Copyright

This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

First published in the United States by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Samburu, Inc 2019

Stephen King, excerpt from Introduction to The Shining (New York: Pocket Books, 2001). Copyright © 2001 by Stephen King. Reprinted by permission.

Tom Russell, excerpt from “Leaving El Paso” (Frontera Music / BMG Firefly). Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Don Winslow asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover photographs © Ted Wood / plainpicture / Aurora Photos (landscape); Shutterstock.com (sky).

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Ebook Edition © February 2019 © ISBN: 9780008227555

Version: 2019-03-06

Dedication

In memory of

Abel García Hernández, Abelardo Vázquez Peniten, Adán Abraján de la Cruz, Alexander Mora Venancio, Antonio Santana Maestro, Benjamín Ascencio Bautista, Bernardo Flores Alcaraz, Carlos Iván Ramírez Villarreal, Carlos Lorenzo Hernández Muñoz, César Manuel González Hernández, Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre, Christian Tomás Colón Garnica, Cutberto Ortiz Ramos, Doriam González Parral, Emiliano Alen Gaspar de la Cruz, Everardo Rodríguez Bello, Felipe Arnulfo Rosa, Giovanni Galindes Guerrero, Israel Caballero Sánchez, Israel Jacinto Lugardo, Jesús Jovany Rodríguez Tlatempa, Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, Jonás Trujillo González, Jorge Álvarez Nava, Jorge Aníbal Cruz Mendoza, Jorge Antonio Tizapa Legideño, Jorge Luis González Parral, José Ángel Campos Cantor, José Ángel Navarrete González, José Eduardo Bartolo Tlatempa, José Luis Luna Torres, Julio César López Patolzín, Leonel Castro Abarca, Luis Ángel Abarca Carrillo, Luis Ángel Francisco Arzola, Magdaleno Rubén Lauro Villegas, Marcial Pablo Baranda, Marco Antonio Gómez Molina, Martín Getsemany Sánchez García, Mauricio Ortega Valerio, Miguel Ángel Hernández Martínez, Miguel Ángel Mendoza Zacarías, Saúl Bruno García, Daniel Solís Gallardo, Julio César Ramírez Nava, Julio César Mondragón Fontes and Aldo Gutiérrez Solano.

And dedicated to

Javier Valdez Cárdenas

and all journalists everywhere.

Epigraph

And when anyone builds a wall, behold, they plaster it over with whitewash; so tell those who plaster it over with whitewash, that it will fall.

—Ezekiel 13:10

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Prologue

Book One: Memorial

1. Monsters and Ghosts

2. The Death of Kings

3. Malevolent Clowns

Book Two: Heroin

1. The Acela

2. Heroin Island

3. Victimville

4. The Bus

Book Three: Los Retornados

1. The Holidays

2. Coyotes

3. La Bestia

4. This Upside-Down World

5. Banking

Book Four: Inauguration

1. Foreign Lands

2. Death Will Be the Proof

3. Bad Hombres

4. Billy the Kid

5. White Christmas

Book Five: Truth

1. The Most Powerful Entity on Earth

2. Broken

3. Cheap Guns

4. The Reflecting Pool

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Don Winslow

About the Publisher

Map

Prologue
Washington, DC
April 2017

Keller sees the child and the glint of the scope in the same moment.

The little boy, holding his mother’s hand, gazes at the names etched into the black stone, and Keller wonders if he’s looking for someone—a grandfather, maybe, or an uncle—or if his mother just brought her son to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as the end of a walk down the National Mall.

The Wall sits low in the park, hidden like a guilty secret, a private shame. Here and there, mourners have left flowers, or cigarettes, even small bottles of booze. Vietnam was a long time ago, another lifetime, and he’s fought his own long war since then.

No battles are inscribed on the Vietnam Wall. No Khe Sanhs or Quảng Trịs or Hamburger Hills. Maybe because we won every battle but lost the war, Keller thinks. All these deaths for a futile war. On previous trips, he’d seen men lean against the Wall and sob like children.

The sense of loss heartbreaking and overwhelming.

There are maybe forty people here today. Some of them look like they might be vets, others families; most are probably tourists. Two older men in VFW uniforms and caps are there to help people locate their loved ones’ names.

Now Keller is at war again—against his own DEA, the US Senate, the Mexican drug cartels, even the president of the United States.

And they’re the same thing, the same entity.

Every border Keller once thought existed has been crossed.

Some of them want to silence him, put him in prison, destroy him; a few, he suspects, want to kill him.

Keller knows that he’s become a polarizing figure, embodying the rift that threatens to widen and tear the country in two. He’s triggered a scandal, an investigation that’s spread from the poppy fields of Mexico to Wall Street to the White House itself.

It’s a warm spring day, a little breezy, and cherry blossoms float in the air. Sensing his emotion, Marisol takes his hand.

Now Keller sees the boy and then—to the right, back toward the Washington Monument—the odd, random glint of light. Lunging for the mother and the child, Keller shoves them to the ground.

Then he turns to shield Mari.

The bullet spins Keller like a top.

Creases his skull and whips his neck around.

Blood pours into his eyes and he literally sees red as he reaches out and pulls Marisol down.

Her cane clatters on the walkway.

Keller covers her body with his.

More bullets smack into the Wall above him.

He hears shouts and screams. Someone yells, “Active shooter!”

Peering up, Keller looks for the origin of the shots and sees that they’re coming from the southeast, from about ten o’clock—from behind a small building he remembers is a restroom. He feels for the Sig Sauer at his hip but then remembers that he’s unarmed.

The shooter flips to automatic.

Bullets spray the stone above Keller, chipping away names. People lie flat or crouch against the Wall. A few near the lower edges scramble over and run toward Constitution Avenue. Others just stand, bewildered.

Keller yells, “Down! Shooter! Down!”

But he sees that’s not going to help and that the memorial is now a death trap. The Wall forms a wide V and there are only two ways out along a narrow path. A middle-aged couple run to the east exit, toward the shooter, and are hit right away, dropping like characters in some hideous video game.

“Mari,” Keller says, “we have to move. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Be ready.”

He waits until there’s a pause in the fire—the shooter changing clips—then gets up, grabs Mari and hefts her over his shoulder. He carries her along the Wall to the west exit, where the Wall slopes down to waist level, tosses her up and over and sets her down behind a tree.

“Stay down!” he yells. “Stay there!”

“Where are you going?!”

The shooting starts again.

Jumping back over the Wall, Keller starts to herd people toward the southwest exit. He puts one hand on the back of a woman’s neck, pushes her head down and moves her along, yelling, “This way! This way!” But then he hears the sharp hiss of a bullet and the solid thunk as it hits her. She staggers and drops to her knees, clutching at her arm as blood pours through her fingers.

Keller tries to lift her.

A round whizzes past his face.

A young man runs up to him and reaches for the woman. “I’m a paramedic!” Keller hands her across, turns back and keeps shoving people ahead of him, away from the gunfire. He sees the boy again, still clutching his mother’s hand, his eyes wide with fear as his mother pushes him ahead of her, trying to screen him with her body.

Keller wraps an arm around her shoulder and bends her down as he keeps her moving. He says, “I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Keep walking.” He sees her to safety at the far end of the Wall and then goes back again.

Another pause in the firing as the shooter changes clips again.

Christ, Keller thinks, how many can he have?

At least one more, because the firing starts again.

People stumble and fall.

Sirens shriek and howl; helicopter rotors throb in deep, vibrating bass.

Keller grabs a man to pull him forward but a bullet hits the man high in the back and he falls at Keller’s feet.

Most people have made it out the west exit, others lie sprawled along the walkway, and still others lie on the grass where they tried to run the wrong way.

A dropped water bottle gurgles out on the walkway.

A cell phone, its glass cracked, rings on the ground next to a souvenir—a small, cheap bust of Lincoln—its face splattered with blood.

Keller looks east and sees a National Park Service policeman, his pistol drawn, charge toward the restroom building and then go down as bullets stitch across his chest.

Dropping to the ground, Keller snake-crawls toward the cop and feels for a pulse in his neck. The man is dead. Keller flattens behind the body as rounds smack into it. He looks up and thinks he spots the shooter, crouched behind the restroom building as he loads another clip.

Art Keller has spent most of his life fighting a war on the other side of the border, and now he’s home.

The war has come with him.

Keller takes the policeman’s sidearm—a 9 mm Glock—and moves through the trees toward the shooter.

Memorial

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

—Plato

1
Monsters and Ghosts

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

—Stephen King

November 1, 2012

Art Keller walks out of the Guatemalan jungle like a refugee.

He left a scene of slaughter behind him. In the little village of Dos Erres, bodies lie in heaps, some half burned in the smoldering remnants of the bonfire into which they’d been tossed, others in the village clearing where they’d been gunned down.

Most of the dead are narcos, gunmen from rival cartels that came here allegedly to make peace. They had negotiated a treaty, but at the debauched party to celebrate their reconciliation, the Zetas pulled out guns, knives and machetes and set to butchering the Sinaloans.

Keller had literally fallen onto the scene—the helicopter he’d been in was hit by a rocket and spun to a hard landing in the middle of the firefight. He was hardly an innocent, having planned with the Sinaloa boss, Adán Barrera, to come in with a team of mercenaries and eliminate the Zetas.

Barrera had set up his enemies.

The problem was, they set him up first.

But the two main targets of Keller’s mission, the Zeta leaders, are dead—one decapitated, the other turned into a flaming torch. Then, as they’d agreed in their uneasy, evil truce, Keller had gone off into the jungle to find Barrera and bring him out.

It seemed to Keller that he’d spent his whole adult life going after Adán Barrera.

After twenty years of trying, he’d finally put Barrera in a US prison, only to see him transferred back to a Mexican maximum-security facility from which he promptly “escaped” and then made himself more powerful than ever, the godfather of the Sinaloa cartel.

So Keller went back down to Mexico to go after Barrera again, only to become, after eight years, his ally, joining with him to bring down the Zetas.

The greater of two evils.

Which they did.

But Barrera disappeared.

So now Keller walks.

A handful of pesos to the border guard gets him into Mexico and then he hikes the ten miles to the Campeche village from which the raid had been staged.

More like he staggers.

The adrenaline from the gunfight that started before dawn has dropped, and now he feels the sun and the close heat of the rain forest. His legs ache, his eyes hurt, the stench of flame, smoke and death sticks in his nose.

The smell of burning flesh never leaves you.

Orduña waits for him at the little airstrip hacked out of the forest. The commander of FES sits inside the bay of a Black Hawk helicopter. Keller and Admiral Orduña had formed an “anything you need, anytime” relationship during their war against the Zetas. Keller provided him with top-level American intelligence and often accompanied his elite special-forces marines on operations inside Mexico.

This one had been different—the chance to decapitate the Zeta leadership in a single stroke came in Guatemala, where the Mexican marines couldn’t go. But Orduña provided Keller’s team with a staging base and logistical support, flew the team into Campeche, and now waits to see if his friend Art Keller is still alive.

Orduña smiles broadly when he sees Keller walk out of the tree line, then reaches into a cooler and hands Keller a cold Modelo.

“The rest of the team?” Keller asks.

“We flew them out already,” Orduña says. “They should be in El Paso by now.”

“Casualties?”

“One KIA,” Orduña says. “Four wounded. I wasn’t so sure about you. If you didn’t come in by nightfall, a la mierda todo, we were going over to get you.”

“I was looking for Barrera,” Keller says, sluicing down the beer.

“And?”

“I didn’t find him,” Keller says.

“What about Ochoa?”

Orduña hates the Zeta leader almost as much as Keller hates Adán Barrera. The war on drugs tends to get very personal. It had gotten personal for Orduña when one of his officers was killed on a raid against the Zetas, and they came in and murdered the young officer’s mother, aunt, sister and brother the night of his funeral. He had formed the Matazetas—“Zeta Killers”—the morning after that. And kill Zetas they did, every chance they got. If they took prisoners, it was only to get information, and then they executed them.

Keller had different reasons to hate the Zetas.

Different, but sufficient.

“Ochoa’s dead,” Keller says.

“Confirmed?”

“I saw it,” Keller says. He’d watched Eddie Ruiz pour a can of paraffin all over the wounded Zeta boss and then toss a match on him. Ochoa died screaming. “Forty, too.”

Forty was Ochoa’s number-two man. A sadist like his boss.

“You saw his body?” Orduña asks.

“I saw his head,” Keller says. “It wasn’t attached to his body. That good enough for you?”

“It’ll do,” Orduña says, smiling.

Actually, Keller didn’t see Forty’s head. What he saw was Forty’s face, which someone had peeled off and sewn to a soccer ball.

“Has Ruiz shown up?” Keller asks.

“Not yet,” Orduña says.

“He was alive the last time I saw him,” Keller says.

Turning Ochoa into a highway flare. Then standing on some old Mayan stone courtyard watching a kid kick a very bizarre soccer ball around.

“Maybe he just took off,” Orduña says.

“Maybe.”

“We should get in touch with your people. They’ve been calling about every fifteen minutes.” Orduña punches some numbers into a burn phone and then says, “Taylor? Guess who I have here.”

Keller takes the phone and hears Tim Taylor, the DEA chief of the Southwest District, say, “Jesus Christ, we thought you were dead.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

They’re waiting for him at the Adobe Inn in Clint, Texas, on a remote highway a few miles east of El Paso.

The room is your standard motel “efficiency,” a large living room with a kitchen area—microwave, coffee maker, small refrigerator—a sofa with a coffee table, a couple of chairs and a television set. A bad painting of a sunset behind a cactus. A door at the left, open now, leads into a bedroom and bathroom. It’s a good, nondescript place to hold their debrief.

The television is on low, tuned to CNN.

Tim Taylor sits on the sofa, looking at a laptop computer set on the coffee table. A satphone stands upright by the computer.

John Downey, the military commander of the raid, stands by the microwave, waiting for something to heat. He’s out of cammies, Keller sees, showered and shaved, wearing a plum polo shirt over jeans and tennis shoes.

Another man, a CIA guy Keller knows as Rollins, sits in one of the chairs and watches the television.

Downey looks up when Keller comes in. “Where the fuck have you been, Art? We’ve done satellite runs, helicopter searches …”

Keller was supposed to have brought Barrera out safely. That was the deal. Keller asks, “How are your people?”

“Phwoom.” Downey makes a gesture with his hands, like a flushed covey of quail. Keller knows that within twelve hours the spec-ops will be scattered all over the country, if not the world, with cover stories about where they’ve been. “The only unaccounted for is Ruiz. I was hoping he came out with you.”

“I saw him after the firefight,” Keller says. “He was walking out.”

“So Ruiz is in the wind?” Rollins asks.

“You don’t have to worry about him,” Keller says.

“He’s your responsibility,” Rollins says.

“Fuck Ruiz,” Taylor says. “What happened to Barrera?”

Keller says, “You tell me.”

“We haven’t had any word from him.”

“Then I guess he didn’t make it,” Keller says.

“You refused to get on the ex-fil chopper,” Rollins says.

“The chopper had to take off,” Keller says, “and I still had to find Barrera.”

“But you didn’t find him,” Rollins says.

“Special ops aren’t room service,” Keller answers. “You can’t always get exactly what you order. Things happen.”

Right from the jump.

They’d helicoptered onto a firefight that was already in progress as the Zetas were butchering the Sinaloans. Then a surface-to-air rocket hit the lead chopper that Keller was in, killing one man and wounding another. So instead of going down the ropes, they made a hard landing onto a hot zone. Then they had to shuttle the team out on the surviving chopper.

We were lucky to have gotten out at all, Keller thinks, never mind completing the main mission of executing the leading Zetas. If we didn’t manage to bring Barrera out with us, well …

“The primary mission, as I understood it,” Keller says, “was to take out the Zetas’ command and control. If Barrera was a collateral casualty …”

“All the better?” Rollins asks.

They all know Keller’s hatred of Barrera.

That the drug lord had tortured and murdered Keller’s partner.

That he’d never forget, never mind forgive.

“I won’t shed any crocodile tears for Adán Barrera,” Keller says. He knows the situation in Mexico better than any of the people in that room. Like it or not, the Sinaloa cartel is key to stability in Mexico. If the cartel falls apart because Barrera is gone, the tenuous peace could fall apart with it. Barrera knew that, too—this après moi, le déluge attitude allowed him to drive a tough bargain with both the Mexican and American governments to lay off him and attack his enemies.

The microwave bings and Downey takes out the tray. “Stouffer’s lasagna. A classic.”

“We don’t even know Barrera’s dead,” Keller says. “Have they found a body?”

“No,” Taylor says.

“D-2 is on the scene now,” Rollins says, referring to the Guatemalan paramilitary intelligence agency. “They haven’t found Barrera. Or either of the primary targets, for that matter.”

“I can personally confirm that both targets were terminated,” Keller says. “Ochoa is basically charcoal, and Forty … well, you don’t want to know about Forty. I’m telling you, they’re both past tense.”

“We’d better hope Barrera isn’t,” Rollins says. “If the Sinaloa cartel is unstable, Mexico is unstable.”

“The law of unintended consequences,” Keller says.

Rollins says, “We had a very specific agreement with the Mexican government to preserve Adán Barrera’s life. We guaranteed his safety. This isn’t Vietnam, Keller. It isn’t Phoenix. If we find out that you violated that agreement, we’ll—”

Keller stands up. “You’ll do exactly shit. Because that was an unauthorized, illegal operation that ‘never happened.’ What are you going to do? Take me to trial? Put me on the witness stand? Let me testify under oath that we had a deal with the world’s biggest drug dealer? That I went on a US-sponsored raid to eliminate his rivals? Let me tell you something that those of us who do the actual work know—never draw your weapon unless you’re prepared to pull the trigger. Are you prepared to pull the trigger?”

There’s no answer.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Keller says. “For the record, I wanted to kill Barrera, I wish I had killed him, but I didn’t.”

He gets up and walks out.

Taylor follows him. “Where are you going?”

“None of your business, Tim.”

“To Mexico?” Taylor asks.

“I’m not with DEA anymore,” Keller says. “I don’t work for you. You can’t tell me where to go or not to go.”

“They’ll kill you, Art,” Taylor says. “If the Zetas don’t, the Sinaloans will.”

Probably, Keller thinks.

But if I don’t go, they’ll kill me anyway.

He drives into El Paso, to the apartment he keeps near EPIC. Strips out of his filthy, sweaty clothes and takes a long, hot shower. Then he goes into the bedroom and lies down, suddenly aware that he hasn’t slept for coming on two days and that he’s exhausted, depleted.

But he’s too tired to sleep.

He gets up, throws on a white button-down shirt over jeans and takes the little Sig 380 compact out of the gun safe in the bedroom closet. Clips the holster onto his belt, puts on a navy-blue windbreaker as he’s headed out the door.

For Sinaloa.

Keller first came to Culiacán as a rookie DEA agent back in the ’70s, when the city was the epicenter of the Mexican heroin trade.

And now it is again, he thinks as he walks through the terminal toward the taxi stand. Everything has come full circle.

Adán Barrera was just a punk kid then, trying to make it as a boxing manager.

His uncle, though, a Sinaloa cop, was the second-biggest opium grower in Sinaloa, striving to become the biggest. That was back when we were burning and poisoning the poppy fields, Keller thinks, driving peasants from their homes, and Adán got caught up in one of those sweeps. The federales were going to throw him out of an airplane, but I intervened and saved his life.

The first, Keller thinks, of many mistakes.

The world would have been a much better place if I had let them go Rocky the Flying Squirrel on little Adán, instead of letting him live to become the world’s greatest drug lord.

But we were actually friends back then.

Friends and allies.

Hard to believe.

Harder to accept.

He gets into a cab and tells the driver to go into centro—downtown.

“Where exactly?” the driver asks, looking at his face in the rearview mirror.

“Doesn’t matter,” Keller says. “That will give you time to call your bosses and tell them a strange yanqui is in town.”

The cabdrivers in every Mexican city where there’s a strong narco presence are halcones—“falcons”—spies for the cartels. Their job is to watch the airports, train stations and streets and let the powers that be know who’s coming in and out of their town.

“I’ll save you some effort,” Keller says. “Tell whoever you’re going to call that you have Art Keller in your cab. They’ll tell you where to take me.”

The driver gets on his phone.

It takes several calls and the driver’s voice gets edgier with each one. Keller knows the drill—the driver will call his local cell leader, who will call his, who will kick it up the chain, and the name Art Keller will take it to the very top.

Keller looks out the window as the cab goes into town on Route 280 and sees the memorials left on the roadside to fallen narcos—mostly young men—killed in the drug wars. Some are simply bunches of flowers and a beer bottle set beside cheaply made wooden crosses, others are full-color banners with photographs of the deceased stretched between two poles, while others are elaborate marble stiles.

But there will be more memorials soon, he thinks, when news of the “Dos Erres Massacre” reaches the city. A hundred Sinaloan sicarios went down to Guatemala with Barrera; few, if any, are coming back.

And there will be memorials in the Zeta heartlands of Chihuahua and Tamaulipas in the country’s northeast, when their soldiers don’t return.

The Zetas are a spent force now, Keller knows. Once a genuine threat to take over the country, the paramilitary cartel made up of former special forces troops is now leaderless and hamstrung, its best people killed by Orduña or lying dead in Guatemala.

There is no one now to challenge Sinaloa.

“They say to take you to Rotarismo,” the driver says, sounding nervous.

Rotarismo is a neighborhood at the far northern edge of the city, hard by the empty hills and farmlands.

An easy place to dump a corpse.

“To an auto body shop,” the driver says.

All the better, Keller thinks.

The tools are already there.

To chop up a car or a body.

You can always spot a conclave of high-ranking narcos by the number of SUVs parked out front, and this has to be a major meeting, Keller thinks as they roll up, because a dozen Suburbans and Expeditions are lined up in front of the garage with guns poking out like porcupine quills.

The guns train on the cab and Keller thinks that the driver might piss himself.

“Tranquilo,” Keller says.

A few uniformed sicarios patrol on foot outside. It’s become a thing in every branch of all the cartels, Keller knows—they each have their own armed security forces with distinctive uniforms.

These wear Armani caps and Hermès vests.

Which Keller thinks is a little fey.

A man hustles out of the garage toward the cab, opens the rear passenger door and tells Keller to get the fuck out.

Keller knows the man. Terry Blanco is a high-ranking Sinaloa state cop. He’s been on the cartel’s payroll since he was a rookie and now there’s some silver in his black hair.

Blanco says, “You don’t know what’s going on around here.”

“It’s why I came,” Keller says.

“You know something?”

“Who’s inside?”

“Núñez,” Blanco says.

“Let’s go.”

“Keller, if you go in,” Blanco says, “you might not come back out.”

“Story of my life, Terry,” Keller says.

Blanco walks him through the garage, past the work bays and the lifts, to a large empty area of concrete floor that seems more like a warehouse.

It’s the same scene as the motel, Keller thinks.

Just different players.

Same action, though—people on phones, working laptops, trying to get information as to the whereabouts of Adán Barrera. The place is dark—no windows and thick walls—just what you want in a climate that is baking hot from the sun or chilled by the north wind. You don’t want the weather or prying eyes penetrating this place, and if anyone dies in here, goes out screaming or crying or pleading, the walls keep that inside.

Keller follows Blanco to a door in the back.

It opens to a small room.

Blanco ushers Keller in and shuts the door behind them.

A man Keller recognizes sits behind a desk, on the phone. Distinguished-looking with salt-and-pepper hair, a neatly trimmed goatee, wearing a houndstooth jacket and a knit tie, looking distinctly uncomfortable in the greasy atmosphere of a garage back room.

Ricardo Núñez.

El Abogado—“The Lawyer.”

A former state prosecutor, he had been the warden of Puente Grande prison, resigning his position just weeks before Barrera “escaped” back in 2004. Keller had questioned him and he pleaded total innocence, but he was disbarred and went on to become Barrera’s right-hand man, making, reportedly, hundreds of millions trafficking cocaine.

He clicks off the phone and looks up at Blanco. “Give us a moment, Terry?”

Blanco walks out.

“What are you doing here?” Núñez asks.

“Saving you the trouble of tracking me down,” Keller says. “You’re apparently aware of Guatemala.”

“Adán confided to me your arrangement,” Núñez says. “What happened down there?”

Keller repeats what he told the boys in Texas.

“You were supposed to have brought El Señor out,” Núñez says. “That was the arrangement.”

“The Zetas got to him first,” Keller says. “He was careless.”

“You have no information about Adán’s whereabouts,” Núñez says.

“Only what I just told you.”

“The family is sick with worry,” Núñez says. “There’s been no word at all. No … remains … found.”

Keller hears a commotion outside—Blanco tells someone they can’t go in—and then the door swings open and bangs against the wall.

Three men come in.

The first is young—late twenties or early thirties—in a black Saint Laurent leather jacket that has to go at least three grand, Rokker jeans, Air Jordans. His curly black hair has a five-hundred-dollar cut and his jawline sports fashionable stubble.

He’s worked up.

Angry, tense.

“Where’s my father?” he demands of Núñez. “What’s happened to my father?”

“We don’t know yet,” Núñez says.

“The fuck you mean, you don’t know?!”

“Easy, Iván,” one of the others says. Another young guy, expensively dressed but sloppy, shaggy black hair jammed under a ball cap, unshaven. He looks a little drunk or a little high, or both. Keller doesn’t recognize him, but the other kid must be Iván Esparza.

The Sinaloa cartel used to have three wings—Barrera’s, Diego Tapia’s, and Ignacio Esparza’s. Barrera was the boss, the first among equals, but “Nacho” Esparza was a respected partner and, not coincidentally, Barrera’s father-in-law. He’d married his young daughter Eva off to the drug lord to cement the alliance.

So this kid, Keller thinks, has to be Esparza’s son and Adán’s brother-in-law. The intelligence profiles say that Iván Esparza now runs the crucial Baja plaza for the cartel, with its vital border crossings in Tijuana and Tecate.

“Is he dead?!” Iván yells. “Is my father dead?!”

“We know he was in Guatemala with Adán,” Núñez says.

“Fuck!” Iván slams his hand on the desk in front of Núñez. He looks around for someone to be angry at and sees Keller. “Who the fuck are you?”

Keller doesn’t answer.

“I asked you a question,” Iván says.

“I heard you.”

“Pinche gringo fuck—”

He starts for Keller but the third man steps between them.

Keller knows him from intelligence photos. Tito Ascensión had been Nacho Esparza’s head of security, a man even the Zetas feared—for good reason; he had slaughtered scores of them. As a reward, he was given his own organization in Jalisco. His massive frame, big sloping head, guard-dog disposition and penchant for brutality had given him the nickname El Mastín—“The Mastiff.”

He grabs Iván by the upper arms and holds him in place.

Núñez looks at the other young man. “Where have you been, Ric? I’ve been calling everywhere.”

Ric shrugs.

Like, What difference does it make where I was?

Núñez frowns.

Father and son, Keller thinks.

“I asked who this guy is,” Iván says. He rips his arms out of Ascensión’s grip but doesn’t go for Keller again.

“Adán had certain … arrangements,” Núñez says. “This man was in Guatemala.”

“Did you see my father?” Iván asks.

I saw what looked like your old man, Keller thinks. What was left of the bottom half of him was lying in the ashes of a smoldering bonfire. “I think you’d better get your head around the probability that your father’s not coming back.”

The expression on Ascensión’s face is exactly that of a dog that’s just learned it has lost its beloved master.

Confusion.

Grief.

Rage.

“How do you know that?” Iván asks Keller.

Ric wraps his arms around Iván. “I’m sorry, ’mano.”

“Someone’s going to pay for this,” Iván says.

“I have Elena on the phone,” Núñez says. He puts it on speaker. “Elena, have you heard anything more?”

It has to be Elena Sánchez, Keller thinks. Adán’s sister, retired from the family trade since she handed Baja over to the Esparzas.

“Nothing, Ricardo. Have you?”

“We have confirmation that Ignacio is gone.”

“Has anyone told Eva? Has anyone been to see her?”

“Not yet,” Núñez says. “We’ve been waiting until we know something definitive.”

“Someone should be with her,” Elena says. “She’s lost her father and maybe her husband. The poor boys …”

Eva has twin sons by Adán.

“I’ll go,” Iván says. “I’ll take her to my mother’s.”

“She’ll be grieving, too,” Núñez says.

“I’m flying down.”

“Do you need transportation from the airport?” Núñez asks.

“We still have people there, Ricardo.”

They’ve forgotten I’m even here, Keller thinks.

Oddly enough, it’s the young stoned one—Ric?—who remembers. “Uhhh, what do we do with him?”

More commotion outside.

Shouts.

Punches and slaps.

Grunts of pain, screams.

The interrogations have started, Keller thinks. The cartel is rounding people up—suspected Zetas, possible traitors, Guatemalan associates, anyone—to try to get information.

By any means necessary.

Keller hears chains being pulled across the concrete floor.

The hiss of an acetylene torch being lit.

Núñez looks up at Keller and raises his eyebrows.

“I came to tell you that I’m done,” Keller says. “It’s over for me now. I’m going to stay in Mexico, but I’m out of all this. You won’t hear from me and I don’t expect to hear from you.”

“You walk away and my father doesn’t?” Iván asks. He pulls a Glock 9 from his jacket and points it at Keller’s face. “I don’t think so.”

It’s a young man’s mistake.

Putting the gun too close to the guy you want to kill.

Keller leans away from the barrel at the same time that his hand shoots out, grabs the gun barrel, twists, and wrenches it out of Iván’s hand. Then he smashes it three times into Iván’s face and hears the cheekbone shatter before Iván slides to the floor like a robe dropped at Keller’s feet.

Ascensión moves in but Keller has his forearm wrapped around Ric Núñez’s throat and puts the gun to the side of his head. “No.”

El Mastín freezes.

“The fuck did I do?” Ric asks.

“Here’s how it’s going to work,” Keller says. “I’m going to walk out of here. I’m going to live my life, you’re going to live yours. If anyone comes after me, I’ll kill all of you. ¿Entienden?”

“We understand,” Núñez says.

Holding Ric as a shield, Keller backs out of the room.

He sees men chained to the walls, pools of blood, smells sweat and urine. No one moves, they all watch him go outside.

There’s nothing he can do for them.

Not a damn thing.

Twenty rifles point at him but no one is going to take a chance on hitting their boss’s son.

Reaching behind him, Keller opens the passenger door of the cab, then pushes Ric to the ground.

Sticks the gun into the back of the driver’s seat. “Ándale.”

On the drive back to the airport, Keller sees the first memorial to Adán on the side of the highway.

A banner spray-painted—

ADÁN VIVE.

Adán lives.

Juárez is a city of ghosts.

What Art Keller thinks as he drives through the town.

More than ten thousand Juarenses were killed in Adán Barrera’s conquest of the city, which he ripped from the old Juárez cartel to give him another gateway into the United States. Four bridges—the Stanton Street Bridge, the Ysleta International Bridge, the Paso del Norte and the Bridge of the Americas, the so-called Bridge of Dreams.

Ten thousand lives so Barrera could have those bridges.

During the five years of the war between the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels, more than three hundred thousand Juarenses fled the city, leaving the population at about a million and a half.

A third of whom, Keller has read, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

He’s surprised there aren’t more. At the height of the fighting, the citizens of Juárez got used to stepping over dead bodies on the sidewalk. The cartels would radio ambulance drivers to tell them which wounded they could pick up, and which they had to let die. Hospitals were attacked, as well as homeless shelters and drug treatment houses.

The city center was virtually abandoned. Once vibrant with its famous nightlife, half the city’s restaurants and a third of its bars shut their doors. Stores closed. The mayor, the town council and most of the city police moved across those bridges to El Paso.

But in the past couple of years the city had started to come back. Businesses were reopening, refugees were coming home, and the murder rate was down.

Keller knows that the violence receded for one reason.

Sinaloa won the war.

And established the Pax Sinaloa.

Well, fuck you, Adán, Keller thinks as he drives around the Plaza del Periodista, with its statue of a newsboy hawking papers.

To hell with your bridges.

And to hell with your peace.

Keller can never drive by the plaza without seeing the scattered remains of his friend Pablo.

Pablo Mora was a journalist who had defied the Zetas by persisting to write a blog that exposed narco crimes. They’d kidnapped him, tortured him to death, dismembered him and arranged the pieces of his body around the statue of the newsboy.

So many journalists murdered, Keller thinks, as the cartels realized that they needed to control not only the action, but the narrative as well.

Most of the media simply stopped covering narco news.

Which is why Pablo started his suicidal blog.

And then there was Jimena Abarca, the baker from a little town in the Juárez Valley, who had stood up against the narcos, the federales, the army, and the entire government. Went on a hunger strike and forced them to release innocent prisoners. One of Barrera’s thugs shot her nine times in the chest and face in the parking lot of her favorite Juárez restaurant.

Or Giorgio, the photojournalist beheaded for the sin of taking images of dead narcos.

Erika Valles, slaughtered and cut up like a chicken. A nineteen-year-old girl brave enough to be the only cop in a little town where narcos had killed her four predecessors.

And then, of course, Marisol.

Dr. Marisol Cisneros is the mayor of Valverde, Jimena Abarca’s town in the Juárez Valley.

She took the office after the three previous mayors had been murdered. Stayed in the job when the Zetas threatened to kill her, then again after they gunned her down in her car, putting bullets in her stomach, chest and legs, breaking her femur and two ribs, cracking a vertebra.

After weeks in the hospital and months of recuperation, Marisol came back and held a press conference. Beautifully dressed, impeccably coiffed and made up, she showed her scars—and her colostomy bag—to the media, looked straight into the camera and told the narcos, I’m going back to work and you will not stop me.

Keller has no way to account for that kind of courage.

So it makes him furious when American politicians paint all Mexicans with the broad brush of corruption. He thinks about people like Pablo Mora, Jimena Abarca, Erika Valles and Marisol Cisneros.

Not all ghosts are dead—some are shades of what might have been.

You’re a ghost yourself, he tells himself.

A ghost of yourself, existing in a half life.

You’ve come back to Mexico because you’re more at home with the dead than the living.

The highway, Carretera Federal 2, parallels the border east of Juárez. Keller can see Texas, just a few miles away, through the driver’s-side window.

It might as well be a world away.

The Mexican federal government sent the army here to restore the peace, and, if anything, the army was as brutal as the cartels. Killings actually rose during the military occupation. There used to be army checkpoints every few miles on this road, which the locals dreaded as the locations of shakedowns, extortion and arbitrary arrests that too often ended in beatings, torture and internment in a hastily built prison camp that used to exist farther up the road.

If you didn’t get killed in a cartel cross fire, you could be murdered by the soldiers.

Or just disappear.

It was on this same road that the Zetas gunned Marisol down, left her for dead at the side of the road, bleeding out. One of the reasons Keller had made his temporary alliance with Barrera was because the “Lord of the Skies” promised to keep her safe.

Keller glances into the rearview mirror just to make sure, but he knows there’s no need for them to follow him. They already know where he’s going and will know when he gets there. The cartel had halcones everywhere. Cops, taxi drivers, kids on the corners, old women in their windows, clerks behind their counters. Everyone has a cell phone these days, and everyone will pick it up to curry favor with Sinaloa.

If they want to kill me, they’ll kill me.

Or at least they’ll try.

He pulls into the little town of Valverde, twenty or so blocks arranged in a rectangle on the desert flat. The houses—the ones that survived, anyway—are mostly cinder block with a few adobes. Some of them, Keller notices, have been repainted in bright blues, reds and yellows.

But the signs of war are still there, he also notices as he drives down the broad central street. The Abarca bakery, once the social center of the town, is still an empty pile of char, the pockmarks of bullets still scar walls, and some of the buildings are still boarded up and abandoned. Thousands of people had fled the Juárez Valley during the war, some afraid, others forced by Barrera’s threats. People would wake up in the morning to find signs draped across the street from phone pole to phone pole, with lists of names, residents who were told to leave that day or be killed.

Barrera depopulated some of the towns to replace their people with his own loyalists from Sinaloa.

He literally colonized the valley.

But now the army checkpoints are gone.

The sandbagged bunker that was on the main street is gone, and a few old people sit in the gazebo in the town square enjoying the afternoon warmth, something they never would have dared to do just a couple of years ago.

And Keller notices the little tienda has reopened, so people have a place again to buy necessities.

Some people have come back to Valverde, many stay away, but the town looks like it’s making a modest recovery. Keller drives past the little clinic and pulls into the parking lot in front of town hall, a two-story cinder-block rectangle that houses what’s left of the town government.

He parks the car and walks up the exterior staircase to the mayor’s office.

Marisol sits behind her desk, her cane hooked over the arm of her chair. Poring over papers, she doesn’t notice Keller.

Her beauty stops his heart.

She’s wearing a simple blue dress and her black hair is pulled back into a severe chignon, setting off her high cheekbones and dark eyes.

He knows that he’ll never stop loving her.

Marisol looks up, sees him, and smiles. “Arturo.”

She grabs her cane and starts to get up. Getting in and out of chairs is still hard for her and Keller notices the slight wince as she pushes herself up. The cut of her dress hides the colostomy bag, an enduring gift from the round that clipped her small intestine.

It was the Zetas who did that to her.

Keller went to Guatemala to kill the men who ordered it, Ochoa and Forty. Even though she begged him not to seek revenge. Now she wraps her arms around him and holds him close. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.”

“You said you weren’t sure if you wanted me to.”

“That was a terrible thing for me to say.” She lays her head against his chest. “I’m so sorry.”

“No need.”

She’s quiet for a few seconds, and then asks, “Is it over?”

“For me it is.”

He feels her sigh. “What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know.”

It’s true. He hadn’t expected to come back from Dos Erres alive, and now that he has, he doesn’t know what to do with his life. He knows he isn’t going back to Tidewater, the security firm that conducted the Guatemala raid, and he sure as shit isn’t going back to DEA. But as for what he is going to do, he doesn’t have a clue.

Except here he is in Valverde.

Drawn to her.

Keller knows that they can never have what they once had. There’s too much shared sorrow between them, too many loved ones killed, each death like a stone in a wall built so high that it can’t be breached.

“I have afternoon clinic hours,” Marisol says.

She’s the town’s mayor and its only doctor. There are thirty thousand people in the Juárez Valley and she’s the one full-time physician.

So she started a free clinic in town.

“I’ll walk you,” Keller says.

Marisol hangs the cane on her wrist and grabs the handrail as she makes her way down the exterior staircase, and Keller is half-terrified she’s going to fall. He walks behind with one hand ready to catch her.

“I do this several times a day, Arturo,” she says.

“I know.”

Poor Arturo, she thinks. There is such a sadness about him.

Marisol knows the price he’s already paid for his long war—his partner murdered, his family estranged, the things he has seen and done that wake him up at night, or worse, trap him in nightmares.

She’s paid a price herself.

The external wounds are obvious, the chronic pain that accompanies them somewhat less so, but still all too real. She’s lost her youth and her beauty—Arturo likes to think that she’s still beautiful, but face it, she thinks, I’m a woman with a cane in my hand and a bag of shit strapped to my back.

That isn’t the worst of it. Marisol is insightful enough to know that she has a bad case of survivor’s guilt—why is she alive when so many others aren’t?—and she knows that Arturo suffers from the same malady.

“How’s Ana doing?” Keller asks.

“I’m worried about her,” Marisol says. “She’s depressed, drinking too much. She’s at the clinic, you’ll see her.”

“We’re a mess, aren’t we? All of us.”

“Pretty much,” Marisol says.

All veterans of an unspeakable war, she thinks. From which there has been—in the pop-speak of the day—no “closure.”

No victory or defeat.

No reconciliation or war crimes tribunals. Certainly no parades, no medals, no speeches, no thanks from a grateful nation.

Just a slow, sodden lessening of the violence.

And a soul-crushing sense of loss, an emptiness that can’t be filled no matter how busy she keeps herself at the office or the clinic.

They walk past the town square.

The old people in the gazebo watch them.

“This will start the rumor mill grinding,” Marisol says. “By five o’clock I’ll be pregnant with your baby. By seven we’ll be married. By nine you’ll have left me for a younger woman, probably a güera.”

The people of Valverde know Keller well. He lived in their town after Marisol was shot, nursing her back to health. He went to their church, to their holidays, to their funerals. If not exactly one of their own, he isn’t a stranger, either, not just another yanqui.

They love him because they love her.

Keller feels more than sees the car cruise behind them on the street, slowly reaches for the gun under his windbreaker and keeps his hand on the grip. The car, an old Lincoln, crawls past them. A driver and a passenger don’t bother to disguise their interest in Keller.

Keller nods to them.

The halcón nods back as the car drives on.

Sinaloa is keeping an eye on him.

Marisol doesn’t notice. Instead, she asks, “Did you kill him, Arturo?”

“Who?”

“Barrera.”

“There’s an old, bad joke,” Keller says, “about this woman on her wedding night. Her husband inquires if she’s a virgin and she answers, ‘Why does everyone keep asking me that?’”

“Why does everyone keep asking you that?” Marisol knows an evasion when she hears one. They had made a promise that they would never lie to each other, and Arturo is a man of his word. By his not answering directly, she suspects what the truth is. “Just tell me the truth. Did you kill him?”

“No,” Keller says. “No, Mari, I didn’t.”

Keller has been living in Ana’s house in Juárez only a couple of days when Eddie Ruiz shows up. He made the veteran reporter an offer and she took it—the house had too many memories for her.

“Crazy Eddie” was on the Guatemala raid. Keller had watched as the young narco—a pocho, a Mexican American from El Paso—poured a can of paraffin over the wounded Zeta boss Heriberto Ochoa and then set him on fire.

When Eddie walks into Keller’s house in Juárez, he isn’t alone.

With him is Jesús Barajos—“Chuy”—a seventeen-year-old schizophrenic battered into psychosis by the horrors he endured, the horrors he witnessed, and the horrors he inflicted on others. A narco hit man at eleven years old, the kid never had a chance, and Keller found him in the Guatemalan jungle, calmly kicking a soccer ball onto which he had sewn the face of a man he had decapitated.

“Why did you bring him here?” Keller asks, looking at Chuy’s blank stare. He’d almost shot the kid himself down in Guatemala. An execution for murdering Erika Valles.

And Ruiz brought him here? To me?

“I didn’t know what else to do with him,” Eddie says.

“Turn him in.”

“They’ll kill him,” Eddie says. Chuy walks past them, curls up on the couch, and falls asleep. Small and scrawny, he has the feral look of an underfed coyote. “Anyway, I can’t take him where I’m going.”

“What are you going to do?” Keller asks.

“Cross the river and turn myself in,” Eddie says. “Four years and I’m out.”

It’s the bargain Keller had arranged for him.

“How about you?” Eddie asks.

“I don’t have a plan,” Keller says. “Just live, I guess.”

Except he has no idea how.

His war is over and he has no idea how to live.

Or what to do with Chuy Barajos.

Marisol vetoes his idea of turning the boy in to the Mexican authorities. “He wouldn’t survive.”

“Mari, he killed—”

“I know he did,” she says. “He’s sick, Arturo. He needs help. What kind of help will he get in the system?”

None, Keller knows, not really sure that he cares. He wants his war to be over, not to drag it around with him like a ball and chain in the person of a virtual catatonic who had slaughtered people he loved. “I’m not you. I can’t forgive like you do.”

“Your war won’t end until you do.”

“Then I guess it won’t end.”

But he doesn’t turn Chuy in.

Mari finds a psychiatrist who will treat the kid gratis and arranges for his meds through her clinic, but the prognosis is “guarded.” The best Chuy can hope for is a marginal existence, a shadow life with the worst of his memories at least muted if not erased.

Keller can’t explain why he undertook to care for the kid.

Maybe it’s penance.

Chuy stays around the house like another ghost in Keller’s life, sleeping in the spare room, playing video games on the Xbox Keller bought at the Walmart in El Paso, or wolfing down whatever meals Keller fixes for them, most of which come out of cans labeled HORMEL. Keller monitors Chuy’s cocktail of medications and makes sure that he takes them on schedule.

Keller escorts him to his psychiatric appointments and sits in the waiting room, leafing through Spanish editions of National Geographic and Newsweek. Then they take the bus home and Chuy settles in front of the television while Keller fixes dinner. They rarely speak. Sometimes Keller hears the screams coming from Chuy’s room and goes in to wake him from his nightmare. Even though he’s sometimes tempted to let the kid suffer, he never does.

Some nights Keller takes a beer and sits outside on the steps leading down to Ana’s small backyard, remembering the parties there—the music, the poetry, the passionate political arguments, the laughter. That’s where he first met Ana, and Pablo and Giorgio, and El Búho—“The Owl”—the dean of Mexican journalism who edited the newspaper that Ana and Pablo had worked for.

Other nights, when Marisol comes into the city to visit a patient she’s placed in the Juárez Hospital, she and Keller go out to dinner or maybe go to El Paso for a movie. Or sometimes he drives out to Valverde, meets her after clinic hours, and they take a quiet sunset walk through town.

It never goes further than that, and he drives home each time.

Life settles into a rhythm that is dreamlike, surreal.

Rumors of Barrera’s death or survival swirl through the city but Keller pays little attention. Every now and then a car cruises slowly past the house, and once Terry Blanco comes by to ask Keller if he’s heard anything, knows anything.

Keller hasn’t, he doesn’t.

But otherwise, as promised, they leave him alone.

Until they don’t.

Eddie Ruiz flushes the steel toilet bolted to the concrete wall. Then he sticks an empty toilet paper roll into the toilet drain and blows into it, sending the water lower into the trap. That done, he takes his foam mattress pad off his concrete bed slab, folds it over the toilet and presses on it as if he were giving it CPR. Then he takes the mattress pad off, stacks three toilet paper rolls into the john, puts his mouth against the top one and hollers, “El Señor!”

He waits a few seconds and then hears, “Eddie! ¿Qué pasa, m’ijo?”

Eddie isn’t Rafael Caro’s son, but he’s glad that the old drug lord calls him that, maybe even thinks of him as a son.

Caro’s been in Florence virtually since it opened back in ’94, one of the first guests of the supermax. It fucking amazes Eddie: since 1994 Rafael Caro has been alone in a seven-by-twelve-foot concrete box—concrete bed, concrete table, concrete stool, concrete desk—and he still has all his marbles.

Kurt Cobain goes room temp, Caro’s in his cell. Bill Clinton gets his cigar smoked, Caro is in his cell. Fuckin’ ragheads fly planes into buildings, we invade the wrong fuckin’ country, a black dude gets elected president, Caro is sitting in that same seven-by-twelve.

Twenty-three hours a day, seven days a week.

Fuck, Eddie thinks, I was fourteen years old, a freshman in high school jerking off to Penthouse Letters, when they closed that door on Caro, and the guy is still here and he’s still sane. Rudolfo Sánchez did just eighteen months and left his balls here. I’m just coming on my second year in the place and I’m about to lose my shit. Probably would have already, I didn’t have Caro to talk to through the “toilet phone.”

Caro is still sharp as a blade—Eddie can see why he was once a major player in the drug game. The only mistake Caro made—but it was a terminal one—was to back the wrong horse in a two-pony race: Güero Méndez against Adán Barrera.

Always a bad bet, Eddie thinks.

Caro got what a lot of Adán’s enemies get—extradition to the US, which had major wood for him as they suspected he’d had a hand in the torture-murder of a DEA agent named Ernie Hidalgo. They couldn’t prove it, though, so he got the max on drug-trafficking charges—twenty-five-to-life instead of the LWOP.

Life without possibility of parole.

But the feds were jacked enough to send him to Florence, where they put cats like the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh before they did him, and a slew of terrorists. Osiel Contreras, the old boss of the Gulf cartel, is here, along with a few other major narcos.

And me, Eddie thinks.

Eddie freakin’ Ruiz, the first and only American to head up a Mexican cartel, for what that’s worth.

Actually, he knows exactly what it’s worth.

Four years.

Which is kind of a problem, because some people, not a few of them inhabitants of this institution, wonder why it’s only four years.

For a guy of Eddie’s stature.

Crazy Eddie.

The former “Narco Polo,” glossed for his choice of shirt. The guy who fought the Zetas to a standstill in Nuevo Laredo, who led Diego Tapia’s sicarios first against the Zetas, then against Barrera. Who survived the marines’ execution of Diego and then headed up his own outfit, a splinter of the old Tapia organization.

Some of these people wonder why Eddie would come back to the States—where he was already wanted on trafficking charges—why he would turn himself in, and why he would get only a double-deuce in a federal lockup.

The obvious speculation was that Eddie was a rat, that he flipped on his friends in exchange for a light bit. Eddie denied this emphatically to other inmates. “Name me one guy who has gone down since I got popped. One.”

He knew there was no answer to that because there hasn’t been anyone.

“And if I was going to make myself a deal,” Eddie pushed, “you think I’d deal myself into Florence? The worst supermax in the country?”

No answer to this, either.

“And a seven-million-dollar fine?” Eddie asked. “The fuck kind of rat deal is that?”

But the clincher was his friendship with Caro, because everyone knew that Rafael Caro—a guy who’s taken a twenty-five-year hit without mumbling a word of complaint, never mind cooperation; would never deign to as much as look at a soplón, never mind be friends with one.

So if Eddie was good with Rafael Caro, he was good with everyone. Now he shouts back through the tube, “It’s all good, Señor. You?”

“I’m fine, thank you. What’s new?”

What’s new? Eddie thinks.

Nothing.

Nothing is ever new in this place—every day is the same as the last. They wake you at six, shove something they call food through a metal slot. After “breakfast,” Eddie cleans his cell. Religiously, meticulously. The purpose of solitary confinement is to turn you into an animal, and Eddie isn’t gonna cooperate with that by living in filth. So he keeps himself, his cell, and his clothes clean and tight. After he wipes off every surface in his cell, he washes his clothes in the metal sink, wrings them out and hangs them up to dry.

Isn’t hard to keep track of his clothes.

He has two regulation orange pullover shirts, two pairs of khaki slacks, two pairs of white socks, two pairs of white underwear, a pair of plastic sandals.

After doing his laundry, he works out.

One hundred push-ups.

One hundred sit-ups.

Eddie is a young dude, still only thirty-two, and he doesn’t intend to let prison make him old. He’s going to hit the bricks at thirty-five in shape, looking good, with his mind still sharp.

Most of the guys in this place are never going to see the world again.

They’re going to die in this shithole.

His workout done, he generally takes a shower in the tiny cubicle in the corner of his cell and then lets himself watch a little TV, a tiny black-and-white he earned by being a “model prisoner,” which on this block pretty much means not screaming all the time, finger-painting on the walls with your own shit, or trying to splash urine out the slot at the guards.

The television is closed-circuit and closely controlled—just educational and religious programs, but some of the women are reasonably hot and at least Eddie gets to hear some human voices.

Around noon, they shove something they call lunch through the door. Sometime in the afternoon, or at night, or whenever the fuck they feel like it, the guards come to take him for his big hour out. They mix up the time because they don’t want to get in a routine so maybe Eddie could call in an airstrike or something.

But when they do decide to show up, Eddie stands backward against the door and puts his hands through the slot for cuffing. They open the door and he kneels like he’s at First Communion while they shackle his ankles and then run a chain up through the handcuffs.

Then they walk him to the exercise yard.

Which is a privilege.

His first couple of months here, Eddie wasn’t allowed outside but instead was taken to an indoor hall with no windows that looked like an empty swimming pool. But now he can actually get some fresh air in a twelve-by-twenty cage of solid concrete walls with heavy wire mesh attached to red beams across the top. It has pull-up bars and a basketball hoop, and if you haven’t fucked up and the guards are in a good mood, they might put a couple of other prisoners in there and let you talk to each other.

Caro doesn’t get to go out there.

He’s a cop killer, he doesn’t get shit.

Usually, though, Eddie is alone. He does pull-ups, shoots some hoops or tosses himself a football. Back in high school, Eddie was a star linebacker in Texas, which made him a big fuckin’ deal and got him a lot of prime cheerleader pussy. Now he throws a ball, runs after it, catches it, and no one cheers.

He used to love making guys cough up the ball. Hit them hard and just right so the air went out of their lungs and the ball popped out of their hands. Rip the hearts right out of their fucking chests.

High school ball.

Friday nights.

A long time ago.

Five days a month, Eddie doesn’t go to the exercise yard but out in a hallway where he can make an hour of phone calls.

Eddie usually calls his wife.

First one, then the other.

It’s tricky, because he never got officially divorced from Teresa, whom he married in the US, so technically he’s not really married to Priscilla, whom he married in Mexico. He has a daughter and a son—almost four and two, respectively—with Priscilla and a thirteen-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son with Teresa.

The families are not, shall we say, “mutually aware,” so Eddie has to be careful to remember who he’s on the phone with at any given time and has been known to write his kids’ names on his hand so he doesn’t fuck up and ask about the wrong ones, which would be, like, awkward.

Same with his monthly visits.

He has to alternate them and make some excuse to either Teresa or Priscilla about why he can’t see her that month. It goes pretty much the same with either wife—

“Baby, I have to use the time to see my lawyer.”

“You love your lawyer more than your wife and kids?”

“I have to see my lawyer so I can come home to my wife and kids.”

Yeah, well, which home and which family is another tricky question, but nothing he has to figure out for another three years. Eddie’s thinking of maybe becoming Mormon, like that guy on Big Love, and then Teresa and Priscilla could become “sister wives.”

But then he’d have to live in Utah.

He does sometimes use the monthly visit to consult with his lawyer. “Minimum Ben” Tompkins makes the trip out from San Diego, especially now that his former biggest client is among the missing.

Eddie was there in Guatemala when El Señor got croaked.

But Eddie didn’t say nothin’ to no one about that. He wasn’t even supposed to have been down there in Guatemala, and he owes that motherfucker Keller a solid for bringing him along and letting him kill Ochoa.

Sometimes Eddie uses that memory to get him through the long hours—him pouring a canful of paraffin over the Zeta boss and then tossing a match on him. They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but this tasted pretty good hot, watching Ochoa go all Wicked Witch of the West and screaming like her, too.

Payback for a friend of Eddie’s who Ochoa burned to death.

So Eddie owes Keller to keep his mouth shut.

But shit, he thinks, they should have given me a medal for doing Ochoa instead of throwing me in ADX Florence.

Keller, too.

We’re motherfuckin’ heroes, him and me.

Texas Rangers.

Barrera was ant food and Tompkins needed a new paycheck, so he was perfectly happy to take Eddie’s messages about what to do with the money stored in offshore accounts all over the world.

Seven million in fines, fuck you, Uncle Sam, Eddie thinks. I’ve had that much fall out of my pockets into the sofa cushions.

Eddie owns four nightclubs in Acapulco, two other restaurants, a car dealership, and shit he’s forgotten about. Plus the cash getting a tan on various islands. All he has to do is complete his time and get out and he’ll be set for life.

But right now he’s in Florence and Caro wants to know what’s “new.”

Eddie thinks, Caro don’t want to know what’s new in Florence, but what’s new out in the world, which Eddie hears about when he’s in the exercise cage or by standing up on his bed and talking through the vent to his neighbors.

Now Caro asks, “What do you hear from Sinaloa?”

Eddie doesn’t know why Caro even cares about this shit. That world passed him by a long time ago, so why is he thinking about it? Then again, what else does he have to think about? So it’s good for him to just shoot the shit like he’s still in the game.

Like those old guys back in El Paso, hanging around the football field, telling war stories about when they played and then arguing about who this new coach should start at quarterback, whether they should dump the I for a spread formation, that sort of thing.

But Eddie respects Caro and is happy to kill the time with him. “I hear they’re ramping up their chiva production,” Eddie says.

He knows Caro won’t approve.

The old gomero was there back in the ’70s when the Americans napalmed and poisoned the poppy fields, scattering the growers to the winds. Caro was present at the famous meeting in Guadalajara when Miguel Ángel Barrera—the famous M-1 himself—told the gomeros to get out of heroin and go into cocaine. He was there when M-1 formed the Federación.

Eddie and Caro talk bullshit for another minute or so, but it’s cumbersome, communicating through the plumbing. It’s why narcos are scared to death of extradition to an American supermax—on a practical level, there’s no way to run their business from inside, like they can do from a Mexican prison. Here they have limited visitation—if any at all—which is monitored and recorded. So are their phone calls. So even the most powerful kingpin can only receive bits of information and give vague orders. After a short while, it breaks down.

Caro has been in a long time.

If this were the NFL draft, Eddie thinks, he’d be Mr. Irrelevant.

Eddie sits across the table from Minimum Ben.

He admires the lawyer’s style—a khaki linen sports jacket, blue shirt and a plaid bow tie, which is a nice touch. Thick snow-white hair, a handlebar mustache and a goatee.

Tompkins would be Colonel Sanders if it were chicken, not dope.

“BOP is moving you,” Tompkins says. “It’s standard operating procedure. You have a good record here so you’re due for a ‘step-down.’”

The American federal prison system has a hierarchy. The most severe is the supermax like Florence. Next comes the penitentiary, still behind walls but on a cell block, not solitary. Then it’s a correctional facility, dormitory buildings behind wire fences, and finally, a minimum-security camp.

“To a penitentiary,” Tompkins says. “Given your charges, you’re not going lower than that until your release date is close. Then they might even move you to a halfway house. Jesus, Eddie, I thought you’d be happy about this.”

“Yeah, I am, but …”

“But what?” Tompkins asks. “You’re in solitary confinement, Eddie, locked down twenty-three hours a day. You don’t see anybody—”

“Maybe that’s the point. Do I have to explain it to you?” Sure, here he’s in solitary and solitary is a bitch, but he’s handling it, he’s gotten used to it. And he’s safe in his own cell, where no one can get to him. You put him on some cell block somewhere, the snitch cloud might rain all over him. Eddie doesn’t want to say this out loud, because you never know what guard is on whose payroll. “I was promised protection.”

Tompkins lowers his voice. “And you’ll get it. Do your time and then you go into the program.”

I have to live through my time to serve it, Eddie thinks. If I get moved, my paperwork goes with me. They can keep my PSI under wraps here, but in a penitentiary? Those guards would sell their mothers for a chocolate glazed. “Where are they sending me?”

“They’re talking Victorville.”

Eddie wants to swallow his teeth. “You know who runs Victimville? La Eme. The Mexican Mafia. They might as well transfer me to Culiacán.”

La Eme does business with all the cartels except the Zetas, he thinks, but they’re thickest with Sinaloa. They get a look at my pre-sentence interview, they’ll shank me in the eyes.

“We’ll get you housed in a protective unit,” Tompkins says.

Eddie leans across the table. “Listen to me—if they put me in AdSeg, they might as well announce I’m a rat over the PA. You think they can’t get to me in segregation? You know how hard that is? A guard leaves a door unlocked. I’ll slash my wrists here before I let them put me in protection.”

“What do you want, Eddie?”

“Keep me where I am.”

“No can do,” Tompkins says.

“What, they need the cell?”

“Something like that,” Tompkins says. “You know the Bureau of Prisons. Once they start the paperwork …”

“They don’t care if I die.” It was a stupid thing to say and he knows it. Of course they don’t care if you die. Guys die in prison all the time and most of the admin write it off as a no loss, addition by subtraction. So does the public. You’re already fucking garbage, so if someone takes you out, all the better.

“I’ll do what I can,” Tompkins says.

Eddie’s pretty sure that what Tompkins can do is exactly nothing. If his papers follow him to V-Ville, he’s a dead man.

“You gotta call someone for me,” Eddie says.

Keller answers his phone and it’s Ben Tompkins.

“What do you want?” Keller asks, not happy.

“I represent Eddie Ruiz now.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“Eddie wants to speak with you,” Tompkins says. “He says he has valuable information.”

“I’m out of the game,” Keller says. “I don’t care about any kind of information.”

“He doesn’t have valuable information for you,” Tompkins says. “He has valuable information on you.”

Keller flies to Denver and then drives down to Florence.

Eddie picks up the phone to talk through the glass. “You gotta help me.”

He tells Keller about his imminent transfer to Victorville.

“What’s that have to do with me?” Keller asks.

“That’s it? YOYO?” You’re on your own.

“We pretty much all are, aren’t we?” Keller says. “Anyway, I don’t have any swag anymore.”

“Bullshit.”

“Truth.”

“You’re pushing me into a corner,” Eddie says. “You’re pushing me someplace neither of us want me to go.”

“Are you threatening me, Eddie?”

“I’m asking for your help,” Eddie says. “But if I don’t get it, I have to help myself. You know what I’m saying here.”

Guatemala.

The raid that never happened.

When Keller stood there and did nothing while Eddie turned Heriberto Ochoa into a road flare.

Then Keller walked into the jungle to find Barrera.

And only Keller walked out.

“You talk about certain things,” Keller says, “maybe I have enough swag left to get you moved to Z-Wing, Eddie.”

Z-Wing.

Basically, under ADX Florence.

Z-Wing is where they toss you if you fuck up. They strip you, shackle you by the hands and feet, throw you in and leave you there.

A black hole.

“You think you can do three years in Z-Wing?” Keller asks. “You’ll come out a babbling idiot, yapping about all kinds of shit that never happened. No one will believe a word you say.”

“Then keep me where I’m at.”

“You’re not thinking this through,” Keller says. “If you stay in Florence, the same people you’re worried about are going to wonder why.”

“Then you think of something better,” Eddie says. “If I get fucked, it’s not going to be by myself. Just so you understand—my next call’s not to you, it’s about you.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Keller says.

“And you gotta do something else for me,” Eddie says.

“What?”

“I want a Big Mac,” Eddie says. “Large fries and a Coke.”

“That’s it?” Keller asks. “I thought you’d want to get laid.”

Eddie thinks for a second, then says, “No, I’ll go with the burger.”

Eddie hears the toilet bang and knows that Caro wants to speak to him. He goes through the whole rigmarole of flushing water out of the toilet and then puts his ear to the toilet paper roll.

“I hear they’re moving you,” Caro says.

That didn’t take long, Eddie thinks. And Caro’s more hooked up than I thought he was. “That’s right.”

“To Victorville.”

“Yeah.”

He’s not as scared about going there anymore since he got a call from Keller telling him that his paperwork was squeaky clean. Anyone looking at it could read through the lines and decide that Eddie got four years because his lawyer was a lot stronger than the government’s case.

“Don’t worry,” Caro says. “We have friends there. They’ll look after you.”

“Thank you.”

“La Mariposa,” Caro says.

Another name for La Eme.

Caro says, “I’ll miss our talks.”

“Me too.”

“You’re a good young man, Eddie. You show respect.” Caro is quiet for a few seconds, then he says, “M’ijo, I want you to do something for me in V-Ville.”

“Anything, Señor.”

Eddie doesn’t want to do whatever it is.

Just wants to do his time and get out.

Out of the joint, out of the trade.

He’s still toying with producing a movie about his life, what do they call it, a “biopic,” which would have to be, like, a huge hit if they got someone like DiCaprio to play him.

But he can’t say no to Rafael Caro. If he does, La Eme will give him another kind of welcome to V-Ville. Maybe shank him on the spot, or maybe just shun him. Either way, he won’t survive without being cliqued up with a gang.

“I knew that would be your answer,” Caro says. He lowers his voice so Eddie can barely hear him say—

“Find us a mayate.”

A black guy.

“From New York. With an early release date. Put him in your debt,” Caro says. “Do you understand?”

Jesus Christ, Eddie thinks. Caro is still a player.

He does the math—Caro has done twenty years on his twenty-five-year sentence. Federal time, they can make you do every day or they can knock it down to 85 percent, maybe even less.

Which makes Caro a short-timer, looking at the gate.

And he wants back in the game.

“I understand, Señor,” Eddie says. “You want to put the arm on a black guy who’s going to get out soon. But why?”

“Because Adán Barrera was right,” Caro says.

Heroin was our past.

And our past is our future.

He don’t need to tell Eddie that.

Keller gets on the horn to Ben O’Brien. “Call me back on a clean line.”

The first time Keller met O’Brien was in a hotel room in Georgetown a few weeks before the Guatemala raid. They didn’t exchange names, and Keller, who was never much of a political animal, didn’t recognize him as a senator from Texas. He just knew that the man represented certain oil interests willing to fund an operation to eliminate the Zeta leadership because the “Z Company” was taking over valuable oil and gas fields in northern Mexico.

The White House had just officially rejected the operation but sent O’Brien to authorize it off the record. The senator arranged a funding line through his oil connections and helped put together a team of mercenaries through a private firm based in Virginia. Keller had resigned from DEA and joined Tidewater Security as a consultant.

Now O’Brien calls him back. “What’s wrong?”

Keller tells him about Eddie’s threat. “You have any leverage at BOP? Get Ruiz’s PSI scrubbed?”

“In English?”

“I need you to reach out to someone in the Bureau of Prisons and get Ruiz’s records cleansed of any trace of his deal,” Keller says.

“We’re letting drug dealers blackmail us now?” O’Brien asks.

“Pretty much,” Keller says. “Unless you want to answer a lot of questions about what happened down in Guatemala.”

“I’ll get it done.”

“I don’t like it any more than you do.”

Goddamn Barrera, Keller thinks when he clicks off.

Adán vive.

Elena Sánchez Barrera is reluctant to admit, even to herself, that her brother is dead.

The family held out hope through the long silence that lasted days, then weeks, and now months, as they tried to glean information as to what had happened in Dos Erres.

But so far they’ve come up with no new information. Nor, apparently, have the authorities disseminated what they do know down the ranks—it seems as if half of law enforcement believe that the rumor of Adán’s death was put out as a smoke screen to help him evade arrest.

As if, Elena thinks. The federal police are virtually a wholly owned subsidiary of the Sinaloa cartel. The government favors us because we pay them well, we retain order and we’re not savages. So the idea that Adán staged his own death to avoid capture is as ludicrous as it is widespread.

If it wasn’t the police, it was the media.

Elena had heard the term media circus before, but she never fully realized what it meant until the rumors about Adán’s death began to swirl. Then she was besieged—reporters even had the nerve to set up post outside her house in Tijuana. She couldn’t go out the door without being harassed by questions about Adán.

“How many ways can I say ‘I don’t know’?” she had said to the reporters. “All I can tell you is that I love my brother and pray for his safety.”

“So you can confirm he’s missing?”

“I love my brother and pray for his safety.”

“Is it true your brother was the world’s biggest drug trafficker?”

“My brother is a businessman. I love him and pray for his safety.”

Every fresh rumor prompted a new assault. “We’ve heard Adán is in Costa Rica.” “Is it true he’s hiding in the United States?” “Adán has been seen in Brazil, Colombia, Paraguay, Paris …”

“All I can tell you is that I love my brother and pray for his safety.”

The pack of hyenas would have eaten little Eva alive, torn her to shreds. If they could have found her. It wasn’t for lack of trying. The media flooded Culiacán, Badiraguato. An ambitious reporter in California even tracked down Eva’s condo in La Jolla. When they couldn’t find her, they pestered Elena.

“Where is Eva? Where are the boys? There are rumors they’ve been kidnapped. Are they alive?”

“Señora Barrera is in seclusion,” Elena said. “We ask you to respect her privacy in this difficult time.”

“You’re public figures.”

“We’re not,” Elena said. “We’re private businesspeople.”

It was true—she had retired from the pista secreta eight years ago, when she agreed to turn over the Baja plaza to Adán so he could give it to the Esparzas. She had done so willingly—she was tired of the killings, of the death, that went along with the trade and was happy to live off her many investments.

And Eva knows as much about the drug trade as she does about particle physics. Goodhearted, beautiful, and stupid. But fecund. She served her purpose. Gave Adán sons and heirs. The twin boys—Miguel and Raúl. And what will become of them? Elena wonders.

Eva is a young Mexican woman, a young Sinaloan woman. With her father and husband apparently dead, she probably feels that she has to obey her older brother, and Elena wonders what Iván has been telling her.

I know what I would tell her, Elena thinks. You’re an American citizen and so are the boys. You have enough money to live like a queen the rest of your life. Take your sons and run back to California. Raise your children away from this business, before you and they are trapped in it for another generation. It will take some time, but eventually the media circus will pack up and move to the next town.

Hopefully.

The bizarre social alchemy of this vulgar age has turned Adán into that most precious of public commodities—a celebrity. Images of him—old mug shots, random photos taken at social events—are plastered over television screens, computer monitors, front pages of newspapers. The details of his 2004 escape from prison are recited with titillated delight. “Experts” join panels of talking heads to assert Adán’s power, wealth and influence. Mexican “witnesses” are interviewed to testify about Adán’s philanthropy—the clinics he built, the schools, the playgrounds. (“To you he is a drug trafficker. To us he is a hero.”)

Celebrity culture, Elena thinks.

An oxymoron.

Even if you could control the traditional press, corralling social media is like grabbing mercury—it slips out of your hand and breaks into a thousand more pieces. The internet, Twitter, Facebook are electric with “news” about Adán Barrera—every rumor, whisper, innuendo and bit of misinformation went viral. Behind the screen of digital anonymity, people inside the organization who know they shouldn’t be talking are leaking what information they have, mixing little bits of truth into a stew of falsehood.

And the most pernicious rumor of all—

Adán is alive.

It wasn’t Adán at all in Guatemala, but a double. The Lord of the Skies outsmarted his enemies yet again.

Adán is in a coma, hidden away in a hospital in Dubai.

I saw Adán in Durango.

In Los Mochis, in Costa Rica, in Mazatlán.

I saw him in a dream. The spirit of Adán came to me and told me everything will be all right.

Like Jesus, Elena thinks, resurrection is always possible when there’s no body. And just like Jesus, Adán now has disciples.

Elena walks from the living room into the enormous kitchen. She’s thought of selling and downsizing now that her sons are grown and out. The maids busy preparing breakfast look away and seem even busier as they try to avoid her glance. The servants always know first, Elena thinks. Somehow they always hear of every death, every birth, every hurried engagement or secret affair before we do.

Elena pours herself a cup of herbal tea and walks out onto the deck. Her house is in the hills above the city and she looks down at the bowl of polluted smoke that is Tijuana and thinks of all the blood that her family shed—in both the active and passive sense—to control this place.

Her brother Adán and her brother Raúl—long dead—had done that, taken the Baja plaza and turned it into the base of a national empire that had risen and fallen and risen again, and now …

Now Iván Esparza has it.

Just as he will have Adán’s crown.

With Adán’s sons mere toddlers, Iván is next in the line of succession. The news of Guatemala had barely reached their ears before he was ready to declare his father and Adán dead and announce that he was taking over.

Elena and Núñez talked him down from that tree.

“It’s premature,” Núñez said. “We don’t yet know for a fact that they’re dead, and you really don’t want to step up to the top position anyway.”

“Why not?” Iván demanded.

“It’s too dangerous,” Núñez said. “Too exposed. In the absence of your father and Adán, we don’t know who will stay loyal.”

“Some ambiguity over their deaths has its uses,” Elena said. “The doubt about whether they might be alive keeps the wolves at bay for a while. But if you announce that the king is dead, everyone from the dukes to the barons to the knights to the peasants will see a weakness in the Sinaloa cartel as a chance to seize the throne.”

Iván reluctantly agreed to wait.

He’s a classic, almost stereotypical third-generation spoiled narco brat, Elena thinks. Hotheaded, violently inclined. Adán didn’t like or trust him and worried about his taking over when Nacho died or retired.

So do I, Elena thinks.

But the only alternatives are her own sons.

They’re Adán’s true nephews, the Barrera blood flows through them. Her oldest son, Rudolfo, has done his time, figuratively and literally. He went into the family business young, trafficking cocaine from Tijuana into California, and did well for years—bought nightclubs, owned top recording bands, and managed champion boxers. A beautiful wife and three beautiful children.

No one loved life more than Rudolfo.

Then he sold 250 grams of coke to a DEA undercover at a motel in San Diego.

Two hundred and fifty grams, Elena thinks. So stupid, so small. They’ve moved tons of cocaine in the States, and poor Rudolfo went down for less than half a pound. The American judge sentenced him to six years in a federal prison.

A “supermax.”

Florence, Colorado.

Because, Elena thinks, he bore the name “Barrera.”

It took everything the family had—money, power, influence, lawyers, blackmail and extortion, but they got him out—well, Adán got him out—after only eighteen months.

Only eighteen months, she reflects.

A year and a half in a seven-by-twelve cell, twenty-three hours a day, alone. An hour a day for a shower, or exercise in a cage with a glimpse of the sky.

When he returned, coming across the Paso del Norte Bridge into Juárez, Elena barely recognized him. Gaunt, pale, haunted—a ghost. Her life-loving son, at thirty-five, looked more like sixty.

That was a year ago.

Now Rudolfo focuses on his “legitimate” business, nightclubs in Culiacán and in Cabo San Lucas, and music—the various bands that he produces and promotes. Sometimes he talks about getting back into la pista secreta, but Elena knows he’s afraid of ever going back to prison. Rudolfo will say that he wants the chair at the head of the table, but he’s lying to himself.

Luis, her baby, she doesn’t worry about. He went to college to become an engineer, God bless him, and wants nothing to do with the family business.

Well, good, Elena thinks now.

It’s what we wanted, isn’t it? It’s what we always intended—for our generation to make the family fortune in the trade so that our children wouldn’t need to. Because the trade has brought us riches beyond imagining, but it has also brought us to the cemetery time and again.

Her husband, her uncle—the patriarch “Tío” Barrera—her brother Raúl, and now her brother Adán is dead. Her nephew Salvador, and so many cousins and in-laws and friends.

And enemies.

Güero Méndez, the Tapia brothers, so many others that Adán defeated. They fought for “turf,” she thinks, and the only turf they eventually, inevitably, inherit and share is the cemetery.

Or the prisons.

Here in Mexico or El Norte.

In cells for decades or for the rest of their lives.

A living death.

So if Rudolfo wants to run a nightclub and play at making music, and Luis wants to build bridges, so much the better.

If the world will let them.

“We’re all going to die young anyway!” Ric Núñez announces. “Let’s make legends while we’re doing it!”

It’s been a night of Cristal and coke at Rudolfo Sánchez’s new club, the Blue Marlin. Well, that’s where they wound up; part of the group informally known as Los Hijos—Ric, the Esparza brothers, Rubén Ascensión—and a host of girls had been hitting all the trendy clubs in Cabo, going from VIP room to VIP room, usually comped but leaving hefty tips, and then they were in a private room at the Marlin when Ric got the idea to “take it to the next level.”

He takes out his .38 Colt and sets it on the table.

Can you imagine the songs they’ll write? Ric thinks. The corridos about young people, the scions of the drug cartels, decked out in Armani, Boss, Gucci; driving Rolls, Ferraris; snorting primo blow through hundred-dollar bills, throwing it all away on a game?

They’ve been together forever, Los Hijos. Went to school together in Culiacán, played together at their parents’ parties, went on vacations together to Cabo and Puerto Vallarta. Snuck off and drank beer together, smoked weed, picked up girls. A few of them did a couple of semesters of college, most went straight into the family business.

They knew who they were.

The next generation of the Sinaloa cartel.

The sons.

Los Hijos.

And the girls? They always get the best girls. Ever since middle school, even more so now. Of course they do—they have looks, clothes, money, drugs, guns. They have the swag—they go to the VIP rooms, get the best tables at the best restaurants, front-row seats and backstage passes to the hot concerts; shit, the bands sing songs to them, about them. Maître d’s open doors and women open up their legs.

Los Hijos.

Now one of Iván’s bitches takes out her phone and screams, “It would be a million YouTube hits!”

Fucking awesome, Ric thinks. Someone blowing his brains out on a vid-clip, over a dare. Show the world we just don’t give a shit, we’re capable of anything, anything. “Okay, whoever the barrel points to puts it to his head and pulls the trigger. If he survives, we do it again.”

He spins it.

Hard.

Everyone holds their breath.

The barrel points right back at him.

Iván Esparza explodes in laughter. “Fuck you, Ric!”

The oldest Esparza brother has always been pushing him, since they were little kids. Daring him to jump off the cliff into the quarry pond. Go on, do it, I dare you. I dare you to break into the school, steal your papi’s whiskey, unbutton that girl’s blouse. They’ve chugged bottles of vodka, raced speedboats straight at each other, cars to the edge of cliffs, but this …

Amid chants of “Do it! Do it! Do it!,” Ric picks up the pistol and puts it against his right temple.

Just like that yanqui cop did.

The one who did a number on Iván’s face.

It’s been what, a year, and the scar is still angry on Iván’s cheek, even after the best plastic surgeons money can buy. Iván is cool about it, of course, claiming that it makes him look even more macho.

And swearing that one day he will kill that gringo Keller.

Ric’s hand shakes.

Drunk and stoned as he is, all he wants in the world right then is to not pull the trigger. All he wants is to go back a few minutes to the moment when he had this insanely stupid idea, and to not suggest it.

But now he’s trapped.

He can’t punk out, not in front of Iván, Alfredo and Oviedo, not in front of Rubén. Especially not in front of Belinda, the girl sitting beside him in a black leather jacket, a sequined bustier and painted-on jeans. Belinda is as crazy as she is beautiful; this girl will do anything. Now she smiles at him and the smile says, Do it, boyfriend. Do it and I’ll make you so happy later.

If you live.

“Come on, man, put it down,” Rubén says. “It was a joke.”

But that’s Rubén. The cautious one, the careful one, what did Iván call him once—the “Emergency Brake.” Yeah, maybe, but Ric knows that Rubén is his father’s son—El Cachorro, “The Puppy,” is absolutely, totally lethal, like his old man.

He doesn’t look lethal now, though; he looks scared.

“No, I’m doing it,” Ric says. They’re telling him not to, and he knows they mean it, but he also knows they’ll think less of him. He’d be the one who chickened out, not them. But if he pulls the trigger and it doesn’t go off, he’ll be the man.

And it’s great to see Iván freaking out.

“It was a joke, Ric! No one expected you’d do it!” Iván yells. He looks like he’s going to lunge across the table but is afraid to make the gun go off. Everyone at the table is frozen, staring at Ric. From the corner of his eye, he sees their private waiter sneak out the door.

“Put the gun down,” Rubén says.

“Okay, here goes,” Ric says. He’s starting to tighten his finger when Belinda grabs the gun from his hand, sticks it in her mouth and pulls the trigger.

The hammer clicks on the empty chamber.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Iván yells.

They all freak out. The crazy chava actually did it, and then she calmly sets the gun back on the table and says, “Next.”

Except Rubén picks up the gun and sticks it in his pocket. “I think we’re done.”

“Pussy,” Belinda says.

If it were a guy who’d said that, Ric knows, it would be on, a reason to go, and Rubén would either pull the trigger on himself or on the mouth that called him that. But it’s a girl, a chica, so it’s all good.

“What a rush,” Belinda says. “I think I came.”

The door opens and Rudolfo Sánchez walks in. “What the hell is going on in here?”

“We’re just having some fun,” Iván says, assuming leadership.

“I heard,” Rudolfo says. “Do me a favor? You want to kill yourselves, don’t do it in my place, okay?”

He asks politely, but if it were any other club owner, there’d be a problem. Iván would feel a need to face him, maybe slap him down, or at least cause some damage, break some shit up, throw down some bills to cover the damage, and walk out.

But this isn’t any club owner.

Rudolfo is Adán Barrera’s nephew, his sister Elena’s son. A little older, but an Hijo like them.

Rudolfo looks at them like, Why are you in my club raising dust? Why did you have to pick this place? And he says, “What would I say to your fathers if I let you blow your brains out in my club?”

Then he stops, looking embarrassed, only now remembering that Iván’s father is dead, killed by the Zetas in Guatemala.

Ric feels bad for him. “Sorry, ’Dolfo. We’re fucked up.”

“Maybe we should just get the check,” Rubén says.

“It’s comped,” Rudolfo says.

But Ric notices he doesn’t say anything like, No, please stay. Have another round. They all get up, say good night to Rudolfo, thank him—show some respect, Ric thinks—and walk out onto the street.

Where Iván goes off. “That malandro, pendejo, pinche motherfucker lambioso fuck! Does he think he’s funny?! ‘What would your fathers think?’”

“He didn’t mean anything,” Rubén says. “He probably just forgot.”

“You don’t forget something like that!” Iván says. “He was stepping on my dick! When I take over …”

Ric says, “The guy hasn’t been the same since he got back.”

Unlike any of them, Rudolfo had gone to prison. Did time in an American supermax and the word was that it wrecked him, that he came home messed up.

“The guy is weak,” Iván says. “He couldn’t take it.”

“None of us know what we’d do,” Rubén says. “My old man says prison is the worst thing that can happen to you.”

“He came out of it okay,” Ric says. “Your dad is tough.”

“None of us know,” Rubén repeats.

“Fuck that,” Iván says. “This is our life. If you go, you go. You have to hold it together, like a man.”

“Rudolfo did,” Ric says. “He didn’t bitch up, he didn’t flip.”

“His uncle got him out,” Iván says.

“Good,” Ric says. “Good for Adán. He’d have done the same for you.”

They all know that Adán did it before, too, when his nephew Sal got busted for killing two people outside a club. Adán made a deal to get the charges dropped, and the rumor they all heard was that he flipped on the Tapia brothers, launching the bloody civil war that almost destroyed the cartel.

And Sal got killed anyway.

Blown to shit by Crazy Eddie Ruiz.

Sal should be here tonight, drinking with us, Ric thinks.

Go with God, ’mano.

Iván notices the girls staring at him. “What are you looking at?! Walk ahead, get in the fucking cars!”

Then, just as quickly as he got furious, he gets all happy again. Throws his arms around Ric’s and Rubén’s shoulders and yells, “We’re brothers! Brothers forever!”

And they all shout, “¡Los Hijos!”

Coked, drunk, and orgasmed out, the girl falls asleep.

Belinda shakes her head. “No stamina. I wish Gaby was here.”

She rolls over and looks at Ric.

Shit, he thinks, she wants to go again. “I can’t.”

“I’ll give you a few minutes,” Belinda says. She finds a blunt on the nightstand, lights it up, takes a hit and offers him one.

He takes it. “That was crazy tonight, what you did.”

“I did it to bail you out,” she says. “You talked yourself into a trap.”

“You could have died.”

“Could have,” she says, gesturing to get the joint back. “Didn’t. Anyway, it’s my job to protect you.”

Belinda Vatos—La Fósfora—was the jefa of FEN, Fuerza Especial de Núñez, the armed wing of the Núñez faction of the Sinaloa cartel. It’s unusual to have a woman in that position, but God knows she earned it, Ric thinks.

Started as a courier, then a mule, then took a major step up when she volunteered to kill a Zeta operative who was playing hell with their people in Veracruz. The guy didn’t expect a young, beautiful woman with big round tits and a head of wavy black hair to walk up and put two bullets in his face, but that’s what Belinda did.

She and her girlfriend, Gabriela, had a technique. La Gaby would go into a bar, stay awhile, then leave pretending to be drunk. She’d fall down on the sidewalk, then when the target bent over to help her, La Fósfora would come out of the alley and blast him.

Ric soon learned that she had more exotic tastes. She and Gaby and a few of her men liked to kidnap victims, chop them up into deli meat, and then drop the pieces off at their families’ doorsteps, as a message.

The message got through.

La Fósfora became a narco rock star, posing in sexy garb for Facebook photos and YouTube videos, having songs written about her, and Ric’s father moved her up to the top spot after the previous head of security was sent to prison.

Ric first fucked her on a dare.

“It would be like sticking your dick into death,” Iván said.

“Yeah, but a chava that crazy has to be great in bed,” Ric said.

“If you live,” Iván said. “She might be like one of those spiders who, you know, kill the male after mating. Anyway, I hear she’s a lesbian.”

“She’s bi,” Ric said. “She told me.”

“So go for it,” Iván said. “You can maybe get a threesome out of it.”

“That’s what she said she wants,” Ric said. “Her and that girl Gaby, I can dick them both.”

“You only live once.”

So Ric went to bed with Belinda and Gaby, and the fucked-up thing is that he fell for one and not the other. He still fucked a lot of different women, including even sometimes his wife, but what he had with Belinda was special.

“We’re soul mates,” Belinda explained to him. “In the sense that neither of us has one.”

“You don’t have a soul?” Ric asked her.

“I like to get high, I like to fuck guys, I like to fuck girls, and I like to kill people,” Belinda said. “If I have a soul, it’s not much of a soul.”

Now Belinda looks at him and says, “Anyway, I couldn’t let the crown prince blow his own brains out.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Think about it,” she says, handing back the joint. “Barrera’s probably dead. Nacho’s dead for sure. Rudolfo is a zero. Your father? I love your father, I kill for him, I’d die for him, but he’s a placeholder. You’re the godson.”

Ric says, “You’re talking crazy. Iván’s next in line.”

“I’m just saying.” She takes the joint from him, sets it down and kisses him. “Lie back, baby. If you can’t fuck me, I’ll fuck you. Let me fuck you, baby.”

She licks her finger and then snakes it into his ass. “You like that, don’t you?”

“Fuck.”

“Oh, I will, baby,” she says. “I’ll fuck you. I’ll fuck you good.”

She does.

With her mouth and her fingers, and when he’s about to come she takes her mouth off him, shoves her fingers in deep and says, “It could be yours, all of it. The whole cartel, the whole country, if you want it.”

Because you’re Adán Barrera’s godson, he hears her tell him.

His rightful heir.

The anointed one.

El Ahijado.

Weeks went by, then months, then a year.

The anniversary of the reputed battle in Guatemala coincides with the Day of the Dead, and makeshift shrines to Adán Barrera—photos of him, candles, coins, little bottles of booze and papel picado—spring up all over the country, even in Juárez. Some are left intact while others are torn down by angry adherents claiming there’s no need for shrines because “Adán vive.”

For Keller, the Christmas holidays come and go with little fanfare. He joins Marisol and Ana for a subdued dinner and an exchange of small gifts, then goes back to Juárez and gives Chuy a new video game that the kid seems to like. The next morning’s newspapers carry stories of toys magically appearing for poor children in rural villages and city barrios in Sinaloa and Durango from their “Tío Adán.” Baskets of food arrive in town plazas, gifts from “El Señor.”

Keller barely acknowledges New Year’s Eve. He and Marisol share an early dinner, a glass of champagne, and a chaste kiss. He’s in bed asleep before the ball drops in Times Square.

Two weeks into the new year, Chuy disappears.

Keller comes back from grocery shopping, the television is off, the Xbox cables unhooked.

In Chuy’s room the backpack Keller had bought him is gone, as are the few clothes Chuy owns. His toothbrush is missing from the ceramic rack in the bathroom. Whatever storms blew inside Chuy’s head, Keller thinks, have apparently driven him to leave. At least, as Keller discovers when he searches the room, he took his meds with him.

Keller drives around the neighborhood, asking at local shops and internet cafés. No one has seen Chuy. He cruises the places downtown where teenagers hang out, but doesn’t see Chuy. On the off chance that the kid has decided to go out to Valverde, he calls Marisol, but no one has seen him there, either.

Maybe, Keller thinks, he’s crossed the bridge back into El Paso where he grew up, so Keller goes over and drives around the barrio, asks some reasonably hostile gangbangers who instantly make him as some sort of cop and tell him that they haven’t seen any Chuy Barajos.

Keller reaches out to old connections with the El Paso PD narcotics squad and finds out that Chuy is a person of interest in several local homicides back in ’07 and ’08 and they’d like to talk with him. In any case, they’ll keep an eye out and give Keller a call if they pick him up.

Going back to Juárez, Keller finds Terry Blanco at San Martín over on Avenida Escobar downing a Caguama at the bar.

“Who is this kid?” the cop asks when Keller explains the favor he wants.

“You know who he is,” Keller says. “You see him when you scope my house.”

“Just checking on your welfare,” Blanco says. He’s drunk more than one beer. “Tough times here, Keller. We don’t know who to report to anymore, who’s in charge. You think he’s alive?”

“Who?”

“Barrera.”

“I don’t know,” Keller says. “Have you seen this kid?”

“You know how many fucked-up kids we got running around Mexico?” Blanco asks. “Shit, just in Juárez? Hundreds? Thousands? What’s one more? What’s this one to you?”

Keller doesn’t have an answer for that. He says, “Just pick him up if you find him. Bring him to me.”

“Sure, why not?”

Keller leaves some money on the bar for Blanco’s next beer. Then he gets back in his car, calls Orduña and explains the situation.

“This Barajos was in Guatemala?” Orduña asks.

“Yeah.”

“Was he a witness?”

“To what, Roberto?”

“Okay.”

“Look, you owe this kid,” Keller says. “He killed Forty.”

After a long silence Orduña says, “We’ll take good care of him. But, Arturo, you know the odds of finding him are …”

“I know.”

Infinitesimal.

The long drug war has left thousands of orphans, shattered families and dislocated teenagers. And that doesn’t include the thousands fleeing gang violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, passing through Mexico to try to find sanctuary in the United States. A lot of them don’t make it.

Chuy is now both a monster and a ghost.

Senator Ben O’Brien calls.

He’s in El Paso, phones Keller and asks for a meeting. What he actually says is “Keller, let me buy you a beer.”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Indigo. On Kansas Street. You know it?”

Keller knows it. He drives up to the city and meets O’Brien at the hotel bar. The senator has gone back to his roots, wearing a denim shirt and Lucchese boots. His Stetson is perched on his lap. Good as his word, he brings a pitcher of beer, pours one for Keller and says, “I saw something interesting driving through El Paso today—a homemade sign that read ‘Adán Vive.’”

Keller isn’t surprised—he’s seen the same signs in Juárez and heard that they’re all over the place in Sinaloa and Durango. “What can I tell you? The man has a following.”

“He’s becoming Che Guevara,” O’Brien says.

“I guess absence does make the heart grow fonder.”

“You heard anything more?” O’Brien asks. “About his death?”

“I don’t follow that world anymore.”

“Bullshit.”

Keller shrugs—it’s true.

“Do you read the American papers?” O’Brien asks.

“The sports pages,” Keller says.

“Then you don’t know what’s been happening up here?” O’Brien asks. “With heroin?”

“No.”

“A lot of people in the law enforcement community have been celebrating Barrera’s alleged demise,” O’Brien says, “but the truth is that it hasn’t slowed the flow of drugs at all. In fact, it’s only gotten worse. Especially with heroin.”

From the year 2000 to 2006, O’Brien tells him, fatal heroin overdoses stayed fairly stable, about 2,000 a year. From 2007 to 2010, they rose to about 3,000. But in 2011, they rose to 4,000. Six thousand in 2012, 8,000 in 2013.

“To put it in perspective,” O’Brien says, “from 2004 to now we lost 7,222 military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.”

“To put it in perspective,” Keller says, “in the same period of time, over a hundred thousand Mexicans were killed in drug violence, with another twenty-two thousand missing. And that’s a conservative estimate.”

“You’re making my argument,” O’Brien says. “The loss of life you cite in Mexico, the heroin epidemic here, the millions of people we have behind bars. Whatever we’re doing, it’s not working.”

“If you asked me here to tell me that,” Keller says, “you’ve wasted both our time. Thanks for the beer, but what do you want?”

“I represent a group of senators and congressmen who have the power and influence to fire the current DEA administrator and appoint a new one,” O’Brien says. “We want that to be you.”

Keller has never been easily shocked, but he is now. “With all respect, you’re out of your goddamn mind.”

“The country is flooded with heroin, use is up over eighty percent, and most of it’s coming from Mexico,” O’Brien says. “I have constituents who go to cemeteries to visit their children.”

“And I’ve seen Mexican kids buried with bulldozers,” Keller says. “Nobody up here gave a damn. There’s a ‘heroin epidemic’ now because white kids are dying.”

“I’m asking you to give a damn now,” O’Brien says.

“I fought my war,” Keller says.

“Kids are dying out there,” O’Brien says. “And I don’t think you’re a guy who can just take your pension, sit on your ass and let it happen.”

“Watch me.”

“Think about it.” O’Brien slides off the barstool and hands Keller his card. “Call me.”

“I won’t be calling.”

“We’ll see.”

O’Brien leaves him sitting there.

Keller does the math—O’Brien said that heroin deaths rose slightly in 2010, but then spiked in 2011. Then rose again by half in 2012.

All while Adán was alive.

Motherfucker, Keller thinks. Barrera put it in place—his last malignant gift to the world. Keller remembers his Shakespeare: “The evil that men do lives after them.”

Ain’t that the truth.

The ghost and the monster.

They eat at Garufa, an Argentine place on Bulevar Tomás Fernández. It’s expensive as hell but he wants to take her someplace nice. Keller has steak, Marisol has salmon and eats with an unabashed appetite, something he’s always liked about her.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Marisol asks, setting down her fork.

“Why do you think there’s something I’m not telling you?”

“Because I know you,” Marisol says. “So what is it? Spill.”

When he tells her about his meeting with O’Brien, she sits back in her chair. “Arturo, oh my God. I’m stunned.”

“Right?”

“I thought you were persona non grata,” Marisol says.

“So did I.” He tells her what O’Brien said and how he’d responded.

Marisol is quiet.

“Christ, you don’t think I should accept, do you?” Keller asks.

She’s still quiet.

“Do you?” Keller asks.

“Art, think of the power you’d have,” Marisol says. “The good you could do. You could actually effect change.”

Keller sometimes forgets her political activism. Now he remembers the woman who had camped out in the Zócalo in Mexico City to protest election fraud, her marches down the Paseo de la Reforma to protest police brutality. All part of the woman he fell in love with.

“You’re completely opposed to virtually everything DEA does,” he says.

“But you could change policies.”

“I don’t know,” Keller says.

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s play it the other way. Why wouldn’t you?”

Keller lays out the reasons for her. One, he’s done with the war on drugs.

“But maybe it’s not done with you,” she says.

Forty years is more than enough, he tells her. He’s not a bureaucrat, not a political animal. He’s not sure he can even live in the US anymore.

She knows that Keller’s mother was Mexican, his father an Anglo who brought them to San Diego and then abandoned them. But he grew up as an American—UCLA, the US Marines—then the DEA took him back to Mexico and he’s spent more of his adult life there than in the States. Marisol knows that he’s always been torn between the two cultures—Arturo has a love/hate relationship with both countries.

And Marisol knows that he moved to Juárez almost out of guilt—that he thought he owed something to this city that had suffered so much from the US war on drugs, that he had a moral obligation to help its recovery—even if it was as small a contribution as paying taxes, buying groceries, keeping a house open.

And then taking care of Chuy, his personal cross to bear.

But Chuy is gone.

Now she asks him, “Why do you want to live in Juárez? And tell the truth.”

“It’s real.”

“It is that,” she says. “And you can’t walk a block without being reminded of the war.”

“Meaning what?”

“There’s nothing for you here now but bad memories and—”

She stops.

“What?” Keller asks.

“All right—me,” she says. “Proximity to me. I know you still love me, Arturo.”

“I can’t help what I feel.”

“I’m not asking you to,” Marisol says. “But if you’re turning this down to be near me, don’t.”

They finish dinner and then go for a walk, something they couldn’t have done a couple of years ago.

“What do you hear?” Marisol asks.

“Nothing.”

“Exactly,” Marisol says. “No police sirens, ambulances screaming. No gunshots.”

“The Pax Sinaloa.”

“Can it last?” she asks.

No, Keller thinks.

This isn’t peace, it’s a lull.

“I’ll drive you home,” Keller says.

“It’s a long drive,” Marisol says. “Why don’t I just stay at your place?”

“Chuy’s room is free,” Keller says.

“What if I don’t want to stay in Chuy’s room?” Marisol asks.

He wakes up very early, before dawn, with a cold Juárez wind whipping the walls and rattling the windows.

It’s funny, he thinks, how the big decisions in your life don’t always follow a big moment or a big change, but just seem to settle on you like an inevitability, something you didn’t decide at all but has always been decided for you.

Maybe it was the sign that decided it.

ADÁN VIVE.

Because it was true, Keller thinks that morning. The king might be gone, but the kingdom he created remains. Spreading suffering and death as surely as if Barrera were still on the throne.

Keller has to admit another truth. If anyone in the world could destroy the kingdom, he tells himself—by dint of history, experience, motivation, knowledge and skills—it’s you.

Marisol knows it, too. That morning he comes back to bed and she wakes up and asks, “What?”

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

“A nightmare?”

“Maybe.” And he laughs.

“What?”

“I don’t think I’m ready to be a ghost yet,” Keller says. “Or live with ghosts. And you were right—my war isn’t over.”

“You want to take that job.”

“Yes,” Keller says. He puts his hand to the back of her head and pulls her closer. “But only if you’ll come with me.”

“Arturo …”

“We wear our sorrow like it’s some sort of medal,” Keller says. “Drag it around like a chain, and it’s heavy, Mari. I don’t want to let it beat us, make us less than we are. We’ve lost so much, let’s not lose each other, too. That’s too big a loss.”

“The clinic—”

“I’ll take care of it. I promise.”

They get married in New Mexico, at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, have a brief honeymoon in Taos, then drive to Washington, where O’Brien’s Realtor has lined up houses for them to look at.

They love a house on Hillyer Place, put in an offer and buy it.

Keller’s at work the next morning.

Because he knows that the ghost has come back.

And with it, the monster.

2
The Death of Kings

Come, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.

—Shakespeare

Richard II, Part One

Washington, DC
May 2014

Keller looks down at the photo of the skeleton.

Blades of grass poke up through the ribs; vines wrap around the leg bones as if trying to strap the body to the earth.

“Is it Barrera?” Keller asks.

Barrera’s been off the radar for a year and a half. Now these photos have just come in from the DEA Guatemala City field office. Guatemalan special forces found the bones in the Petén, in the rain forest about a kilometer from the village of Dos Erres, where Barrera was last seen.

Tom Blair, the head of DEA’s Intelligence Unit, lays down a different photo on Keller’s desk, this of the skeleton lying on a gurney. “The height matches.”

Barrera is short, Keller knows, a shade under five seven, but that could describe a lot of people, especially in the undernourished Mayan regions of Guatemala.

Blair spreads more photos on the desk—a close-up of the skull next to a facial shot of Adán Barrera. Keller recognizes the image: it was taken fifteen years ago, when Barrera was booked into the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego.

Keller put him there.

The face looks back at him.

Familiar, almost intimate.

“Orbitals match,” Blair is saying, “brain case measurements identical. We’d need dental and DNA analysis to be a hundred percent, but …”

We’ll have dental records and DNA samples from Barrera’s stay in the American prison system, Keller thinks. It would be highly doubtful that any useful DNA could be pulled from a skeleton that had been rotting in the rain forest for more than a year, but Keller can see in the photos that the jaw is still intact.

And he knows in his gut that the dental records are going to match.

“The way the back of the skull is blown out,” Blair says, “I’d say two shots to the face, close range, fired downward. Barrera was executed, by someone who wanted him to know it was coming. It would match the Dos Erres theory.”

The Dos Erres theory, a particular pet of the DEA’s Sinaloa Working Group, postulates that in October 2012, Adán Barrera and his partner and father-in-law, Ignacio Esparza, traveled with a large, armed entourage to Guatemala for a peace conference with their rivals, an especially vicious drug cartel known as the Zetas. There was a factual precedent for this—Barrera had sat down with the Zeta leadership at a similar conference back in 2006, divided Mexico into territories, and created a short-lived peace that fell apart into an even more violent and costly war. The theory continues that Barrera and the Zeta leader Heriberto Ochoa met in the remote village of Dos Erres in the Petén District of Guatemala and again carved up Mexico like a Thanksgiving turkey. At a party to celebrate the peace, the Zetas ambushed and slaughtered the Sinaloans.

Neither Barrera nor Esparza had been seen or heard from since the reputed meeting, nor had Ochoa or his right-hand man, Miguel Morales, also known as Forty. And there was intelligence to support the theory that a large gunfight occurred in Dos Erres—D-2, the military unit that controls Guatemalan intelligence, had gone in and found scores of corpses, some in the remnants of a large bonfire, which was consistent with the Zeta practice of burning bodies.

The Zetas, once the most feared cartel in Mexico, went into steep decline after the alleged Dos Erres conference, further suggesting that their leadership had been killed and that they had suffered mass casualties.

The Sinaloa cartel had not experienced a similar decline. To the contrary, it had become the undisputed power, by far the most dominant cartel, and had imposed a sort of peace on a Mexico that had seen a hundred thousand people killed in ten years of drug violence.

And Sinaloa was sending more drugs than ever into the United States, not only the marijuana, methamphetamine and cocaine that had made the cartel wealthy beyond measure, but also masses of heroin.

All of which argued against the Dos Erres theory and for the rival “empty coffin theory” that Barrera had, in fact, decimated the Zetas in Dos Erres, then staged his own death and was now running the cartel from a remote location.

Again, there was ample precedent—over the years several cartel bosses had faked their deaths to relieve relentless DEA pressure. Cartel soldiers had raided coroners’ offices and stolen the bodies of their bosses to prevent positive identification and to encourage rumors that their jefes were still on the right side of the grass.

Indeed, as Keller has often pointed out to his subordinates, none of the bodies of the leaders alleged to have been killed in Dos Erres have ever been found. And while it is widely accepted that Ochoa and Forty have gone to their reward, the fact that Sinaloa just keeps humming along like a machine lends credence to the empty coffin theory.

But the absence of any appearances by Barrera over the past year and a half indicates otherwise. While he always tended to be reclusive, Barrera usually would have shown up with his young wife, Eva, for holiday celebrations in his hometown of La Tuna, Sinaloa, or for New Year’s Eve at a resort town like Puerto Vallarta or Mazatlán. No such sightings have been reported. Furthermore, digital surveillance has revealed no emails, tweets, or other social media messages; phone monitoring has revealed no telephonic communications.

Barrera has numerous estancias in Sinaloa and Durango in addition to houses in Los Mochis, along the coast. The DEA knows about these residences and there are doubtless others. But satellite photos of these locations have shown a decided lessening of traffic in and out. Ordinarily, when Barrera was moving from one location to another, there would be an increase in traffic of bodyguards and support personnel, a spike in internet and cell-phone communications as his people arranged logistics, and a heavier communications footprint among state and local police on the Sinaloa cartel payroll.

The absence of any of this would tend to support the Dos Erres theory, that Barrera is dead.

But the question—if Barrera isn’t running the cartel, who is?—has yet to be answered, and the Mexican rumor mill is full to capacity with Barrera sightings in Sinaloa, Durango, Guatemala, Barcelona, even in San Diego where his wife (or widow?) and two small sons live. “Barrera” has even sent texts and Twitter messages that have fueled a cult of “Adán vive” disciples, who leave hand-painted signs along roadsides to that effect.

Members of Barrera’s immediate family—especially his sister, Elena—have gone to some lengths to not confirm his death, and any ambiguity surrounding his status gives the cartel time to try to arrange an orderly succession.

The Dos Erres theory believers aver that the cartel has a vested interest in keeping Barrera “alive” and is putting out these messages as disinformation—a living Barrera is to be feared, and that fear helps keep potential enemies from challenging Sinaloa. Some of the theory’s strongest adherents even posit that the Mexican government itself, desperate to maintain stability, is behind the Adán Vive movement.

The confirmation of Barrera’s death, if that’s what this is, Keller thinks, is going to send shock waves across the narco world.

“Who has custody of the body?” Keller asks.

“D-2,” Blair says.

“So Sinaloa already knows.” The cartel has deep sources in all levels of the Guatemalan government. And the CIA already knows, too, Keller thinks. D-2 has been penetrated by everybody. “Who else in DEA knows about this?”

“Just the Guat City RAC, you, and me,” Blair says. “I thought you’d want to keep this tight.”

Blair is smart and loyal enough to make sure that Keller got this news first and as exclusively as possible. Art Keller is a good man to have as a boss and a dangerous man to have as an enemy.

Everyone in DEA knows about the vendetta between Keller and Adán Barrera, which goes all the way back to the 1980s, when Barrera participated in the torture-murder of Keller’s partner, Ernie Hidalgo.

And everyone knows that Keller was sent down to Mexico to recapture Barrera, but ended up taking down the Zetas instead.

Maybe literally.

The watercooler talk—more like whispers—speaks of the ruins of a wrecked Black Hawk helicopter in the village of Dos Erres, where the battle between the Zetas and Barrera’s Sinaloans allegedly took place. Sure, the Guatemalan army has American helicopters—so does the Sinaloa cartel for that matter—but the talk continues about a secret mission of American spec-op mercenaries who went in and took out the Zeta leadership, bin Laden style. And if you believe those rumors—dismissed as laughable grassy knoll fantasies by the DEA brass—you might also believe that on that mission was one Art Keller.

And now Keller, who took down both Adán Barrera and the Zetas, is the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency, the most powerful “drug warrior” in the world, commanding an agency with over 10,000 employees, 5,000 special agents, and 800 intelligence analysts.

“Keep it tight for now,” Keller says.

He knows that Blair hears the dog whistle—that what Keller really means is that he wants to keep this away from Denton Howard, the assistant administrator of the DEA, a political appointee who would like nothing more than to flay Keller alive and display the pelt on his office wall.

The chief whisperer of all things Keller—Keller has a questionable past, Keller has divided loyalties, a Mexican mother and a Mexican wife (did you know that his first name isn’t actually Arthur, it’s Arturo?), Keller is a cowboy, a loose cannon, he has blood on his hands, there are rumors that he was even there in Dos Erres—Howard is a cancer, going around the Intelligence Unit to work his own sources, cultivating personal diplomatic relationships in Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Europe, Asia, working the Hill, cuddling up to the media.

Keller can’t keep this news from him, but even a couple of hours’ head start will help. For one thing, the Mexican government has to hear this from me, Keller thinks, not from Howard, or worse, from Howard’s buddies at Fox News.

“Send the dental records to D-2,” Keller says. “They get our full cooperation.”

We’re talking hours, not days, Keller thinks, before this gets out there. Some responsible person in D-2 sent this to us, but someone else has doubtless put in a call to Sinaloa, and someone else will look to cash in with the media.

Because Adán Barrera has become in death what he never was in life.

A rock star.

It started, in of all places, with an article in Rolling Stone.

An investigative journalist named Clay Bowen started to chase down the rumors of a gun battle in Guatemala between the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel and soon tripped over the fact that Adán Barrera had, in the snappy hip language of the story, “gone 414.” The journalistic Stanley went in search of his narco Livingstone and came up with nothing.

So that became his story.

Adán Barrera was the phantom, the will-o’-the-wisp, the mysterious, invisible power behind the world’s largest drug-trafficking organization, an elusive genius that law enforcement could neither catch nor even find. The story went back to Barrera’s “daring escape” from a Mexican prison in 2004 (“Daring,” my aching ass, Keller thought when he read the story—the man bought his way out of the prison and left from the roof in a helicopter), and now Barrera had made the “ultimate escape” by staging his own death.

In the absence of an interview with his subject, Bowen apparently talked to associates and family members (“anonymous sources say … unidentified people close to Barrera state that …”) who painted a flattering picture of Barrera—he gives money to churches and schools; he builds clinics and playgrounds; he’s good to his mother and his kids.

He brought peace to Mexico.

(This last quote made Keller laugh out loud. It was Barrera who started the war that killed a hundred thousand people, and he “brought peace” by winning it?)

Adán Barrera, drug trafficker and mass murderer, became a combination of Houdini, Zorro, Amelia Earhart, and Mahatma Gandhi. A misunderstood child of rural poverty who rose from his humble beginnings to wealth and power by selling a product that, after all, people wanted anyway, and who is now a benefactor, a philanthropist harassed and hunted by two governments that he brilliantly eludes and outwits.

The rest of the media took it up during a slow news cycle, and stories about Barrera’s disappearance ran on CNN, Fox, all the networks. He became a social media darling, with thousands playing a game of “Where’s Waldo?” on the internet, breathlessly speculating on the great man’s whereabouts. (Keller’s absolute favorite story was that Barrera had turned down an offer from Dancing with the Stars, or alternatively, was hiding out as the star of an NBC sitcom.) The furor faded, of course, as all these things do, save for a few die-hard bloggers and the DEA and the Mexican SEIDO, for whom the issue of Barrera’s existence or lack thereof wasn’t a game but deadly serious business.

And now, Keller thinks, it will start again.

The coffin is filled.

Now it’s the throne that’s empty.

We’re in a double bind, Keller thinks. The Sinaloa cartel is the key driver behind the heroin traffic. If we help take the cartel down, we destroy the Pax Sinaloa. If we lay off the cartel, we accept the continuation of the heroin crisis here.

The Sinaloa cartel has its agenda and we have ours, and Barrera’s “death” could create an irreconcilable conflict between promoting stability in Mexico and stopping the heroin epidemic in the United States.

The first requires the preservation of the Sinaloa cartel, the second requires its destruction.

The State Department and CIA will at least passively collude in Mexico’s partnership with the cartel, while the Justice Department and DEA are determined to shut down the cartel’s heroin operations.

There are other factions. The AG wants drug policy reforms, and so does the White House drug czar, but while the attorney general is going to leave soon anyway, the White House is more cautious. The president has all the courage and freedom of a lame duck, but doesn’t want to hand the conservatives any ammunition to fire at his potential successor who has to run in 2016.

And one of those conservatives is your own deputy, Keller thinks, who would like to see you and the reforms swept out in ’16 and preferably before. The Republicans already have the House and Senate, if they win the White House the new occupant will put in a new AG who will take us back to the heights—or depths, if you will—of the war on drugs, and one of the first people he’ll fire is you.

So the clock is ticking.

It’s your job, Keller thinks, to stop the flow of heroin into this country. The Sinaloa cartel—Adán’s legacy, the edifice he constructed, that you helped him construct—is slaughtering thousands of people and it has to die.

Check that—it won’t just die.

You have to kill it.

When Blair leaves, Keller starts working the phones.

First he puts in a call to Orduña.

“They found the body,” Keller says, without introduction.

“Where?”

“Where do you think?” Keller says. “I’m about to call SEIDO but I wanted you to know first.”

Because Orduña is clean—absolutely squeaky clean, taking neither money nor shit from anyone. His marines—with Keller’s help and intelligence from the US—had devastated the Zetas, and now Orduña is ready to take down the rest, including Sinaloa.

A silence, then Orduña says, “So champagne is in order.”

Next, Keller phones SEIDO, the Mexican version of a combined FBI and DEA, and speaks to the attorney general. It’s a delicate call because the Mexican AG would be offended that the Guatemalans contacted DEA before they contacted him. The relationship has always been fragile, all the more so because of Howard’s incessant meddling, but mostly because SEIDO has been, at various times, in Sinaloa’s pocket.

“I wanted to give you a heads-up right away,” Keller says. “We’re going to put out a press release, but we can hold it until you put out yours.”

“I appreciate that.”

The next call Keller makes is to his own attorney general.

“We want to get a statement out,” the AG says.

“We do,” Keller says, “but let’s hold it until Mexico can get it out first.”

“Why is that?”

“To let them save face,” Keller says. “It looks bad for them if they got the news from us.”

“They did get the news from us.”

“We have to work with them,” Keller says. “And it’s always good to have a marker. Hell, it’s not like we captured the guy—he got killed by other narcos.”

“Is that what happened?”

“Sure looks like it.” He spends five more minutes persuading the AG to hold the announcement and then calls a contact at CNN. “You didn’t get this from me, but Mexico is about to announce that Adán Barrera’s body has been found in Guatemala.”

“Jesus, can we run with that?”

“That’s your call,” Keller says. “I’m just telling you what’s about to happen. It will confirm the story that Barrera was killed after a peace meeting with the Zetas.”

“Then who’s been running the cartel?”

“Hell if I know.”

“Come on, Art.”

“Do you want to get out ahead of Fox,” Keller asks, “or do you want to stay on the phone asking me questions I can’t answer?”

Turns out it’s the former.

Martin’s Tavern has been in business since they repealed Prohibition in 1933 and has been a haven for Democratic pols ever since. Keller steps inside next to the booth where legend says that John Kennedy proposed to Jackie.

Camelot, Keller thinks.

Another myth, but one that he had profoundly believed in as a kid. He believed in JFK and Bobby, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus and God. The first four having been assassinated, that leaves God, but not the one who’d inhabited Keller’s childhood in the place of his absent father, not the omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent deity who ruled with stern but fair justice.

That God died in Mexico.

Like a lot of gods, Keller thinks as the stale warmth of the cozy tavern hits him. Mexico is a country where the temples of the new gods are built on the gravesites of the old.

He climbs the narrow wooden stairs to the upstairs room where Sam Rayburn used to hold court, and Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson twisted arms to get their bills passed.

O’Brien sits alone in a booth. His full face is ruddy, his thick hair snow white, as befits a man in his seventies. His thick hand is wrapped around a squat glass. Another glass sits on the table.

O’Brien is a Republican. He just likes Martin’s.

“I ordered for you,” he says as Keller sits down.

“Thanks,” Keller says. “It is Barrera’s body. They just confirmed it.”

“What did you tell the attorney general?” O’Brien asks.

“What we know,” Keller says. “That our intelligence about a battle between the Zetas and Sinaloa turned out to be accurate, and that Barrera was apparently killed in the gunfight.”

O’Brien says, “If Dos Erres becomes a real story, we can be connected to Tidewater.”

“We can,” Keller says. “But there’s nothing to connect Tidewater to the raid.”

The company had dissolved and then re-formed in Arizona under a different flag. Twenty people went on the Guatemala mission. One KIA. His body was extracted, the family informed that he was killed in a training accident, and they agreed to an out-of-court settlement. Four wounded, also successfully extracted and treated at a facility in Costa Rica, the medical records destroyed and the men compensated according to the contractual terms. Of the remaining fifteen, one has been killed in a car accident, a second while under contract to another vendor. The other thirteen have no intention of breaching the confidentiality clauses in their contracts.

The Black Hawk that went down had no markings, and the guys blew it up before they exfilled. D-2 came in the next day and laundered the scene.

“I’m more worried about the White House getting nervous,” Keller says.

“I’ll keep them steady,” O’Brien says. “We got guns to each other’s heads, what we used to call ‘mutually assured destruction.’ And shit, when you think about it, if the public found out that POTUS went cowboy and whacked three of the world’s biggest drug dealers? In the current environment—the heroin epidemic—his approval rating would go through the roof.”

“Your Republican colleagues would try to impeach,” Keller says. “And you’d vote with them.”

There’s been talk of O’Brien running for president in 2016, most of it started by the senator himself.

O’Brien laughs. “In terms of sheer treachery, backstabbing and cutthroat, hand-to-hand combat—in terms of pure lethal killing power—the Mexican cartels have nothing on this town. Try to remember that.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“So you’re satisfied this won’t come back on us.”

“I am.”

O’Brien raises his glass. “Then here’s to the recently discovered dead.”

Keller finishes his drink.

Two hours later Keller looks at the image of Iván Esparza on the big screen of the briefing room. Esparza wears a striped norteño shirt, jeans, and shades, and stands in front of a private jet.

“Iván Archivaldo Esparza,” Blair says. “Age thirty. Born in Culiacán, Sinaloa. Eldest son of the late Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Esparza, one of the three principal partners in the Sinaloa cartel. Iván has two younger brothers, Oviedo and Alfredo, in order of seniority, all in the family business.”

The picture changes to a bare-chested Iván standing on a boat with other motor yachts in the background.

“Iván is a classic example of the group that has come to be known as Los Hijos,” Blair says. “‘The Sons.’ Replete with norteño-cowboy wardrobe, oversize jewelry, gold chains, backward baseball caps, exotic boots and multiple cars—Maseratis, Ferraris, Lamborghinis. He even has the diamond-encrusted handguns. And he posts photos of all this on social media.”

Blair shows some images from Iván’s blog:

A gold-plated AK-47 on the console of a Maserati convertible.

Stacks of twenty-dollar bills.

Iván posing with two bikini-clad young women.

Another chica sitting in the front seat of a car with the name Esparza tattooed on her long left leg.

Sports cars, boats, jet skis, more guns.

Keller’s favorite photos are of Iván in a hooded jacket bending over a fully grown lion stretched out in front of a Ferrari, and then one with two lion cubs in the front seat. The scar on Iván’s face is barely visible, but the cheekbone is still a little flattened.

“Now that Barrera is confirmed dead,” Blair says, “Iván is next in line to take over. Not only is he Nacho’s son, he’s Adán’s brother-in-law. The Esparza wing of the cartel has billions of dollars, hundreds of soldiers and heavy political influence. But there are other candidates.”

A picture of an elegant woman comes on the screen.

“Elena Sánchez Barrera,” Blair says, “Adán’s sister, once ran his Baja plaza but retired years ago, yielding the territory to Iván. She has two sons: Rudolfo, who did time here in the US for cocaine trafficking, and Luis. Elena is reputed to be out of the drug business now, as are her two sons. Most of the family money is now invested in legitimate businesses, but both Rudolfo and Luis occasionally run with Los Hijos, and as Adán’s blood nephews, they have to be considered potential heirs to the throne.”

A photo of Ricardo Núñez comes up.

“Núñez has the wealth and the power to take over the cartel,” Blair says, “but he’s a natural born number two, born to stand behind the throne, not to sit in it. He’s a lawyer at heart, a cautious, persnickety legalist without the taste or tolerance for blood that a move for the top demands.”

Another picture of a young man goes up on the screen.

Keller recognizes Ric Núñez.

“Núñez has a son,” Blair says, “also Ricardo, twenty-five, with the ridiculous sobriquet of ‘Mini-Ric.’ He’s only on the list because he’s Barrera’s godson.”

More pictures go up of Mini-Ric.

Drinking beer.

Driving a Porsche.

Holding a monogrammed pistol.

Pulling a cheetah on a leash.

“Ric lacks his father’s seriousness,” Blair says. “He’s another Hijo, a playboy burning through money he never earned through his own sweat or blood. When he isn’t high, he’s drunk. He can’t control himself, never mind the cartel.”

Keller sees a photo of Ric and Iván drinking together, raising glasses in a toast to the camera. Their free hands are tossed over each other’s shoulders.

“Iván Esparza and Ric Núñez are best friends,” Blair says. “Iván is probably closer to Ric than to his own brothers. But Ric is a beta wolf in the pack that Iván leads. Iván is ambitious, Ric is almost antiambitious.”

Keller already knows all this, but he asked Blair to give a briefing to the DEA and Justice personnel in the wake of the discovery of Adán’s body. Denton Howard is in the front row—finally educating himself, Keller thinks.

“There are a few other Hijos,” Blair says. “Rubén Ascensión’s father, Tito, was Nacho Esparza’s bodyguard, but now has his own organization, the Jalisco cartel, which primarily makes its money from methamphetamine.

“This kid—”

He shows another picture of a young man—short black hair, black shirt, staring angrily into the camera.

“—Damien Tapia,” Blair says, “aka ‘The Young Wolf.’ Age twenty-two, son of the late Diego Tapia, another one of Adán’s former partners. Was a member of Los Hijos until his dad ran afoul of Barrera back in 2007, touching off a major civil war in the cartel, which Barrera won. Used to be very tight with Ric and Iván, but Damien doesn’t hang with them anymore, as he blames their fathers for his father’s killing.”

Los Hijos, Keller thinks, are sort of the Brat Pack of the Mexican drug trade, the third generation of traffickers. The first was Miguel Ángel Barrera—“M-1”—and his associates; the second was Adán Barrera, Nacho Esparza, Diego Tapia, and their various rivals and enemies—Heriberto Ochoa, Hugo Garza, Rafael Caro.

Now it’s Los Hijos.

But unlike the previous generation, Los Hijos never worked the poppy fields, never got their hands dirty in the soil or bloody in the wars that their fathers and uncles fought. They talk a good game, they wave around gold-plated pistols and AKs, but they’ve never walked the walk. Spoiled, entitled and vacuous, they think they’re just owed the money and the power. They have no idea what comes with it.

Iván Esparza’s assumption of power is at least ten years premature. He doesn’t have the maturity or experience required to run this thing. If he’s smart, he’ll use Ricardo Núñez as a sort of consigliere, but the word on Iván is that he’s not smart—he’s arrogant, short-tempered and showy, qualities that his buttoned-down father had only contempt for.

But the son is not the father.

“It’s a new day,” Keller says. “Barrera’s death didn’t slow down the flow for even a week. There’s more coming in now than ever. So there’s a continuity and stability there. The cartel is a corporation that lost its CEO. It still has a board of directors that will eventually appoint a new chief executive. Let’s make sure we’re privy to that conversation.”

He’s the image of his old man.

When Hugo Hidalgo walks through the door, it takes Keller back almost thirty years.

To himself and Ernie Hidalgo in Guadalajara.

Same jet-black hair.

Same handsome face.

Same smile.

“Hugo, how long has it been?” Keller walks out from behind the desk and hugs him. “Come on, sit down, sit down.”

He leads Hugo to a chair in a little alcove by the window and takes the seat across from him. His receptionist and a number of secretaries had wondered how a junior field agent had managed to get an appointment with the administrator, especially on a day when Keller had canceled everything else and basically locked himself in his office.

Keller has been in there all day, watching Mexican news shows and satellite feeds covering the announcement of Adán Barrera’s death. Univision broadcast footage of the funeral cortege—scores of vehicles—as it snaked its way down from the mountains toward Culiacán. In villages and towns along the way, people lined the road and tossed flowers, ran up to the hearse weeping, pressing their hands against the glass. Makeshift shrines had been constructed with photos of Barrera, candles and signs that read ¡ADÁN VIVE!

All for the little piece of shit who murdered the father of the young man who now sits across from him, who used to call him Tío Arturo. Hugo must be, what, thirty now? A little older?

“How are you?” Keller asks. “How’s the family?”

“Mom’s good,” Hugo says. “She’s living in Houston now. Ernesto is with Austin PD. One of those hippie cops on a bicycle. Married, three kids.”

Keller feels guilty that he’s lost touch.

Feels guilty about a lot of things involving Ernie Hidalgo. It was his fault that Ernie got killed when Hugo was just a little boy. Keller had spent his entire career trying to make it right—had tracked down everyone involved and put them behind bars.

Devoted his life to taking down Adán Barrera.

And finally did.

“How about you?” Keller asks. “Married? Kids?”

“Neither,” Hugo says. “Yet. Look, sir, I know you’re very busy, I appreciate you taking the time—”

“Of course.”

“You once told me if there was anything you could ever do, not to hesitate.”

“I meant it.”

“Thank you,” Hugo says. “I haven’t wanted to take advantage of that, of our relationship, it’s not that I think I’m owed anything …”

Keller has followed Hugo’s career from afar.

The kid has done it the right way.

Military. Good service with the US Marines in Iraq.

Then he went back and finished college, degree in criminal justice from UT, and then caught on with Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. Put up a good record there and kept applying to DEA until he was finally hired.

He could have done it differently, Keller knows. Could simply have walked in and said he was the son of a fallen DEA hero, and they would have given him a job right away.

But he didn’t do that.

He earned it, and Keller respects that.

His father would have, too.

“What can I do for you, Hugo?”

“I’ve been on the job for three years now,” Hugo says, “and I’m still investigating marijuana buys in suburban Seattle.”

“You don’t like Seattle?”

“It’s about as far as you can get from Mexico,” Hugo says. “But maybe that’s the idea.”

“What do you mean?”

Hugo looks uncomfortable, but then sets his jaw and looks straight at Keller.

Just like Ernie would have done, Keller thinks.

“Are you keeping me out of danger, sir?” Hugo asks. “If you are—”

“I’m not.”

“Well, someone is,” Hugo says. “I’ve put in for FAST assignments five times and haven’t gotten one of them. It doesn’t make any sense. I speak fluent Spanish, I look Mexican, I have all the weapons qualifications.”

“Why do you want FAST?”

FAST is an acronym for Foreign-Deployed Advisory and Support Team, but Keller knows they do a lot more than advise and support. They’re basically the DEA’s special forces.

“Because that’s where it’s happening,” Hugo says. “I see kids dying of overdoses. I want in on that fight. On the front lines.”

“Is that the only reason?” Keller asks.

“Isn’t it enough?”

“Can I be honest with you, Hugo?”

“I wish someone would,” Hugo says.

“You can’t spend your life getting revenge for your father,” Keller says.

“With all respect, sir,” Hugo says. “You did.”

“Which is how I know.” Keller leans forward in his chair. “The men who killed your father are all dead. Two died in prison, one was killed in a gunfight on a bridge in San Diego. I was there. The last one … they’re about to hold his wake. The job is finished, son. You don’t have to take it up.”

“I want my father to have been proud of me,” Hugo says.

“I’m sure he is.”

“I don’t want to be advanced because of who my father was,” Hugo says, “but I don’t want to be held back, either.”

“That’s fair,” Keller says. “I tell you what, if someone is blocking your transfer to FAST, I’ll unblock it. You pass the test, you get through training—only half do—I’ll oil the wheels for assignment to Afghanistan. Front lines.”

“I speak Spanish, not Urdu.”

“Be realistic, Hugo,” Keller says. “There’s no way in hell we’re going to let you go into Mexico. Or Guatemala, or El Salvador, or Costa Rica or Colombia. DEA is simply not going to risk those headlines, if something happened to you. And something would—you’d be a marked man.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“I won’t.” I had to tell Teresa Hidalgo her husband was dead, Keller thinks. I’m not going to tell her that her son has been killed. He makes a mental note to find out who has been keeping Hugo out of harm’s way and thank him. It was solid thinking. “You don’t want Kabul, name me something you would want. Europe—Spain, France, Italy?”

“Don’t dangle shiny objects in front of me, sir,” Hugo says. “Either I get moved to the front lines or I leave DEA. And you know I’ll catch on with a border-state police force and you also know they’ll put me UC. I’ll be making drug buys from Sinaloa before you take my name off the Christmas card list.”

You are your father’s son, Keller thinks. You’ll do exactly what you said, and you’ll get yourself killed, and I owe your dad more than that.

“You want to take down the cartel?” Keller asks.

“Yes, sir.”

“I might have a job for you right here,” Keller says. “As my aide.”

“Pushing paper,” Hugo says.

“You think you’re going to take down the cartel by buying a few keys of coke in El Paso or gunning down a few sicarios in El Salvador, you might be too stupid to work here,” Keller says. “But if you want to be in the real war, fly back to Seattle, pack your things, and be here ready to work first thing Monday morning. It’s the best offer you’re going to get, son. I’d take it if I were you.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Good. See you Monday.”

He walks Hugo to the door and thinks, Shit, I just got stood down by Ernie Hidalgo’s kid.

He goes back to the television.

They’ve brought Adán’s body back to Culiacán.

If Ric has to sit there five more minutes, he will blow his brains out.

For sure, this time.

Death would be preferable to sitting on this wooden folding chair staring at a closed coffin full of Adán Barrera’s bones, pretending to be grieving, pretending to be contemplating fond memories of his godfather that he really didn’t have.

The whole thing is gross.

But kind of funny, in a Guillermo del Toro kind of way. The whole concept of a velorio is so people can view the body, but there is no body, not really; they just tossed the skeleton into a coffin that probably cost more than most people’s houses, so it’s kind of like going to a movie where there’s no picture, only sound.

Then there was the whole discussion of what to do with the suit, because you’re supposed to dress the deceased in his best suit so he’s not walking around in the next life looking shabby, but that clearly wasn’t going to work, so what they did was they folded up an Armani they found in one of Adán’s closets and laid it in the coffin.

Even funnier, though, was the dilemma about what else to throw in, because the tradition is you put in stuff that the dead guy liked to do in life, but no one could think of anything that Adán did for fun, anything that he actually liked.

“We could put money in there,” Iván muttered to Ric as they stood on the edge of this conversation. “He sure as shit liked money.”

“Or pussy,” Ric answered.

The word was that his godfather was a major player.

“Yeah, I don’t think they’re going to let you kill some hot bitch and lay her in there with him,” Iván said.

“I dunno,” Ric said. “There’s plenty of room.”

“I’ll give you a thousand bucks to suggest it,” Iván said.

“Not worth it,” Ric said, watching his father and Elena Sánchez in earnest discussion on the topic. No, his dad would not be amused and Elena already didn’t like him. And, anyway, he wouldn’t say anything like that in front of Eva—speaking of hot bitches—who looked … well, hot … in her black dress.

Ric would definitely fuck Eva, who was, after all, his own age, but he wasn’t going to say that, either, not in front of her brother Iván.

“I’d fuck her,” Belinda had said to Ric. “Definitely.”

“You think she goes both ways?”

“Baby,” Belinda said, “with me, they all go both ways. I get anyone I want.”

Ric thought about this for a second. “Not Elena. She has ice down there.”

“I’d melt it,” Belinda said, flicking out her tongue. “And turn it to tears of joy.”

Belinda never lacked for confidence.

Anyway, what they finally decided to put in the coffin was a baseball, because Adán sort of liked baseball—although no one there could remember him going to a single game—an old pair of boxing gloves from Adán’s teenage days as a wannabe boxing promoter, and a photo of the daughter who died so young, which made Ric feel a little bad about wanting to put a dead chick in with him.

So that was that discussion—the more serious debate had been where to hold the velorio in the first place. At first they thought they’d do it at Adán’s mother’s house in his home village of La Tuna, but then they reconsidered that it might be too much on the old lady and also—as Ric’s father had pointed out—“the rural location would present a host of logistical difficulties.”

Okay.

They decided to hold it in Culiacán, where the cemetery was, after all, at someone’s house. The problem was that everyone had a house—actually, houses—in or around the city, so an argument started about whose house they should do it in because it seemed to have some significance.

Elena wanted it at her house—Adán was her brother, after all; Iván wanted it at the Esparza family home—Adán was the son-in-law; Ric’s dad suggested their place in the suburbs of Eldorado, “farther away from prying eyes.”

The fuck difference does it make? Ric wondered, watching the debate get heated. Adán’s not going to care, the guy is dead. But it seemed to matter to them and they really got into it until Eva quietly said, “Adán and I also had a home. We’ll do it there.”

Ric noticed that Iván didn’t look too thrilled about his little sister speaking up. “It’s too much to ask you to host this.”

Why? Ric wondered. It’s not like Adán’s going to be too busy laying out bean dip or something to enjoy his own wake.

“It really is too much, dear,” Elena said.

Ric’s dad nodded. “It’s so far out in the country.”

They finally agree on something, Ric thought.

But Eva said, “We’ll do it there.”

So Ric and everyone else had to drive all the way out to East Buttfuck to Adán’s estancia, up twisting dirt roads, past blockades of state police providing security. Fucking caravans of narcos coming to pay their respects, some out of love, some out of obligation, some out of fear of not being seen there. You got an invitation to Adán Barrera’s velorio and you no-showed, you might be the guest of honor for the next one.

His dad and Elena had made most of the arrangements, so of course it was perfect. Helicopters circling overhead, armed security prowling the grounds, parking valets with nines strapped to their waists.

Guests crowded the sloping front lawn. Tables with white cloths had been set out and were heavy with platters of food, bottles of wine, and pitchers of beer, lemonade, and water. Waiters walked around with trays of hors d’oeuvres.

One of Rudolfo Sánchez’s norteño bands played from a gazebo.

The walkway up to the house was strewn with marigold petals, a tradition in a velorio.

“They really went all out,” Ric’s wife, Karin, said.

“What did you expect?”

Ric had attended the Autonomous University of Sinaloa for all of two semesters, majoring in business, and all he really learned about economics was that a cheap condom can be far more expensive than a good one. When he told his father that Karin was embarazada, Ricardo told him he was going to do the right thing.

Ric knew what that was: get rid of the thing and break up with Karin.

“No,” Núñez said. “You’re going to get married and raise your child.”

Ric Sr. thought the responsibility of having a family would “make a man” out of his son. It sort of did—it made a man who rarely came home and had a mistress who would do everything his wife wouldn’t. Not that he asked her—Karin, while pretty enough, was as dull as Sunday dinner. If he suggested some of the things that Belinda did, she would probably burst out crying and lock herself in the bathroom.

His father was unsympathetic. “You spend more time running around with the Esparzas than you do at home.”

“I need a boys’ night out now and again.”

“But you’re not a boy, you’re a man,” Núñez said. “A man spends time with his family.”

“You’ve met Karin?”

“You chose to have sex with her,” Núñez said. “Without adequate protection.”

“Once,” Ric said. “I don’t have to worry about sex with her much now.”

“Have a mistress,” Núñez said. “A man does that. But a man takes care of his family.”

Although his father would shit bricks sideways if he knew Ric’s choice of a mistress—an out-and-out psycho who is also his head of security. No, Dad would not approve of La Fósfora so they’ve kept it on the down low.

His old man had more to say. “To disrespect your marriage is to disrespect your godfather, and that I cannot allow.”

Ric went home that night, all right.

“Have you been bitching to my father?” he asked Karin.

“You’re never home!” she said. “You spend every night with your friends! You’re probably fucking some whore!”

Whores, plural, Ric thought, but he didn’t say that. What he said was “Do you like this big new house? How about the condo in Cabo, do you like that? The Rosarito beach cottage? Where do you think all that comes from? The clothes, the jewelry, the big flat-screen your eyes are always glued to. The nanny for your daughter so your telenovelas won’t be interrupted. Where do you think all that comes from? Me?”

Karin sneered. “You don’t even have a job.”

“My job,” Ric said, “is being that man’s son.”

Another sneer. “ ‘Mini-Ric.’ ”

“That’s right,” he said. “So someone who’s not acting like a dumb bitch might think, ‘Hmm, the last thing I want to do is run my husband down to his dad and risk cutting all that off.’ Of course, that’s someone who’s not acting like a dumb bitch.”

“Get out.”

“Jesus Christ, make up your mind,” Ric said. “You want me home or you want me out, which is it? One fucking night with you and it turns into a life sentence.”

“How do you think I feel?” Karin asked.

That’s the best she can do, Ric thought. If he’d called Belinda a dumb cunt, she would have shot him in the dick and then sucked the bullet out.

“Here’s the point,” Ric said. “You want to bitch, bitch to your girlfriends over one of your lunches. Complain to the housekeeper, complain to the worthless little piece of shit dog I paid for. But you do not, ever, complain to my father.”

“Or you’ll what?” She got right in his face.

“I would never hit a woman,” Ric said. “You know that’s not me. But I will divorce you. You’ll get one of the houses and you’ll live in it alone, and good luck trying to find a new husband with a kid on your hip.”

Later that night he crawled into bed, drunk enough to soften a little. “Karin?”

“What?”

“I know I’m an asshole,” Ric said. “I’m an Hijo, I don’t know any different.”

“It’s just that you …”

“What?”

“You just play at life,” she said.

Ric laughed. “Baby, what else is there to do with it?”

As an Hijo, he’s seen friends, cousins, uncles killed. Most of them young, some younger than he is. You have to play while life gives you the time to play, because sooner or later, probably sooner, they’re going to be putting your favorite toys in a box with you.

Fast cars, fast boats, faster women. Good food, better booze, best drugs. Nice houses, nicer clothes, nicest guns. If there’s anything more to life than that, he hasn’t seen it.

“Play with me,” he said.

“I can’t,” she said. “We have a child.”

Now that she’s settled into young motherhood, raising their little girl, their marriage has evolved from open hostility to dull tolerance. And, of course, she had to accompany him to Adán’s velorio, anything else would have been “unseemly” in his father’s eyes.

But it didn’t help that Belinda was there, too.

On the job.

Karin noticed her. “That girl. Is she security?”

“She’s the head of security.”

“She’s striking,” Karin said. “Is she a tortillera, do you think?”

Ric laughed. “How do you know that word?”

“I know things. I don’t live in a cocoon.”

Yeah, sort of you do, Ric thought. “I don’t know if she’s lesbian or not. Probably.”

Now Karin sits next to Ric, looking every bit as miserable as he feels, but gazing dutifully at the coffin (Karin does duty like a nun does a rosary, Ric thinks) as befits the wife of the godson.

Which reminds Ric that he became Adán’s godson on the happy occasion of his wedding, an old Mexican tradition in which a man can “adopt” a godson on the celebration of a major event in his life, although Ric knows that Adán did this to honor his father more than to express any particular closeness to him.

Ric has heard the story of how his father hooked up with Adán Barrera at least a thousand times.

Ricardo Núñez was a young man then, just thirty-eight when Adán was brought to the gates of the prison, having been given “compassionate extradition” from the US to serve the remainder of his twenty-two-year sentence in Mexico.

It was a cold morning, Ric’s dad always said when relating the story. Adán was cuffed by the wrists and ankles, shivering as he changed from a blue down issue jacket into a brown uniform with the number 817 stitched on the front and back.

“I made a sanctimonious speech,” Núñez told Ric. (Does he make any other kind? Ric thought.) “Adán Barrera, you are now a prisoner of CEFERESO II. Do not think that your former status gives you any standing here. You are just another criminal.”

That was for the benefit of the cameras, which Adán completely understood. Inside, he graciously accepted Núñez’s apology and assurances that everything that could be done to make him comfortable would be done.

As indeed it was.

Diego Tapia had already arranged for complete security. A number of his most trusted men agreed to be arrested, convicted and sent to the facility so that they could guard “El Patrón.” And Núñez cooperated with Diego to provide Adán with a “cell” that was over six hundred square feet with a full kitchen, a well-stocked bar, an LED television, a computer, and a commercial refrigerator stocked with fresh groceries.

On some nights, the prison cafeteria would be converted into a theater for Adán to host “movie nights” for his friends, and Ric’s dad always made it a point to relate that the drug lord preferred G movies without sex or violence.

On other nights, prison guards would go into Guadalajara and return with a van full of ladies of the evening for the Barrera supports and employees. But Adán didn’t partake, and it wasn’t long before he started his affair with a beautiful convict, former Miss Sinaloa Magda Beltrán, who became his famous mistress.

“But that was Adán,” Núñez told Ric. “He always had a certain class, a certain dignity, and appreciation for quality, in people as well as things.”

Adán took care of people who took care of him.

So it was just like him when weeks before Christmas he came into the office and quietly suggested that Núñez resign. That a numbered bank account had been opened for him in the Caymans and he’d find the paperwork in his new house in Culiacán.

Núñez resigned his position and went back to Sinaloa.

On Christmas night, a helicopter whisked Adán Barrera and Magda Beltrán off the roof and rumors circulated that the “escape” cost more than four million dollars in payments to people in Mexico City.

Part of that was in a numbered account in Grand Cayman for Ricardo Núñez.

Federal investigators came to question Núñez but he knew nothing about the escape. They expressed moral outrage over Adán’s favored treatment in prison and threatened to prosecute Núñez, but nothing came of it. And while Núñez became unemployable as a prosecutor, it no longer mattered—Adán was as good as his word and reached out to him.

Put him into the cocaine business.

Núñez became respected.

Trusted.

And discreet. He wasn’t showy, stayed out of the spotlight and off social media. Flew deliberately under the radar so even SEIDO and DEA—in fact, few people in the cartel—knew just how important he’d become.

El Abogado.

Núñez, in fact, became Adán’s right-hand man.

Ric himself actually spent little time at all with Barrera, so it’s weird sitting there pretending to mourn.

Adán’s coffin is set on an altar built at the end of the great room for the occasion. Piles of fresh flowers are heaped on the altar, along with religious icons and crosses. Unhusked ears of corn, squash, and papel picado hang from a bower of branches constructed above the coffin. Open containers of raw coffee have been set out, another velorio tradition, which Ric suspects had more to do with killing the smell of decomposition.

As a godson, Ric sits in the front row along with Eva, of course, the Esparzas, and Elena and her sons. Adán’s mother, ancient as the land, sits in a rocking chair, clad in black, a black shawl over her head, her shriveled face showing the patient sorrow of the Mexican campesina. God, the things she’s seen, Ric thinks, the losses she’s suffered—both sons, a grandson killed, a granddaughter who died young, so many others.

He knows the expression about cutting the tension with a knife, but you couldn’t cut the tension in this room with a blowtorch. They’re supposed to be sitting there exchanging fond stories about the deceased, except no one can think of any.

Ric has a few ideas—

Hey, how about the time Tío Adán had a whole village slaughtered to make sure he killed the snitch?

Or—

What about that time Tío Adán had his rival’s wife’s head sent to him in a package of dry ice?

Or—

Hey, hey, remember when Tío Adán threw those two little kids off a bridge? What a stitch. What a great, funny guy, huh?

Barrera made billions of dollars, created and ruled a freaking empire, and what does he have to show for it?

A dead child, an ex-wife who doesn’t come to his wake, a young trophy widow, twin sons who will grow up without their father, a baseball, some smelly old boxing gloves and a suit he never wore. And no one, not one of the hundreds of people here, can think of one nice story to tell about him.

And that’s the guy who won.

El Señor. El Patrón. The Godfather.

Ric sees Iván looking at him, touching his nose with his index finger. Iván gets up from his chair.

“I have to piss,” Ric says.

Ric shuts the bathroom door behind him.

Iván is laying out lines on the marble-top vanity. “Fuck, could this get any more tedious?”

“It’s pretty awful.”

Iván rolls up a hundred-dollar bill (of course, Ric thinks), snorts a line of coke, then hands Ric the bill. “None of this shit for me, cuate. When I go, big fucking party, then take me out on a cigarette boat and, bam, Viking funeral.”

Ric leans over and breathes the coke into his nose. “Goddamn, that’s better. What if I go first?”

“I’ll dump your body in an alley.”

“Thanks.”

There’s a soft knock at the door.

“¡Momento!” Iván yells.

“It’s me.”

“Belinda,” Ric says.

He opens the door, she slides in quickly and shuts it behind her. “I knew what you assholes were doing in here. Share.”

Iván takes the vial out of his pocket and hands it to her. “Knock yourself out.”

Belinda pours out a line and snorts it.

Iván leans against the wall. “Guess who I saw the other day? Damien Tapia.”

“No shit,” Ric says. “Where?”

“Starbucks.”

“Christ, what did you say?”

“I said ‘hello,’ what do you think?”

Ric doesn’t know what he thought. Damien had been an Hijo, they were kids together, played together all the time, partied, all that shit. He was as close to Damien as he was to Iván, until Adán and Diego Tapia got into a beef, which turned into a war, and Damien’s father was killed.

They were all just teenagers then, kids.

Adán, of course, won the war, and the Tapia family was thrown out of the fold. Since then they had been forbidden to have any contact with Damien Tapia. Not that he wanted anything to do with them anyway. He was still around town, but running into him was, well, awkward.

“When I take over,” Iván says, “I’m going to bring Damien back in.”

“Yeah?”

“Why not?” Iván says. “The beef was between Adán and Damien’s old man. Adán’s dead, as you might have noticed. I’ll make it right with Damien, it will be like before.”

“Sounds good,” Ric says.

He’s missed Damien.

“That generation,” Iván says, jutting his chin at the door, “we don’t have to inherit their wars. We’re going to move ahead. The Esparzas, you, Rubén and Damien. Like before. Los Hijos, like brothers, right?”

“Like brothers,” Ric says.

They touch knuckles.

“If you guys are done being gay,” Belinda says, “we better get back out there before they figure out what we’re doing. Snorting coke at El Patrón’s velorio? Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

“Coke built this place,” Iván says.

“Selling it, not snorting it,” Belinda says. She looks at Ric. “Wipe your nose, boyfriend. Hey, your wife is cute.”

“You’ve seen her before.”

“Yeah, but she looks cuter today,” Belinda says. “You want to do a threesome, I’ll teach her some things. Come on, let’s go.”

She opens the door and steps out.

Iván grabs Ric by the elbow. “Hey, you know I have to take care of my brothers. But let things settle down for a few days and we’ll talk, okay? About where you fit in?”

“Okay.”

“Don’t worry, ’mano,” Iván says. “I’ll be fair with your father, and I’ll take care of you.”

Ric follows him out the door.

Elena sits between her sons.

She saw a documentary on television, a nature show, and learned that when a new male lion takes over a pride, the first thing he does is kill the previous ruler’s cubs. Her own cubs still carry the Barrera name and people will assume that they have ambitions even if they don’t. Rudolfo has a small retinue of bodyguards and a few hangers-on, Luis even fewer. Whether I want to or not, she thinks, I’ll have to take on a certain level of power to protect them.

But the top spot?

There’s never been a female head of a cartel, and she doesn’t want to be the first.

But she’ll have to do something.

Without a power base, the other lions will track down her cubs and kill them.

Looking at her brother’s coffin, she wishes she felt more. Adán was always very good to her, good to her children. She wants to cry, but the tears won’t come and she tells herself that’s because her heart is exhausted, played out from all the loss over the years.

Her mother, perched in her chair like a crow, is virtually catatonic. She’s buried two sons, a grandson and a granddaughter. Elena wishes that she could get her to move to town but she insists on staying in the house that Adán built for her in La Tuna, all by herself if you don’t count the servants and the bodyguards.

But she won’t leave, she’ll die in that house.

If my mother is a crow, Elena thinks, the rest are vultures. Circling, waiting to swoop down to pick my brother’s bones.

Iván Esparza and his two equally cretinous brothers, Adán’s horrible lawyer Núñez, and a flock of smaller players—plaza bosses, cell leaders, gunmen—looking to become bigger players.

She feels tired, all the more so when she sees Núñez walking toward her.

“Elena,” Núñez says, “I wonder if we could have a word. In private.”

She follows him outside to the grand sloping lawn she walked so many times with Adán.

Núñez hands her a piece of paper and says, “This is awkward.”

He waits while she reads.

“This is not a position I relish,” Núñez says, “certainly not one that I wanted. In fact, I prayed that this day would never come about. But I feel—strongly—that your brother’s wishes should be respected.”

It’s Adán’s writing, no question, Elena thinks. And it quite clearly declares that Ricardo Núñez should take over in the event of Adán’s untimely death until his own sons reach the age of responsibility. Christ, the twins are barely two years old. Núñez will have a long regency. Plenty of time to turn the organization over to his own offspring.

“I realize that this might be a surprise,” Núñez says, “and a disappointment. I only hope that there’s no resentment.”

“Why should there be?”

“I could understand that you might think this should have gone to family.”

“Neither of my sons is interested, and Eva—”

“Is a beauty pageant queen,” Núñez says.

“So was Magda Beltrán,” Elena says, although she doesn’t know why she feels a need to argue with him. But it’s true. Adán should have married his magnificent mistress. The beautiful Magda met Adán in prison, became his lover, and then parlayed that and her considerable business acumen into creating her own multimillion-dollar organization.

“And look what happened to her,” Núñez says.

True enough, Elena thinks. The Zetas suffocated her with a plastic bag and then slashed a Z into her chest. And she was carrying Adán’s unborn child. Magda had confided in Elena and now she wonders if Adán ever knew. She hopes not—it would have broken his heart.

“Obviously Eva is not the person to take over,” Elena says.

“Please understand,” Núñez says, “that I believe I hold this position in trust for Adán’s sons. But if you think that you would be the better choice, I am willing to ignore Adán’s wishes and step down.”

“No,” she says.

Letting Núñez take the throne means shoving her own sons aside, but Elena knows that they’re secretly happy to be pushed. And, frankly, if Núñez wants to make himself a target, all the better.

But Iván … Iván is not going to like it.

“You have my support,” Elena says. She sees Núñez nod with a lawyer’s graciousness at having won a settlement. Then she drops the other shoe. “I just have one small request.”

Núñez smiles. “Please.”

“I want Baja back. For Rudolfo.”

“Baja is Iván Esparza’s.”

“And before it was his, it was mine.”

“In all fairness, Elena, you gave it up,” Núñez says. “You wanted to retire.”

It was my uncle, M-1, who sent my brothers to take the Baja plaza from Güero Méndez and Rafael Caro, Elena thinks. That was in 1990, and Adán and Raúl did it. They seduced the rich Tijuana kids and turned them into a trafficking network that co-opted their parents’ power structure on our behalf. They recruited gangs from San Diego to be gunmen, and they beat Méndez, Caro and everyone else to seize that plaza and use it as a base to take the entire country.

We made your Sinaloa cartel what it is, she thinks, so if I want Baja back, you’re going to give it to me. I won’t leave my sons without a power base with which to defend themselves.

“Baja was given to Nacho Esparza,” Ricardo is saying. “And with his death, it passed to Iván.”

“Iván is a clown,” Elena says. They all are, she thinks, all the Hijos, including your son, Ricardo.

“With a legitimate claim and an army to back it up,” Núñez says.

“And you now have Adán’s army,” Elena says, allowing to go unspoken the obvious—if I back you up.

“Iván is already going to be very disappointed that he’s not getting the big chair,” Núñez says. “Elena, I have to leave him with something.”

“And Rudolfo—Adán’s nephew—gets nothing?” Elena asks. “The Esparza brothers have plenty—more money than they can waste in their collective lifetimes. I’m asking for one plaza. And you can keep your domestic sales there.”

Núñez looks surprised.

“Oh, please,” Elena says. “I know young Ric is dealing your drugs all over Baja Sur. It’s fine—I just want the north and the border.”

“Oh, that’s all.” Elena wants one of the most lucrative plazas in the narcotics trade. Baja has a growing narcomenudeo, domestic street sales, but that’s dwarfed by the trasiego, the products that run from Tijuana and Tecate into San Diego and Los Angeles. From there the drugs are distributed all over the United States.

“Is it so much?” Elena asks. “For Adán’s sister to put her blessings on her brother’s last wishes? You need that, Ricardo. Without it …”

“You’re asking me to give you something that’s not mine to give,” Núñez says. “Adán gave the plaza to Esparza. And with all respect, Elena—my domestic business in Cabo is none of yours.”

“Spoken like a lawyer,” Elena says. “Not a patrón. If you’re going to be El Patrón, be El Patrón. Make decisions, give orders. If you want my support, the price is Baja for my son.”

The king is dead, Elena thinks.

Long live the king.

Ric sits out by the pool next to Iván.

“This is better,” Ric says. “I couldn’t stand another fucking minute in there.”

“Where’s Karin?”

“On the phone with the nanny,” Ric says, “probably discussing the color of poop. It’ll be a while.”

“You think she’s figured out you and Belinda?” Iván asks.

“Who gives a fuck?”

“Uh-oh.”

“What?”

“Look,” Iván says.

Ric turns to see Tito Ascensión walking toward them. About as tall as a refrigerator but thicker.

The Mastiff.

“My father’s old attack dog,” Iván says.

“Show some respect,” Ric says. “He’s Rubén’s dad. Anyway, you know how many guys he’s killed?”

A lot, is the answer.

Triple digits, at least.

Tito Ascensión used to be the head of Nacho Esparza’s armed wing. He fought the Zetas, then the Tapias, then the Zetas again. Tito once killed thirty-eight Zetas in a single whack and hanged their bodies from a highway overpass. Turned out it was a whoops—they weren’t Zetas after all, just your average citizens. Tito donned a balaclava, held a press conference and apologized for the mistake, with the caveat that his group was still at war with the Zetas so it would be prudent not to be mistaken for one.

Anyway, Tito played a big role in winning the wars for Sinaloa, and as a reward Nacho let him start his own organization in Jalisco, independent but still a satellite of Sinaloa.

Tito loved Nacho, and when he heard the Zetas had killed him down in Guatemala he grabbed five of them, tortured them to death over the course of weeks, then cut off their dicks and stuffed them in their mouths.

No, you don’t disrespect El Mastín.

Now the man’s shadow literally falls over both of them.

“Iván,” Tito says, “may I have a word?”

“I’ll catch you later,” Ric says, trying not to laugh. All he can think of is Luca Brazi from the wedding scene in The Godfather, which he’s had to watch with Iván about fifty-seven thousand times. Iván is obsessed with the movie to only a slighter lesser degree than he is with Scarface.

“No, stay,” Iván says, and when Tito looks dubious, adds, “Ric is going to be my number two. Anything you can say to me, you can say in front of him.”

He talks a little slow, like Tito is stupid.

Tito says, “I want to move my organization into heroin.”

“Do you think that’s wise?” Iván asks.

“It’s profitable,” Tito says.

He’s got that right, Ric thinks. Sinaloa is making millions off smack while Jalisco is still slinging cocaine and meth.

“The two don’t always go together,” Iván says, trying to sound like his father. “For one thing, it would put you into competition with us.”

“The market’s big enough for both of us,” Tito says.

Iván frowns. “Tito. Why fix what isn’t broken? Jalisco makes plenty of money on meth, doesn’t it? And we don’t even charge you a piso to use our plazas.”

“That was the arrangement I had with your father,” Tito says.

“You paid your dues,” Iván says, “no question. You’ve been a good soldier, and you got your own organization as a reward for that. But I think it’s better to just leave things as they are, don’t you?”

Christ, Ric thinks, it’s almost as if he’s patting the man’s head.

Good dog, good dog.

Sit.

Stay.

But Tito says, “If that’s what you think is best.”

“It is,” Iván says.

Tito nods to Ric and walks away.

“Rubén got his brains from his mother,” Iván says. “His looks, too, thank God.”

“Rubén’s a good guy.”

“He’s a great guy,” Iván says.

Doesn’t Ric know it. Rubén is Tito’s solid number two, runs his security force in Jalisco and is heavily involved in the transport of their product. How many times has Ric heard his own father say, If only you were more like Rubén Ascensión. Serious. Mature.

He’s made it pretty clear, Ric thinks. Given a choice, he’d rather have Rubén for his son than me.

Tough luck for both of us, I guess.

“What?” Iván asks.

“What what?”

“You got a look on your face like someone just ass-fucked your puppy.”

“I don’t have a puppy,” Ric says.

“Maybe that’s it,” Iván says. “You want me to get you one? What kind of dog do you want, Ric? I’ll send someone out right now to get it for you. I want you to be happy, ’mano.”

That’s Iván, Ric thinks.

Ever since they were kids. You told him you were hungry, he went out and got food. Your bike got stolen, a new one appeared. You said you were horny, a girl showed up at the door.

“Love you, man.”

“Love you, too,” Iván says. Then he adds, “It’s our turn now, ’mano. Our time. You’ll see—it’s going to be good.”

“Yeah.”

Ric sees his father approaching.

But it’s not Ric he wants to see.

Núñez says, “Iván, we should talk.”

“We should,” Iván says.

Ric sees the look on his face, the smile, knows that this is the moment he’s been waiting for.

His coronation.

Núñez glances down at his son and says, “In private.”

“Sure.” Iván winks at Ric. “I’ll be back, bro.”

Ric nods.

Leans back in the chair and watches his best friend and his father walk away from him.

Then he does have a memory of Adán.

Standing on the side of a dirt road in rural Durango.

“Look around you,” Adán said. “What do you see?”

“Fields,” Ric said.

“Empty fields,” Adán said.

Ric couldn’t argue with that. On both sides of the road, as far as he could see, marijuana fields lay fallow.

“The US has, de facto, legalized marijuana,” Adán said. “If my American sources are right, two or more states will soon make it official. We simply can’t compete with the local American quality and transportation costs. Last year we were getting a hundred dollars for a kilo of marijuana. Now it’s twenty-five. It’s hardly worth our growing the stuff anymore. We’re losing tens of millions of dollars a year, and if California, for instance, legalizes, the loss will be in the hundreds of millions. But it’s hot out here. Let’s go get a beer.”

They drove another ten miles to a little town.

A lead car went in first, made sure it was all clear, and then went into a tavern and emptied it out. The nervous owner and a girl who looked to be his daughter brought in a pitcher of cold beer and glasses.

Adán said, “Our marijuana market, once a major profit center, is collapsing; meth sales are falling; cocaine sales have flattened. For the first time in over a decade, we’re looking at a fiscal year of negative growth.”

It’s not like they were losing money, Ric thought. Everyone there was making millions. But they made less millions than they had the year before, and it was human nature that, even if you’re rich, being less rich feels like being poor.

“The present situation is unsustainable,” Adán said. “The last time this occurred we were saved by the innovation of crystal meth. It became, and remains, a major profit center, but there is small potential for growth that would compensate for our marijuana losses. Similarly, the cocaine market seems to have reached its saturation point.”

“What we need,” Ric’s father said, “is a new product.”

“No,” Adán said. “What we need is an old product.”

Adán paused for dramatic effect and then said, “Heroin.”

Ric was shocked. Sure, they still sold heroin, but it was a side product compared to weed, meth and coke. All their business had started with heroin, with opium, back in the days of the old gomeros who grew the poppy and made their fortunes selling it to the Americans to make the morphine they needed during World War II. After the war, it was the American Mafia that provided the market and bought up as much opium as they could grow for heroin.

But in the 1970s, the American DEA joined forces with the Mexican military to burn and poison the poppy fields in Sinaloa and Durango. They sprayed pesticides from airplanes, burned villages, forced the campesinos from their homes and scattered the gomeros to the winds.

It was Adán’s uncle, the great Miguel Ángel Barrera—M-1—who gathered the gomeros at a meeting similar to this one and told them that they didn’t want to be farmers—farms could be poisoned and burned—they wanted to be traffickers. He introduced them to the Colombian cocaine market and they all became wealthy as middlemen, moving Cali and Medellín coke into the United States. It was also M-1 who introduced crack cocaine to the market, creating the greatest financial windfall the gomeros—now known as narcos—had ever known.

Millionaires became billionaires.

The loose confederation of narcos became the Federación.

And now Adán wants them to make opium again? Ric thought. He thinks heroin is the answer to their problem?

It was insane.

“We have an opportunity,” Adán said, “even greater than crack. A ready-made market that’s just waiting for us to take advantage of. And the Americans have created it themselves.”

The giant American pharmaceutical companies, he explained, had addicted thousands of people to legal painkillers.

Pills.

Oxycodone, Vicodin and others, all opium derivatives, all the fruit of the poppy.

But the pills are expensive and can be hard to obtain, Adán explained. Addicts who can no longer get prescriptions from their doctors turn to the street, where the bootleg product can cost up to thirty dollars a dose. Some of these addicts need as many as ten doses a day.

“What I propose,” Adán said, “is to increase our production of heroin by seventy percent.”

Ric was skeptical. Mexican black tar heroin had never been able to compete with the quality of the purer product that comes in from South Asia or the Golden Triangle. More than doubling production would only lead to massive losses.

“Our black tar heroin is currently around forty percent pure,” Adán said. “I’ve met with the best heroin cookers in Colombia, who assure me that they can take our base product and create something called ‘cinnamon heroin.’”

He took a small glassine envelope from his jacket pocket and held it up. “Cinnamon heroin is seventy to eighty percent pure. And the beauty of it is, we can sell it for ten dollars a dose.”

“Why so cheap?” Núñez asked.

“We make up for it in volume,” Adán said. “We become Walmart. We undercut the American pharmaceutical companies in their own market. They can’t possibly compete. It will more than compensate for our marijuana losses. The yield could be in billions of new dollars. Heroin was our past. It will also be our future.”

Adán, as usual, had been prescient.

In the time since just three American states legalized weed, the cartel’s marijuana sales dropped by almost forty percent. It’s going to take time to complete, but Núñez started to convert the marijuana fields to poppies. Just over the past year, they’ve increased the heroin production by 30 percent. Soon it will be 50 and by the end of the year they’ll reach the 70 percent goal.

The Americans are buying. And why not? Ric thinks now. The new product is cheaper, more plentiful and more potent. It’s a win-win-win. Heroin is flowing north, dollars are flowing back. So maybe, he thinks, the Adanistas are right—Barrera lives on.

Heroin is his legacy.

So that’s a story you could tell.

3
Malevolent Clowns

I had a friend who was a clown. When he died, all his friends came to the funeral in the same car.

—Steven Wright

Their house is a brownstone on Hillyer Place east of Twenty-First in the Dupont Circle neighborhood. They chose it because Dupont is “walkable,” for Marisol; there are coffee shops, restaurants, and bookstores nearby; and Keller likes the historical resonance of the neighborhood. Teddy Roosevelt lived around here; so did Franklin and Eleanor.

And Marisol loved the crepe myrtle tree that grew up to the third-story window, its lavender blooms reminding her of the vivid colors back in Mexico.

She’s waiting up when Keller gets home, sitting in the big armchair by the living room window, reading a magazine.

“We’re a ‘power couple,’” she says when Keller comes through the door.

“We are?” He bends over and kisses her forehead.

“It says so right here,” she says, pointing to the copy of Washington Life in her lap. “‘Washington power couple Mr. and Mrs.’—actually, Doctor—‘Art Keller showed up at the Kennedy Center fund-raiser. The DEA director and his stylish Latina wife’—that’s me, I’m your ‘stylish Latina wife’ …”

Keller looks at the page, not thrilled that she’s been photographed. He doesn’t like her image being out there. But it’s almost inevitable—she is stylish and interesting, and the story of the DEA hero with the Mexican wife who was once gunned down by narcos is irresistible to both the media and the Washington society types. So they get invitations to the chic parties and events, which Keller would by inclination turn down, but Marisol says that whether they like it or not, the political and social connections are extremely useful to his work.

She’s right, Keller thinks. Mari’s charm has proved to be an effective antidote to what has been referred to as his “anticharm,” and she has opened doors (and kept them open) that would otherwise be closed to him.

When Keller needs to talk with a representative, a senator, a cabinet official, a lobbyist, an editor, an ambassador, a shaker-and-mover—even someone in the White House—the chances are that Mari just had lunch or breakfast or served on a committee with the spouse.

Or she does the talking herself. Marisol is fully aware that people who would say no to Keller find it much harder to refuse his charming, fashionable wife, and she’s not above picking up the phone when an appropriations vote is needed, a critical piece of information has to go out in the media, or a project needs to be funded.

She’s busy—already on the board of the Children’s National Medical Center and the Art Museum of the Americas and has worked on fund-raisers for the Children’s Inn, Doorways for Women and Families, and AIDS United.

Keller worries that she’s too busy for her health.

“I love those causes,” she said to him when he expressed his concern. “And anyway, you need to put political capital in the bank.”

“It’s not your job.”

“It is my job,” she said. “It’s exactly my job. You kept your promise to me.”

He had. When he first called O’Brien to accept the offer, he said he had one condition—a replacement for Mari at her clinic had to be found and funded. O’Brien called him back the same morning with the news that a Texas oil firm had stepped up with a qualified physician and a big check, and was there anything else he needed?

Marisol started her diplomatic campaign to help him. Joined the boards and the committees, went to the lunches and the fund-raisers. Over Keller’s objections she was profiled in the Post and the Washingtonian.

“The cartels already know what I look like,” she told him. “And you need me doing these things, Arturo. The Tea Party troglodytes are already out to hang you, and the liberals don’t love you, either.”

Keller knew that she was right. Marisol was “politically perspicacious,” as she once put it, her observations and analysis usually dead-on, and she was quick to discern the nuances of the increasingly polarized American scene. And he had to admit that his desperate desire to escape politics and “just do his job” was naive.

“All jobs are political,” Marisol said. “Yours more than most.”

True enough, Keller thought, because he was the top “drug warrior” at a time when the current administration was seriously questioning what the war on drugs should mean and what it should—and, more importantly, shouldn’t—be.

The attorney general, in fact, had ordered DEA to stop using the phrase war on drugs at all, stating (rightly, in Keller’s opinion) that we shouldn’t wage war on our own people. The Justice Department and the White House were reevaluating the draconian drug laws passed during the crack epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s that legislated mandatory minimum sentences that put nonviolent offenders behind bars for thirty years to life.

The result of that legislation was that more than two million people—the majority of them African American and Hispanic—were in prison, and now the administration was reviewing a lot of those sentences, considering clemency for some of them, and exploring ending mandatory minimum sentences.

Keller agreed with these efforts but wanted to stay out of the controversies and focus on the mandate to end the heroin epidemic. In his opinion, he was the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and while he was willing to put less emphasis on enforcing, say, marijuana laws, he preferred to defer policy statements to the drug czar.

Officially the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the “drug czar”—as the position had been tagged—was the guy who spoke for the president on drug policy and was in charge of seeing the White House’s intentions implemented.

Well, sort of.

The current czar was a hard-liner who was somewhat resistant to the AG’s reforms that POTUS supported, so he was on his way out to become the boss of US Customs and Border Protection (so Keller would still have to work with him), and a new guy—more amenable to the reforms—was on his way in.

To Keller, it was just another strand of bureaucracy in an already tangled net. Technically, Keller’s immediate boss was the attorney general, but they both had to take the drug czar into account, as the AG served at the behest of the White House.

Then there was Congress. At various times, DEA had to consult with and report to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Appropriations Committee, Budget Committee, the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

The House was even worse. It had its own Budget, Appropriations, and Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committees, but its Judiciary Committee also had subcommittees—Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations, and Immigration Policy and Border Security.

So Keller had to confer and coordinate with the Justice Department, the White House, and the Senate and House committees, but there were also the other federal agencies whose missions coincided with his—Homeland Security; CIA; FBI; Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco; ICE; Bureau of Prisons; the Coast Guard and the Navy; the Department of Transportation; the State Department … the list went on and on.

And that was just federal.

Keller also had to deal with fifty state governments and state police forces, over three thousand county sheriff’s departments and more than twelve thousand city police departments. Not to mention state and local prosecutors and judges.

That was the United States, but Keller also had to communicate, confer and negotiate with government officials and police from foreign countries—Mexico, of course, but also Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and all the European Union countries where heroin was bought, sold and/or transshipped. And any of those dealings had to be run through the State Department and sometimes the White House.

Of course, Keller delegated most of this—in many ways the DEA was a perpetual motion machine that functioned on its own momentum—but he still had to handle the major issues personally and was determined to sharpen its blade and point it straight at the heroin problem.

Keller took over a DEA that was deeply wary of him as a former undercover operative, a field agent and a hard charger with a reputation for ruthlessness.

We got us a real cowboy now was pretty much the overall take, and a number of midlevel bureaucrats started to pack their personal belongings because they thought the new boss would bring in his own people.

Keller disappointed them.

He called a general meeting at which he said, “I’m not firing anybody. The knock on me is that I’m not an administrator and don’t have a clue how to run a gigantic organization. That rap is accurate—I don’t. What I do have is you. I will give clear, concise direction and I trust you to make the organization work toward those objectives. What I expect from you is loyalty, honesty and hard work. What you can expect from me is loyalty, honesty, hard work and support. I will never stab you in the back, but I will stab you in the chest if I catch you playing games. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes—only slackers and cowards don’t make mistakes. But if we have a problem, I don’t want to be the last to know. I want your thoughts and your criticisms. I’m a big believer in the battleground of ideas—I don’t need the only word, just the last word.”

He set priorities.

Next he called in the deputy administrator, Denton Howard, and the chiefs of Intelligence and Operations and told them that their first priority was heroin.

The second priority was heroin.

The third priority was heroin.

“We’ll sustain our efforts on all Schedule I drugs,” he told them, “but our overriding emphasis on the enforcement side is ending the heroin epidemic. I don’t care about marijuana, except where it can lead us up the ladder to the heroin traffickers.”

Which meant focusing on the Sinaloa cartel.

Keller’s approach is something of a departure—historically, Sinaloa hadn’t been greatly involved with heroin production since the 1970s, when the DEA and the Mexican military had burned and poisoned the poppy fields (Keller was there), and the growers turned to other products.

The Barrera wing of the cartel had made most of its money from cocaine and marijuana, the Esparza wing from methamphetamine, the Tapia faction from a combination of all three.

“It’s a mistake to put all our efforts into fighting them in Mexico,” Keller told his people. “I know, because it’s a mistake I made. Repeatedly. From now on we put our priority on hitting them where we can hit them—here in the United States.”

Howard said, “That’s a piecemeal approach that will require coordination from dozens of metropolitan police departments.”

“Set it up,” Keller said. “Within the next month I want face-to-face meetings with the chiefs of narcotics from New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. If they can’t or won’t come to me, I’ll go to them. After that, I want Boston, Detroit and San Diego. And so on. The days of standing at the urinal pissing on each other’s shoes are over.”

But great, Keller thought, I have a deputy who’s looking to sabotage me. I’m going to have to starve him out, and the way to starve a bureaucrat is to deprive him of access and information.

Keller kept Blair after the meeting. “Does Howard have a hard-on for me?”

Blair smiled. “He expected to get your desk.”

The administrator and deputy administrator of the DEA are political appointees—all the rest are civil servants who come up through the system. Keller figured that Howard probably thought O’Brien and his cabal fucked him.

The organizational chart has all the department heads reporting directly to Howard, who then reports to Keller.

“Anything significant,” Keller told Blair, “you bypass Howard, bring directly to me.”

“You want me to keep a double set of books.”

“You have a problem with that?”

“No,” Blair said. “I don’t trust the son of a bitch, either.”

“It blows up, I’ll cover your ass.”

“Who’s going to cover yours?” Blair asked.

Same person who always has, Keller thought.

Me.

“Let’s look at the velorio again,” Keller says.

Blair puts up the photos from Barrera’s wake, taken by an incredibly brave SEIDO undercover working as a waiter for the catering company that serviced the event. Keller stares at the dozens of photos—Elena Sánchez sitting by the coffin; the Esparza brothers; Ricardo Núñez and his son, Mini-Ric; a host of other important players. He studies photos taken in the house, on the lawn, out by the pool.

“Can you order them by time sequence?” Keller asks.

The cliché is that every picture tells a story, but a sequence of pictures, Keller thinks, can be more like a movie and tell a different story. He’s a big believer in chronology, in causation, and now he studies the photos with that sensibility.

Blair is smart enough to shut up.

Twenty minutes later, Keller starts to select a series of photos and lay them out in line. “Look at this—Núñez goes up to Elena. They walk outside, let’s say it’s to talk in private.” He highlights a series of photos that show Elena and Núñez walking closely together, in what seems to be intense conversation. Then—

“Shit,” Keller says, “what’s this?”

He zooms in on Núñez’s hands, on a piece of paper that he gives Elena.

“What is it?” Blair asks.

“Can’t make it out, but she’s sure as hell reading it.” Keller zooms in on Elena’s face—reading, frowning. “It could be the catering bill, who knows, but she isn’t happy.”

They look at pictures of Elena and Núñez in conversation and then check the time log. The conversation lasted for five minutes and twenty-two seconds. Elena gave Núñez the paper and went back inside the house.

“What I wouldn’t give for some audio,” Keller says.

“They were jamming,” Blair says.

Keller goes back to his timeline series of photos and notes Iván and Mini-Ric in what looks to be a casual conversation by the pool. Then Núñez comes out and walks away with Iván, leaving Ric sitting there. Half an hour later, by the time log, Iván comes back out and talks to Ric.

And it doesn’t look casual.

“Am I imagining things,” Keller says, “or are they in an argument?”

“Iván sure looks angry.”

“Whatever got his panties in a wad,” Keller says, “it had to have been when he was with Núñez. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too much into this.”

And maybe not, he thinks.

All the drumbeats said that Iván was next in line to take control of the cartel, merging the Barrera and Esparza wings of the organization. But now we seem to be seeing Ricardo Núñez summoning Elena Sánchez and Iván Esparza to personal talks, after which Iván appears to be angry.

Jesus Christ, could we have missed something here?

Keller had thought of Ricardo Núñez as a midlevel functionary, at most some kind of adviser to Barrera, but he’s been playing an outsize role in the velorio and the funeral and now he seems to be some kind of go-between from Elena to Iván.

Negotiating what, though?

Elena’s been out of the trade for years.

Keller tries a different theory—maybe Núñez isn’t simply providing “good offices,” but has become a power in and of his own.

Stay tuned, Keller thinks.

¡ADÁN VIVE!

Elena Sánchez Barrera looks at the graffiti spray-painted on the stone wall of the Jardines del Valle cemetery.

She saw the same thing on the ride into the city, painted on walls, the sides of buildings, on billboards. She’s been told that the same phenomenon has occurred in Badiraguato and that little shrines to “Santo Adán” have shown up on roadsides in smaller towns and villages all across Sinaloa and Durango—the deeply felt, passionate wishful thinking that Adán Barrera—the beloved El Señor, El Patrón, the “Godfather,” the “Lord of the Skies,” the man who built clinics, schools, churches, who gave money to the poor and fed the hungry—is immortal, that he lives in flesh or spirit.

Saint Adán, indeed, she thinks.

Adán was many things, but a saint wasn’t one of them.

Elena looks out the window and sees the entire power structure of the Sinaloa cartel, in fact of the whole Mexican trafficking world, gathered. If the government really intended to stop the drug trade, it could do so in one fell swoop.

A single raid would net them all.

It will never happen—not only are there hundreds of cartel sicarios posted around and inside the cemetery, but it’s been cordoned off by the Sinaloa state police and the Culiacán municipal police. A state police helicopter hovers overhead, and, in any case, the federal government is not serious about shutting down the drug trade, it’s serious about managing the drug trade, so it’s not going to disrupt this service.

Ricardo Núñez stands in his impeccably tailored black suit, rubbing his hands together like some kind of Latino Uriah Heep, Elena thinks. The man insisted on inserting himself into the planning of every element of the funeral, from the selection of the coffin to the seating arrangements to security, and Núñez sicarios in their trademark Armani caps and Hermès vests guard the gate and the walls.

Elena spots the notorious La Fósfora, somewhat subdued in a black suit jacket over black pants, supervising the sicarios, and she has to admit that the girl is quite striking. Ricardo’s son, “Mini-Ric,” stands beside him with his mousy wife, whose name Elena cannot recall.

The Esparza brothers stand in a row like crows on a telephone line. For once they aren’t dressed like extras in a cheap telenovela, but respectfully garbed in black suits and real shoes with actual laces. She nods to Iván, who curtly nods back and then moves a little closer to his sister as if asserting his ownership.

Poor Eva, Elena thinks, standing there with her two small boys, who are now pawns in a game they know nothing about. As is Eva, of course—Iván will take control of her as leverage against Núñez. She can hear it already—See, we are Adán Barrera’s real family, his true heirs, not some jumped-up assistant, some clerk. If Eva is too weak to go back to California, Iván will roll her and the twins around like stage props.

Speaking of props, he has his guard dog close at hand. El Mastín is sweating at the collar, looking distinctly uncomfortable in a jacket and tie, and Elena knows that he was brought here as a reminder that Jalisco is allied to the Esparza wing of the cartel and that if it comes to a fight, this brutal mass murderer and all his troops are loyal to Iván.

But hopefully it won’t come to that.

Ricardo had phoned her to say that Iván had—albeit grudgingly and bitterly—accepted Núñez’s leadership of the cartel and—grudgingly and bitterly—the transfer of Baja to Rudolfo.

It must have been some scene, Elena thinks, at least as Ricardo described it. Iván had yelled, cursed, called Elena every name in the book and a few that hadn’t been memorialized yet, had threatened war, promised to fight to the death, but was finally worn down by Ricardo’s steady, monotonous, Chinese-water-torture application of logic and reason.

“He agreed to a two percent piso,” Ricardo told her.

“The standard is five.”

“Elena …”

“Very well, fine.” She would have agreed to zero, if that’s what it took.

Ricardo couldn’t help but slip the knife in a little. “And shouldn’t I be having this conversation with Rudolfo?”

“You phoned me.”

“So I did,” Ricardo said. “Slip of the speed dial.”

“I’ll run it past Rudolfo,” she said. “But I’m sure he’ll agree.”

“Oh, I’m sure he will,” Ricardo said.

Rudolfo sits beside her in the back seat of the limousine. He had claimed nothing but enthusiasm when she told him that he was the new boss of Baja, but she could tell he was nervous.

He has reason to be, she thinks.

There’s hard and uncertain work to be done. Traffickers and gunmen who had once been “Barrera people” had been transferred to the Esparzas and would now be asked to come back. Most will, she knows, eagerly; but others will be reluctant, even rebellious.

A few examples might have to be made—the first person who vocally objects will have to be killed—and she worries if Rudolfo has it in him to order that. If he ever did—her poor sweet son likes to be liked, a useful trait in the music and club businesses, not so much in la pista secreta.

Elena has people who will do it, and do it in his name, but sooner rather than later he will need to have his own armed wing. She can and will give him the people, but he will have to command.

She puts her hand over his.

“What?” Rudolfo asks.

“Nothing,” Elena says. “Just that it’s a sad occasion.”

The car slows as one of Núñez’s people tells them where to park.

The mausoleum, Elena thinks as she takes her seat next to her mother, is a monument to tasteless excess. Three stories high in classic churrigueresque architecture with a dome roof tiled with mosaic; marble columns; and stone carvings of birds, phoenixes and dragons.

And it’s air-conditioned.

I doubt, Elena thinks, that Adán will feel the heat.

A Dolby sound system is encased in the columns, running a continuous loop of corridos about Adán; inside the crypt, a flat-screen monitor shows videos of the great man and his good works.

It’s hideous, Elena thinks, but it’s what the people expect.

And it wouldn’t do to let the people down.

The priest had actually hesitated to perform the service for “a notorious drug lord.”

“Look around you, you sanctimonious little prick,” Elena said when they met in his office. “That desk you’re sitting behind? We paid for it. The chair your flabby ass sits in? We paid for it. The sanctuary, the altar, the pews, the new stained-glass windows? All straight from Adán’s pocket. So I’m not asking you, Padre, I’m telling you—you will perform this service. Otherwise—my hand to the Virgin Mary—we will send people in to remove everything from this church, starting with you.”

So now Father Rivera says some prayers, gives a blessing, then a little homily about Adán’s virtues as a dedicated family man, his generosity toward the church and the community, his deep love of Sinaloa and its people, his faith in Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost and God the Father.

Adán had faith in money, power and himself, Elena thinks as the priest moves to wrap it up. That was his Holy Trinity, he didn’t believe in God.

“I do believe in Satan, though,” he had told her once.

“You can’t believe in one without the other,” she said.

“Sure you can,” Adán said. “The way I understand it, God and the devil were in a giant battle to rule the world, right?”

“I suppose.”

“Right,” Adán said. “Look around you—the devil won.”

The whole thing is a joke, Ric thinks.

He’s also thinking about how badly he has to piss and wishes he had before this endless service began, but it’s too late now, he’ll just have to hold it.

And endure Iván’s stink eye.

His friend hasn’t stopped glaring at him since it started. Just as he had glared at him when he came out of his meeting with Ricardo Sr. at the velorio, walked up to Ric at the pool, glared down at him and said, “You knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That Adán made your father the new boss.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Fuck you.”

“I didn’t.”

“You father called me a clown,” Iván said.

“I’m sure he didn’t say that, Iván.”

“No, that bitch Elena did,” Iván said. “But your father repeated it. And you knew, Ric. You knew. You let me talk, go on and on about what I was going to do, and all the time, you knew.”

“Come on, Iván, I—”

“No, you’re the guy now, right?” Iván said. “Your father is the jefe, that makes you what, Mini-Ric, huh?”

“Still your friend.”

“No, you’re not,” Iván said. “We’re not friends. Not anymore.”

He walked away.

Ric called him, texted him, but got no answers. Nothing. Now Iván sits there staring at him like he hates him.

Which maybe he does, Ric thinks.

And maybe I can’t blame him.

After talking to Iván, his father had called Ric in.

Ric read the paper that his old man slid across the glass top. “Jesus Christ.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I was hoping for something more along the lines of ‘Let me know what I can do to help, Dad,’” Núñez said, “or ‘Whatever you need from me, I’m there.’ Or ‘Adán chose wisely, Dad, you’re the man for the job.’”

“All that goes without saying.”

“And yet I had to say it.” Núñez leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together, a gesture Ric had hated since he was a child, as it always meant that a lecture was coming. “I need you to step up now, Ric. Take more of an active role, lend a hand.”

“Iván thought it was going to be him.” Every other word out of Iván’s mouth had been how things were going to be when he took over, and now here was Adán reaching out from the grave to snatch that from him.

“His happiness is not my concern,” Núñez said. “Or, for that matter, yours.”

“He’s my friend.”

“Then perhaps you can help persuade him to be reasonable,” Núñez said. “He’ll still run the Esparza wing of the organization.”

“I think he had something more in mind.”

“We all have to live with our disappointments,” Núñez said.

Ric had an idea he was talking about him.

“Iván will have to run the entire Esparza operation,” Núñez said. “He wouldn’t have time for Baja anyway.”

“He was going to give it to Oviedo.”

“The same Oviedo I saw on Facebook driving a motorcycle with his feet?” Núñez asked.

“I didn’t know you went on Facebook.”

“Aides keep me in touch,” Núñez said. “In any case, you have Elena’s permission to keep selling in Baja.”

“Elena’s or Rudolfo’s?”

“Are you being funny with me?”

“I had an arrangement,” Ric said. “With Iván.”

“Now you have it with Rudolfo,” Núñez said. “Show me some success on the narcomenudeo, I might give you the trasiego. From there, who knows?”

“Show you some success.”

“For God’s sake, Ric,” Núñez said, “show me something. You’re Adán Barrera’s godson. With that comes certain privileges, and with privilege comes responsibility. I have a responsibility to see that his wishes are carried out, and you share in that.”

“Okay.”

“Here’s something else you should think about,” Núñez said. “We’re holding this position for Adán’s sons to come of age, but that will be years from now. Suppose something happens to me in the interim? That leaves you.”

“I don’t want it,” Ric said.

There it was again—that trace of disappointment, even disgust, as his father asked, “Do you want to be ‘Mini-Ric’ your whole life?”

Ric was surprised by his father’s ability to hurt him. He thought he was over it by now, but he felt a stab in his heart.

He didn’t answer.

One of the things Ric is expected to show his father is a speech, a eulogy, at the funeral service.

To which Ric had objected. “Why me?”

“As the godson,” Ricardo said, “it’s expected.”

Well, if it’s expected, Ric thought. He had no idea what he was going to say.

Belinda offered some ideas. “‘My godfather, Adán, was a ruthless cocksucker who killed more men than ass cancer—”

“Nice.”

“—and married a hot chica less than half his age who we would all like to fuck, if we’re being honest with ourselves. What’s not to love about Adán Barrera, a man’s man, a narco’s narco, a godfather’s godfather. Peace. Out.’”

She hadn’t been much more help about his Iván problem.

“You know Iván,” she said. “He runs hot. He’ll get over it, you’ll be doing shots together tonight.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then so be it,” Belinda said. “You got to start looking at the facts. Fact: Barrera named your father the boss, not Iván. Fact: you’re the godson, not him. Maybe you should start acting like it.”

“You sound like my father.”

“He’s not always wrong.”

Now Ric really has to piss. The fucking priest finally gets offstage and then a singer comes on. One of Rudolfo’s older recording hacks who starts in with a corrido he wrote “especially for El Señor,” and it has more downer lyrics than an Adele tune.

After that, a poet comes up.

A poet.

What’s next, Ric thinks, puppets?

Actually, it’s him.

His father gives him what could be called a “significant” nod and Ric walks up to the altar. He’s not stupid—he knows it’s a moment, an announcement of sorts that he has leapfrogged Iván to the head of the line.

Ric leans into the microphone. “My godfather, Adán Barrera, was a great man.”

A general murmur of agreement and the audience waits for him to go on.

“He loved me like a son,” Ric says, “and I loved him like a second father. He was a father to us all, wasn’t he? He—”

Ric blinks when he sees a clown—a full-fledged payaso with white makeup, a red curly wig, a rubber nose, baggy pants and floppy shoes come prancing down the center aisle blowing on a kazoo and carrying a bunch of white balloons in one hand.

Who ordered this up? Ric wonders, thinking he’s seeing things.

It couldn’t have been laugh-a-minute Elena or his old man, neither of whom is exactly known for whimsy. Ric glances over at both of them and neither is laughing.

Elena, in fact, looks pissed.

But, then again, she always does.

Ric tries to pick up his speech. “He gave money to the poor and built …”

But no one is listening as the clown makes his way to the altar, tossing paper flowers and little papel picado animals to the astonished onlookers. Then he turns, reaches inside his patched madras jacket, and pulls out a 9 mm Glock.

I’m going to get killed by a fucking clown, Ric thinks in disbelief. It’s not fair, it’s not right.

But the payaso turns and shoots Rudolfo square in the forehead.

Blood flecks Elena’s face.

Her son falls into her lap and she sits holding him, her face twisted in agony as she screams and screams.

The killer runs back up the aisle—but how fast can a clown run in floppy shoes—and Belinda pulls a MAC-10 from her jacket and melts him.

Balloons rise into the air.

Adán Barrera’s Pax Sinaloa ended before he was even lowered into the ground, Keller thinks, watching the news on Univision.

Reporters outside the walls of the cemetery described a “scene of chaos” as panicked mourners fled, others pulled out a “proliferation” of weapons, and ambulances raced toward the scene. And with that touch of surrealism that so often seems to pervade the Mexican narco world, early reports indicate that Rudolfo Sánchez’s killer was dressed as a clown.

“A clown,” Keller says to Blair.

Blair shrugs.

“Do they have an ID on the shooter?” Keller asks, unwilling to say clown.

“SEIDO thinks it’s this guy,” Blair says, throwing a file up on the computer screen. “Jorge Galina Aguirre—‘El Caballo’—a player in the Tijuana cartel way back in the nineties when Adán and Raúl were first taking over. A midlevel marijuana trafficker with no known enemies, and no known grudges against the Barreras.”

“Apparently he had a grudge against Rudolfo.”

“There’s some shit running around that Rudolfo nailed Galina’s daughter, or maybe his wife,” Blair says.

“Rudolfo was a player.”

“The wages of sin,” Blair says.

Yeah, but Keller doubts it.

The old “honor killing” ethos is rapidly fading into the past, and the insult—the almost unbelievably offensive act of murdering one of Barrera’s nephews in front of his family at his funeral—argues that this is something more.

It’s a declaration.

But of what, and by whom?

By all accounts, Rudolfo Sánchez was a spent force, the juice drained out of him by the stay in Florence. He was involved with nightclubs, restaurants and music management, cash businesses handy for laundering money. Had he fucked someone on a deal, lost someone a serious amount of cash?

Maybe, but you don’t kill a Barrera over something like that, especially not at El Señor’s funeral. You negotiate a settlement or you eat the loss because it’s better for business and your odds for survival. Again, intelligence had it that Rudolfo—or any of the Sánchez family—wasn’t trafficking anymore, so he shouldn’t have been killed over turf.

Unless the intelligence is wrong or things have changed.

Of course things have changed, Keller thinks. Barrera is dead and maybe this was the opening shot in the battle to replace him.

Rudolfo didn’t want to be buried in the cemetery, he wanted to be cremated, his ashes tossed into the sea. There will be no grave, no crypt, no gaudy mausoleum to visit, just the sound of waves and an endless horizon.

His widow—we have so many widows, Elena thinks, we are our own cartel—stands with her son and daughter, ten and seven, respectively. Who saw their father murdered.

They shot my son in front of his wife and children.

And his mother.

She’s heard the joke going around—Did they catch the clown who did it?

They did.

He never made it out of the mausoleum. One of Núñez’s people gunned him down in the aisle. The question, Elena thinks, is how he made it in. There was so much security, so much security. Barrera security, Esparza security, Núñez security, city police, state police—and this man walked right through it all.

The shooter was Jorge Galina Aguirre, a marijuana trafficker with no known enemies, and no known grudges against the Barreras.

Certainly not against Rudolfo.

That night, after she had seen Rudolfo to a funeral home, Elena went to a house on the edge of town where the entire security contingent was held in the basement, sitting on the concrete floor, their hands tied behind their backs.

Elena walked down the row and looked each one in the eye.

Looking for guilt.

Looking for fear.

She saw a lot of the latter, none of the former.

They all told the same story—they saw a black SUV pull up. With just the driver and the clown, in the passenger seat. The clown got out of the car, and the guards let him in because they thought he was some bizarre part of the ceremony. The SUV drove off. So it was a suicide mission, Elena thought. A suicide mission that the shooter didn’t know was a suicide mission. The driver watched him go in and then took off, leaving him there.

To do his job and die.

When they went back upstairs, Ricardo Núñez said, “If you want them all dead, they’re all dead.”

Members of his armed wing were already in place, locked, loaded and ready to perform a mass execution.

“Do what you want with your men,” Elena said. “Release mine.”

“You’re sure?”

Elena just nodded.

She sat in the back of a car, flanked by armed guards, her own people flown in from Tijuana, and watched the local Barrera men walk out of the house.

They looked surprised, stunned to still be alive.

Elena said to one of her men, “Go out there, tell them they’re fired. They’ll never work for us again.”

Then she watched Ricardo’s people go in.

They walked back to their cars an hour later.

Now she watches her daughter-in-law step ankle-deep into the ocean and pour Rudolfo’s ashes out of a jar.

Like instant coffee, Elena thinks.

My son.

Whom I laid on my chest, held in my arms.

Wiped his ass, his nose, his tears.

My baby.

She talked to her other baby, Luis, that morning.

“It was the Esparzas,” she said. “It was Iván.”

“I don’t think so, Mother,” Luis said. “The police say that Gallina was insane. Delusional. He thought Rudolfo had slept with his daughter or something.”

“And you believe that.”

“Why would Iván want to kill Rudolfo?” Luis asked.

Because I took Baja from him, Elena thought. Or thought I did. “They killed your brother and now they’re going to try to kill you. They’ll never let us out alive, so we have to stay in. And if we stay in, we have to win. I’m sorry, but that’s the cold truth.”

Luis turned pale. “I’ve never had anything to do with the business. I don’t want to have anything to do with the business.”

“I know,” Elena said. “And I wish it were possible to keep you out of it, my darling. But it’s not.”

“Mother—I don’t want it.”

“And I didn’t want it for you,” Elena said. “But I’m going to need you. To avenge your brother.”

She watches Luis looking at his brother’s ashes float on the surface of the water and then disappear into the foam of a gentle wave.

Just like that.

The poor boy, she thinks.

Not a boy, a young man, twenty-seven now. Born to this life from which he can’t escape. It was foolish of me to think otherwise.

And that foolishness cost my other son his life.

She watches the wave go out, taking her child with it, and thinks of the song she sang on his birthdays.

The day you were born,

All the flowers were born,

And in the baptismal fountain

The nightingales did sing,

The light of day is shining on us,

Get up in the morning,

See that it has already dawned.

A sharp, heavy blade presses down on her chest.

Pain that will never go away.

Keller sits down on the sofa across from Marisol.

“You look tired,” Marisol says.

“It’s been a day.”

“Barrera,” she says. “It’s been all over the shows. What a scene, huh?”

“Even dead, he’s still getting people killed,” Keller says.

They talk for a few more minutes and then she goes up to bed. He goes into the den and turns the television on. CNN is covering the Barrera story and doing a recap of his life—how he started as a teenager selling bootleg jeans, how he joined his uncle’s drug business, his bloody war with Güero Méndez to take over the Baja plaza, his succeeding his uncle as the head of the Mexican Federación. As the scant photos of Barrera appear on the screen, the reporter goes on to talk about “unconfirmed rumors”—that Barrera was involved in the torture-murder of DEA agent Ernie Hidalgo, that Barrera had thrown the two small children of his rival Méndez off a bridge, that he’d slaughtered nineteen innocent men, women and children in a small Baja village.

Keller pours himself a weak nightcap as the reporter provides “balance”—Barrera built schools, clinics and playgrounds in his home state of Sinaloa, he had forbidden his people to engage in kidnappings or extortion, he was “beloved” by the rural people in the mountains of the Sierra Madre.

The screen shows the signs reading ¡ADÁN VIVE! and the little homebuilt roadside shrines with photos of him, candles, bottles of beer, and cigarettes.

Barrera didn’t smoke, Keller thinks.

The profile relates Barrera’s 1999 arrest by “current DEA head Art Keller,” his transfer to a Mexican prison, his 2004 “daring escape” and subsequent rise back to the top of the drug world. His war with the “hyperviolent” Zetas, and his betrayal at the peace conference in Guatemala.

Then the scene at the funeral.

The bizarre murder.

The lonely lowering of the coffin into the ground, with only his widow, his twin sons and Ricardo Núñez present.

Keller turns off the television.

He thought that putting two bullets into Adán Barrera’s face would bring him peace.

It hasn’t.

Heroin

They left at once and met the Lotus-eaters, who had no thought of killing my companions, but gave them lotus plants to eat, whose fruit, sweet as honey, made any man who tried it lose his desire ever to journey home …

—Homer

The Odyssey, book 9

1
The Acela

This train don’t carry no liars, this train …

—Traditional American folk song

New York City
July 2014

Keller looks out the train window at abandoned factory buildings in Baltimore and wonders if some of them are now shooting galleries. The windows are shattered, gang graffiti is sprayed on the redbrick walls, fence posts lean like drunken sailors, and the chain links have been cut.

It’s the same story all the way up the Amtrak line, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Newark—the factories are shells, the jobs are gone and too many of the former workers are shooting smack.

A huge sign over a decrepit building outside Wilmington says it all. It originally read GOOD BUY WORKS, but someone spray-painted it to GOOD BYE WORK.

Keller’s glad he took the train instead of flying. From the air he would have missed seeing all this. It’s tempting to think that the root causes of the heroin epidemic are in Mexico, because he’s so focused on interdiction, but the real source is right here and in scores of smaller cities and towns.

Opiates are a response to pain.

Physical pain, emotional pain, economic pain.

He’s looking at all three.

The Heroin Trifecta.

Keller is riding the Acela, the three-hour train from Washington, DC, to New York City, from the governmental power center to the financial one, although sometimes it’s hard to know which rules which.

And hard to know what he can do about Mexico from Washington when the real source of the opiate problem might just be on Wall Street. You’re standing on the Rio Grande with a broom, he thinks, trying to sweep back the tide of heroin while billionaires are sending jobs overseas, closing factories and towns, killing hopes and dreams, inflicting pain.

And then they tell you, stop the heroin epidemic.

The difference between a hedge fund manager and a cartel boss?

Wharton Business School.

He looks over to see Hugo Hidalgo lurching down the aisle with a cardboard tray in his hand, bringing back coffee and sandwiches. The young agent plops down in the aisle seat beside him. “I got you a ham and cheese panini. I hope that’s all right.”

“It’s fine. What did you get?”

“A burger.”

“Brave man.”

A good man, actually.

In a few short months, Hidalgo has become a rock star. He’s the first one to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night, although Keller suspects that Hugo sometimes sleeps on a cot in the office if he’s monitoring something.

Hugo is immersed in cell phone traffic analysis, email tracking, satellite pickups, field reports, anything he can look at to assemble a picture of the changing, fluid nature of the Sinaloa cartel.

He’s become Keller’s personal briefer, his last report coming before they left this morning to catch the train: three Tijuana street dealers found hanging from a bridge.

“They were Esparza’s people,” Hugo said. “Elena’s answer to her son’s murder.”

“Is he still denying responsibility for Rudolfo’s murder?”

“He is,” Hugo said, “but the street says that he’s using Elena’s hostility as an excuse for not handing over Baja, so she hits his street dealers.”

The Mexican street sales are a relatively small profit center compared to the cross-border trade, but they’re essential to holding the border turf. To hold a plaza, a boss needs local gunmen, and the gunmen make most of their money from local street sales.

Without the street sales, no army.

No army, no plaza.

Hence, no local street sales, no international trade.

So unless Núñez can enforce peace, Elena and Iván will fight it out locally in Baja for control of the border crossings.

“Does Elena have the troops?” Keller asked.

Hugo shrugged. “Hard to say. Some old Barrera loyalists are going back to Elena now that she’s raised her flag. A lot of them were Rudolfo’s friends looking for revenge. Others are holding with the Esparzas, scared shitless Iván will bring Tito Ascensión and his Jalisco people in to keep them in line.”

It’s a reasonable fear, Keller thought. Nacho’s old guard dog El Mastín is as brutal as it gets. “Núñez?”

“Staying neutral,” Hugo said. “Trying to keep the peace.”

Keller’s suspicions about Núñez had proved to be true—Barrera had named the lawyer as his successor, as the “first among equals” to run the cartel. Núñez is in a tough position—if he lets Iván keep Baja, he looks weak, which in the narco world is the top of a slippery slope. But if he forces Iván to give it up, he’ll have to go to war against him. Either way he goes, his organization fractures. While most of the old Barrera wing is staying loyal to Núñez, some are reported to be looking hard at Elena or Iván as options.

Núñez will have to either force Iván and Elena to the peace table or choose a side.

In the aftermath of Adán Barrera’s death the Pax Sinaloa is dissolving.

Maybe it’s all deck chairs on the Titanic, Keller thinks. Maybe it doesn’t matter who’s sending the heroin, only that it’s coming in. The narcos can play musical chairs all they want; hell, we can empty the chairs with the so-called kingpin strategy—arresting or killing cartel bosses—but the top chair always gets filled and the drugs keep coming.

Keller had been one of the main executors of that strategy, having had a hand in taking out the jefes of the old Federación, the Gulf cartel, the Zetas and Sinaloa, and what’s been the result?

More Americans than ever are dying from overdoses.

If you asked the average citizen to name America’s longest war, he’d probably say Vietnam and then quickly amend it to Afghanistan, but the true answer is the war on drugs.

Fifty years old and counting.

It’s cost over a trillion dollars, and that’s only one part of the financial equation—the legitimate, “clean” money that goes for equipment, police, courts and prisons. But if we’re going to be really honest, Keller knows, we have to account for the dirty money, too.

Tens of billions of drug dollars—in cash—go down to Mexico alone every year, so much cash they don’t even count it, they weigh it. It has to go somewhere, the narcos can’t stick it under their pillows or dig holes in their backyards. A lot of it is invested in Mexico, the estimate being that drug money accounts for 7 to 12 percent of the Mexican economy.

But a lot of it comes back here—into real estate and other investments.

Into banking and then out to legitimate businesses.

It’s the dirty secret of the war on drugs—every time an addict sticks a needle into his arm, everyone makes money.

We’re all investors.

We’re all the cartel.

Now you’re the commanding general in this war, Keller thinks, and you have no idea how to win it. You have thousands of brave, dedicated troops and all they can do is hold the line. You only know how to do the same old thing you’ve been doing, which isn’t working, but what’s the alternative?

Just give up?

Surrender?

You can’t do that, because people are dying.

But you have to try something different.

The train goes into a tunnel on its way to Manhattan.

By design, no one is there to meet them. No one from DEA or the AG’s office. They go out of Penn Station by the Eighth Avenue exit and hail a cab. Hugo tells the driver, “Ninety-Nine West Tenth.”

“We’re not going there,” Keller says, and before Hidalgo can ask why not, adds, “Because if I take a piss in the New York DEA office, Denton Howard knows how much and what color before I finish washing my hands.”

Leaks are going out from DEA, Keller knows—to the conservative media and also to the Republican politicians now vying for the presidential nomination, Ben O’Brien among them.

One of the potential candidates is right here in New York, although Keller has a hard time believing he’s for real.

Real estate tycoon and reality TV star John Dennison is making noise about running, and a lot of the noises he’s making have to do with Mexico and the border. All Keller needs is Howard feeding Dennison half-truths and insider information, including that Keller is meeting privately with the chief of the New York City Police Department’s Division of Narcotics.

“Where are we going?” Hidalgo asks.

Keller tells the driver, “Two-Eighty Richmond Terrace. Staten Island.”

“What’s there?” Hidalgo asks.

“You ask a lot of questions.”

Brian Mullen is waiting for them on the sidewalk outside an old house.

Keller gets out of the cab, walks up to him and says, “Thanks for meeting me.”

“If my chief finds out I’m doing this on the down low,” Mullen says, “he’ll hand me my ass.”

Mullen came up the hard way, as an undercover, working Brooklyn during the bad old crack days and coming out of a dirty precinct squeaky clean. Now he’s breaking every protocol by agreeing to meet with Keller without informing his superiors.

The visit of the head of DEA would be an occasion, replete with media and photos taken with a gang of brass in dress uniform at One Police Plaza. There’d be assistants and cupbearers and PR flaks and a lot of talk and nothing would get done.

Mullen is wearing a Yankees jacket over jeans.

“Does it bring back your UC days?” Keller asks.

“Sort of.”

“What is this place?” Keller asks.

“Amethyst House,” Mullen says. “A halfway house for female addicts. If I get spotted by some cop from the One Twenty, I can say I was meeting with a source.”

“This is Hugo Hidalgo,” Keller says. He can see Mullen isn’t thrilled to see someone else there. “His father and I worked together back in the day. Ernie Hidalgo.”

Mullen shakes Hugo’s hand. “Welcome. Come on, I have a car. There’s a deli at the corner, you need coffee or something.”

“We’re good.”

They follow Mullen to an unmarked black Navigator parked on the street. The guy behind the wheel doesn’t look at them as they get into the back. Young guy, black hair slicked back, wearing a black leather jacket.

“Meet Bobby Cirello,” Mullen says. “He works for me. Don’t worry. Detective Cirello is professionally deaf and dumb. Just take us for a drive, Bobby, okay?”

Cirello pulls out onto the street.

“This is the St. George neighborhood,” Mullen says. “Used to be the epicenter of the heroin epidemic in New York, because it’s closest to the city, except now heroin is everywhere on the island—Brighton, Fox Hills, Tottenville—hence the name ‘Heroin Island.’”

St. George looks like junkie turf, Keller thinks, if there is such a thing, and he sees what look like addicts from the car, hanging out on the corner, in parking lots and vacant lots.

But then they drive into what could be any suburb in any town in the United States. Residential areas of single-family homes, tree-lined streets, well-kept yards, swing sets and driveway basketball hoops.

“Smack is killing kids here now,” Mullen says. “Which is why we have an ‘epidemic.’ When it was blacks and Puerto Ricans, it wasn’t an illness, it was a crime, right?”

“It’s still a crime, Brian.”

“You know what I mean,” Mullen says. “It’s this new ‘cinnamon.’ Thirty percent stronger than the black tar the Mexicans used to sell, that the addicts were used to. That’s why they’re overdosing—they’re shooting the same amount they used to and it’s taking them out. Or they were used to taking pills, but the heroin is cheaper, and they shoot too much.”

As the drive moves south into even more suburban areas, Mullen points out houses—a son from this house, a daughter from this one, these people lucked out, their kid ODed but survived, is in rehab now, who knows, we’ll see, I guess.

“We’re talking triage here,” Mullen says. “The first step is to treat the wounded, right? See if we can save them on the battlefield. New York State just gave us a grant to equip twenty thousand officers with naloxone.”

Keller knows the drug, commercially known as Narcan. It’s like an EpiPen—if an overdosing addict is treated in time, you can practically bring them back from the dead. A Narcan kit costs all of sixty bucks.

“But DEA has expressed ‘reservations,’ right?” Mullen says. “You’re concerned it will just encourage addicts to shoot up, or kids will start using it to get high. You’re worried about ‘Narcan parties.’”

That’s Denton Howard shooting his mouth off to the media, Keller thinks, but he doesn’t say it. He’s not about to lay it off with a “that ain’t me” excuse.

“I’d put Narcan kits out on the street like fire extinguishers,” Mullen says. “Maybe the addicts could save their friends, because by the time my cops or first responders get there, it’s often too late.”

It makes sense, Keller thinks. It’s also political suicide—if he came out for open Narcan distribution, Fox and Friends would chop him to pieces. “Okay, triage—keep going.”

“Cutting down on overdose deaths is the first step,” Mullen says, “but when the addict comes to, he’s still an addict, right? You’re just saving him so you can save him again, until one day you can’t. What you have to do is get him into rehab.”

“So rehab’s the answer?”

“I know jail isn’t the answer, prison isn’t the answer,” Mullen says. “They’re getting high in there, only it costs more. Drug courts, maybe—bust them, have a judge force them into rehab? I don’t know that there’s an answer. But we have to do something different. We have to change the way we think.”

“Is this you?” Keller asks. “I mean, are you expressing a shift in the department’s thinking or are you an outlier?”

“A little bit of both,” Mullen says. “Look, you go to the chief, some of the older guys with this stuff, they look at you like you’re some bleeding-heart mugger hugger, but even some of the guys at One Police are starting to look for different answers, they see what’s going on now. Hell, we had a detective overdose two years ago, did you know that? Guy got hurt on the job, started taking pain pills. Then smack. Then he ODed. An NYPD gold shield, for Chrissakes. It makes people think. Look for new solutions. You heard of SIFs?”

Supervised injection facilities, Keller thinks. Places addicts can go and shoot up. Medical personnel supervise the content and the dose. “De facto legalization of heroin?”

“Call it what you want,” Mullen says. “It’s saving lives. The revolving door of bust-and-convict doesn’t. I arrest addicts, they shoot up in jail. I take dealers out, new ones take their place. I seize heroin, more comes in. Bobby, let’s head up to Inwood, show this man what he needs to see.”

“Jersey or Brooklyn?” Cirello asks.

“Take the Verrazano,” Mullen says. He looks at Keller. “I don’t like going out of my jurisdiction.”

They take Route 278 into the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, then Sunset Park and Carroll Gardens. Mullen says, “This used to be called Red Hook, but Carroll Gardens sounds better for real estate. You’re not a New York guy, are you?”

“San Diego.”

“Beautiful there,” Mullen says. “Great weather, right?”

“I haven’t been there much the past few years,” Keller says. “Mostly El Paso and Mexico. Now DC.”

They cross the Brooklyn Bridge into lower Manhattan, over to the West Side Highway almost all the way up the island until they turn off at Dyckman Street, then take a left and go up Broadway.

“Where are we?” Keller asks.

“Fort Tryon Park, Inwood area,” Mullen says. “The northernmost tip of Manhattan, and heroin central.”

Keller looks around at the well-tended redbrick apartment complexes. Parks, ballfields, nannies pushing babies in strollers. “Doesn’t look like it.”

“Exactly,” Mullen says. “There aren’t a lot of users up here, but what you have here in Inwood and Washington Heights, just downtown from here, are heroin mills. This is where your Mexicans bring the shit in, sell it to wholesalers who cut it up, put it into dime bags and ship it out. Sort of an Amazon fulfillment center.”

“Why here?”

Location, location, location, Mullen explains. Easy access to Route 9, right up to the little towns on the Hudson that are getting hammered with the shit. A short hop to 95 and the Bronx, or out to Long Island or up to New England. Harlem is just down Broadway, and you’re close to the West Side Highway and the FDR to go to the boroughs.

“If you were UPS or FedEx,” Mullen says, “and wanted to serve the Northeast Corridor, this is where you’d be. You can get in your car, be on the Jersey Turnpike or the Garden State in minutes and you’re on your way to Newark, Camden, Wilmington, Philly, Baltimore, Washington. If you’re moving less weight, you put it in a backpack, you take the One or the Two train to Penn Station and get on the Acela. Go south to the towns I just mentioned or north to Providence or Boston. No one is going to stop you, no one’s going to search your bag, and they have Wi-Fi on the train, you can catch up on Narcos.

“Your people are onto this, too. We’ve busted mills here … fifteen pounds, twenty, thirty-five, millions in cash … but the narcos write it off as the cost of doing business, and the shit keeps coming.”

“You feel like you’re trying to sweep back the ocean,” Keller says.

“Something like that.”

“Are you getting what you need from my agency?” Keller asks.

“In the short term?” Mullen says. “Pretty much. Look, there’s always the tension between feds and local police, let’s not kid ourselves. Some of your people are afraid to share information with us, either because they want the busts for themselves or they think all local cops are dirty. My people will play hide-the-ball with your guys because they want the busts and they don’t want the feds tromping over their turf and jacking it up.”

Coordination is tricky, Keller knows, even when there’s the best of intent, which isn’t always the case. It’s too easy for different agencies to run across each other’s informants or protected witnesses, jam up or cut short a promising investigation, even get informants killed. And he knows DEA can be high-handed with local police forces, telling them to stay away from investigations, just as he knows the local guys are too often more than willing to freeze his people out of valuable intelligence.

Professional jealousy is a real problem. Everyone wants to make busts themselves because busts are the route to promotions. And good publicity—everyone wants to stand in front of that table loaded with drugs, guns, and money and get their picture taken. It’s become a cliché but not a harmless one, Keller thinks, because it gives the impression that we’re winning a war we’re not winning.

The drugs on the table are like photos of dead Vietcong.

“But for the most part,” Mullen is saying, “I think we’re working pretty well together. It could always be better, of course.”

Which is Mullen opening the door, Keller thinks. Asking the question—what are you really doing here?

“Why don’t you and I talk away from the kids,” Keller says.

“You ever been to the Cloisters?”

Keller and Mullen walk along the pillared arches of the Cuxa Cloisters in the park not far from Inwood. The structure was once part of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Michel in the French Pyrenees, was moved to New York in 1907 and now surrounds a central garden.

Keller knows that Mullen is making a statement by coming here. And, sure enough, Mullen says, “I heard you liked monasteries.”

“I lived in one for a while.”

“Yeah, that’s what I heard,” Mullen says. “In New Mexico, right? What was that like?”

“Quiet.”

“They said you were in charge of, what, the beehives or something?” Mullen asks.

“The monastery sold honey,” Keller says. “What else do you want to know, Brian?”

Because if Mullen has doubts about him, it’s better to know now.

“Why did you leave it?” Mullen asks.

“Because they let Adán Barrera out of prison.”

“And you wanted to put him back in,” Mullen says.

“Something like that.”

“I like it here,” Mullen says. “I like to come here, walk around and think. It gets me away from all the shit. I’m not sure I like the modern world, Art.”

“Me neither,” Keller says. “But it’s the one we have.”

“Hey, we’re at the chapel, you want to go in?” Mullen asks. “I mean, if we’re going to have a come-to-Jesus talk, we might as well come to Jesus.”

They go through the heavy oak doors, which are flanked by carvings of leaping animals. The large room is dominated by an apse at the end with a hanging crucifix. The side wall contains frescoes honoring the Virgin Mary.

“They moved this here from Spain,” Mullen says. “Beautiful, huh?”

“It is.”

“Why are you really here?” Mullen asks. “I know it’s not for me to give you a tour and show you things you already know.”

“You talked about triage,” Keller says. “Short-term and long-term solutions. I want you to know my long-term intentions. I’m going to move DEA onto a new course, more in the direction of what you were talking about earlier. Away from the revolving door of arrest and incarceration, more into rehabilitation. I want us to back local initiatives with federal power and remove federal obstacles.”

“Can you?” Mullen says. “Your people aren’t going to like it.”

Keller knows what Mullen isn’t saying but what he’s thinking, that DEA has a vested interest in keeping the drug war going—its own existence.

“I don’t know,” Keller says. “But I’m going to try. If I’m going to succeed, I’ll need support from police forces like NYPD.”

“And the short term?”

“Until we change the baseline,” Keller says, “we have to do everything we can to slow the flow of heroin.”

“No argument from me.”

“I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t do much in Mexico,” Keller says. “They’re too protected. If I’m going to attack the problem, it has to be here in New York, which has become the heroin hub.”

Mullen smiles. “Any other epiphanies, Art?”

“Yeah,” Keller says. “We can’t answer the question of why people do drugs. But we do know why people deal them. Very simple—money.”

“So?”

“So if we really want to do something, we go after the money,” Keller says. “And I don’t mean down in Mexico.”

“You know what you’re talking about here.”

“Yeah, I do,” Keller says. “And I’m ready to go there. I guess the question is, are you?”

Keller knows what he’s asking of the man.

It’s a potentially career-ending move.

You go after junkies and street dealers, they don’t have a way to fight back. You attack the centers of power, they have more than enough ways of fighting back.

They can bury you.

Mullen doesn’t look scared.

“Only if you’re going to go all the way,” he says. “I’m not interested in sending a few patsies to Club Fed for a few years. But if you’re going to take this wherever it goes, then … what do you need?”

A banker, Keller tells him.

A Wall Street banker.

On the train back, Hidalgo has another burger and tells Keller that actually it isn’t so bad.

“That’s good,” Keller says.

Because you’re going to be spending a lot more time on the Acela.

It’s the start of Operation Agitator.

Guerrero, Mexico

Heroin reminds Ric of Easter.

The poppies shimmer vibrant purple in the sunlight, and the flowers that aren’t purple are pink, red and yellow. Set against the emerald-green stalks, they look like candy baskets.

The plane banks hard against the Sierra Madre del Sur as it angles for its landing at a private airstrip outside the Guerrero town of Tristeza. Ric’s father has brought him here as sort of a tutorial, “to learn the business from the ground up, as it were.” It’s part of his ongoing “Your Generation” lecture series, along the lines of “Your generation is separated from the soil that has made you all rich.”

As if, Ric thinks, my lawyer father spent a single day in the fields. His closest brush with being a campesino was a thankfully brief attempt to grow tomatoes in the backyard that ended in a declaration that it was more “economically efficient” to buy them at the market, notwithstanding a previous installment in the lecture series entitled “Your Generation Doesn’t Know Where Its Food Comes From.”

Yes, we do, Ric thinks.

Calimax.

The plane lands with a hard bounce.

Ric sees the Jeeps full of armed men beside the airstrip, waiting to take them up the winding dirt roads into the mountains. A convoy is necessary because this part of Guerrero is increasingly “bandit country,” relatively new to the Sinaloa cartel.

The cartel’s fields in Sinaloa and Durango can’t keep up with the growing demand for heroin, so the cartel has expanded into Guerrero and Michoacán.

Both states are producing more and more opium paste, Ric knows. The problem is that the infrastructure hasn’t yet caught up to the production and they have to rely on smaller organizations as middlemen between the growers and the cartel.

Not a bad thing in itself, if the middlemen weren’t at war with each other. So this beautiful country, Ric thinks as the Jeep passes through stands of tall ocote pines, is rife with gunmen on the hunt for one another.

First there are the Knights Templar, mostly in Michoacán, the survivors of the old La Familia organization, still possessed (and that is the word, Ric thinks) with a crazy quasi-religious zeal to eradicate “evildoers.” Sinaloa tolerated them as long as they were helping to fight the Zetas, but now their utility is fast coming to an end and they’re more trouble than they’re worth. Especially as these “do-gooders” are heavily involved in meth, extortion and murder for hire.

The Knights insist on fighting Los Guerreros Unidos, a splinter group of the Tapia organization founded by the old Tapia gunman Eddie Ruiz, now residing in an American penitentiary.

Ruiz was the first American to be the head of a Mexican cartel. Ric met him once or twice as a kid, but mostly knows him from the famous YouTube videos when “Crazy Eddie” filmed himself interviewing four Zetas before he executed them. Then he sent the tapes to all the television stations and put the clip out on the internet.

It started a trend.

Now “Eddie’s Boys,” as Guerreros Unidos are sometimes known, are running amok in Guerrero, Morelos and Edoméx, killing rivals, kidnapping for profit, extorting businesses and just generally being a pain in the ass.

We can’t step on them because we need them, Núñez has told Ric. Especially here in Guerrero, where they control Tristeza. A city of about a hundred thousand people, Tristeza has importance beyond its size because it sits on the crossroads of several highways, including the all-important interstate down to Acapulco. The mayor of Tristeza is a longtime member of GU, and we need, at least for the time being, to stay in her good graces.

GU has a blood feud with Los Rojos, yet another splinter group of the Tapia organization, which, it should be fairly noted, was itself a splinter group of the Sinaloa cartel.

“The conflict is over smuggling routes,” Núñez explained, “but when you really analyze it, what they’re fighting over is us. It’s a flaw in the system that we set up, and Adán was too busy fighting the Zetas to repair it, and since his death, it’s only gotten worse.”

The Sinaloa cartel, Ric has learned, doesn’t actually own heroin farms in Guerrero. Most of them are just a few acres large, tucked away deep in the mountains, and are owned by small farmers who harvest the poppy and then sell the opium gum to middlemen, such as GU and Los Rojos, who transport it north—mostly hidden on commercial buses out of Tristeza to Acapulco and then to labs in Sinaloa or closer to the American border.

So they’re killing each other, Ric thinks, his breath getting tight as they climb up past the ten-thousand-foot mark, for the right to sell to us.

Then there’s his old friend Damien Tapia.

Now glossing himself the Young Wolf and making himself another pain in Sinaloa’s ass.

Damien has reassembled some of his father’s old loyalists and started to sell cocaine and methamphetamine in Culiacán, Badiraguato, Mazatlán, and even Acapulco, where he’s reportedly based, protected by some of Ruiz’s former people, extorting bars and nightclubs. There are rumors that he’s been spotted in Durango and here in Guerrero, and, if that’s the case, he’s going to try to get into the heroin market as well.

“Such a nice young man,” Núñez had said about Damien. “It was a shame that his father went insane and had to be put down like a mad dog.”

The convoy comes into a sharp curve and Ric sees a flash of color ahead—hidden behind a stand of tall pines on a steep slope are the bright blooms of the poppy. He can see and smell the charred stumps where the farmer burned down the trees to create land for opium cultivation.

The field is maybe only two acres, but Núñez tells his son not to be deceived. “A well-irrigated, skillfully tended acre in Guerrero can yield as much as eight kilos of opium sap in a season, which is enough to produce a kilo of raw heroin.

“Just last year,” he says, “that kilo of sap sold for about seven hundred dollars; already the price has doubled to fifteen hundred dollars as demand has grown, and we’ve only managed to keep the price that low by being the sole buyer, Walmart, if you will.

“This farmer might have as many as eight to ten of these patches scattered around the mountainside, hidden from the army helicopters that patrol the terrain in order to spray herbicides. At three thousand dollars a patch, you’re starting to talk real money.”

Three thousand dollars is lunch money to my old man, Ric thinks, but a fortune to a poor farmer in rural Guerrero.

He gets out of the Jeep to watch the rayadores work the patch.

They make good money, he learns. A productive worker can make thirty to forty dollars a day, seven times what her parents can make working in fields of corn or avocado groves. The rayadores are mostly teenagers and mostly girls, because their hands are smaller and nimbler. Wearing small razor blades attached to rings on their thumbs, they carefully slice tiny slits into the opium pods until the gum seeps out like a teardrop.

It’s delicate work: Cut too shallow and you get no sap. Cut too deep and you ruin the pod, a disaster to profitability. The rayadora will come back to the same plant again—a pod can be scored as many as seven or eight times to produce the maximum amount of sap.

Once the cut is made, the seeping liquid is allowed to harden into brown gum and the rayadores use the razors to gently scrape the gum into pans, then take it to sheds or barns where other workers roll it into balls or cakes, which can be stored, for years if necessary.

When the farmer has harvested enough opium paste, he contacts the middleman, who comes and collects it, pays for it, and takes it to a lab to be processed into cinnamon heroin. From there it goes to a transshipment point like Tristeza, where it’s loaded onto buses for what’s called “shotgun shipping” north.

The middleman marks it up by as much as 40 percent—up to $2,100 a kilo—and then sells it to the cartel, which, again, controls the price by being virtually the only buyer.

A kilo of raw heroin will sell for somewhere between $60,000 and $80,000 in the States.

“The margin is excellent,” Núñez says, “and even when you factor in the costs of transport, smuggling, security and, of course, bribes, we can still undersell the American pharmaceuticals and make a healthy profit.”

Ric is a city kid, but he can’t help but appreciate the beauty of the scene in front of him. It’s idyllic. The air is crisp and clean, the flowers beautiful, and the sight of the young girls with their white smocks and long black hair moving quietly and efficiently as they do their work is peaceful beyond description, beautiful, really, in its simplicity.

“It’s gratifying to know,” Ric hears his father say, “that this business gives so many people gainful employment at a salary they could never otherwise realize.”

There are hundreds of these farms scattered around Guerrero.

Plenty of work for everyone.

Yeah, Ric thinks, we’re social benefactors.

He gets back in the Jeep and the convoy snakes its way down the mountain, the sicarios on the lookout for bandits.

Damien Tapia, the Young Wolf, watches the convoy through the telescopic sights of a sniper rifle.

From the cover of trees on the facing slope, he has the head of the Sinaloa cartel, Ricardo Núñez—one of the men who made the decision to kill his father—literally in the crosshairs.

When Damien was a boy, his father was one of the three bosses of the Sinaloa cartel, along with Adán Barrera and Nacho Esparza, two men Damien thought of as his uncles. The Tapia brothers were powerful then—Martín as the politician, Alberto the gunman, and his father, Diego, the undisputed leader.

When Tío Adán was captured in the States, it was Damien’s father who took care of the business. When Tío Adán was transferred back to Mexico, to Puente Grande prison, it was Damien’s father who arranged for his protection. When Tío Adán got out, it was Damien’s father who fought alongside him to take Nuevo Laredo from the Gulf and the Zetas.

They were all friends then, the Tapias, the Barreras, the Esparzas. In those days, Damien looked up to the older boys like Iván and Sal and Rubén Ascensión and Ric Núñez, who was closer to him in age. They were his buddies, his cuates. They were Los Hijos, the sons who would inherit the all-powerful Sinaloa cartel, and they would run it together and be brothers forever.

Then Tío Adán married Eva Esparza.

Little Eva is younger than I am, Damien thinks now as he centers the sights on Ricardo Núñez’s graying temple; we used to play together as kids.

But Tío Nacho wanted Baja for Iván, and he pimped his daughter out to get it. After Eva married Tío Adán, the Tapia wing of the cartel became the stepchild—slighted, ignored, pushed to the side. The very night Adán was popping little Eva’s cherry, his tame federales went to arrest Damien’s uncle Alberto and shot him dead. It turned out that Adán had sold out the Tapias to save his nephew Sal from a murder charge.

My father, Damien thinks, was never the same after that. He couldn’t believe the men he called his primos, his cousins—Adán and Nacho—would betray him, would kill his flesh and blood. He started to get deeper and deeper into the Santa Muerte, deeper into the coke. The anger, the grief, ate him alive and the war he launched to get revenge tore the cartel to pieces.

Shit, Damien thinks, it tore the whole country to pieces, as Diego allied the Tapia organization with the Zetas to fight the Barreras and the Esparzas, his old partners in the Sinaloa cartel.

Thousands died.

Damien was only sixteen that day, just after Christmas, when the marines tracked his father down to an apartment tower in Cuernavaca, went in with armored cars, helicopters, and machine guns, and murdered him.

He keeps the photo on his phone as a screen saver. Diego Tapia, bullet holes in his face and chest, his shirt ripped open, his pants pulled down, dollar bills tossed over him.

The marines did that to his father.

Killed him, mocked his corpse, put the disgusting photos out on the net.

But Damien always blamed Tío Adán.

And Tío Nacho.

His “uncles.”

And Ricardo Núñez, Ric’s father.

What they did to Diego Tapia is unforgivable, Damien thinks. My father was a great man.

And I am my father’s son.

He wrote a narcocorrido about it, put it out on Instagram.

I am my father’s son and always will be

I’m a man of my family

A man of the trade

And I’ll never turn my back on my blood

This is my life until I die.

I’m the Young Wolf.

His mother has begged him to get out of the business, do something else, anything else, she’s already lost too many loved ones to the trade. You’re handsome, she tells him—movie star, rock star, Telemundo handsome, why don’t you become an actor, a singer, a television host? But Damien told her no, he wouldn’t disrespect his father that way. He swore on Diego’s grave to bring the Tapias back to where they belong.

At the top of the Sinaloa cartel.

“They stole it from us, Mami,” Damien told his mother. “And I’m going to take back what they stole.”

Easy to say.

Harder to do.

The Tapia organization still exists, but with only a fraction of the power it used to have. Without the leadership of the three brothers—Diego and Alberto dead, Martín in prison—it operates more like a group of franchises giving nominal allegiance to the Tapia name while they each operate independently, trafficking coke, meth, marijuana and now heroin. And they’re scattered, with cells in southern Sinaloa, Durango, Guerrero, Veracruz, Cuernavaca, Baja, Mexico City and Quintana Roo.

Damien has his own cell, based in Acapulco, and while the other cells give him a certain level of respect because of who his father was, they don’t view him as the boss. And Sinaloa—maybe out of guilt over what they did to his family—tolerates him as long as he’s subservient and not looking to get revenge.

And the truth, Damien knows, is that he’s not much of a threat—hopelessly outgunned by the combined forces of the Barrera and Esparza wings of the cartel.

Until now, he thinks.

Now Tío Adán and Tío Nacho are dead.

Iván and Elena Sánchez are at war.

Game changer.

And now he can pull the trigger on Ricardo Núñez.

“Shoot,” Fausto tells him.

Fausto—squat, thickset, mustached—was one of his father’s loyalists who went with Eddie Ruiz after Diego’s death. Now, with Eddie in prison, he’s back with Damien.

Based in Mazatlán, Fausto is a stone killer.

What Damien needs.

“Shoot,” Fausto repeats.

Damien’s finger tightens on the trigger.

But stops.

For several reasons.

One, he’s unsure of the wind. Two, he’s never killed anyone before. But three—

Damien shifts the scope onto Ric.

Ric is sitting right next to his dad, and Damien doesn’t want to take the chance on missing and killing his friend.

“No,” he says, lowering the rifle. “They’d come after us too hard.”

“Not if they’re dead.” Fausto shrugs. “Shit, I’ll do it.”

“No, it’s too soon,” Damien says. “We don’t have the power yet.”

It’s what he tells Fausto, what he tells himself.

He watches the convoy turn into the next switchback, out of sight and out of range.

The plane takes an unexpected turn.

Ric expected that they’d fly directly back to Culiacán, but the plane banks west toward the ocean to Mazatlán.

“I want to show you something,” Núñez says.

Ric figures he already pretty much knows Mazatlán, which has been a major playground for Los Hijos. They’ve been coming to the carnival here since they were kids, and when they got older would frequent the beachside bars and clubs and hit on the turista women who flocked from the US and Europe for the sunshine and sand. It was in Mazatlán where Iván taught Ric how to say, “Would you like to sleep with me tonight?” in French, German, Italian and, on one occasion that lives only hazily in Ric’s memory, Romanian.

That might have been the night—Ric is unclear—when he and the Esparza boys and Rubén Ascensión were arrested on the Malecón for some forgotten transgression, taken to the city jail and immediately released, with apologies, when they revealed their last names.

Ric is vaguely aware that Mazatlán, like a lot of towns in Sinaloa, was settled by Germans and still has a kind of Bavarian feel about it in its music and its affinity for beer, a heritage that Ric has partaken in more than he should have.

A car is waiting at the airstrip and drives them not to the boardwalk or the beach but down to the port.

Ric also knows the port well because that’s where the cruise ships come, and where you have cruise ships you have available women. He and the Esparzas used to sit on the boardwalk above the piers and rate the women as they got off the ships, then pretend to be local tour guides and volunteer to take the top scorers to the best bars.

Although there was that time when Iván looked a tall, striking Norwegian woman straight in her blues eyes and stated flatly, “Actually, I’m not a guide. I’m the son of a cartel boss. I have millions of dollars, speedboats and fast cars, but what I really like to do is fuck beautiful women like you.”

To Ric’s surprise, she said okay, so they went off with her and her friends, rented a hotel suite, guzzled Dom, did a ton of coke and fucked like monkeys until it was time for the girls to get back on the cruise ship.

Yeah, Ric could show his father a few things about Mazatlán.

But they don’t go to the cruise ship docks. They pass right by them and go to the commercial docks where the freighters come in.

“A business,” Núñez says as they get out of the car next to a warehouse, “can never stand still. If you are static, you are dying. Your godfather, Adán, knew this, which is why he moved us into heroin.”

A guard standing at the door of the warehouse lets them in.

“Heroin is good,” Núñez says as they go in, “it’s profitable, but like all profitable things, it attracts competition. Other people see you making money and they copy you. The first thing they try to do is undersell you, driving the price down and reducing everyone’s profits.”

If the cartel were truly a cartel, he explains, in the classic sense—that is, a collection of businesses that dominate a commodity and have agreed to meet set prices—it wouldn’t be a problem.

“But ‘cartel’ is really a misnomer in our case; in fact, it’s oxymoronic to speak of ‘cartels’ in the plural.” They have competition, he explains—the remnants of the Zetas, bits and pieces left of the Gulf “cartel,” the Knights Templar—but what worries Núñez is Tito Ascensión.

Ascensión asked Iván for permission to get into heroin, Iván smartly refused, but what if Tito does it anyway? Jalisco could become, quickly, the Sinaloa cartel’s biggest competition. He’d undersell them, and Núñez is not of a mind to be forced into reducing profit margins. So …

They step into a back room.

Núñez closes the door behind them.

A young Asian man sits behind a table, on which are stacked several tightly wrapped bricks of …

Ric doesn’t recognize whatever it is.

“The only good response to lower prices,” Núñez says, “is higher quality. Customers will pay a premium for quality.”

“So this is a higher-grade heroin?” Ric asks.

“No,” Núñez says. “This is fentanyl. It’s fifty times stronger than heroin.”

A synthetic opiate, fentanyl was originally used in skin patches to relieve the pain of terminal cancer patients, Núñez explains. It’s so powerful, even a small dot can be lethal. But the right dose gets the addict much higher, much faster.

He leads Ric out of the office to the back of the warehouse. A number of men are gathered there, some of whom Ric recognizes as high-ranking people in the cartel—Carlos Martínez, who operates out of Sonora; Héctor Greco, the plaza boss of Juárez; Pedro Esteban from Badiraguato. A few others that Ric doesn’t know.

Behind them, along the wall, three men are tied to chairs.

One look at them, Ric knows they’re junkies.

Emaciated, shaking, strung out.

A guy who looks like a lab tech sits at a chair by a small table, on which three syringes are set.

“Gentlemen,” Núñez says. “I’ve told you about the new product, but seeing is believing. So, a little demonstration.”

He nods at the lab tech, who takes one of the syringes and squats next to one of the junkies. “This is our standard cinnamon heroin.”

The tech ties off the junkie’s arm, finds a vein and injects him. A second later, the junkie’s head snaps back, and then lolls.

He’s high.

“The next syringe is the heroin laced with a small amount of fentanyl,” Núñez says.

The tech injects the second junkie.

His head snaps, his eyes open wide, his mouth curls into an almost beatific smile. “Oh, God. Oh, my God.”

“How is it?” Núñez asks.

“It’s wonderful,” the junkie says. “It’s so wonderful.”

Ric feels like he’s watching QVC.

And sort of he is. The myth, he knows, is that cartel bosses are dictators who simply issue commands and expect them done. That’s true with the sicarios, the gunmen and the lower levels, but a cartel is made up of businesspeople who will only do what’s good for their businesses, and they have to be sold.

“The next,” Núñez says, “is just three milligrams of fentanyl.”

The last junkie strains against the ropes, screams, “No!”

But the tech ties him off, locates a vein, and then shoots the full syringe into his arm. The same snap of the head, the same wide eyes. Then the eyes close and the man’s head falls forward. The tech holds two fingers against the junkie’s neck and then shakes his head. “He’s gone.”

Ric fights the urge to throw up.

Jesus, did his father just do that? Did his father just really do that? He couldn’t have used a lab rat, or a monkey or something, he just had a human being killed for a sales demo?

“Any addict who tries this new product,” Núñez says, “would never go back, could never go back to the more expensive and less potent pharmaceutical pills or even cinnamon heroin. Why take the local, when you can take the express?”

“What’s the cost to us?” Martínez asks.

“Four thousand US per kilogram,” Núñez says. “Although by buying bulk we can probably get that down to three. But each kilo of fentanyl will produce twenty kilos of enhanced product worth over a million dollars at the retail level. The margin isn’t the problem.”

“What is the problem?” Martínez asks.

“Supply,” Núñez says. “The production of fentanyl is tightly controlled in the US and Europe. We can buy it in China, however, and ship it into the ports we control, such as Mazatlán, La Paz and Cabo. But that means we have to control the ports.

“Gentlemen, thirty years ago, the great Miguel Ángel Barrera—M-1, the founder of our organization—introduced a derivative product of cocaine at a similar gathering. That derivative, ‘crack,’ made our organization wealthy and powerful. I’m now introducing a derivative of heroin that will take us to an even higher level. I want to take the organization into fentanyl and I hope you’ll get behind me. Now, I’ve arranged for dinner at a local restaurant, and I hope you’ll join me in that as well.”

They go out to dinner at a place on the shore.

The usual drill, Ric thinks—private room in the back, the rest of the place bought out, a ring of guards circling the restaurant. They dine on ceviche, lobster, shrimp, smoked marlin, and bearded tamales washed down with quantities of Pacífico beer, and if any one of them gave a thought to the dead junkie in the back of the warehouse, Ric doesn’t notice.

After the banquet, the plane flies Ric and his father back to Culiacán.

“So what do you think?” Núñez asks on the flight.

“About …”

“Fentanyl.”

“I think you sold them,” Ric says. “But if fentanyl’s that good, the competition will also get in on it.”

“Of course they will,” Núñez says. “That’s business. Ford designs a good pickup truck, Chevy copies and improves it, Ford designs an even better one. The key is getting there first, monopolizing the supply chain, establishing dominant sales channels and a loyal customer base, and continuing to service them. You can be very helpful by assuring that La Paz remains ours exclusively.”

“Sure,” Ric says. “But there’s a problem you haven’t thought of. Fentanyl’s a synthetic?”

“Yes.”

“Then anyone can make it,” Ric says. “You don’t need farms, like you do with heroin. You only need a lab, which you can put up anywhere. It will be like meth was—every asshole with a couple of bucks and a chemistry set will be making it in his bathtub.”

“There’ll be cheap knockoffs, no doubt,” Núñez says. “But it will be an annoyance at the edge of the market, at most. The bootleggers won’t have the sales reach to create a serious problem.”

If you say so, Ric thinks.

But you won’t be able to control it at the retail level. The retailers won’t have the discipline to limit the doses, and they’ll start to kill off the customer base. People are going to start dying, just like that poor guy in the warehouse, and when they start dying in the US, it’s going to bring heat and light on us.

Pandora’s box has been opened.

And the demons have flown out.

Fentanyl, Ric thinks, could kill us all.

Staten Island, New York

Jacqui wakes up sick.

Like she wakes up every morning.

That’s why they call it a “wake-up shot,” she thinks as she rolls out of bed. Well, it’s not exactly a bed, it’s an air mattress on the floor of a van, but I guess if you sleep in it … on it … it’s a bed.

Nouns, after all, are based on verbs. Which is sort of too bad, she thinks, because her nickname, Jacqui the Junkie (a noun), lends itself far too easily to alliteration based on what she does, shoot junk, a verb.

Now she fights off an urge to puke.

Jacqui hates puking. She needs a wake-up.

Elbowing Travis, she says, “Hey.”

“Hey.” He’s out of it.

“I’m going out to score.”

“’Kay.”

Lazy prick, she thinks, I’m going out to score for you, too. She pulls on an old UConn sweatshirt, slips into her jeans, then puts on a pair of purple Nikes she found at a yard sale.

Slides the door open and steps out into a Staten Island Sunday morning.

Specifically Tottenville, down on the south end of the island across the river from Perth Amboy. The van is parked in the lot at Tottenville Commons, out behind the Walgreens along Amboy Road, but she knows they’ll have to move this morning before the security guys throw them out.

She walks into the drugstore, ignores the cashier’s dirty look and goes to the back to the restroom because she really has to pee. Does her business, washes her hands, splashes water on her face and is pissed at herself because she forgot to bring her toothbrush and her mouth tastes like day-old shit.

Which is pretty much what you look like, Jacqui thinks.

She doesn’t have any makeup on, her long brown hair is dirty and stringy and she’s going to have to find a place to deal with that before she goes to work today but right now all she hears is her mother’s voice: You’re such a pretty girl, Jacqueline, when you take care of yourself.

What I’m trying to do, Mom, Jacqui thinks as she walks out of the store and gives the cashier a fuck you smile on her way out.

Fuck you, bitch, you try living in a van.

Which is what she and Travis have been doing since her mom threw them out, what, three months ago, when she came home from the bar early—miracle of miracles—and found them shooting up.

So they moved into Travis’s van and live basically as gypsies now. Not homeless, Jacqui insists, because the van is a home, but they’re … what’s the word … peripatetic. She’s always liked the word peripatetic. She wishes it rhymed with something so she could use it in a song, but it really doesn’t. It sort of rhymes with pathetic, but Jacqui doesn’t want to go there because it has the ring of truth.

We are, she thinks, kind of pathetic.

They want to get an apartment, plan to get an apartment, but so far the first—and last—and the damage deposit have been going up their arms.

Back out in the parking lot she starts working the phone and calls her dealer, Marco, but it goes right to voice mail. She leaves a quick message—It’s Jacqui. Looking for you. Call back.

She really wants to hook up by phone because she’s starting to feel seriously sick and doesn’t want to have to get in the van and go all the way over to Princes Bay or way the hell up to Richmond, where the street dealers work.

It’s too far and it’s too risky, because the cops are clamping down, chasing the slingers inside. Or worse, you buy from some narc and get busted and what Jacqui really, really doesn’t want is to get arrested and detox at Rikers.

She’s about to go back to the van and drive down to Waldbaum’s parking lot where you can usually score and then her phone buzzes and it’s Marco and he isn’t happy. “It’s Sunday morning.”

“I know, I need a wake-up.”

“You should have saved some from last night.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“What do you need?” Marco asks.

“Two bags.”

“You want me to come out for twenty bucks?”

Jesus, why is he hassling her? Her nose is starting to run and she thinks she’s going to puke. “I’m getting sick, Marco.”

“Okay, where are you?”

“The Walgreens on Amboy.”

“I’m at Micky D’s,” Marco says. “I’ll meet you behind the Laundromat. You know where that is?”

Yeah, she does her laundry there all the time. Well, not all the time, when she thinks about it. When it gets too disgusting. “Duh, yes.”

“Half an hour,” Marco says.

“To walk across the parking lot?”

“I just got my food.”

“Okay, I’ll come there.”

“Ten minutes,” Marco says. “Behind the Laundromat.”

“Bring me a coffee,” Jacqui says. “Milk, four sugars.”

“Yes, Lady Mary,” Marco says. “You want, like, a McMuffin or something?”

“Just the coffee.” She’s just going to be able to keep that down, never mind greasy food.

Jacqui crosses the parking lot and walks out to Page Avenue, then up to the next strip mall, which has a CVS, a McDonald’s, a grocery store, a liquor store, an Italian restaurant and the Laundromat.

She walks behind the CVS and waits out the back of the Laundromat.

Five minutes later, Marco pulls up in his Ford Taurus. He rolls down the window and hands her the coffee.

“You drove across the parking lot?” Jacqui asks. “Global warming, Marco? Ever heard of that?”

“You have the money?” Marco asks. “And don’t tell me you’ll get it, you’re totally out of credit right now.”

“I have it.” She looks around and then hands him a twenty.

He reaches into the console and then slips her two glassine envelopes. “And a buck for the coffee.”

“Really?” Marco’s gotten kind of salty since he started dealing. Sometimes he forgets he’s just another addict, slinging shit so he has the money to get himself well. A lot of people are doing that these days—every dealer Jacqui knows is a user. She digs into her jeans pocket, finds a dollar bill and gives it to him. “I thought you were being a gentleman.”

“No, I’m a feminist.”

“Where are you going to be later?”

Marco holds his little finger to his mouth and his thumb to his ear—“Call me”—and pulls away.

Jacqui puts the envelopes in her pocket and walks back to the van.

Travis is awake.

“I scored,” Jacqui says, pulling the envelopes out.

“Where?”

“From Marco.”

“He’s an asshole,” Travis says.

“Okay, you go the next time,” Jacqui says.

Fuck the lazy bastard, she thinks. She loves him, but, Jesus, he can be a pain in the ass sometimes. And speaking of Our Lord and Savior, Travis looks a little like Jesus—shoulder-length hair and a beard, all slightly tinged with red. And thin like Jesus, at least like he looks in all the pictures.

Jacqui finds the cut-out bottom of a soda can she uses instead of a spoon for a cooker and pours the heroin into it. She fills her syringe out of a water bottle, squirts it into the heroin, then flicks on her lighter and holds it under the cooker until the solution bubbles. Taking the filter out of a cigarette, she dips it in water and gently lays it into the solution. Then she puts the tip of the needle into the filter and sucks the liquid into the syringe.

She takes a skinny belt she keeps for the purpose, wraps it around her left arm, and pulls on it until a vein pops up. Then she places the needle into the vein and pulls the plunger back so there’s a little air bubble in it and moves the needle around until a little blood shows up in the needle.

Jacqui hits the plunger.

Unties before she pulls the needle out and then—

Bam.

It hits her.

So beautiful, so peaceful.

Jacqui leans back against the van wall and looks at Travis, who just finished shooting up himself. They smile at each other and then she drifts off into heroin world, so vastly superior to the real world.

Which isn’t that high a bar to clear.

When Jacqui was little, when she was little, when Jacqui was a little girl, she saw her daddy in every man on the sidewalk, on the bus, every man who came into the restaurant where her mommy worked.

Is that my daddy? Is that my daddy? Is that my daddy? she’d asked her mom until her mom got tired of hearing it and told her that her daddy was in heaven with Jesus and Jacqui wondered why Jesus got him and she didn’t so she didn’t like Jesus very much.

When Jacqui was little she stayed in her room and looked at picture books and made up stories and told herself stories, especially when Mommy thought she was asleep and brought home some of the men who came into the restaurant where Mommy worked. She’d lie in her bed and make up stories and sings songs about when Jacqui was little, when she was little, when Jacqui was a little girl.

She wasn’t so little, she was nine, when Mommy married one of the men who came into the restaurant where she worked and he told Jacqui he wasn’t her daddy, he was her stepdaddy, and she told him she knew that because her daddy was with Jesus and he laughed and said yeah maybe, if Jesus is holding down a barstool in Bay Ridge.

Jacqui was eleven the first time Barry asked her if she was going to grow up to be a whore like her mother and she remembers that he pronounced it “who-are,” like “Horton Hears a Who-Are,” and Jacqui would go around the house muttering I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. Barry’s an asshole, one hundred percent. And one time he heard her and smacked her in the face and said You may not love me but you’re sure as shit going to respect me and her mother sat there at the kitchen table and did nothing. But then again she did nothing when he hit her and called her a who-are and a fucking drunk and Jacqui would run and hide in her room ashamed she didn’t do anything to stop him. And when Barry stormed out to go to the bar, Jacqui came out and asked her mother why she would stay with a man who was mean to her and her mother answered that someday she’d understand that a woman has needs, she gets lonely.

Jacqui didn’t feel lonely, because she had books. She would shut herself up in her room and read books—she read all of Harry Potter and the idea that they had been written by a woman led her to go to the library and find Jane Austen, the Brontës, Mary Shelley and George Eliot and then Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch and poems by Sylvia Plath and Jacqui decided that someday she’d leave Tottenville and move to England and become a writer and live in a room of her own where she didn’t have to block out the sounds of shouting and crying and hitting outside the door.

She started listening to music—not the pop shit her few friends listened to but good shit like the Dead Weather, Broken Bells, Monsters of Folk, Dead by Sunrise, Skunk Anansie. She bought an old guitar at a pawn shop, sat in her room and taught herself (in both literature and music Jacqui is an autodidact) chords and started to write songs when Jacqui was little (C), when she was little (F), when Jacqui was a little girl (C).

Jacqui is playing her guitar one afternoon when her mother is at work and Barry comes in and takes the guitar from her hand and says This will be our secret, our little secret, I’ll make you feel so good and lays her back on the bed and lies on top of her and she doesn’t tell her mother and she doesn’t tell anyone This will be our secret (D), our little secret (G), I’ll make you feel so good (Em) even when her mother says I can tell you’ve been having sex you’re a little whore who’s the boy I’ll have his ass thrown in jail and Barry keeps coming into her room until one day one early morning she hears her mother screaming and runs and sees Barry hunched over on the toilet and her mother screams Call 911 and Jacqui walks slowly to her room to get her phone and sings This will be our secret (D), our little secret (G), I’ll make you feel so good (Em) before she punches in the number and by the time the EMTs get there Barry is dead.

By this time Jacqui is in middle school, smoking a little weed, drinking some beer, some wine with her friends but mostly she stays in and reads or plays guitar, discovers Patti Smith and Deborah Harry, even Janis Joplin, writes songs with sardonic lyrics This will be my secret / My little secret / I killed my stepfather / Passively aggressively / And it makes me feel good / So good and her mother says she needs to get a job to help out so she becomes a barista at Starbucks.

Jacqui gets good grades in high school, almost out of spite because she hates high school and everything about it except study hall. Her grades are good enough to get a scholarship, but not good enough for Columbia or NYU or Boston University and there’s no money to send her anywhere she wants to go and she’s never going to live in England and be a writer and have a room of her own and her mother wants her to go to cosmetology school so she can make a living but Jacqui holds on to a shred of dream and enrolls at CUNY Staten Island.

It starts with pills.

She’s a freshman at CUNY, living at home with her mother, and it’s Christmas break and someone offers her some Oxy and she’s a little drunk and a lot bored so she thinks what the fuck and downs it and she likes it and the next day she goes out and gets some more because if you can’t find pills in Tottenville your seeing-eye dog probably can. They’re selling it in schools, on corners, in bars, shit, they’re even selling it from ice cream trucks.

The pills are everywhere—Oxy, Vicodin, Percocet—everyone is selling or buying or both. For Jacqui, it takes the edge off, the edge off having no fucking idea what she wants to do with her life, the edge off knowing that she was born in Tottenville and is going to live in Tottenville and die in Tottenville, working minimum-wage jobs no matter what degree she gets from CUNY. The edge off keeping the secret that her stepfather had turned her into a matinee.

The pills make her feel good and she doesn’t have a drug problem; what Jacqui has is a money problem. Not at first, when she was doing a little Oxy on weekends, not even when it was a pill a day, but now it’s two or three at thirty dollars a pop.

Some of the money she gets from her job at Starbucks, then some from her mother’s purse, sometimes she doesn’t need money at all if she wants to fuck guys who have pills. Fucking is nothing, she’s used to lying there letting a man fuck her and it might as well be somebody who can get her high if he can’t get her off.

Jacqui is basically high her second semester of college, then all summer, and then she kind of stops going to class her sophomore year as she goes from a 3.8 GPA to Incompletes, and then she just gives up the sham and drops out.

She drifts into working and getting high and fucking dealers and then she meets Travis.

Who turns her on to heroin.

It would be easy to blame him—her mother certainly does—but it wasn’t really Travis’s fault. They met at a club, one of those grungy coffeehouses where the neo-Kerouac crowd hangs out and plays guitars, and Travis had just been laid off from his construction job—he was a roofer—because he’d hurt his back and couldn’t really work and his disability ran out.

That was Travis’s story—he started taking Vike for the back pain—prescribed by a doctor—and never really stopped. On the age-old theory that if one was good, fifteen is better, Travis started chucking pills like M&M’s.

They were both high when they met but it was like—

BAM.

Love.

They fucked in the back of his van and Jacqui got off like she’d never gotten off; he had a long skinny dick like his long skinny body and it touched her in a place she’d never been touched.

It was Travis for her after that, and she for him.

They liked the same art, the same music, the same poetry. They wrote music together, busked together up in St. George for people getting off the ferry. They were having a blast, but it was the money.

The money, the money.

Because they had a habit together, too, a habit that cost up to three hundred dollars a day, and that was just unsustainable.

Travis had the answer.

“H,” he said, “it takes less to get you high and it costs, like, six or seven bucks a hit.”

Instead of thirty.

But Jacqui was afraid of heroin.

“It’s the same shit,” Travis said. “They’re all opiates, whether it’s a pill or a powder, it’s all the fruit of the poppy.”

“I don’t want to get addicted,” Jacqui said.

Travis laughed. “Shit, you’re addicted now.”

Everything he said was true, but Jacqui argued she didn’t want to use a needle. Cool, Travis said, we can just snort.

He did it first.

It really got him off.

He looked beatific.

So Jacqui snorted and it was so good, so good, so good. Better than anything, until they discovered smoking the shit, which was so much better, better, better.

Then one day Travis said, “Fuck this shit. Why are we messing around? It’s so much more efficient to shoot it, I’m not letting trypanophobia get in the way.”

Trypanophobia, Jacqui thought—the fear of needles.

They both loved words.

But she didn’t think she had a phobia, she thought she had a reasonable fear—needles gave you hep C, HIV, God knows what.

“Not if you’re clean, not if you’re careful, not if you’re … meticulous,” Travis said.

At first he was, using only fresh needles he bought from nurses and guys who worked at drugstores. He always swabbed his arm with alcohol before he shot up, always boiled the heroin to get any bacteria out.

And he got high.

Higher than Oxy, higher than snorting or smoking, he got mainlining-in-your-blood, in-your-brain high. Jacqui was jealous, felt left behind, earthbound while he flew to the moon, and one night he offered to shoot her up and she let him do it. Stuck a needle instead of his dick in her and it got her off more than he ever did.

Once she did that she knew she was never going back.

So you can blame Travis all you want, but Jacqui knows it’s her, it’s in her, the heart and soul of an addict, because she loves it, loves the H, loves the high, it’s literally in her blood.

“You’re too smart to be doing this,” her mother would tell her.

No, I’m too smart not to, Jacqui would think. Who would want to stay in this world when there’s an alternative?

“You’re killing yourself,” her mother would wail.

No, Mom, I’m living.

“It’s that rotten bastard’s fault.”

I love him.

I love our life.

I love …

It’s two hours later when Jacqui looks at her watch and thinks, Shit, I’m going to be late.

She gets out of the van and walks to CVS this time because she likes to switch it up. Goes into the restroom, locks the door behind her, takes some shampoo from her purse and washes her hair in the sink. Dries off with paper towels, and then puts on eyeliner and a little mascara and changes into her work clothes, reasonably clean jeans and a long-sleeved plum polo shirt with a name tag on it.

Back in the van, she rouses Travis. “I have to go to work.”

“Okay.”

“Try to score for us, okay?”

“Okay.”

I mean, how hard can it be, Travis? It’s easier to find H on Staten Island than it is to find weed. It’s everywhere. Half the people she knows are users.

“And move the van,” Jacqui says.

“Where?” Travis asks.

“I dunno, just move it.”

She gets out and takes the bus to the Starbucks on Page Avenue. Hopes the manager doesn’t see her come in five minutes late because it would be her third time in the last two weeks and she really needs this job.

There’s the Verizon bill, gas money, food money and she’s up to fifty bucks a day now just to stay well, never mind get high.

It’s like a train that just keeps picking up speed.

There are no stops and you can’t get off.

Keller steps out of the Metro at Dupont Circle sweating.

The Washington summer is typically hot, humid, and sweltering. Shirts and flowers wilt, energies and ambitions flag, blazing afternoons yield to sticky nights that bring small relief. It reminds Keller that the nation’s capital was actually built on a drained swamp, revives the rumor that old George chose the location to rescue himself from an ill-advised real estate investment.

It’s been an ugly summer everywhere.

In June, a radical Islamic group called ISIS emerged in Syria and Iraq, its atrocities rivaling those of the Mexican drug cartels.

In Veracruz, Mexico, thirty-one bodies were exhumed from a mass grave on property owned by the former mayor.

The Mexican army fought a gun battle with Guerreros Unidos and killed twenty-two of them. Later, a story came out that the narcos had actually been taken into a barn and executed.

In the post-Barrera era, violence in Mexico has just gone on and on and on.

In July, a group of three hundred flag-waving, sign-wielding protesters chanting “USA, USA” and screaming “Go home!” surrounded three buses full of Central American immigrants—many of them children—in Murrieta, California, and forced them to turn around.

“Is this America?” Marisol asked when she and Keller watched the news on television.

Two weeks later, NYPD cops on Staten Island put a black man named Eric Garner in a lethal headlock, killing him. Garner had been selling illegal cigarettes.

In August, a cop in Ferguson, Missouri, fatally shot eighteen-year-old African American Michael Brown, triggering, as it were, days of violent rioting. It reminded Keller of the long hot summers of the ’60s.

Later that month, potential presidential candidate John Dennison—without a trace of evidence, never mind actual proof—accused the Obama administration of dealing guns to ISIS.

“Is he insane?” Marisol asked.

“He’s throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks,” Keller said.

He knows from experience—Dennison has thrown some mud at him, too. Keller’s advocacy of naloxone prompted the barrage.

“Isn’t it a shame,” Dennison said, “that the boss of the Drug Enforcement Administration is soft on drugs? Weak. Not good. And isn’t his wife from Mexico?”

“He’s right about that,” Marisol said. “I am from Mexico.”

The conservative media picked it up and ran with it.

Keller was furious that they’d brought Marisol into it, but he didn’t issue a response. Dennison can’t play tennis, he thought, if I don’t hit the ball back. But he brought another attack on himself when he said, in response to a question from the Huffington Post, that he basically agreed with the administration’s review of maximum sentences for drug offenses.

Pathetic, Dennison tweeted. DEA boss wants drug dealers back on the streets. Weak Obama should say, “You’re fired!”

Which apparently is a catchphrase Dennison uses on his reality TV show, which Keller has never seen.

“B-list celebrities go around running errands for him,” Mari explained, “and the one who does the worst job every week gets fired.”

Keller doesn’t even know what a “B-list celebrity” is, but Mari does, having become shamelessly addicted to Real Housewives shows. She informed him that there are “real housewives” of Orange County, New Jersey, New York, Beverly Hills, and that what they do is go out to dinner, get drunk, and call each other names.

He was tempted to suggest Real Housewives of Sinaloa—a few of whom he’d actually known—in which they go out to dinner, get into arguments and machine-gun each other, but wisely decided to leave that one alone—Marisol can get very protective of her American pop culture.

On a serious level, his efforts to move DEA toward more progressive policy positions is running into resistance inside the agency.

Keller gets it.

He was one of the original true believers, a real hard-liner. He’s a hard-liner now on the cartels that bring heroin, coke and meth into the country. But he’s also a realist. What we’re doing now isn’t working, he thinks; it’s time to try something different, but it’s hard to sell that to other people who’ve also spent their lives fighting this war.

Denton Howard picks up Keller’s statements like rocks and throws them at him. Like Keller, he’s a political appointee, and he’s lobbying inside and outside DEA, making sure that potential supporters on the Hill and in the media know that he disagrees with his boss.

It gets out there.

Two days later, Politico comes out with a story about “factionalism” inside DEA. According to the story, the agency is splitting between a “Keller faction”’ and a “Howard faction.”

It’s no secret that the two men don’t like each other, the story reads, but the issue is more philosophical than personal. Art Keller is more liberal, wants to see a relaxation of drug prohibition laws, reduction of mandatory sentences and more focus placed on treatment than prohibition. Howard is a hard-liner on prohibition, a “lock ’em up and throw away the key” conservative.

Factions are forming around the two positions, the story goes on to say:

But it’s more complicated than a bipolar political struggle. What makes it really interesting is what might be called an “experiential divide.” A lot of the veteran, old-school personnel, who might otherwise support Howard’s more hard-core stance, don’t respect him because he’s a bureaucrat, a politician who never worked the field, while Keller is a veteran field agent, a former undercover, who knows the job from the street up. On the other hand, some of the younger personnel, who might otherwise be sympathetic to Keller’s more liberal positions, tend to see him as something of a dinosaur, a street cop with a “shoot first, ask questions later” history who lacks administrative skills and tends to spend too much time on operations to the detriment of policy.

It might all be a moot point, anyway, decided not in the halls of the DEA but in the voting booth. If the Democrats win the next presidential election, Keller is almost certain to keep his job and will in all likelihood move to dump Howard and purge his faction. If a Republican candidate takes the White House, Keller is almost as certainly out the door, with Howard taking his desk.

Stay tuned.

Keller gets the writer on the phone. “Who did you talk to for this story?”

“I can’t reveal sources.”

“I know the feeling,” Keller says. Marisol has schooled him that the media is not the enemy and that he needs to play nice. “But I know you didn’t talk to me.”

“I tried. You wouldn’t take my call.”

“Well, that was a mistake,” Keller says. Or sabotage, he thinks. “Look, here’s my cell number. Next time you want to do a story about my operation, call me directly.”

“Is there anything in the story you want to correct or comment on?”

“Well, I don’t shoot first and ask questions later,” he says. That was Howard, he thinks, building a narrative. “And I’m not going to conduct any ‘purges.’”

“But you would dump Howard.”

“Denton Howard is a political appointee,” Keller says. “I couldn’t fire him if I wanted to.”

“But you do want to.”

“No.”

“Can I quote you?”

“Sure.”

Let Howard look like the asshole.

Keller clicks off and walks out to the reception area. “Elise, did I get an incoming call from Politico?”

He is an old undercover guy, so the slight trace of hesitation in her eyes tells him what he needs to know.

“Never mind,” Keller says. “I’m reassigning you.”

“Why?”

“Because I need someone I can trust,” Keller says. “Have your desk cleaned out by the end of day.”

He can’t afford to have a Howard loyalist screening his phone calls.

Not with Agitator going on.

Keller has kept knowledge of, and access to, Agitator on a highly select need-to-know basis, the intelligence on which is restricted to Blair, Hidalgo, and himself.

On the NYPD side, Mullen has laid his neck on the chopping block by running the op from his own desk, not informing his superiors or anyone else in the Narcotics Division except for one detective—Bobby Cirello, the cop who drove them around on the New York City heroin tour.

This was part of the “top-down/bottom-up” strategy that Keller and Mullen developed over their intense discussions. Cirello would be sent out to penetrate the New York heroin connection from the lowest level and work his way up. At the same time, they’d try to find an opening at the top of the financial world and work their way toward a connection between the two.

Agitator is a slow burn, it’s going to take months, if not years. Keller and Mullen have promised each other that they will make no premature arrests or seizures, no matter how tempting.

“We won’t pull the string on the net,” Mullen said, “until we have all the fish.”

Cirello is already on the street.

Finding a target in the financial world has taken longer.

They can’t put an undercover cop into the financial world, because the learning curve at the level they want would be too steep and it would take too long.

That means finding a snitch.

It’s ugly, but what they’re looking for is a victim. Like any predators, they’re scanning the herd to find the vulnerable, the injured, the weak.

It’s no different from finding an informer in the drug world, Keller thinks; you’re looking for someone who has succumbed to weaknesses or is in trouble.

The vulnerabilities always come in the same categories.

Money, anger, fear, drugs, or sex.

Money is the easiest. In the drug world, someone has received some dope on credit, then got it busted or ripped. He owes a lot of money he can’t pay. He flips in exchange for cash or refuge.

Anger. Someone doesn’t get the bump he wanted, the deal he wanted, the respect he thinks he deserves. Or someone screws someone’s wife or girlfriend. Or, worse, someone kills someone’s brother or friend. The aggrieved doesn’t have the power to extract his own revenge, so he goes to law enforcement to do it for him.

Fear. Someone gets word he’s on the list, his head is on the block. He has nowhere to run but to the cops. But he can’t come empty-handed, the law doesn’t give protection from the goodness of its heart. He has to come with information, he has to be willing to go back and wear a wire. Then there’s the fear of going to prison for a long stretch—one of the biggest motivations for ratting out. The feds used that particular fear to rip the guts out of the Mafia—most guys can’t deal with the fear of dying in the joint. There are the few who could—Johnny Boy Cozzo, Rafael Caro—but they’re few and far between.

Drugs. It used to be axiomatic in organized crime that if you do dope, you die. It makes guys too unpredictable, too talkative, too vulnerable. People do crazy, fucked-up things when they’re high or drunk. They gamble stupidly, they get into fights, they crash cars. And an addict? All you have to do to get information from an addict is to withhold the drug. The addict will talk.

And then there’s sex. Carnal misdeeds are not such a big deal in the drug world—unless you screw someone’s wife, girlfriend, daughter, or sister, or unless you’re gay—but out in the civilian world, sex is the undefeated champion of vulnerabilities.

Men who will confess to their wives that they cheated on their taxes, embezzled millions, hell, killed somebody, won’t cop to something on the side. Guys who make sure their buddies know that they’re players—that they have girlfriends, mistresses, hookers, high-priced call girls—would practically die before letting those same buddies find out that they don the girlfriends’ lingerie, the mistresses’ makeup; that the hookers and the call girls get a bonus for spanking them or pissing on them.

The weirder the sex, the more vulnerable the target is.

Money, anger, fear, drugs and sex.

What you’re really looking for is a combo plate. Mix any of the five and you have a guy who is on the fast track to being your victim.

Hugo Hidalgo takes a cab from Penn Station to the Four Seasons Hotel.

He spends most of his time in New York now, because that’s the new heroin hub and because, in the words often attributed to bank robber Willie Sutton, “That’s where the money is.”

Mullen is waiting for Hugo in the sitting room of a penthouse suite.

A guy in his early thirties, Hidalgo guesses, sits on one of the upholstered chairs. His sandy hair is slicked straight back, although a little disheveled as if he’s run his hands through it. He’s wearing an expensive white shirt and black suit pants, but he’s barefoot.

His elbows are on his knees, his face in his hands.

Hidalgo is familiar with the posture.

It’s someone who’s been caught.

He looks at Mullen.

“Chandler Claiborne,” Mullen says. “Meet Agent Hidalgo from DEA.”

Claiborne doesn’t look up, but mumbles, “Hello.”

“How are you?” Hidalgo says.

“He’s had better days,” Mullen says. “Mr. Claiborne rented a suite here, brought up a thousand-dollar escort, an ounce of coke, got shall we say ‘overexcited,’ and beat the hell out of the woman. She, in turn, called a detective she knows, who came up to the room, saw the coke and had the good career sense to call me.”

Claiborne finally looks up. Sees Hidalgo and says, “Do you know who I am? I’m a syndication broker with the Berkeley Group.”

“Okay …”

Claiborne sighs, like a twenty-year-old trying to teach his parents how to use an iPhone app. “A hedge fund. We have controlling interest in some of the largest office and residential building projects in the world, over twenty million square feet of prime property.”

He goes on to name buildings that Hidalgo knows, and a bunch he doesn’t.

“What I think Mr. Claiborne is trying to indicate,” Mullen says, “is that he’s an important person who has powerful business connections. Am I representing that correctly, Mr. Claiborne?”

“I mean, if I didn’t,” Claiborne says, “I’d be in jail right now, wouldn’t I?”

He’s a cocky prick, Hidalgo thinks, used to getting away with shit. “What’s a ‘syndication broker’ do?”

Claiborne is getting comfortable now. “As you can imagine, these properties cost hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars to finance. No single bank or lending institution is going to take that entire risk. It takes sometimes as many as fifty lenders to put together a project. That’s called a syndicate. I put syndicates together.”

“How do you get paid?” Hidalgo asks.

“I have a salary,” Claiborne says, “mid–seven figures, but the real money comes from bonuses. Last year it was north of twenty-eight mil.”

“Mil would be millions?”

Hidalgo’s DEA salary is $57,000.

“Yeah,” Claiborne says. “Look, I’m sorry, I did get carried away. I’ll pay her whatever she wants, within reason. And if I can make some sort of contribution to a policemen’s fund, or …”

“I think he’s offering us a bribe,” Mullen says.

“I think he is,” says Hidalgo.

Mullen says, “See, Chandler … may I call you Chandler?”

“Sure.”

“See, Chandler,” Mullen says, “money isn’t going to do it this time. Cash isn’t the coin of my realm.”

“What is the ‘coin of your realm’?” Claiborne says. Because he’s confident that there’s some kind of coin—there always is.

“This idiot’s getting snarky with us,” Mullen says. “I don’t think he’s used to taking crap from a mick or a Mexican. That isn’t the way you want to go here, Chandler.”

Claiborne says, “If I call certain people … I can get John Dennison on his private cell right now.”

Mullen looks at Hidalgo. “He can get John Dennison on his private cell.”

“Right now,” Hidalgo says.

Mullen offers him his phone. “Call him. And then here’s what’s going to happen: We take you right down to Central Booking, charge you with felony possession of a Class One drug, soliciting, aggravated assault, and attempted bribery. Your lawyer will probably bail you before we can get you to Rikers, but you never know. In any case, you can read all about it in the Post and the Daily News. The Times will take another day but they’ll get to it. So call.”

Claiborne doesn’t take the phone. “What are my other options?”

Because Claiborne is basically right, Hidalgo thinks. If he was your basic Johnny Jerkoff, he’d be downtown already. He knows he has options—rich people always have options, that’s how it works.

“Agent Hidalgo is up from Washington,” Mullen explains. “He’s very interested in how drug money makes its way through the banking system. So am I. If you could help us with that, we might be willing to forestall arrest and prosecution.”

Hidalgo thinks that Claiborne is already about as white as white gets, but now he turns whiter.

Like ghost white.

Pay dirt.

“I think I’ll take my chances,” Claiborne says.

Hidalgo hears what Claiborne didn’t say. He didn’t say, I don’t know anything about drug money. He didn’t say, We don’t do that. What he did say was that he would take his chances, meaning that he does know people who deal in dope money, and he’s more scared of them than he is of the cops.

“Really?” Mullen asks. “Okay. Maybe your money people get to the hooker and she drops the assault charges. Then you hire a seven-figure lawyer and maybe, maybe he keeps you out of jail on the coke charge. But by then it’s too late, because by that time your career is fucked, your marriage is fucked and you are fucked.”

“I’ll sue you for malicious prosecution,” Claiborne says. “I’ll destroy your career.”

“Here’s the bad news for you,” Mullen says. “I don’t care about my career. I’ve got kids dying on my watch. I only care about stopping the drugs. So sue me. I have a house in Long Island City, you can have it—the roof leaks, by the way, full disclosure.

“Now, here’s what’s going to happen—I’m going to have a DA up here in about thirty minutes. She can take your statement, which will be composed of a full and forthright confession, and write a memorandum of agreement for your cooperation, the details of which you will work out with Agent Hidalgo here. Or she can charge you with the full monty and we’ll all go to the precinct together and get this war started. But, son? I’m telling you this right now, and I beg you to believe me, I am not the guy you want to go to war with. Because I will fly the last kamikaze mission right into your ship. So you have a half hour to think about it.”

Hidalgo and Mullen step out into the hallway.

“I’m impressed,” Hidalgo says.

“Ahhhh,” Mullen says. “It’s an old routine. I have it down.”

“Do you know what we’re taking on here?”

Because Claiborne’s not entirely wrong. You start fucking with people who control billions of dollars, they fuck back. And a John Dennison could do a lot of fucking back.

“Your boss said he was willing to go the whole way,” Mullen says. “If that was bullshit, I need to know now, so I can kick this asshole.”

“I’ll call him.”

Mullen goes back in to babysit.

Hidalgo gets on the phone to Keller and fills him in. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Oh, yeah.

Keller is sure.

It’s time to start agitating.

Keller testifies in front of Ben O’Brien’s committee to brief them on his strategy for combatting the heroin epidemic. He started by dismissing the so-called kingpin strategy.

“As you know,” Keller says, “I was one of the chief supporters of the kingpin strategy—the focus on arresting or otherwise disposing of the cartel leaders. It roughly parallels our strategy in the war on terror. In coordination with the Mexican marines, we did an extraordinary job of it, lopping off the heads of the Gulf, Zeta, and Sinaloa cartels along with dozens of other plaza bosses and other high-ranking members. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked.”

He tells them that marijuana exports from Mexico are down by almost 40 percent, but satellite photos and other intelligence show that the Sinaloans are converting thousands of acres from marijuana to poppy cultivation.

“You just said that you decapitated the major cartels,” one of the senators says.

“Exactly,” Keller says. “And what was the result? An increase in drug exports into the United States. In modeling the war against terrorists, we’ve been following the wrong model. Terrorists are reluctant to take over the top spots of their dead comrades—but the profits from drug trafficking are so great that there is always someone willing to step up. So all we’ve really done is to create job vacancies worth killing for.”

The other major strategy of interdiction—the effort to prevent drugs from coming across the border—also hasn’t worked, he explains to them. The agency estimates that, at best, they seize about 15 percent of the illicit drugs coming across the border, even though, in their business plans, the cartels plan for a 30 percent loss.

“Why can’t we do better than that?” a senator asks.

“Because your predecessors passed NAFTA,” Keller says. “Three-quarters of the drugs come in on tractor-trailer trucks through legal crossings—San Diego, Laredo, El Paso—the busiest commercial crossings in the world. Thousands of trucks every day, and if we thoroughly searched every truck and car, we’d shut down commerce.”

“You’ve told us what doesn’t work,” O’Brien says. “So what will work?”

“For fifty years our primary effort has been stopping the flow of drugs from south to north,” Keller says. “My idea is to reverse that priority and focus on shutting down the flow of money from north to south. If money stops flowing south, the motivation to send drugs north will diminish. We can’t destroy the cartels in Mexico, but maybe we can starve them from the United States.”

“It sounds to me like you’re surrendering,” one says.

“No one is surrendering,” Keller says.

It’s a closed hearing but he wants to keep this on the broadest possible terms. He sure as hell doesn’t tell them about Agitator, because if you sneeze in DC someone on Wall Street says gesundheit. It’s not that he doesn’t trust the senators, but he doesn’t trust the senators. A campaign year is coming up, two of the guys sitting in front of him have set up “exploratory committees” and PACs, and they’re going to be looking for campaign contributions. And like me, Keller thinks, they’re going to go where the money is.

New York.

Blair has already tipped him that Denton Howard is crawling into bed with John Dennison.

“They had dinner together at one of Dennison’s golf clubs down in Florida,” Blair said.

Keller guesses he was on the menu.

Dennison, still flirting with running, tweeted, DEA boss wants to let drug dealers out of prison! A disgrace!

Well, Keller thinks, I do want to let some drug dealers out of prison. But he doesn’t need Howard talking out of school. After the hearing, he collars O’Brien in the hallway and tells him he wants Howard out.

“You can’t fire him,” O’Brien says.

“You can.”

“No, I can’t,” O’Brien says. “He’s a Tea Party favorite and I’m facing a revolt from the right in the next election. I can’t win the general if I lose in the primary. You’re stuck with him.”

“He’s stabbing me in the back.”

“No shit,” O’Brien says. “That’s what we do in this town. The best way for you to deal with it is to get results.”

The man is right, Keller thinks.

He goes back to the office and calls Hidalgo in.

“How are we doing with Claiborne?”

“He’s given us shit,” Hidalgo says. “‘This broker does coke, this hedge fund manager is heavy into tree …’”

“Not good enough,” Keller says. “Lean on him.”

“Will do.”

The “bottom-up” half of Agitator is going well—Cirello is climbing the ladder. But the “top-down” half is stalled—this cute piece of shit Claiborne thinks he can play them by giving them bits and pieces.

They need to bring him up short, make him produce.

No more free ride.

He pays the fare or he’s off the bus.

They meet on the Acela.

“What do you think we are, Chandler, assholes?” Hidalgo asks. “You think you can just blow us off and go on with your life?”

“I’m trying.”

“Not hard enough.”

“What do you want me to do?” Chandler asks.

“Bring us something we can use,” Hidalgo says. “New York’s fed up with your act. They’re going to prosecute.”

“They can’t do that,” Claiborne says. “We have a deal.”

“Which you haven’t lived up to.”

“I’ve been doing my best.”

“Bullshit, you have,” Hidalgo says. “You’ve been playing us. You think you’re so much smarter than a bunch of dumb cops who buy their suits off the rack, and you probably are. You’re so smart you’re going to smart your way right into a cell. You’re going to love the room service in Attica, motherfucker.”

“No, give me a chance.”

“You had your chance. We’re done.”

“Please.”

Hidalgo pretends to think about it. Then he says, “All right, let me get on the phone, see what I can do. But no promises.”

He gets up, walks out of the car and stands in the next one for a couple of minutes. Then he walks back in and says, “I bought you a little more time. But not, like, infinity. You give us something we can use, or I let New York hump you.”

Keller takes a call from Admiral Orduña.

“That kid you’re looking for,” Orduña says, “we might have a sighting.”

“Where?”

“Guerrero,” Orduña says. “Does that make any sense?”

“No,” Keller says. But when has anything to do with Chuy Barajos made any sense?

They’re not sure it’s him, Orduña says, but one of his people in Guerrero was surveilling a group of student radicals at a local college and spotted a young man hanging around the fringes who meets the description, and he heard one of the students call him Jesús.

Could be anybody, Keller thinks. “What college?”

Chuy never finished high school.

“Hold on,” Orduña says, checking his notes. “Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College.”

“Never heard of it.”

“That makes two of us.”

“I don’t suppose your guy—”

“It’s on its way, cuate.”

Keller stares at his computer screen.

Christ, the odds are …

The photo comes across.

Keller sees a short, scrawny kid in torn jeans, sneakers and a black ball cap. His hair is long and unkempt.

The photo is a little blurry, but there’s no question.

It’s Chuy.

2
Heroin Island

Let me have a dram of poison, such soon-speeding gear

As will dispense itself through all the veins …

—Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, act V, scene 1

Staten Island, New York
2014

Bobby Cirello is thirty-four.

Young for a detective.

Chief Mullen is his hook and he’s worked for the man for a long time, first as a UC out in Brooklyn when the boss was running the Seven Six. Cirello made a shitload of cases for him. When Mullen got the big job at One Police, he brought Cirello with him, and a gold shield came with the ride across the bridge.

Cirello’s glad to be out from under UC. It’s no way to live, hanging out with skels, junkies and dealers all the time.

You can’t have your own life.

He likes his new job, his little efficiency apartment in Brooklyn Heights, just big enough for him to be able to keep clean and trim, and at least semiregular hours, although there are a lot of them.

Now he sits in Mullen’s office on the eleventh floor of One Police Plaza.

Mullen has the remote control in his hand and clicks from news channel to news channel on the television mounted to the wall. Every one of them is running the story of a famous actor’s overdose, and every one of them refers to the “flood of heroin” and the “heroin epidemic” rampant in the city. And they each maintain that NYPD “seems powerless to stop it.”

Cirello knows Mullen isn’t one to take the description “powerless” passively. Nor the phone calls from the chief of D’s, the commissioner, and Hizzoner the Mayor. Shit, about the only big shot who hasn’t piled weight on Mullen is the president of the United States, and that’s probably only because he doesn’t have his phone number.

“So now we have a heroin epidemic,” Mullen says. “You know how I know? The New York Times, the Post, the Daily News, the Voice, CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, and, let us not forget, Entertainment Tonight. That’s right, people, we’re getting ass-fucked by ET.

“All that aside, people are dying out there. Black people, white people, young people, poor people, rich people—this shit is an equal opportunity killer. Last year we had 335 homicides and 420 heroin overdoses. I don’t care about the media, I can deal with the media. What I do care about is these people dying.”

Cirello doesn’t speak the obvious. ET wasn’t there when it was blacks dying out in Brooklyn. He keeps his mouth shut, though. He has too much respect for Mullen and, anyway, the man is right.

There are too many people dying.

And we’re a few brooms trying to sweep back an ocean of H.

“The paradigm has shifted,” Mullen says, “and we have to shift with it. ‘Buy and bust’ works up to a point, but that point is far short of what we need. We’ve had some success busting the heroin mills—we’ve seized a lot of horse and a lot of cash—but the Mexicans can always make more heroin and therefore more cash. They figure these losses into their business plans. We’re in a numbers game we can never win.”

Cirello’s done some of the mill busts.

The Mexicans bring the heroin up through Texas to New York and store it in apartments and houses, mostly in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. At these “mills” they cut the H up into dime bags and sell it to the retailers, mostly gangbangers, who put it out in the boroughs or take it to smaller towns upstate and in New England.

NYPD has made some big hits on the mills—twenty-million-, fifty-million-dollar pops—but it’s a revolving door. Mullen’s right, the Mexican cartels can replace any dope and any money they lose.

They can also replace the people, because most of the personnel at the mills are local women who cut the heroin and low-level managers who work for cash. The cartel wholesalers themselves are rarely, if ever, present at the mills except for the few minutes it takes to bring the drugs in.

And the drugs are coming in.

Mullen is in daily touch with DEA liaisons who tell him the same thing is happening all over the country—the new Mexican heroin is coming up through San Diego, El Paso and Laredo into Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Washington, DC, and New York—all the major markets.

And the minor ones.

Street gangs are migrating from the cities into small towns, setting up and doing business from motels. It’s not just urban dwellers hooked on opiates now—it’s suburban housewives and rural farmers.

They aren’t Mullen’s responsibility, though.

New York City is.

Mullen cuts right to it. “If we’re going to beat the Mexicans at their game, we have to start playing like the Mexicans.”

“I’m not following you.”

“What do the narcos have in Mexico they don’t have here?” Mullen asks.

Primo tequila, Cirello thinks, but he doesn’t say it. He doesn’t say anything—Bobby Cirello recognizes a rhetorical question when he hears one.

“Cops,” Mullen says. “Sure, we have some dirty cops. Guys who’ll look the other way for cash, a few who do rips, a rare few who sell dope themselves, even serve as bodyguards for the narcos, but they’re the exception. In Mexico, they’re the rule.”

“I don’t get where you’re going with this.”

“I want you to go back undercover,” Mullen says.

Cirello shakes his head. His UC days are over—even if he wants to go back under, he can’t. He’s too well known as a cop now. He’d get made in thirty seconds, it would be a fuckin’ joke.

He tells Mullen this. “They all know I’m a cop.”

“Right. I want you to go undercover as a cop,” Mullen says. “A dirty cop.”

Now Cirello doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t want this job. Assignments like this are career killers—you get the rep for being dirty, the stink stays on you. The suspicion lingers, and when the promotion lists are posted, your name isn’t on them.

“I want you to put it out there that you’re for sale,” Mullen says.

“I’m a thirty-year man,” Cirello says. “I want to pull the pin from this job. This is my life, Chief. What you’re asking will only jam me up.”

“I know what I’m asking.”

Cirello grabs at straws. “Besides, I’m a gold shield. That’s too high up the chain. The last gold chains who went dirty were all the way back in the eighties.”

“Also true.”

“And everyone knows I’m your guy.”

“That’s the point,” Mullen says. “When you get a high-enough buyer, you’re going to put it out that you represent me.”

Jesus Christ, Cirello thinks, Mullen wants me to put it out that the whole Narcotics Division is up for sale?

“That’s how it works in Mexico,” Mullen says. “They don’t buy cops, they buy departments. They want to deal with the top guys. It’s the only way we get in the same room with the Sinaloans.”

Cirello’s brain is spinning.

It’s so goddamn dangerous, what Mullen’s suggesting. There’s so much that can go wrong. Other cops get word he’s dirty and run an op against him. Or the feds do.

“How are you going to paper this?” he asks. Document the operation so that if it goes south, their asses are covered.

“I’m not,” Mullen says. “No one is going to know about this. Just you and me.”

“And that guy Keller?” Cirello asks.

“But you don’t know about that.”

“If we get popped, we can’t prove we’re clean.”

“That’s right.”

“We could end up in jail.”

“I’m relying on my reputation,” Mullen says. “And yours.”

Yeah, Cirello thinks, that’s going to do a lot of good if I run into other cops who are dirty, who are taking drug money, doing rips. What the hell do I do then? I’m not a goddamn rat.

Mullen reads his mind. “I only want the narcos. Anything else you might come across, you don’t see.”

“That’s in direct violation of every reg—”

“I know.” Mullen gets up from behind his desk and looks out the window. “What the hell do you want me to do? Keep playing it by the book while kids are dying like flies? You’re too young, you don’t really remember the AIDS epidemic, but I watched this city become a graveyard. I’m not watching it again.”

“I get it.”

“I don’t have anyone else to go to, Bobby,” Mullen says. “You have the brains and the experience to do this and I don’t know who else I could trust. You have my word, I’ll do everything I can to protect your career.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, you’ll do it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you.”

Riding down in the elevator, Cirello wonders if he’s not completely, utterly and totally fucked.

Libby looks at him and says, “So you’re a nice Italian boy.”

“Actually, I’m a nice Greek boy,” Cirello says.

They’re sitting at a table at Joe Allen, near the theater where she’s working, bolting down cheeseburgers.

“‘Cirello’?” she asks.

“It doesn’t hurt to have an Italian-sounding name on the job,” Cirello says. “If you can’t be Irish, it’s the next best thing. But, yeah, I’m a Greek boy from Astoria.”

Almost a stereotype. His grandparents came over after World War II, worked their asses off and opened the restaurant on Twenty-Third Street that his father still runs. The neighborhood isn’t so Greek anymore, but a lot of them still live there and you can still hear “Ellenika” spoken on the streets.

Cirello didn’t want to go into the restaurant business, and it’s a good thing he has a younger brother who did so his parents weren’t heartbroken when Bobby went first to John Jay and then to the police academy. They came to his graduation and were proud of him, although they always worry, and never really understood when he was undercover and would show up with shaggy hair and a beard, looking thin and haggard.

His grandmother looked him straight in the eyes and asked, “Bobby, are you on drugs?”

“No, Ya-Ya.”

I just buy them, he thought. It was impossible to explain his life to them. Another reason undercover is such a tough gig—nobody understands what you really do except other undercovers, and you never see them anyway.

“And you’re a detective,” Libby says now.

“Let’s talk about you.”

Libby is freaking beautiful. Rich red hair Cirello thinks they usually describe as “lustrous.” A long nose, wide lips and a body that won’t quit. Legs longer than a country road, although Cirello wouldn’t know much about country roads. He saw her at a Starbucks in the Village, turned around and said, “I have you for a low-fat macchiato type.”

“How did you know?”

“I’m a detective.”

“Not a very good one,” Libby said. “I’m a low-fat latte.”

“But your phone number,” Cirello said, “is 212-555-6708. Am I right?”

“No, you’re wrong.”

“Prove it.”

“Let me see your badge,” Libby said.

“Oh, you’re not going to turn me in for sexual harassment, are you?” Cirello asked.

But he showed her his badge.

She gave him her phone number.

He had her down as a cop groupie, except it took him about eighteen phone calls to get her to this table.

“There’s not much to tell,” she says. “I’m from a little town in Ohio, I went to Ohio State and studied dance. Six years ago I came to the big city to make it.”

“How’s that going?”

“Well,” she says, shrugging, “I’m on Broadway.”

Libby’s in the chorus of Chicago, which Cirello figures is probably the dancer equivalent of a gold shield. And she’s looking at him with those green eyes, letting him know that she’s his equal.

Cool, Cirello thinks.

Very cool.

“You live in the city?” he asks.

“Upper West Side,” she says. “Eighty-Ninth between Broadway and Amsterdam. You?”

“Brooklyn Heights.”

“I guess we’re not geographically compatible,” Libby says.

“You know, I’ve always thought geography was overrated,” Cirello says. “I don’t think they even teach it in school anymore. Anyway, I work in Manhattan, down at One Police.”

“What’s that?”

“NYPD headquarters,” he says. “I work in the Narcotics Division.”

“So I shouldn’t smoke weed around you.”

“I don’t care,” Cirello says. “I’d do it with you, except they test us from time to time. Let me ask you something, you have roommates?”

“Bobby,” she says, “I’m not sleeping with you tonight.”

“I didn’t ask you to,” Cirello says. “Frankly, I’m offended. What do I look like, some cheap whore, you can let him buy you a burger and you think it means you can have your way with him?”

Libby laughs.

It’s deep and throaty and he likes it a lot.

“Do you have roommates?” Libby asks.

“No,” Cirello says. “I have an efficiency, you have to step outside to change your mind, but I like it. I’m not there a lot.”

“You work all the time.”

“Pretty much.”

“What are you working on now?” she asks. “Or can you tell me?”

“We were going to talk about you,” Cirello says. “For instance, I didn’t think dancers ate cheeseburgers.”

“I’ll have to take an extra class tomorrow, but it’s worth it.”

“Class?” Cirello asks. “I thought you already went to college for this.”

“You have to keep working,” Libby says, “to stay in shape. Especially if you’re going to indulge in late-night meat binges, and I realized how gross that sounded the second it came out of my mouth. How about you? Do you eat healthy?”

“No,” Cirello says. “I eat like a cop, whatever I can grab on the street at the moment.”

“Like doughnuts?”

“Don’t profile me, Libby.”

“What about all that wonderful Greek food?”

“Not so wonderful when you grow up on it,” Cirello says. “Don’t tell my ya-ya, but I’d take Italian every time. Or Indian, or Caribbean, anything, as long as it’s not wrapped in a grape leaf. Let me ask you something else: Indians or Reds?”

“Reds,” Libby says. “I’m all about the National League.”

“Should Rose get in the Hall?”

“Absolutely,” Libby says. “I bet on myself every day. I’ll bet you do, too.”

“You know, this could work out.”

“Mets?”

“Of course.”

She takes a french fry off his plate and pops it in her mouth. “Bobby, about this cheap whore thing …”

Cirello spoons coffee into the briki and turns the gas stove to medium. He stirs the coffee until the foam rises, pours it into two cups and walks over to the bed. “Libby? You said wake you at seven.”

“Oh shit,” she says, “I have to get to class.”

He hands her the coffee.

“This is wonderful,” she says. “What is it?”

“Greek coffee.”

“I thought you said you hated Greek food.”

“I’m so full of shit …”

She walks into the bathroom, apparently unbothered by her nudity. Yeah, I wouldn’t be bothered either, Cirello thinks, a body like that. When she comes out, her red hair is in a ponytail and she has a sweatshirt and leggings on.

“Time to do the walk of shame,” she says.

“Let me drive you.”

“I’ll take the subway.”

“Is that your way of saying this was a one-night stand?” Cirello asks.

“Look at you, Mr. Big-Shot Detective, all insecure,” she says. She kisses him on the lips. “It’s my way of saying that the subway is faster.”

He tosses his coffee down. “Come on, I’ll walk you.”

“Yeah?”

“Like I said, I’m a nice Greek boy.”

At the top of the subway entrance she says, “You’d better call me.”

“I’ll call you,” Cirello says.

She kisses him lightly and goes down the stairs.

Cirello stops at a newsstand, buys the papers, and walks to a diner for breakfast. He sits down at a booth, has a big cheese omelet with rye toast, and looks through the Times. There’s a prominent story about the actor who overdosed.

And now, Cirello thinks, I have to reach out and sell myself to the people who killed him.

Easy to say, harder to do.

These people aren’t billionaires because they’re idiots. They don’t own cops in Mexico just because Mexican cops are easier to buy—they own cops because they have leverage on them. The offer isn’t “take it or leave it,” the offer is “take it or we kill you and your family.” That way they know they can trust the cop they bought—he isn’t going to flip on them.

Doesn’t work that way up here.

No wiseguy in his right mind would kill a New York City cop, much less threaten his family, because he knows he’d have thirty-eight thousand angry police up his ass. Even if he survived his arrest—which is unlikely—the Irish and Italian prosecutors and the Jewish judge would see that he did the rest of his life under the worst prison in the state. Worse, it would fuck up business, so the bosses make sure their troops don’t do that shit.

The black and Latino gangbangers know better than to kill a cop, because it would shut their businesses down.

Cops get killed, all right, too many, but not by OC.

The Mexicans are going to be hinky about buying an NYPD cop because they won’t have the insurance policy on him.

So you have to give them some.

He goes to the garage, picks up his car, a 2012 Mustang GT, and drives out to Resorts World Casino.

A week later he’s at a Starbucks in Staten Island listening to the barista sing the theme song from Gilligan’s Island.

“You’re too young to know that show,” he says.

“Hulu,” she answers. “What can I get you?”

He looks at her name tag. “A latte, please, Jacqui.”

“Just a latte?” she asks. “No annoying adjectives?”

“Just a latte,” he says, thinking, And maybe some smack. The girl wears long sleeves and her eyes look as if she’s high.

Staten Island is one of the heroin hot spots. They’re seeing three times the smack they did only two years ago. Used to be the drug was just in the northern, more urban part of the island, where it came on the ferry from Manhattan or over the bridge from Brooklyn, and you found it in the projects.

Not anymore.

Now it’s down to the single-family neighborhoods in the central and southern parts of the island, working-class neighborhoods with a lot of cops, firefighters, and city employees.

And let’s be honest about it, Cirello thinks.

White neighborhoods.

Blue-collar neighborhoods.

Why he’s here now.

Because he’s white.

Up in Manhattan and out in Brooklyn, drug trafficking is pretty much a gang thing. The black and Latino gangs dominate the trade in and around the projects and he knows he’s not going to break in with them.

Not a white cop.

Not even a dirty white cop.

But out here the heroin trafficking is different—you have a lot of independent dealers, most of them users themselves, selling dime and even nickel bags they’re buying from wiseguy retailers who buy it from the mills uptown.

Twenty years ago, maybe even ten, it would be worth your life to deal H to white kids in Staten Island, which is as mobbed up as it is copped up. Shit, Paul Calabrese himself lived out here, and there’s still a mob presence but it’s different. They don’t look out for their own like they used to, and that thing about the mob protecting white kids from dope is a long-gone myth.

Cirello has heard that John Cozzo’s fucking grandkid is slinging dope out here. Which is really no big surprise when you consider that Cozzo killed Calabrese to clear the way for importing Mexican heroin.

Anyway, Cirello knows he isn’t going to find his hook in the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Manhattan. He’s going to find it out here in white Staten Island—Heroin Isle—with users like Jacqui here.

To lead him to the sharks.

He’s thrown out the chum. Went to Resorts World and dropped three large at the blackjack table, betting stupid. Then he chased it with basketball bets—college and pro—and dropped five more. Then he drove up to Connecticut—Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods—dumped a few grand more and got drunk and loud so the word would get around the northeast OC community that a New York detective was off the leash, gambling heavy, losing heavy, drinking heavy.

Blood in the water.

Now he drinks his latte and watches Jacqui work behind the counter. She’s got a smile on her face and does her job but she looks a little shaky, walks a little jumpy, and Cirello knows she has maybe three hours before she needs a get-well fix.

She has to be what, nineteen? Twenty, tops?

What a world.

Young people dropping like it’s World War I out here. Parents burying their kids. It’s unnatural.

Other than this jacked-up assignment, his new life is pretty good. He’s been seeing Libby for a few weeks now and so far it’s working out. Their schedules match—she’s not available until late night or early in the morning and right now they’re both content with a triweekly late dinner and subsequent sex. She isn’t making any further demands and neither is he.

It’s easy.

He finishes his coffee and walks up the block to Zio Toto.

The bar is empty and he pulls out one of the black stools, sits down and orders a Seven and Coke.

Angie is late and Cirello knows it’s a power play.

Make the other guy wait.

Angie comes in about five minutes later.

If he’s been a regular at 24 Hour Fitness, he’s hiding it pretty well, Cirello thinks. Angelo Bucci is still the same doughy slob he was when they went to Archbishop Malloy together in Astoria. He has his hair cut short now and wears a Mets jacket with jeans and a pair of loafers.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.