“You probably shouldn’t get involved, Matt, for your own good. So what do you think Daniel? Can we get this guy talking?”
“Honestly, there might be little my people can do, but I know someone else who may. It will not be easy. It all depends on how far you are prepared to go.”
Avery didn’t hesitate. “As far as it takes.”
THIRTEEN
One of the most brutal and violent places in Colombia is Bellavista Prison, known as Hell’s Waiting Room, located in the heart of Medellin. One hundred miles north of Bogotá, Bellavista consists of seven housing units, each made of dilapidated red brick painted blue and white, each comprising three floors of four hallways. The average sentence here is thirty years.
Gun violence is common inside the prison, second only to stabbings, with an average of fifteen murders a day. Prisoners kill each other over petty disputes. Rival gangs are perpetually at each other’s throats. There are sporadic prisoner revolts and frequent attacks against the guards, who rely on guns, beatings, and the occasional extrajudicial execution to enforce control over the populace. In the courtyard, it was once common for inmates to play soccer with severed heads.
Originally built to accommodate 1,500 inmates, Bellavista now houses well over 5,000. To accommodate the perpetual inflow of terrorists, murderers, rapists, drug traffickers, and gang members, many of the already small cells are subdivided to accommodate two or three more inmates. Most prisoners simply sleep on the floor in the hallways or stairwells, which they share with hundreds of other prisoners.
Prisoners with money are able to “rent” private cells. This was an enormous luxury for Cesar Rivero, even if he did have to share three toilets with over two hundred other men. Most days, Rivero pissed in the corner of his cell. When he wanted to shit, he used cigarettes to buy access to a toilet from whatever gang was in power.
He left the safety of his cell only when absolutely necessary. He had no shortage of enemies within the prison, and there had already been two attempts on his life since his incarceration began. Even inside prison walls, members of the right wing vigilante groups and death squads preyed on members of FARC and the cartels.
Cesar Rivero started out as a gunman for the Medellin drug cartel, doing security at the cartel’s cocaine processing plants in the jungle and eliminating the cartel’s enemies. Later, he was assigned to help FARC establish urban terrorist cells in the city.
The cartel wanted a courthouse taken out, and FARC assigned its best operative. Knowing he was a trusted contact of her brother, Arianna Moreno sought Rivero out personally for the operation. Rivero provided the logistical support and helped gather the necessary materials for the construction of a truck bomb.
The Viper could penetrate the highest levels of security and deliver and place the bomb, but she lacked the scientific and technical skills necessary to engineer the weapon. Fortunately, bomb making was something at which Rivero’s cousin was quite proficiently skilled. He’d assembled dozens of sophisticated car bombs for the cartel and the M-19 terrorist group.
The bomb demolished the courthouse, killing over a hundred people, and wounding over twice that number, one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Colombia’s history.
Unlike previous Viper hits, mistakes were made, the result of carelessness.
Rivero’s cousin accidently cut his finger preparing the bomb. He’d cleaned up the blood, but microscopic bits of DNA remained and were later recovered and analyzed by the FBI forensics team sent to Medellin to assist the Colombians in their investigation in the aftermath of the explosion. Rivero’s cousin was a man already known to the National Police and ANIC, and the Colombians quickly identified, arrested, and tortured him, and were subsequently led to Cesar Rivero.
Rivero was sentenced three weeks later and hadn’t stepped foot outside of Bellavista’s high walls since. He was the only member of the cell to have seen or spoken with Arianna Moreno. The other two men, Rivero’s cousin included, never even knew of her involvement. But Colombian army SIGINT intercepts from a FARC base camp revealed the Viper’s involvement.
So ANIC tortured the three cell members.
Rivero successfully held out, to the point where his interrogators wondered if he truly knew nothing of the Viper’s involvement. He held out because he knew that whatever pain ANIC inflicted on him was nothing compared to what the cartel or the Viper would do to him, even here.
The working of the lock, followed by the sound of rusted, degraded hinges, intruded upon Rivero’s dreams, jarring him from his sleep. He’d become acclimated to the regular nightly sounds of the prison, but his senses reacted at once to this unusual disturbance in his external environment, a vital survival mechanism here.
His eyes snapped open, staring into the darkness, and he blinked several times to acclimate his vision.
The door swung open and light from the hallway spilled over the floor of his cell.
Rivero bolted upright on his cot as human-shaped wraiths poured silently into his cell.
A bright, white beam of light flashed in his face. Behind the light, when he raised a hand to his brow and averted his gaze, he discerned solid black figures, their bulky vests, gloves, and balaclava facemasks rendering them featureless and indistinguishable.
Two of them entered Rivero’s five-by-five foot cell, while a third figure filled the space of the open doorframe, partially blocking the exterior light. They advanced on Rivero, towered over him, and screamed orders and obscenities at him in Spanish, while the flashlight shined in his face.
One of the intruders grabbed onto Rivero by his undershirt and effortlessly hauled him out of his cot, slammed him face first against the cement wall, landed a punch to his kidney, pushed him down onto his knees, and forced him onto his face.
Blood dripped from his nose and from a gash in his forehead. Sweat dripped down his face, soaked his shirt, and his heart pounded against the inside of his chest. Laying face down on the floor, the ammonia stench of urine reached his nostrils.
Rivero rolled over and sat up on the floor. His head hurt, and the room spun around him.
They kicked him again, barraged him with their heavy, steel-capped boots, and didn’t let up. He cried out and tried to cover himself with his arms, but then the kicks came from another direction. He curled into a ball in the corner of the cell, and the boots battered the small of his back and his spine.
Rivero was surprised at the effect the pain had on him.
Before, he’d grown accustomed to the savagery and brutality as a facet of daily life. Once the fuckers from ANIC, or their right-wing proxy agents, tore out your fingernails and put burning cigarettes out on your body, then poured salt into the open wounds, and attached electrodes to your balls, there was no further pain they could possibly inflict on you. You had been through the worst, knew what to expect, and could mentally prepare yourself for the next torture session.
But after a five month reprieve, the body quickly grew complacent and comfortable, and it was like starting over again. Rivero cowered, flinched, and cried out. The cracked ribs and the battered liver and kidney came as an unexpected shock to the system. Stress signals flashed throughout his nervous system.
One of the attackers commented, in Spanish, that they needed to get moving and shouldn’t stand around here too long. The kicking let up, with Rivero taking one last blow hard against his ribs before he was hauled onto his feet, and, barely able to find balance, was pushed out of his cell.
In the dimly lit corridor, there were two more men dressed like the others and cradling submachine guns with pistols holstered at their sides. Their uniforms lacked unit patches, insignia, or any other identifier. Armored prison guards were positioned throughout the corridor to keep the other prisoners at bay. Through the slits in their facemasks, Rivero saw their eyes, dark and penetrating, contemptuous of him, and one of them asked Rivero what he was looking at.