by Don Winslow
He sits in his dark spot and waits.
That night, and the next three.
He’s there each night as the Talavera family comes home from the restaurant. As a light goes on in a room upstairs, then goes off a little while later when Pilar turns in for the night. Art gives it another half-hour and then goes home.
Maybe you’re wrong, he thinks.
No, you’re not. Tío gets what he wants.
Art’s about to go home on the fourth night when a Mercedes comes down the street, kills its headlights and pulls up in front of the Talavera house.
Ever gallant, Art thinks, Tío sends a car and driver. No taxicab for this underage piece of ass. It’s fucking pathetic, he thinks as he watches Pilar come out the front door and scurry into the backseat of the car.
Art gives it a good head start, then pulls out.
The car pulls up in front of a condo on a little knoll in the west suburbs. It’s in a nice, quiet neighborhood, fairly new, individual units nestled among the city’s trademark jacaranda trees. The address is new to Art, not any of the properties he’s traced to Tío. How sweet, Art thinks—a brand-new love nest for a brand-new love.
Tío’s car is already there. The driver gets out and opens the door for Pilar. Tío meets her at the door and ushers her in. They’re in each other’s arms before the door is even shut.
Jesus, Art thinks, if I were fucking a fifteen-year-old girl, I’d at least pull the curtains.
But you think you’re safe, don’t you, Tío?
And the most dangerous place on earth—
Is where you’re safe.
He’s back at La Casa del Amor (as he styles it) late that morning, when he knows that Tío will be at the office and Pilar in, well, ahem, school. He’s wearing the overalls he uses to work in his own garden and he carries a pair of clippers. In fact, he does trim a couple of unruly jacaranda branches as he makes his reconnaissance, noting the color of the exterior paint and plaster, the location of the phone lines, the windows, the pool, the spa, any outbuildings.
A week later, after visits to a hardware store and a model-supply shop and a call to a mail-order techno warehouse in San Diego, he goes back, wearing the same outfit, and clips a few more branches on his way to ducking behind the shrubs that have been thoughtfully planted outside the bedroom wall. He likes this location not for prurient reasons—he’d actually rather not hear that part of it—but because the telephone lines go into the bedroom. He pulls a small flathead screwdriver from his pocket and, delicate as a surgeon, pries a minuscule opening behind the aluminum windowsill. He inserts the tiny FX-101 bug into the opening, removes a small tube of caulking from his pocket and reseals the opening, then takes the little bottle of green paint that closely matches the original color and, with a tiny brush meant for painting model airplanes, paints over the caulk. He blows gently on the paint to dry it, then leans back to assess his work.
The bug, illegal and unauthorized, is also undetectable.
The FX-101 can pick up any sound within ten yards and throw it for another sixty, so Art has some flexibility. He goes outside the complex to the sewer opening. He takes the unit that contains the receiver and a voice-activated tape recorder and duct-tapes it to the top of the sewer. Now it will be a simple matter of swinging by, taking out one cassette and replacing it with a fresh one.
He knows it’s going to be hit-and-miss, but he needs only a few hits. Tío will use La Casa del Amor mostly as a spot for his assignations with Pilar, but he’ll also use the phone. He might even use the condo for meetings. Even the most cautious criminal, Art knows, can’t separate his business from his personal life.
Of course, he admits, neither can you.
He lies to Ernie and Shag.
They take jogs together now. Ostensibly, it’s Art’s mandate for his team to stay in shape, but in reality it’s a cover for them to have the conversations they can’t have in the office. It’s hard to listen in on a moving target, particularly in the open plazas of downtown Guadalajara, so every day before lunch they change into sweats and Nikes and go out for their run.
“I have a CI,” he tells them. A Confidential Informant.
He feels bad about lying to them, but it’s for their own protection. If this goes sick and wrong, as it almost has to, he wants to take it all on his own shoulders. If his guys know that he’s running an illegal tap, they’re obliged by regulations to inform their superiors. Otherwise, they’re concealing “guilty knowledge,” which would ruin their careers. He knows that they would never rat him out, so he makes up a confidential informant.
An imaginary friend, Art thinks. At least it’s consistent—a nonexistent source for nonexistent coke, et cetera . . .
“That’s great, boss,” Ernie says. “Who—”
“Sorry,” Art says. “It’s early. We’re just dating.”
They get it. A relationship with a snitch is like a relationship with the opposite sex. You flirt, you seduce, you tempt. You buy them presents, you tell them how much you need them, you can’t live without them. And if they do get in bed with you, you don’t tell, even—especially—the boys in the locker room.
At least not until it’s a done deal, and by the time it becomes common knowledge, it’s usually about over anyway.
So this becomes Art’s day: He puts in his hours at the office, goes home, leaves the house late at night to retrieve his daily tape, then comes home and listens to it in his study.
This goes on for two useless weeks.
What he hears is mostly love talk, sex talk, as Tío woos his young inamorata and gradually instructs her in the finer points of lovemaking. Art fast-forwards through most of this, but he gets the idea.
Pilar Talavera is growing up fast as Tío starts introducing some interesting grace notes into the music of love. Well, interesting if you’re into that sort of thing, which Art is decidedly not. In fact, it makes him want to puke.
You’ve been a bad girl.
Have I?
Yes, and you need to be punished.
It’s a commonplace of surveillance—you hear so much shit that you never wanted to hear.
Then, albeit rarely, the rose in the manure pile.
One night Art brings his tape home, makes himself a scotch and sips on it while he goes through that evening’s sick tedium, and hears Tío confirm the delivery of “three hundred wedding gowns” to an address in Chula Vista, a neighborhood that sits between San Diego and Tijuana.
Now that you’ve got it, Art thinks, what do you do with it?
The SOP requires that you turn the info over to your Mexican colleagues, and simultaneously to the DEA office in Mexico City, for transferral to the San Diego office. Well, if I turn it over to my Mexican counterpart it goes straight to Tío, and if I turn it in to Tim Taylor he’ll just repeat the official line that there are no “wedding gowns” moving through Mexico. And he’ll demand to know who my source is.
Which I ain’t about to give him.
They talk it over on the morning jog.
“We’re fucked,” Ernie says.
“No, we’re not,” Art answers.
Time to take the next step toward the cliff.
He leaves the office after lunch and goes to a phone booth. In the States, he thinks, it’s the criminals who have to sneak around and use pay phones. Here, it’s the cops.
He phones a guy he knows on the San Diego Police narco squad. He met Russ Dantzler at some inter-agency conference a few months ago. Seemed like a decent guy, a player.
Yeah, and what I need now is a definite player.
With a set of stones.
“Russ? Art Keller, DEA. We had a couple of beers together, what was it, last July?”
Dantzler remembers him. “What’s up, Art?”
Art tells him.
“This might be bullshit,” he finishes, “but I don’t think so. You might want to hit it.”
Hell yes, he might want to hit it. And there’s nothing the attorney gen-eral of the United
States or the State Department or the entire federal government can do about it. The Feds come down on San Diego PD, San Diego PD is just going to tell them to go fuck themselves sideways with something jagged.
With a proper regard to cop etiquette, Dantzler asks, “What do you want from me?”
“You keep me out of it and you keep me in it,” Art answers. “You forget I gave you the tip, and you remember to share any intel you get with me.”
“Deal,” Dantzler says. “But I need a warrant, Art. Just in case you’ve forgotten how things work in a democracy that scrupulously protects the rights of its citizens.”
“I have a CI,” he lies.
“Gotcha.”
They don’t need to say anything more. Dantzler will take the info to one of his own guys, who will tell it to one of his CIs, who’ll then turn around and tell it to Dantzler, who will take it to a judge and presto—probable cause.
The next day Dantzler calls Art back at the phone booth at a prearranged time and screams, “Three hundred pounds of cocaine! That’s six million dollars in street value! Art, I’ll make sure you get a lot of the credit!”
“Forget I gave you anything,” Art says. “ Just remember you owe me.”
Two weeks later, the El Paso police also owe Art for the seizure of a trailer-truck full of cocaine. A month after that, Art goes back to Russ Dantzler with another tip, about a house in Lemon Grove.
The subsequent raid yields a paltry fifty pounds of cocaine.
Plus $4 million in cash, three money-counting machines, and stacks of interesting documents that include bank deposit slips. The deposit slips are so interesting that when Dantzler takes them into federal court the judge freezes an additional $15 million in assets deposited under several names in five San Diego County banks. Although none of the names is Miguel Ángel Barrera, every penny of the money belongs either to him or to cartel members who are paying him a fee to keep their assets safe.
And Art can hear from the phone traffic that none of them is very happy.
Neither is Tim Taylor.
The DEA boss is looking at a faxed copy of The San Diego Union-Tribune, its headline screaming MASSIVE DRUG BUST IN LEMON GROVE,
with references to a “federación,” and at another fax, from the AG’s office, screaming, Just what the fuck is going on? He gets on the horn to Art.
“Just what the fuck is going on?!” he yells.
“What do you mean?”
“Goddammit, I know what you’re doing!”
“Then I wish you’d share it with me.”
“You have a CI! And you’re running it through other agencies and goddamn it, Arthur, you’d better not be the one leaking this shit to the press!”
“I’m not,” Art answers truthfully. I’m leaking it to other agencies so they can leak it to the press.
“Who’s the CI?!”
“There is no CI,” Art answers. “I have nothing to do with this.”
Yeah, except three weeks later he gives the LAPD a 200-pound bust in Hacienda Heights. The Arizona state cops get a trailer-truck with 350 pounds rolling up I-10. Anaheim PD pops a house for cash and prizes totaling ten mil.
They all deny getting anything from him, but they all speak his gospel: La Federación, La Federación, La Federación, forever and ever, world without end, amen.
Even the RAC Bogotá comes to the altar.
Shag answers the phone one day and holds it into his chest as he tells Art, “It’s the Big Man himself. Straight from the front lines of the War on Drugs.”
Even two months ago, Chris Conti, the RAC in Colombia, wouldn’t have touched his old friend Art Keller with the proverbial ten-foot pole. But now even Conti has apparently gotten religion.
“Art,” he says, “I ran across something I think you might be interested in.”
“You coming up here?” Art asks. “Or do you want me to come down there?”
“Why don’t we split the difference? You been to Costa Rica lately?”
What he means is that he doesn’t want Tim Taylor or anyone else to know he’s sitting down with Art Keller. They meet in Quepos. Sit in a palm-frond cabana on the beach. Conti comes bearing gifts: He spreads a series of deposit slips out on the rough table. The slips match up with the cashier-check receipts from the Bank of America in San Diego that were captured in the last raid. Documentary proof linking the Barrera organization with Colombian cocaine.
“Where’d you get these?” Art asks.
“Small-town banks in the Medellín area.”
“Well, thanks, Chris.”
“You didn’t get them from me.”
“Of course not.”
Conti lays a grainy photograph on the table.
An airstrip in the jungle, a bunch of guys standing around a DC-4 with the serial numbers N-3423VX. Art recognizes Ramón Mette right away, but one of the other men rings a fainter bell. Middle-aged, he has a short, military haircut and wears fatigues over highly polished black jump boots.
Been a long time.
A long time.
Vietnam. Operation Phoenix.
Even then, Sal Scachi liked polished boots.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Conti asks.
Well, if you’re thinking the man looks Company, you’re thinking right. Last time I heard, Scachi had been a bird colonel in Special Forces, then pulled the pin. Which is a Company résumé all the way.
“Look,” Conti says. “I’ve heard some rumors.”
“I trade in rumors. Go ahead.”
“Three radio towers in the jungles north of Bogotá,” Conti says. “I can’t get near the area to check it out.”
“The Medellín people are easily capable of that kind of technology,” Art says. And it would explain the mystery of how the SETCO planes are flying under the radar. Three radio towers emitting VOR signals could guide them out and back.
“The Medellín cartel has the technology to build them,” Conti says. “But does it have the technology to make them disappear?”
“What do you mean?”
“Satellite photos.”
“Okay.”
“They don’t show up,” Conti says. “Not three radio towers, not two, not one. We can read license plates off those photos, Art. A VOR tower’s not going to show up? And what about the planes, Art? I get the AWACS gen, and they don’t show up. Any plane flying from Colombia to Honduras has to go over Nicaragua, Sandinista Land, and that, my friend, we definitely have the Eye in the Sky on.”
That’s no shit, Art thinks. Nicaragua is the bull's-eye in the Reagan administration’s Central American scope, a Communist regime right in the heart of the Monroe Doctrine. The administration was sponsoring the Contra forces that surround Nicaragua from Honduras to the north and from right here in Costa Rica on the south, but then the U.S. Congress passed the Boland Amendment, banning military aid to the Contras.
Now you have a former Special Forces guy and ardent anti-Communist (They’re atheists, aren’t they? Fuck 'em) in the company of Ramón Mette Ballasteros and a SETCO plane.
Art leaves Costa Rica more freaked out than when he got there.
Back in Guadalajara, Art sends Shag to the States on a mission. The cowboy huddles up with every narco squad and DEA office in the Southwest and in his soft cowboy drawl tells them, “This Mexican thing is for real. It’s going to blow up, and when it does, you don’t want to be caught with your pants down trying to explain why you didn’t see it coming. Shit, you can toe the company line in public, but in private, you might want to be playing ball with us because when the trumpets blow, amigos, we’re gonna remember who are the sheep and who are the goats.”
There’s nothing that the boys in Washington can do about it. What are they going to do—tell American cops not to make drug busts on American soil? The Justice Department wants to crucify Art. They suspect that he’s disseminating this shit, but they can’t touch him, even when the State Department calls up screaming about “irreparable damage to our relationship
with an important neighbor.”
The AG’s office would like to flog Art Keller up Pennsylvania Avenue then nail him to a pole on Capitol Hill, except he hasn’t done anything they can prove. And they can’t transfer him out of Guadalajara because the media has picked up on La Federación, so how would that look?
So they have to sit by in mounting frustration as Art Keller builds an empire based on pronouncements from the invisible, unknowable, nonexistent CI-D0243.
