I’m sorry too, man. It was because of me this all happened, because of my job, because I was so driven to catch that piece of shit that I exposed my family to danger. I just have to pray she gets better. She’s all I have left in the world. I guess that if she ever recovers, I’ll be all she has too.’ Nico glanced across at Ben. ‘That’s why I can’t lose my life doing this, you understand? If it wasn’t for Valentina I wouldn’t give a damn. But I just can’t leave her all alone like that.’

  Ben took out his cigarettes and offered one to Nico. ‘Don’t you ever think,’ he said as they lit up, ‘that maybe you should quit this vendetta and just go home to take care of her? What if something does happen to you?’

  Nico looked at him sharply. ‘Is that what you’d do, man? Give it up and go home?’