1
Antioquia Department, Colombia
An unseen hand ripped the black linen hood from off Rogelio Vélez's bruised and bloodied head, causing his rodentlike eyes to squint against the sudden glare of ceiling-mounted floodlights. Pain, a constant since the moment he had been abducted, flared to agony inside his skull.
Vélez tried to survey his prison, which by all apparent indicators—smell, sound, sight as he regained it—seemed to be an old, disused warehouse abandoned to the pigeons, rats and spiders that lay claim to such former abodes of men. A forklift layered with years of dust sat at the far end of the massive chamber. Small things scratched and scuttled in its dark corners.
Beside Vélez, immediately to his left, was Andrés Araújo, blinking as if to mimic his employer, drying blood caked on lips and chin as if it were a rusty-colored Van Dyke beard. Both men were handcuffed, wrists secured behind their backs. Beyond that, both were bound with thin, tough nylon ropes to painfully uncomfortable metal folding chairs.
It was outrageous for such men of prominence to be abused this way. If Vélez was not living it, he might have called the travesty unthinkable.
He and Araújo had been leaving the Agujero de la Gloria nightclub in Parque Lleras, Medellín's center of action between dusk and dawn, accompanied by young cabaret dancers, when a black van screeched to a halt beside Vélez's silver limousine, disgorging six armed men dressed all in black from balaclavas down to combat boots, shouting commands for everyone to raise their hands.
Vélez's driver earned his pay by reaching for the pistol in his shoulder holster. One of the attackers dropped him with a three-round burst of submachine-gun fire. Another set the women running for their lives—an awkward flight in tall stiletto heels—while the remaining four frisked Vélez and Araújo, handcuffed them, and dragged them both inside the van, where hoods were snugged over their heads. When each in turn asked what was happening, who the abductors thought they were, they had been gun-whipped into silence.
Now here they were, wherever here might be, trussed up and staring at a forklift, half a dozen wooden pallets, and a rat creeping along the nearest wall.
But they were not alone.
Although the watchers made no sound, Vélez trusted his finely-honed survival sense to tell him that much.
What a pity that it was unlikely to preserve his life much longer. There could be no coming back from this sort of intrusion, such a mortal insult. Logic and experience told him could only end up with a shallow grave—or worse.
Behind him, a man's voice said, "So, we meet again, Rogelio."
Footsteps on cracked concrete approached him from behind, then moved around Araújo's chair. The speaker stood before them, smiling almost wistfully. His face was instantly familiar, although changed somewhat by time and circumstance, but recognizable. Stunning.
"You're dead," Vélez half-whispered. "Dead for what? How many years?"
"Approaching twenty-eight," the man behind their kidnapping replied. "But who's counting?"
"This is impossible," Vélez declared, trying for greater strength and emphasis.
"And yet…"
The dead man spread his hands, stepped closer, bending from the waist to let Vélez survey his face up close and personal. Same wavy hair, still black on top but with more gray around the temples. Same thick eyebrows. Same bushy mustache as in the early mugshots, later in the media. The smile beneath that mugshot still projected mockery.
"Rogelio, do you not trust your own two eyes?"
"I saw your body," said Vélez. "I was among the mourners at your funeral…"
"You dare not speak my name?" the dead man challenged him.
"It can't be you."
"Perhaps this will convince you, then."
The man who couldn't be stepped closer, bending from the waist, and raised a hand to brush the graying hair back from his right temple. Vélez beheld the dimpled scar there, felt the warehouse and his whole world tilting.
"Pablo Emilio?"
Having presented his stigmata for inspection, their kidnapper straightened and stepped back a pace. His smile beneath the famous mustache morphed into a frown.
"At last," he said. "It grieves me to inform you of my disappointment."
"What? I don't—"
"La Oficina de Envigado, Rogelio."
"Yes? And?"
Before the Medellín Cartel's collapse in 1993, Vélez had organized the so-called "Office of Envigado"—a town located seven miles southwest of Antioquia Department's capital in the Aburrá Valley. Formed as a defense against the cartel's enemies in Cali and the wild men of Los Pepes—short for "persecuted by Pablo Escobar"—it had fought on to the bitter end, then managed to survives as a successor syndicate of sorts, maintaining ties to both the government in Bogotá and to guerillas lurking in the hinterlands.
"You organized us, Pablo," said Vélez, still nearly choking on the name. "We followed your instructions to the letter, did whatever you commanded."
"Until you believed that I was gone," their host responded in a scolding tone. "Since then you've made yourself a multi-millionaire and man of influence. Is that not so, Rogelio?"
"I carried on," Vélez protested, "and survived. I never slighted you—your memory—by any word or deed."
"Unless we count attempting to control my former territory, eh?" The not-so-dead man shrugged and spread his hands. "But what of that? Time passes. Life moves on."
For some, Vélez thought, but he kept it to himself.
"The good news, now, is that I'm back!" his captor said, smiling again. "I am reclaiming all that's mine and all that would have been, if traitors had not stabbed me in the back."
"You can't mean—"
"What else could I mean?" the image of a man long dead replied. "Do you expect me to believe the Search Bloc and Los Pepes actually traced my phone to Los Olivos and surprised me there, among my own people who loved me, owed me everything they had, from homes and hospital to schools and churches, plus their daily bread? Do you accept the lie that I grew frightened near the end and shot myself to keep from going back to prison? Eh?"
"But—"
"No!" The voice rose to a shout. "We both know who bears the responsibility. Is that now true, Rogelio?"
"You think that I betrayed you?" Vélez could no longer feign a pose of disbelief. His mind could not conceive how such a thing was possible, and yet…
"I think nothing," the man who had returned to life answered. "I know it for a fact. A certainty."
"You are mistaken, jefe."
"Don't debase yourself with any further lies. You have been tried, convicted, and your sentence passed. You know what must be done to halt contagion's spread."
Vélez could think of no response, sat blinking at his former lord and master, now become his mortal enemy.
The ghost made flesh pressed on. "It must be purged by fire."
Rogelio Vélez stared blankly at the man standing before him. He could feel Andrés Araújo staring at him, but kept his eyes fixed directly on the man in charge.