Revenge of the Assassin Read online

  Revenge of the Assassin

  Russell Blake

  © 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Russell Blake

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact [email protected].

  Excerpts from Russell Blake’s books

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Excerpt from KING OF SWORDS

  Introduction

  Excerpt from THE VOYNICH CYPHER

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  Excerpts from Russell Blake’s books

  King of Swords by Russell Blake

  King of Swords is an epic assassination thriller set in modern Mexico against a backdrop of cartel violence. Captain Romero Cruz discovers an assassination plot to kill the Mexican and U.S. presidents at the G-20 conference in Cabo by "El Rey" - a super assassin responsible for some of the world's most shocking killings.

  Purchase King of Swords

  Purchase King of Swords in the UK

  Go to excerpt of King of Swords

  The Voynich Cypher by Russell Blake

  When a sacred relic is stolen from its subterranean guarded vault, Dr. Steven Cross, amateur cryptographer, becomes embroiled in a deadly quest to decipher one of history's most enigmatic documents - a 15th century parchment written entirely in unbreakable code; The Voynich Manuscript. Stalked by secret societies, and aided by the daughter of a murdered colleague, a trail of riddles catapults Cross from England to Italy to the Middle East, where a Byzantine web of ancient secrets leads him to a revelation so profound it will change the world order.

  Purchase The Voynich Cypher

  Purchase The Voynich Cypher in the UK

  Go to excerpt of The Voynich Cypher

  Critical acclaim for The Voynich Cypher:

  "The Voynich Cypher is a fast-paced, intelligently written story with twists & turns that kept me up late at night turning pages. I was as hooked by this book as I was by the Da Vinci Code -- if you liked Da Vinci, The Voynich Cypher has the same flavor -- I urge you to pick it up. A must read for any suspense lover." Melissa Foster, bestselling author of Chasing Amanda, Megan's Way & Come Back to Me

  "Russell Blake writes with a brisk intensity & pulse-pounding power. Jump in and hang on for a nonstop thrill ride." Scott Nicholson, Liquid Fear

  "Blake has never failed to deliver an intelligent, exquisitely paced thriller, packed with unforgettable characters, devious intrigue and immersive detail. He has emerged as the most consistently satisfying writer on the thriller scene." Steven Konkoly, bestselling author of Black Flagged & The Jakarta Pandemic

  "Dr. Steven Cross, aided by hot, edgy, yet vulnerable gal pal, Natalie Twain, will have you racing across Europe and the Middle East in Russell Blake's action-packed thriller, The Voynich Cypher - a taut roller-coaster ride featuring plenty of intrigue, suspense and mayhem; not to mention the kind of good-versus-evil conflicts that can only arise out of institutional religion gone bad. If you enjoyed The Da Vinci Code, this book's for you!" John L. Betcher, bestselling author of the James Becker Thriller Series

  "The Voynich Cypher is a breakneck-paced thriller that will give fans of the likes of the Da Vinci Code a dose of Russell Blake speed, mixed with gut-twisting international intrigue & suspense." David Lender, bestselling author of Vaccine Nation, Bull Street, The Gravy Train & Trojan Horse

  Introduction

  Most of the events and people in Revenge of the Assassin are fictional. Many of the organizations and a few of the events are not.

  The state of Tamaulipas in Mexico, bordering Texas, has had numerous mass prison breaks over the last few years. It is also largely considered to be out of the control of the Mexican government.

  The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was recently embroiled in a massive ‘gun walking’ scandal where thousands of weapons were shipped into Mexico from the U.S. while the American authorities turned a blind eye. No coherent reasoning was ever offered, and the matter quickly disappeared from the public eye after a Congressional investigation that went nowhere – much as the Iran/Contra hearings never yielded any real meat.

  Submarines are regularly manufactured out of fiberglass in Colombia for the trafficking of cocaine to Mexican waters, where the drugs are either offloaded to Mexican boats or left submerged with sea anchors for later pick up by Mexican craft.

  The tunnels under the border in most frontier towns are a matter of regular news coverage each time one is discovered, which occurs with considerable frequency.

  Massacres carried out by the Los Zetas cartel are well documented, and their descriptions in this novel are true.

  The Sinaloa, Juárez and Los Zetas cartels are very real, and are now the most powerful drug-trafficking and organized crime syndicates on the planet.

  Chapter 1

  Six Weeks Ago, Mexico City, Mexico. Midnight.

  The pounding from the front door of the high-rise condo seemed to resonate eerily with the tinny ringing of the phone in the kitchen. Captain Romero Cruz of the Federal Police flicked the hallway light as he pulled a bathrobe on. The phone stopped its insistent trilling as he shuffled down the entry hall and then peered blearily through the peephole. Satisfied there was no obvious threat, he fumbled with the deadbolt and then opened the door.

  A man in the distinctive blue uniform of the Federales saluted, ignoring the disheveled hair of his superior officer. He shifted nervously as he stared into space at some neutral point a thousand miles beyond his commander’s shoulder. Cruz ignored the circumstances and gestured for him to speak up.

  “Capitan. I’m sorry to intrude. But you wanted to be alerted as soon as we had confirmation on the Tijuana situation. We’ve been calling for half an hour, but there was no answer…”

  “That’s fine. I’m sorry. I had the bedroom door closed, and this phone isn’t very loud. I must have slept through it. What’s the update?” Cruz asked, cinching the robe ties around his waist as he shook off his grogginess and became more alert. Unlike when he’d been younger, now that he was in his mid-forties it took a while for him to fire on all cylinders, especially since he’d only gotten to sleep two hours earlier.

  “We received word that five hundred kilos arrived at the suspect warehouse this evening, to be transported tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest. That means if we want to catch them red-handed–”

  “I get it. Do we have sufficient assets there to go in on a frontal assault? And can they be ready in an hour?”

  “Yes, sir. I already took the liberty of putting out the word.” He hesitated. “We have a jet standing by to get tactical leadership there by three in the mornin
g, worst case,” the officer confirmed.

  Cruz paused and considered the alternatives, and then nodded. “Then we go in. I’ll put on a pot of coffee and be ready to get to headquarters shortly. Have my car ready for me. I’ll run the operation from there.” Cruz studied the man’s face, hardened from years on the force and strained with fatigue. “It’s going to be a long one. What time did you come on duty today?”

  “I got in at ten this morning, Capitan. I was going to quit by eight tonight, and then we started getting chatter from our sources, so I decided to stay on for a little while.”

  “No good deed goes unpunished. Do we have any idea whose dope this is? Or do I even need to ask?”

  “Sinaloa.”

  “Ahhh. Well, let me take a shower and get ready, then. I’ll be downstairs in forty-five minutes. That’s all,” Cruz said, then waved off the officer’s parting salute.

  Five hundred kilos of cocaine. Now that was worth getting out of bed for.

  “Corazon? Who was that? Is everything okay?” a female voice called from the bedroom once the front door had slammed closed.

  “It’s fine, mi amor. But I need to go into the office. I’m sorry. I’ll probably be getting back around the time you’re up for work,” he apologized as he moved into the bedroom. “It’s an emergency. Go back to sleep. I’ll be as quiet as possible,” he reassured the woman peering at him from the far side of the bed, beautiful even with no makeup and roused in the middle of the night. He padded over to her and gave her a fleeting kiss. “Close your eyes, Dinah. I need to get a uniform out of the closet.”

  ~

  Six Weeks Ago, Tijuana, Mexico. 3:27 a.m.

  Monday nights in Tijuana were usually calm, the weekend’s lunacy and tourist rush having ebbed, leaving the town worked, but marginally wealthier. The weather was chilly in late March, in the low sixties, with a light drizzle having clogged the poorly drained streets with refuse and murky runoff. The industrial row of warehouses along the border wall was a no-man’s land in the best of daylight hours, and approaching midnight, only the foolhardy, the desperate or the suicidal ventured into the menacing district.

  Junkyards and body shops dotted the area’s mean streets, with decrepit buildings and darkened half-completed construction punctuating the rows of tin-roofed shacks and wrecking yards. An occasional car prowled along the unlit thoroughfares, bass-heavy reggaeton booming from the lowered chassis as the shady occupants crept about their nocturnal business. Near one of the larger gray cinderblock edifices, a pair of bony stray dogs rooted through bags of refuse dumped on the sidewalks for morning collection, their furtive movement ample evidence that, even for scavengers, danger was a constant.

  One of the armed guards standing watch outside the ten-foot-high, broken-glass-topped walls of a compound at the end of the cul-de-sac flicked his cigarette at the mutts, causing them to bolt from their paltry find. He grinned to himself and wiped a sheen of moisture from his brow, then glanced over to the other two men lurking at the far end of the wall, also toting weapons and on the alert for any threats. The rain had stopped twenty minutes earlier but there was still a pall of humidity mixed with raw exhaust and the reek of overflowing sewage pipes that coated everything with a noxious film. The smell of the tobacco offered slim relief from the ever-present stench that was part of the duty of guarding the complex.

  The gloom was shattered by the roar of heavy vehicles tearing up the street, then the guard was blinded by spotlights mounted on the turrets of the BTR-70s. He fumbled for his two-way radio while simultaneously raising his M-4 assault rifle and barely barked out a warning before he was cut down by a stream of silenced rounds from the leading truck. The other two sentries met with the same fate, though one managed to get off several bursts of sub-machine -gun fire before being hacked to pieces by the muffled shooters in the vehicles.

  Within thirty seconds, the sidewalk in front of the wall was bristling with black-clad marines in full combat gear, augmented by Federal Police carrying Heckler & Koch UMP45 machine pistols with specially-fitted sound and flash suppressors. The leader of the squad made a curt hand gesture to his lieutenant, indicating the security camera mounted near the gate – a well-aimed volley from his weapon shattered the device.

  An armored assault truck slammed through the steel-plated gates, and three dozen armed commandos followed it through. The percussive burp of machine guns strafed from the largest of the three warehouses as the defenders inside engaged their attackers. Several of the marines uttered cries, cut down as they ran, their body armor slim protection against the armor-piercing rounds spraying from the windows.

  Three of the personnel carriers rolled into the yard and focused their gun turrets on the building, unleashing a devastating volley of lethal fire, the neon orange of tracer rounds illuminating the windows as they streaked to their targets. A federal police sergeant ran in a crouch under the cover of the shooting, and rolling to the side of one of the large, partially-open steel doors, he tossed a grenade inside before ducking away from the volley of shots that greeted his silhouette. A muffled explosion blew out the glass from the windows above his head, and he quickly threw in two more grenades, shielding himself by hugging the concrete foundation as the detonations hurled shrapnel throughout the interior.

  The leader watched helplessly as another of his men had his throat torn out in a bloody spray by gunfire coming from the roof, and he ducked behind the relative safety of one of the BTR-70s as he barked commands into the radio. Thirty seconds later a helicopter shredded the air above the building with its rotors and rained destruction down upon the shooters on the roof.

  One of the gunmen swiveled around at the sound of the approaching chopper and methodically fired three-round bursts at the craft’s silhouette, as he’d been trained to do when a marine himself only a few years earlier. He watched with satisfaction as his M-16’s fully-jacketed slugs punctured the front window and the pilot’s chest exploded in a red pulp. His glee was short-lived as the helicopter gunner directed his last salvo of large caliber rounds at him, cutting his torso in two before he could throw himself flat against the roof.

  The chopper spun giddily in the night sky before plunging into the side of the neighboring building and exploding in an orange fireball that momentarily blinded the assault team. A second detonation erupted from the shattered hulk and a cloud of sooty smoke redolent of burning flesh belched into the dank breeze.

  The leader fired through the haze at the few remaining defendants, and then held up three gloved fingers and murmured into his com line. The shooting gradually subsided, replaced by an uneasy silence. The blast from the copter crash and the booming of the turret guns still echoed in the team’s ears as they waited cautiously for direction. Seeing no further fire from the building, the leader made two hand signals. His men divided up and raced for the warehouse door that the advance man had pitched the grenades through.

  After a few moments of hesitation, the men dropped night vision goggles into place and tore through the opening, weapons ready to cut down anything that moved. The bodies of their foes lay strewn around the floor near the windows, where the brutally effective onslaught from the BTR-70 main guns had cut any resistance short. The goggles illuminated the gloomy depths of the warehouse with a distinctive green glow, and it quickly became apparent that nothing remained alive to threaten them.

  The leader crept into the area, and once satisfied that all danger was neutralized, he motioned to one of his men to hit the lights. The team members flipped their goggles up, and an officer at the entry threw the breaker into the on position.

  The overhead bulbs flickered to life, revealing a tableau of carnage. Corpses littered the floor in pools of blood alongside pallets of cardboard boxes accumulated in haphazard piles. Studying the scene, the leader approached an ancient forklift that sat idle in a far corner, in front of a crudely-formed cinderblock room with a steel roll-up door. That had to be the elevator they’d been told about.

  A sound caus
ed him to whirl around. A man lay on the ground, his arm and half his torso blown off by a grenade, along with much of his face. His one good eye regarded the interloper as his breath gurgled in his chest, and then he groaned and lay still. The leader paused to consider the now lifeless carcass, and then returned his attention to the elevator. He gestured to his men, and three of them hurried to take position on either side, their weapons trained on the steel roll-up door.

  On the leader’s nod, the tallest of his men pulled it up, revealing a shaft twelve feet square. He cautiously shone a flashlight into the depths; its beam reflected off a steel platform four stories below. Glancing around, the leader summoned a group of his men and conducted a hurried discussion. A sweating marine trotted out to the vehicles and returned with three bundles of rappelling line.

  Five minutes later, six commandos stood deep in the earth below Tijuana, peering down a long tunnel with an elaborate rail car system. One of the soldiers activated the low voltage lighting that ran the length of the excavation and noted that it stretched on seemingly forever. Wood and cement blocks supported the walls and ceiling of the passageway, ten feet wide and seven feet high. The rails of the electric trolley gleamed in the light. It was obvious that the system had been in place for some time and was well used.

  A storage room sat just adjacent to the shaft, and when the lock was cut off with a welding torch, five hundred and thirty kilos of cocaine sat neatly packaged in orange plastic, with a distinctive scorpion logo stamped on the outside of each bundle. The room was large enough to accommodate ten times that amount, and there was no question in any of the men’s minds that this was only a few days’ worth of shipments waiting to make their way to the other end of the passage – a small, decrepit warehouse on the U.S. side of the border that ostensibly sold used automobile parts.