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,
