The Devil's Elixir ts-3 Read online

  My gaze lingered on the fallen man for a long second, then I rasped, “I’m coming out,” into my mike. I took a deep breath, popped the strikers off two incendiary grenades and lobbed them at the pistoleros who were hunting me down, then sprang to my feet, laying down a wall of gunfire behind me as I bolted toward the exit. I stopped at the back door of the lab, took one last look at the place, then I burst out of there as the whole place went up in flames behind me.

  III

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA SIX MONTHS AGO

  In his corner office on the twentieth floor of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building, Hank Corliss stared at his monitor and continued to grind over the latest morsel of background information he’d unearthed. Then he leaned back, swiveled his chair around so he could face the window, and frowned at his trembling fingers.

  It’s him.

  Again.

  Corliss clenched his fists, tight, and took in some long, deep breaths, trying to corral the fury that was galloping through him.

  I have to do something.

  I have to put an end to this.

  I have to make him pay.

  His knuckles were bone-white.

  Corliss—the Special Agent in Charge of the LA field division of the DEA and the OCDE task force’s executive director—turned and glanced at the plasma screen that sat on the shelves across from his desk. Four days later, coverage of the recent outrage was still all over the airwaves, although it had now degenerated from the endless, repetitive loops that cable news networks somehow managed to thrive on into even more mindless and less relevant peripheral pieces.

  He blew out a weary sigh and adjusted his posture, feeling a familiar pain lighting up in his spine. He shut his eyes to try to push it back and mulled over what he’d just read.

  The attack had taken place up the coast from Corliss’s office, at the Schultes Ethnomedicine Institute. Overlooking the rolling surf thirty miles northwest of Santa Barbara, the institute was a state-of-the-art research center that was devoted to finding new cures for all kinds of diseases—or, to put it more accurately, to uncovering old cures that had eluded the modern world. Its researchers—physicians, pharmacologists, botanists, microbiologists, neurobiologists, linguists, anthropologists, and oceanographers, among others—roamed the globe, “bioprospectors” seeking out isolated indigenous tribes, spending time with them, and ingratiating themselves to their medicine men in the hope of prying from them the ancient treatments and cures they’d been handed down over generations. It was home to a world-class collection of MDs and PhDs who were great outdoorsmen and adventurers in addition to being outstanding scientists, real-life Indiana Joneses whose survival skills came in handy when it came to trekking deep into Amazonian rainforests or climbing up to oxygen-starved villages high in the Andes.

  Their survival skills hadn’t been too useful that fateful Monday.

  At around ten A.M., two SUVs had driven up to the institute’s entrance gate. The security guard manning it had been shot dead. The SUVs had carried on into the facility unchallenged and pulled up outside one of its main labs. A half-dozen armed men had coolly marched into the building, shot up the place with snub-nosed machine guns, grabbed two research scientists, and whisked them away. Another guard had, by sheer coincidence, stumbled upon them as they were coming out. In the gunfight that ensued, the guard, as well as a resident who got caught in the crossfire, had been killed. Three other bystanders had been injured, one badly.

  The kidnappers, and their victims, were gone. There had been no ransom demands as yet.

  Corliss didn’t expect any.

  Early speculation from the detectives on the scene was that drug dealers were behind the kidnappings and the bloodshed. Corliss didn’t disagree. Scientists like the two men who were taken weren’t plucked from their labs in a hail of bullets by Pfizer or Bristol-Myers. Especially not when they had skill sets that were highly prized in the wild frontiers of illegal narcotics.

  Frontiers that were changing by the day, and not for the better.

  Initially, it was mostly about getting people with the right technical expertise to help produce mass quantities of popular synthetic drugs, chemists who could create, say, methamphetamine from its precursor chemicals, ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, without blowing themselves up in the process. With tighter regulations complicating the sale of the base chemical ingredients—much to the chagrin of the big pharmaceutical companies’ army of lobbyists—alternatives had to be found. Corliss remembered participating in the arrest of an American chemist in Guadalajara a few years back, in the days when Corliss was running the DEA field office in Mexico City. The man, an embittered out-of-work chemistry teacher, was working for the cartels and had earned himself a small fortune by figuring out how to use legal, off-the-shelf reagents to engineer meth precursors from scratch. The perks—the cash, the women, the booze, and, yes, the drugs—were an added bonus that sure as hell beat grading papers and dodging switchblades at his local high school.

  Beyond the actual designing and manufacturing of the drugs, scientists were also proving invaluable in dreaming up original ways of smuggling them across borders. One of Corliss’s strike teams had recently intercepted a shipment of Bolivian powdered mashed potatoes. It had taken the agency’s scientists a couple of weeks to discover that two tons of cocaine had been chemically infused into it. A month later, a similar shipment of soya oil had yielded another mother lode.

  Chemicals had mysterious, hidden qualities.

  Unlocking them and putting them to work in original ways could make a world of difference—and billions in profits—for the cartels.

  Hence the need for brainiacs with the technical chops to make it happen.

  Hence the kidnappings.

  So far, the investigators didn’t have much to go on. No suspects had been nabbed, and CCTV footage and witnesses had pegged them as white and beefy, and that was about it, since the men had worn fabric face masks and caps. One witness, however, had gone further, referring to them as “biker-gang types.” That wasn’t a big break in and of itself, not in Southern California, where biker gangs were rampant and big into drug dealing—they’d actually started the whole meth craze—but it was significant in other ways.

  The rules of the game had changed.

  Over the last decade or so, the Mexican cartels had taken over drug trafficking across the United States, bringing a ferocious new level of violence with them. Not content with their long-established role as the nation’s major supplier of marijuana, their growth exploded after the so-called War on Drugs of successive U.S. administrations that targeted Colombian traffickers severely curtailed the latter’s activities through the Caribbean and into southern Florida. The Mexicans stepped in to fill the gap. They started by taking over the distribution of cocaine from the harried Colombians, then they broadened their horizons. They went from mules to principals and took over the supply chain. And they weren’t content with just pumping coke and heroin into the United States. They forged ahead and embraced the drugs of the future—the ones you could make anywhere, the ones users could enjoy without too much hassle. It was the Mexican cartels that saw the real potential in methamphetamine and took it from being nothing more than a crude biker drug with limited use in the valleys of Northern California and turned it into the biggest and most widespread drug problem now facing America. Other synthetic drugs—easy-to-swallow pills that didn’t need all the cumbersome paraphernalia—were soon following suit.

  The Mexican cartels were now calling the shots from Washington to Maine, bringing in eighty percent of the illegal drugs that entered the country, with local bikers, prison gangs, and street gangs as their foot soldiers. At last count, the DEA had tracked the cartels’ operations to more than two hundred and fifty cities across the country. Their reach was limitless, their ambition voracious, their impudence unbounded. They didn’t seem to blink, even though they were basically at war with the U.S. government—an undeclared war that was affecting American lives far
more than the wars being fought in the deserts thousands of miles to the east.

  A war that had left deep scars on Corliss.

  Scars he’d never forget.

  Mementos of that savage night in Mexico, like the pain that was now throbbing across his spine, a reminder that always reared its malignant head when it was least welcome.

  The speculation that a Mexican cartel was behind the violent kidnapping of the scientists was supported by the fact that the DEA and other law enforcement agencies had made significant inroads into shutting down hundreds of meth labs across the United States. This had driven production south of the border, where the narcos had set up superlabs far from the reach of the Mexican authorities and where the talents of the missing scientists were a more likely fit. Furthermore, this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Other researchers had gone missing. In four earlier, separate incidents, chemists working for pharmaceutical corporations had been grabbed while doing fieldwork in Central and South America. No ransoms were ever demanded. The men were never seen again. Then things escalated. Two other incidents followed, this time on Corliss’s side of the border. A university chemistry professor in El Paso, a little over a year ago. Then another, a few months later, just outside Phoenix, snatched along with his lab assistant in an early morning swoop.

  And now this.

  Bang in Corliss’s jurisdiction.

  A vicious, deadly shoot-out on an idyllic stretch of the Pacific coast.

  A shoot-out that had snared Corliss’s interest even more than it naturally merited, given that he was heading the local DEA field office.

  He knew it wasn’t just any narco.

  He’d suspected it was Navarro the second he heard the news. Unlike his colleagues at the DEA, Corliss had never bought the story that Navarro had been killed by internal cartel bloodletting. He knew the monster was still alive, and when he’d dug deeper into the missing scientists’ areas of expertise, as he’d done for the previous kidnappings, he’d been left in no doubt. It fit a pattern, a common thread that ran through all their work, one only he had picked up on, one he’d kept to himself.

  For now.

  Raoul Navarro—El Brujo, meaning the shaman, the black arts practitioner, the sorcerer—was still after it. Corliss was sure of it.

  The burn in his spine intensified.

  He’s getting wilder, more bold, more reckless, he thought.

  Which meant one of two things.

  The bastard was getting desperate. Or he was getting close.

  Either way, it was bad news.

  Or, maybe . . . it was an opportunity.

  An opportunity for retribution.

  The retribution that Corliss had been hungering for since the day Raoul Navarro and his men came for him.

  His hands shaking and sweaty, Corliss reached into his desk drawer and pulled out the small, innocuous plastic bottle. He glanced furtively at the door to his office as he fished out a couple of capsules, making sure no one was on his way in to see him, then flicked them into his mouth and swallowed them without water. He didn’t need anything to chase them down with. Not anymore. Not after being on the pills for all these years.

  He didn’t have any proof that it was Navarro, of course. He wasn’t about to voice his suspicions either. He’d been there, done that, years ago, and he knew what watercooler chatter was going on behind his back. He knew that his colleagues and his superiors had little time for what they viewed as his delusional obsession with the man who’d ruined his life, the man who’d taken away what he held dearest on this earth.

  He didn’t care what they thought.

  He knew El Brujo was still out there. And, as it did for most of his waking life and a big part of his sleeping one, the mere thought of it whipped up a storm in the pit of his stomach.

  He stared at the muted screen again, his numb eyes taking in yet another loop of the same footage, and thought about the part of the story that he was most sensitive to: the pain and destruction the armed raid will have left behind. The new widows and orphans. The partners, parents, and children who’d probably never know what happened to the disappeared. The innocent whose lives would be altered forever.

  He reached for his phone and hit a speed dial key.

  His star operative answered promptly.

  “Where are you?” Corliss asked.

  “The marina,” the man informed him. “About to sit down with an informant.”

  “I’ve been reading up on the scientists that were grabbed up at that research center.”

  “Those cabróns are getting out of hand.”

  “I don’t think it’s just any old cabrón,” Corliss specified.

  The man paused for a second, clearly thrown by it, then said, “You think it’s him?”

  “I’m sure of it.” Corliss visualized the Mexican kingpin—and triggered a deluge of painful imagery that would be hard to push back.

  His fingers tightened around the handset, its casing creaking under the strain. “Come in when you’re done,” he finally said. “I’ve been doing some thinking. Maybe there’s a way to nail his ass.”

  “Sounds good,” Jesse Munro replied. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  SATURDAY

  1

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA PRESENT DAY

  The doorbell chimed shortly after nine A.M. on a lazy, sunny Saturday morning.

  Michelle Martinez was in her kitchen, emptying a dishwasher that had been stacked far beyond anything the laws of physics could explain while accompanying the rousing choral outro to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge” that was belting out from the radio. She looked up, used her forearm to sweep back the chestnut-brown bangs that kept playing games with her baby blues, and gave a gentle yell in the direction of the living room.

  “Tom? Can you get that, cariño?”

  “You got it, alteza,” came a reply from the front of the house.

  Michelle grinned, threw a glance over her shoulder at her four-year-old son, Alex, who was playing out in the backyard, and got back to emptying the cutlery tray. In the background, the lead Chili was lamenting the dark days he’d spent chasing speedballs in the bowels of LA. She loved that song, with its haunting guitar intro and its epic closing chorus, despite the emotions its lyrics stirred in her. Being a retired DEA agent, it was a world of pain and devastation that she knew well. But right now, what she loved far more was when Tom called her that—your highness. It was so not her, so wildly off the mark, and the sheer absurdity of it never failed to tickle her.

  He usually said it when she asked him for something, which didn’t happen that often, not even with her consciously reminding herself to do so every once in a while. The fact was, there wasn’t much that Michelle Martinez couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do for herself. She was as self-sufficient as a military spouse, which is exactly what her mother had been, something that had probably been ingrained in her by watching her mom all those years while growing up on army bases in Puerto Rico and New Jersey. It was that self-sufficiency, combined with her iron will and her intolerance for bullshit, that had got her into all kinds of trouble—she’d been expelled from a handful of schools before dropping out of high school altogether—but it was also what had helped her straighten up, get herself a General Education Diploma, and parlay her wild streak, her sharp tongue, and a series of brushes with the law into a meteoric, if ultimately cut short, career as an undercover agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

  The thing was, guys didn’t appreciate feeling like you didn’t need them. At least, that’s what her girlfriends kept telling her. Apparently, it was some vestige from man’s hunter-gatherer days, and, truth be told, they weren’t all wrong. Tom seemed to enjoy the occasional request, whether it was for something as trivial as opening the front door or for something more, shall we say, intimate. And it had generated the alteza nickname that she’d grown to love, one she far preferred to the various macho nicknames her fellow agents had for her back when she w
as on the force. Alteza was much smoother on the ears and had an old-world, romantic ring to it. It was a word that triggered a little grin at the edge of her mouth every time she heard him say it.

  The grin didn’t last long.

  As the chorus gave way to the song’s closing solo guitar strums, the next sound she heard wasn’t as pleasing.

  It wasn’t Tom’s voice. It was something else.

  Two sharp, metallic snaps, like someone had just fired a nail gun. Only Michelle knew it wasn’t a nail gun at all. She’d been around enough sound-suppressed handguns in her life to know what the automatic slide action of a real gun sounded like.

  The kind that fired bullets that killed people.

  Tom.

  She yelled out his name as she sprang to action, propelled by instinct and training, almost without thinking, as if the threat of death had triggered some kind of Pavlovian reflex that took over her body. Her eyes quickly picked out the large kitchen knife from the mess of cutlery, and it was already firmly in her grip as she rounded the counter and hurtled toward the kitchen door.

  She reached it just as a figure emerged from it, a man in white coveralls, a black cap, a black pull-up mask covering his face from the nose down, and a silenced gun in his hand. The split-second glimpse she got of him shouted out some vague features—thickset, bad skin, what looked like a buzz cut—but most of all, she was struck by the unflinching commitment that emanated from his eyes. She took him by surprise as they almost collided and she leapt at him, pushing his gun hand away with her left hand while plunging the knife into the side of his neck with the other. His eyes saucered with shock, and the blade had pulled down his face mask, exposing his thick, black Fu Manchu mustache just as blood spewed out of his mouth. He dropped the gun and reached up for the knife with both hands and grappled with it, but Michelle had plunged it in deep and it was solidly embedded. She’d also clearly hit his carotid as blood was geysering out of the wound, spraying the doorjamb to his left.