The Border

by Don Winslow

  “I was trying to help an addict.”

  “Did you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s sure a lot that you don’t know,” O’Brien said. He went on to pound Cirello. “You’re a degenerate gambler, aren’t you, you owe money to the Mafia, you’re under investigation by your own department—how are we supposed to believe a word you say?”

  Watching this, Keller got furious.

  But Cirello didn’t get visibly angry, certainly didn’t lose his temper. He’d had a career of being attacked by defense attorneys and he let the assault wash over him before he calmly responded, “Senator, I was an undercover police officer. It’s clear that you don’t know what that entails, and I don’t think we have the time here for me to educate you.”

  That clip made all the news shows.

  But it doesn’t change the fact, Keller thinks, that no connection has been made between Lerner and the cartels.

  The next logical witness would be Hugo Hidalgo.

  Hidalgo could establish the relationship between Ruiz and Caro, testify that it was Caro who instructed Ruiz to provide security for the meetings. It wouldn’t establish Lerner’s guilty knowledge—only the tapes could do that—but it would go a long way to link the cartel to Terra.

  But Hidalgo is off the radar.

  No one can find him.

  Keller is worried that he’s dead.

  They killed Claiborne, they tried to kill Cirello, there’s no reason not to believe they wouldn’t have gone after Hugo, too. He’s disappeared. The FBI is looking for him, the US Marshals Service is looking for him, Keller has his remaining loyalists in DEA looking for him.

  Nothing.

  So the next witness is Keller.

  At the end of the day, it all comes down to Keller.

  Because, so far, it wasn’t going well, Crosby explained. Lerner held his own, so did Fowler and Howard. Cirello damaged them but couldn’t make the essential link.

  The president and his allies were using the hearings to make their case.

  NO money laundering, Dennison tweeted. NO obstruction. Witch hunt proved. Now DOJ should do its duty—PROSECUTE KELLER.

  If the hearings didn’t go any better, Crosby told Keller, it would embolden the attorney general to charge him.

  “In terms of Lerner and Terra,” Crosby said, “it’s all about the recordings. In terms of the AG, Howard and the president, it’s all about credibility, now. It’s your word against theirs. It just depends on who the public believes.”

  Crosby isn’t stupid.

  She saw Ruiz’s name on the list, saw where it was placed, and made the right conclusions.

  “What do they have on you, Art?” she asked him the day before his testimony. “What does Ruiz have on you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Okay,” she said. “Now you have a choice to make. I told you that I view my job as keeping you out of jail. My recommendation as your lawyer is that you take a dive. I’ll advise you when to take the Fifth. I frankly doubt that, if you back down at the hearings, they’ll pursue a prosecution against you. They won’t want to reopen this can of worms. Let it go, Art. It’s sad, it’s a shame, it’s not the country that either of us wants, but my advice is to let it go.”

  Keller heard her.

  Had to admit that he’d thought the same thing.

  That there was no point in making himself a kamikaze in a lost war.

  At that point in time, he didn’t really know what he was going to do.

  Neither did the country.

  Art Keller’s testimony was a much-anticipated event, akin to the O.J. Simpson trial, the final episode of The Sopranos or the Super Bowl. Everyone was waiting to see what would happen, what he would do, what he would say.

  It would be Keller against Dennison.

  The showdown.

  Now Keller climbs into a gray suit and knots a red tie and thinks about the phone calls he got last night.

  The first was from O’Brien.

  “It’s your last chance,” O’Brien said, “to do the right thing. Remember who we have and what we have.”

  The second was from Marisol.

  “I just wanted to wish you good luck,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said. “That’s kind of you.”

  “Oh, Arturo,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I know what I’m going to do.”

  “You do?”

  Yes, he thinks as he tightens his tie.

  Maybe for the first time in my life, I know what I’m doing.

  I’m going to save my life.

  The shooter’s name is Daniel Mercado.

  Army vet, Iraq vet, sniper, “illegal alien.” Involuntary separation from the military due to unspecified “psychological issues.” Mother and sisters still in Mexicali. On the bumper with La Eme.

  Mercado is told that the request comes from the jefe of the Sinaloa cartel, Ricardo Núñez, on behalf of the martyred El Señor, Adán Barrera. If Mercado successfully completes the mission, $2 million will be placed in an offshore account—for him if he lives, for his mother if he doesn’t. In either case, if he chooses to accept the assignment, his family will be treated like gold. On the other hand, if he decides to deny a direct request from El Patrón for a favor, well . . . who can guarantee anyone’s safety these days?

  Rollins knows his type—Mercado’s a man with grudges—denied citizenship in the country he had fought for, thrown out of the army he loved. He desperately needs to belong to something; if it’s not going to be the army, it’s going to be La Eme. If he survives this job, he gets instant entry into the car. Mercado has delusions of grandeur—he wants to be a hero, a legend. The man who finally gets vengeance for Santo Adán will certainly be that.

  And he can shoot.

  According to Mercado’s DD214, the man was an “expert” marksman, the highest level. According to his own account, which may or may not be trustworthy, he had fourteen confirmed kills in Iraq.

  He is told that this is not a suicide mission.

  An extraction team will be waiting at a designated place to get him out of the city and then out of the country. A backup team and location will also be in place. The chances for escape are not as slim as they appear—there will be chaos, mayhem, especially as Mercado starts to spray fire around. He has a good chance of making it to one of the two extraction points.

  If you’re captured, he’s told, go ahead and tell them everything. We want the Americans to know that we’re avenging Santo Adán. If you go to prison, La Eme will make sure that you have the best possible life—booze, drugs, women. You will be a king on the yard, a hero to la raza.

  And Keller’s shooting will have a political bonus here, Rollins thinks.

  The murder of a high-ranking government official will be Pearl Harbor. The president will be able to use it as a pretext to fund the border wall, deport illegals, take virtually any action against Mexico.

  They don’t tell Mercado that they’re going to back him up with two other shooters who will engage if he misses. Mercado will have an AR-15, because that’s what the American public will expect. The backup shooters will also use 5.56-caliber weapons.

  Mercado accepts the assignment.

  He’s Oswald, Rollins thinks. He’s Ray, he’s Sirhan.

  He’s the perfect patsy.

  You can’t just walk in and see the president of the United States.

  Well, maybe you can if you’re Nora Hayden.

  She made a call to someone who made a call to someone who made a call, and now she’s in the elevator on the way to the penthouse of Dennison’s building in New York. Where he probably spends more time than he does in the White House. He’s certainly here on the day that Art Keller is going to testify in front of Congress, because he doesn’t want to be in Washington for that.

  Nora gets searched by the Secret Service guys.

  She has no weapons.

  That they can f
ind, anyway.

  Dennison dismisses his aides when she comes into the living room suite with its marvelous view of Central Park. He looks at Nora and says, “It’s been a long time.”

  “Decades,” she says. “But I remember it like it was last night. All the sick little games, the twists, the kinks.”

  “What is this, blackmail?” Dennison asks. “How much do you want? I’ll give you my lawyer’s number, Mr. Cohn, and you can work it out with him.”

  “I don’t want money.”

  “A job?” Dennison asks, looking annoyed. “An apartment? What?”

  “My husband,” Nora says. “Sean Callan.”

  Dennison’s eyes flicker. He knows.

  “You’ll get him released immediately,” Nora says, “or I’ll go to the media and make what Art Keller is doing to you look like a slap on the wrist. I’ll tell every filthy thing.”

  “No one will believe you.”

  “Yes, they will,” Nora says. “Look at this face, you slimy son of a bitch. I’ll be a star within seconds. And everyone will believe me because I’ll give them details. Then you’ll deny it, I’ll sue for defamation, and you’ll have to give a deposition in which those details will come out. And you’ll either admit them or commit perjury. So what’s it going to be?”

  Keller hears a child laugh.

  It’s discordant, odd, out of place as he walks up the steps to the Capitol. Reporters stick cameras in his face, journalists shout questions, other people want autographs signed. Some people yell, “Go get ’em, Keller!,” others tell him to go to hell. Some hold up signs and placards—make america great again! lock him up! the wall will be built!

  He knows that he’s become a polarizing figure, embodying the rift that threatens to widen and tear the country in two. He’s triggered a scandal, an investigation that has spread from the poppy fields of Mexico to Wall Street to the White House itself.

  Pausing for a second, Keller turns back to look down at the long stretch of the National Mall, the cherry trees in bloom, the Washington Monument in the distance. He can’t see the Reflecting Pool or the Vietnam Veterans Memorial but he knows they’re there—he often walks along the Wall to pay respects to old friends. He might go there later, depending on how things go inside; it might be his last chance for a long time, maybe ever. Looking back at the green lawn, the pink blossoms literally floating in the light breeze, it all seems so peaceful.

  But Keller is at war—against his own DEA, the US Senate, the Mexican drug cartels, even the president of the United States.

  And they’re the same thing.

  Some of them want to silence and imprison him, destroy him; a few, he suspects, want to kill him. He half expects to hear the crack of a rifle as he goes up the steps now to testify, so the child’s laughter is a welcome relief, a needed reminder that outside his world of drugs, lies, dirty money and murder there is another life, another land where kids still laugh.

  Keller can barely remember that country.

  He’s spent most of his life fighting a war on the other side of the border, and now he’s home.

  And the war has come with him.

  He pushes through, into the relative safety of the Capitol, and is escorted to the hearing room. The senators are already in their places, high-backed chairs in front of wood paneling.

  Keller takes his seat behind a table on the floor. It’s deliberately arranged, he knows, to be intimidating, so that he has to look up at the senators. Crosby sits down beside him.

  He looks around a little and sees that the gallery behind him is packed. Most of the onlookers are journalists.

  But one of them is Marisol.

  She nods to him and he nods back.

  O’Brien raps a gavel for order, and then a bailiff swears Keller in.

  He swears to tell the truth.

  O’Brien starts, “Mr. Keller—”

  Crosby interrupts him. “Mr. Chairman, my client would like to make a statement.”

  “A brief one, please,” O’Brien says. “We have a lot to cover. But go ahead, Mr. Keller.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Keller says. “And my thanks to the committee for hearing me out. I don’t intend to answer any questions today.”

  There’s a buzz in the room.

  O’Brien raps the gavel again.

  “You understand that could put you in contempt,” O’Brien says. “Do you intend to take the Fifth?”

  “No,” Keller says. “I believe that there comes a moment where we, both as individuals and a nation, have to look at ourselves honestly and truthfully, and speak that truth. That’s what I intend to do today.”

  The room goes quiet.

  Belinda gets into the front passenger seat of the car that Tito sent to pick her up.

  The new godfather wants to deliver her reward personally.

  The driver says hello, Belinda says hello back and buckles her seat belt. Then she feels the pistol barrel poke into the back of her neck.

  “Oh no,” she says.

  “I first met Adán Barrera in 1975,” Keller says. “I was then a young DEA agent assigned to the field office in Sinaloa, Mexico. Barrera was, I believe, nineteen years old at the time. He introduced me to his uncle, Miguel Ángel Barrera, then a policeman. The Barreras gave me information leading to the arrest of a number of heroin traffickers. I was naive then and didn’t realize that they were traffickers themselves and were using me to help eliminate competition.

  “It is true that I rescued Adán Barrera from a severe beating and possible killing at the hands of Mexican federal police and American mercenary pilots. This was during Operation Condor, during which the DEA, myself included, and the Mexican military and police poisoned and burned thousands of acres of poppies, forcing thousands of campesinos—Mexican peasant farmers—from their fields and villages.

  “The unintended consequence of Operation Condor was that it forced the Mexican opium growers to scatter across Mexico. In trying to remove a cancer, we had only metastasized it. They formed an organization, the Federación, the first true drug cartel, under the leadership of Miguel Ángel Barrera, aka ‘M-1,’ aka ‘The Godfather.’ He divided Mexico into plazas—territories—for the smuggling of drugs into the United States, and he ruled the Federación from his base in Guadalajara.”

  Keller pauses and sips from a glass of water.

  “To replace the heroin trade,” Keller continues, “Barrera introduced a new product—highly addictive ‘crack’ cocaine—which fueled a tragic epidemic that had devastating effects in urban America in the 1980s.

  “At the time, DEA was concentrated on the cocaine trade from Colombia into Florida and did not fully appreciate the ‘back door’ of Mexico and what became known as the ‘Mexican Trampoline’—that is, cocaine shipments coming in small airplanes and ‘bouncing’ from Colombia to various Central American locations and then to Guadalajara, from where it was distributed to the various plazas and brought into our country.

  “During this period, I was the resident in charge of our Guadalajara office and tried to alert my superiors to the Mexican Trampoline. I was a voice crying in the wilderness. By this time, Adán Barrera was living in San Diego and selling cocaine for his uncle. As a result of one of our operations, Barrera had to flee his San Diego home, his then pregnant wife took a serious fall in the process of fleeing a raid, and his daughter was subsequently born with a serious, eventually fatal, birth defect.

  “Barrera blamed me for his daughter’s tragedy.

  “At this point in time, to disguise an illegal and unwarranted wiretap that I placed in Miguel Ángel Barrera’s home, I invented a fictional informant with the code name ‘Source Chupar.’ Enraged by the losses caused by information he believed to have come from Source Chupar, M-1 ordered Adán Barrera and others, including Rafael Caro, to kidnap my then partner Ernesto Hidalgo, to force him to divulge the identity of the informant.

  “Ernie didn’t have this information. I had not told him about the illegal wiretap or, o
bviously, given him the name of an informant who, in fact, didn’t exist.

  “Barrera, his brother Raúl, Rafael Caro and others tortured Ernie Hidalgo to death over the course of several days, despite a deal I had made with Adán to shut down my investigation if he released Ernie.

  “In the aftermath of Agent Hidalgo’s murder, Miguel Barrera fled to El Salvador, where myself and Mexican police tracked him down, arrested him, and flew him to the American consulate in Costa Rica, at which point American intelligence personnel forcibly removed him from my custody and released him.”

  O’Brien raps his gavel. “I think we’ve heard about enough of Mr. Keller’s speechifying. He was called here to answer questions, not to filibuster—and—”

  “I was kidnapped,” Keller says, “and taken to a training base for contra guerrillas on the Nicaraguan border, a base funded by Miguel Ángel Barrera, where a high-ranking intelligence officer named John Hobbs explained to me that the Mexican Trampoline included cocaine shipments flown by a shell company called SETCO, the money from which was being used to fund the contras in the war against the Communist government of Nicaragua.

  “Let me be clear—subsequent investigative journalism made the accusation that the CIA was selling crack in American cities. This, to my knowledge, was not true. What is true is that the National Security Council ran an operation—called Cerberus—that covered up the smuggling of cocaine for the purpose of funding and arming the contras, which Congress had declined to do. I saw the drugs, I saw the planes, I saw the NSC personnel. Simply put, the war on communism trumped the war on drugs.

  “In 1991, I testified in front of a congressional committee investigating this issue.

  “I testified under oath that I had never heard of SETCO, or Cerberus. I also testified that I had never heard of an operation called ‘Red Mist,’ which was a multinational coordinated policy of assassinating Communist and left-wing leaders in Central America.

  “I lied. I committed perjury.”

  Crosby puts her hand over the microphone. “Art—”