The Border

by Don Winslow

  I want my lawyer.

  Keller takes a call from Ben Tompkins.

  “I’m representing Eddie Ruiz,” Tompkins says. “Mr. Ruiz suggests, and I concur, that I should have a conversation with your lawyer.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “You’re going to need the best,” Tompkins says. “I’m conflicted out but I can make a recommendation.”

  “No, thanks,” Keller says. “And you can say what you have to say directly to me.”

  “That’s imprudent.”

  “Get on with it.”

  “Fine,” Tompkins says. “Mr. Ruiz says that he can talk to the government about Jason Lerner or he can talk to the government about you.”

  “If Eddie’s holding an auction,” Keller says, “I’m not bidding.”

  “That’s a shame because Eddie would prefer you were the highest bidder,” Tompkins says. “I can’t imagine why, I don’t see it myself, but for some reason he likes you.”

  “Tell him his affections are misplaced,” Keller says. “I think of him as a drug-dealing piece of shit, a punk-ass informer I had a long time ago. Tell him I think he’s a bitch.”

  “At least let me tell you what information Eddie can—”

  “I know what Eddie has on me,” Keller says. “I don’t care.”

  “You should.”

  “Probably,” Keller says. “If you want to help your client, the call you should be making is to the New York AG. You want me to have that put through?”

  “Not just yet.”

  “Then we have nothing to talk about,” Keller says.

  “Mr. Ruiz has a lot to talk about.”

  “Then go talk to him.” Keller clicks off.

  Eddie sits with Ben Tompkins.

  “Darnell rolled over on you,” Tompkins says. “He’s going to testify about his dealings with you and about the Berkeley loan meetings.”

  “Did you talk to Keller?” Eddie asks.

  “He basically told you to go fuck yourself,” Tompkins says.

  “He’s bluffing,” Eddie says.

  “I don’t think so,” Tompkins says. “I’ve been dealing with this guy for twenty years, I’ve never known him to bluff.”

  “I can put him behind bars.”

  “He doesn’t seem to care.”

  “Crazy motherfucker,” Eddie says.

  He’s truly pissed. Why is Keller being this way? It could all be so easy, and he has to make it hard.

  But okay.

  “Call Lerner,” Eddie says.

  Like old times.

  They meet upstairs at Martin’s.

  “Ruiz is threatening to blow up Guatemala,” O’Brien says.

  “I don’t care.”

  “I do,” O’Brien says. “He blows me up with you.”

  Keller says, “Ruiz doesn’t know anything about your involvement. I don’t want to take you down, Ben.”

  “No, just the president of the United States,” O’Brien says.

  “If he’s guilty.”

  “If you do this,” O’Brien says, “you are crossing a line—”

  “I’m crossing a line?!”

  “I asked you not to do this,” O’Brien says. “Now I’m telling you. Walk away from this. Hand over the tapes to Howard, walk away, take Mari and live your life.”

  “Are you speaking for yourself?” Keller asks. “Or Dennison?”

  “This comes from the highest level.”

  “And we point fingers at Mexico,” Keller says.

  “For once in your life, make the smart decision,” O’Brien says. “Make a decision for the people who love you. Or—”

  “Or what, Ben?”

  “Are you going to make me say it?” O’Brien asks.

  The senator gets up and walks away.

  Arthur Jackson crosses the last square off his calendar.

  Marking Barack Obama’s final day in office.

  And his last hope.

  Now he knows that he’s going to complete his three life sentences here in Victorville. Spend the rest of his life here, die here, be buried here. Do the last two life stretches in the grave.

  Jackson breaks down and cries.

  Sobs his heart out.

  Knows for the first time the true meaning of hopelessness.

  The complete loss or absence of hope.

  He tries to pray, turns to his Bible—So I am ready to give up; I am in deep despair. I remember the days gone by; I think about all that you have done, I bring to mind all your deeds. I lift up my hands to you in prayer; like dry ground my soul is thirsty for you.

  Jackson knows that giving up hope is a sin, but he’s a sinner and now he can’t help himself, can’t help but believe that God has abandoned him in this place, that Jesus is going to leave him in this hell.

  It’s a guard that brings him the news. “Arthur, you have a phone call.”

  Leads him down to the bank of phones.

  It’s his volunteer lawyer, a young lady.

  Arthur steels himself. “This is Arthur Jackson.”

  “Arthur! It was granted!”

  “What?”

  “Your clemency!” she shouts. “Obama pardoned seventeen offenders on his last day! You’re on the list!”

  Jackson drops the phone and falls to his knees.

  Sobs again.

  And speaks a psalm: “I waited patiently for the Lord to help me, and he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the pit of despair, out of the mud and the mire. He set my feet on solid ground and steadied me as I walked along.”

  Praise God.

  “You don’t have it,” Goodwin says.

  “What don’t I have?” Keller asks. “Darnell told you that Eddie Ruiz set up security for the Terra meetings with HBMX.”

  “And Ruiz isn’t saying anything.”

  “Yet,” Keller says. “He could give you Rafael Caro and Caro is a known associate of Echeverría.”

  “And there’s still nothing to connect Lerner to that knowledge.”

  “You heard the tape!”

  “And I don’t have corroboration!”

  “Hidalgo can testify that he wired Claiborne.”

  “And we can’t prove that Claiborne was talking to Lerner,” Goodwin says. “Keller, I’m sorry. But you got forty keys of fire off the streets. Major drug dealers. The biggest bust in history. Go out on that and be happy.”

  “So you’ll prosecute Darnell,” Keller says. “You’ll prosecute Cozzo and Andrea, but you won’t prosecute the money people. The usual suspects go to jail and the rich guys walk.”

  “I can’t bring a case I don’t think I can win.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  Keller sits Hidalgo down in his office.

  “We’re not going to get Lerner,” Keller says. “We’ll get Darnell, Ruiz and the mob guys, but we’re not going to get Lerner.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “We’re not going to get Caro, either.”

  “Why not?” Hidalgo asks.

  “Mexico won’t prosecute.”

  “Because the prosecutors are on Caro’s payroll,” Hidalgo says.

  “That’s part of it,” Keller says. “The other part is that the government thinks they need him to try to restore the peace.”

  Because the Sinaloa cartel is all but dead and the new king is Tito Ascensión.

  And Tito is a brutal thug.

  The Mexican government is hoping that Rafael Caro will be a restraining influence.

  Hidalgo takes it in. “You promised me we’d go after him.”

  “We did,” Keller says. “We just didn’t get him. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “It’s going to have to be, Hugo.”

  “I don’t accept it,” Hidalgo says. “We can keep at it.”

  “I’m out of here tomorrow,” Keller says. “The new people are not going to pursue this and we both know why. But be patient, play the long game. This administration could go down.
Or change in four years.”

  “Nothing changes.” Hidalgo gets up. “You lied to me.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “Where are you going?” Keller asks.

  “I quit.”

  Keller watches him walk out.

  He doesn’t blame Hidalgo, knows exactly how he feels. Remembers when he himself was told that he couldn’t go after Adán Barrera.

  Inauguration Day comes cold and cloudy.

  Keller doesn’t attend the ceremony, he spends the morning packing the last of the few personal belongings in his office. The new president has already announced that one of the first things he’s going to do after taking the oath is to fire Art Keller and appoint Denton Howard in his place.

  He’s also going to appoint Jason Lerner as a senior White House adviser.

  Keller is heartbroken.

  It breaks his heart that his country has just been mortgaged to a drug cartel.

  And the drugs keep coming.

  It breaks his heart that his best efforts have been futile, that heroin keeps killing Americans in greater numbers, that not only has he failed to stem the epidemic but the system that provides the drugs now has nexuses not only in Guadalajara, but in New York and, as of this morning, Washington, DC.

  He glances at the speech on television.

  “Together we will make America strong again. We will make America wealthy again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. And, yes, together, we will make America great again.”

  On the other side of the country, the gates open.

  Arthur Jackson walks out into the cool air of freedom.

  Art Keller walks out of his office.

  It’s over, he thinks.

  They beat you, you lost.

  Let it go, it’s time to fade away. Take Mari and live the rest of your lives in peace.

  Your war is over.

  He walks over to Arlington cemetery.

  Sees row after row of headstones.

  The crosses.

  The Stars of David.

  The crescents.

  No, Keller thinks, they didn’t die for this.

  Not for this.

  It’s a long walk on a cold day, but Keller walks to the Washington Post.

  Book Five

  Truth

  Hell is truth seen too late.

  —Thomas Hobbes

  Leviathan

  1

  The Most Powerful Entity on Earth

  The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent.

  —Malcolm X

  Washington, DC

  January 2017

  Keller never wanted to be famous.

  Or infamous, depending on your point of view.

  To some people, he’s a heroic whistleblower, to others a subversive traitor. Some people think he’s a truth teller, to others he’s a liar. Some think he’s a patriot trying to save the country, others see him as a bitter ex-employee trying to bring down a legally elected president.

  But everyone thinks something.

  If Keller thought that the public exposure that came with being the DEA director was intense, it was nothing compared to the media storm that swirls around him now after the story in the Washington Post.

  Ex-Dea Boss Alleges Lerner Laundered Drug Money

  In an exclusive interview with the Post, former DEA administrator Art Keller alleged that White House senior adviser and presidential son-in-law Jason Lerner knowingly accepted a loan from Mexican banking institutions that was funded by drug-trafficking organizations, including the Sinaloa cartel and others. Keller stated that Lerner, through his company Terra, accepted the loan to bail out his troubled Park Tower project in order to make a “balloon payment” of $285 million after Deutsche Bank pulled out of a financing syndicate. The former DEA boss further stated that the money was received extracontractually through rents paid by phony shell companies, false purchases of construction and maintenance materials and rigged cost overruns.

  If proven, the allegations would place Lerner in jeopardy of prosecution under a number of federal and New York State money-laundering and fraud statutes.

  Keller alleged that the loans were arranged through HBMX bank by the late Chandler Claiborne, who died of a drug overdose in a Manhattan hotel room last December. Keller went on to state that he was approached by “allies” of the Dennison administration, whom he declined at this point to name, offering to allow him to continue in his job, as well as suggesting certain policy concessions, if he would cease his investigation of Lerner and Terra. Keller stated that the people told him that the offer came from the “highest levels,” although he refused to specify whether they were referring to Lerner himself or to President Dennison. When he refused this offer, Keller said, the same allies threatened to “destroy” him.

  Keller resigned from office on January 19, a standard practice of presidential appointees when a new administration comes into office. He said that he came to the Post with the story only because current DEA administrator Denton Howard refuses to pursue the Lerner investigation.

  When challenged on his allegations, Keller stated that he has documentary evidence and alluded to the existence of recordings that “absolutely prove” his charges. Keller declined to play any portions of the alleged recordings, stating that he would turn over his evidence to the proper authorities if a “legitimate investigation is conducted by an independent entity.” Keller stated that he has removed this evidence from DEA premises, fearing that it might be “destroyed, suppressed or altered,” and has it in his own safekeeping. He admitted that his removal of evidence might, in fact, be a criminal offense in itself, making him susceptible to federal charges under the Espionage Act.

  “I thought I had a higher duty,” Keller said, “that the potential infiltration of the White House by drug cartels represents a greater threat to the security of the United States.”

  Keller said that he had no information to indicate that President Dennison has any financial interest in Terra or knowledge of the Park Tower loan in question.

  Mr. Lerner was unavailable for comment, but anonymous sources in the White House called Keller’s allegations “outrageous,” “slanderous” and “criminal.”

  CNN called it a “bombshell.”

  Which was exactly Keller’s intent in going to the Post.

  To roll a grenade down the airplane aisle and blow it all up.

  If a state prosecutor won’t open the case, he thought, and a federal prosecutor won’t open the case, maybe a special counsel will. And if the new US attorney general won’t appoint a special counsel, Congress could. Congress could form its own investigative committee, but the president’s party would have control, so Keller didn’t think anything would come of it.

  Of course, the AG is a Dennison appointee and his party controls both houses, but the allegations are so “outrageous” that public opinion might force an independent investigation.

  It’s Keller’s last hope.

  By nature, training and experience, he’s an essentially private person, but now the media sits outside the house like the bivouac of an invading army. He’s deluged with requests for interviews—all the networks, the cable outlets, the print media.

  He turns them all down.

  Because his strategy is to let other people carry the ball and move it forward. If it’s just him appearing on all the shows, then he’s a one-man band, a solitary voice singing the same song. He wants to put in just enough to keep the story in the news cycle.

  Just now and again blow on the embers to keep the flame alive.

  And now his life is public, every detail of his past and present—some factual, others fantastical—is being dug up and displayed on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, the network news, every front page.

  Pundits on the talking-head shows provide “analysis” that Keller is the illegitimate son of a Mexican mother an
d an American father (an alt-right blog cheerfully reports keller really is a bastard).

  The more rabid speculate is keller american or mexican? and generate a mini-“birther” controversy by suggesting that Keller was born in Mexico and was therefore not only disqualified from his former position but eligible for deportation.

  Keller responds to this one.

  “I can probably lay my hands on my birth certificate,” he tells Jake Tapper, “but no one questioned my nationality when I was serving in Vietnam.”

  The reports go on that he grew up poor in San Diego’s Barrio Logan (where his brief and mediocre Golden Gloves stint accounts for his crooked nose), went to UCLA, where he met his first wife (whose family were stalwarts in the California Democratic Party), and then to Vietnam: keller’s army unit connected to operation phoenix—notorious vietnam assassination program.

  Well, they got that, Keller thinks when the story comes out, but they missed the real story, that he’d been recruited by the CIA. The media did get to a related story—Keller was coming out of his house when a reporter walked alongside him and said, “The early personnel of the DEA were largely drafted from CIA. Were you one of those?”

  Keller doesn’t answer and the story goes out as keller’s cia background probed.

  Also “probed” is his DEA career, that he’d been a field agent in Sinaloa in the 1970s during Operation Condor, when thousands of acres of poppy fields were burned and poisoned.

  Keller watches a CNN panel discussion where an “expert” says, “This is probably where Keller first met the Barreras. One of my sources tells me that Keller actually knew the young Adán Barrera, that they were friends, that Keller actually saved him from a brutal beating by Mexican federal police.”

  The same expert—whom Keller doesn’t know and has never met—provides “insight.”

  “The torture-murder of Keller’s partner, Ernie Hidalgo,” she says, “is really the transformative moment in Keller’s life. If you track his career subsequent to that, it’s really an obsessive quest to bring all the people involved to justice, especially Adán Barrera. I think Keller felt a personal sense of betrayal with Barrera, possibly because they’d once been friends.”