Текст книги "The Cartel"

Автор книги: Don Winslow

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 35 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

Slower, more satisfying.

Despite himself, Keller feels a jolt of pure terror.

Adán still wears the black business suit and the white shirt, Keller notices as Adán sits down across from him. It’s strange, to say the least, to be so close to this man he’s been hunting for over six years now. But here he is, Adán Barrera in the flesh.

“We need to talk, Arturo,” Adán says. “We’ve put this off too long.”

“Talk.”

“My daughter choked to death,” Adán says. “Did you know that?”

“If you’re going to kill me, kill me. I don’t need to sit here waiting while you justify yourself.”

“If I wanted you dead,” Adán says, “you’d already be dead. I’m not a sadist like Ochoa. I don’t need to see, participate in, or prolong your death. I asked Taylor to come so that you’d be reassured that I mean you no harm today.”

“Just so we’re clear,” Keller says, “I mean you harm. Today and every day.”

“The Zetas murdered one of your own,” Adán says. “You, of all people, should know how that alters the terrain. Your superiors will stop at nothing to avenge him, just as you will stop at nothing to avenge your fallen comrade. Believe me, I respect it.”

“You don’t respect anything.”

“I know what you think of me,” Adán says calmly. “I know you think that I’m evil incarnate—I think the same of you—but we both know that there are far worse demons out there.”

“The Zetas?”

“You were at San Fernando,” Adán says. “You saw what they’re capable of. Now they’ve apparently done it again.”

“And you’re telling me you care about that.”

“They killed one of my loved ones,” Adán said, “and they killed one of yours.”

“What do you want?” Keller asks. He’s sick to death of all this talk.

Adán says, “I had you brought here to propose a truce between us.”

Keller can’t believe what he’s hearing. A truce between them? They’ve been at war with each other for over thirty years.

“We make peace between us,” Adán continues, “to fight the Zetas.”

“I have enough hate for you and the Zetas.”

“I agree that you have an unlimited capacity for hatred,” Adán says. “In fact, I’m counting on it. You have ample hatred, what you don’t have enough of are resources. Neither do I.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Zetas are winning,” Adán says simply. “They’ll soon have all of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Michoacán. They’re moving in Acapulco, Guerrero, Durango, even Sinaloa. Down south they’ve sent forces into Quintana Roo and Chiapas, to protect the border with Guatemala. If they succeed in taking Guatemala, it’s over. Neither I nor you will be able to stop them. They’ll control the cocaine trade, not just in the U.S. but in Europe, too. If it gives you a personal rooting interest, they’re moving into the Juárez Valley, too. It wasn’t me who slaughtered Erika Valles, who tried to kill Dr. Cisneros. They’ll try again. Eventually they’ll succeed.”

Taylor weighs in. “The Mexican government will do anything to stop the Zetas from becoming the dominant force. They would be virtually a shadow government. But the FES combined with American intelligence is by far the strongest force fighting the Zetas. We can annihilate them.”

“What do you need me for?” Keller asks. “You already have the government on your side, apparently on both sides of the border.”

“Orduña and the FES are loyal to you personally,” Adán says. “The operation you’ve created together is tremendously effective. I don’t want to see it disrupted. Also…”

“What?”

Adán smiles ruefully. “You’re the best they have, aren’t you? Taylor can put you on the shelf and send someone else, but whoever that is would be second best, and I can’t afford second best. Neither can you, and I’m by far the best offer you have, the best ally. You hate me, but you need me. And vice versa.”

“And if I say no?” Keller asks. “I get a bullet in the neck?”

“If you reject my offer,” Adán says, “you walk away from this meeting, your organization puts you on the shelf, and it’s business as usual between us.”

“I’m not going to help you become the king of the drug world again.”

“Do you think anyone is serious about the so-called war on drugs?” Adán asks. “A few cops on the street, perhaps—some low– to middle-management crusaders like yourself, maybe—but at the top levels? Government and business?

“Serious people can’t afford to be serious about it. Especially not after 2008. After the crash, the only source of liquidity was drug money. If they shut us down, it would have taken the economy on the final plunge. They had to bail out General Motors, not us. And now? Think of the billions of dollars into real estate, stocks, start-up companies. Not to mention the millions of dollars generated fighting the ‘war’—weapons manufacture, aircraft, surveillance. Prison construction. You think business is going to let that stop?

“I’ll take it a step further—let me tell you why the U.S. won’t let the Zetas win—because the Zetas want the oil, because they’re interfering with new drilling—and the oil companies are never going to let that happen. ExxonMobil, BP—they’re on my side, because I won’t interfere with their business. In turn, they will not interfere with mine. Bottom line? Someone is going to sell the drugs. Now, it’s either going to be Ochoa or me, and I’m the better choice. I’ll bring peace and stability. Ochoa will bring more suffering. You know that. And you know that you need to do everything you can to bring him down, or you can’t live with yourself.”

“I’ll give it a try, though.”

Adán looks at him for several long seconds. “I’m going to have a child. Twins, and I want to raise them without being hunted. I don’t want their lives to be like mine. If you’ll end your vendetta, so will I.”

End the vendetta, Keller thinks.

After all these years.

After Tío, and Ernie.

The children on the bridge, the dead of El Sauzal.

It’s impossible.

But then there’s Córdova’s murdered family, Don Pedro Alejo de Castillo, the bodies in the mass grave at San Fernando.

Keller sees Erika’s butchered body.

Marisol’s stricken face.

Barrera is right—the Zetas failed to kill Marisol so they’ll have to try again. They won’t stop until they succeed. And there’s something else, something ugly, and he has to face it. Barrera is right about that, too—my capacity for hatred is infinite.

I want revenge.

And I’ll sell my soul to get it.

“I want them all dead,” Keller says. “Every one of them.”

“Good.”

“You have to give me your word,” Taylor says. “Your vendetta against Adán is over. Finished.”

“You have my word,” Keller says.

“On our immortal souls, on the lives of our children.” Adán offers his hand.

Keller takes it.

Why not? he thinks.

We’re all the cartel now.

“It’s a new day,” Taylor says.

They say that love conquers all.

They’re wrong, Keller thinks.

Hate conquers all.

It even conquers hate.

The Cleansing

People don’t usually go off decapitating each other or committing mass murder just because they hate people in another group. These things happen because soul-dead political leaders are in a struggle for power and use ethnic violence as a tool in that struggle.

–David Brooks

“In the Land of Mass Graves”

The New York Times

June 19, 2014

1 Jihad

The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDS, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of these wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead—everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.

–Bruce Jackson Keynote address “Media and War” symposium, University of Buffalo November 17–18, 2003

Nuevo Laredo

April 2012

The bodies of fourteen Zetas, skinned, lie in the backs of garbage trucks.

The symbolism, Keller thinks, is deft.

Keller looks at the flayed corpses—Adán Barrera’s announcement that he’s back in Nuevo Laredo—and thinks that he should be feeling more than he is. Years ago he’d looked at nineteen bodies and his heart had broken, but now he feels nothing. Years ago the machine-gunning of nineteen men, women, and children was the worst atrocity he ever thought he’d see. Now he knows better.

A narcomensaje has been left with the bodies: WE HAVE BEGUN TO CLEAR NUEVO LAREDO OF ZETAS BECAUSE WE WANT A FREE CITY AND SO YOU CAN LIVE IN PEACE. WE ARE NARCOTICS TRAFFICKERS AND WE DON’T MESS WITH HONEST WORKING OR BUSINESS PEOPLE. I’M GOING TO TEACH THESE SCUM HOW TO WORK SINALOA STYLE—WITHOUT KIDNAPPING, WITHOUT EXTORTION. AS FOR YOU, OCHOA AND FORTY—YOU DON’T SCARE ME. DON’T FORGET THAT I’M YOUR TRUE FATHER—SINCERELY, ADÁN BARRERA.

Keller finds the paternal language interesting.

Adán is a father again—a year ago, Eva Barrera flew up to Los Angeles and gave birth to twin sons. There was nothing that DEA or the Justice Department could do about Eva’s presence in the United States. An American citizen not wanted for any crimes, she was free to come and go as she pleased. So Eva had her children in the best facility that money could buy, rested for a few days, and then flew back to Mexico, where she “disappeared” into the hills of Sinaloa or Durango, or even into Guatemala or Argentina, depending on which rumor you preferred.

The talk is that the birth of the twins reinvigorated Adán, is perhaps even the cause of his all-out invasion of Tamaulipas. Because he needs a plaza for each son—Nuevo Laredo for one, Juárez for the other, and Tijuana to keep Nacho Esparza happy. In any case, the man who could not produce an heir now has two, named for his late uncle and brother.

Speaking of garbage, Keller thinks.

This isn’t Barrera’s first venture into “bodies as public relations.”

A few months earlier, masked gunmen blocked traffic on a major intersection in the Boca del Río section of Veracruz and dumped thirty-five naked and dismembered corpses, twelve of them women, with the narcomensaje NO MORE EXTORTION, NO MORE KILLINGS OF INNOCENT PEOPLE! ZETAS IN VERACRUZ AND THE POLITICIANS HELPING THEM—THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU. PEOPLE OF VERACRUZ, DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELVES TO BE EXTORTED; DO NOT PAY FOR PROTECTION. THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ALL THE ZETA-FUCKS THAT CONTINUE TO OPERATE IN VERACUZ. THIS PLAZA HAS A NEW PROPRIETOR. SINCERELY, ADÁN BARRERA.

While most of the major papers and television stations shied away from coverage, Esta Vida did not, posting graphic photos of the naked bodies dumped into the street like so much, well, garbage. The Zetas were almost as infuriated by the coverage as they were by the event, and threatened horrific retaliation when they found “Wild Child.”

The next day, it was discovered that the thirty-five dead probably had no connection whatsoever with the Zetas. A masked vigilante group held a press conference, apologized for the mistake, but declared that it was still at war against the Zetas.

Over the next three weeks, the vigilante group killed seventy-five more Zetas in Veracruz and Acapulco, both cities vacated by the demise of the Tapia organization and then the “disappearance” of Crazy Eddie Ruiz. The susurro has it that the Sinaloans are moving into Veracruz as a port of entry for the precursor chemicals they need for their expansion into methamphetamine; rumor further has it that Adán Barrera himself has been spotted in the city.

Bodies from both sides piled up, almost literally, in Durango. Eleven here, eight there, then sixty-eight in a mass grave—eventually the number rose to over three hundred.

Zetas invading Nayarit stumbled into an ambush in which Barrera sicarios gunned down twenty-seven of them on the highway. Almost, Keller thinks, as if the Sinaloans had been forewarned, as if they’d been handed American satellite images of the Zeta trucks moving in.

The U.S. intelligence apparatus in Mexico has expanded dramatically since the Jiménez murder. There are now over sixty DEA agents, forty ICE, twenty U.S. marshals, and dozens of FBI, Immigration and Customs, Secret Service, and TSA personnel, as well as seventy people from the State Department Narcotics Affairs Section in-country as a response to the murder of Richard Jiménez.

A lot of their “ISR”—intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance—resources are routed via Keller to the FES.

Orduña’s unit has been killing Zetas, too—eighteen during a three-day battle in Valle Hermoso, Tamaulipas, with convoys of up to fifty vehicles full of armed Zetas bringing in reinforcements.

An FES patrol hit a Zeta training base on Falcon Lake, bordering Texas, and killed twelve. Another pitched battle was fought in Zacatecas, where more than 250 Zetas fought the FES in a five-hour running gunfight. The FES killed fifteen Zetas and arrested seventeen more. In another action, FES troopers dropped down fast-lines from helicopters and raided another Zeta camp, capturing nineteen more.

And the FES, with the aid of U.S. intelligence, has been pounding the Zeta leadership, arresting gunmen, plaza bosses, and financial officers. Over eighty Zetas alone have been arrested in connection with the first San Fernando bus massacre. Six Zetas, including a character with the aporto “Tweety-Bird,” have been arrested in connection with the murder of Agent Jiménez, although if Keller had his way, none of the six would have made it into a cell.

A weeklong FES campaign against the Zetas in Veracruz resulted in twenty-one more arrests and the seizure of a payroll list for eighteen Veracruz police officers on the take—depending on rank, they received between $145 and $700 a month.

Two former navy admirals took over the police departments in Veracruz and Boca del Río.

Based on an “anonymous tip”—a euphemism for American intelligence—the FES captured the Zeta plaza boss for Veracruz, who confirmed that Ochoa had personally ordered Erika Valles’s killing.

“Why didn’t they kill Cisneros?” Keller asked.

“Z-1 said he wanted to do her last,” the plaza boss answered. “Let the big-mouth chocha watch her friend die first. But they fucked it up.”

“Where is Z-1 now?”

The man didn’t know. It turned out under enhanced interrogation techniques that he really didn’t know. Didn’t know where Forty was, either.

Maybe Monterrey.

Once the jewel of the PAN economic revival, the symbol of modern corporate Mexico with shiny skyscrapers, boulevards of exclusive stores, and trendy restaurants patronized by regios—the young up-and-coming—Monterrey has become a nightmare.

With police basically paralyzed, crime has gotten out of control.

Downtown stores and restaurants are regularly robbed. There’s open fighting in the streets—a man was chased down, shot, and then hanged from a bridge in front of a horrified crowd.

At a trendy restaurant that made the mistake of serving Sinaloan cuisine, about a hundred regios were enjoying beers and aguachile about midnight when seven Zeta gunmen came in, made everyone lie on the floor, collected wallets and cell phones, then separated the men from the women and systematically took the women into the restrooms and raped them.

The women were afraid to press charges because their assailants kept their identification cards for purposes of retaliation.

It got worse.

A Zeta cell in the city tried to extort a casino known for laundering narco money through its accounts. The casino owners refused to pay. Keller has seen the videotapes of two pickup trucks pulling up to a Pemex station and filling plastic barrels full of gasoline. Other security cameras caught the trucks pulling up to the Casino Royale on a Saturday afternoon at about two o’clock in the afternoon. Seven gunmen get out of the trucks. They walk into the casino lobby and start to shoot. They come out, and the other Zetas roll the barrels into the casino and set them on fire.

The emergency exits were padlocked and chained.

Fifty-three people died of flame, smoke, and toxins.

Five of the attackers arrested later in the week said that they didn’t mean to kill anyone, that they were just trying to scare the owners into paying the 130,000 pesos a week.

More critical than Monterrey, the Zetas are taking ground—literally taking ground—in Guatemala, especially in the north, in the Petén district bordering Mexico. Last year, the Zetas slaughtered twenty-seven campesinos in the province, terrifying countless others off their smallholdings, and now Ochoa is consolidating power there. If he controls Guatemala, he takes Barrera’s main cocaine route into Mexico.

And the weakened CDG is (barely) hanging on against the Zetas in Matamoros, Reynosa is once again under contention between the Zetas and the CDG, and the border towns are a howling wilderness.

Despite the FES and Sinaloa pressure, the Zetas control—rule, really—large swaths of Mexico. They dominate numerous state and municipal police forces, have effectively silenced the mainstream media, and have established a virtual reign of terror.

And now Barrera has taken the war right into the Zeta stronghold of Nuevo Laredo.

Again.

This poor city, Keller thinks as he walks away from the garbage truck display—that’s all you can call it, truly, a “display.”

First Sinaloa fights the Gulf and the Zetas for it.

Then the Gulf and the Zetas fight each other.

Now Sinaloa fights the Zetas.

Well, Sinaloa and us.

Me.

Me and my new best friend Adán Barrera.

Barrera has shifted his focus to Nuevo Laredo, so Keller has, too, taking up residence in a nondescript “long-stay” hotel across the bridge in Laredo. He moves between Laredo and Mexico City, with only occasional stops in Valverde to see Marisol.

There’s “light” as in the opposite of “dark,” Keller thinks as he gets back in his car for the trip back across the bridge, and “light” as in the opposite of “heavy,” and his relationship with Marisol now has aspects of dark weight.

The weight of guilt, for one—Marisol’s guilt for having let Erika take the dangerous job. Keller’s guilty for not having been there to protect her, for failing to have rescued her.

Add to that a sense of immutable loss.

“Let’s be honest,” Marisol said one night during one of her starkly darker moods. “We had this little faux family going here, didn’t we? Faux marriage, faux child? Then reality hit, didn’t it?”

“Let’s get married for real, then,” Keller suggested.

She stared at him incredulously. “Do you seriously think that’s going to help?”

“It could.”

“How?’

He didn’t have an answer for that.

The rest of their mutual ennui, he supposes, is simply cumulative. He had read that the Puritans used to execute heretics by placing stones on their chests until their rib cages were crushed or they suffocated. And that’s a little what he feels like—and he supposes that Marisol does as well—the sheer cumulative weight of death after death, sorrow after sorrow, crushing them, taking the air out of their lives.

But they don’t split up. They’re both too stubborn and honorable, he thinks, to go back on the unspoken vow, the silent understanding that they would see this through together, wherever it led.

So they stay together.

Well, sort of.

He spends more and more time in the Mexico City bunker, in Laredo, on raids with FES, or on whatever front of the Mexican drug war is especially hot at the moment. Marisol is kind enough to feign sadness when he leaves, but they’re both (guiltily) relieved for the breaks from the weight that they enforce on each other.

The painful truth is that they can’t look at each other without seeing Erika.

Despite his urgings, his imprecations, his angry arguments, Marisol has stayed in Valverde, and stayed in office. She forced herself to make a brilliant, defiant speech at Erika’s funeral, made herself go through a press conference in which she again openly defied both the government and the cartels while managing to imply that there was small, if any, difference between the two. She once again made herself a target, almost as if she could not tolerate living after so many have died.

“Survivor guilt,” Keller said to her one night.

“Just as you did not appreciate my amateur psychoanalysis,” Marisol answered, “I don’t appreciate yours.”

“I don’t care if you appreciate it—”

“Thank you.”

“—I care only that you don’t carry out this death wish.”

“I don’t have a death wish,” Marisol said.

“Prove it. Move to the States with me.”

“I’m a Mexican.”

“Then come to Mexico City.”

“No.”

He’d already sold his soul to the devil, so a bonus payment that bought security for Marisol didn’t matter. Keller put out word to Adán, who sent word back to the army in the valley that La Médica Hermosa was now a friend, the lady of an important ally, to be protected at all costs.

“Do you think I’m stupid?” Marisol asked a few days later. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice soldiers patrolling outside the house? The office? The clinic? They’ve never been there before. Nor have they ever followed my car except to harass me.”

“Are they harassing you now?” asked Keller, concerned that his demand hadn’t been met.

“In fact they’re elaborately polite,” Marisol said. “What did you do?”

“What I should have done sooner,” Keller said. Except I didn’t have the power then, the goddamn alliance with Adán.

“Such a powerful man,” Marisol said. “I don’t want them.”

“I don’t care.”

“You don’t care what I want?” Marisol asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Not in this case.” He hated arguing, but it was better than the long silences, the averted eyes, the sidelong glances, the lying in bed side by side wanting to touch or at least speak but not being able. “I’m trying to protect you.”

“You’re patronizing me.”

That’s exactly what I’m doing, Keller thinks now.

Being a patrón.

It’s what I do now.

Fourteen Zetas skinned alive.

And I provided the intelligence that located them.

He buys “dinner” at 7-Eleven before going back to his room.

–

The Zetas strike back less than two weeks later, killing twenty-three of Barrera’s people. Fourteen of them are decapitated and nine hang from a bridge next to a banner reading FUCKING BARRERA WHORES, THIS IS HOW I’M GOING TO FINISH OFF EVERY FUCKER YOU SEND TO HEAT UP THE PLAZA. THESE GUYS CRIED AND BEGGED FOR MERCY. THE REST GOT AWAY BUT I’LL GET THEM SOONER OR LATER. SEE YOU AROUND, FUCKERS.—THE Z COMPANY.

The Nuevo Laredo police quickly come out and deny that the Sinaloa cartel is in the city, prompting Barrera’s people to leave six severed heads in ice chests outside the Nuevo Laredo police station with the message YOU WANT CREDIBILITY THAT I’M IN NL? WHAT WILL IT TAKE, THE HEADS OF THE ZETA LEADERS? KEEP IT UP AND I ASSURE YOU THAT HEADS WILL KEEP ROLLING. I DON’T KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE LIKE YOU DO, FORTY, ALL THE DEAD ARE PURE SCUM—IN OTHER WORDS—PURE ZETAS. SINCERELY, YOUR FATHER, ADÁN.

Once again, the grisly images appear on Esta Vida.

Once again, the Zetas vow that they will find Wild Child.

–

The problem, Keller thinks, is that we can’t get to Forty or Ochoa, and until we decapitate that two-headed snake, we won’t crush the Zetas. We can take down as many underbosses as we want, but until we get Forty and Ochoa, the Zetas just keep marching on.

Forty is apparently again in charge of defending Nuevo Laredo from Barrera, but he’s never spotted in the city. Barrera’s people are looking for him, the FES is looking for him, American intelligence is looking for him, but so far, he’s invisible. They just find his handiwork, hanging from bridges or dumped on the sides of roads.

And Ochoa is easily the most elusive cartel leader since, well, Adán Barrera. He moves from safe house to safe house, in Valle Hermoso, in Saltillo out in Coahuila. He’s said to meet with Forty once a month at ranches in Río Bravo, Sabinas, or Hidalgo. Or they go hunting zebras, gazelles, and other “exotics” at private game ranches in Coahuila or San Luis Potosí. Or they watch their horses race as they sit in armored cars near the track, surrounded by bodyguards.

In all the Zeta territories, they hire ventanas—lookouts. Ambulantes, store clerks, neighborhood kids, who watch for the police or the marines, and use whistles or cell phones to give warnings. Los Tapados—“the Hidden Ones”—are poor children hired to put up pro-Zeta banners, chant slogans, and protest the presence of the military and the federales.

The government can’t find Ochoa, and he shoves the fact in their faces. Just three hundred yards from an army base in the 18th Military Zone, he endowed a church, where a plaque reads CENTER OF EVANGELIZATION AND CATECHISM. DONATED BY HERIBERTO OCHOA. He uses a Nextel phone once, and then throws it away. Like Barrera, Z-1 eschews the showy persona of other narcos. He doesn’t frequent clubs and restaurants, doesn’t show off his wealth.

He just kills.

It’s the hunt for Barrera redux, except this time the Mexican government is putting massive resources into the effort. MexSat, the national security system, operates two Boeing 702 HP satellite systems, costing over a billion dollars, from ground control stations in Mexico City and Hermosillo. It scans the country for signs of Forty and Ochoa and finds nothing.

American drones fly over the border area like hawks hunting for mice.

And find nothing.

“What if we’re looking on the wrong border?” Keller asks Orduña one day in Mexico City. “What if they’re not in Mexico at all? What if they’re in Guatemala?”

Ochoa has a grasp of military history. What if he’s adopted the classic guerrilla strategy of basing himself in an extraterritorial sanctuary across a border in a neutral country?

Where Barrera is relatively weak, and where the FES can’t get to him. Even Orduña won’t cross an international border. It makes sense—the Zetas have been increasingly active in Guatemala, and maybe Ochoa has decided to run his war from there.

“We’re still talking about eight hundred miles of border,” Orduña says. “Rain forest, jungle, hills.”

“Wasn’t there a mass killing in Guatemala recently?” Keller asks. “Twenty-seven people in a village? Where was that?”

The sort of thing that used to make headlines and is now considered just another day of business as usual. But Orduña goes back through the intelligence files and locates the site.

Dos Erres is a small village in the Petén district, in a heavily forested area not far from the border.

Orduña orders a satellite run.

Two days later, he and Keller look at the photographs.

The village itself looks pretty standard—a dirt road runs through a hamlet of small houses and huts, with a small church and what looks to be a school. But to the east of the village there’s a freshly cut rectangle with the outlines of what seem to be neatly ordered rows of tents.

“It’s a military camp,” Orduña says. “A bivouac.”

“Like special forces might build?” Keller asks.

They do another satellite run for closer images and get them. Perusing the new photos, Keller can clearly see men dressed in military-style uniforms around the tent sites, jeeps with mounted machine guns, “bush kitchens,” and latrines.

The village itself seems oddly deserted.

No kids in the schoolyard.

Few people around the church.

There are some civilians, most of them seem to be women, but not as many as you would expect from the number of houses.

“The Zetas have taken over,” Orduña says, “moved most of the people out and kept only enough to service their basic needs.”

Cooking, Keller thinks.

Cleaning.

Sleeping with the men.

“Look at this,” Keller says, pointing to images of the church and the school. Both buildings have men in the front and rear.

“Sentries?” Orduña asks. “Guards? Are Forty and Ochoa living in the church and the school?”

The old military saying, Keller thinks—“Rank hath its privileges.” The two top-ranking officers don’t live under canvas but in the two biggest buildings in the village. It’s SOP.

The next satellite run yields gold.

Keller stares at the photo.

Then he flies to El Paso.

–

Fort Bliss is the living definition of a misnomer, Keller thinks as he drives onto the base on the semidesert flats east of El Paso.

He’s seen little of Crazy Eddie since he lifted him out of Acapulco. Literally. One of those black-helicopter jobs that the right-wing crazies are always muttering about. Two minutes after getting Eddie’s call, Keller was on a secure SAT line, exchanging coded messages with Washington that even his Mexican colleagues couldn’t access. There was no telling how even Orduña would react to the U.S. snatching one of the most wanted men in Mexico.

An hour later, Keller was on a helicopter owned by a CIA shell corporation, which landed him on the roof of the Hotel Continental. He met a very nervous consular agent who took him into a small conference room where Eddie Ruiz sat.

Narco Polo, Keller thought. Eddie had on a sky-blue polo shirt with white chinos and a pair of sandals.

He looked tired but calm.

“We’re going to get on a helicopter that will fly us to Ciudad Juárez,” Keller said. “From there another helicopter will take us to Fort Bliss army base in Texas. If at any time during that process you try to run, I will put a bullet in the back of your head. Do you understand?”

“This is running,” Eddie answered.

The flights went smoothly.

During the entire time, Eddie didn’t say a word.

The suits were waiting when they got to Fort Bliss. A State Department attorney read him his rights, so to speak. “You are here as an American citizen, under protective custody based on prior, present, and future cooperation in ongoing investigations. Do you understand?”

“Sure.”

It was a tag-team match. A federal deputy AG took over. “You have been indicted under the so-called Kingpin statutes for drug trafficking. But we are not arresting you at this moment. If you try to leave, or cease cooperating, you will be arrested and placed in the custody of the federal corrections system and be taken to trial. That being said, you do have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney—”

Eddie chuckled. He had attorneys who owed him money.

“—one will be afforded to you. Do you wish an attorney?”

“No.”

“In all probability,” the prosecutor continued, “you will face trial on the trafficking charges. However, your past and future cooperation will be noted in your file for those prosecutors with a view toward charges and to the presiding judge with a view toward sentencing. Do you have any questions?”

“Can I get a Coke?”

“I think that could be worked out.”