“Not right now, Sandro,” the Padre said as he ground his cigar out on the cantina’s pockmarked wooden floor with his boot. “Right now, I’ve got something else I need you to do for me. You two,” the Padre said, motioning to his guards, “give us a minute.” The two burly men ambled to the bar to wait, never taking their eyes off what was happening inside the cantina or with the Padre. “Sandro, I need you to cross the border and take care of something for me,” the Padre said quietly amidst the din of the noisy room.
“Yes, Padre,” Sandro replied, leaning forward to listen to his boss. “Take care of something, or someone?”
“Good man,” the Padre said as he smiled at the tattooed man. “We have an issue with a thief. A very big but very naughty thief that is no longer of use to us.”
“Who?”
“El Barquero,” the Padre hissed.
“I never trusted him,” Sandro said with an evil grin as he spat on the floor. “Never liked him.”
“Do you want to take some men with you?”
“No, Padre. I want to do this myself.”
“Very well, then,” the Padre replied. “But, Sandro, be very careful with this man. I don’t know if he expects anything, but you need to assume that he does.”
“Yes, Padre. How do I find him?”
“He has a silver case with him.” The Padre removed a black smartphone from his pocket. “The case has a GPS tracking device in it. Push the tracking application on the phone like this,” he said as he launched the tracking device on the phone. A map of the local area pulled up on the phone’s screen. “Press this button to locate. There, you see?” the Padre said as the image expanded to show a map of western Texas. “He’s near El Paso. I think he’s going to try and take another shipment in the desert. I can’t have a war with the other cartels right now. Not until El Barquero’s weapons shipment arrives.”
“Yes, Padre,” Sandro said as the Padre handed him the phone. “I’ll take care of him.”
“Good. Now, listen carefully. I want you to bring back his head to me. If he has the shipment from the desert already, let me know and I’ll tell you where to take it. No point in crossing the border again with it.”
“Yes, Padre.”
“And Sandro,” the Padre said as he leaned forward and placed his hand on Sandro’s muscled, tattooed shoulder to make his point. “Be sure to come home with the silver case.” He peered into Sandro’s eyes. “I want my money back.”
Later that evening, in the desert, two cartel couriers waited in the dark for the delivery they expected in the next few hours. Smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, they laughed and told jokes in Spanish as they listened to the pop music on their jeep’s radio, their AK-47s resting on their laps.
One hundred yards away, El Barquero viewed their location through the night vision goggles attached to his face. He had left his vehicle a mile back on a small dirt road before hiking to his current position. The two men had not been hard to find. Confirming that there were only two men, El Barquero slowly slithered on his stomach toward their position, his sound-suppressed sub-machine gun strapped across his back, his silenced pistol in one free hand. Deliberately taking his time, he silently crossed the broken ground between himself and the jeep, stopping in the shadows ten yards to the rear of their position. The glow from the men’s cigarettes provided enough illumination to make out their faces without the assistance of his night vision equipment. Removing the goggles, the huge Mexican assassin quietly rose to one knee. Raising his pistol, he sighted in on the back of the head of the courier in the driver’s seat. He planned on shooting each man once in the head in quick succession. He would then close in to finish the job. Slowly adding pressure to his pistol’s trigger, he prepared to fire.
Unexpectedly, the courier in the passenger seat abruptly tossed his cigarette to the ground and exited the Jeep. Walking into the brush behind the Jeep, the courier unzipped his fly and relieved himself on the desert ground. El Barquero approached the urinating man from behind. Closing the distance between himself and his prey, El Barquero stuck his pistol into his front belt and removed one of the curved hand scythes from the small of his back. Clamping his left hand over the courier’s mouth, he drove his knee hard into the small of the man’s back for leverage before drawing the scythe across the man’s throat. Pulling hard on the handle of his blade, he ripped the razor-sharp blade in a downward motion from the man’s left ear to his right clavicle. The sharp steel sliced the man’s throat clean through to his spine. Slowly, El Barquero lowered the struggling man, who was spewing red arcs of blood from his severed jugular and still urinating a scattered stream into the desert night, quietly down to the ground. Keeping his hand tightly clamped across the dying man’s mouth, he waited as the man bled out in a pool of dark blood quickly swallowed up by the dry desert floor.
When the man stopped moving, El Barquero turned and approached the rear of the Jeep. The man’s full attention was on the music from the radio. As one song ended, the courier reached for the tuning knob and scanned for another station. Spinning the tuner through bits of static and stations with poor reception, the man caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of movement in the Jeep’s rearview mirror. Turning to address his partner, the only thing he found was the long black sound suppressor of El Barquero’s pistol pressed against his temple. A single muffled thump sounded as the man slumped over onto the steering wheel, his cigarette falling to the floorboard.
In his room, Avery grumbled as he typed.
To: Editor in Chief, National Geographic
National Geographic Society
Dear Sir:
In response to your recent article regarding the majestic beauty of cloud formations, I’m writing to let you know that once again your incredibly biased publication has completely lost the plot. While I’m sure many of your vapid subscribers immensely enjoyed the glossy full-color photos of seemingly harmless cloud formations gracing the article while they vacantly thumb through your magazine as they slouch on their commodes for their ritualistic morning constitutionals, your failure to discuss the real cause of the dramatic increase in the number of such unique vapor formations is a clear violation of your Society’s journalistic duty to provide a balanced and fair message to your audience, no matter how inane the vast majority of them are. The shocking increase in the formation of these cloud groupings, particularly the cirrus variety, is directly related to high-altitude government chemical spraying. Even the smallest child can see the physical results of their diabolical spraying from commercial and military aircraft. These trails of chemicals, better known as chemtrails, crisscross our clear blue skies in the wake of airliners deploying their poison. The trails provide perfect visual evidence of the crime in progress. The resulting cloudlike formations caused by the overlapping and conjoining of these chemtrails fill our urban skies by the hundreds. By my visual observation, airline traffic and the chemtrails have increased by over thirty percent in the greater Austin, Texas, area in the last two years alone. Not surprisingly, so have the number of maladies and afflictions that are associated with them. You can’t throw a peanut in this town without hitting someone with an allergy to it. Staph infections, lesions, and annoying rashes are at an all-time high. Coincidence? I think not. The answer is simple. Our government is deliberately poisoning its population. Why? Greed. Sick people are more economically valuable to pharmaceutical companies and our economy than healthy ones. Trillions of dollars are spent annually to cure the sick and infirm. The cure is of course some synthetic wonder drug with a happy-sounding trademarked name cooked up in a secret underground laboratory guarded by elite Special Forces commandos, as natural and holistic remedies can’t be patented. The dollars generated by these drug sales propel the economy forward and prop up equity market values. The more profitable pharmaceutical companies are, the more dollars they have available for soft-money political contributions and under-the-table kickbacks. It’s nothing more than a circular symbiotic relationship of evil and greed. To be fair, you should have informed your subscribers that when they lie on their backs in gentle fields of soft green grass and imagine what they see in the fluffy clouds overhead, they aren’t seeing cute bunny rabbits or the profile of Abraham Lincoln. Instead they’re seeing eczema and athlete’s foot raining down as aerosol-delivered nanoparticles. Diligent truth-seekers like myself have a hard enough time populating our websites and online forums with the real explanation for these innocuous-looking cloud formations of death without you assisting in the coverup. I expect a fully accurate discussion of this conspiracy in your next issue.