Devil's Mark

Bolan lifted his chin. “There’s our reciprocity right there.”

“¡Hola, amigo, muchacha!” Inspector Villaluz leaned against a gleaming black Toyota Tundra pickup and tipped his hat at them. “How was your visit?”

“We’re pretty much persona non grata,” Bolan said.

“Ah, yes.” The inspector held open the door for Smiley. She climbed in the back. Villaluz gave Bolan a solicitous grin. “So, they…ripped you a new rectum?” He savored the American colloquialism.

“They tried.”

“To be honest I was quite surprised to see you both walk out of the agency without shackles or escorts.”

“They forced me to make some phone calls,” Bolan admitted.

“I cannot imagine what that might mean.”

Bolan sized up Villaluz. Cop. Gunfighter. Corrupt, but brave, and honorable by his own lights. Bolan rolled the dice. “It means that card I gave you means something.”

Villaluz looked meditative as he pulled out into traffic. “So how do you feel? Are you hungry?”

Bolan patted the empty place where his Beretta should have been. “Actually, I’m feeling a little light.”

“Ah.” Villaluz nodded. “I think I can do something about that.”

“Lunch wouldn’t hurt either. Where do you recommend?”

“Mexicali,” Villaluz answered.

Bolan consulted his mental map. Mexicali was more than a hundred miles due east of Tijuana. “Why Mexicali?”

“Why?” Villaluz smiled happily. “They have the best Chinese food in all of Mexico!”

“And to see who follows us,” Bolan concluded.

“That, too.”

“And because I’m feeling light.”

Villaluz shrugged.

“You sure your superiors are going to approve?”

“I am getting you out of Tijuana, and I am keeping an eye on you,” the inspector replied.

“And reporting our every move?” Bolan surmised.

“Well…” Villaluz pursed his lips judiciously. “As I believe the situation requires.”

Bolan nodded. The inspector wanted the guys who had taken down Cuah Nigris, and he was willing to play both ends against the middle when it came to Bolan and his own superiors. They both knew Bolan and Smiley would be the fall guys if it went sour. It was a situation the soldier was willing to accept. “Fair enough.”

Villaluz pulled onto Highway D2 heading east. It was Sunday, and most people were heading the other way for home. The brown landscape was lined with shrines. They were constructed out of tombstones, piles of bricks or adobe, and covered with collages of curled photos, dried-up postcards of the Virgin Mary, desiccated garlands of flowers and spent votive candles. They were shrines to the dead. Most Mexican roadsides were dotted with them, but here along the border they were mostly shrines to the murdered. Along the D2 they marched like dominoes to the horizon and were a testament to the endemic violence that convulsed the country.

They made good time. Traffic wasn’t bad, and the inspector liked to drive fast. The only things that slowed them were the military and police checkpoints. Villaluz could have breezed through them on his FIA inspector’s badge but he stopped at each checkpoint and chatted up the men manning them. Bolan watched as the inspector pressed flesh and clapped shoulders. He seemed to know most of the uniforms by name, and all seemed eager to bask in the inspector’s reputation and machismo. Villaluz was dropping a net of lookouts and informants behind them on the road to Mexicali.

Bolan eased his seat back. “He’s good.”

“Mole worships the ground he walks on. Even the dirtiest cops do. The cartel street thugs respect him, and the cartel jefes in Tijuana have a hands-off policy. He doesn’t mess with them and they don’t mess with him.”

“He’s messing with them now.”

“He’s sticking his neck way out on this one, and that is uncharacteristic.” Smiley shook her head. “Cuah and the Barbacoa Four all going down while in custody has him riled up. As far as he’s concerned, someone has crossed the line, and now he’s going to cross it, as well.”

“There’s going to be a war soon.”

“Soon? Buddy, last night was World War III. I can’t wait to see what you consider a real war.”

“Stick around.”

Villaluz hopped back into his truck and peeled out with screaming tires to the cheers of the khaki-clad federales. Bolan brought up the million-dollar question. “You ever seen the cartels attack like that?”

“I have seen them brazen, bold and reckless,” the inspector said.

“You ever seen them suicidal? You ever seen them go kamikaze?”

The inspector pushed in the cigarette lighter in the dash and took his time lighting a Montana cigarette.

“You’ve seen this before tonight, haven’t you,” Bolan stated.

The usually loquacious Villaluz examined the glowing end of his cigarette. “Yes.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“The taking of heads as a terror tactic is not new among the Mexican crime syndicates. I have seen them behave—what is the English idiom—crazy-brave to prove themselves. But ruthlessly willing to die, to sacrifice themselves to kill their target, that was, as you said, kamikaze. That is new.”

Bolan shot the inspector a shrewd look. “That’s not what bothers you the most.”

“No, it is not. What bothers me most,” the inspector continued, “is the code of silence.”

“All criminal gangs have it,” Bolan said.

“That is correct,” the inspector agreed. “The Italian mafia calls it omertà, in Mexico it is simply called silencio, but as you say, in all cultures, it is basically the same. If you are a member, you do not talk.”

“And?”

“I have never seen such a silencio as I have seen now. Cartel men talk about a code of honor, but in the end? They do not have one. That much money, that much drugs? They betray one another all the time. Now I fear there is some new player in the game, and his silencio is absolute. All of the Barbacoa Four died in custody, three in ours, and finally Cuah in yours. That is just the tip of the iceberg. Many have died in federal custody and witness protection, and whoever is doing this? He takes the heads of his enemies, and he takes the heads of his own fallen. No one is talking. You saw Cuah Nigris. He was wetting himself in fear, like a dog. What does it take to inspire such fear in a known sociopath?”

It was an ugly question and Bolan didn’t have an immediate answer.

Smiley spoke from the backseat. “The DEA fears that al Qaeda has somehow infiltrated one or more of the border cartels.”

Villaluz snorted. “I wish that was the case.”

Bolan raised an eyebrow but waited for Villaluz to elaborate.

Smiley was less circumspect. “That’s a hell of a thing to say.”

“It is the truth, Agent Smiley. I am sure terrorists from the Middle East with money could pay the cartels to smuggle men and materials across the border. But a bunch of foreigners taking over the streets of Tijuana? With an iron silencio? Forgive me, señorita, but I was born here. I have been a policeman all my adult life. I promise you, getting Mexican gangsters to get behind Muslim sharia law and sacrificing their lives unflinchingly in the name of the Holy Koran? I do not find it credible. Something else is going on.”

Bolan found himself on the same page as the inspector. “What do you think?”

“I do not know.” Villaluz stared into the smog clouding Mexicali city in the distance. He suddenly perked up as they hit the city limits. “Let us get onto business.”

“The Barbacoa Four?” Smiley asked.

“No, the best Mongolian Barbecue in Mexico.” Villaluz roared into town as if he owned it, and now he whipped through the checkpoints with a flash of his badge. He drove to the famous intersection of Avenida Madero and Calle Megar and took a turn into La Chinesca, Mexicali’s famous Chinatown. The buildings were a mix of old and new, but most had Chinese flourishes like pagoda accents and painted doors. What La Chinesca had more than anything was restaurants. They crowded every street, each one declaring in Spanish, Cantonese and English that they served the auténtico Chinese-Mexican cuisine.

Bolan had never seen so many Chinese people dressed like cowboys in his life.

Villaluz pulled down an alley and rolled up the windows against the flies and the rotting stench of the offal littering the ground from all the butchering going on to fuel over a hundred restaurants in less than four city blocks. The feral cats and dogs were some of the fattest Bolan had ever seen. He smiled at the inspector. “You were born here.”

The inspector grinned back. “You are a very astute man. I was born in Mexicali, but as you may suspect, particularly for a man of my age, when I was coming up through the ranks, if you had ambition, Tijuana was the only place to be. But this is where I grew up. Right across the street. When I was a boy, you could cut the line between La Chinesca and the rest of Mexicali with a knife, and we were always fighting the Chinese gangs.”

“What’s the tong situation like here?” Bolan asked.

“A very good question. Up until the 1950s Chinese actually outnumbered Mexicans in this city. The tongs controlled the opium trade, prostitution and gambling. Now they are a small minority, and, as you might imagine, Mexican brown heroin pushed out China white in the 1980s and the tong control with it. The cartels have pushed the Chinese out of almost all organized crime except that which the Chinese commit against one another. Though they do a brisk business in specialty Chinese brothels, gun-running and gambling.”

“What kind of gambling?”

“Mostly dog and cock fighting.” Villaluz shook his head ruefully. “The Chinese have a ferocious reputation.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, sí, if you challenge them? They have a special stipulation.”

Smiley gave Villaluz a leery look. “What’s that?”

“That if their animal wins? They get to cook and eat yours.”

“That’s sick,” Smiley stated.

“Oh, some of the restaurants in La Chinesca specialize in fighting-dog meat. Many people, both Mexican and Chinese, believe if you eat moo shu pit bull it increases your virility, and machismo.”

Smiley stared at a badly drawn graffito of a dog on the back door of the building. “No. Oh, hell no. Tell me we’re not.”

“We are. There is someone I think we should talk to.” Villaluz gave Smiley a serious look. “Señorita, I strongly recommend you order the shark fin tacos with hoisin sauce.”

Bolan opened his door and the side-street abattoir stench was almost overpowering. He gave Smiley a hand over an expansive puddle while Villaluz banged on the door. A pudgy little Chinese man in an apron and a paper hat opened the door with a cleaver in his hand. He and Villaluz exchanged a few words, and suddenly the man was all smiles and ushered them in. Smiley closed her eyes as they walked through the kitchen past meat hanging on hooks that clearly wasn’t beef, pork or chicken. Both Chinese and Mexicans labored over prepping ingredients for the Sunday dinner crowd and takeout rush. They pushed through the kitchen door out into the restaurant. The decor was half Mexican rancho and half Mandarin splendor. It was just about noon on Sunday, and the place wasn’t open for business yet. The chef led them to a booth in the back where a man sat with a bottle sipping Patrón Silver tequila.

Bolan was pretty sure he had never seen a Chinese man dressed for a square dance before. The man wore a taupe-colored Stetson hat and a pink, yoked cowboy shirt. His attempt at a beard and mustache was worse than Villaluz’s. Most of the Chinese people Bolan knew avoided the sun, but this man was deeply tanned and had crow’s feet around his eyes. The man’s sleeves were rolled up, and the calluses covering his knuckles bespoke long and intensive martial arts practice. He paused for the barest of moments as he took in the state of Agent Smiley’s face and then nodded at the inspector.

Villaluz made a graceful gesture with his hand. “Señor Cooper, Señorita Smiley, allow me to introduce Señor Juan-Waldemar Wang.”

Bolan shook his head. “That’s a mouthful.”

Wang threw back his head and laughed. “You have no idea, GI.” Wang spoke his English with a southwestern twang. “So you can just call me J.W.”

“You speak excellent English, J.W.”

“Texas A&M, business. Take a load off.”

Everyone took a seat. Wang made a vague gesture at the chef and a waiter with shot glasses and beers appeared almost instantaneously. Wang didn’t appear to believe in frivolous excesses like lime or salt. He raised his glass. “Salud.”

Everyone drank. The smooth tequila blossomed into warmth in Bolan’s stomach and he chased it with a slug from a sweating bottle of Pacífico beer. Bolan motioned for another round of shots and raised his. “Gan bei.”

Wang drank to the traditional Chinese toast “dry glass” and grinned. “Check out the culture on Cooper!” Bolan shrugged.

Wang looked Bolan up and down with renewed interest. “So my old buddy Israel is FIA, the señorita is DEA, what does that make you muchacho?”

“Concerned citizen?” Bolan ventured.

“Well, what’s concerning you today, Citizen Cooper?”

“Milanesas?” Bolan asked.

Wang sighed happily at Bolan’s request for fried, breaded steak. “Oh, we got that, and oh! And I have surprise delicacy!” Smiley squirmed visibly in her chair. Wang fired off a rapid string of orders in Cantonese, and the waiter and the chef made for the kitchen at the double. “What else is concerning you, Cooper?”

“Silencio.”

Wang leaned back in the booth in thought. “Well, you know we inscrutable Chinese practically invented the concept.”

“True, and as the inspector pointed out earlier, by comparison cartel guys talk about silence a hell of a lot more than they practice it.”

“They’re a bit loose-lipped compared to some,” Wang conceded. “What’s that to me?”

“Well, in Tijuana the silencio is starting to get enviable even by Chinese standards.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“How’s it here in Mexicali?”

Wang smiled as the waiter staggered over beneath a mountain of plates and a bucket of beer on ice. “Ah.”

The plates of beans, rice and tortillas and fried steaks were plentiful; however, the biggest point of interest were the heaping plates of fire-roasted red mezcal worms. Smiley eyed the mystery-meat milanesas with suspicion. She regarded the roasted caterpillars in open horror. Wang was throwing the gringos an open culinary challenge. Villaluz sighed with pleasure at the seasonal Mexican delicacy and dived in with aplomb. Bolan followed suit.

Bolan squeezed a wedge of lemon over his milanesa and tucked in. Despite the fact that it was delicious, he privately hoped no canine gladiator had given its life for it. Bolan finished his beer and the waiter stopped just short of doing a baseball slide to fetch him a fresh one. Bolan and the inspector ate heartily and waited politely for Wang to pick up the ball again. Smiley picked at her beans and rice.

“Well, speaking of silencio,” Wang stated, “I expect it might sound like something of a contradiction, but it’s gotten a tad more violent and more silent here in ol’ Mexicali.”

The inspector speared himself another steak from the pile. “It is the same in Tijuana.”

“It’s my experience,” Bolan said, “that Mexico isn’t a very quiet place, and when it does get quiet it means something very bad is about to happen.”

“That’s pretty astute there, Coop.”

Villaluz polished off his beer. “My friend is feeling somewhat light.”

“Well, I reckon if I were him I’d want to go heeled.” Wang pushed away from the table. “Follow me.”

Bolan, Smiley and Villaluz followed Wang back into the kitchen and down the stairs into the cellar. Sacks of beans, rice and flour formed pyramids that nearly brushed the ceiling. Wang went to a steel security door and punched in a code.

Bolan stepped into the candy store.

Small arms of all descriptions were racked on the walls and covered tables. Wooden crates of weapons were palleted in piles like the beans and rice next door. “So what can I do you for?” Wang asked proudly.

“Tell me a story,” Bolan said.

Wang chewed his lip for a moment in thought. “I’ll tell you a story about the old days. Most yanquis don’t know it, but the Chinese tongs used to run a lot of the crime on the border. When the U.S. had their anti-Chinese movements in the 1800s, many Chinese moved south across the border. In the end the Mexicans had their own night of the long-knives, but we still stayed. People still wanted opium and a place to do it. Men wanted Chinese prostitutes and places to do them. Mexico until recently was never the land of gunfighters the U.S. was, so if you wanted someone dead and didn’t have men of your own? A tong hatchet man was a good bet.”

“And then you got pushed out.”

“Yep, in the 1980s Mexican brown heroin became cheap, plentiful and of higher quality than ever before. Our China white couldn’t compete. Cocaine was the other drug of choice, and we were not a natural conduit for it. The Chinese criminal web in Mexico contracted. But if there is one thing we Chinese have it’s worldwide connections. Mexican criminals have always gotten most of their weapons by stealing them or buying them black market from the Mexican military or smuggling them in from the United States. However, we Chinese have always been a secondary, shadow-conduit. AK-47s and light support weapons to revolutionaries in the south. PRC, Taiwanese and Philippine knockoffs of MAC-10s, Uzis and M-16s to the drug cartels. We Chinese never cared, business was business.”

“And what’s your relationship with the cartels?” Bolan probed.

“For the most part we have always had a wary truce with the cartels. We are a source of guns, and the Chinese laundries these days launder money into Asian offshore banks in the Pacific.”

“And now?” Bolan asked.

“Now?” J.W. frowned. “Now, things are…”

“Beginning to take an alarming turn?” Bolan suggested.

Wang walked over to a crate and opened it with a small crowbar. “You know what those are.”

Bolan looked at a dozen AK-47s packed in straw. “Kalashnikovs.”

“You betcha. Weapon of the people. Used to be every cartel asshole wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt had to have one. I couldn’t keep them in stock. Now? Now I can hardly give them away. The cartels took the high hat and consider them peasant weapons, used by barefoot illiterate assholes. Now they want M-4 carbines like your boys use. The weapons of the world conquerors.”

Bolan was aware of this. “And?”

Wang pulled a pistol out from under his jacket. “You know what this is?”

Bolan eyed the large, uniformly gray, space-gun-looking Belgian weapon. “FN Five-seveN.”

“No, it’s a mata policias.”

“Cop killer.”

Wang nodded. “Every Mexican criminal wants one of these. Now me? I’m a .45-caliber man, give me that 12.5 mm slug any day. But the little 5.7 mm rounds this baby squirts out? Rumor is they slide right through bulletproof vests. The U.S. war on drugs? Well, in Mexico it’s starting to look like a civil war. The cops are arming up, the government is sending in the army, and the bad guys want a solution to all these assholes in body armor. They love the mata policia, and they all want that Belgian carbine that fires the same cartridge. But you know what the problem is?”

“Supply and demand,” Bolan stated.

“That’s right. Belgian guns have always been expensive, and trying to smuggle Belgian guns into Mexico, well, that’s a very interesting proposition. It takes a U.S. buyer. Five-seveNs are legal up north, but it throws in another middleman. If a U.S. citizen buys five or ten or fifty of them, he risks attracting a lot of unwanted attention, so the price goes way up. So they only come in at a very slow drip. They’re also status symbols. I heard of them going for 10k a pop down here on the border and the supply just cannot meet the demand.”

“So what’s the solution?”

“From an economic standpoint?” Wang reached into an already opened crate and pulled out another pistol. “The solution is this.”

The weapon looked like any one of a dozen 9 mm service pistols from around the world made of black metal and wearing black plastic grips. It was the Chinese QSZ-92 service pistol, and the only thing unique about it was the proprietary cartridge if fired.

Wang regarded the pistol. “Oh, I’ll admit it’s not as sexy as the Five-seveN. It’s no race gun, but the 5.8 mm cartridge it fires has the pedigree. Needle-pointed steel-core bullet? Check. Magnum velocity? Check. And—”

Smiley stared at the pistol as if it were a snake. “And half the price of a Five-seveN.”

“Try less than a tenth,” Bolan said. “And you don’t have to smuggle it across the U.S. border. You just pay off any customs official from Ensenada to Acapulco and he can bring them in by the container vessel.” Bolan smiled at Wang without an ounce of warmth. “How many are you bringing in this year, Wang? Hundreds? Thousands? You going to bring in Chinese Type 05 submachine guns in the same caliber, as well?”

Wang frowned. “Therein lies the problem.”

“What would that be?”

“I don’t want to.”

Bolan was mildly surprised. “Oh?”

“Oh, I’m telling you, my cousin in Hong Kong has them ready to go. He thinks we should market them locally as asesinos chinos.”

“Chinese assassins?”

“Yeah, my cousin earned his degree in marketing. He’s good. He wants to sell them from Tijuana to Matamoros, one end of the border to the other, from sea to shining sea.” Wang laid the weapon back in the crate. “Every punk on the street will want one.”

“And be able to afford one,” Smiley added bitterly. “You’ll make a killing.”

“You bet we would, but kill who?”

Wang turned to the inspector. “Forgive me, my friend, but the Chinese philosophy has always been to pay off the police and then get out of the way and let the Mexican criminals kill each other.”

Villaluz’s eyes narrowed but he reserved comment.

“Now it’s different. Now it’s war. The cartels aren’t just killing one another. They are killing policemen, soldiers, mayors, judges and journalists. They are taking over whole towns. Parts of whole states. The days of paying off police and politicians in Mexico is almost over. Now it’s simpler, and cheaper, to kill them. I was born in Mexico. I’m a Mexican citizen. My family is here. My business is here, and I reckon I just don’t want to live in a narco-state.”

Bolan had to admit that for a tong gunrunner who pit-fought animals and ate them J. W. Wang was a somewhat surprising man of conscience. He still kept his voice hard. “So what are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know.” Wang looked Bolan straight in the eye. “What would you like me to do about it?”

“Go to war,” Bolan said. He looked around at the crates of armament. “What else have you got?”

CHAPTER FOUR

Bolan sat shotgun in Wang’s black BMW 7 series sedan. An exploratory tap of his knuckles on the body panels upon entry told Bolan the car was armored. Wang pointed to the corner across the street. “You see that guy?”

Bolan looked through the tinted window. A man as big as Bolan stood outside a barbershop on the La Chinesca street corner as if he owned it. He wore mirrored blue aviator sunglasses and a blue-and-white team Cruz Azul soccer team warm-up jacket. His black hair was pulled straight back into a short ponytail. He had zipped open the front of his jacket in the heat, and gang tattoos crawled up out of his wifebeater from his chest to his neck. By the way he was standing and occasionally adjusting his jacket, Bolan could tell he was armed. He reeked Mexican gangster, but there was something about the vibe he was throwing off that the Executioner didn’t like. Great minds thought alike, and Smiley shook her head in the backseat. “There’s something hinky about that guy, and more than just the fact that he’s a scumbag.”

“Who is he?” Bolan asked.

Wang made an unhappy noise. “It took some time to find out, but his name’s Balthazar Gomez. He used to be a sicario for the Valencia Cartel.”