Narcos

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  THE JAGUAR’S CLAW

  THE JAGUAR’S CLAW

  JEFF MARIOTTE

  TITAN BOOKS

  NARCOS: The Jaguar’s Claw

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789090123

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789090130

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: November 2018

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  ™ & © 2018 Narcos Productions LLC. All Rights Reserved.

  Visit our website: www.titanbooks.com

  Gaumont Books

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  This book is for Marcy Spring, with all my love.

  1

  Scottsdale, Arizona, United States, 1993

  THE MAN CALLED Luis Roberts—known to his friends and post office coworkers as Lou, even though his real name was Jose Aguilar Gonzales—pushed through the glass doors of the Robinsons-May department store in Arizona’s Scottsdale Fashion Square. His hands were laden with shopping bags. He had gone to the mall to do his Christmas shopping, taking advantage of the sales on the day after Thanksgiving.

  Lou’s habit of generosity had been developed during an earlier phase of his life, when his income had far exceeded what he made now, sorting mail in the back of the post office. He liked giving presents. His colleagues and the neighborhood kids had come to expect them, thinking of Lou as a kind of Santa Claus figure. But with his diminished income, shopping during sales had become a necessity.

  His red Ford Escort—another step down from the old days—was parked in the lot that faced onto Camelback Road, outside Robinsons-May. He’d been lucky to get a spot close by; the parking lot was jammed, and vehicles circled like vultures, trying to nab any space that opened up. As he waited on the curb for a chance to cross into the lot, a black Mitsubishi Montero with tinted windows rolled slowly past. Inside, the driver and passenger—both Hispanic men—eyed him. He didn’t recognize either one, but that meant nothing. From their expressions, as far as he could tell through the darkened glass, he believed they recognized him.

  He dropped the bags where he stood, spun, and hurtled toward the department store. A woman was coming out as he reached the doors; he shoved past her, causing her to drop something that landed with the crash of breaking glass. He kept going. Weaving through the crowded aisles at something less than a full-on sprint but more than a jog, he made it through the store and out into the main area of the mall in a couple of minutes. All the way, his right hand was tucked inside the zipper of his leather jacket, close to his gun.

  The wide corridors were jammed with holiday shoppers. Lou’s gaze darted this way and that, seeking an escape route and scanning for enemies. Most of the shoppers were white, many with families, children. Of course, anyone could be an assassin, but he had always believed that when they came, they would be Latinos. Colombians, most likely. Possibly even people he knew.

  Not seeing anyone who seemed to pose an immediate threat, he started toward another exit, walking quickly but no longer running. He didn’t want to attract undue attention to himself. He kept his gun hand inside his jacket, close to his holster, just in case.

  The shoppers he passed were largely cheerful; he heard laughter and uplifted voices. Gloria Estefan’s “Christmas Through Your Eyes” was playing over the P.A. system. Lou was glad for her success in the U.S.; he hated Miami, but as long as he could think of her as Cuban, he could ignore her Miami connections. A few minutes earlier, he might have been humming along, smiling like so many of the people around him. Instead, he was sweating, fighting back panic—the price of years of paranoia, of living on the run, always watching over his shoulder.

  A Hispanic-looking man shifted course, as if to block his path. Lou cut across to the far side of the walkway. A woman reached suddenly into her purse. For a gun? Lou tightened his grip on his, and moved so that a family was between him and the woman.

  Ahead, he spotted a hallway leading to restrooms. They would offer some degree of privacy; he could fight back, if necessary. He started toward them, but before he’d made it halfway down, the hall started to look like a dead end. In there, he would be trapped, with no escape possible. He whirled around and sprinted out, made for the nearest escalator. On the way, he saw a man by himself, carrying a small bag, looking his way. When Lou hit the escalator, he took the steps two at a time, pushing past people standing still and letting it carry them up.

  On the upper floor, he no longer worried about discretion. He raced full tilt for the bridge that passed over Camelback Road. Inside Nordstrom, he slowed once again, eyeing everyone around him as he rode the escalator back to ground level. His fingers rested against the butt of his pistol, ready to yank it from its holster.

  Sweat beaded on his forehead, ran down his cheeks, stung his eyes. The escalator seemed to crawl.

  Finally on the ground floor, he quickly walked toward the exit and outside, across a small parking lot facing Goldwater Boulevard. If the attack came, it would be here. His head swiveled this way and that, seeking out potential threats. Across Goldwater was a bus stop, and a bus huffed its way toward it, less than a block away. At a break in traffic, he raced across the street, arriving just in time to board the bus. He found a seat in the back and rode, no particular destination in mind, watching every passenger who boarded while keeping an eye on the street.

  Luis Roberts had to die, so that Jose Aguilar Gonzales could live for another day. Cheerful Lou, beloved by customers and coworkers alike, generous Lou who gave Christmas presents to the neighborhood children and handed out the best candy at Halloween, could exist no more. He would have to leave Arizona; too close to Mexico, which he had always known but tried to ignore.

  Where to go, though? Someplace north. Chicago? Minneapolis? Maybe Detroit? Somewhere far from the southern border.

  But did distance really matter? According to the news from Colombia, Pablo Escobar was a fugitive in his own land. But El Patrón’s reach was long, his memory longer still. Forgiveness was not in his vocabulary.

  Lou—Aguilar—rode the bus, and watched, and pondered his next steps.

  2

  Medellín
, Departamento de Antioquia, Colombia, 1981

  WHEN JOSE AGUILAR Gonzales looked at his wife Luisa, he saw beauty personified, joy made flesh. She didn’t resemble the Colombian beauty queens he saw on TV and in the newspapers. Her skin was much darker than theirs, her features less refined, sculpted more broadly. She was sturdy, thick through the middle, with breasts small for her frame and calves that barely tapered into shapeless ankles.

  Her brown eyes were flecked with gold, and to gaze into them was the closest thing to heaven Jose had found on this earth. She had a shy, sly smile that alternately charmed him or thrilled him to his toes. He loved to hold her, and when he couldn’t do that, he loved to watch her move, or breathe, or simply be. He loved her laugh, her fierce intelligence, the way she sank her entire being into any given task.

  She was his, and he was hers, and the day they wed was the happiest day of his life.

  The second happiest was the day he graduated from the Carlos Holguín police academy in Medellín, the city where he had always lived.

  Most of his fellow graduates were local boys, raised in poverty or the middle classes, like him. They were overwhelmingly dark-skinned—the children of Colombia’s white-skinned oligarchy stayed away from such common occupations as officer of the Metropolitan Police. To Aguilar, whose father was a cobbler and whose mother mended clothing when she could and sold lottery tickets on street corners, it was a big step up in the world.

  To make things even harder for Aguilar, when he’d been seven years old, a cousin had accidentally spilled a pot of boiling water on him. He’d been badly burned. For a while, no one expected him to survive. He did, but his flesh was mottled, with white and dark patches that he thought made him look like a mangy dog. In some places, hair grew, in others it didn’t. As a boy, he’d thought that his disfigurement would doom him to the life of a street beggar or worse. When Luisa fell in love with him, he wondered about her eyesight; his freakish skin didn’t seem to disturb her. And when he was accepted into the academy, he had at first thought it was a mistake. But he vowed to become the best police officer he could, to pay back his city for taking a chance on him.

  He loved his country, but he knew its history. He had studied the Thousand Days’ War in school. La Violencia had just ended when he was born; although he had never seen the men cut into pieces, or the “neckties” made by slicing open their throats and pulling their tongues through the slits, he had seen the photographs and heard the stories his whole life. He had been married for a year, he and Luisa were ready to start a family, and he wanted to raise his children in a Colombia free of its violent past. He couldn’t tame the whole country, but he could start at home, in Medellín.

  At the same time, he wasn’t naïve. Everyone in the academy had heard the rumors that some of their fellow students were already on cartel payrolls. Some barely tried to hide it—while most walked or bicycled to classes, they drove convertibles or sports cars or powerful imported motorcycles. When they went out at night, their clothing was flashier than most cadets could afford, and their dates more beautiful.

  Aguilar knew that circumstances might one day pit him against brother cadets who had chosen the wrong side. He didn’t mind; he almost looked forward to the opportunity to teach them that Colombia could, despite history, despite everything, be a nation of laws. On that graduation day, in his dress uniform, with Luisa by his side, he fairly swelled with pride. He was proud to be an officer, proud to be a husband, proud to be Antioquian, proud to be part of Colombia’s future rather than its past. After the ceremony and the drinking that followed, he took Luisa home and made love with her and fell asleep wearing a smile and nothing else.

  Then came the morning.

  His assigned partner was Alberto Montoya. Barely thirty, Montoya was already a veteran officer, a first sergeant whose arrest record was legendary among the cadets. Aguilar could barely believe his luck when they were introduced.

  Montoya was tall and broad-shouldered, with curly dark hair and a jutting chin. His olive drab uniform was wrinkled, as if he had slept in it. He had an easy smile and sleepy eyes, leading Aguilar to wonder at first if he was stoned. But the sergeant’s speech was crisp, his intellect sharp. “Welcome to the Colombian National Police, Jose,” he said. “You’ll find this a rewarding career, I’m sure.”

  “It’s an honor to meet you, sir. I’m so lucky to be partnered with you. In the academy, everyone talks about you.”

  Montoya chuckled. “You can’t believe everything you hear,” he said.

  “Only good things, I mean,” Aguilar said, flustered. “That time you stopped the holdup at the Banco Nationale. Or when you foiled the kidnapping of Señora Guerrero. And—”

  Montoya held up a hand to stop him. “I did none of those by myself. You’ll see. Police work is teamwork. We cover each other’s backs. Nobody’s a hero.”

  “Or you all are.”

  “Not ‘you,’ Jose. ‘We.’ You’re one of us now.”

  Pride filled Aguilar near to bursting, as it had earlier that morning when he’d donned his brand-new uniform. He had a Beretta 92FS holstered against his hip and his usual pocketknife in his right front pocket, and he was ready for anything. “Where do we start?” he asked, to bring himself back to earth.

  Montoya ticked his head toward a Nissan Patrol four-wheel drive SUV. It was boxy, a rectangle on wheels, it needed washing, and it looked as if it had been run into once a month for a year or more. But it had a light bar on the roof and POLICIA across the top of its windshield and a green stripe down its side, and to Aguilar it was the most beautiful vehicle he had ever seen. When he looked back at Montoya, the sergeant was holding keys out toward him.

  “You want me to—” Aguilar began.

  Snapping his fist closed around the keys, Montoya said, “I’m driving.” He headed for the four-wheeler, and Aguilar followed, reminding himself to pay attention to everything, to learn, and most of all, to remember to breathe.

  It didn’t take long for his expectations to be dashed.

  Montoya drove all over Medellín, from the Bello, through the comunas of 12 de Octubre, Castilla, across the river into Aranjuez, La Candelaria, El Poblado, and up the mountain into Envigado, then back down through Guayabal, Belén, Laureles Estadio, and Robledo. Along the way, he kept up a running patter, pointing out where notable crimes had occurred, or once in a while, where they’d been prevented. He showed Aguilar how to spot likely criminals, sicarios he recognized as in the employ of Medellín strongman Pablo Escobar, walls pockmarked with bullet holes. Montoya usually had a Pielroja cigarette burning. Luisa said that spending all of her working hours in a smoke-filled restaurant had made her hate the smell, so Aguilar had quit, but he recognized the Indian on the packaging and the smaller one on the cigarette itself. He wondered how long it would take to get the stink out of his uniform and his hair.

  The older officer punctuated his tour with complaints. His pay was too low, especially for someone as decorated as he was. The ranking officers were corrupt or idiotic or both, mentally incapable of working the streets and therefore confined to the safety of their desks in police headquarters. Some of his greatest achievements—and there were many, he insisted—went unrecognized by superiors.

  Occasionally, he stopped outside a business and told Aguilar to wait while he went inside. He was never in for long. When he came out of the third place, he had a white envelope sticking out of a pants pocket.

  “What are you doing in those places?” Aguilar asked. He thought he knew the answer, but wanted to hear it from Montoya.

  “Just dropping in on various business owners,” Montoya said. “Public relations. They like to know the police are keeping them safe.”

  “What’s in the envelope, then?”

  “Nothing that concerns you.”

  Aguilar had started the shift expecting to be inspired by riding with his hero, but by the fifth or sixth hour of nonstop bitching, he was discouraged. If even Alberto Montoya was bitter about his career,
what chance did he have for happiness? Maybe he’d made a mistake. He should have joined the army, or become a teacher. Or let his father teach him how to repair shoes.

  The next time he mentioned his paltry salary, Aguilar—already pushed close to the edge by the envelope—could no longer contain his suspicions. “Why do you stay if you hate it so much?”

  Montoya shot him a cynical grin. “Not for the pay,” he said. “But for the benefits.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Montoya didn’t answer for a while. He seemed to be considering how to answer. Then he shrugged and confirmed Aguilar’s hunch. “You’ll find out soon enough, anyway. Certain people will pay nicely for the favors that a policeman can do for them. Especially a sergeant. But even a rookie patrol officer can do okay.”

  “What people? That’s what the envelopes are, right?”

  Even before the question was out of his mouth, Aguilar realized he shouldn’t have asked it. “Never mind, I don’t want to know.”

  “Which means you already do,” Montoya said.

  “Who? Escobar?”

  “Among others. But Pablo pays the best.”

  “You call him Pablo? Like you’re friends?”

  “Not friends. Business partners, in a way.”

  “But you’re police! You’re supposed to prevent crime.”

  “Look, Jose. I’m telling you this because I like you. I think you can go far in this job, but you have to understand how things are here. You think the captain doesn’t take money from Don Pablo? That bastard owns three houses, and one of them has seven bedrooms. Who needs that many bedrooms? If you take his money, you take his orders. It’s how this city works.”

  “But—”

  Montoya talked over his objection. “You have to be realistic. Don Pablo has more money to throw around than the city does. If he didn’t share some of it with the police, he would have to hire more criminals to get his business done. Who would you rather have running errands for him, cops or killers?”

  “Is there a difference?”