Conquistadors

  Conquistadors

  Black Autumn Book Two

  Jeff Kirkham

  Jason Ross

  Black Autumn

  Conquistadors

  Black Autumn Companion Series

  Book 2

  by Jeff Kirkham, Fmr. Army Green Beret

  & Jason Ross

  © copyright 2019

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  1. Tavo Castillo

  2. Tavo Castillo

  3. Noah Miller

  4. Tavo Castillo

  5. Noah Miller

  6. Tavo Castillo

  7. Noah Miller

  8. Tavo Castillo

  9. Noah Miller

  10. Tavo Castillo

  11. Tavo Castillo

  12. Noah Miller

  13. Tavo Castillo

  14. Noah Miller

  15. Tavo Castillo

  16. Noah Miller

  17. Tavo Castillo

  18. Noah Miller

  19. Tavo Castillo

  20. Noah Miller

  21. Tavo Castillo

  22. Noah Miller

  23. Tavo Castillo

  24. Noah Miller

  25. Tavo Castillo

  26. Noah Miller

  27. Tavo Castillo

  28. Tavo Castillo

  29. Noah Miller

  30. Tavo Castillo

  31. Noah Miller

  32. Tavo Castillo

  33. Tavo Castillo

  34. Tavo Castillo

  35. Noah Miller

  36. Tavo Castillo

  37. Tavo Castillo

  38. Noah Miller

  39. Tavo Castillo

  40. Noah Miller

  41. Bill McCallister

  42. Noah Miller

  43. Tavo Castillo

  44. Tavo Castillo

  45. Sofi Castillo

  46. Noah Miller

  A Word From Jason Ross

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  “The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.”

  George Bernard Shaw

  Chapter 1

  Tavo Castillo

  If Tavo knew he would be using an assassin to murder his daughter, he probably would’ve picked one with a different name. Sending a “mongrel dog” to murder his spotless darling struck him as a profound sacrilege.

  “I’ve pre-positioned El Chucho in Hermosillo,” the assassin’s handler repeated.

  The voice over the satellite phone came through warbled and spackled, like a demon reaching across an ice-bound solar system.

  “Sir,” the man on the other end of the phone interrupted his fugue. “Please confirm. El Chucho to prosecute target Sofía Castillo Sausa in Hermosillo, Sonora.”

  The roaring ache in his severed toe rose like boiling water at the mention of her name. Tavo steadied himself with deep breaths and gripped the rotting lawn chair so tightly he feared the brittle armrests might shatter. After an eternity, the pain receded.

  “Sir. I need you to confirm,” the satellite phone chirped.

  “Confirmed.”

  There was nothing else to say. The other man disconnected, as though saying “goodbye” might be an inappropriate way to end the call.

  The shack where Tavo rolled between pain, malice and regret must’ve been a guard shack in a previous life. The walls were decaying adobe, but someone had recently replaced the roof with gleaming, corrugated metal. It radiated the sun’s relentless heat like a stone pulled from the fire. Whoever had replaced the roof hadn’t bothered to pull down the 1980s porn calendar, hanging on a rust-chewed nail. A big-breasted Latina stared back at Tavo with a vacant smile, her face yellowing from decades hanging there.

  Such a strange room for an emperor, Tavo brooded. Again, his ruined foot throbbed so powerfully that it made his ears pulse with a dull thrum. Somewhere in Hermosillo, Mexico the daughter he had once lived to serve had now been marked for death. She was likely dressed in white today, like most days—a crisp breeze cutting the desert heat. At that same moment, her father sweltered in a mud shack, wounded, swooning and spattered in his own blood.

  Maybe all great men faced solitary moments in windowless rooms like this one. Maybe all great men committed deeds that only fierce men could.

  Chapter 2

  Tavo Castillo

  Filadelfia Hotel, Antigua, Guatemala

  Three weeks earlier.

  Whoever said “crime doesn’t pay” must not have known many smart criminals.

  Gustavo “Tavo” Castillo drifted in and out of thought as the coming dawn filtered through the coffee plantation and quieted his restless soul. The rich light touched off the emerald greens of the leaves and the brilliant white of the blossoms one degree at a time, like an awakening after too much sleep.

  Each of the hundred million blossoms granted a minuscule breath of fragrance, mingling in the slight breeze and washing the hillside in alternating waves of vanilla and jasmine.

  Nothing in the world touched Tavo more deeply than this place, during this time of year: the flowering of the coffee in Antigua, Guatemala. Tavo had set the annual business meeting with his daughter for this place and time—the Hotel Filadelfia in late September.

  “Buenas dias, Papi.” His daughter kissed him on the head, careful not to jostle his coffee, and took the seat across from him at the wrought iron patio table.

  Well, Tavo corrected himself, there was one thing in the world that touched him more deeply than the coffee bloom. He looked at her and felt mesmerized by his daughter, as Latin American fathers had for eons.

  Somehow, even without makeup and at the cusp of dawn, she lit up the patio like a Roman goddess. Her airy white blouse floated around her shoulders and set off her rosy, latte-colored skin and her blush lips, delicately closing on the edge of her coffee cup. She smiled at Tavo silently, as if to acknowledge the perfect morning.

  Loving his daughter was one of the few ways Tavo felt human. Mostly, he didn’t. He felt like an alien wearing the skin of a man; an infiltrator, passing through the world, harvesting the weakness of humans. Tavo preyed upon them—except for this gut-punch-beautiful woman.

  He pulled his eyes away from the coffee bloom to watch her pour half-and-half into her coffee. Were it not for her, he would be no different than any other predator; living only to kill and eat. Because of Sofía, his predations meant something: that the spoils of his life would pass to this light-dappled creature. As far as life purpose went, Tavo knew that many men had far less.

  She waited on his pleasure. She sipped her coffee without a sound, honoring his enjoyment of the dawn and the mist-dusted coffee flowers. It was something he might do, himself, to soften a target of manipulation—feigning grace and openheartedness. Pretending to respect the other man’s pleasure and taking time to indulge the petty contentments of his target. Tavo was ninety-nine percent certain that his daughter did it because she sincerely cared for him. Either way, he respected her self-mastery. It was a rare trait among twenty-nine year old women.

  He set his coffee cup quietly on the patio table and straightened in his chair, signaling his willingness to get to work.

  “Will you tell me me what you think about the troubles in America?” she began.

  Good, Tavo thought. Always start with a question. Draw the other person in. Make them feel heard before maneuvering toward your objective.

  “We’ve seen big swings in the stock market six times in the last year,” Tavo recalled. “This could just be one more of those.”

  “Yes, but the dirty bomb attack on the Saudi oil pumping station might make this stick. We haven’t seen the New York Stock Exchange circuit breakers close trading until now. The
market troubles in the past have been herd panic. This one’s founded on an actual loss of capital infrastructure.”

  He couldn’t help but take pride in her nuanced understanding of the global financial situation, but it also unsettled him. She’d done her undergrad at Vanderbilt and then whipped through her MBA at Wharton. Since then, she’d been building her way up to running all his legitimate enterprises, and she’d had unbelievable success. Of course, his legitimate businesses could never compete with drug trafficking for profitability. But until she’d taken the helm of his corporations, they almost all lost money. They were money laundering schemes more than anything else, so losses hadn’t been an issue. But she’d turned that around. Now they were making money on their money laundering.

  He wondered how much her analysis of the stock market had been lifted from a class she’d taken at Wharton. The alternative—that her genius approached his own in magnitude—brought with it another set of problems. He’d made it a personal mantra: never work with anyone as intelligent as him. A smart enough person would see through his well-manicured humanity and peg him for the sociopath he was. Had his daughter already turned that corner?

  “American financial trouble has always been good for us,” Tavo threw out the statement, more interested in keeping her talking than anything.

  She chuckled. “It’s been good for you. My businesses take damage when markets fall. They’re only worth what people will pay for them and that depends on private equity funds and the cash they have on hand, which relies heavily on their investors’ stock gains.”

  Tavo received it for what it was: an intellectual parry. She was fully aware of the drug trade that had funded all the family’s legitimate enterprises. At the same time, she had worked tirelessly to firewall the two sides of the family fortune. In theory, her policy fit perfectly into his empire strategy. In practice, her relentless fence-building between his “dirty work” and her “clean work” tasted like last night’s garlic.

  And yet, he reminded himself, it had always been just the two of them. Father and daughter, forever driving toward the same outcome; her long-term wealth, and hopefully, the well-being of his grandchildren at some point. The thought of grandchildren made him think of a male counterpart for Sofía. Just another person I would have to eventually kill, he worried. He knew everything about every man she’d ever been with, and thankfully, she had never taken any of them seriously. There hadn’t been one equal to the challenge of becoming a Castillo.

  Tavo realized that his long silence had revealed his discomfiture and he regretted his lapse in control. “I’ll make sure you have the capital to weather any storm, Sofí. If American investors take losses, that’s our time to buy. Did they teach you at business school about how the industrialists expanded their empires on the back of the Great Depression? We should be so lucky.”

  She enjoyed her coffee and her eyes lingered over the plantation.

  She’s suppressing her first response, Tavo noticed. Her first response had probably been to take a jab. But she didn’t go with that. She refrained.

  “We may not need the expansion. I’m getting close to our exit threshold,” she reported, returning to the agenda. “Our net worth is running just above thirty-five million on my side. We can cut over to purely legitimate businesses and we’ll be good.”

  Tavo leaned back in his chair and chuffed. Thirty-five million. The glacial pace of profit accumulation in the corporate world always amazed him. He could generate thirty-five million in three days with narcotics. It’d taken her four years.

  Sofía always came back to “the exit threshold.” Our exit threshold, Tavo noted. She presumed his consent to her strategy—that someday they would abandon his drug operation in favor of legitimate enterprise. When they hit their “exit threshold” of clean cash, they would move off together, Tavo and Sofía, respectable business partners, welcome to walk among the elites without any taint of criminality.

  Every time she said it, his disdain for “the elites” arose. Tavo ground his teeth, eager to pulverize the useless upper class between the twin stones of his formidable intellect and his hatred for aristocrats. He had sent his daughter into their world to study at their schools and master their markets, but he had never ceded one inch to the oligarchs. In the end, he longed to see them burn.

  She must’ve noticed the foul wind pass across his face because she tacked an anxious footnote to her statement. “Papi. Nobody survives forever as a narcotraficante. You need to get out while you can.”

  He held up a finger, hearing something in the breeze. A dog barked at the edge of the plantation. After a moment’s pause, he replied, “Nobody yet has survived. Everyone who has tried, so far, has been a fucking idiot. I apologize, mi amor, but you need to leave right now. Don’t pack. Go to your helicopter now. I’ll see you in Los Mochis soon. Go.” He stood and lifted her from her chair, her face beset with momentary confusion. He kissed her on the forehead. “Go.”

  Sofía left her coffee cooling and walked back into the hotel without another word.

  As soon as she disappeared around the plaster-spackled columns, Tavo slid the Glock G26 from the low-viz holster on his waistband and reflexively press-checked the chamber. Brass glinted back at him.

  He moved to another patio table, this one surrounded by stone and adobe columns, the same columns that once ringed the hacienda of the Filadelfia before it had become an ultra-lux hotel. He left his coffee alongside his daughter’s and dragged a wrought iron patio chair from behind a table and over to a column. To the staff, Tavo would look like he was being discrete. To another shooter, Tavo would look like he was taking cover and concealment.

  There were no other guests. When he visited the Filly—one of his few, secretly-owned Latin American holdings—he ordered all other guest reservations cancelled, if for no other reason than to protect his quiet time in the morning. It was one of the few financial indulgences he allowed himself south of the American border.

  This visit to the Filly had been a close call. Tavo’s personal “Egghead,” as he jokingly called his pet millennial Octavio, had flagged an up-tick in Guatemalan electronic chatter around one of Tavo’s nicknames, “El Mentor.” “Mentor” was a common enough word in Spanish, but El Mentor was a term worthy of note. The fact that the phrase had been bouncing around the Guatemalan Ministry of Defense had elevated the possible threat sufficiently that Octavio had raised the red flag. That, together with the barking dog, had set off Tavo’s finely-tuned situational awareness.

  Something was wrong.

  Later, he might feel bad about possibly losing the Filly to the Guatemalan government. For the moment, his heart rate picked up and his endocrine system flooded with one of the few highs he actually enjoyed: combat.

  Someone had quieted the dog.

  Tavo knew the grey and brown mongrel the manager of the plantation kept at his shack along the southern wall. Tavo had threatened the dog half-a-dozen times with a stick when he walked the rows of coffee on his morning strolls. He had seen the gerente beat the living shit out of the dog for barking, to an early morning chorus of yelps and whines. This time, the barking had simply gone silent.

  His Glock held at the low ready, Tavo considered his options. There was a good chance this was a false alarm, but if the blood pounding in his ears could be trusted, it was not. If the Guatemalan Ministry of Defense had anything to do with this interruption of his annual meeting with Sofía, they would come at him hard. Anyone who knew of his existence would also know that he was a formidable adversary. No petty criminal could maintain his level of secrecy and preparedness.

  He had invested hundreds, if not thousands, of hours in American combat shooting schools. He also became indistinguishable from an American—without any Spanish accent whatsoever. He justified the allocation of time by telling himself that the training eliminated the need for personal security, which would otherwise increase his profile. But in reality, there were other reasons: Tavo took great pride in being one of t
he toughest gunfighters in the country. Maybe one of the top hundred in the world. That truth placed him in another universe as a man, set apart from the paunch-belly narcos and golf-playing oligarchs he so despised. He had honed himself into a hunter of men and had mastered the sword of the modern age: the firearm.

  Tavo considered his first impulse; to slip deeper into the area of operation and engage the threat. He could move along the outside of the south wall—detecting security they may have posted at their rear. Then he could double back into the plantation at the big drainage grate, about halfway down the six-hundred yard wall. Given good timing, he would probably come up behind any assault force. Odds were better than ninety percent that he could pull off the buttonhook and backdoor the assaulters, racking up a few kills before they reset their OODA loop and figured out a way to come at him from a new angle. By then he would be gone, and he’d have a row of new notches on his leather gun belt.

  The words of his pistol/carbine instructor at the DARC School of Combat Shooting, rang in his ears: “When you open the Pandora’s box of combat, no matter how good you may be, you release forces that cannot be controlled. The smart gunfighter walks away from an ambush, every time he can.”