Mission: Apocalypse

Over the course of the last decade and a half he had carved himself a somewhat small, but tidy and quite profitable corner in Mexican organized crime.

He was big on Mexican pride and insisted on selling his wares north of the border. Anyone who worked for him who he caught selling locally received his judgment. Even other drug dealers liked and respected him and on several occasions “King Solomon” had been called upon to mediate disputes between the cartels. Dominico was a walking anomaly, a drug kingpin who had a code and actually walked his walk as he talked his talk. Bolan looked at the DEA file photo that Kurtzman had brought up on the screen.

Dominico bore a disturbing resemblance to a smiling, Mexican Sylvester Stallone with a beer gut.

Kurtzman was right. Smuggling nuclear materials for terrorists was not the sort of thing Guillermo Dominico would normally be involved with. Drugs, guns and kidnapping were things to be inflicted upon the yanquis, his neighbors north of the Rio Grande. For Dominico, Mexico was holy ground. Bolan just couldn’t see him trafficking in radioactive poison even if it was heading north. The other very interesting thing was that unlike most crime lords who ended up in prison or dead, according to the FBI Dominico appeared to have gone into retirement several years ago, left the state of Sinaloa and moved to Mexico City.

“I think maybe I need to go have words with King Solomon.”

Kurtzman had been afraid of that. “Well, here’s something about the boy you might not know.”

“Do tell.”

“Many people believe that King Solomon the drug lord was once the masked wrestler Santo Solomon.”

Bolan raised a bemused eyebrow. “Really.”

Bolan knew just enough about the wonderful world of Lucha Libre, or Mexican professional wrestling, to know that the original masked wrestler named Santo ran a close second to Jesus as most popular person on Earth with the previous three generations of Mexican citizenry. Untold legions of luchadors had attached the name Santo to themselves to ride his rep.

Kurtzman called up more files. “At first he called himself Silver Solomon, and his gimmick was to come into the ring tossing peso coins to the crowd as he made his entrance.” He pulled up a grainy screen capture from Mexican cable television. A man in silver tights and a silver mask stood atop the second rope of a wrestling ring. His fists were cocked on his hips and his chin lifted like Superman as he absorbed the adulation of the crowd. He was wearing a silver cape. A twenty, a five and a one peso coin were sewn in descending order on the forehead of his mask with the one set between the mask’s stylized eyebrows. He was strong-looking, with impossibly broad shoulders, but was built more like a gymnast than his freakishly muscled wrestling counterparts north of the border. Mexican luchadors engaged in a lot of high-flying maneuvers and needed a higher power-to-weight ratio.

“So then he started dedicating matches to this church, or that charity or this orphan,” Kurtzman went on, “and people started calling him Santo Solomon.”

“So what happened to him?”

“The Santo Solomon gimmick just disappeared. Some people say the guy behind the mask took on a new persona, others say he got injured and had to quit. Being unmasked is a grave dishonor in the ring, and a lot of these guys retire without anyone knowing their true identities.”

“If it’s true he’d have the seed money to buy his own planes and start his own business. Can you link them?”

“I’m working on it.”

“You say Dominico is currently in Mexico City?”

“Nice little house in the hills.”

Bolan nodded. The nuclear material was still on its way north. He didn’t have much time. “I’m on a plane.”

Mexico City

KING SOLOMON’S KINGDOM was humble by most drug-lord-estate standards. It wasn’t the usual Latin crime-king sprawling rancho or fortresslike hacienda. It was a modest Eichler-style house of mostly glass walls and open floor plan. The most opulent thing about it was the prime hillside real estate it rested upon. The altitude put it above the horrendous air pollution and afforded a sea-of-stars view of urban Mexico City below. The house itself didn’t have much in the way of security, but most of the homes up in the hills were part of gated enclaves each with their own security station and armed guards. The raven-black 2008 Cadillac STS-V Bolan drove told most onlookers that Bolan belonged in these hills, and he wasn’t going to bother with trying to bluff his way past the gate. Bolan parked at a turnoff located about a hundred feet below the cliff that King Solomon’s house perched upon.

It wasn’t a particularly technical climb, but a hundred feet of rock was still a hundred feet of rock and Bolan was making his ascent at night. The soldier shrugged out of his sport jacket and took off his tie. He rolled up the sleeves of the black silk shirt he wore and strapped his silenced Beretta machine pistol to the thigh of his black climbing pants. Bolan put handcuffs and a few other odds and ends in a fanny pack and looped a coil of rope over his shoulder. He kicked out of his Italian loafers, laced into his rock shoes, powered up his night-vision goggles and started to climb.

Even at midnight the rock still radiated heat from the summer day, but a warm, dry rock face was the climber’s friend. He had scouted the cliff in the morning, and he climbed more by feel than what his goggles revealed. Only one overhang provided much of an obstacle, and for a few moments Bolan hung in space seventy-five feet above the road. However, he had photographed the ledge and committed its surface to memory, so the crevices and knobs were where he expected them to be.

Bolan was at the top a full five minutes under the time he had allotted himself.

He looped his rope around a tree trunk and cast the coil down the cliffside in case he needed to make a fast rope extraction. Satellite surveillance from the Farm had informed Bolan that Dominico’s girlfriend had left at noon and not returned. The gardener had gone home around 4:00 p.m. and the maid-cook had left at 10:00 p.m. It was now 12:15 a.m., and it appeared that Guillermo Dominico was alone. Bolan scouted the outside of the house. It was literally perched on a cliff and the glass walls had been designed to take full advantage of the view. Dominico had just enough of a back porch to include a long, narrow pool lined with black lava rock with an attached hot tub. There was a barbecue area off to one side, but no walls or fence to interfere with the vistas of the Anáhuac plateau below. Bolan spent long moments watching. Through his goggles he didn’t see the ghostly beams of any laser motion sensors. It appeared Dominico felt fairly secure in his aerie and the gates and guards on the periphery that kept out the riffraff and unwanted visitors from his past.

No one had planned on some American pulling a Spider-Man in the middle of the night.

Most of the rooms were dark. The master suite glowed blue from the light of a television. Bolan stepped into the shadows of the eaves and peered into the bedroom. One look told Bolan that Guillermo Dominico and the luchador Santo Solomon were the same man. King Solomon had been working out. He hadn’t quite reclaimed the fighting physique of his luchador days, but the barn-door shoulders were no longer sagging and the paunch and jowls from his DEA surveillance photos were gone. The coin-embossed, silver wrestling mask mounted behind glass on the wall surrounded by wrestling photos and newspaper clippings were something of a giveaway, as well. Dominico sat on a folded blue yoga mat wearing a pair of sausage-casing tight biking shorts; he was sheened with sweat and twitching and grimacing as he tried to hold a very forced and uncomfortable-looking half-lotus pose in front of his seventy-two-inch HDTV. Bolan paused a moment. It wasn’t something you saw drug kingpins do every day, even supposedly retired ones.

Up on the screen a man wearing nothing but a white loincloth sat in a full-lotus position and lectured in obviously dubbed Spanish. He looked like Yul Brynner, if the actor was a six-foot-six Special Forces operator moonlighting as a yoga instructor. Beneath his dais three beautiful blond women demonstrated poses at various levels of difficulty as he lectured. Bolan bided his time and silently picked the lock on the sliding-glass door.

He had run up against some wrestlers gone bad before, and anyone who had the capacity to fake that kind of physical carnage day in and day out without using wires or computer-generated special effects could also inflict it for real outside the ring. Bolan grimaced at the tiny click the latch made as he lifted it with his pick. Dominico was oblivious. His attention was equally divided between his DVD guru and his own straining knee joints. Bolan watched as the women on the giant TV unfolded themselves effortlessly from their sitting positions and flicked out their legs into full-forward splits. Dominico’s groan was audible through the sliding glass as he made a very impressive attempt at following suit.

Bolan slid back the door and it closed behind him as he strode into the room.

Dominico’s head snapped around and he rose an inch out of his splits. “Hey!”

Bolan slammed his hands down on Dominico’s shoulders. The former crime lord groaned as the soldier leaned his two hundred plus pounds into his attack and pushed Dominico a little deeper into the splits than he’d ever gone before. He could almost hear the groin muscles and tendons pulling like piano strings being tuned to the breaking point. Dominico’s shoulders suddenly heaved as he tried to push himself up. He was a powerful man, and it was a mighty attempt but Bolan had all the leverage. Dominico was pinned in place like a bug. The only direction for him to go was down. Bolan spoke quietly from his position of moral advantage. “Try that again and you’re going to sing soprano, Santo.”

Dominico couldn’t rise and he sure as hell didn’t want to go any lower. He snarled, suspended in yogic purgatory. “Don’t call me Santo!”

Bolan raised an intrigued eyebrow. For a man about to be snapped like a wishbone Dominico was remarkably defiant. Bolan leaned a little harder. “You’d prefer King Solomon?”

“No!” Dominico’s triceps stood out like horseshoes as he bore the weight of both of them. “It’s just Memo now!” he gritted.

“Memo” was the diminutive of Guillermo, like Billy for William. Bolan decided to give it to him. He didn’t have a partner to play good cop-bad cop with so he was going to have to play both roles; that and Guillermo Dominico was giving off just about the weirdest vibe of any crime lord Bolan had ever encountered. It was going to require more study than just a quick beat down for intel. “Okay, Memo, let’s talk.”

“Hey, man…” Dominico groaned in counterpoint. “Do I know you?”

“I want to know about the operation in Culiacán.”

“What are you? FBI? DEA?”

Bolan shoved down a little harder. “Talk to me or make a wish.”

Every muscle in Dominico’s body tensed with strain. “I haven’t been to Culiacán in years!”

“There’s a farm up in the hills. Near the Tamazula River. It has a hacienda and a warehouse and an airstrip. There was a time when you flew out of it. From what I know you used to own it.”

“I got nothing going on in Sinaloa! I’m retired!”

“Drug dealers don’t retire, Memo.” Bolan leaned hard. “They just change their M.O.”

“Jesus!” Dominico shuddered with effort. “I’m retired! Ask anybody!”

“That’s not what I hear, Memo.”

“Heard from who!” Dominico probed.

“Your old buddy, Oswaldo Salcido, for one,” Bolan replied.

“Pinto!” A geyser of Spanish profanities erupted from Dominico’s mouth. “That prick? You took his word? I set him up in business! I gave him a piece of my territory when I retired as a gift! Now he fingers me? Pinche chingaso mother…” Dominico dropped back into profanity.

Bolan shut it off by giving the crime lord an extra millimeter of unwanted flexibility. “You are going to talk to me.”

“Listen…” Dominico’s elbows bent as his muscles began to give out and his crotch moved inexorably toward the floor. He hissed through clenched teeth. “You gotta let me up, man…before I never have children!”

Bolan relented a couple of inches. “Come up slow.”

Dominico didn’t rise. He suddenly dropped beneath Bolan’s grip and spun on his back like a break-dancer. His legs scythed upward and his ankles locked behind Bolan’s head. The soldier’s feet left the ground as he found himself in a scissors hold. The glass walls shook as Bolan hit the floor flat on his back and the air blasted out of his lungs. He clawed for the Beretta 93R strapped to his thigh, but Dominico grabbed his wrist in both hands. “Gonna snap you like a toothpick, motherfucker!” Dominico began pulling back to straighten Bolan’s arm and break his elbow.

Bolan found himself wrestling with a professional luchador, and he had no illusions about who was going to win a match between them. Dominico’s legs felt like two pieces of oak as they vised down on Bolan’s carotids for the strangle.

The soldier’s temples pounded as he felt the blood shut off to his brain. His only advantage was that wrestling, whether real or fake, was played by rules and most people in an emergency did what they had practiced, and a lot of wrestling holds had weaknesses for those willing to cheat. Bolan managed to turn his head two inches. Dominico howled and released the scissors hold and Bolan’s arm as the big American sank his teeth into his calf. Bolan shook his head against the head rush as he lurched to his feet. Dominico popped up and came in snarling and limping. “You dirty son of a bitch! I’m gonna—”

Bolan faked a right-hand lead but Dominico lowered his head and came in, willing to take a punch so he could get his hands on Bolan again and resume trying to snap him like kindling. Bolan fired his right hand for real—except that rather than going for a fist to the jaw he corkscrewed his thumb into the hollow of Dominico’s throat. His adversary’s eyes flew wide, and his tongue popped out as his trachea compressed. Bolan slammed his fist into the ex-drug dealer’s solar plexus, and the guy’s diaphragm spasmed against his already deflated lungs. Dominico’s face drained of blood, and he sat down on his yoga mat gasping like a landed fish. Bolan stepped in and threw an uppercut as if he were bowling to pick up a spare. His knuckles looped into the point of Dominico’s chin like a wrecking ball and ironed him out flat on the floor.

Bolan drew his Beretta 93-R machine pistol. The laser sight blazed into life as he squeezed, and it painted a ruby red dot between Dominico’s eyebrows. Dominico gazed up into the muzzle of the machine pistol dazedly and sucked for air. Bolan took a couple of long breaths himself and shook his head to clear it. “Memo? I’m done playing with you.”

“You aren’t DEA,” Dominico gasped. “And FBI doesn’t work like this. You aren’t cartel, either. Who the fuck are you?”

Bolan gazed down on Dominico. He had taken down more bad guys than most people had eaten hot meals. A lot of those bad guys had been drug traffickers. At this point most drug dealers would be screaming for mercy or screaming for their lawyer. For a former professional wrestler who’d just gotten his ass kicked and a drug dealer staring down the muzzle of a machine pistol, Dominico was remarkably calm and collected.

Bolan raised an eyebrow at the Yul Brynner look-alike lecturing in dubbed Spanish on the screen. “Memo, what is that stuff?”

“You gotta be kidding me, man.” Dominico genuinely looked shocked that Bolan didn’t know. “That’s Cielo Ahora.”

Bolan watched the bald man gesture gracefully with hands the size of catcher’s mitts while his nubile assistants twisted like dreamy-eyed circus contortionists. “Heaven Now?”

“Change your life, man,” Dominico confirmed. “Changed mine.”

Bolan peered down at Dominico with sudden intuition. “This is why you retired from the life?”

“Hey, man, everybody’s got to grow up sometime. I been a legend twice. But Santo Solomon had two cracked vertebrae in his neck, and the doctors told him if he wrestled again he’d end up in a wheelchair. No one needed to tell King Solomon that he was going to wind up dead or in prison. Not that I cared, until a couple of years ago. Gavi helped me get my head right.”

“Gavi?”

Dominico grunted up at the screen and the bald man with the piercing eyes. “Gavi.”

“So you quit the life because you found God?”

“Found Gavi.” Dominico grinned. “The rest I’m working on.”

Bolan gave Dominico a long, calculating look. “Memo, you want to go for a ride?”

Dominico’s face went flat. “I’ve seen that movie, man.”

Bolan shrugged. The ruby dot of the laser never wavered from Dominico’s forehead. “I can kill you now.”

Dominico weighed the steel in Bolan’s blue eyes. “A ride is good.”

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