Guzmán shut his laptop, took one last drag of his joint and left to take a shower.
***
The man in orange overalls and a bulletproof vest walked taking short steps, it was all he could manage with the shackles that bound both his hands and feet together. Aldo Ríos, tall and slender at the age of fifty, was the new war trophy that would be exhibited as a warning to drug cartels. He was a public enemy finally arrested, and his deportation required all the appropriate security measures for a high-risk prisoner. Escorted by six agents of the DEA, Aldo had a slight limp. He was still in pain from shot he had received in his calf, his latest scar. He walked the one hundred meters of the cement path that led to the airplane that would take him to the penitentiary at Florence, Colorado, to its high security unit, the ADX, where he would stay until the trial for narcotics trafficking. Along the hangar’s perimeter, over one hundred Mexican police agents guarded the prisoner’s handover. Aldo’s eyes were fixed on his short steps, concentrating on not falling. The agents kept a hand on the prisoner as a reference; meanwhile, their eyes continued scanning the whole perimeter, feeling the tension of being observed. The rear ramp of the military airplane was waiting open for him; Aldo stepped onto the ramp, he felt the pain shoot up his leg, and looked at either side of him, knowing that he was being watched. Standing there as he was, he would have liked to raise his arm and form the sign of victory with his fingers. A push made him walk towards the airplane’s entrance.
“Have a good trip, Aldo”, murmured Juno Coentrao, who was watching the whole operation from a rooftop outside the security perimeter. Don had asked him to check on his brother’s health after three months in jail. Juno was the son of one of the drug-trafficking capos in Brazil, Néstor Coentrao, and he had been offered to Don as a sign of respect. The young man was dressed impeccably, he was the king’s messenger in the drug trafficking business and his eyes betrayed an unscrupulous character.
The plane was speeding at the take-off runway.
An unforgivable security error from their ‘Florida friends’ had led to the arrest; the monthly movements at the bank account registered under the name of Kaspar Klee, located in Miami, transactions that withdrew cash and which had been investigated by the DEA. They only had to wait for Aldo to enter the Azteca bank in Tijuana, on that second of September, like every month, five o’clock of a hot evening, arriving in an armored van with seven men armed with AK-47s.
Aldo always carried out the transaction in person, always, with his automatic, the safety off, always trusting that he was moving in his own territory, his home. A group of intervention police from both countries was waiting for him, armed for combat. They knew Aldo would not give up easily. And they were right. When the group with the eight traffickers accessed the staircase that lead up to the bank, three Federal Police cars blocked the entrance to the narrow street; Aldo took out his gun and started shooting everywhere, not knowing where he was aiming, but guided by his ‘I have nothing to lose’ instinct. The first crossfire ended the lives of three traffickers and one policeman who received a bullet in his head. Surrounded and trapped between the bank’s door and the armored van, Aldo and his men fired in all directions They were answered by shots from snipers up rooftops. From that height, they began to undermine the gunman’s shots, who were death’s grooms celebrating their wedding with shots that were blowing up their heads and hearts. At street level, a burst initiated by a policeman who had thrown himself down on the pavement, got Aldo Ríos on the calf, making him kneel on the bloodied sidewalk. When he tried to react, he found a gun pointing at his temple; his men lied around him as anonymous corpses. The battle was lost and a general of the drug-trafficking army had fallen.
Juno dialed the number that appeared under XL on his phone.
“It’s a clear day”, he said as soon as there was a connection, no waits, no greetings, no answers. He hung up.
He knew that the perimeter at a mile’s radio would be under surveillance, listening to any phone connections. ‘It’s a clear day’. Juno waited for the plane to take off northwards, he turned to the door that was being guarded by a five-foot-nine blonde woman, dressed in a plain suit with black pants; attached to her side, next to her heart was a NP29, nine millimeters.
“We’re going to the wall and we’ll be right back. Tell the pilots to be ready at three”. She nodded.
Don had heard ‘It’s a clear day’. Aldo, his brother was being deported to the United States of America. It was completely silent at the office that rose over Hollywood’s hills in a grand mansion where he remained anonymous under the name of Don Nassar. He touched the picture where he appeared with his brother Aldo. Don had adopted his wife Hela Nassar’s surname; from Jewish origin, a Persian family that had emigrated to America after the fall of the Shah in Iran. Doncel Ríos had taken advantage of his new situation to clean up his record, his surname; there is nothing that a good law firm cannot do in the United States of America. So, Doncel Ríos became Don Nassar, a respectable large real estate investor who dealt with hotels, apartments, marinas, entire buildings and big mansions; still, he continued to manage the millionaire business of opiates trafficking in a border that was impossible to control.
Hela, his wife, died ten years ago from a breast cancer that ended her life in a matter of months. Don had never been truly in love with her; he had confessed it to his daughter once, after three mescals. She interpreted it as the words of a drunk and depressed man. Don looked at the picture of the woman that presided the table; next to it, he kept the picture of Esther Nassar, his daughter, who had the same dark hair his wife had, and the same tough character. A single daughter for a gigantic legacy full of lights and shadows. Esther was in the light side of the business and knew about the shaded side, she was his family. Aldo was his right hand in the dark side of things, the limitless money that chemical addiction provided; that was where little Aldo had been, always out on the field, among tensions, shots and corpses. They saw each other from time to time; traveling in their private jets, they met at a mansion that Don had in Los Cabos.
Don spotted Esther’s red sports car driving through the gate. His daughter was wearing a Versace dress, Jimmy Choo shoes, a Kelly Hermes’ handbag and some exquisite Tiffany’s jewelry; a true ‘Masaryk girl’.
Esther studied and USC and held a master in Finance from Harvard, at twenty-seven she had already outdone everyone. She knew she had power and was completely aware of her future; she was ready to accept her role. Like in a monarchy, where the princess knows that she must choose the man she is going to share her kingdom with, always keeping her own interests and power in mind, rather than following her heart’s desire. It was something she had learnt from her father. Juno, more than a boyfriend, was a duty; above all, was her family’s legacy.
The house’s exterior security was discrete: two uniformed guards stood at the hut by the entrance and another one kept watch of the whole outside perimeter, driving up and down in an armored car. The idea was that it would not draw the attention of their millionaire neighbors, that they would not relate it to the images of armed drug-traffickers. Don rejected anything that might connect him to the Hispanic world and had forbidden the hiring of Spanish speaking employees for the house. If you erase your past, you must destroy all evidence that it ever existed. Doncel Ríos was dead, and only one loose end remained: Aldo.
Inside the house, ten Chinese bodyguards accompanied him day and night in two-people shifts.
Esther walked into the room and directed her eyes to the two men who stood behind him like statues, not even batting an eyelid.
“Hi, Dad. I really don’t get how you can live with these guys stuck to your side all day and night”.
“You get used to it”.
“Besides, you can’t even have a conversation with them”.
“Precisely,