by Don Winslow
“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
Henry VI, 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 Hi
dalgo.
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.
