The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  Adán goes back into the party room and looks at his guests—his extended family, or what’s left of it.

  His sister, Elena.

  His sister-in-law, Sondra, and his nephew Salvador.

  His cousins, the Tapia brothers—Diego, Martín, and Alberto—and their wives, Chele, Yvette, and Lupe, respectively. Diego’s children…This is his family, his blood, all that he has left.

  Without me, he thinks, they go where a deposed king’s family go in this merciless realm—to the slaughterhouse. Your enemies will kill them just after they’ve killed you. And unless you take back your rightful place, all the death, all the killing, all the terrible acts for which you’re going to hell, were all for nothing.

  He’s heard it said that life is a river, that the past flows downstream. It isn’t true—if it flows, it flows through the blood in your veins. You can no more cut yourself away from the past than you can cut out your own heart.

  I was the king once, I will have to be the king again.

  Life, he muses, always gives you an excuse to take what you want anyway.

  —

  Adán’s relieved when they’re gone.

  When the mandatory oohs and ahhs over presents have been exchanged, the equally obligatory confessions over having eaten too much, the hugs and busses on the cheeks, the insincere promises that we need to do this again sooner, Diego finally manages to herd them all back into the truck and they leave him to the peace of his prison.

  He flops face first down on the bed beside Magda.

  “Families are exhausting,” he says. “It’s easier to manage a hundred traffickers than one family.”

  “I thought they were nice.”

  “You don’t have to meet their needs,” Adán says.

  “No, only yours.”

  “Are they a burden on you?”

  “No, I like your needs,” she says, reaching for him. “Feliz Navidad. Do you want your last present?”

  “Not now,” he says. “Pack a few things.”

  She looks at him oddly. “What do you mean?”

  “Just a few,” he says. “Not your whole wardrobe. We can buy more clothes later. Go on—we don’t have a lot of time.”

  Diego walks into the cell. “You ready, primo?”

  “For years.”

  Diego points to his ear—listen.

  Adán hears a shout, then another, then a chorus of shouts. Then the banging of wooden bats on steel bars, feet pounding on the metal catwalks, alarms.

  Then shots.

  A motín.

  A prison riot.

  Los Bateadores are rampaging through Block 2, Level 1-A, attacking other inmates, attacking each other, creating chaos. The guards are running back and forth, trying to contain it, radioing for reinforcements, but it’s already too late—inmates are busting out of cells, running down the cell block, spilling out into the yard.

  “We have to go!” Diego says. “Now!”

  “Did you hear that?!” Adán yells to Magda.

  “I heard!” She comes out with a small shoulder bag while trying to put on a different pair of shoes, flats. “You might have given a lady some notice.”

  Adán takes her arm and follows Diego onto the block.

  It’s as if they’re invisible. No one looks at them as they move through the swirling fights, the noise, the guards, and Diego leads them to a steel door that has been left unlocked. He ushers them into a stairwell and they climb to another door that opens onto the roof.

  The guards aren’t watching them, they have their guns and lights aimed down at the yard and don’t even seem to notice when the helicopter comes in and lands on the roof.

  The rotors blow Magda’s hair into a mess, and Adán puts his hand on her back and pushes her down a little as they step into the open door.

  Diego climbs in behind them and gives a thumbs-up to the pilot.

  The helicopter lifts off.

  Adán looks down at Puente Grande.

  It’s been five years of negotiations, diplomacy, payoffs, establishing relationships, waiting for the other bosses to accept his presence, for some of them to die, for others to be killed, for the North Americans to move on and become obsessed with another public enemy number one.

  Five years of patience and persistence and now he’s free.

  To resume his rightful place.

  Erie, Pennsylvania

  Outside a diner the next morning, going in for the breakfast special of two eggs, toast, and coffee, Keller sees it.

  A headline behind the cracked glass of a newspaper box.

  DRUG KINGPIN ESCAPES.

  Almost dizzy, Keller puts two quarters in the slot, takes out the paper, and scans the story for the name.

  It can’t be.

  It can’t be.

  The letters spring out at him like shards of metal from a tripwire, booby-trap grenade.

  “Adán Barrera.”

  Keller lays the paper on top of the box and reads the story. Barrera extradited to a Mexican prison…Puente Grande…a Christmas party…

  He can’t believe it.

  Then again, he can.

  Of course he can.

  It’s Barrera and it’s Mexico.

  The irony, Keller thinks, is as perfect as it is painful.

  I’m a prisoner in the world’s largest solitary confinement.

  And Barrera is free.

  Keller tosses the paper into a trash can. He walks the streets for hours, past piles of dirty snow, closed factories, shivering crack whores, the detritus of a Rust Belt town where the jobs have gone south.

  At some point, late in the afternoon with the sky turning a harsh, threatening gray, Keller walks into the bus station to go where he knows he’s always been headed.

  —

  The Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters are in Pentagon City. Which, Keller supposes, makes perfect sense. If you’re going to fight a war on drugs, base yourself in the Pentagon.

  He’s in a suit and tie now, his only one of either, closely shaved and his hair freshly cut. He sits in the lobby and waits until they finally let him up to the fifth floor to see Tim Taylor, who successfully masks his enthusiasm at seeing Art Keller.

  “What do you want, Art?” Taylor asks.

  “You know what I want.”

  “Forget it,” Taylor says. “The last thing we need right now is some old vendetta of yours.”

  “Nobody knows Barrera like I do,” Art answers. “His family, his connections, the way his mind works. And nobody is as motivated as I am.”

  “Why, because he’s hunting you?” Taylor asks. “I thought you had a different life now.”

  “That was before you guys let Barrera out.”

  “Go back to your bees, Art,” Taylor says now.

  “I’ll go down the road.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you let me walk out of here,” Keller answers, “I’ll go to Langley. I’ll bet they’d send me.”

  The rivalry between DEA and CIA is bitter, the tension between the two agencies horrific, the trust virtually nonexistent. CIA had at least helped to cover up Hidalgo’s murder, and DEA had never forgotten or forgiven it.

  “You and Barrera,” Taylor says, “you’re the same guy.”

  “My point.”

  Taylor stares at him for a long time and then says, “This is going to be complicated. Not everyone is going to welcome you back. But I’ll see what I can do. Leave me a number where you can be reached.”

  Keller finds a decent hotel up in Bethesda by the Naval Hospital and waits. He knows what’s happening—Taylor has to meet with higher-ups at DEA, who then have to go to their bosses at Justice. Justice has to talk to the State Department, and then it would have to be coordinated with CIA. There will be quiet lunches on K Street and quieter drinks in Georgetown.

  He knows what the arguments will be: Art Keller is a loose cannon, not a team player; Keller has his own agenda, he’s too personally involved; the Mexicans resent him;
it’s too dangerous.

  The last argument is the toughest.

  With a $2 million reward on Keller’s head, sending him down to Mexico is dangerous, to say the least, and DEA can’t afford the media storm that would ensue if another agent were killed in Mexico. Still, no one can reasonably question Keller’s potential value in the hunt for Adán Barrera.

  “Give him a desk at EPIC,” a White House official determines, referring to DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center. “He can advise the Mexicans from there.”

  Taylor relays the offer to Keller.

  “I’m pretty sure,” Keller says, “that Barrera isn’t in El Paso.”

  “Asshole.”

  Keller hangs up.

  The White House official who was listening in explodes. “Since when does some agent tell us where he will or will not go?!”

  “This is not ‘some agent,’ ” Taylor responds. “This is Art fucking Keller, the former ‘Border Lord.’ He knows where the bodies are buried, and not just in Mexico.”

  “What about the danger?”

  Taylor shrugs. “It is what it is. If Keller gets Barrera, great. If Barrera gets him first…It puts other things to bed, doesn’t it?”

  Keller knows what happened in 1985. He was there. He busted the flights of cocaine, saw the training camps, knew that NSC and CIA had used the Mexican cartels to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, with full approval of the White House. He perjured himself in his testimony before Congress in exchange for a free hand to go after the Barreras, and he destroyed them and put Adán Barrera away.

  And now Barrera’s out, and Keller is back.

  If he gets killed in Mexico, he takes some secrets with him.

  Mexico is a cemetery for secrets.

  —

  After more phone calls, more classified memos, more lunches, and more drinks, the powers-that-be finally decide that Keller can go to Mexico City with DEA credentials, not as a special agent, but as an intelligence officer. And with a simple mission statement—“assist and advise in the capture of Adán Barrera or, alternatively, the verification of his death.”

  Keller accepts.

  But they still have to sell it to the Mexicans, who are skeptical about Keller being sent to “assist and advise.” It touches off a bureaucratic pissing match between the Mexican attorney general’s office, the Ministry of Public Security, and an alphabet soup of other agencies, all variously cooperating and/or competing within overlapping jurisdictions.

  On the one hand, they want his knowledge; on the other hand is the notorious, if understandable, Mexican sensitivity about the perception that they’re “little brown brothers” in the relationship, as well as aggrievement over the constant—and one-sided—American insinuations of corruption.

  Taylor lectures Keller about it. “Perhaps you missed it when you were off playing Friar Tuck, but it’s a new day down there. The PRI is out and PAN is in. The federal law enforcement agencies have been reorganized and cleaned up, and the received wisdom—which you will receive, Art—is that Los Pinos is reborn with a bright shiny new soul.”

  Yeah, Keller thinks. Back in the ’80s, the received wisdom was that there was no cocaine in Mexico, and he was ordered to keep his mouth shut about the all too tangible evidence to the contrary, the countless tons of blow the Colombians were moving through Barrera’s Federación into the United States. And Los Pinos—the Mexican White House—was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Federación. Now the official word is that the Mexican government is squeaky clean?

  “So Barrera’s escape was a Houdini magic act,” Keller says. “No one in the government was bought off.”

  “Maybe a prison guard or two.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “I’m not bullshitting you,” Taylor says. “You are not going to go down there and make onions. You assist and you advise, and otherwise you keep your mouth shut.”

  A battle of e-mails, meetings, and confidential cables between Washington and Mexico City ensues, the result of which is a compromise: Keller would be on loan to, and under the supervision of, a “coordinating committee” and would serve in a strictly advisory capacity.

  “You accept the mission,” Taylor says, “you accept these conditions.”

  Keller accepts. It’s all bullshit anyway—he’s fully aware that one of his roles in Mexico is that of “bait.” If anything would bring Adán Barrera out of the woodwork, it would be the chance to get Art Keller.

  Keller knows this and doesn’t care.

  If Adán wants to come after him—good.

  Let him come.

  The words of a psalm they used to chant at Vigils comes back to him.

  Romans 13:11.

  “And do this, knowing the hour,

  That now it is high time for us to arise from sleep.”

  3

  The Hunting of Man

  There is no hunting like the hunting of man.

  —Ernest Hemingway

  “On the Blue Water”

  Los Elijos, Durango

  March 2005

  The sun, soft and diffuse in the haze, comes up over the mountains on this Holy Thursday.

  Keller sits in the front of an unmarked SUV tucked into a stand of Morales pines on the edge of a ridge, fingers the trigger of the Sig Sauer he isn’t supposed to have, and looks down into the narrow valley where the little village of Los Elijos, wedged between mountain peaks, just starts to appear through the mist.

  The thin mountain air is cold and Keller shivers from the chill but also from fatigue. The convoy has driven all night up the narrow twisting road, little more than a goat path, in the hope of arriving here unseen.

  Looking through binoculars, Keller sees that the village is still asleep, so no one has raised an alarm.

  Luis Aguilar shivers behind him.

  The two men don’t like each other.

  —

  The first meeting of the “Barrera Coordinating Committee,” held the day after Keller arrived in Mexico City, was inauspicious.

  “Let’s have things clear between us,” Aguilar said as soon as they sat down. “You are here to share your knowledge of the Barrera organization. You are not here to cultivate your own sources, take independent action, or do surveillance or any other intelligence gathering. I will not have another gringo wiping his boots on my turf. Do we understand each other?”

  Everything about Luis Aguilar had an edge to it—from his aquiline nose, to the press of his trousers, to his words.

  “We have resources of our own,” Keller answered. Satellite surveillance, cell phone intercepts, computer hacks, information developed in the States. “I’ll share them with you unless and until I see that intelligence leaked. Then it’s cut off and you and I don’t know each other.”

  Aguilar’s sharp eyes got sharper. “What are you trying to say?”

  “I’m just getting things clear between us.”

  As sharp as Aguilar was, Gerardo Vera was that smooth. He laughed and said, “Gentlemen, please, let’s fight the narcos instead of each other.”

  Luis Aguilar and Gerardo Vera head up the two new agencies charged with the task of cutting through the Gordian knot of corruption and bureaucracy to finally, seriously take on the cartels.

  Aguilar’s SEIDO (Subprocuraduría Especializada en Investigación de Delincuencia Organizada)—the Assistant Attorney General’s Office for the Investigation of Organized Crime—was created to replace its predecessor, FEADS, which the new administration had disbanded, labeling it “a dung heap of corruption.”

  Similarly, Vera disbanded the old PJF—the federales—and replaced it with the AFI, the Federal Investigative Agency.

  The heads of the two new organizations were a study in contrast—Aguilar short, slim, dark, compact, and tidy; Vera tall, heavy, blond, broad-faced, and expansive. Aguilar was a lawyer with a reputation as a hard-charging prosecutor; Vera a career cop, trained by, among others, the FBI.

  Vera was a regular guy you’d swap stories over a few beers wit
h; Aguilar a quiet academic, devout Catholic, and family man who never told tales. Vera wore custom-made Italian suits; Aguilar was strictly Brooks Brothers off-the-rack.

  What they had in common was a determination to clean things up.

  They started with their own people, making each investigator pass a background check and a polygraph asserting that he never has been, nor is he now, in the employ of the narcos. Aguilar and Vera were the first ones to take the test, and they released the (clean) results to the media.

  Not everyone passed. Aguilar and Vera fired hundreds of investigators who failed the test.

  “Some of these bastards,” Vera told Keller, “were working with the cartels before they came to us. The cartels sent them to enlist, do you believe that? Fuck their mothers.”

  Aguilar winced at the obscenity.

  “Now we all take the test once a month,” Vera said. “Expensive, but if you’re going to keep the stable clean you have to keep shoveling out the shit.”

  The shit tried to shovel back.

  Vera and Aguilar had each received scores of death threats. Each had half a dozen heavily armed bodyguards who escorted them everywhere; sentries patrolled their houses twenty-four/seven.

  DEA was encouraged.

  “We’ve finally found people we can work with,” Taylor told Keller in his predeployment briefing. “These guys are honest, competent, and driven.”

  Keller had to agree with that.

  Still, Keller and Aguilar knocked heads.

  “Your organizational chart,” Keller said one day after it took an exchange of thirty-seven memos to approve a simple wiretap, “is about as straightforward as a bowl of day-old spaghetti.”

  “I don’t eat stale food,” Aguilar answered, “but perhaps you can enlighten me as to the exact delineations between DEA, ICE, FBI, Homeland Security, and the plethora of state and local jurisdictions on your side of the border, because, frankly, I haven’t noticed them.”

  They argued about the Puente Grande escape.

  The prison system now came under Vera’s bailiwick, but prosecutions of prison staff had to be done under Aguilar’s authority. So Vera had appointed his own man to investigate the escape, while Aguilar had ordered the arrests of seventy-two guards and staff, including the warden. Interrogations were conducted by a top AFI official named Edgar Delgado, but Aguilar and Keller were allowed to sit in. Aguilar was humiliated by what he heard—that Barrera basically ran the prison.