Текст книги "The Cartel"

Автор книги: Don Winslow

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

And then there’s that moment with an informant where you pull the carrot away and just show him the stick. You have to let him know he’s trapped, and the only way out is you.

I am the truth and the way.

“Yeah you will,” Keller says, smiling at the woman behind the glass. “Or I’ll put it out that you were talking to DEA. Then Contreras won’t need any goddamn gypsy to tell him to kill you. He’ll turn you over to Ochoa to find out what you told me.”

“You evil motherfucker.”

“Hey, you could have chosen to fly for the friendly skies,” Keller says, walking down the street with Sosa at his side like a puppy. “Now, you have options: The federales arrest you right now and you go to a jail where Contreras’s guys kill you; you run until Ochoa finds you and tortures you to death; or you go back, you do your job like nothing happened, you call me when you know where your boss is going to be, and I put you in the ‘program.’ ”

Sosa chooses door number three.

Now they just have to wait for him to call.

Keller flies back to Mexico City.

–

Luis Aguilar finally broke down to his wife’s imprecations and invited the North American to dinner, albeit not without some rearguard resistance. “It would be unkind.”

“How so?” Lucinda asked.

“The man lost his own family,” Luis assayed, “and it would be unkind to confront him with our happiness.”

“Is that the best you can do?” Lucinda asked. “How do you win any cases?”

“I’ll call him.”

Keller got the call at his desk and was too surprised to think of an excuse. He showed up that night at Aguilar’s with a bottle of wine and flowers, both of which Lucinda graciously accepted.

If Keller expected Luis Aguilar’s wife to be, well…dull…he’s disappointed. In a word, she’s striking. A head taller than her husband, with long chestnut hair and an aquiline nose, subtly but elegantly dressed.

The daughters, luckily, favor their mother. Tall, thin, each resembling a ballerina (which, he learned over dinner, was accurate), Caterina and Isobel, sixteen and thirteen respectively, are lovely, perfect combinations of their father’s reserve and their mother’s graciousness.

They politely answer Keller’s polite questions over a meal that starts with a delicious soup made of cactus tenders, followed by diced chicken in a creamy almond sauce over wild rice, and then a coconut flan.

“You went to a lot of trouble,” Keller tells Lucinda.

“Not at all. I love to cook.”

At a subtle nod from their mother, the girls excuse themselves after dinner and Lucinda says she’s going to “finish up” in the kitchen.

Keller starts to say, “Let me—”

“We have help,” Aguilar says as he takes Keller into his study. “Do you play chess?”

“Not very well.”

“Oh.”

“We can play.”

“No,” Aguilar says, “not if you don’t play well. It wouldn’t be a challenge.”

A maid—Keller learns that her name is Dolores—brings in coffee, which Aguilar laces with cognac. They sit down, and with nothing else to talk about, the conversation turns to Vera.

“Gerardo runs roughshod on the law,” Aguilar complains. “It looks good in the media, I suppose it gets results, but sooner or later it comes back and bites you in the ankle.”

Keller is a little skeptical about Aguilar’s by-the-book pretense. The lawyer hasn’t been exactly reluctant to use the information that Vera’s none-too-gentle interrogations produce. Half the time, the suspects actually confess, and Keller hasn’t noticed Aguilar asking too many questions as to how those confessions were induced.

He doesn’t tell Aguilar about his trip to Nuevo Laredo for Vera.

“And this ‘Batman and Robin’ business,” Aguilar says, “it’s silly and demeaning.”

“But it gives the media a hook,” Keller says.

“I’m not in the media business.”

“Sure you are.”

Lucinda comes in and rescues them from another debate, steering the conversation to film, sports, and Keller. He finds himself telling them about his background—the absentee Mexican businessman father, his days at UCLA, meeting Althea, Vietnam…Then he sees Aguilar glance at his watch. “And I should be going. Thank you for a wonderful evening.”

After he leaves, Lucinda says, “See, he isn’t so bad. I like him.”

“Hmmmm,” Aguilar says.

Gerardo Vera spends the evening with his latest mistress. Good wine, good food, better sex.

Drink, food, and women. What else is there in life?

“God?” Aguilar asked him when he’d spouted this philosophy over lunch.

“That’s the next life,” Vera said. “I’ll worry about that when I get there.”

“Then it will be too late.”

“Yes, Father Luis.”

Luis believes in heaven and hell, Vera knows that there is neither. You die and that’s it, so you have to suck the marrow out of life. The American, Keller, he likes to pretend that he’s lost his faith, but it’s still there, tormenting him with guilt over his supposed sins.

Vera has no such torments.

He doesn’t believe in sin.

Right and wrong, yes.

Courage and cowardice, yes.

Duty and dereliction, yes, but these are parts of being a man. A man does the right thing, does his duty and does it bravely.

Then he drinks, eats, and fucks.

The woman tonight is a charmer, her husband a government official too busy with his work to do his duty at home, and Vera is the grateful beneficiary of this neglect, cheerful to hang horns on a fool.

It’s an epidemic in Mexico these days, what with these Ivy League technocrats bringing the absurd American “work ethic” back with them. They have volunteered to become cogs in a machine, and they forget why it is that they work.

Vera doesn’t forget.

He’s ordered a fine meal delivered to this Polanco love nest, has put fine champagne on ice, music on the stereo.

Discreet, trusted sentries stand guard outside.

Vera pours the woman a glass of champagne, just enough now to make her giddy but not sloppy, then savors the perfume of her elegant neck, then reaches down to feel her equally elegant ass.

She freezes but doesn’t stop him, and he lifts the silk up and then reaches around to feel the essence of her, and she doesn’t object but leans back and lays her head on his shoulder as he strokes her and whispers filth into her ear.

The rich ones, their husbands are too tame, they like to hear words that come from the slums.

Luis hopes for heaven.

Keller fears hell.

Vera fears only death, and that because he takes such pleasure in life.

–

Sosa calls that night.

“I’m taking Contreras from Nuevo Laredo to his niece’s birthday party in Matamoros tomorrow,” he tells Keller. “After that, he’s going to have a party of his own at one of his safe houses.”

“I need an address.”

Sosa gives it to him—a three-story apartment building on Agustín Melgar in the Encantada district.

“Anyone flying with him?”

“Ochoa,” Sosa says. “And Forty. And another Zeta named Segura. Crazy guy who wears a grenade on a chain around his neck. Other Zetas are coming to the party. Look, I don’t want to stay on the phone too long.”

“Okay,” Keller says. “Here’s what you do. You drop Contreras off. You go downtown. You walk across the Puente Nuevo into Brownsville. A DEA agent will be waiting for you on the other side.”

“You promise?”

“You have my word.”

Keller gets on the horn to Vera. Thirty minutes later, he’s sitting in the SEIDO office with him and Aguilar.

“What do you have to do with this?” Aguilar asks Keller.

“He helped me with the informant,” Vera says.

“That’s not—”

“You want Contreras or not?” Vera snaps.

“I should have been informed of this operation,” Aguilar says. “My God, gypsy fortune-tellers…what’s next?”

“What’s next is that we take Contreras,” Vera says, “and three top Zetas.”

Aguilar warns, “They won’t give up Contreras without a fight.”

“Good,” Vera says.

“I want him alive,” Aguilar says to Vera.

Keller gets on the phone to Tim Taylor. “I’m going to need an agent to pick up an informant on the New Bridge in Brownsville. And I’m going to need an S-visa for him.”

“What the hell, Keller? What are you doing in Matamoros?”

“The op is out of Mexico City.”

“What does it have to do with Barrera?”

“Nothing,” Keller says. “It has to do with Contreras.”

“Keller—”

“You want him or not?” Keller asks, echoing Vera.

“Of course we want him.”

“Then get an agent there tomorrow afternoon,” Keller says. “He’s picking up an Alejandro Sosa and putting him into protective custody. Then get the extradition papers going for Contreras.”

“Gee, is that all? Anything else?”

“Not right now.” He hangs up and turns back to Aguilar and Vera. “We’d better get going.”

“You’re not coming,” Aguilar says.

“Do you know the address of the safe house?” Keller asks.

“No.”

“Then I guess I’m coming.”

Vera laughs.

–

Matamoros makes cars.

Perched on the south bank of the Río Bravo where it flows into the Gulf, the city is home to over a hundred maquiladoras, many of which build parts for GM, Chrysler, Ford, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz.

Once the odd combination of a cow town and fishing village, Matamoros came of age during the American Civil War, when it became an alternate port from which to ship Confederate cotton after the North closed New Orleans. Now it has the feel of an industrial city, with factories, warehouses, pollution, and endless rows of trucks carrying its products across four bridges into Brownsville, Texas, just across the river.

Matamoros is the home of the Gulf cartel, and Osiel Contreras is throwing a party.

–

Ten o’clock in the morning, Ochoa thinks, and the boss is sound asleep, naked, wedged between two similarly unconscious and unclad thousand-dollar whores in a bedroom on the second floor of the safe house.

It was a hell of a fiesta.

The women were exceptional.

But he’s starting to worry more and more about Contreras. The boss is doing too much cocaine, his paranoia is becoming treacherous, and his ego has led to acts of terrible misjudgment.

The assault on the American DEA agents had come one second from what would have been a catastrophe. Even what did happen put the CDG on the radar in ways that just aren’t good.

Ochoa doesn’t like it—it’s bad for business, bad for his money. And Ochoa has come to like his money.

“Patrón, patrón.” Contreras had ordered his plane to be ready by eleven. They have business in Nuevo Laredo. “Patrón.”

Contreras opens one jaundiced eye. “Chíngate.”

Okay, fuck me, Ochoa thinks, but—

Miguel Morales, whom they call Forty, comes up the stairs. A thick, squat man with a thick mustache and curly black hair, he’s pulled on his jeans but nothing else and he looks both hungover and fucked out.

And alarmed.

Which in turn alarms Ochoa, because Forty isn’t one to panic. He’s risen quickly in the Zeta ranks despite not being one of the original special-ops veterans. In fact, he’s half American, a pocho from Laredo, with no military experience but a long history with the Los Tejos gang along the border. He took to the military training like he was born to it and didn’t blink at the rougher stuff.

A story going around has it that Forty once tore the heart out of one of his living victims and ate it, saying that it gave him strength, and while Ochoa doesn’t really believe the story, he doesn’t really disbelieve it, either. So when Forty says, “There’s a problem”—there’s a problem.

He follows Forty to the window and looks out.

Police and soldiers are everywhere.

–

The Zetas fight.

For six hours, fifteen of them, surrounded, hold out against over three hundred AFI, SEIDO, and army troopers trying to storm the house.

Ochoa never goes into any building without working out fields of fire, and his disciplined men are laying it down. First they drive the federales from the door, then across the street, but that’s the best they can do.

The soldiers have armored cars, and after an initial burst of overexcited, incontinent fire, they’ve settled down and are picking their targets. They’ve fired tear-gas grenades through the shattered windows, and the helicopters have swept Zeta snipers off the roof.

If we could hold out until dark, Ochoa thinks, there’s a slim chance of getting Contreras out in the confusion, but we can’t hold until dark.

He looks at his watch.

It’s only 1:30 in the afternoon.

They already have one KIA and two wounded, and they’re running out of ammunition.

A bullhorn once again demands Contreras’s surrender.

–

Vera lowers the megaphone.

“It’s time to storm the house,” he says.

“Why?” Aguilar asks. “We have them surrounded. They’re not going anywhere.”

“It makes us look weak,” Vera says. “The longer they hold out, the worse it makes us look. I can hear the corridos already.”

“Let them sing,” Aguilar says. “We’ll have Contreras. Without him, these Zetas are nothing.”

He’s missing the point, Keller thinks. Vera wants bodies, the more the better. Contreras and his troops in handcuffs sends one message—Contreras and his troops in pools of their own blood sends another:

If you form an army, we don’t arrest you.

We kill you.

You want a war, you get a war.

“Strap your vest on,” Vera says. “Five more minutes and we go.”

“You should reconsider that,” Keller says.

Vera looks at him, surprised.

Same with Aguilar.

But for once, Keller thinks, the lawyer is right. Contreras is trapped, he can’t possibly escape. Those aren’t just narcos in that house, they’re highly trained elite soldiers.

“Whatever message you want to send,” Keller tells Vera, “it’s not worth a bloodbath. Which there will be if we storm the house.”

Vera stares at him.

“Make them surrender,” Keller presses. “Make them come out with their hands in the air. That’s the footage you want. Dead, they’re martyrs; alive, they’re bitches. That’s the song you want sung. That’s what makes some kid look at you and not them as the hero.”

“Quite a speech, Arturo,” Vera says. “But you still don’t understand Mexico. Five minutes.”

–

“They’re moving!” Forty yells.

Ochoa crawls back to the window and peers out. Forty is right—there’s movement behind the armored cars.

He recognizes the signs of an imminent assault.

“They’re coming,” Ochoa says.

Segura fingers the grenade around his neck. He’s a giant of a man, six-seven and built like a tree. He’s worn his “grenade necklace” ever since Ochoa can remember, since they served together in Chiapas. “If they get in, I let them get close and pull the pin. We go to the devil together.”

“It will be a good time,” Forty says. “All the best women are in hell.”

“Don’t be idiots,” Contreras says. “I’m going to surrender.”

“Not me,” Segura grunts. That’s why he wears the grenade.

“I didn’t say you, I said me,” Contreras snaps. Turning to Ochoa, he says, “Take your best men out the back. I’ll go to the front with my hands up, make a big show. You might have a chance in the excitement.”

“They’ll gun you down,” Ochoa says.

The AFI are murderers.

“Maybe not in front of the cameras,” Contreras says. “Ochoa, listen to me, this is the right decision.”

Ochoa knows that it is. Contreras can still run the organization from prison, but only if he still has an organization to run.

Which means the Zetas surviving.

Contreras says, “My brother will take over the day-to-day running of the organization.”

Despite the grimness of the situation, Ochoa almost has to laugh. The “little” brother is little only in the sense of “younger.” Héctor Contreras is known as “Gordo,” who is only impressive in that he manages to be obese despite an addiction to cocaine. The man has no self-discipline whatsoever, and therefore Ochoa has no respect whatsoever for him.

Gordo “running the operation” in reality means that I’ll be running the operation, Ochoa thinks. There are worse things.

“You know who’s behind this,” he says.

“Of course,” Contreras answers. “It was the right move.”

“Hell will wait,” Ochoa says.

–

Keller tightens his Kevlar vest.

Aguilar stares at him. “I wonder who you are sometimes.”

“You and me both, Luis.” He checks the load on the Sig Sauer, hoping not to use it, and wishes that Aguilar would stay behind the vehicles. I don’t care that much about you, Luis, he thinks, but I do like your wife and kids, and I don’t want the next time I see them to be at your funeral.

Keller feels that moment of calm he always has before going into a firefight. The fear subsides, the pins-and-needles pricking of anxiety goes away, and he feels this cool rush in his brain.

His only regret is that it’s not Barrera.

He gets his weight solidly under his feet and gets ready to push off.

Then the front door of the house opens.

Contreras steps out.

His hands high over his head.

At least two hundred weapons are trained on him.

So are a dozen news cameras.

“Me rindo!” Contreras yells. “I surrender!”

Vera stares across the street for a moment. Then he yells, “Hold your fire! Don’t shoot!”

Keller hears a burst of fire, then an explosion from the back of the house. For a second it seems like everything is going to fall apart. Contreras drops to his knees, yelling, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

The gunfire stops.

Vera strides across the street. He grabs Contreras by the wrists, turns him, kicks him to the ground, and handcuffs him. “Osiel Contreras, you are under arrest!”

“Go fuck yourself,” Contreras says quietly. “You and your bosses.”

Canelas, Sinaloa

Eva Esparza is seventeen and beautiful.

Long, wavy black hair, brown doe eyes, high cheekbones, and a figure that is just beginning to fulfill its promise. She’s just a little taller than Adán, who holds her loosely in his arms as they dance to the music of Los Canelos de Durango, a band that Nacho had flown in for the occasion.

The occasion is a dance to raise support for his daughter’s candidacy for Miss Canelas, which she’ll probably win anyway by virtue of her beauty and charm, but Nacho isn’t taking any chances. He’s sponsored this dance and handed out gifts to the judges.

Adán wouldn’t be interested in a runner-up.

A king can only marry a queen.

Or, better, a princess.

Adán finds Nacho’s solicitude a little amusing. His ally has at least six families scattered across Sinaloa, Durango, Jalisco, and God knows where else, but Eva is clearly his favorite, Daddy’s little girl.

Holding her, smelling her hair and her perfume, Adán can see why. The girl is intoxicating, and he’s grateful that Nacho’s favorite daughter inherited his charm and not his looks.

When the subject first came up, Adán wasn’t exactly sanguine.

“We’re not getting any younger,” Nacho had said, at the end of a long discussion about the war in Tijuana.

Adán smelled a trap. “I don’t know, Nacho, you look younger than I’ve ever seen you. Maybe it’s the money.”

“Don’t let’s kid ourselves,” Nacho answered. “I take the Viagra, you know.”

Adán let the chance to exchange confidences pass. Erectile dysfunction was not an issue with Magda in his bed, although she was now in Colombia, setting up a cocaine pipeline.

“Still,” Nacho said, “I’m not making any more children.”

“Jesus, Nacho, get to the point,” Adán snapped.

“All right,” Nacho said. “What’s all this for, this empire building, if we don’t have anyone to leave it to?”

“You have a son.”

“You don’t.”

Adán got up from his desk chair and walked over to the window. “I had a child, Nacho.”

“I know.”

“The truth is,” Adán said, “I don’t know if I could live with that kind of heartbreak again.”

“Children are life, Adanito. You still have time.”

“I don’t think Magda would be interested.”

“It can’t be Magda,” Nacho said. “Don’t get me wrong, no offense, but she’s been around.”

“This from you?” Adán asks.

“It’s different with a woman and you know it,” Nacho said. “No, your wife has to be a virgin, of course, and the mother of your children must be from an important family.”

Then Adán got what Nacho was really driving at. “Are you suggesting—”

“Why not?” Nacho asked. “Think about it. An Esparza and a Barrera? Now that would be an alianza de sangre.”

Yes, it would be, Adán thought. It would lock Nacho in. I would not only get his undying loyalty, but, in a sense, the Tijuana plaza back with it. But…

“What about Diego?” he asked.

“Have you seen his eldest daughter?” Nacho asked. “She’ll have a heavier beard than he does!”

Adán laughed in spite of himself. Diego, always sensitive of his position, might feel threatened if I move closer to Esparza.

Nacho said, “I have a daughter, Eva. Seventeen years old—”

“That’s young.”

“We’re about to hold a dance for her,” Nacho said. “Just come and meet her. If you don’t like her, if she doesn’t like you, it’s one day out of your life. This is all I’m asking.”

“And what will Eva think about this?” Adán asked.

“She’s seventeen,” Nacho answered. “She doesn’t know what she thinks.”

Now, as the music stops, Adán wonders what she is thinking. Here’s this young girl, the center of attention at a party in her honor, and suddenly two hundred armed men in black hoods and masks roar in on ATVs and block off all the roads. Then six small planes land on a field nearby and I get out of one of them, with an AK slung over my shoulder, and now two helicopters circle overhead.

She’s either totally taken with it all, or totally disgusted.

And I’m more than thirty years her senior, what does she think about that? I’m guessing it’s not the honeymoon night that she’s dreamed of. She’s probably not even thinking of marriage—she wants to date, go to clubs, hang out with her friends, go to college…

Adán feels like one of those old-time Sinaloan grandes, exercising his droit du signeur, and it makes him feel creepy. Still, it would be an important marriage. Twenty years or so down the road I’ll be ready to retire, and by then there might be a son, and he would have it all.

Adán walks Eva over to a table for an agua fresca.

–

He’s not as gross as Eva feared.

When her father came home with the news that Adán Barrera was going to be a “special guest” at her dance, Eva cried, sobbed, threw a temper tantrum, and then sobbed some more. After her father stormed out of the room, her mother held her, dried her tears, and said, “This is our life, m’ija.”

“Not mine, Mami.”

Her mother slapped her.

Hard, across the face.

She’d never done that before.

“Who do you think you are?” her mother asked. “Everything you have—the clothes, the jewels, the pretty things, the parties—come to you because of this life of ours. Do you think that God just chose you?”

Eva held her hand to her cheek.

“If this man wants you,” her mother said, “do you think you can reject him? Do you think your father would allow his most important ally to be humiliated by his own daughter? He would take you out and beat you and I would hand him the belt. He would throw you into the road and I would pack your bag.”

“Mami, please…”

Her mother held her tight, stroked her hair, and whispered, “Not everyone would cry for you. You would have money, houses, position, prestige. You would be a queen. Your children would have everything. I am going to go pray that this man likes you. You should do the same.”

Eva didn’t.

She only prayed that he wouldn’t be hideous, and, in all fairness, he isn’t. He’s not bad-looking for an old man, he’s polite, gentle, and charming in an old-fashioned way.

Eva can’t imagine having sex with him, but she can’t imagine having sex with any man. Unlike so many of her buchona friends, her parents haven’t let her run wild, go to overnight parties, or on skiing weekends away.

They’ve kept her under tight wraps, and now she knows why.

Her virginity isn’t going to be given away.

It’s going to be negotiated.

–

“So?” Nacho asks Adán after he returns from dancing with Eva.

“She’s charming.”

“So you’d like to see her again,” Nacho presses.

“If she wants to see me.”

“She will.”

“I don’t know,” Adán says.

“She’s my daughter,” Nacho insists, “and she will do what I say.”

Sometimes, Adán thinks, I forget how old-school Nacho really is. “Let’s go see Diego.”

They find him having a beer at the refreshment table, and walk away to have a private conversation. The big man has a beer in each hand, foam on his mustache, and is feeling no pain. Seeing Adán, he raises one glass. “To fortune-tellers.”

“For a hundred dollars,” Nacho says to Adán, “you brought down an empire.”

“Not yet,” Adán answers.

Unfortunately, infuriatingly, Contreras is still alive, and will doubtless do his best to run the CDG from prison. The sooner the North Americans can extradite him, the better. Still, the situation is different with Contreras at least hobbled. El Gordo is a joke, and the Zetas? Without Contreras they’re just toy soldiers—line them up and knock them down.

It’s taken months and months of patience. Kissing Contreras’s ass, pretending to believe that he didn’t try to kill you, pretending to tolerate his taking Nuevo Laredo—all to put him at his ease until you could figure a way to topple him.

A bribe to a fortune-teller, Adán muses.

It’s a funny world.

And now everything is ready.

Well, almost.

“On another topic,” Adán says, “why is Keller still alive?”

Diego and Nacho look at each other uncomfortably. Finally, Nacho says, “Now is not the time, Adán.”

“When is the time?” Adán snaps. It never seems to be “the time.”

“Not now,” Nacho answers. “Not when you want to make a move on the Gulf. Not while there’s a presidential election—a close election in which we have a lot at stake. We simply cannot afford to antagonize—”

“I know, I know.” Adán waves his hand as if to brush away the unwanted concession.

“We know where Keller is,” Diego says. “We won’t lose track of him again. You can have him anytime you want.”

“After the election,” Nacho adds.

They talk for a few more minutes, mostly about inconsequential things, and then Adán walks over and says goodbye to Eva.

He kisses her hand.

Then he gets back in his plane and flies off.

Eva wins the pageant.

–

The press conference is classic, Keller thinks, watching it on television from the American consulate in Matamoros. Vera presents Osiel Contreras to the public like Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles.

Contreras plays his role.

His hands cuffed in front of him, he looks down at the ground sullenly as Vera makes a speech…another victory for society…for order…a lesson to all those who would defy the laws of the land…this is the way it will always end…the jail cell or the morgue…

–

The corpse of one of the Zetas is propped up on a gurney. Two others were wounded. Sadly, one AFI trooper and one soldier died heroically for their country. Their murders will be relentlessly, mercilessly prosecuted.

One cheeky reporter, Pablo, points out that there was a gun battle in the street following Contreras’s surrender.

“Pablo”—Vera smiles at the reporter—“some of the Zetas did attempt a breakout.”

“Well,” Pablo follows up, “they did break out, isn’t that correct?”

Ochoa, Forty, and Segura fought their way out, Keller knows from the statements of the two wounded Zetas.

Glaring at the reporter, Vera answers, “Some of these criminals escaped, but don’t worry, we will bring them to justice.”

Vera moves on to introduce Aguilar, who stumbles through a statement expressing his grief for the fallen, his thoughts and prayers for the families, and his satisfaction that Osiel Contreras will be put through the due process of the law.

It’s all very good, Keller thinks, but he can’t help getting the feeling that Vera is disappointed that Contreras is alive.

Keller’s bosses at DEA aren’t disappointed. Champagne corks pop, cake is brought in, congratulatory phone calls go from El Paso to D.C. And to Keller, in Brownsville, where he dutifully delivered Alejandro Sosa to Tim Taylor.

Taylor hands Keller the phone. “The big boss.”

“Art,” Keller hears. “Fantastic job. Needless to say we’re all thrilled here. Teach these guys to threaten our agents. Extradition papers are already in the works…”

Keller mumbles a thank-you and zones him out. Taylor takes the phone back and Keller vaguely hears him taking a verbal bow. When the boss clicks off, Taylor says, “Not everyone here is so happy with you poaching other agents’ hunting grounds, Art.”

Keller says, “If we think this is the end of the CDG…”

“No one thinks that,” Taylor answers, “but it’s a huge step. Take out enough of the number one guys, pretty soon no one is going to want the job.”

Yes they will, Keller thinks.

They’ll fight for the top job, they’ll kill for it.

“Contreras’s brother is a cokehead dumbass,” Taylor says. “Not exactly the A Team taking over.”

“Okay.”

“Jesus Christ,” Taylor says, “take a minute to celebrate, would you? It’s a good day and we don’t get a lot of them. Let’s at least crack a smile when we do.”

“Sure.”

Taylor shakes his head. “Don’t be smug. You just saved your own ass, and you know it.”

Yeah, they both know it. Taylor wouldn’t dare call him back now, not the guy who just took down Osiel Contreras.

Keller doesn’t say what else he’s thinking.

That the Contreras operation wasn’t a successful arrest.

It was a botched execution.