Requiem for Betrayal

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Published by River Grove Books Austin, TX www.rivergrovebooks.com Copyright © 2023 Ephraim Clark All rights reserved. Thank you for purchasing an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright law. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder. Distributed by River Grove Books Design and composition by Greenleaf Book Group Cover design by Greenleaf Book Group and Anna Jordan Cover image © Shutterstock/Kittichai Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data is available. Print ISBN: 978-1-63299-671-8 eBook ISBN: 978-1-63299-672-5 First Edition ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank my wife, Maria, for all her patience and support, as well as my little sister, Chrissie, and my friends, Konstantino Kassimatis and David Bernthal, for their many helpful suggestions on the text and plots. I also thank Tenyia Lee, Rebecca Logan, and Stephanie Bouchard for all their help with the editing. PROLOGUE HONDURAS, SPRING 1971 Revenge, they say, is a ravenous cancer that devours a life and destroys the soul. They are wrong. An unsuccessful quest for revenge does that. Revenge itself, the act of retaliating and redressing a wrong, is sweet and satisfying. It heals the wound, brings closure, and soothes the soul. The French say that revenge is a meal so delicious that it can be eaten cold. He could eat it cold and raw. They had taken his ears, an eye, three fingers, a hand, and a foot. They would be back for more. Hunger for revenge kept him alive, clinging to life. He had managed to send a message before he went down. They should have chosen to kill him and flee, not capture him and hide. Even as he suffered, avenging forces were gathering strength and closing in. The longer they waited the more of them would fall—wives and husbands, children, parents, friends, and supporters. His revenge would be magnificent. He wouldn’t be there to share the meal, but his family would have a feast. His body was being systematically dismembered piece by piece and sent to his family. The amputations were performed by an experienced surgeon using professional surgical instruments. Scalpels, bone saws, pliers, needles, and threads were all state of the art. Only anesthesia was missing. The pain was excruciating. He often lost consciousness. He was always brought back to his senses so that he could fully experience the violence being wreaked on his tortured body. The ostensible leader of the operation was a smooth-talking Latino with a Cuban accent and an abundance of hate. He could not understand why the man hated him so much. The man called himself Comandante, as did everyone else except for the American. She called him Cariño. He called her Amy. She was the real power behind the throne. Her inventive genius for inflicting pain was limitless. Sometimes even Comandante Cariño recoiled at her sadistic brutality. But he never said no. So, on and on it went. HONDURAS, SUMMER 1971 He wasn’t there to appreciate what happened because what remained of his lifeless body was dumped unceremoniously on the lawn of his parents’ villa on the outskirts of San Pedro Sula in the early hours of the morning. The Pomero posse came in the evening and rounded up the three Honduran men who had participated in his abduction, along with their families—fathers, mothers, wives, children, brothers, and sisters. In an abandoned barn at the edge of the jungle, the kidnappers were hung by their feet to watch the show. First, the women were all brought forward and stripped. There were fifteen of them—three mothers, four sisters, the three wives, and five teenage daughters. They were raped repeatedly for hours and then beaten to death with wooden Louisville Slugger baseball bats. The men were brought forward next. There were fourteen of them—three fathers, five brothers, and six teenage sons. It took thirty minutes to beat them to death with the Louisville Slugger bats. The children were last. There were only three of them under ten years old. They were executed with a bullet to the head. The three kidnappers were left hanging until their brains exploded. That left four more to go—two Cubans, the American called Amy, and Comandante Cariño. MIAMI, SUMMER 1971 He would have felt right at home here in Miami’s Little Havana. Located just west of downtown Miami, it looked and felt exactly like a typical Central American town, a lot like San Pedro Sula, in fact. This is where the Cubans came to escape the consequences of Castro’s communism. Spanish was the local language. There were a few new, well-kept houses scattered here and there, but many, if not most, of the buildings were run-down, ramshackle, and dilapidated. Yep. He would have been right at home here—maybe not right at home but a lot more at home than in the six-foot grave where the rest of his mutilated body lay rotting away. Little Havana was a perfect haven for a rich Cuban to remain anonymous while living the good life in the U.S. of A. Little Havana is where the Pomero family’s private intelligence team found the good doctor who operated on their son’s missing body parts. He was living a life of luxury off the proceeds from the kidnapping. The patriarch Pomero and Pomero’s little sister had reserved special treatment for him. The Pomero posse came quietly in the early hours of the morning and took him, his wife, his three children, and his sister to an abandoned warehouse owned by one of the Pomero family’s many businesses. He sat in the circle of a bright spotlight, chained to his chair. His sister, sobbing silently, was led on a leash into the light. They took her from behind