The Border

by Don Winslow

  “Assuming I’m not in jail?” Keller asks.

  “If you are,” she says, “do they have parietal visits?”

  “Depends on the prison,” Keller says.

  “Get one that does,” she says.

  “When this is all over,” Keller says, “and assuming I’m not in an orange jumpsuit, you want to stay in DC, right? George Washington contacted me about an adjunct faculty position.”

  That’s good, Marisol thinks. She was half-afraid that after all this he might want to go to a monastery in New Mexico to raise bees or something. She would go with him and do whatever it is you do with bees (herd them? swarm them?), but academia sounds better.

  The doorbell rings.

  “I’ll get it,” she says.

  It’s Ben O’Brien. “I need to talk to Art.”

  “I’m not sure he needs to talk to you,” Marisol says.

  “Please,” O’Brien says. “It’s important.”

  She opens the door and lets him in.

  Keller gets up and comes to the foyer.

  “Marisol,” O’Brien says, “could you give us a few minutes?”

  She looks at Keller, who nods. Marisol takes a moment to give O’Brien a harsh look and then goes upstairs. Keller leads O’Brien into the living room and they sit down.

  “We have Sean Callan,” O’Brien says. “Name rings a bell, right? I think he saved your life one time. On a bridge in San Diego?”

  Keller doesn’t say anything.

  “He’s in tough shape, I’m told,” O’Brien says. “And we got him eight ways to Sunday. We have people who will testify they saw him murder Paul Calabrese way back when. But he also just shot a couple of pimps in Tijuana, some argument over a child he was trying to buy.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” O’Brien says. “Probably the easiest thing is to extradite him back to Mexico, let them have him for the murders. He’d get thirty in some Mexican shithole, although I doubt he’ll last anywhere near that long. What do you think? Of course, the other option is we cut him loose. It’s up to you.”

  Keller knows what’s coming.

  “Give us the tapes, recant your allegations, go away,” O’Brien says. “You’re good at that, aren’t you, going away?”

  O’Brien gets up. “Say ten thirty? Lobby of the Hamilton? Oh . . . and in case your gratitude to Callan isn’t sufficient to pay Callan back for your life . . . Ruiz saw you kill Barrera.”

  “He’s lying.”

  “He has details,” O’Brien says. “It was in the jungle. Barrera asked you for water. You gave him some. Then you shot him twice in the face, dropped the gun and walked away.”

  That’s exactly what happened, Keller thinks.

  Ruiz has kept that in his pocket for a long time.

  “He has the gun,” O’Brien says, “in a safe deposit box. It will have your prints on it and it will match the wounds in Barrera’s skull.”

  Yes, it will, Keller thinks. “Who did he say this to—Scorti?”

  “One of Lerner’s attorneys,” O’Brien says. “He’s prepared to testify that you killed Barrera, that you got him a sweetheart plea deal, and that you’ve helped him with various problems to keep him quiet.”

  Keller knows what he’s looking at—he could be tried in the States on any number of corruption charges, including perjury. He could be extradited to Guatemala and tried for murder.

  He also knows why Ruiz flipped—the White House offered him a deal, a get-out-of-jail-free card. He’ll do a couple of years and then his sentence will be quietly commuted.

  “Save Callan and yourself,” O’Brien says. “The other option is that Ruiz testifies and you and Callan go to prison. And don’t think you’ll take me, or Lerner, or Dennison with you—you’ll be discredited—no one will believe anything you say after Ruiz is done with you.”

  Keller lets him out.

  Then he hears Marisol come down the stairs.

  “I need to talk with you,” Keller says.

  They sit at the kitchen table.

  Keller tells her everything.

  About that night on the bridge.

  And he tells her that he killed Barrera.

  Marisol sits quietly while he talks, and when he’s finished, she says, “You lied to me.”

  “I did.”

  “I asked you directly if you killed him,” Marisol says, “and you looked me in the eye and lied to me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “We promised each other,” she says, “that the one thing we’d never do was lie to each other. So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Keller says. “What should I do?”

  She gets up from her chair. It takes her a moment, it always does. She grabs her cane, leans on it and looks back at Keller. “Call Daniella. I’m not your lawyer, I’m not your shrink, I’m not your priest. I was your wife.”

  Keller hears her footsteps and her cane on the chair. He hears the sound of suitcases opening and closing. A little while later she asks him to carry her bags down to the door.

  “Goodbye, Arturo,” Marisol says. “Whatever you decide to do, I hope it’s the right thing for you.”

  He carries her bags to the Uber outside, opens the door for her and helps her in.

  Then she’s gone.

  Keller doesn’t try to sleep.

  What’s the point?

  It would be funny if it weren’t so sad—Adán Barrera has reached up from the grave again.

  Adán vive.

  Keller doesn’t show up in the lobby of the Hamilton.

  There’s no point, because at 9:00 a.m. the news comes out that Dennison’s financial records showed that he had significant investments in Terra.

  At 10:00, Dennison instructs Ribello to fire Scorti.

  In a “Twitter-storm,” the president goes on to call Keller a “pathetic liar,” a “loser,” a “traitor.”

  Ribello does fire Scorti.

  By 10:30 the government of the United States is in chaos.

  “It buys us time,” Rollins says, “to do what we need to do.”

  “No,” O’Brien says.

  “What’s the alternative?” Rollins asks. “We let this man bring down the administration and go back to eight more years of a left-wing government? Open immigration, high taxes, drug legalization? We have a unique opportunity now to turn this country around.”

  “Make it great again?”

  “Scoff, but yes, that’s right,” Rollins says. “We have to clean this up. Some people have to go. You don’t have to say yes, O’Brien. Just don’t say anything.”

  O’Brien doesn’t answer.

  He hears the door open and then close.

  Caro is reluctant.

  Just a few years ago, the Zetas made the mistake of killing an American agent in Mexico. The American response, led by Art Keller, was violent and efficient. The Americans teamed with the Mexican marines on raids that were basically executions. They slaughtered the Zetas and took them off the board as major players.

  But Caro doesn’t need that as an example.

  No one knows better than he the danger of killing an American DEA agent. After the murder of Ernesto Hidalgo, the DEA took the Federación apart. Keller himself killed Miguel Ángel Barrera, the founder, M-1. If the rumors are true, Keller killed Adán Barrera. Caro had participated in the DEA agent’s murder, and for his small role, Keller had put him away for twenty-five to life.

  Now he’s finally free, and these men want his help in assassinating not just an American DEA agent, but Art Keller himself?

  He voices his concerns to Echeverría and the American—what is his name?—yes, Rollins.

  “We don’t have a choice,” Rollins says. “Keller hasn’t come to terms yet. If he does decide to come out with these tapes, the wine is out of the bottle and we’ll never be able to get it back in.”

  “A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity could be lost if we don’t act,” Echeverría says.
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  “And if we do, we could be destroyed,” Caro says.

  “This administration won’t overreact,” Rollins says. “You send a shooter, the shooter does the job and is killed immediately. There’s noise for a few weeks, some disruption, and then it’s business as usual.”

  Caro asks, “Why don’t you use one of your own people?”

  “A cartel gunman makes more sense,” Rollins says. “‘Mexican drug cartel murders its worst enemy.’ Hell, Barrera had a two-million-dollar bounty out on Keller. Better yet, we put out flak that Keller was in bed with the cartel and double-crossed you.”

  Kill the man and his name, Caro thinks. “And you can guarantee me that there won’t be repercussions?”

  “These people,” Echeverría says, “will be just as motivated as you to cover this up. More, actually. Of course there will be repercussions—the Americans will have to respond. But it can be arranged that they’ll respond against people who are, shall we say, problematic.”

  Caro thinks it through—Tito won’t object to it; a part of him blames Keller for Nacho Esparza’s death. And Iván certainly would be all for killing the man who smashed his face in and humiliated him.

  He gives the green light.

  And feigns reluctance.

  Can these people know, he wonders, that every night for twenty years in that frozen hell I dreamed of killing Art Keller?

  Nothing is emptier than an empty house.

  The vacant kitchen chair, the imprint on a sofa cushion, the pillow unsplayed with hair, absent of scent. An unspoken thought, an unshared laugh, the silence of no footsteps, no sighs, no breaths.

  Marisol has called twice, both brief, once to let him know that she arrived safely in New York and was at the Beekman, another later to tell him that she had sublet a studio apartment in Murray Hill.

  A spacious solitary confinement, Keller thinks as he wanders from empty room to empty room, makes a meal for one, barely eats it, listlessly sips on a beer, pays half attention to the television, which drones about a “constitutional crisis” and a “crisis of faith.”

  He hears an analyst say, “What this comes down to is really a mano a mano between John Dennison and Art Keller.”

  Keller goes upstairs to check his arsenal.

  A Sig 9 for his hip, a Sig .380 for his ankle.

  A Mossberg pump under the bed.

  A Ka-Bar knife.

  For forty years he’s been at war with the Mexican cartels.

  Now he’s at war with his own government.

  And they’re the same.

  The syndicate.

  2

  Broken

  Aquí se rompió una taza.

  “Here a cup got broken.”

  —Mexican expression meaning “the party’s over”

  Mexico

  March 2017

  Mini-Ric is becoming Micro-Ric.

  I’m getting smaller every day, he thinks.

  Which maybe isn’t a totally bad thing, because when everyone and his dog is hunting you, it’s better not to have too big a profile. And when you’re constantly on the run, moving from place to place, it’s better not to be carrying a lot of baggage.

  I’m getting smaller, Ric thinks, because shit keeps dropping off me like excess weight. People—a wife, a daughter, bodyguards, gunmen, associates, allies, friends. Things—cars, motorcycles, boats, houses, apartments, even clothes. Power—all his life he lived in a privileged, make-it-thus world where underlings and servants and hangers-on were always around to anticipate his needs before he even expressed them. He could order an execution if he wanted; now he’s lucky if he can order a pizza. Money—he never used to even think about money. It was always there and if it wasn’t, he could always get more. Now money, not to put too fine a point on it, is leaking out his ass.

  It takes money to run, money to hide. Money to buy clean cars, rent apartments, houses, hotel rooms; buy silence from renters, from clerks, from anyone who happens to see him and recognize him. Money to pay halcones, cops, soldiers. There’s a lot of money flowing out and not a lot coming in because it’s hard for him and his father to run their operation from underground.

  How do you check on the growers when to step outside is to put yourself at risk? How do you stay in touch with your traffickers, your transport people, your soldiers, your informers when every cell phone, email or text is risky? How do you hold meetings, plan strategy when you have to come up with secret locations at the last possible moment and everyone who attends is the person who might give you up to Iván, to Tito, to the federales, the state police, the local police, the DEA, the army or the marines? How do you get hold of your money when accountants are scrambling to the other side, when every communication to the ones who remain is dangerous, when some of your launderers are just flat-out stealing from you because they’re not afraid of you anymore?

  And they’re right.

  The Núñez name used to scare people.

  The mantle of Adán Barrera used to awe people.

  Now Adán is a dead saint—people still burn candles and pray to him, but they’re not necessarily going to put themselves on the line for his godson. Some do, some will—those are a lot of the people who Ric counts on now, to move him, to hide him, to make calls, run messages. These people see him as the true heir to Adán’s crown and help him out of pure loyalty.

  It’s dangerous for them and he feels bad, because what Iván, Tito, the soldiers and the cops can’t get by cajoling or bribing, they get with intimidation, beatings, burnings of houses or whole villages.

  Most of them give in—Ric can’t blame them. Some of the hard-core tough it out—Ric almost wishes they wouldn’t. He feels worst for the people who have no information and their interrogators won’t believe them. It goes hard on them and there’s nothing they can do.

  He keeps running.

  From Eldorado to Culiacán, from Culiacán to Badiraguato, where Iván’s people came within ten minutes of him getting in an apartment. He escaped to Los Mochis, but too many people there knew him, so he got a plane to fly him down to Mazatlán—and found too many of Tito’s people there, fighting for the port.

  Ric thought about going to Baja—La Paz was once his stronghold—but now Belinda is too powerful there and she wouldn’t hesitate to sell him to the highest bidder, or just chop him up and sell him piece by piece. (There’s a story making the rounds right now that she had a new boyfriend who cheated on her with a girl from his gym. Belinda kidnapped the girl and beat her to death over the course of three days. Then she got pissed when she found out that the boyfriend had fucked the girl in her new pickup, so she chopped his forearms off with a machete so he couldn’t drive anymore.)

  Ric made a long and dangerous car trip through Tito’s base in Jalisco and Michoacán up into the hills of Guerrero and hid for weeks near one of the opium plantations. It was safe until some of the old GU people got wind of it and were trying to decide whether to turn him over to Iván or Tito, and he got out and made it to Puebla.

  His father has taken a different approach.

  “Movement attracts the eye,” he told Ric. “It’s better to sit still.”

  So Núñez is holed up in a condo in the upscale Anzures neighborhood of Mexico City, right under the noses of the government officials who turned on him and are now hunting him.

  Ric meets him at the Pisco Grill, not far from the condo.

  His father has a full beard now, and his hair is cut short. Ric is heartened to see that he’s gained a little weight—his face is fleshier, although still pale.

  “Are you sure this is safe?” Ric asks him.

  “We still have some friends in the capital,” Núñez says, “and the rest are bought and paid for.”

  They go over business—money transfers, routes, personnel—then Núñez moves on to strategy.

  “It was Caro all along,” Núñez says. “Caro who had Rudolfo Sánchez killed, Caro who tried to kill me. It was a smart strategy—he succeeded in turning us agains
t each other.”

  “And Tito is the new boss.”

  “A dog is always a dog,” Núñez says. “It never becomes a wolf. A dog craves a master and Tito will find a new one. First it was Esparza, now it’s Caro.”

  Ric worries that his father underestimates Ascensión.

  Tito is winning everywhere.

  Tijuana is all but his, now that Elena’s gone.

  Killed by Belinda on behalf of Iván, although Ric isn’t so sure that Tito didn’t have a hand in murdering his supposed ally. At the very least he didn’t veto it, and now he has everything she used to have. In any case, he’s absorbed most of Elena’s people and together they’re driving Iván out of the city, and the only turf Elena and her son occupy now is a crypt in Jardines del Valle cemetery.

  The Esparzas are reportedly holding their own in northern Sinaloa, but Tito has taken over the southern half and added it to his Jalisco and Michoacán territories. He’s moving into Juárez, too, and points east, replicating Adán’s old ambition of holding all the major border crossings—Tijuana, Juárez and Nuevo Laredo.

  And you can’t tell me, Ric thinks, that Tito didn’t have Osiel Contreras killed, too. The old man was just out of an American prison and went down to Cancún to get a little sun after being in a cell for twelve years. Some people said he just wanted to retire, others that he had an idea of reviving his old Gulf cartel in Nuevo Laredo, but we’ll never know, because he was lounging in a beach chair, sipping a drink with an umbrella in it, when someone put three bullets through his newspaper and into his face.

  I guess Tito didn’t want to take any chances that Contreras might want to be, as it were, top dog again.

  Tito’s people are also on the move in Tamaulipas and Veracruz against the Zetas, who themselves have split into factions fighting each other. He’ll gobble them up one at a time.

  It’s only in Guerrero, Ric thinks, that Tito’s not making progress, but shit, no one can make progress in that fractured, anarchistic hellhole. No one can get any traction there, not Tito, not Iván, not us. Not the army, the marines, or the dozens of citizen self-defense groups that have sprung up like mushrooms.