More gunfire followed rapidly, Gilberto's point man dropping in his tracks while the remainder blasted anything that moved. The slaughter lasted less than ninety seconds, leaving bodies strewn about the open space, its concrete floor and walls painted with crimson jets of blood.
And in the middle of the room, a long table stood undefended now, heaped with kilos of marching powder shrink-wrapped in plastic. Gilberto did a hasty count, came up with fifteen hundred packages, and did the mental math: $45 million wholesale in Miami or New York.
He smiled, knowing his master would be pleased.
Los Colores, Medellín
Raül Sandino stood two inches taller than his average countryman at five foot seven and seemed taller still in his brigadier general's uniform of the Colombian National Police. Twin ten-pointed golden stars adorned his epaulets, each stamped with his homeland's elaborate coat of arms.
An Andean condor surmounted the seal, holding an olive crown in its beak, talons protruding from beneath a scroll bearing the nation's motto: Libertad y Orden ("Liberty and Order"). Below the bird and scroll, Colombia's tricolored national flag draped each side of a shield divided into three sections. The topmost has a pomegranate flanked by cornucopias, one spilling gold and silver coins, the other various tropical fruits. In the middle, a spearpoint supported a Phrygian cap. Below, two old-time sailing ships cruised past the Isthmus of Panama, severed from Colombia in 1903.
Besides that finery, Sandino wore a peaked cap bearing yet another Colombian seal, the hat adding two more inches to his height. A dozen medals glittered on his jacket underneath pole-mounted vapor lamps as he approached his audience with Medellín's new man of mystery, alleged by some to be no less than Pablo Escobar reborn.
Sandino had his doubts on that, to say the least, but he had happily accepted a retainer from the man of mystery, a sum sufficient to serve Raül Sandino as a healthy pension when he finally decided to retire. Not that the payment satisfied him absolutely, mind you. If the man he'd come to meet succeeded, Brigadier Sandino stood to wind up in his golden years a billionaire.
Los Colores, in northwestern Medellín, is a suburb located west of Calle 59 and the Quebrada Iguana River. Sandino's limousine stood idling in the driveway of a mini mansion set on manicured grounds, made noonday bright by floodlights mounted underneath the eaves. Two men stood waiting for him on the broad porch as Sandino left the car, both eyeing him impassively, holding their automatic rifles in a rough approximation of port arms.
They looked him over as Sandino reached the porch, apparently perceived no threat, and one of them opened the tall front door, a houseman on the other side, waiting to serve as escort to a library well stocked with books which, if Sandino was a decent judge, had never been perused.
The man who stood before him certainly resembled Pablo Escobar, as far as Brigadier Sandino could recall from photographs published when he—Sandino—was a teenager. He'd never glimpsed the cocaine baron personally, but he'd read Escobar's file and knew that if the drug lord had survived his final showdown with police he should appear significantly older now, a figure in his early seventies. His host tonight seemed to be closer to Sandino's age in fact and smiling as he scrutinized his guest.
"Hola," he said in greeting.
"Buena noches, Señor…" Sandino faltered, stuck on the selection of a name.
"Please call me Pablo. I believe that friends should be familiar in their private dealings, eh?"
"Of course, Pablo." Somehow, Sandino managed without choking on the name. "Gracias for the invitation to your home."
"I hope we shall see much more of each other as our business grows and prospers, Brigadier."
"Raül, please."
"Si. But of course." The smile worn by his undead host seemed genuine enough, but in the circumstances, who could say?
The Pablo lookalike, who seemingly defied not only point-blank execution but the normal wear and tear of age, moved toward a wet bar on the library's east wall. "Aguardiente Antioqueño? Rum, perhaps? Tequila? Beer, if you prefer?"
"Antioqueño, por favor."
Sandino's host poured each of them a generous measure of the liquor considered Colombia's national drink, carried the glasses to a central table flanked by leather-covered easy chairs. They sat, Sandino with his cap resting upon his knees, sipping the liquid fire.
The mansion's owner followed suit, then smiled and said, "Let us discuss how we may make each other what the gringos feign to denigrate, dismissing it as 'filthy rich'."
Castilla, Medellín
"Muéstrame las armas." Not a man who wasted time on "please" or "thank you" in a conversation with subordinates, Filipe "El Tigre" Ortiz demanded presentation of the weapons he had come to purchase for his war in Antioquia.
The vendor, a Colombian named Julián Gamboa, bobbed his head and led Ortiz, trailed by his right-hand man, Isidro Buendia, to stand before a table covered by lumpy oilcloth. Drawing the shroud aside, Gamboa gestured toward the military hardware laid out for display.
"As you requested, Señor Tigre. You will find it all in order."
Ortiz studied the lineup, pleased by what he saw, but shunning any outward sign of satisfaction.
The arsenal included ten AKS-74U carbines, folding stock versions of the Russian AK-74 assault rifle, measuring 19.3 inches to the parent weapon's 37.1 inches, thirteen ounces lighter, chambered for the same 5.45×39mm rounds. The carbine's shorter barrel—8.3 inches versus 16.3—reduced muzzle velocity by 145 feet per second and shaved effective range back from 550 yards to 330, but that hardly mattered. Regardless of size, the weapons still fired at a cyclic rate of ten rounds per second, and no one ever mistook the carbine for a long-range sniper's rifle.
Besides the AKs, there were half a dozen shotguns, equally divided between Mossburg 500 pump-actions and Russian-made Saiga 12 semiautomatics, all twelve-gauge, the Saigas fed from detachable box magazines holding ten to thirty rounds apiece.
Gamboa had also provided eighteen pistols, mostly Glocks, although he'd tossed in three Berettas and one outsized Desert Eagle .44 Magnum designed in Israel, manufactured by Saco Defense, an armaments subsidiary of America's General Dynamics Corporation.
Guns aside, a wooden crate set at the table's far end held what looked to be a couple dozen hand grenades, turned out by Instalaza Corporation based in Zaragoza, Spain, marketed worldwide as the Alhambra brand.
The pièce de résistance was another Russian-made weapon, an RPG-7. The rocket-propelled grenade launcher was portable, reusable, unguided and shoulder-launched, designed for anti-tank warfare, but it could serve as well against armored trucks, civilian vehicles or buildings. Its optimum effective range was 360 yards, its 40mm rockets wired to self-detonate at one thousand yards if they missed their targets. Six of those lay in a row beside the launcher, each nearly as long, with its propellant charge, as the thirty-seven-inch launcher itself.
"Bueno," Ortega said at last, nodding for Isidro Buendia to deliver final payment. While Gamboa counted rumpled bills, El Tigre said, "I take for granted that you speak to no one else of this transaction, eh?"
Gamboa lost count, glanced up at his customer, came close to blanching if that had been possible, given his dark complexion. "No one, sir! Of course not!"