The Devil Underground (Kindle Single) by Nadja Drost

Author:Nadja Drost
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: The Atavist
Published: 2014-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

Ten

The Serafines remained a major, if not the major, target of the dissident Rastrojos. On several occasions, the Serafines’ security team exchanged gunfire with the new band of outlaws. There was also the constant question of the loyalties of the mine employees. Heliodoro and his security advisers had fired a handful of guards after suspecting they were also working for Jairo Hugo and passing along information.

The mine’s security team was led by Javier Carmona, who had started working for the Serafines shortly before their brothers’ murders and now led a team of 33 men. He was fit and muscular and often hid his eyes behind wraparound sunglasses. In Javier, the Serafines had found a security chief who had practically been engineered to battle the infectious violence of Segovia. He had grown up a self-described delinquent in a rough neighborhood of Medellín, where he was a member of a local gang. When he was 16 years old, his brother was gunned down by criminals who mistook him for Javier. His father, a pastor, encouraged him to put his skills to better use by joining the police, and Javier took his advice. In his years on the force, he admits to having carried out dirty work and extrajudicial killings. He became, in his own words, a sadist.

Eventually, he told me, he was accepted into training for an elite police unit, where he stayed for seven years. Stints with a detective agency, private security companies, and security academies followed. He tried to get away from conflict, and there was a brief period of tranquility involving an empanada business, rotisserie chickens, and intense churchgoing and Bible study. But it didn’t last. Life obliged him to return to fighting, he told me. I asked him why. “Perhaps because of what I know I am,” he said. War was his art, he said. Physically, he was a “monster.” He considered himself good at chess.

He had been drawn to Segovia by its Wild West scene. “There’s gold, there’s money,” he told me. “Where there’s money, there’s violence. This is Sodom: self-indulgence, prostitution, homicides—everything you want.” But now the war had become personal. He had warned the two Serafines brothers who were killed not to go to the meeting with the Rastrojos, he told me, but that didn’t matter. They had been killed, and with that “my image fell to the floor,” Javier said. “They hurt my pride.” Now he was pouring everything he had learned in his years of fighting into a redemptive battle for La Roca.

After the massacre, Javier gave the Serafines two options. They could spend a lot of money waging a war; there would be “a lot of blood,” he told them. Or they could employ a cold war strategy: weakening their enemies not with bullets but with the strategic exchange of intelligence, letting the police and military fight the war for them. The Serafines opted for the latter.

Javier and Heliodoro began cultivating informants, including disgruntled dissident Rastrojos who could pass along information about what Jairo Hugo and his suspected allies were saying about them—or plotting against them.

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